Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Well, it’s been an interesting week, that’s for sure. The healing process in my arm continued quite well until I tried to pull a car door closed with it and broke it all over again. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll be repaired soon enough. If BUPA adverts have taught me anything, it’s that I’m an amazing biological machine that shouldn’t actually even private healthcare.

Today was a day of great joy, you see, for my new DVD drive got here. It’s a replacement for my beloved Toshiba, which is about 2 and a half years old but won’t read DVDs and is getting a bit flakey even with CDs, these days. It cost me £26, and arrived in under 24 hours, so I’m quite pleased with the results of buying from Dabs. Unfortunately, it came at a time when I also had a lot of other things to buy, such as car tax. £110 pounds of money to the damn, dirty government. Shouldn’t I be exempt or something!? I don’t live the student life so that I can, like, pay TAX for god’s sake. It’s an outrage. It’s probably all going on asylum seekers and the homosexualists! Next election, my vote goes to an Anarchist Collective.

So, new computer components aside, I’ve not really been up to much. Lectures, some general vegetating, then some Nikki-related shopping earlier today. Ian and I went to Toys R Us and had a poke around looking for Transformers, but didn’t actually buy anything in the end. We also went to sainsburys and balked at the hideous price of things compared to Tescos. Living close to a Tescos is high on our list of priorities, after Uni.

I guess that covers everything. Because we’re in week 2, the basic lay of this term’s land has now been seen. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursday’s I’m off (and available for any gamestesting work I might be offered) Wednesdays I’m at Uni for probably the longest time I’ve stayed there since the first year, around 5 hours for 2 seperate modules, which includes an hour’s gap that would normally have us all going back home, but we’ve decided to make a collective effort to attend stuff for this term. Then there’s Friday, where we should have a lecture but it’s so terribly useless, we’re just downloading the lecture notes and doing them in our own time. Rosemary Phillimore isn’t a bad lecturer, but her subjects are invariably mind-numbing to the point where the pace of her lectures needs to be about twice what it is to hold interest. Also, we’re in a room where there’s nowhere to lean and make notes. No place to make notes means double boringness, because there’s no place to doodle, so god help us with that. That’s not to say we’ll never go back, it’s just unlikely in the immediate future.

I’ve been home and back now. Obviously, I didn’t stay long, but it’s the payment that counts. On Monday, Nikki and I went into Oxford to buy mum’s birthday stuff and to see if Nikki could return the No Doubt best of which she had realised a few hours too late, was not actually any good. No luck though. Even the shops don’t want it back. Shortly after 1pm, I embarked on the journey home.

The heat was becoming pretty bad, by this point. I had the fans going and that seemed to be keeping things cool enough as long as the car was moving. The M40, however, conspired against me. The first slow down came when there was a huge crash on the other side of the road. As far as I could see, an articulated lorry had veered into the central barrier and several cars had crashed into it. There was a huge dent, but the barrier wasn’t broken at all. This is the second time I’ve seen a lorry smash into those barriers without breaking one, so I feel pretty safe in the knowledge that they’re doing their job. The obvious inclination to rubberneck slowed traffic down a bit, but it was nothing compared to the jam that hit me on the other side of Banbury. I spent a good 20 minutes trundling along at an average speed of about 3mph while emergency vehicles scorched down the hard shoulder. As I approached the scene, it became obvious that a tyre had burst on some guy’s mini-lorry, because it was lying on its side across two lanes, facing the wrong direction. The driver seemed unhurt but obviously, two lanes were closed off and people were driving past the scene really slowly to get a good view.

After that, it was plain sailing to Stratford. I parked right right near to the centre, which is always a bonus, and when I stepped out onto the pavement, I became aware that some ephemeral speaker was playing “greensleeves.” Somehow, whenever I remember being in Stratford over the summer, it always seems to have greensleeves playing in the background. I didn’t hang around for too long after I’d picked up my comics because I was sick of driving and just wanted to get home. I managed it, had dinner, and then went to Josh’s for a couple of hours to take from him the blank DVDs, which he had mistakenly purchased, at reduced cost.

