Diary of an up and coming sociopath

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.)