Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Clearly I am a prolific and dedicated writer. I have reviewed the Black Dossier for Den of Geek. I utterly loved it, though as you might read on Seb’s Livejournal, most online reviewers seem in complete denial of its quality. I tend to agree with him, that it’s because most people are just skipping the text/sourcebook parts and sticking to the comics bits. FOOLS! It took me the best part of an entire day to read the Black Dossier the first time, and it was worth every second it took to pore over the details. A message to all comics reviewers: giving it a quick once-over and bashing a review out the same day it arrived in the post so that you can be first to write about it does not reflect well on you. The Black Dossier is going to judged over years, and when you look at your review again it’s going to be painfully clear that either you didn’t read it or didn’t understand it, and neither circumstance is desirable.

Because I’m a masochist (and because I’m almost out of Jeffrey Brown stuff to review) I have started up my second specialist blog - the goal behind this one is daily comics reviews. It’ll go on as long as I can handle the strain, but I’m doing fairly well, it’s been going a few days now and I’ve kept up the pace. Not too sure what I’d do when I buy less than 5 comics in a week, but I imagine I’ll just dip into the archives. I’ve also added RSS feeds to my main blog’s sidebar so you can click straight through to the latest entries. How exciting.

I have also been asked to contribute to Den of Geek which is Dennis Publishing’s initiative to get hold of the unwashed Pound, as I believe economists might call it, so that’s nice in a kind of writery career way.

Ah well, while I’m here I might as well cover the weekend too, I suppose. On Friday, Nikki came back from work early and we drove down to Brighton to partake of one Paul Annett’s surprise 30th birthday party. Well, the 30th Birthday wasn’t a surprise, it’s a bit predictable that it’ll come roughly a year after the 29th birthday, but the party, at least, was largely unexpected. We picked up Relly on the way into town, parked in Brighton, walked via Brighton’s secret network of Restaurant-avoiding sub-space tunnels to Aral’s (utterly cavernous) flat, to collect some party goods and gether some intelligence data on Paul’s whereabouts so that we might walk freely in the streets, and then finally to the pub where the action was happening. Which it then did. There were a lot of open flames and I was kind of expecting at least one uncontrolled fire, but we were all good in the end. Nikki and I took some time out to go get food with Glenn and Jodie, who I don’t think we’ve actually seen since Paul and Relly got married. Eventually it was heading for midnight and I was starting to feel the pressure of waking up before 10am that morning, so we said our goodbyes, dropped Paul and Relly back home, and drove back to London. Well, I drove, Nikki mostly slept.

On Sunday, we had an Arcade Fire gig to go to at Alexandra Palace. While the gig was good, the venue did at least confirm itself as the crappest one on the face of the planet, and I think in future I’ll just do the sensible thing and go to the Birmingham date of any future tour that involves it. Mouldy buses, standing on a hill in the freezing rain, completely crap atmosphere inside the venue, the whole experience could really kill a lesser band stone fucking dead. Luckily they were great, and my favourite bit was when, during some technical problems, someone tapped out the Mario 3 theme tune on the keyboard while Win was chatting to the crowd. Definitely worth it. especially since they’re apparantly disappearing for a bit now the tour’s over…

Today while I was attempting to play the tutorial of SimCity Societies (I won’t say how I got it, but I acquired it legally, you can be sure of that.) my computer crashed. It hasn’t done that in a while, not genuinely, properly crashed anyway. I rebooted and tried again. Same behaviour. Just as I was cursing SimCity Societies for being poorly coded, windows bluescreened, for literally the first time since I built the PC over 2 years ago.

This is what those of us in the business (of owning a computer) call a “warning sign.”

I cracked open the case (or rather, just removed it, for we power-users never actually secure the covers in place at all) to find myself staring down a severely mangled northbridge fan. You don’t need to know anything more about what that means, except that the northbridge is fairly necessary, and there’s a perfectly good reason it has a fan.

After dissembling the fan and coming to the highly technical diagnosis that Yes, It Is Properly Fucked, I went to the Internet and bought a replacement heatsink which will arrive in about a week. As long as I avoid overheating it with CPU-intensive tasks (like, say, SimCity Societies) I should be able to run the PC fine until the heatsink gets here, after which I’ll have to dismantle pretty much the whole damn thing just to get the fan fittings out and install it. I know it’s not much of a challenge in this weather, but if everyone could think cold thoughts for my beloved computer, it would help me a lot.

I know some of you may have witnessed me doing things like kicking, punching and damaging my hand on the case while applying percussive correction to prevent the horribly loud whine that signifies a slightly loosened northbridge fan, but I assure you this hardware failure was entirely a manufacturing fault that K8Ns are notorious for and most last only 6 months. Mine’s over 2 years old now, and it’s been whirring stupidly pretty much since the day it was installed. Why it quit now, I cannot say, but the truth should not be forgotten: It’s entirely someone else’s fault.

