Diary of an up and coming sociopath

There’s nothing quite like going to bed on a Saturday evening, knowing full well that you’re not even halfway through the weekend. I’m getting quite familiar with the situation too, what with all the bank holidays that seem to be all over the place these days.

This amount of time off is giving me an adequate period of reflection and consideration, which I have been sorely in need of. I’ve decided though, that the Wii is a crap name no matter how you look at it.

After almost 24 solid hours of mockery, during which every “wee” related pun that exists was surely used by Ian and I, we got the chance to tell Josh the wonderful news as well. He ran the same gamut of emotions I did, though in a different order. I began with Anger, moved to Confusion, and settled with Disappointment. He started with Confusion, moved through to Anger, and I believe will be hitting the Disappointment zone soon enough. It’s a sick, sad day to be a Nintendo fan.

Though that doesn’t stop me bookending my days with Tetris DS. Oh god how I love Tetris DS.

During lunchtime at work I managed to get my car tax with the minimum of fuss. It was shocking how fast they managed to process my desire to give them a hundred quid, because in previous years it’s been a real trial - last year I had to go to several post offices to find one that did car tax and believed that my insurance cover note wasn’t a photocopy, two years previously they had all kinds of problems with what my address was supposed to be on certain documents, and I can’t remember the intervening year so I’m sure it was an equally horrendous experience that I’ve repressed completely. I’m hoping to do it online next year once I should have all the requisite updated forms, and I’m sure that’ll come with an entirely new set of problems all its own. All this for money I don’t even think I should pay to a government that I don’t think deserves it. Christ.

I was going to gush about how great Tetris DS is again but I’ve had to put my praise on hold to bring you all my opinion on one of the most prevalent issues facing young adults today.

The name of the former “Nintendo Revolution.”

Today, it was announced on the official site as being known as the “Wii” (pronounced “We”, or similarly, “Wee”)

Now, I think I have massive support from the public when I say this is the gayest shit they could’ve ever chosen. The end of the flash animation has marketing spiel so horribly generic and cliché it could’ve been written as a joke. God. I cannot think of a worse named console that has ever existed. The previous contender was the Gizmondo which had a name that was 10 years out of date, but the Wii!? That name will never be cool, and god help anything that ever manages to have a worse name.

This is the kind of thing that could’ve been prevented had someone in the room just had the balls to say “hang on guys… this is a really shit idea!” - (there are quite a large number of situations like that in modern day living, mostly related to new movies.) I both pity and fear the sick minds that are so removed from humanity that this is what they think passes for a decent name.

Jesus christ, my disillusionment with Nintendo is at an all time high, and that’s even with Tetris DS counteracting the horrendous name. By christ, the Revolution sounds so perfect a name by comparison…

I’ll leave it up to you to make your own “I’ll take a Wii”-style jokes.

Today I played my part in helping to free the people of Iraq. I removed Saddam Hussein Airport from our databases at work and renamed it Baghdad International.

Of course, it’s probably 80% rubble at the moment…

On Friday I went out at lunchtime for a meal with Garry, Dipesh, Lyndon and Steve from work. This was to celebrate the fact that the Travel team had, to use the correct jargon , totally buttraped the revenue target for this quarter. We went to Signor Zilli which, as I understand it, is run by one of the guys off Celebrity Fit Club, though because I don’t watch TV like that I can’t really comment on the accuracy of that statement. It was a damn expensive place, and thus far greater for the fact that it was the company was paying. Mainly because I knew I should choose something I liked, I went for the Cod, though to be fair I’m not sure it was very good. It’s hard to say. When I eat somewhere expensive I can’t tell if I don’t like it because it’s been cooked differently than I’m used to (that is to say, properly) or because it is actually bad. I dunno. Is fish supposed to have like…a crumbly texture? I dunno. The chips were great, though, can’t go wrong with chips. Just seems like a waste to give food of that quality to me, though.

Since Nikki was away, I also ate out on Thursday. These days I’m far more likely to do that because as I may have mentioned, my credit card and overdraft are basically fading memories, plus there’s the extra income from my second job to look forward to, so all in all I’m able to dispose of some of that income once in a while.

I won’t let money change me though. I do still enjoy a good sit around at the weekend. Ideally playing Tetris DS, which I bought on Friday and would’ve played solid if I didn’t force some control over myself. By christ, it’s a good game. So good, I just did a nice Tetris DS review for NTS. In addition to my comics reviews, which I always like to talk about. Those two reviews in themselves represent another £40 of income disposed of this week, though I did have a tenner off at Virgin Megastore so it’s a little less worse than it seems. Plus I get paid on Tuesday and I’m just enjoying the novelty of being in the black at the end of the month. I should probably come up with a proper saving scheme now that my income is likely to go significantly above my spending…

Today Nikki sent me this link. It’s an exposé of sorts of something anyone whose had the internet longer than about 5 minutes has probably heard of - Realdolls:
http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/reports/The_men_who_have_sex_with_dolls_article_83159.html

Now, despite the kind of disgusted tone of the article, it all reads like fairly insular and harmless deviancy up until this quote:

‘I bought Rebecca a few months ago with the money left from my redundancy payment,’ he recalls. ‘In my imagination, she’s 14 and earns pocket money by working in her school library.’