But then, no-one really cares about that, I’m sure. What I’m certain people really clamour for is stuff about the gamestesting I did today. Well, it was FCars again. I think I’ve done more FCars than anything else, now. I’m pretty certain it’s at least equal with Golf. Again, much to no-one’s surprise, I’m utterly shit at the game. I can beat it hands down in “easy” mode but I’m completely screwed once we get to medium. Generally, the way I play the game tends to be: Accelerate until corner, overshoot corner, hit wall, slide around on grass trying to correct orientation, rejoin track in last place. FCars was submitted but came back with a list of bugs that have generally been fixed, and that’s what I was checking today. I’ve mentioned before how Sony’s criteria are awful, and as if to really make things funny, today it turned out that two different revision of the PS2 hardware were acting entirely differently to each other, and the test station. I don’t envy the people responsible for fixing that.

At lunchtime, I had an agenda. Pixies album, or Spaced DVD. The Spaced DVD turned out to be more expensive than I though, so I decided against that, but when I got to the Pixies section I saw they had Trompe le Monde for £5, AND the B-Sides album for £5. This being Fopp, it’s about as cheap as it’ll ever get, so I bought both. I was earning, after all. As I left Aqua, I spoke to Diane and it seems I’ll be doing some Tennis testing at some point in the next few weeks. So that’ll pay for yet more DVDs.

Or, possibly, physiotherapy, since I seem to have destroyed a muscle in my arm. I woke up with a slight twinge in it the other day, and it was about as bad this morning, but throughout a day of hanging on to joypads with my arms outstretched, the pain has increased and it is, occasionally, slightly short of agonising. If it continues, I may have to break form and go see a professional about it, though I’m assuming that as with all my ailments it’ll just go away after some sleep. I could take a leaf out of Rachel’s book and place a sock over the top and kind of mention it casually next time I’m near a doctor or something. I don’t expect it’ll get to that to be honest. Actually, I’m going apply some curative sleep now. Then lectures. Great.

I considered, as I sat alone waiting for Nikki, Tom and Ian to come back from ordering food, that the pub which we were in (The White Horse in Headington) was seemingly filled with old people, all the other youngsters having opted to sit outdoors in the scenic roadside beer garden, and I silently mocked their choice of seat. Later on, as I stood in the queue, sandwiched between stringy old women and a toothless old man, listening to them complain loudly that Oh The Pork Isn’t Ready Yet That’s Not Very Good Is It and How Long Have You Worked Here Because Last Time We Ate Here 9 Years Ago We Dished Up Our Own Veg, it crossed my mind that maybe inhaling car fumes wasn’t such a bad idea.

Old people are frequently annoying. Now, I’m not suggesting that all old people are, nor am I trying to reinforce a stereotype, but the more I encouter pensioners in the wild, the more convinced I am that geriocide isn’t so much a crime as a blessing in disguise. The older you get, it seems, the more entitled you are to complain about everything in life. Perhaps the old just become bitter, or they just stop caring. Perhaps it’s just a desperate cry for some attention from a world that has passed them by. Frankly, I’m not that bothered. When I worked at the Dairy, even for those few brief months, I notied a trend long since confirmed by many of my peers, in that all old people begin their complaints with “I am [insert age here]” like it somehow adds weight or sympathy to their claim.

“I’m 82 and I haven’t had my milk arrive yet, even though it’s 5 past 9.”

“I’m 91 and the only way I can get myself some human contact is to phone up and find someone to whinge at.”

“I’m 102 and I didn’t take shrapnel in the ass so that you could let this country collapse under the weight of niggers and coons!”

Sad that people should end up so bitter, but maybe that’s because they spent their entire life being annoying and indignant and they’re finally getting just deserts. I dunno. As Ian put it, maybe the problem with the old is that they confront us with our own mortality. I know it’ll happen to me one day, but to be honest, I think I’d prefer to be dead before I get to that state. Maybe I’m already at it, given the most prevaent issue in my mind right now is to complain about how old people complain.

Still, it’s not like it ruined the day. The food was nice, the weather was nice, and the after-eight Ice Cream I recently bought because it was on offer is actually, incredibly nice. On Saturday, I bought comics. Well, rather, I bought Comic. Tomorrow, I shall go to Stratford and buy a whole bunch more. I don’t normally drive home, but I’ve got work on Tuesday and it’s a good reason to go. Seems like this year I’m scooting up and down the country more than ever. Only last week I was back down in Leamington, and here I am about to go again. Kind of makes up for the whole not being home over Easter thing, I suppose.

