Ain’t Flickr great…I love this picture.
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GAA Players On The PS2
There was a report in yesterday’s Tribune that caught my eye. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be on their website so I can’t link to it but it was a piece on the ongoing row between the GAA and the GBA about the image rights of the players, this time in relation to a new Playstation game by Sony. Now, I realise that there’s a whole lot more going on behind this, it’s just one more chapter in a big beef between these two groups but it just struck me as ridiculous.
According to the Tribune’s report the Gaelic Football players are up in arms because the game allows gamers to name the players on their make-believe teams whatever they want. So essentially they can play the All-Ireland final all over again with players of their choice or with players from whatever era or with whoever they want. The players are angry because they feel their image rights are not being protected in this. Hmm. Oookay. But fellas, your images aren’t being used. Your names may be but as I understand it this is just in the same way that any game provides the gamer with the ability to name the characters. So your name could be used but then again so could the entire cast of Coronation Streets’. There could be a Corrie v Crossroads playoff on some gamer’s console. Hey for all I know somebody could be using my name to play Halo with!! I feel so used!
Or maybe that’s it. I just have to wonder are they peeved because they’ve heard the stories about Tiger Woods or Ronaldo or Tony Hawks being paid big bucks to have their images used in the games that bear their names. If that’s the case then they’ve got their heads in the clouds. Ronaldo was involved in all aspects of his game from the cover to the promotion. An image of his face was used to texture the head of the ingame model. As for Tiger Woods, he was mo-capped (wore a ping-pong covered body suit that digitally tracked his movements) so that not only was his image used ingame, but so were his signature moves.
Perhaps this is what they’re getting at, maybe the players are hoping for some sweet deal that involves them in all the merchandising of this game and gives them a nice wad of cash. Well, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree by blaming the GAA for not securing this for them. Face it, a gaelic football game is never going to have the same global appeal as a Golf or Soccer game, no matter if it’s got Ryan McMenamin on the cover. I can’t even find a mention of it on amazon.co.uk. I would say that it was Sony who wasn’t interested in going to the hassle of putting the players’ faces on the ingame characters and they wouldn’t have been interested in shelling out big bucks to secure image rights when they can just go the easy route and leave it open to the gamer. It just wouldn’t make any difference to the bottom line. Those die-hard fans would still buy it and those who don’t know about Gaelic football won’t know who these guys are or care about the game.
Plus, with the developers being Australian I’d say they just tweaked their Aussie Rules game and regurgitated it to make it GAA.
I don’t drive. Yes it’s true, I’m in my 30’s and I just haven’t gotten around to it. I know how, I’ve had lessons many times over the years, I even own my own car and used to drive it…on short trips…avoiding all hills…and roundabouts. I just don’t have my full license and now that I have a baby I don’t think it’s right to drive without one. I mean, it’s one thing to put myself and thousands of other Dubliners at risk, but my precious baby?! Yes, trout-slap me now.
So, up until now I’ve not experienced the guilt-trip that is loading up your car in a car park. My sister looks after Eve and her own two-year-old son for the few hours I work every day and today she had one of those minor episodes that is the daily bread and butter of every parent of young children. She had just got back to the car when she discovered that her son had had a wardrobe-malfunction of the nappy variety and was soaked through. So, she strapped Eve into her carseat and then proceded to perfrom an emergency nappy change on the front seat of the car. Meanwhile she notices that another driver has decided to wait for her spot and slowly a long line of cars is forming behind him.
Trying desperately to get the nappy on to her furiously struggling toddler she can feel the weight of all those eyes upon her. That lovely feeling of being judged. She is so hassled she gives up trying to put his trousers back on and plonks him wearing just nappy, vest and coat into his carseat. At this point he decides he does not want to be in the carseat and proceeds to have a full on screaming, limb-flailing tantrum while she is trying to strap him in. Does this prompt the driver to move on? Noooo, he just sits there, with the queue of people behind him, all tapping their steering wheels and craning to watch the show.
As she struggles on, her face bright red, sweat streaming, one of the other drivers comes up and asks the lead driver would he please move on as there are plenty of other spaces further on and the line of traffic is starting to back up out onto the main road causing a traffic jam.
Phew! Thinks my sister, at last someone with some sense, she can carry on her battle without the audience. The first driver finally pulls away and goes on to find another spot. Only the line doesn’t budge because the next driver in line decides that he will now wait for her! So she has to finish the wrestling match with her son, whose screams have been joined by Eve’s who’s upset that he’s upset, and then she has to collapse the buggy, manhandle it into the boot and try to find space for the shopping…all with the impatient ticking of engines in her ears.
When she did get out onto the road she was already a good few miles away when she remembered the scratch card and packet of M&Ms she’d put on the roof while trying to find her keys. Good on her though, she was so peed off with the whole mess she went back to search and found the scratch card and the M&Ms on the side of the road. She decided she was just a little too embarrassed to be seen picking the M&Ms out of the gutter (I mean it was Dalkey you know!) but she swiped up the scratch card and ended up winning a fiver on it!
If you are just dying to see this film and don’t want to read any spoilers then you might not want to read on. However, since this film is summed up by its tagline I wouldn’t imagine there are many who can’t guess the story. In a nutshell it is the supposedly based-on-true-events tale of three young people; two English girls and an Australian guy (Teabag from Neighbours) who buy a beat-up car and set off on a roadtrip through the Australian outback. Along the way they stop at Wolf Creek meteor site but never get any further as their car breaks down and the man who comes to help them is actually a psycho with plans to torture and kill them.
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Finally I’m Getting Some!
No, not that…I’m talking about sleep!
I know it’s a cliché and I was willing to clock those who made comments towards the end of my pregnancy about “getting used to sleepless nights heh heh” but I had no idea what sleep deprivation could do to a person. Eve is a couple of weeks shy of her first birthday and the night before last was the very first time she has slept through the night without waking once. I was afraid it might be a cruel fluke so I said nothing but then she slept through again last night so (touch wood) this might be the start of something wonderful.
For most of her year Eve hasn’t been an occasional waker either. More nights than not she woke every hour on the hour demanding to be fed and I would drag myself into her room, feed her, put her back down and crawl back to bed to sleep for 45 minutes before repeating the cycle. At the beginning I remember thinking I couldn’t do it but I didn’t know how I could get out of it, no one else could feed her and that’s all she wanted. In the wee hours I would often plan my escape from motherhood as I slumped in the feeding chair with this mini-torturer clamped to my boob. If I could just have one night I thought it would be ok, if I could just catch up a bit on my sleep debt. Usually just when I was on the verge of collapse she’d deign to permit me 3 or 4 hours on the trot and the next day it would be enough to stop me running out the door and not looking back.
The worst nights were when I wouldn’t be able to tell you how many times exactly I’d been up during the night, I’d startle awake in my bed thinking I was still in the chair and not knowing where she was. I’d get up, feed her, put her back down, all while still semi-conscious, how I didn’t fall down the stairs (again) or try to put her to sleep in the cupboard I don’t know. For the longest time I truly thought this wasn’t going to get better. Anyone else I spoke to with a baby Eve’s age told me that their little Sleeping Beauties put themselves to bed at 7:30 and didn’t wake for 12 hours. I thought I’d been given a baby insomniac and I’d have to wait until she was in school before I’d ever see an 8 hour night again.
Well, I’m here to tell any poor unfortunate who’s going through the same that it will happen. One of these nights your little darling will finally figure it out and sleep the night through. Now of course I have to train myself not to wake at 4am and lie listening to the monitor wondering if I should just poke my head in there and check…