2011, and all that that means

‘… and a place in the winter, for Di-hig-nity...’

It’s been weird this year, so far. I’ve not been doing the usual things I do, and yet the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same.

I went to Blighty for the holidays. I never do that. I avoid England because there’s nothing to see there. There are people, granted, but I know most of the places and, let’s be honest, I’m not going there to sight-see, am I? And the places - I know them but they’ve changed. They look the same on the surface, but they’re nothing like they used to be. But then again, neither are the people.

I bought a computer. Last time I did that was about three years ago (not counting 1812, my failed ninja project). Still got the three-year-old. Jarvis, my ever-faithful iMac, now has a fellow clan member in the form of Billy, my eleven inch MacBook Air. They get along fine via Bluetooth and memory stick, and between them they take up most of my time. Like I said, things stay the same.

… In that they change. Now, instead of freezing my arse off in my small room (that belongs to Jarvis), I can be found on my sofa, using Billy to read and re-read stuff I’ve written. In fact, Billy has kind of become my third hand, seeing as he’s always attached to my original two. Even JT, my iPhone 4, is starting to give him shifty, possessive looks. She’ll get over it, I know. After all, PCCW can’t make the wi-fi modem work, so only Jarvis is hooked up to (cabled) Tinternet right now. All Billy can do is look on with wistful sighs as I shut him down to go use Jarvis for all Tinternet shite. It’s a shame, but then, Jarvis is quicker, more powerful and pretty much the real brain in my house flat, so it’s only right. And he’s where I’ve spent hours on Photoshop - mostly swearing and cursing at the bloody thing crashing or just plain refusing to work on me. Yes, the ‘known issue’ of Photoshop Elements 8 not letting Mac users change the frame delay on animated gifs is more than a little annoying. So is its refusal to let me resize or rotate layers without first shifting them in some direction by a few pixels. There is a lesson in all this: why did I bother paying for a legitimate version of PE8 when I should have stuck with my cracked, pirated version of CS4 that always worked? Ah well. I shan’t be wasting my money on another Photoshop product. Adobe fall into the Ben Kenobi category of effective teaching styles.

Cafepress. They’ve also incurred my wrath this afternoon - trying to work out why products don’t show up in your own shop is just a little vexing, especially when you’ve read the ‘help’ pages that don’t seem to pertain to your version of a shop. Then again, they were really fast (a matter of hours) in answering my direct e-mail for help. If only the information they e-mailed me were available in the help section to begin with, they wouldn’t get so many mails bitching about the same subject - I’m willing to bet. Still, mystery solved. It’s all sorted, and a lot more quickly than I’d anticipated. Go team Cafepress.

So I sat on the sofa tonight - oh alright, lounged on the sofa - and watched some telly via Billy and a Moshi Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter, and my nice big telly, Tosh (you get to guess what make she is). And the funny thing was, the two programmes I watched were both from my secondary school years. First was ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, with the real, actual Holmes playing himself. For some reason, no-one was supposed to know, so they billed him as Jeremy Brett and kept up the pretence for the entire series. Granada tried very hard to fool people into thinking they hadn’t simply borrowed the TARDIS from the Beeb and whisked him forward in time to play himself, but I saw the signs and I’ve witnessed his little slips with my own eyes - gotcha, Mr Holmes. But don’t worry; when I tell people this they don’t believe me, and simply assume I’ve been on the vodka.

Which is odd, because I haven’t been. Been out to dinner with friends, and haven’t actually felt like drinking. Still haven’t been to a single pub quiz this year, and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Must make it next week.

Anyway, point was (when I can get to it), the other show was ‘The Pretender’. Used to love it back in the day, and now I’m watching it again and wondering how I forgot so much. Mostly to do with the fact that, while Jarod is perfectly innocent and lovely (in a Sam Tyler kind of way, meaning I could never give him one), he’s also a complete fucking psycho whose ee-vil face is proper fru-its of the dev-il and he honestly can kill people with his brain - it’s just that he wants to torture them by snaring them in some overly-elaborate yet excruciatingly agonising plan mirroring their own misdeed. He’s ace. And then I look at the fact that I’m watching both TV series via a cable sticking out of a brand spanking new MacBook, and marvel at the distance and time between now and when I first saw them, live on real telly. So much has happened in the time that feels so long, that I really have to just stop and think about it, mentally pick through all the highs and lows. And then I realise there’s just too much and I have to say ‘fuck it’ and leave it alone. Such is the way of all things memory.