This time last week, I made some vague promises about talking about Comic Shops. Well, let it never be said that I don’t keep my promises, no matter how ill-conceived you might think them. Last week, I was concentrating mainly ont he shops that had a fond place in my memories, where this time I’m talking about the utilitarian aspect of the remaining shops.

I only recently discovered Gosh! in London, when Nikki and I went to the British Museum and I noticed a giant Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) on a sandwich-board outside. Naturally, we went inside. Gosh! is a pretty up-scale comic shop. It’s got ceiling-high bookshelves filled with neatly organised graphic novels, and a large wall of more recent issues. It’s all surprisingly clean and tidy, which is rare for comic shops. At the back of the shops is a near-vertical spiral staircase that leads to a basement level which has more books and some back-issues. Gosh! seems to be more of a bookstore than a comic shop, and while I didn’t buy anything from there this time, it’s not going to be far from my mind next time I’m in search of a graphic novel.

Of course, close to Gosh! is Comicana - It is, for better or worse, an embodiment of all the comic shop stereotypes you can think of. It’s small, it’s packed with box upon box of old, dusty-bagged comics that probably haven’t moved in years and leave your fingers feeling tainted somehow. Most comic shops have these boxes, it’s just that Comicana seemed to be entirely composed of them. The only time I visited, the guy at the checkout was listening to a Lord of the Rings audiobook. Don’t get me wrong, if I wanted a comic from the past 10 years, I’d be straight here, but this isn’t really a progressive establishment. Certainly, it’s dead opposite to how I’d run a store but I can’t criticise too much because I guess it’s working for these guys.

Completing the London Triumverate of Tottenham Court Roadish shops, is Forbidden Planet London, which has almost mythical status. Arguably, it is the best-stocked comic shop in the country. It’s at new premises so it’s clean and nicely laid out, though the military grey throughout resembles a bomb shelter, somehow. There’s a nice amount of graphic novels, and a few back issues - Recent ones especially are easy to get here and to illustrate that point, last time I was there I bought the previous 3 issues of Demo. However, this place suffers because, like all Forbidden Planets, it is a Forbidden Planet. The comic prices are set with a competitive exchange rate, but I suspect that’s more than compensated for by their toy and memorabilia prices, which are little short of gouging. They’re the only place, bar eBay, that I can reliably find comic-themed T-Shirts, but they always cost upwards of £20, and that’s just too much. The same holds true for Forbidden Planet Birmingham which is obviously much smaller with a greatly reduced comic section, but still contains as much overpriced crap. Amusingly, Birmingham seems to get the stuff that nowhere else will sell which means every time I go there, there’s a wall of figures no-one in their right mind would buy, like Everquest or something. I go to the Brum store because it’s a comic shop, y’know? The only other reason I can think I’d go would be if I was after the last shop on the planet selling Quake 2 figures.

This brings me to the closing part of my life’s experiences with comic shops. Online comic shops. Frankly, I think that it’s utterly unforgivable for a comic shop to not have an online store, given the market conditions and miniscule cost. I know what comic shop employees do, and the bulk of it is sitting and talking. Believe me, it wouldn’t take much time out of the week to log in new back issues and arrivals, and package up mail orders. An online shop allows customers from all over the country, if not world, to buy something from your shop.

I admit, if something isn’t available at the local store, I go online and track the fucker down. When Transformers licensing problems prevented Transformers comics being shipped to the UK, I went to Reed Comics, who circumvented the embargo, and bought the damn things. Solely because of that, they had months of regular business from me and I continue to buy stuff from their website, which is well designed and easy ot browse, though the logging-in and transactions could be a little smoother. They even have order tracking and history, for god’s sake. Every shop should have a site at LEAST as good as this, as far as I’m concerned. They even sell original artwork. This is the online shop I’d recommend to my friends, that’s for certain.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, is Comix-Shop. I’ve never visited the store, I’ve only bought stuff off there once, and there’s a solid reason for that - it’s a horrendous page to navigate. It’s frequently updated, which is a definite plus, and it works, because I bought a recent issue of Demo from there. I can tell the owners are good guys because when I received my invoice, they had taken the time to write “Cheers, James!” on it, which is more customer relations that you usually get even when the clerk is 3 feet away. They need to sort that page out though.

