It being my day off, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a very special ‘Meet the Archaeologist’ event yesterday at the Museum of Wigan Life. Ian Miller, head of the recent digs in Wigan town centre, was on hand to discuss his findings and also to plug his new book, which it turns out is so new it hasn’t even been published yet. You know, because of the recession and all. Even I’ve had to stop throwing pennies into the wishing well in Mesnes Park (and don’t give me that ‘it’s just a pond’ nonsense).
The most interesting part, for me, was a brief walk round the excavation sites, now occupied by the Grand Arcade and renovation work for the Wigan Life Centre on Library Street. Forget for a moment that you’re in 2010 and stand at the top of the hill, just by the side of the Moon Under the Water public house. Imagine you’re looking towards Scholes and the old gasworks in the second century AD, and it’s easy to see why the Romans would have once erected fortifications in that very spot.
I had almost completely forgotten about those poor quality videos I uploaded to YouTube for no other reason than embed them on my project blogs. Until this morning, when I was mucking about with the ‘Insight’ feature and discovered a large increase in views for a particular date: 20th April 2010.
Turns out Biased BBC used it to make a small satirical point about some politician or other at the beginning of last week. I shouldn’t really comment, as the closest I ever got to this genre was taking the mickey out of local MP Ian McCartney, and even that was tepid and rather childish.
Still, it reminded me about those pointless ‘Day in Your Life’ uploads I made. Incidentally, many have now been deleted because the fools over at YouTube cannot quite grasp the concept of a project video. Never mind.
This one’s been kicking around since Halloween, however because it took me so long to settle on a format I was happy with (as usual) you lucky people are getting it in the middle of summer! Well, spring, really. Anyway, I think it’s a nice little parody of council workers and such. Don’t read into it too much, though, because it was shot and made relatively quickly, but not cheaply, because we had to buy the costume. In fact, this makes the project the most expensive in Illarterate history!
This project is quite significant in that it was my first ever attempt at fashioning some sort of video game critique in the form of a video. It didn’t really take long, just a few days – in my opinion the perfect length for such a review, anything longer and you start reading into things too much. Besides, this is a very simple game I played a lot when I was younger, so it wasn’t that hard to pick up and get into again.
The reason it wasn’t ever uploaded until this week is because I couldn’t quite get the audio right. In the end I decided to go with a take from 2008, one recorded with a horrible microphone. However, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the hissy bits have been removed and it doesn’t sound quite as bad! Having said that, I still had to paste a bit of music over the top to plug the awkward silence left since the background noise departed.
