Priyan Meewella

Today I am plugging a couple of musical selections linked predominantly by their social effect on my life. First up is a new music video from jazz singer/pianist Anthony Strong, For Once In My Life from his Delovely EP. Anthony is an old school friend of mine (as in we went to school together, not that he is old school). Anthony is the sort of person whose talent would be infuriating if he were not such a lovely, unassuming chap. He was also responsible for my initial introduction to some of London's top burlesque performers, while he performed on that circuit. That has certainly led to a few of the more memorable nights out in the past few years. Unfortunately we seem to have reached a point where his releasing a CD or video is what reminds me that we are long overdue a drink. Therefore it is terribly important that you support him so that he can keep making great music and I can remember to catch up with him.

Next up, Amanda Palmer is again using Kickstarter to crowdsource funding but this time it is a little more ambitious: raising funds outside of a label to produce and promote her new album and an accompanying artbook, and to embark upon a worldwide tour with a new band. Any donation above a dollar nets a copy of the album, and backers have access to the first single now. This return to a patronage system (albeit a distributed one: people have donated anywhere between $1 and $10,000 each) is, she proclaims, the future of music and I am inclined to agree. I am always fascinated by the varied fans she has hidden amongst my friends, who crawl out of the woodwork whenever I mention her, whilst the crowds at her gigs are amongst the easiest to strike up a conversation and connect with if I find myself there alone — after all, at least half of them are guaranteed to be Neil Gaiman fans too. This summer she plays a sold-out London gig the day Jenna and her family arrive. Having been able to witness Jenna's first real gig experience back in New Orleans (it was A Perfect Circle), accompanying her to her first London gig is almost as enticing a prospect.

If you happen not to care about music then, aside from the fact you have no soul, you may wish to check out the following:

• Chameleon: an impressive looking homescreen in development for Android tablets.
• Ghild: a short film written by Michael Rosenbaum (though appreciation may require the aforementioned soul).
• New Yorker article on George "Geohot" Hotz, best known for unlocking the iPhone and the PlayStation 3.

By now Keggfest, the annual post-Easter celebration of chocolatey delights, should require no introduction. This year's Keggfest actually took place about two weeks ago but I only just got round to checking out the photos, most of which are actually other people's handiwork as my camera drifted between hands over the course of the night. The third year running of the London-based Keggfest, it now has as many years under its belt as its Cantabrigian predecessor. In the spirit of the past year's democratic uprisings — and because of the problems caused by last year's late date-change — the actual date fell to a vote, which means I cannot be held responsible (no matter what the absent Kirsten may claim). It resulted in a good turnout over the course of the evening, though no one traveled quite as far as last year when we had guests from N. Ireland and the USA.

"The Keggteorite", my sculpture for this year was a cake-based diorama with an alien object having plummeted to Earth, cracking open and spilling its, um, buttons. Admittedly it doesn't quite challenge this record-breaking 8000kg masterpiece (maybe we can book them next year?). Whilst the traditional wine and chocolate binge continued as normal, there was slightly less chocolatey destruction with the exception of a certain incident involving a telescopic vacuum cleaner pipe and a refrigerated Kegg. As the kids say: standard. I'm already looking forward to next year's bash.

"That's nearly the size of my head," I thought apprehensively as I extracted the large metal cube of an aftermarket CPU heatsink from its box. Looking at the assortment of metal and bolts required just to mount it, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake. But as the screws glinted under the spotlights of the living room, surrounded by a myriad of electronic parts destined to form a greater whole, I smiled. So long as it actually fitted in the case, this was going to be fun. I am left slightly concerned that for me building a PC may be less about the end result and more like a £1,000 single-use Lego kit. At which point I really ought just to buy LEGO 10179.

Some of you will recall that my primary machines (i.e. desktops and laptops) are named after fictional AIs, hence MAX (the onboard AI of the alien spacecraft in the 80s classic Flight of the Navigator) and Daedalus (the mysterious AI that chooses to assist the player in the original Deus Ex). Most readers ought to recognise the origin of my new machine, JARVIS, the name narrowly beating out rival option GERTY.

JARVIS follows my usual design philosophy for computers which means a good but not excessive graphics card to keep things cooler and quieter, coupled with as much RAM as I can get on two sticks for a reasonable price. Currently, I discovered, that means a slightly excessive 16GB. With lower power draw in mind, I have been waiting for Intel's new Ivybridge processors so under the hood is a 3.3 GHz Core i5, paired with an MSI mainboard and factory overclocked Radeon HD 7850.

What really makes the machine fly, however, is that after experimenting with an SSD in my HTPC, I have been converted and picked up a 256GB Crucial SSD for the operating system and applications. Boot times are negligible and even Firefox launches swiftly! More substantial storage comes in the form of two convention HDDs transferred over from MAX, offering 3TB in total. The build is housed inside a sleek Antec Solo II case, an upgrade to the Sonata line which I used for MAX. It is based on the same silent computing principles, but with improved airflow and sound dampening polycarbonate panels lining the inside.