Finally, there’s Incognito Comics. Haven’t used these guys for a while, but their site and stock straddles the line betwixt good and bad - it’s an old, functional approach to layout, but that makes browsing and buying easy. However, the database is often filled with redundant entries - titles that contain no issues available to buy. I check the place as a last resort, certainly if I was after something old because their library is big and comprehensive, but to be fair it’s not often necessary to get this far down my list.

So that’s about it, the dizzying highs, the suffocating lows, and the comfortable yet unremarkable middles. Practically all the comic shops I have deigned to grace with my presence over the years. I like to think I’ve guided people somehow, into thinking more about their own retail experiences. One day, perhaps all this pontificating will aid me, should I ever start up my own comic shop. Primarily, it has allowed me to actually write about something, rather than what I was doing, which has made a nice change, though I’m about to follow up with the minor events of the next two days, which you’ll probably have just read, in which case, congratulations for making it this far.

Today I begin a new section of this blog. It may not be long lived, and it will certainly bore the shit out of a lot of you, but it’s arguably relative to the wider web community and I have the motivation to do it, if only to keep myself on top of the new site design.

Yes, that’s right, new site design.

After little over a year of green and grey boxes, I’ve decided to start afresh. Not just with the design, with the whole site, actually. I expect to be leaving Uni soon, and I want a site that’s slightly more up to date. Something I can put on my CV and that’ll be worth coming to for potential employers. Something that actually contributes to the internet instead of just being a loose collection of stuff I like.

Primarily, my website has always been a learning aid. The original version of this webpage was literally the first time I wrote HTML by hand, and when I started I didn’t even know how to do tables. The second revision was my first attempt at expanding my design horizons. It wasn’t great, but it was a step away from the Windows 16-colour pallette on black background design that had pervaded my sites for the previous few years. Following that, was Version 3 - the all singing, all dancing, CSS, XML, PHP version of the page that currently lives here. It was the first time I felt my design could be called good. It’s not revolutionary, and it’s not going to win awards for aesthetics, but it did what I wanted and it did it with CSS.

However, omnia mutantur - and this site is no exception. Version 3 is deprecated, and all that remains is to replace it with Version 4. The goal is to finally cross the line that separates functional design and aesthetic design - or rather, to integrate the two. One of my options after Uni is to go into web design and development, and if I can redo this page, then I can get a step closer to proving to myself that I can design a site as well as I can implement one.

So that was my first step - in order to take design seriously, I had to actually do some design. Thus, I did the first ever James Hunt original web-design concept piece. I mocked up the front page and colour scheme of my new site in about 3 hours. It pleased me - it was utterly unlike any of my previous webpages, which was in keeping with my initial plan. In fact, it pleased me so much, I didn’t even bother to consider a second design and decided to have a stab at it.

I began writing the site the day after. I’ll be modest - it wasn’t that difficult to get started. I’m quite adept at writing raw XHTML and CSS to compliant standards and Textpad, the editor of choice, has syntax highlighting, which is a complete dream come true for a combination programmer/web-author like myself. It’s not WYSIWYG, but that’s not a problem, since the only way to get a proper idea of how a page will be displayed is to use the actual browsers. The browsers of choice are, as ever, the latest IE and the latest Mozilla. The design came together fast, and in a few hours it was looking all good. Except, of course, for Mozilla’s tendancy to display the page brokenly.

I tracked this down to a problem with height attributes and percentages. With correct CSS specification, you can specify height in percentage, but that percentage is of the containing div. Nest that back to the body tag, and I hit my first issue - IE seems to assume the height of the containing div for body is the height of the browser window, where Mozilla assumes that there is no containing div and thus cannot assume height as a percentage. This meant that my design wasn’t working - I’m a great advocate of having relative values used as much as possible, to accomodate the most resolutions, and thus my percentage-based heights were breaking in Mozilla.