Cleverest IT Guy password-cracked some old - nay, fucking ancient - Word files of mine this week, and I found the Holy Grail of Where It All Began, my own original book-wise. All the facts I thought I had in my head, all the back-story and history I thought existed nowhere but my own little nutshell of a brain, had actually been set down on virtual paper by me a over a decade ago. Reading them again was a weird experience; the sentences were mine, the characters remarkably unchanged from when I turned them into real people in the latter half of 2010, the storylines exactly as I knew the foundation to unfold. But I don’t remember having written it down.

Perhaps, at the time, writing wasn’t important in the Grand Scheme of Things. Perhaps, at that time, I had a life and other things that kept me occupied. Which means I was writing, but not really obsessing over it.

How things have changed. I coast along in my job - so that I can concentrate on writing when I get home. I get home late Saturday night but stay up later - so that I can read through what I’ve written in the week. I own an iMac and a MacBook - so I can use MacSpeech Dictate to get things down. It’s fair to say that writing is pretty much my obsession, and even distractions like TV shows and work won’t always be in the way. And so it goes.

And so do I. This post, my first for 2011, has been longer than I’d anticipated. I was supposed to say ‘oh, nearly broke my foot but we’ll find out if it’s just a sprain when I’ve had an X-ray later this week’, but obviously I needed to get a few things off my chest first.

So that, my friends, is all the news that’s fit to print. At least for now. Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ Sherlock Holmes ~ The Pretender ~ England ~ iMac ~ MacBook Air ~ writing

Marry, Shag or Cliff cheat!

So I have this private student who I go to see every Wednesday morning. I do really enjoy our lessons together, partly because she’s a grown-up and therefore we can discuss grown-up topics, but also because she’s a typical dirty housewife and we talk about ‘adult themes’.

Last week I mentioned the game Marry, Shag or Cliff. This week, she decided she wanted to know how to play. Cue five minutes of me giving examples, and her laughing and offering me more tea. Soon she wanted to play for real, and so, inevitably, I ended up giving her three options. They included Sir Sean of Connery, George Clooney, and Richard Gere. Unsurprisingly, she opted to marry George Clooney, shag Sir Sean of Connery, and cliff Richard Gere. A lot of hilarity and girlie giggles played out while she was debating her answers, and then she decided that she would have to try to torture me in return. Saying that she needed a few minutes to think about it, we went onto the next subject, which was an article about North Korea that she'd seen in the paper. Being South Korean she had views that she wanted to express and learn words for. (No, I did not teach her the word ‘fuckers’.) Some proper vocab and tense exercises aside, we got back to the very serious business of Marry, Shag or Cliff - Round Two.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be easily tortured, especially when it comes to things that I know I’ll never get to have. But there’s something about the game Marry, Shag or Cliff that makes me quite competitive. And so, when a Korean housewife tells me in a malicious voice that I have to choose between three names that she has been working on for the past ten minutes, I get quite excited.

And then she hits me with the bombshell:

Starbuck, she says, with a knowing smile.



Face, she says, already having to put a hand over her mouth because she’s chuckling.



Bradley Cooper, she adds finally, unable to stop herself laughing and almost falling off the chair and rolling around her front room with her legs in the air in abderian amusement.




What an absolute fucking cheat! I did try to explain that all three of those overlap in so many ways, but she was having none of it. She said that I had to choose, and that it bloody well served me right for giving her three supposedly tortuous choices. I maintained the point that she was cheating - seeing as Starbuck was also Face, and Bradley Cooper had masqueraded as Face at one point. However she refused to see my point of view. So I cheated by saying that I would shag Starbuck and marry Face, as that would include all incarnations. Ergo, nobody had to get cliffed.

So then of course she accused me of cheating. Well bollocks. Never mind, eh? We’re even.

And while we’re on the subject, why are there no original series A-Team calendars for 2011? Does this mean I have to trawl Cafepress or even - heavens forbid - make my own at the local print shop?

Soopytwist, everyone.

Tags:

~ The A-Team ~ Dirk Benedict ~ Starbuck ~ BSG ~ Bradley Cooper

SPN update

Yes, I’ve been busy. No, I can’t tell you what I’ve been up to. Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Etc.

No, actually? I’ve done some more Supernatural season six headlines. For those of you just tuning in, they replace the old LOLcaps from season five. Sheerly because the LOLcaps took five hours per episode and the format is now wearing a little thin.

Behold, as I present the updated:



In other news, my A-Team fan fiction is now up to chapter 4 of 5, and the second book I’m writing is now finished. Adopts Hugh Laurie ‘pass the marmalade’ voice: Pass the agent!

That’s pretty much it. Well, there is more, but it would take slightly more webspace than Blogger possesses to tell you all about it.

Soopytwist.


Tags:
Supernatural ~ fan-fic ~ The A-Team ~ LOLcaps ~ fan-fic