QPR vs Stoke City

I went to the QPR game last night. What a pisser!

Stoke were dreadful in the first half. QPR's goal after about four minutes was a joke and could have been cleared by a couple of Stoke players. I had to leave someone's birthday drinks to go to the match, and when the ref gave QPR a penalty after about 10 minutes I thought I'd made a terrible mistake! Thank god it was such a weak effort and easily saved.

The ref was the funniest thing about the game. He reminded me of the Second Division refs who had no idea what they were doing, before we finally escaped back into The Championship. At one point he gave a goal kick to QPR when even the QPR players were saying it must have cannoned off their player. He backpeddled on that one - something I've never seen a ref do before.

And the first time we got into their box in the second half all the Stoke player had to do was fall over like the QPR man had in the first half and it was a guaranteed penalty. At 1-1 it looked like we might actually get something from an appalling game. Then something strange happened to QPR, like the sleep drugs in the half time cup of tea finally kicked in. The team seemed to give up and with about 15 minutes to go Stoke passed it around their box before one of our players could be arsed to tap it in.

That was the winning goal. Cue a mental and a rendition of Delilah. Not a bad evening and I have to applaud any game where I can get a tube home.

Family Hostel

I've been going on about how much I wished I hadn't watched Hostel.

So imagine my wife's surprise when she gets an email suggesting its about as hardcore as Bambi. No Thumper, put down the blow torch. Aaaaarrgrrgghhhhhh....


Hostel is out now in UK cinemas and is released on Region 1 DVD at Amazon.com on April 18 2006

Web Dev

Or website development as anyone outside Shoreditch would call it. It can be a slow process when you're doing each page by hand, rather than in a snazzy web generator-type program.

You know what won't help? Forgetting to write down the font you used for the main links on your homepage. Updating the Matt Chapman website isn't going to be a simple delete and replace if you don't know that. Still it's your own falut for including links to important stuff like where you work. Because that never changes, does it dumbass?!

Oh and if you think the font is easy to figure out (having tried every one it must be Palatino), did you remember what colour you made the roll-over buttons? What do you mean you've slept since then? You mean I have to trial and error about 80 different colours side by side until we match it up. Gggaaaaarrhggghh.

And finally...

When I wrote this story on Friday I wasn't sure if it would actually make it onto the website. It's interesting to write something with a bit of a twist for what should be a fairly serious tech news site.

I'd like to thank UPS for making all this possible.

And now over to Sian for the weather.


VNU Trackback

FILM: Stay

Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland director Marc Forster has a knack for finding interesting films. His involvement no doubt helped pull in a stellar cast – Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, a wonderfully fractured turn by Ryan Gosling and even a high-quality cameo from Bob Hoskins.

The film contains a lot of art, and through the course of the story it strives to become a living work of art itself. The editing is exquisite, the effects help bend the film’s reality and even the music plays its part (watch the bonus featurette to see just how much artistic outpouring the soundtrack contains).

If you’ve watched a lot of genre movies you might recognise where everything is headed, but overall the journey is still well worth it.

Stay is out now in UK cinemas or available on Region 1 DVD at Amazon.com

You can take the boy out of sci-fi...

...but you can't take the sci-fi out of the boy.

So what was my first story on Vnunet.com? I'll give you no guesses.

Swings and Roundabouts

Of course, there has to be a downside to everything. It's the natural law of the universe. Think of it like the glass half-full version of 'Every cloud has a silver lining'.

So, the downside of getting a cool job in the middle of soho means that the Day Job page on the Matt Chapman website needs an update. Since it only took me six months to get it up there in the first place, that should happen any day now.

So long and thanks for all the fish...

Those of you keeping an eye on my journo career (thanks mum, you're the best) will know that I went freelance three weeks ago. As so often in my career - three months at The Net magazine; six months as a reporter on Network News - I didn't stick at it for long.

It's not that it wasn't paying. I've worked out I earned 50 per cent more before tax than I did when I was fulltime at Dreamwatch. That's what a combination of doing three days a week in freelance shifts and writing features and workshops for a number of computer and other magazines will get you. I was actually starting to enjoy it, even if it did eat into my weekends and nights out a little bit. I even turned work down in my first month, which is a cardinal sin in most freelancers' eyes.

However, I'm like a magpie to a shiny thing when an interesting job offer comes along. Two in particular caught my eye. In the end I wasn't offered the one on a Playstation magazine - what a year it would have been to be working on one of those! But I have taken up the offer from Vnunet.com.