I fixed this (or attempted to) mainly by completely re-writing the site to have absolutely positioned elements at the top (which is fine, because it’s the size that I like to keep relative) and thus made the browser start the content div in the correct place - beneath the header - and stretch down as far as possible, since it was not now confined to a container div which was causing the problems in the first place. With the content design element displayed properly, I could move onto actually putting content inside it, which I began - and surely as the world turns or as Duke Nuken Forever is not released, so I encountered my second problem. Trying to use columns.

Columns are a sordid bitch to make properly in pure CSS, especially if they use the most horribly interpreted element of CSS, “float”, which they invariably do. IE and Mozilla just refused to agree on how to interpret the CSS. A common problem. In this case they were positioning the two columns offset in various ways, occasionally off the screen, occasionally on seperate lines, and occasionally on top of each other. I poked and prodded, and re-wrote the code, but woe was I, because Mozilla not only didn’t like 80% of the rewrites, it was usually far, far worse than the previous. Almost depressingly, IE would suck up everything and have it displayed exactly how I wanted, which makes me think that either CSS is incredibly broken, Moz’s CSS parsing ignores the standard or IE’s CSS parsing ignores huge chunks displays things however it wants, and I suspect it’s actually all 3. Eventually, I got it down to the closest of designs - but Moz was still having none of it. I wanted one column to resize with the screen, without moving to a new line, to allow the design to remain correct in smaller resolutions. Moz was moving onto a new line even before the window would’ve fit into 1024×768 (I work in 1280×960) and so I had to concede defeat. After trying 5 or 6 different ways, I just gave up, threw in the towel and used … a table.

It worked first time, no fuss, in both browsers. The design was exactly as I envisioned, exactly as I had been attempting to get both browsers to display for a couple of hours now. I could’ve wept, frankly. Where is the seperation of design and content Nirvana that CSS promised? It’s bad enough elements like “min-width” are just ignored by most parsers, but for CSS to be so terribly shamed by a table is just pathetic - tables were supposed to be superseded by CSS, it’s not supposed to be this hard to replicate their behaviour! However, it’s not a huge blow. Table is included in the transitional XHTML spec and if I’ve been taught anything by this horrible affair it’s that we are certainly still in the transitional period of CSS. The right tools must be used for the job, and in this case, that tool is the table tag.

I admit, it’s disappointing to have to fall back on such measures so early in the game. Somehow fitting that my web-design education began with hand-coded tables and a few years later, here I am, still reduced to coding tables. I’m finding to hard to believe there’s no other way. I tried using “display” elements to replicate tabled behaviout but IE doesn’t have that implemented yet. I’m not giving up without a fight though - I will continue to work at getting these columns to display and resize in both browsers without the use of outdated techniques, but for now I’m going to have to sleep on it and admit it’s going to take more time. I shall push ahead on other fronts. I may be losing this battle, but there’s a whole war going on that I have to think of too. Tomorrow, I have a PHP script to write - one to choose the image for a page, and to display a watermarked version of that image behind some text. Nothing difficult, and it should prove theraputic after the frustrations of the evening. After that, I can consider the front page complete and start organising the other sections.

I haven’t decided how often I need to do one of these web-design updates, I guess I’ll do one whenever I feel like I’ve got something to talk about. Hopefully, they’ll be a little more technical and focussed because I decided to write this one after I’d done the stuff, and from now on I can keep reminders of changes and problems as I go, and because I won’t be recounting the entire history of the site, there shouldn’t be so much to write about. It should prove a valuable log of my progress.

Nikki and I recently got back in after seeing Kill Bill, Volume 2 (or, as the BBFC card would suggest, just “Volume 2″) - Expectations were obviously high after the first one and we’d even gone so far as to go to the preview showing to ensure maximum exclusivity. I admit, a few minutes into the film I was beginning to wonder if things hadn’t gone horribly wrong. The pacing of the first 15 minutes just seems incredibly off. Far, far too slow. Luckily, it picks up. There are far fewer action scenes in this film, but the cinematography and dialogue makes it remain interesting. The whole Pai-Mei sequence is great in a kind of Quentin Tarantino does The Karate Kid way. I liked that we kind of get to see the “origin story” of the bride, though ultimately her motivations for ever joining Bill aren’t really explained, which would’ve been nice. There’s a good part near the end where Bill does some amateur super-hero philosophy. Nothing proper geeks didn’t already know but interesting to people like me, nonetheless. There’s also a part with Samuel L. Jackson, which is awe-inspiring solely because I didn’t even realise it was him until the credits. That’s talented acting, when you’re being projected 15 feet high on the wall and people fail to notice who you are.

