'Billie Gene' [sic]

I doubt that I'm the only person who's going to write about it, but I haven't seen anyone else do it in this way. Doesn't mean it hasn't happened, obviously. Argh, blabbering.

Anyway.

I'm going to blog about Michael Jackson.

Well, I'm not really. I'm going to blog about the media furore that has exploded the Internet over the last 24 hours (or so). It has literally broken everything.

I've quite frankly never seen anything like it. You can't escape from it. Pretty much every site on the Internet has been 'touched' in some way. The more obvious ones are things like Twitter and Facebook. Twitter had to break out the good ol' whale on numerous occasions, poor thing, while the trending topics list was 9/10ths full of MJ-related posts.

Facebook was similar, but didn't buckle. Most status updates I got from friends were about him too. About an hour after it happened, I typed 'RIP Michael Jackson' into the search bar on Facebook and, lo and behold, about 10 (at least) pages of memorial groups and pages sprung up. Fast work, eh?

The news sites seemed to cope quite well, surprisingly, although there are a lot of them. The BBC, for instance, was fine. I was watching the live News 24 feed for about half an hour and there wasn't even a jot of lag. So, um, not much to say there :S

Jokes started trickling very soon, as per usual. I use the term 'joke' loosely, by the way. Most stemming from 4chan, the crap-pot of the web. Oddly enough, even that was down for the majority of the night (although I only went on for literally about 10 seconds to check reports of it's downtime), presumably under hundreds of pictures of 'pedobear' being uploaded.

Anyway, then I went to bed. I couldn't believe what I found when I woke up. The traditional media were causing such a shit-storm I couldn't believe it. Not entirely unexpected, it must be said, but it appears, quite seriously, that nothing else of any significance has happened in the world these past 24 hours. Somewhat luckily, the event happened so late that most of the newspapers must've gone to print beforehand. Of all the ones I saw, only The Sun ran the story on the front page. There could have been more I guess, but I wasn't outside for long. Ahem.

Back on the Internet, (oh God, that sounds like a comic book panel header. 'Meanwhile, in another part of town...) Jackson's albums filled up the top 15 of Amazon's top sellers. All 15 places! I really couldn't get my head around that. I didn't even know he'd released 15 albums, to be frank. iTunes was a little more 'business as usual' this morning, with only his greatest hits occupying the top 10. Not so now. Nine albums out of ten. Honestly, the top ten, come Sunday night, is going to be broken.

And sites that have nothing to do with music have been covering the news. Like Kotaku. Kotaku, if you don't know, is a very highly regarded (and downright awesome, it must be said) gaming blog. Now, MJ's contribution to the world of videogames essentially boils down to a Moonwalker-based Mega Drive game (how the hell that ever got made I'll never know) and a rumoured contribution to the soundtrack of Sonic The Hedgehog 3. And yet 3 posts in the last 24 hours have been about MJ, in one way or another. It's a bit ridiculous.

But, at the centre of all this, we can't forget that a human being has died. Think what you like about him and his personal life, but there's no denying the fact that he contributed to a lot of peoples' lives and left an undisputable mark on the music industry that will last a lifetime. And, in death, he may well have just had a lasting impact on the new media industry as well. RIP.

Generic Title Here

E3 was held last week. You know what that is. Probably. If you don't, it's basically the world's biggest (or at least one of the biggest) video and computer gaming convention. Essentially, it's for the companies to show off their latest products with a splash of dick measuring thrown in for good measure.

Now, every single blog on the Internet has done a post about E3. Somewhat understandably. I felt like doing one too, but I thought that would be surplus to requirements. Not least because I'm, ahem, a week late. 

But unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything original.

D'oh.

So instead, here's a few things that I loved and what I hated about E3 '09

LOVED:

Microsoft. In general. Their press conference was really interesting and showed off a lot of reasons to be excited. Project Natal is the biggest, of course. If it works, it'll be amazing, if it doesn't, it'll just be an EyeToy, like what Sony made about half a decade ago, like. So not that good. Personally, though, as a massive Rock Band fan and a liker of The Beatles, my favourite announcement was The Beatles: Rock Band. Well, reveal, I suppose, given that everyone's known about it for months. It does look amazingly good though, and I can't wait to spend tons of money to pretend to be George Harrison.

Golden Sun 3. I'm not the world's greatest fan of JRPGs, but the two Golden Sun games on the GBA were damned good. Hopefully the new one can replicate the success.

HATED:

Nintendo. And Sony, actually. This makes me sound like a Microsoft fanboy. Believe me, I'm not. I own all three of this generation's consoles and play them all a fair bit. And God knows I was something of a Nintendo fanboy 'back in the day', actually. But seriously guys? Boring conferences. Nintendo's was an improvement over last year's, but a chimp playing the bongos could have been an improvement. Actually, they should make a new Donkey Konga just so they can pull off that publicity stunt. And even then, they'd still be flogging a dead horse. Mario Galaxy is over-rated, they still put far too much influence on Mario as a rule of thumb...they just seem stuck in a rut. Admittedly a rut that's making them a metric fuckton of cash though. Sony's was...OK but nothing special. PSP Go is big, I guess, and arguably could be more crucial to the future of gaming than Natal. I mean, if it pays off it could lead the way for an entirely digitally distributed future. But if it doesn't, we might have discs around for a while yet. Everything else was crummy, except for impressive demoes of MAG and Uncharted 2.

Everything Else. In general, I thought it was a really bad show this year. It's good that it's still around, and no doubt I'll be very excited when it comes round again next year but...I can't help but think the companies might be better doing an Apple, and announcing stuff at various times around the year. I know to an extent they do that already, but to a greater degree. I dunno. 

So that's it. I'll maybe try and be more original next year!