How fucking detached from reality is this man? How sick is his mind? I mean, does he really think someone would get PAID for working in a school library? He’s clearly got no idea. Someone should explain to him that the traditional way for Fourteen year old girls to earn extra money is by selling their underwear on the internet.

Okay, so admittedly I didn’t do anything useful at all this weekend, Monday afternoon or otherwise. but it’s a bank holiday, and if they can bunk off, so can I.

This morning I was faced with a far more insidious form of bunking off though. In this case, the train had bunked off and decided to stop moving on the track, which meant Northfields station was closed. If the station’s shut then I can’t get to work, so I had to bus up to Ealing Broadway and get the central line. A comfortable journey, yes, since it’s the end of the line and you’re virtually guaranteed a seat, but it meant I arrived like 20 minutes late, so not so great on that front.

Sunday night, after fixing Dad’s PC and watching the Antiques roadshow (”We took this from my grandmother’s house when she died in case it was worth something” “It’s worth £50″ “… oh, that much?”) and then dodgy crime drama “Mayo”, which is filmed IN MY HOME TOWN OF LEAMINGTON (someone got murdered by being pushed off the Jephson Bridge. What a great way to go.) I went up Josh’s where we played some Tetris DS, a bit of Geo-thingy on his 360, and then Sam, Lorna, Josh and I performed the usual ritual of taking the piss out of shitty TV until there’s nothing left but to go to sleep. We watched Star Trek VI, which I consider to be the best Star Trek film, if only for the Kirk Vs. Kirk fight, and the the middle 2 quarters of Kill Bill Vol. 2 which I haven’t even seen since the cinema. Then we turned our attention the top 10 Britney Spears videos (they’re all great, with the volume down) and then to those programs where obscenely rich music stars take you around their obscenely sized homes and demonstrate how obscenely detached from reality they are. Bastards.

Then obviously I spent today at work. As you can expect, there’s not a lot to say about that besides how the frequent problems of the past week are far from disappeared. It makes it very hard to do work wen the site is in this state. At lunch I went up to check out the Silver Screen closing down sale (it was opened by Darth Vader a few months ago. No wonder if bombed, given his track record of wasting venture capital on doomed projects) but failed to find anything of great interest. I won’t let that prevent me from trying agian, though. X-Files season 1 was only £16 and I’m sorely, sorely tempted, if only I didn’t know that the stuff I really want to re-watch is more like seasons 4-6…

Sometimes when I discover a rare comic exists, it can be months until I get hold of it. In fact, sometimes, it can be weeks until I get hold of new comics, let alone indie titles that are 4 years old.

 Luckily, sometimes it just falls in your lap: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6621124600

Quite lucky, considering I only just finished reading the Jeff Brown back catalogue (thanks to Josh’s almost-comprehensive collection.) He will no doubt be pleased to learn that I did in fact buy two copies, since the guy had two for sale, which will ensure Josh’s collection is yet further comprehensive. Now to try and find a copy of True Porn to read..

Nikki went to her grandparent’s this morning and Ian went up to his Mum’s, I’ve had a day of guru meditation where I do all the things I usually have to curtail. Get your mind out of the gutter, fools, I’m talking about blasting out Ben Folds and the Pixies at full volume, and ignoring the washing up for hours, simply because I can do so without worrying if I’m going to inconvenience anyone else that might be trying to inhabit the domicile. I mean, the music might have upset the neighbours, but then I don’t care because they’ve upset us plenty of times with their hammering and drilling and fuck knows what else they do in there to cause so much noise.

I’ve also done the following things:
1. Given my monitor screen a long overdue proper clean. It’s factory-clear again.
2. Gone to Tescos! Doing a solo trip lets me take all the time I want. Unfortunately there’s also no-one to warn me off the stupid decisions, either. Can I interest anyone in 5 cans of Limited Edition (non-diet) Coke with Lime?
3. Played Tetris DS (downloaded onto the flashcart). It had previously been my belief that Tetris could not be improved on. Tetris DS has made the whole game seem like new again. I mean, it’s the same game, but it’s all coupled with jazzed up NES music and NES original sound effects, as well as using one of the screens to display old NES games as you play Tetris. It’s so fucking great I’m going to buy it when it comes out in the UK so I can live the dream of online multiplayer Tetris.
4. Watched the new Dr. Who. Well, it’s about the same as it was. Still not convinced I’ll remain interested enough to without Christopher Eccleston, but I expect I’ll end up downloading it for those nights when we’re out of stuff to rewatch with dinner.
5. That’s it! It’s a bank Holiday weekend and we’re only halfway through, I don’t have to do anything remotely interesting until Monday afternoon. Don’t judge me.

My, it’s been a quiet week for blogging hasn’t it? I’ve got plenty of really excellent excuses though! Don’t count me out just yet.