However, one thing we do learn the motivation for is why the film was cut up. The two parts are so different in tone and pace that I can’t imagine people would’ve enjoyed it half as much spliced together. If the first part is a kung-fu homage, the second part is more like a western. Spliced together, it would’ve been all out action for half the film, then a grinding halt, and the rest of the film resolved by, er, deep conversation. People may have felt cheated of a climatic moment. I’d be interested to see if the film was literally split down the middle, or whether a longer cut of the film would be mixed up somehow. The changes seem so dramatic I can’t help but feel some modifications must’ve been made.

One thing that I am totally unclear on was the deliberate obscuring of the Bride’s name though. As far as any of us can see, it was only a device to, er, allow for a really, really weird aside once it gets revealed. Anticlimax, perhaps? Not a very good one, when the power of DVD freeframe has revealed it anyway. Someone needs to explain to me whyTarantino found it so important.

I’ll talk a little about Wednesday. See, on Wednesday we went to all of our lectures and practicals. That’s a rare thing, though we usually do it in the first weeks so we can decide if and when to turn up to things. Our first practical really took the biscuited goods, though. The title was “Software Project Management” and yes, it’s about as interesting as it sounds. The point of the practical (and this is where things get confusing) was: To plan a project to present the choices of project planning software to the project leaders. Mmmm. Metaprojectual. Planning a project about project planning. We found it incredibly mirthful and Ian, George and I pulled out every trendy management buzzword we could think of to make our project plan the most obscene parody of middle-management everywhere. We were consumed with laughter at our Dilbert-style lampooning of the subject, a sadistic glint in each of our formerly apathetic eyes. The lecturer walked around and told us we were doing a good job.

Later, I drew him into a conversation about milk. We were discussing whether to model on our plan, time spent around waiting. We figured 3 days of waiting for forms to arrive was adequate, but was it an activity that needed to be modelled? We discussed it with the guy taking the class, and we suggested that if non-activities were modelled, so should tea-making activities. Then we descided to deconstruct and plan the tea-drinking process and I appointed myself head of a committee in charge of purchasing dairy and non-dairy products to research, specifically, the various kinds of milk. Then I pointed out that UHT milk was disgusting and this paragraph comes full circle.

After that, we went and sat around in the food hall for a bit, and discussed how we could intentionally annoy certain lecturers by thrusting forms at them in their lunch periods, as we had managed to do back during the days of project registration. Later, we headed off to our first “e-business” period, which was again, just pure hilarity. The room was packed, moreso than I’d ever seen any computing lecture filled. The guy at the front said “I expect most of you are here because you think it’ll be an easy pass” and in my case, the only defense to that was, “Well, you sure got our number.” I overheard a female business student remark “Wow, there’re a lot of blokes doing this module.” Welcome to computing. Please leave your excess estrogen at the door. Then the guy starting talking which was less fun because he spent a good 5 minutes describing his choice of clipart for one slide. Luckily, it was only an hour long and it flew by. If I had more 1-hour lectures, things would be really bearable around here.

Yesterday I went to Polar Bear to try my luck at acquiring a new Pixies album. I listened to a bootleg of their Winnipeg show and it got me thinking that to enjoy the forthcoming live show as much as possible, I should continue to educate myself of their back-catalogue. While Surfer Rosa was initially a hard listen, it grew on me. Doolittle, on the other hand, was an instant hit. When we got to Polar Bear, my luck was in. I procured a 3rd - in fact, the 3rd Pixies album, “Bossanova”.