For those that want to know, “unemployment” is so far agreeing with me. Much has happened since our last time together. Let me run through the important stuff:

Last Thursday Nikki and I met Relly while she was in town for some food at the Rainforest Cafe. It’s a fairly pricey establishment, but dear god, I had a steak that was quite literally the best I have had in my entire life. The good thing about seeing Relly is that I can re-use the last few month’s worth of jokes that I’ve been making, and thus I appear far wittier and smarter than I am (if you can believe that’s actually possible.)

On Sunday I went back home to face the parental music regarding my recent employment decisions, though luckily I do appear to have finally reached the age where I can be treated like an adult who is free to make his own way in things, so that was pleasing. I took a Radiohead mix that I made back with me, re-living the days from Pablo Honey all the way through In Rainbows (which, by the way Si, I love and have bought the Discbox version of.)

On Monday, Josh, Ian and I went to Bush Hall to see another recording of 2 episodes of the popular history-based comedy radio sketch show, TWTTIN, with washed-up 90s Comedian Richard Herring at the helm. One of the things I love most about London is that due to the unique way the BBC is funded, people like you (and by “you” I mean, people who aren’t me) are paying for my direct entertainment.

On Tuesday, Nikki headed off to her work conference and Josh and I headed first to TGI Fridays to make the most of the food there, because Josh has been obsessing over the chicken BLT he had a fortnight ago to the point where he eventually tried to make his own to tide him over until we could return to TGI’s. He ended up with some horrible mockery of a BLT that, while he claims it was good, clearly was nothing more than an insult to the TGI version and what’s more, didn’t have any B in it. But still. We then went to the Soho Theatre to see Stewart Lee. Despite the title of his show (”41st Best Stand-up”)He was probably the best stand-up comedian I’ve ever seen. There was not a duff joke in the entire set and his handling of comedy is nothing short of masterful. He even did a joke about obscure Marvel Comics character, The Watcher, and then announced that the people who got that joke were his real audience, which certainly pleased me, because I did get it.

TodayI went to buy comics. Not just any comics, of course - the new Scott Pilgrim. There are few things on this planet that can cause my stony heart to melt, but if you’d read Scott Pilgrim you’d understand. I had to stop 2 chapters into reading the most recent volume because I just can’t bring myself to finish it so quickly. Forbidden Planet didn’t have any copies and I was all prepared to go back home Pilgrimless and defeated, but thankfully Orbital Comics saved me from this horrible fate. Meanwhile, Word War Hulk brought itself to an underwhelming and odd conclusion, once again teaching me the cold, hard truth that you should never get your hopes up about anything because you’ll simply be disappointed. Oh well.

Well, the time has come for me to out myself as a member of that group of social pariahs we call the unemployed. It’s been a few days, admittedly, but I had to ensure that the people who needed to know didn’t find out from reading my blog. I’m sure you understand.

Additionally, I can’t really put the circumstances of it on the Internet - not because of anything shady going on, of course - but because they’ll have grounds to take away all my glorious redundancy pay if I do mention it. Suffice to say, most people reading this will know that for a good few months now, I felt my time at the company was at an end, and luckily those that mattered were well aware of this when the time came to cut our wing of the company down to size. It might look to some like I was pushed, but really what I did was scale the building, strap on a parachute and beg to be given that final nudge, if you catch my drift. And that’s as much as I’m going to write down.

So, first I’m going to take a few weeks off and pursue some more personally fulfilling goals while I take stock of the situation. I’ve been spending plenty of time catching up with my writing, some free, some paid, and doing some small programming jobs. I have to be honest and say that working at Yahoo had its good and bad sides, but if nothing else, it paid well enough that I’m not about to jump into something shitty that I don’t want to do just so I can start paying taxes again. So far the biggest dent in my lifestyle is that getting comics every week has become something of a mission - the convenience of working a few door’s down from Forbidden Planet is, if we’re being honest, the thing that I’m going to miss the most.

In the meantime, please feel free to send any jobs my way that you think might be suitable, because I’ve got a lot of free time and I need stuff to fill it. Other than that, the best you can do is be very pleased for me and keep me entertained with facebook Scrabble.

(Went to David Ford gig at the SBE last week. Excellent set, but didn’t think much of the support acts, and I kind of wish we were seeing him in the smaller venues because as good as SBE was, it doesn’t remotely compare to the smaller gigs. Next gig: Arcade Fire on the 18th. Yay! Except it’s at Ally Pally. Ugh.)