Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The origin of laziness

While watching the bootlegged trailer from Comic-Con for the Wolverine Origin movie I got to thinking. Always a dangerous situation so I had to lay down. As I was laying in my underwear on the couch covered in a fine coat of Doritos cheese dust, I wondered "Where does being lazy come from?". I mean, everything comes from somewhere right? Eggs come from chickens. Babies come from storks. Lawnmowers come from Mexico, as does salmonella. Credit crunches come from a combination of stupid banks over lending, and stupid people over extending. Everything else comes from China.

Everything has an origin, and laziness is no different. Laziness is generated by a very specific, and also very dangerous, type of attitude. The "I don't give a fuck" attitude.

This attitude manifests itself in 3 different ways.

1) The Lazy I don't give a fuck way.
Here you get your standard lazy person, like Mike and I. In this area you don't give a fuck if anything really gets done so you always try to find a way not to do something or find the easiest way to get that something done. If it has to be done. Like eating. Or going to the bathroom without missing any TV or letting your dinner get cold (or finding ways of preventing your dinner from being too damn hot).

2) The Lazy, yet I'm an asshole, and don't give a fuck way.
In this dangerous little combo you get your criminals and thugs. People who are too lazy and stupid to go to school or get a job, yet they're also assholes so they steal and rob and beat people up. They're also amazingly unconcerned with personal safety and well being. They end up making people scared to go to malls or drive through certain parts of town and are thankfully gunned down or incarcerated at an early age. Or they end up being politicians.

3) The shockingly hardworking, I just don't give a fuck way.
This is how you get stuntmen, ninjas, samurais, and, sadly, X-Games athletes. These people are too energetic to just do fuckall on the couch all day so they're bound to do something. Not get a real job, of course, the "Don't give a fuck attitude" must manifest itself somehow. And so it does so with the same disregard for personal safety that is a hallmark of Type 2. By flinging yourself through the air in a mostly made up career that is of questionable value in modern society. At least these people aren't assholes though. Imagine trying to run down a criminal if he jumped over 20 school buses, or did a double back flip over a building during the get away.

Here at LazyView we're only concerned with type 1 and, occasionally, type 2. Type 3 people are cool to watch, mostly because they're going to end up in traction or with a shuriken sticking out of the forehead. And if someone gets that on video, we'll be sure to post it. Because it's funny when dumbasses get jacked up.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

LazyViews: Mario Kart Wii


Intro

The latest instalment of Mario Kart comes to the Wii with a brand new wheelshaped controller to stick your Wiimote in.

Good

  • It's Mario Kart!
  • The wheel controller works well. It's a bit weird pointing a wheel at the screen when you are using the mouse pointer, but as a wheel it's good.
  • You can ride motorbikes as well as driving karts, and the bikes are a lot of fun.
  • You can unlock the ability to drive as Miis so you can take on Mario et al. If not then look out for yourself in the crowd.
  • The new tracks are really interesting and show off the new gameplay like tricks when you are jumping and the new drifting system
  • You can engage in Wi-Fi play with your friends around the world or randoms
  • You can download ghost images from top experts at the game from around the world, or from people who are just a bit better than you and find out how they do it and try and beat their times.
Bad
  • Some of the items you pick up or get hit by feel a bit unfair or unbalanced. If you've been battling hard to get up to 5th place with Bowzer continuously knocking you off the track and someone picks up a Billy Bullet and shoots past you and off into the distance you're likely to be hurling your controller in rage faster than a stupid Canadian who failed to plug his laptop in properly would throw his laptop at the wall.
  • Leading has never been great in Mario Kart but now it's easily the worst place to be, you can get hit by all kinds of nasty shit and your defensive items basically suck. I've even read a strategy guide entry that says on the tougher 150cc races the best tactic is to sit near the back and have a big push towards the end of the race.
  • Some of the courses they've imported from old systems are a bit shit compared to the new courses and don't work so well with the new gameplay.
Summary

As always the real strength of Mario Kart lies in multi-player. They've possibly taken the concept that "anyone can play against anyone" a bit too far, but a better racer will win more often than a novice it just evens the odds a bit. And it's still just as fun as Mario Kart ever was with just about enough fresh ideas to make it interesting even for people who've played the previous games in the series to death.

Score

8/10 Read the Eurogamer scoring policy

LazyViews

Hello readers!

Both Danny and I are occasional game reviewers and I've been known to knock out the odd music review from time to time but neither of us have done too much of that recently. Why not? It's actually quite hard work and generally takes time away that you could be playing whatever game it is you enjoyed so much you felt like writing about it.

So we came up with the concept of LazyViews, a series of very short reviews that we can write very quickly but can get our recommendations across to you. They'll probably mostly be on games but they could be on anything. Music, TV shows, films, books, just depends what kind of a mood we are in.

It's a simple model we'll have 5 sections to each review with a couple of sentences in each and a bulleted list of good and bad points.

Intro
Good Points
Bad Points
Summary
Score

The score will be out of 10, and as we're too lazy to make up our own scoring policy we'll just steal Eurogamer's, as they are one of my favourite online review sites.

I expect that I'll be kicking things off with a few reviews of the new Wii games I've got. Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros: Brawl are probably the top candidates.

If you want to send us in any reviews then please do. E-mail your reviews to letmedoyourworkforyou at lazyview.com with your review split into the sections above. Include a web link if you want us to link to your blog or site!

Monday, July 21, 2008

A Cure for Procrastination

This morning I was watching BBC Breakfast whilst eating my breakfast (how did they think of the name?) and they had a piece saying that procrastination causes problems with jobs/relationships etc for 1 in 5 people.