Excuse the first: http://planetxmen.gamespy.com/ - I’ve been spending my evenings this week working with the other guys to get the site live. As with my other job, I’m not going to talk too much about the behind-the-scenes stuff here because of not wanting to give anyone reason to fire me, but suffice to say that I am enjoying it very much so far, and I’m looking forward to finding a way of claiming back VAT on all the comics I buy now that I can technically call them a business expense ;-)

Excuse the second: Nikki and I went to a Placebo gig! For free! At Alexandra Palace… Well, two out of three ain’t bad. It was my second visit to Ally Pally and while last time I got a wonderful view of a smog-laden London from the high up vantage point, this time it was raiing and incredibly windy. It’s more of a summer view, I suspect. We took a bus to the venue, naturally, up until which point Nikki thought I was exaggerating about how the place was nowhere near the tube station. The support acts were The Ivories and White Rose Movement, neither of whom grabbed my interest, though credit must go to whichever one of the Ivories went around handing out flyers after their set (even if they did miss the .com part out of the URL…)

Placebo were on fine form, and while I’m not a huge fan of the new album, it does work far better live as I expected it would. They played Space Monkey and Every Me, Every You so I was happy as a pig in shit, frankly. Bizarrely, they didn’t play a single track off Black Market Music, or even much off Sleeping with Ghosts. Or WYIN. In fact, between 36 Degrees, Teenage Angst and Nancy Boy, the second most represented album was probably Placebo. How odd. In the encore, they indicated a guest would be joining them who they were the proudest they’ve ever been to have on stage with them. Nikki turned to me and said “It can’t be Michael Stipe!” (who guests on the new album) and… it was VV from the Kills (who also guests.) We both agree that for a band who have shared a stage with Robert Smith and David Bowie, inviting VV on stage probably isn’t the greatest honour as much as he claimed it was.

I’ve also done a couple more articles on Noise to Signal, in the comics section and a short article about Tomb Raider Legend, the first I’ve properly played through since god knows when. If you’re particularly bothered, it’s on that site anyway.

Today at work, our main database server managed to die just in time for us to be totally screwed for the long weekend. And the three people who had most experience fixing it were all taking an even longer weekend. Between the few of us that were actually in the office we managed to cobble something together, but frankly, I’m not looking forward to Tuesday when we get to survey the lasting damange, and there’s no chance in hell I’m even looking at the site over the weekend because a problem doesn’t exist until I see it. (or as Garry pointed out, until someone else sees it.)

I finished reading The Trial yesterday, having frustratingly read up until the last few pages right as the train pulled into Northfields, forcing me to abandon my “only read books on the tube” ethos. As I expected, it’s a pretty depressive book, about one man trying to fight a system that barely acknowledges him and actively keeps itself secret, even from those who are accused of a crime by it.

As with all Kafka, it’s pretty heavy on symbology, and I was getting very definite existentialist vibes from it. I don’t normally get on very well with existentialism, having long since concluded that life has no meaning and the pursuit of such is utterly pointless, but The Trial was quite engaging. It’s the little details like how he aims to arrive at court 9am even though no-one has told him to be there at that time which drive home the central theme of the book, the way he is imprisoned without being jailed. Even though no-one, least of all the reader, knows what the trial is really about, I began to suspect about halfway through that Joseph K, the main character, was only guilty because he was protesting innocence, and the rest of the book played out with that assumption quite logically. The character never reaches such a conclusion, though, so I guess I’ll never find out.

I’m now trying to decide what book to go with next. Douglas Coupland’s next book, jPod, is still a couple of months away, and part of me is hungry for more Kafka, but his prose makes a challenging read for me and I’m wondering if I might not go with something that requires a little less concentration, though he does have short stories, and I’m always partial to reading those on the tube… I suspect a trip to borders will solve my indecision though.

After work today, Nikki and I went to Blogging Demystified at the Apple Store (technically, we went to Lloyds for some food first, but that’s peripheral to the story. I don’t know why I even brought it up.) where some of London’s most famous bloggers were giving talks on blogging to other people who may have blogs. There wasn’t a huge number of people there but I suspect the nature of it alone means it’ll be blogged more than most things. Let’s face it, it’s the nerdiest thing I’ve attended in quite a while. Since that comic convention a few days back, in fact. At one point it was asked who used IRC and when only like 6 people admit to it even in that kind of company, you know you’re a bigger nerd than most.

The culprits we saw giving a speech were all london-based and generally the kind of thing you read when you’re a tech-savvy urbanite like what Nikki and I am:

Annie Mole of the London Underground Blog who gave a general overview of blogging and tried to explain why people do it, and measured that against why they /should/ do  it and the like.

Tom Reynolds of Random acts of Reality who is a very hateful nerd I suspect I’d probably get on with (Original blog title: “Why I hate people” - plus he was wearing a Warren Ellis hoodie.) who gave us a speech on blogging as identity.

Finally, the three women from Inky Circus, which I’d never heard of before but will definitely check out now, who explained where their site came from and what they like about it.

We also appeared to spot Relly’s friend Talia in the crowd. This is what you call an example of the blogosphere collapsing in on itself. She once mistook my friend for me when they coincidentally met at Uni, because we both linked to Relly’s blog, as I recall.

I hope the word blog has, by now, lost all meaning to you.

In other news, I appear to be developing a different, less intense cold. What the hell’s up with that?