Topic Focus...

One of the worst things a blogger can do is start with a title. It ties you in to you subject matter and it doesn't allow you to think more freely to create a better article, which the subject of may naturally change in the first few sentences, the first few words even. But that of course is exactly what I do. Would you expect anything different?

The last post I titled a "Inspiration", in a bid to try and get my mind to think of something to write about. It ended up being another blog about me leaving for university. I looked back at recent blogs have some sort of link with me going off to university. And feedback from you guys is very positive towards blogs about student life and the progression to Uni.  

So I am making a decision, that the most productive path for my blog to follow, as well as it being the best, is about my life as a student. Following examples such as www.thestudentblogger.com I am going to talk about things which are happening for people who are looking to go to university in the future and want to find out more from a first person perspective, as well as interesting stuff and quirky little things that I am in no doubt will happen.

I thin by doing this it gives my writings some direction and some purpose as apposed to me just telling you what level I am at on Candy Crush (Still level 28 by the way)

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy the slightly revised format of the blog and I look forward to writing many more happy posts in the future!

Thanks very much for reading! Got something to say? Write it in the comments below, or you can even email me at tomstalkblog@yahoo.co.uk

Why not check out thestudentblogger.com. If you are reading this you will probably also be interested in this!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Inspiration...

There reaches a point in everyone's blogging where you will inevitably, eventually, horrendously run out of ideas. Thinking today about the multiple blogging ideas I could write about: The 12 year old kid with DOPE written on a baseball cap who came into work today. I even know where you can buy a hat like that. Or maybe I was thinking about telling you my parents were off to Yorkshire. Again. Which might be interesting, but it probably won't be. Or I could even tell you about the worlds most amazing potato wedges that I created tonight, but that I can see is just as boring!

You can see where my lack of inspiration comes from really. I mean all I have really done today is go to work and play candy crush, then cook potato wedges. Actually on the Candy Crush front, I have managed to finally crack level 25... I know not impressive, but from humble beginnings... I have only been playing it for 3 days...

So as many of you may know, I am off to university in just a couple of weeks. This means that I am going to have to give up the job I currently hold at The Co-op. While this news may appear to be sad for me, I really don't think I will miss it. And I am not going to start complaining about the opportunity I have had to have a job, and earn decent money doing it, which has set me for many things, not least of which is running ad maintaining my car, working at a shop like the Co-op can have a lot of things compared to Candy Crush.

The frustration. You spend your entire life trying to make things work which are just not going to work. I think the problem with working in a retail shop is that they are all set out to be the same, and therefore the systems are just not adaptable to different situations. In trying to think of the best way to explain this, it is like trying to fit a ball into a cube shaped box. It doesn't fit in nicely. I mean you can get it in with a bit of squeezing and pushing, but it is not perfect, in fact in many ways the ball is now ruined.

This is the same with the shop. When it was a newsagents before, everything worked, because it was designed to work in that situation. A small shop with a limited access and limited stockroom space in a 60's prefab row of shops. Stock came to the shop in the owner's Citroen Belingo van, people only bought a paper and a bag of humbugs and everything ran smoothly. Now deliveries come in on huge lorries, in cages and trolleys far too big to fit in the stock room and at one point in the shop the aisles aren't even wide enough to fit a trolley through. How are people supposed to shop for their groceries in a shop which is barely big enough for 4 pints of milk and a loaf of bread?

I suppose you have to treat everything as a learning opportunity, and there have been some parts of the job that I have really enjoyed, like the colleagues I have had,  and other things that I hope will be part of my future career: the mindset of business, predicting what people will buy, helping customers out and advising them on what the best product is. But there are many things that, a week on Saturday I will be more than happy to wave goodbye to.

Oh and check this, in my tea break in writing this article, I managed to get to level 28! Watch out Dad, 32 here we come!

Thanks for reading!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Exciting News!

I have some great news for all those people who just can't get enough. I now have an email address and a weekly email newsletter! I understand that for some of you the best way to keep up to date with the blog is to recieve an email newsletter! So all you have to do is send me an email to this address: tomstalkblog@yahoo.co.uk and you will forever on recieve a weekly notification of what I am posting as well as a little bit more about what is going on in my life and the life of the local community.

Please send me an email at tomstalkblog@yahoo.co.uk if you would like to subscribe to this weekly newsletter! Thanks for your support!

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Mobile Gaming - Is It The Future?

This post is an aside from a recent post I put out about the ever popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga. The thing about this is that it is something really well debated in the global gaming community, and was something that I wanted to get on a bit of a technical soap-box, but knowing there was people like my gran reading my blog, I thought I would do it on a separate occasion!

Candy Crush has been the fastest growing mobile game of 2013. It to date has around 44 million global downloads, with this growing by 110 downloads every minute, something in itself a magical figure. The thing that this really highlights to me is the rapid rate that mobile gaming is growing and changing and developing. I think the main thing with it is that it is all about games being more and more accessible  People can play it on the bus, while they are having their breakfasts, over a cup of coffee, rather than having to boot up PCs and spend hours getting incredibly involved and engaged in the game.

Not only that, but the short time that 1 game takes makes it a lot more available for people to play, they can have a round of candy crush before they get out of bed, while they are having a cup of coffee or in those ever shorter spaces that we have in our day-to-day lives. 

