Diary of an up and coming sociopath

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…