So they had on 2 experts, one who was a lazy person and one who claimed to have a cure for procrastination. I heard the expert lazy man say that he was too lazy even to iron his shirt to come on TV, but I had to leave to go to work before I could hear the cure. Oh well!

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Ways I get in trouble

I'm taking a little bit of a departure here. Bending away from the world of laziness a bit, toward the world of me being a fuck up.

According to the results of our recent, highly scientific poll, our good readers (aka the ass clowns) want to see us get in more trouble with our women folk. Well, to help make that a reality, I'm going to post all the things that usually get me into said trouble. By merely posting this list, I'm pretty sure I'll get in trouble, so here's me giving you ass clowns what you asked for.

1) Talk about me being fat
2) Eating hair
3) Biting
4) Tickling
5) "Nearly" running over old ladies in the parking lot
6) Driving someones BMW 325i
7) Not letting the same someone drive my 350z
8) Making fun of height, fingers, toes, or elbows
9) Not being nice
10) Looking at porn
11) Going to strip clubs
12) Utilizing my extensive knowledge of celebrity nudity to answer self invented trivia questions
13) General mischief with common items on the table at dinner

There they are. The known things that automatically get me in trouble. Anyone got any to add? And by anyone, I think you know who I mean. I can think of a few more that will be added to this list in the near future, but I'm not going to spoil the fun and list them now. That would be too easy.

Any ass clowns out there feel like trying to bait me into doing any of them? Specifically #5, 9, or 11. Especially if you're footing the bill.

A Cunning Plan


Apparently the house needs cleaning. I know this because it's been mentioned a couple of times at home, and even online. I think it's fine, but I am not the person designated with updating the official house cleanliness status*.

Anyway, I've got a cunning plan. My girlfriend has wanted a Wii for ages, so if we buy a Wii this week we're bound to spend the whole weekend playing that, and none of the weekend doing cleaning. It's brilliant! No downsides at all that I can think of.

*The house is kept to a very high standard of cleanliness, apparently when I say the house needs cleaning and talk about my ways to get out of it on here it makes it sound like we live in a cess pit and I get in trouble. But me getting into trouble is what the readers demand!

Monday, July 14, 2008

Competition: Write your own LazyView article!

Right, we've had some feedback. Not feedback on here obviously, that'd be too easy, but on cg. There are two schools of thought about how LazyView could do better.

1. We need to try harder.
2. We are trying too hard.

Now, on first view point 1 might seem the logical solution. If LazyView isn't working too well then we should put more work into it, try harder, post more etc. Obviously this view is totally WRONG! We didn't get where we are today by working harder when things got difficult. We got there by being lazy and letting the problem solve itself. Anyone can get rich by working hard. Where's the fun in that?

It's a simple problem, with a simple solution. If something needs doing, get someone else to do it for you! So with that in mind we're launching a new competition for you to become writers for LazyView! That's right, all you need to do is send us a contribution and if you are a winner we'll put your contribution on the site! WOW! What a prize! The best entrant of each month will be crowned Author of the Month and gain automatic entry into the LazyView Hall of Fame.

If you're really, really good we might even add you to the permanent staff of LazyView. You could become part of our thousand dollar empire! Sure, you'd be a very lowly unpaid part of the empire, more of a glorified tea boy/girl than anything else, but everyone has to start somewhere, and everyone needs hot caffeinated beverages made for them regularly.

So get writing and e-mail your submissions to letmedoyourworkforyou at lazyview.com, change the at to an @ obviously. We just don't want to be spammed.

You can write about any subject really, if you want to you can make some kind of loose pretence to link your article to laziness but it's not a requirement. Get writing!

Friday, July 11, 2008

Jedi Gym

This is a brilliant idea. Make exercising fun! Go and train at the Jedi Gym.

"The main Jedi lesson is to stop trying so hard".

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

What do you like?

I have been inspired by the new changes to LazyView, the recent 1 year anniversary of the blog and this post on Birdseed's Tunedown to ask you lot, our readers, what it is you like or don't like about LazyView.

So here goes. How, other than me posting less and that lazy bastard Danny posting more, can we make LazyView better?

I've added some of these options as a poll to the right hand side of the blog for those of you too lazy to write a proper comment.

I don't think we mentioned it when we started but our brilliant aim at the start of this project was to make this brilliantly successful blog that we could sell for a million dollars (or more) in a couple of years so we didn't have to work again. Because we were too lazy. A blog seemed like less effort than a real website.

How are we doing on our $1m target? Oh... yeah... great! We'll buy you a beer when we're rich. Totally. We'd put ads on to help but we're too lazy to deal with the accounting.



And yes, this post is like a clips episode of a sitcom where they are too lazy and cheap to make a proper episode.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

All change!

Well, minor changes. Blogger have added a couple of new applications so I've stuck them on our site. Our blogroll now shows the latest post from each blog, and I've replaced our old subscription buttons with the google app for it. None of the other stuff looks particularly interesting.

I know, none of it really matters. It's just our brilliantly witty posts that you both come and read us for isn't it?

Friday, July 4, 2008

Games for you.

Bored? Well here are a couple of games to keep you occupied.

For the nerds: Protector is another tower defence type variant. This one has a big long campaign, lots of maps and some strategy. Takes ages to complete but it strangely satisfying. It saves your campaign on your browser so you can close down and come back later.

For the cool kids: Sitar Star is like a flash guitar hero where you play a sitar. What more needs saying?