Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It’s surprising how quickly the weekends seem to come and go recently. I’m pretty much on autopilot most weeks now, except in the evenings when I am very briefly released from the restraints of the working day. It’s debatable whether that’s a good or bad thing. On the one hand, the days are utterly flying by. On the other hand, well, the same thing. It often seems that once I’ve got in, had dinner and watched TV or played a few games, it’s time to go to sleep.

This is not helped by the utter fuckery of the Central line of late which is making me late to work on a daily basis, and late back home, and generally speaking on the tube for about 50% more time than in recent months. Then the weekends come and standard Sunday lethargy aside, the problem is fitting everything in. Today I was planning to file some of the mounting pile of comics I’ve got and tidy up a bunch of CDs, but I didn’t get remotely close to doing either.

On Saturday, we went to Tescos with Seb and Rach, bought a Christmas tree and some decorations (and chocolate) to go on it and I somehow spent £40 on food. I’m currently attempting to save my monies because in the past 3 weeks I’ve bought like, almost a hundred quid of graphic novels, £65 of gig tickets, the Tenacious D album, the Bassknives EP, a £23 transformer, as well as £30 worth of Kevin Smith DVDs and I’m wary of, er, overspending. Perhaps it’s a little late for that, but like the borderline alcoholic who goes a few weeks without drinking to prove that he’s not addicted, I too must last until at least christmas without spending too much money on shit for myself to show that I can self-moderate.

To that end, I made my first sacrifice in the form of not going to see Casino Royale. I was more interested in it than the usual Bond Film, but the fact it was almost 3 hours long meant I was already inclined not to bother even before deciding on the foolish purchase embargo. Instead, Seb, Rachel and Cappsy came over and we watched one of the aforementioned Kevin Smith DVDs (the UK disc of Evening Harder - not as funny a talk as the Toronto disc, though his “British” accent almost makes up for that.)

Also, today, I decided to bang out a review for NTS of one of my other purposes, the latest anthology of indie comics from Adhouse, Project Romantic - it took me about 2 hours to write, proof (ahem), format and post, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out given my lack of planning and dedication to getting it finished as quickly as possible. Worse things have taken longer (though if only it was all that simple.)

History will take note of a missing two (almost three) weeks of blogging. That’s actually a far more interesting mystery than the reality of it all, though. Truth be told, it’s sometimes quite difficult to work up the enthusiasm for yourself to a point where it’s worth posting anything, so I thought I’d give it a bit and come back refreshed.

Still, the missing weeks. I was obviously doing something, if not blogging. For instance:

Went to Game On at the science museum. It’s a fun afternoon, made slightly less so by the vast amounts of people who plant themselves in front of a game and don’t move. I imagine it’ll be far cooler if you go during a time when, say, it isn’t Saturday afternoon and everyone had the same idea as you. They could probably work out a system, though. While there, I played a few things, the highlight of which was a Tron game, though I also played the original Pitfall, Street Fighters one and two, some old homebrew Yaroze games that were quite decent, and some other things that have rapidly faded from memory. I have plenty of opinions on how I’d have handled an event of this kind, but it’s not for me to tell the science museum how to do their job. It was resoundly adequate.

It all goes kind of blurry from that point on. That would’ve been Saturday the 4th, I think. I distinctly remember very little until my memory re-emerges somewhere around the 12th, when Nikki and I went home for the day. Actually, Nikki had gone home on the Saturday, and Josh a few days beforehand, so I spent the day playing Ultimate Alliance (a common theme throughout these missing weeks) and finding ways to stave off cabin fever. I tried unsuccessfully to pre-order a Wii but I’ve since started to wonder whether I even care about getting one at launch, given the lack of decent games and stuff. Seems kind of foolish to buy a console safe in the knowledge that the titles you’ll be forced to buy at launch are going to suck. I’ll have to think about it.

On Tuesday this week, Nikki went to her conference for a few days that she’s been working towards for god knows how long. While she was gone Rachel and I met up to discuss our comic about why society is crap and what to do instead of simply killing yourself as a result. Or things around that topic anyway. It’s about 50% genuine socio-politics and insight, and 50% insane ravings about being drugged by society and turned into a automaton without realising, though in the course of writing that sentence I stopped believing that those two things are different, so that probably shows you what my half, at least, might end up reading like.

Speaking of comics, I’ve got at least some things to mention in my capacity as commentator on the medium. The first is that my IGN contract is up, and without a movie to promote, pxm goes with it. Hard to complain, given the experience, contacts and, yes, the money I made out of the deal. There’s also a good chance I can do more for them in the future since they were very pleased withhow it went. Second bit of news is that my comics reviewing enterprise on NTS continues to gain recognition from indie creators who thank me for my sycophantc grades. Creators from two of my newest favourite comics said hi and I got some links out of it. Very cool.

However, in order to commentate, I have to consume. I got those Captain tickets, Ben Folds tickets, and some for Tedstock, a comedy Happening with lee and herring, TOGETHER! Those are still in the future, though. Recently I bought the new Tenacious D album and we went to see the film. Both good, but both fell pretty short of expectations. One thing that didn’t, though, is my new Titanium Range Optimus Prime, the first transformable version of his ‘war within’ cybertronian mode. Yes, yes, I’m a geek. DEAL WITH IT.

That’s more or less it for now. There’s surely tonnes of stuff I missed out so feel free to remind me if you were there and feel it’s worth a mention. Chances are I only missed it out because I wrote this in bed on the DS and this on-screen keyboard is inceasingly tedious…

I am posting this entry from my Nintendo DS, using the dodgy browser which I bought off Maarten at work for a tenner (he won a copy off opera.)

It’s not the greatest implementation of browsing, but it is a cool little curio. It handles like something halfway between a mobile phone and a PDA. As you can tell from the length of this entry, the touch-keyboard is actually quite useable.

Can’t see myself getting too much use out of this, but the novelty value makes it worth what I paid.