It was second hand, but in pristine condition. Cost me £6. After a few listens, I quite like it. I’m especially fond of the opening track, Cecilia Ann, Velouria, Is She Wierd and All Over the World. My main criticism is that the producion sounds a little 80s at times, as in, Blondie. I read up on it and the general take is that it was a bit of a disappointment that doesn’t really stretch as far as either of the prior offerings. I can see where that opinion comes from, though I think all the releases seem to have their own flavour, and Bossanova’s is just a little less adventurous than previously. Clearly worth the £6 though. I have a B-Sides collection and the final album left to get. I guess I’ll get the BBC album too.

Today, a tap in the bathroom exploded. We kind of left the water spraying our for a while, unable to do much, until a plumber turned up, told us he couldn’t fix it, and that we should just wait, until he comes back tomorrow, with no hot water. So it’s official - we’re currently living somewhere back in the 19th century. No hot water, and thus no central heating. Hopefully, we’ll be in when he comes to fix things because tomorrow I’m officially back at Uni, with a glorious 5 hours of timetabled nonsense to chew on.

The holidays are over.

So, I mean, we haven’t really had the chance to talk recently. About stuff that isn’t boring, I mean. Yes, yes, dissertation this, mundanity that, but I think I know what you’ve been clamouring for. The question on the tip of all of your lips. Go on, spit it out:

“James,” (you’d say) “just what do you think of all the comic shops you’ve frequented over the last few years of our horrible geekdom?”

“Well,” (I’d reply) “that’s a deep and interesting question. You are indeed wise beyond your years and posessed of a thirst for knowledge that shames most others.”

And then the answer would go something like this:

Comic Legends (formerly Alien Enterprises) in Stratford, was where I cut my teeth as an aspiring geek. Before this I was a lone weirdo, adrift in a sea of normality. Then, one day, mum and Terry came back from Stratford with a Spider-Men wall decoration and a Star-Trek door hanger and they told me strange tales of a place nearby that was filled with comics and wonder, and I made it my business, nay, my destiny, to go there. And go there I did. Such moments in life you cannot create artificially. The crystalisation of all that I was and would be. The moment where I entered the shop and realised “Yes. I am home.” I remember the first comic I bought. X-Men #50. Up until then, I’d been buying UK comics, I’d bought the odd US one from some newsagents and my Nan on my mother’s side would send me some from a newsagents near where she lived (a story for another time) but this was my first proper comic shop experience. I also bought X-Men Firsts, a reprint comic that contained the first appearances of Gambit, Rogue, Wolverine and Sinister. A few weeks later, I went into Stratford with Josh’s family and took him to the shop too, and he saw that it was good.

And it continued to be good. We spent more and more money there, we blew months worth of pocket money buying up each and every Onslaught comic because we were terribly naive and dazzled by the idea of a shared superhero universe, and frankly I still think it’s a cool stroy even if the plot made zero fucking sense. Eventually, the shop moved, and still, we visit it. I still have a pull list there for many of my regular reads, out of loyalty as much as anything. It would seem wrong to just cut all ties with that shop. It’s my favourite in the country and the only criticism I can level against it is that it doens’t have a website, which I think is unforgivable for a comic shop, given the current market trends and huge potential audience.

and then there’s Forbidden Planet Coventry. What can I say? It’s a forbidden planet. It’s filled with overpriced toys, in a shit area of Coventry, the store was, for a long time, dark and dirty and by god, it felt like a the dark side of corporate comicana. But it was the closest we had besides the previous shop, so we went and we went often. I bought my first VHS copy of Clerks there. I remember we used to laugh at the Quake II figures going unsold for week upon week, month upon month, and watch the price drop and drop until one day they were all just gone. I first got wind of RiD Transformers in that Forbidden Planet. I bought “Onslaught: Epilogue” there. And more recently, I bought Public Domain and Jennie One from it. It might not have been the best comic shop around, but again, there’s a sentimentality there. I’ll always be 15 inside those walls. Back issues, Indie comics - Oni Press first became known to me in that Forbidden Planet. It’ll never be the best, but by god, it’ll be remembered.