I decided this was as good a time as any to test out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview but, while I'm still wrangling the new Metro-style Start Menu replacement, I'll save my thoughts on it for another post.

Even the bumbling Jacques Clouseau would have had scant difficulty identifying overarching the theme to the long weekend: film. Not merely film, in fact, but rather film experiences.

It kicked off on Friday with a screening of La Haine put on by The Other Cinema, the group behind Secret Cinema (about which naturally I can tell you nothing). La Haine ("Hatred") is a gritty 1995 French film about three young friends struggling in an impoverished housing project in the outskirts of Paris. About a decade ago, Asian Dub Foundation wrote their own soundtrack to the film and on Friday they performed it as a live accompaniment to the screening. Their diverse, multicultural sound was a perfect match with an unsettling score that represented the seething resentment between the protagonists and the police as it rose and withdrew but rarely fell silent. Ravi rightly commented that returning to the original film will be difficult, as it will undoubtedly lack a certain intensity. The themed screening was held out in East London with BMX bikers and break dances showing off their skills. Also shown, on what became a somewhat political evening with various spoken word performances, were the trailer and music video for Plan B's "ill Manors" project. Whilst not a fan in the past, this I can certainly get behind.

On Sunday afternoon Nick and I switched gears to blockbuster mode for The Avengers. When Marvel announced its intentions five years ago it sounded impressively ambitious but logistically unrealistic. When last year's precursor films were announced it became achievable but still seemed destined for mediocrity in attempting to wrangle so many big characters and names into a single film. When the film was given to Joss Whedon to write and direct, I suddenly realised the benefit of Marvel Studios producing films themselves: they actually understand their own properties and the players in their own industry. The result is simply spectacular. Whedon's fingerprints are all over the dialogue which allows for both character development as the Avengers gradually pull together as a team, as well as hilarious conflict and one-liners. I was surprised by people's concern over Mark Ruffalo's casting, calling him "untested" as the character, because Ruffalo always seemed perfect for the role (as well as being a hugely talented actor). Someone else described The Avengers as "the best Hulk movie ever made" and it's certainly fair to say he steals most scenes in which he appears. The only minor downside is that, given Whedon's talent for writing strong female characters, the male-dominated cast was already fixed. That he managed to make good use of even Black Widow despite her lack of superpowers is testament to his skill.

It is hard to say much more without veering into spoiler territory but, even without its record-breaking box office takings, The Avengers has certainly set a new benchmark for superhero movies in the vein of my previous two favourites Spider-man 2 and Iron Man (there is limited use in comparison to The Dark Knight which is a very different kind of film). As for Whedon, the telephone is sure to be ringing a lot more, as Hollywood hopefully will finally realise what we've been telling them all along. Meanwhile, with The Amazing Spider-man and The Dark Knight Rises also out this summer, it will be interesting to see who ends up at the top of the comicbook pile.

Finally on Sunday night Chandara and I went super old school with a silent film night courtesy of Ciné Illuminé.  The film was 1929 classic Piccadilly, about a young Chinese girl given the chance to take centre stage at a London club, leading to an early noir-esque story of betrayal, forbidden love and murder. But the real treat is the atmosphere around the screening with a glamorous but intimate setting, themed cocktails, food-toting usherettes and most notably Luke Meredith's live piano accompaniment to the film. Seeing (and hearing) the interaction as a musician reacts to what occurs on screen makes a startling difference. Ciné Illuminé looks here to stay with screenings announced for the first Sunday of each month for the foreseeable future.

I have long been sceptical of the importance of breakfast and one of my more infamous early posts, long before the current incarnation of the site, was that setting out The Breakfast Conspiracy.  While intended solely as a humorous jab at those who (a) knocked my eating habits; or (b) subscribed to conspiracy theories, there has always been something unsettling about the way people mindlessly repeat the "most important meal" mantra with no explanation, yet a fervour bordering on the religious. I mean it practically screams conspiracy. The truth, I knew, was out there.

Recently, tumbling down one of those impossible-to-avoid Internet research rabbit-holes, I discovered some revealing information.  Our story begins with Edward Bernays, whom those in advertising will know as "the father of public relations" and a pioneer in propaganda. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and combined his uncle's psychoanalytical ideas with the crowd psychology theories of Le Bon and Trotter.

Bernays's belief was that the public democratic judgement was unreliable and had to be "guided from above". Of course, this "guidance" was primarily in the interest of the corporations that hired him, like the American Tobacco Company. He viewed the public as a "herd that needed to be led" and, more worryingly, described his opinion-moulding techniques as the "engineering of consent".