There are so many reasons this job is perfect for me. For starters, it's daily news. And boy do I miss doing news. I've also worked at VNU* before, so I know what to expect. Not to mention that at the moment the website staff are the golden boys of the company for pulling in so many readers and VNU is taking its online presence very seriously. From a comfort level point of view, the journey to work shaves about 20 minutes off the hour-plus it takes to reach Titan. And the pay is back at the level I was on at IPC, having taken a massive cut to go and work on Dreamwatch. That's without even factoring in the trips abroad those nice technology company like to send you on.

So, a good job that pays OK and offers personal perks. I think that's what you call a no-brainer. I start on Monday :)




*Incidentally, the VNU building features in the realistically created London streets in The Getaway. So if I have a bad day at work I can just get the PS2 character to repeatedly smash their car into it. That should relieve some stress ;)

FILM: Hostel

American college buddies Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are backpacking through Europe with their new Icelandic friend Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). When they get tired of all the Americans in Amsterdam, they head for an out-of-the-way Slovakian town that promises a Hostel full of beautiful Eastern European women starved of male contact since the war...


If it wasn't for the brief glimpse of some teeth in the opening shots of this film, you might think you'd wrongly bought a ticket to a soft core porn movie. The three unsympathetic main characters are drinking and fucking their way around Europe on a backpacking holiday. By the time they finally head to a hostel on the promise of hot loose girls you're not exactly rooting for them. (Judging by their snatched conversation, I'm guessing this is also the point the two reviewers sitting in front of me who were supposed to be watching MirrorMask next door realised this wasn't their film).

If there's a moral to Hostel it's the same one that should be applied to the tempting email offers that clog up your Inbox - if something seems too good to be true it probably is. When the three leads reach the hostel it's like a male fantasy brought to life. However, the slow build-up to reach this point doesn't work as well as with something like House of Wax, partly because you care less about the characters here.

SPOILER (highlight to read):
Anyone who has seen House of Wax must also wonder if there is a new set of horror rules being created. The Scream series blew apart the old set of horror cliches by naming and then using them as part of the plot. House of Wax and Hostel both share some new rules: Had your achilles tendons cut? You're a goner. Lost one or more fingers? That's your lot for this film, see you at the closing credits.

At the moment there seems to be a push towards really nasty psycho horrors in mainstream cinema. When modern horrors are mistakenly made for a PG-13 audience (The Fog, Cursed, etc), do 18 certificate films have to push things that much further? Or is this just an expression of a culture where rendition and torture are so everyday that you have to step it up and show what people have only imagined before? When Jack Bauer kills and tortures terrorists for fun every week on TV, would Quentin Tarantino's pull away from an ear-slicing shot in 1992 look weak today rather than clever? Whatever the reason, this is pretty nasty stuff and it's the quickest I've seen a viewing room empty when the credits started to roll.

Still, these movies have their uses. If in a few months your 18-year-old is making plans to go backpacking, why not host a DVD night for them. Pick up a takeaway, pop along to Blockbuster and rent out Wolf Creek and Hostel. After that they'll probably prefer two weeks in Tenerife instead...

Hostel is out now in UK cinemas and is released on Region 1 DVD at Amazon.com on April 18 2006

Guardian Writer

I featured in today's Fiver, in the readers' bit they slot in between the TV listings. Technically, that means I've written for the Guardian. Might have to add them to the list of publications I've worked for.

TONIGHT'S TV & RADIO

ITV1: Soccer Night (12am)
"What a weekend I just had!" wrote a breathless Matt Chapman earlier this week.

Five: Golazo Football Show (12am)
In fact, his weekend was sooooooo amazing that he felt compelled to describe it to us in an email that was approximately 2,000 words in length, and therefore way too long to fit in a TV & Radio guide that nobody actually uses as a TV & Radio guide.

Dutch Football - AZ Alkmaar v PSV (1am)
So to cut a long story short - a phrase, incidentally, that featured in Mr Chapman's epic tale - he went to Stoke for a few pints and had a nice time. The end.

This publication has been sexed up

Interesting addition to the magazines world in today's Gorkana update:

SEx
SEx is the journal of The Erotic Print Society, launched in February 2006, and brings together a broad range of established and new writers who cover the theme of sex. Some will explore its social dynamic, others will contribute fiction, while others will be looking at the arts, the media, the adult entertainment industry, the law and politics. SEx is published by Jamie Maclean, who founded the Erotic Review, and is edited by Christopher Peachment.

Does this mean SFX magazine will stop covering up the F in its title in an attempt to look like the word SEX?