Bloody Mars. They’ve only gone and made the joins on their Galaxy chocolate bars all wibbly wobbly. Chocolate bar joins should be straight, not wobbly! It makes no sense, you must acquit!
I got one of these beauties two weeks ago, and it’s a noisy bugger. An energy hog too.
Before I bought the xbox 360, I’d been telling various friends about the fact that I own an Apple TV and that I re-encode my DVDs so that I can watch them on it. Pretty often they’d turn round to me and ask “what’s the point? If you’re going to be re-encoding them to watch on a device like that, why not get an xbox? Then you’ll be able to play games too!”.
My response to those friends then was that firstly I wanted something very simple to use that I didn’mt have to think about, and secondly that the AppleTV was silent. As far as I was aware, the xbox 360 wasn’t.
Still, a couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to be able to play on some of these newfangled games that all the kids are going on about nowadays. So, I caved and bought an xbox 360. When I got it home I excitedly got it out of the box, plugged it in and was greeted with the sound of a tornado in my living room.
To say I was a little bit miffed was an understatement. Whilst I’d been made aware by my friends that they did make some noise I’d not been prepared for how much. And this was before I’d even put a disk in the drive! After I’d started playing a game my brain started to filter out the constant drone of the console, but it was constantly there, causing me a noise fatigue that annoyed me no end. Turning the console off returned me to blissful silence.
So, there you have it - the xbox 360 elite is a noisy bugger. Good to play games on though.
I’m a fan of Fopp. Where I work we had a Fopp literally right across the road from us. I was not a happy bunny when they closed because of “cash flow problems”.
Happily though, HMV decided to buy u pa few of the stores and run them as Fopp stores, with the values of variety and low apparent low price still intact. I say apparent…
Today I went into my local Fopp for the first time since it reopened on saturday. The first thing that hit me was the increased number of chart items (at chart prices, except using Fopp’s “whole pound” pricing) that greeted me as I walked in. No matter, I thought - I can live with that. Then I delved further.
Walking downstairs I saw a vast array of DVDs priced at £5. Obviously £5 isn’t much for a DVD, but in the past there had also been a good chunk of £3 and £4 DVDs as well (on closer inspection upstairs I managed to find eight £3 DVDs). It looks like as part of HMV’s taking over of the store, a lot of items have been increased in price slightly to give a less flexible, and more profitable, pricing structure.
I didn’t venture upstairs to look at the CDs, but I’m expecting a similar situation. Put frankly, this newly Reopened Fopp just doesn’t feel the same as the old one, and I for one am not happy! It just feels like HMV have taken their prices from HMV and ported them over to a Fopp look and feel. As Mike said at work, the store is a prime location for HMV to take over as one of their own stores.
The thing that annoyed me most though was the “HMV exclusive” sticker that I saw on the IT Crowd DVD. Fopp isn’t HMV. It might be owned by them now, but it isn’t HMV.
I guess I’ll be going back to buying my DVDs and CDs online then. It’s a pity, I used to like Fopp.