What does any of this have to do with breakfast, you may be wondering? Well, one of Bernays's less prominent clients was the Beech-Nuttagum Packing Company, which was experiencing serious financial losses due to its relatively new food product, bacon, not selling particularly well to an American public used to eating very little in the morning.

And so Bernays, using the psychological techniques he had acquired, approached a medical doctor and asked a few innocuous, leading questions along the following lines:

1. Does the human body expend energy in the night during sleep?
2. Does the human body need energy during the day to complete day-to-day tasks, labour, etc.?
3. Would it make sense to eat a hearty breakfast as opposed to a light breakfast in order to provide the body with energy?

Having secured one positive response, he circulated it around 5,000 doctors, of whom 4,500 were willing to support the opinion. This was then fed to the newspapers as health advice: 4,500 doctors agree a hearty breakfast provides the energy needed to sustain activity. Of course, bacon and eggs* were subtly suggested as a part of that meal, and his client's financial woes were history. Meanwhile, this spurious but highly profitable medical advice morphed into the maxim that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Indeed, it is now so widely repeated that the corporations with a vested interest in our breakfasting barely need to "remind" us themselves.

*Do not misinterpret this as a knock against bacon and eggs: they are fantastic foods for brunch. Or as a hangover cure. But then it is medicine.

Humans and our ancestors have been using tools for some two and a half million years.  Over that time I think we have earned the right to be picky not just about their utility, but just how they sit in our hands.  Certainly, I have always been abnormally selective in the cutlery I feel comfortable using (at home anyway, I can generally suppress it when outside): it must be slender, smoothly curved with a balanced weight distribution.  The reason, it eventually dawned on me, is that subconsciously I see cutlery as an extension of my fingers, giving rise to certain preconceptions about how it should feel and respond.  It also explains my affinity for chopsticks which are essentially a direct extension of two fingers.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I am similarly specific about my mice, being tools many of us spend hours each day using both at work and home. I recently described purchasing a new mouse as like acquiring a new limb, an idea which seemed to resonate with several people. A good mouse is a perfect example of how, when form follows functional ergonomics, a thing of beauty is created. I currently use three mice, with different choices behind each one.

The bedroom: my desktop is primarily a gaming machine and unsurprisingly sports a gaming mouse, a Razer DeathAdder. Razer understands that while there are technological requirements consistent across all gaming mice (high resolution sensor, fast response time), an individual's mouse grip affects ergonomic considerations, as they distinguish between the most common palm grip, the claw grip and the fingertip grip. My gaming style is a claw grip which I find lends itself to swifter reactions. The result is that I wanted a mouse with an arched body for support and lipped edges to it buttons to avoid my fingers sliding off the sides (essentially concave buttons rather than a mouse's typical convex surface). Unlike my other mice, this one is still wired to avoid the risk of running out of charge mid-game.

The Office: Conversely, at work I adopt a palm grip for comfort over long periods. When replacing my work mouse recently, I briefly considered one of the new wave of multitouch mice with the neat swiping gestures they bring. However it became clear that far too many ergonomic compromises have been made in all the touch mice on the market. Instead a large "handshake" mouse would maximise comfort and the Logitech MX Performance is the easy choice.  Its perfectly constructed sweeping body both feels and looks fantastic, while its freely spinning scroll wheel is a life-saver when dealing with long documents – a single flick of the wheel sends pages flying past. Despite its size, the mouse is surprisingly lightweight, requiring minimal effort to use for long stretches. Sold as rechargeable, opening it up reveals it actually runs off an AA battery, shipping with an eneloop (Sanyo's new rechargeable range with a greatly reduced self-discharge rate, with which I have replaced all my AA batteries).

The Living Room: While my HTPC is primarily controlled with the same universal remote as the television to which it is connected, it runs Windows 7 and is capable of other functions that necessitate using a mouse from the sofa.  The Logitech MX Air is ideal as, in addition to functioning as a normal mouse when on a flat surface, it is gyroscopic so can also be picked up and used in the air.  Rather than waving it around in an exhausting manner, it is best used by simply angling it in the appropriate direction with a small movement of the wrist. Given that it is held more like a remote than a typical mouse, its weight distribution is crucial, sitting comfortably in a rounded ball that fits the palm of your hand with just the slender buttons at the front.

A few days ago I came across a fluff piece in which a freelance writer attempted to disprove Dunbar's number using his facebook friends. Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships one can maintain, and lies somewhere between 100 and 230.

I have no problem with Dunbar's number: it always sounded about right to me, though I suspected that approaching the maximum limit might devalue the quality of the much of smaller number of close friendships. A quick trawl through my 500-odd facebook "friends" narrows the current active friendships to a little under 150. Add in a few friends and family not on facebook and I fall pretty squarely in Dunbar's expected range.

