The Most Generous Thing a Stranger Ever Did For Me

There are lots of things people have done for me, without being asked, but the most generous was in a video game. I used to play a game called ‘Shot Online’, an MMORPG golf game. I know, it’s kinda nerdy, but anyway, I played it for years and years. I still have an account and occasionally go back and play a few rounds. It’s a very in-depth game – upgrading your character, clubs, items etc. The graphics are a bit old school, but it’s a really good game, with a nice friendly community, as you’d expect, in a golf game. There are no 15 year olds threatening to hack you or saying they slept with your mother and that kind of thing.


In the game there are different play modes – a simple 18 holes alone, quests and missions, 2 balls/4 players, 4 balls/4 players, and ‘mastery’. In mastery, you don’t get an aiming target, that is, you don’t get to see where your ball will land, you have to know the courses very, very well to play, as the name suggests. Also, a typical round costs maybe $20 000 game dollars, but mastery costs maybe $5 000 000, although the rewards, if you’re good enough, are very high. I was quite low level, early on in my career, and had saved up around $6 000 000, a fortune for me at the time in that game, but I was only around level 35, nowhere near good or experienced enough to play mastery.

So I’m playing hole 1 of what I thought was a regular 2 ball/4 player game, and to my horror I realized that I’d selected mastery by accident. My $6 000 000 savings, which is about 6 months of playing, had gone – and of course I was nowhere near good enough to recoup it via the rewards during the round. I was genuinely devastated – anyone who plays games will, I’m sure, understand. Kevin Bridges, the famous and brilliant Scottish comedian, says that he once died in Call of Duty and was so grief-stricken he considered buying a poppy.

So I’m playing this round, landing in bunkers, getting bogeys and double bogeys, and basically screwing it all up – meanwhile in the chat, I’m grumbling a little about how I’d accidentally clicked this game type and had lost all my hard-earned loot. A player who I’d never spoken to before said that he’d meet me back in the ‘square’ (the mini town you go to between rounds to buy clubs etc) after the game and he’d gift me the $5 000 000 – which he, to my utter amazement, did. He just gave me like 5 months’ worth of money, for nothing.

Now, I went on to play this game for many more years, reaching, I think, maybe level 140, at which point I had amassed around $600 000 000 or $700 000 000, and $5 000 000 was to me, by that point, virtually (pun unintended) nothing. No doubt it was virtually nothing to that experienced player at that time too, but it meant the world to me. Heartbroken to ‘fixed toy’, due to another’s generosity.

I helped many others out over the next few years – giving away cash and equipment to newer players, so what goes around comes around and all that – but I’ll never forget that one act of kindness.

Just a small addendum, unrelated to generosity. Back then – mid 2000s – I had an old friend, Dave Westoby, who was approaching 60 at that time – but we’d have a smoke and a drink together. I liked Dave – he’d tell me his stories about his wild life – the time he made a porno, or the time he went to jail for smuggling, or the time he lived in flat above a brothel. We’d play boules in his back garden and drink whisky. Anyway, one day I was telling Dave how I’d spent $2 on a virtual golf club to improve my online golf game – and it totally blew his mind that I’d spent real money on a virtual golf club. “You did what? Run that by me again! You can't even hold it in your hand?” RIP Dave, you’re missed, don’t worry about that old pal.

BTS Shouldn't be Compared to The Beatles, but to Bros.

BTS played Wembley Stadium recently, and the press went wild wild wild wild comparing them to the Beatles. But let’s get a few things straight. I’m not a Beatles fan, mostly on account of my never listening to their music. That’s what defines ‘liking’ music to me - would I play their songs at home, for my own pleasure? In the case of the Beatles, no I wouldn’t. I’m very much a ‘songs’ person anyway, I prefer individual songs over artist worship. I may like one song by, say, Father John Misty (and I do), but I’ve checked out the rest of his stuff and none of the songs grabbed me in the same way. It’s the same with the Beatles, I’ve probably heard most of their songs over the years – it’s just not my thing. 