Just to have a game on something like COD or Halo takes 20 minutes at a minimum, and even then if you are sitting down to play a game on a console, then you end us spending a lot longer than 20 minutes. People just can't find the time in their lives to do this, whereas mobile gaming is much more fast paced and light-hearted.

I still think though, when you posit the idea that mobile gaming will eventually take over from PC gaming and console gaming, that this will never happen. The mobile gaming audience is a completely different one to that of more substantial video games, and is something that will stay that way for as long as they exist. All mobile gaming does is open up a new avenue, a new industry created by the ever increasing complexities and capabilities of our mobile phones.

And that is the magic of mobile gaming. People who play World of Warcraft for hours every night, will continue to do so, undisturbed by Candy Crush, Farmville and the likes, it is almost like the 2 move in parallel universes. The industries aren't competing, and in fact I think they can really work together well. There is already some evidence of this, the big game development organisations have made mobile versions of their games, like EAs Fifa and Rockstar's GTA III as some examples of games that I have found work really well on a mobile. 

The question however is does the future lie in mobile gaming. And I think for the industry, mobile gaming at the minute certainly looks to be more profitable, especially if you find the right game for your audience. And I think that can also be said for the devices themselves, in that mobiles and tablet PCs and Apple's equivalents are developing at a much quicker pace than the PCs and consoles. The best things we have seen in the past few years is motion controlled technology like X-Box Kinect and Playstation Move, whereas smatphones, tablets and the like have pretty much come from nothing in the past 2 years, and continue to develop at the same rate.

If you have any feelings either way on this topic, then please comment below. I would be really interested to read your opinions on what you think is the geography of gaming in the future.

If not, then thanks for reading, and you can follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Candy Crush House Rules

Some of you may have seen a tweet that I posted last night about my parents arguing over who had used up all the lives of Candy Crush, and as a result of that interest I have started playing it too. I have always steered clear of it due to it's "addictive capabilities" and "impulsive in-app purchases" however I could hold off the curiosity no longer.

There is one trait that we all have as children of our parents. We cannot let them know more about something that is cool and modern. That would be BAD. This in the past has led me to learn all about how a computer works just so I can baffle them with jargon and things, and so when I find my mum and dad hopelessly addicted to Candy Crush, to the point where the first thing they do when they get up in the morning is use their 5 lives, I have to make sure I am ahead of the game, literally speaking.

Unfortunately I think I may just have ruined my life... ever since I downloaded it at about 6pm yesterday I have been unable to get off my phone. I have successfully run down the battery twice in one day, which would normally take me 2 days, and I have had to schedule things that I do in order to fit around life regeneration. Not only that, but it is SO frustrating. I have heard my Dad say on numerous occasions: "This game is fixed, all it wants is your money, I am never playing it again." Half an hour later he is sat on his iPad looking intently a several coloured squares, hoping, praying, that this time he will get past level 30...

There is one thing to be said though, for my Mum and Dad's new addiction to the iDevices, is that they seem to have created a new house rule. It reads: "The one who is playing Candy Crush, plays Candy Crush and is therefore excused of any other jobs."

It does make me laugh really that parents lecture you for the whole of your lives that there is more important things in life than games and computers and phones and TVs, and you can't let them take over your life. The sad fact is though, is that when my Dad gets up early to sit downstairs with his cup of coffee and play candy crush, is enough ambition for me and my sister to rip them for be "addicted" which I am content with, for the time being anyway!

Thanks for reading!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Me and Lucy: Our Story So Far...

As some of you may know, I own a Morris Minor Traveller called Lucy. Firstly let me tell you a little bit about her. She is 45 years old and was rescued from my Great Uncle's barn in September after being sat unused for 14 years. She was only owned by 2 other people before me. The village estate stonemason and the local farmer, being my uncle. The stonemason used her as a builders van and my uncle used Lucy as a posh car for when he wasn't driving sheep around in the back of his series 3 Land Rover. 

She has had her ups and downs since she arrived in my care, but over the past 9 months she has been amazing! She has taken me to school pretty much every day, and got me home again on most of them, she has even taken me as far as North Yorkshire to the farm she first came from, and then back again from that. 3 times! 

She has been to 2 Rallies with me. One of those being the Morris Minor Owners Club Young Member's Rally and the other one of those being the International Morris Centenary Rally where she was joined by over 600 of her brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews, and grandparents, and probably great grandparents too! 

The reason why I got a Morris Minor is quite simple. Insurance. The most expensive thing you can actually buy is Insurance for a teenage boy in the UK. On the ford fiesta that I learnt to drive in the insurance would have been 3 times what the car was actually worth in money. I had spoken to a friend about Morris Minors and he said that is was so so so much cheaper for the insurance, and no doubt it was, a quarter of the price! So that is why Lucy is Lucy... well sort of. The real reason why Lucy is called Lucy is because she has the best number plate in the world. LSD 496G. Naturally, for a teenage lad, that is quite amazing to say the least. And as a Beatles fan, that makes it even more perfect-er-erer.

Many of my friends and family have asked my what is going to happen to Tom and Lucy when I go to university in not too many days time. Well Lucy cannot be expected to travel with me all the way to Liverpool, and it is far to big a city for her to be comfortable (and not get her wheels nicked) so I am going to have to leave her at home. However, given the history that the car has to me, I am going to have to keep her forever. We are going to try and make something work long distance until I have finished university until she can join me where ever I reside and we can live happily (and bumpily) ever after.

The End.

Thanks for reading!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146