What the exercise highlighted is not some shocking revelation about how I don't actually maintain all those facebook friendships, nor how I have this vast graveyard of ostensibly dead friendships — that list remains a valuable index of contacts through which it is much easier to get in touch with someone should it later be useful (and the ability to hide updates from individuals means regular "culls" are no longer entirely necessary). The real lesson for me was that there were a handful of people hidden in that list with whom I really did want to get in touch but, without having seen their names, the thought might never have occurred. Perhaps, rather than an act of social vanity, it is an exercise I ought to conduct more frequently in order to prevent some people falling through the cracks. After all, Dunbar might have set an upper limit, but he offers no guarantee that those social relationships will be the right ones. So I wonder: if you have more than 230 facebook friends, who might be hiding in yours?

Meanwhile, if I'm running at roughly capacity, that also means anyone who wants to join my friendship group (for reasons I cannot begin to fathom) will probably need to kill off an existing member. Friends, consider this a heads up. Don't blame me, blame the evolutionary limitations of my neocortex.

Today, with all it's outmoded discussion of leap year proposals (cue an articulate rant from a friend of mine*), seems like a good day to mention Catherine. When I mention videogames on this site, I generally prefer to highlight the games that push the medium forward (okay, or sometimes hark back two decades). Catherine is certainly unique and a purely descriptive explanation — it is a story-driven tower-climbing action puzzle game — is largely useless. Really it is an exploration of fidelity. This is a bizarre game of parts that build up to a greater whole because of how each layer informs the others, moreso because, against a backdrop of games that rarely handle romantic or sexual relationships with any semblence of finesse, Catherine actually manages to be rather thought-provoking.

Protagonist Vincent is a pretty ineffectual chap in a long term relationship with a girl named Katherine, who is beginning to press him about their future and settling down. Vincent is seemingly content enough whiling away his life in a local bar that he would rather maintain the status quo than make any serious decisions about commitment. In the week we spend with Vincent, a chance encounter with a vivacious young blonde (conveniently named Catharine) leads to infidelity, leaving him wracked by powerful guilt-ridden nightmares.

Much of essential plot is conveyed through high-quality anime cut-scenes that instantly reveal the game's Japanese heritage. Meanwhile the gameplay is split between narrative segments in a bar, where Vincent can converse with his friends, the other patrons and — by text message — with the two girls now in his life, and tower-climbing segments in Vincent's nightmares.

The conversations you have in the bar — often including questions of morality and faithfulness — affect the story outcome, while some patrons are reflected in the "sheep" characters Vincent meets in his nightmares. These nightmare levels form the heart of the gameplay, scaling a tower of boxes by moving them around to create traversable paths and avoiding traps, while the bottom continually falls away beneath Vincent's feet. It's a simple concept but with surprising complexity and challenge at speed. The really interesting thing is that this very mechanic underscores the heart of the game's narrative: the paralysis of indecision isn't an option — to live, you have to keep moving forwards, and sure you might get hurt or make a mistake that sets you back, but you have to commit one way or another.

* I suspect that, beyond tradition, waiting for the man to propose was considered partly a way to test his commitment rather than simply "waiting until he was ready". By extension the modern proposer perhaps ought to be the more commitment-phobic of the couple, irrespective of gender. Just a suggestion.

Happy commercialised love day, readers! Should you be acceding to social pressure and purchasing a token of affection for your significant other, I certainly hope it is one of these stunning heart-shaped cakes. By comparison anything else can only be considered failure.

Speaking of spending money on things you love, since its inception the crowd-sourced funding site Kickstarter has scaled up from small arts projects to a feature-length independent sci-fi film I helped fund called 95ers: Echoes, which has now released a trailer.

Last week the exponential growth continued when game developing legend Tim Schafer launched a Kickstarter project to fund a small, old-school point-and-click adventure game. Having co-designed the early classics of the genre, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, this swiftly captured fans' imaginations and (more importantly) wallets, hitting the $400,000 target in around eight hours. A day later $1 million had been pledged. With 28 days to go, it looks on track at least to break $2 million.

While some hail this as a paradigm shift for the gaming industry, it really isn't much more than it was for the music industry where veterans have used alternative internet funding in what artists like Amanda Palmer see as a return to the older patronage system. Pay-what-you-like sales, for example, allow major returns for those with established careers over which they have built up a fanbase, all typically within the label/studio system. It is certainly not available to everyone. But for accomplished auteurs, crowd-sourced funding represents a way to maintain creative control and integrity once you have garnered sufficient trust from fans.

Quintupling the funding goal brings its own risks. No longer is this a tiny $400K pet project; we're already looking at a game with a budget two thirds the size of Schafer's Grim Fandango, the best adventure game ever made (this is not opinion: it was a beautifully stylised hilarious noir romp through the Mexican Land of the Dead by way of Casablanca — even conceptually how can one top that?). The stakes have been raised by a not insubstantial measure. But they have my money, I'm invested and I really want them to succeed.