The Beatles were serious musicians though, and changed the face of music forever – they have been hugely influential, their songs have been covered by thousands of artists, they are record-breaking songwriters, hold numerous sales records too, and have had many compositions written by them charted with other artists – did you know ‘Fame’ by David Bowie was co-written by John Lennon, for example? How about ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ by the Rolling Stones? Yup, a Lennon/McCartney song. And there are countless others. Between Lennon and McCartney, they have five of the top ten most covered songs of all time. 

And they’ve been famous for almost sixty years. In the decade 2000 – 2009, they were the second best selling artists in the world after Eminem. They are still, almost fifty years after splitting: influential, big sellers, much covered, and oft-emulated. Anyone who likes music knows who the Beatles are. They are simply the most famous, most well-known, most covered, most copied and most successful band there ever was. 

And then there was Bros. Who? Exactly. But if this was 1987, you’d know, because in 1987 they were a very famous teeny-pop band that sold out Wembley stadium, and 77 000 delirious teenage girls went absolutely wild. For a brief period. That’s who you should be comparing BTS to, not the Beatles, because filling Wembley stadium and selling millions of records for a couple of years has been done by many a teen heart-throb who has since faded into obscurity. It’s music that endures, not ticket sales and ‘fan worship’ and the Beatles music, love it or hate it, has lasted, is influential, and admired over a wide-ranging demographic, from cool kids to dusty geography teachers, and everyone in between. BTS are not, and will never ever be, that big, that widely liked, that popular, that influential. Never. They are Bros. 

Incidentally – although the Beatles played Wembley Arena, a nearby indoor venue with a capacity then of about 10 000, they  never played Wembley Stadium. 

Meat Shaped Vegetarian Food

Hello, and welcome back to my blog. It’s been a few years, and honestly I thought I was gonna finish it with my last post about why I don’t talk to my sister – it seemed like a good place to stop, and furthermore an old nemesis from years past had caught up with me and was trolling me about it, so I thought I’d stop.

But I’m back! And this time I’m vegetarian. And that’s what this post is about.

Firstly, one criticism often laid at vegetarians, is that we are always harping on about it. That may be true, but no one is forcing you to read this, so if you don’t like it, fuck off and read something else.

People Saying You Shouldn’t Eat Meat-Shaped Food That Isn’t Meat.

Well. This gets my goat. Gets my goat? Did you read about PETA trying to change common sayings that contain animals, for example ‘flogging a dead horse’ to ‘feeding a fed horse’? They really did/are. Read about it here. I digress. Why would anyone want meat-shaped food that isn’t meat? Well isn’t it fucking obvious? You’ve eaten certain foods, in certain ways, with certain textures, all your life. Food isn’t all about ousting hunger, it’s also about other things – health, satisfaction, enjoyment and so on. If a person particularly enjoyed bacon sandwiches before becoming meat-free, they may particularly enjoy the same thing but meat-free afterwards. I kinda get it with say, a steak. But a burger? Meat eaters saying ‘you shouldn’t eat meat shaped food!!’ What shape do you mean? That well known meat shape, round?

This isn’t the problem with meat eating though. The problem is the macho-ness associated with it. ‘Men’ thinking they are somewhere between Bear Grylls and Fred Flintstone, because they recently consumed a bacon butty. ‘It’s man food!’ they say. Get over yourselves.  I’m not up on recent animal-related politics, but if PETA and whatnot aren’t focusing on the associations between misplaced masculinity and meat-eating, they should be, rather than being concerned about the above sayings (which, I have to say, I don’t entirely disagree with – there’s no harm in changing the sayings. Anyone who went to school when and where I did, will remember ‘eenie meenie minie mo, catch a n*gger by the toe’, which has now changed, thankfully to ‘catch a tiger by the toe’. It looks like we’ll have to change that again too though.)

Anyway.

Plus ça change.