Comic Showcase in Oxford is another venue that became local to me. I was glad to see there was a comic shop in the same city as me, for the first time ever I actually lived nearby and was educated close to a comic shop. A few times a term, I would walk there and back up Headington Hill, just to grab some extra reasing material. It was here that I really connected with the indie comics scene, because it was the first one I went to have a specifically indie section. This shop is, to me, all about Jhonen Vasquez. I remember buying my prized copies of Fillerbunny there. I bought the copies of “I Feel Sick” there, which I later gave to Rachel as a birthday present because they didn’t have any new ones in stock, and a few weeks later I bought my replacement copies of I Feel Sick there. But more: living in halls, I met Ian and Greg, who turned me on to Invader Zim. Nikki was reading Lenore, and suddenly I realised that all this pop culture was connected. I watched Zim, and I told Ian where to get Jhonen’s comics, and I bought Nikki the Lenore graphic novels, and later Josh and Rachel and Tom all turned out to be fans. However, I’ll always remember the friendly yet laconic employees. The general sense of utter geekdom that percolates the shop more so than almost any other I’ve been to. The annoying way in which new comics don’t get unpacked until the day after they’re delivered, occasionally leaving me cursing my fortune as I browse yeat another rack of comics I don’t want and deal with the only choice of action: To come back tomorrow. There, I bought my second ever issue of 2000AD, because of the Shaun of the Dead story. Most of all, I’ll miss the convenience of living so close. A comic shop little more than 5 minutes away, on foot. I doubt it’ll ever be that good again.

Next installment: Gosh!, Comicana, Forbidden Planet London, Forbidden Planet Birmingham, and the Online stores - Reed Comics, Comix-shop and Eclipse.

Well, that’s it then. Dissertation over. As quickly as it became an all-consuming aspect of life, it has ceased to be.

It has left its scars.

As previously mentioned, I decided to forego sleep and make a herculean effort at finished the wretched document once and for all. This act alone was instrumental in allowing me adequate time to finish the writeup properly. However, the biggest contribution to the project during this dis-somnulic period came when, at 9am Friday, after almost 19 hours of solid dissertation work, I finally chanced upon the code that actually made it do something I had been erroneously claiming it did throughout the project. I’m not sure how, or why, or under what divine intervention I was able to write coherent code at a time when coherent english had all but become impossible, but I admit that if I had a god, I’d owe him for that.

You know, something I discovered on Thursday night was that time clearly speeds up as a deadline approaches. I expect it’s some kind of distortion caused by the huge gravity of this “dead line” but the 24 hour period in which I wrote and wrote and wrote went excessively fast. Possibly that was just neurons dying off though.

After the project was deemed complete, I printed it and Nikki had the unenviable task of binding it. We saved money and precious hours spent queueing at Uni by binding it, though as far as mind-numbing tasks go, I’m sure it was second only to writing the damn thing. However, the binding looked professional, and we paused to take in the completeness of all our projects (mine, Ian, George, and the absent Tom’s) before jumping in the car and heading to Wheatley, graveyard of the damned.

Clearly, driving in the state I was in was an intensive task, though I was more than up to it because it meant the end was in sight. My gently weakening grip on reality was not helped by the appearance of a person playing bagpipes in a layby on the A40 and a car with a giant can of Red Bull strapped to the top, but I got there, we handed our work in, and all was good.

When we got back, we noticed the weather was incredibly sunny for a change. The wind was warm, like I always imagines it to be after a nuclear bomb has recently dropped, which seemed somehow appropriate. I decided to take a walk up to the comic shop to clear out the mental cobwebs, but when I got there I remembered that it was a bank holiday this week and as such, comic deliveries were late, which meant that nothing new was on the shelves. On the way back home, I couldn’t help feeling incredibly disconected from reality. It was a combination of the bright sun and mental exhaustion from a total lack of sleep, but it felt really strange to be walking around, there was a weird sense of lucidity. I took this as a decent queue, when I got back home, to have myself a power nap.

I woke up 2 hours later and clawed my way into a communicable state. We were due to go for a celbratory Nandos after all. When in the establishment, my unbalanced state was no more obvious than when the guy taking the order asked me for what hotness of chicken I desired, and the only response I could find was “the small one.” However, bottomless soft drinks sugared me up, Si came over for a bit, we watched HIGNFY and Jonothan Ross, then I went to sleep just before 1am. I woke up 13 hours later feeling incredibly refreshed, tried the comic shop again with much improved results, and generally had a day of recuperation where I didn’t think about writing code or any form of project again.