#oneaday Day 120: Communal Blogging II

Hello! I am in the pub with good friends celebrating my birthday. As a result, it seems like a good time to take the Communal Blogging approach, where everyone present gets to write a short paragraph. This also absolves me of responsibility for any drunken grammatical errors because they probably weren’t my fault. So there. Without further ado, here comes the first paragraph from someone who isn’t me.

Aren’t kittens awesome. I mean like cats in general to be honest, all fwuffeh and cute and slinky and tired and stretchy and shit. Like I said. Awesome.

Luke is being all kinds of mean on twitter. I think that Amy may destroy him at some point. Sometimes, I worry about Luke. And then sometimes I just don’t care.

So Luke just tried to steal Pete’s iPhone how rude!?? Honestly I had to resort to telling him off like one of my students, I’m not so sure that I can achieve the standard Q31 in a pub on a Saturday night!!

“What’s a lovely curry” said pete and Graham sneezed on Laura, in which she replied “you need to be wiped down” pete then jokingly laughed and called graham a “dirty boy” ..which he liked a little too much.

Thanks pete for a great night. Was also really nice to meet andi who I forgot I met before. Is good to see you happy. Ultimately it’s been fun to be around people who make me laugh and who are interesting. Happy 30th.

Absolutely splendid night with my mate pete-not entirely sure what should be written here, but I’ve had a few pints and honestly life is quite good! Great to see friends grow up, although not too much thankfully-and its nice to have a chat with new people-with a lowest common denominator (that’s you pete). Right, should stop- fact from tonight-9 out of 10 people have an iPhone…..if you believe tonight’s statistics…

Pete! What more needs to be said? You’re amazing. Good job!!

Well, here we are again. It’s a Saturday night on the whiskey. Curry has been done (full!) and gin has been given. Why are we here? For wholly celebratory purposes, of course. Unless you mean life, in which case I haven’t the foggiest, save to say it doesn’t involve a god of any sort that I know of. Music is probably the answer. That or inevitable death. Cheery, eh? Yep, that’ll be the whiskey talking…

Well done everyone. Thank you for your contributions. Good night!

#oneaday Day 119: Birth Day

It’s my birthday today! I’m 30. Changes of decade are generally assumed to be significant events, but really, once you pass the age of 18, there are very few really meaningful age milestones and the number of years you’ve been alive is just a number. So I’ve been alive for 30 years, and I’ve not achieved many of the things I’m supposed to achieve before you’re 30. In fact, I’ve never bothered to make a list of “things I want to do before I’m 30” and when probed recently, my friends couldn’t come up with many things worth doing that I would no longer be able to do after today. So that’s good.

Birthdays have been something of a non-event for a while. They’re one of those things like Easter and Christmas that cease to have any real meaning after you’ve “grown up”, whatever that means. So I haven’t been expecting that much from them for quite a few years. And, generally speaking, this has meant I haven’t been particularly disappointed — they’ve been pleasant enough, with a few presents, cards and whatnot, but nothing particularly remarkable.

This year’s a bit different, though. Despite the fact that turning 30 is ultimately meaningless, I’d figured it might be nice to do something to remember. And my awesome girlfriend agreed — so it is that we’re currently sitting in a nice hotel in London having just seen Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre, and tomorrow we’re off to Southampton to eat curry, see friends and generally have a good time.

Chicago, for anyone considering seeing it, by the way, is awesome, clever, full of catchy tunes and a selection of fine lady-arses and rippling man-torsos (depending on what you’re into, of course.) Also, most of the cast is inexplicably dressed in their underwear throughout, so bonus.

So this birthday has been awesome for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that my last birthday was just before lots of things went to shit. But the less said about all that the better now, as it’s hopefully been pretty clear from here and Twitter and whatnot that things — while not perfect just yet — are at least on the up and improving.

This is good. I approve of things getting better. And I have a feeling they’re going to continue to improve. My thirties could well be the decade where Good Things Happen. Where I find some sort of “life course”, as it were. Because although I’ve technically had a “career” when I was a teacher, it clearly wasn’t the right thing for me.

So here’s to being 30. It’s been pretty good so far, frankly, and let’s hope it continues to be awesome.

Oh, right, and two rich white people got married today too, apparently.

#oneaday Day 118: Among Friends

It’s said that you can’t switch on your TV and not be able to watch an episode of Top Gear, Friends or Scrubs. And far from being a bad thing, I feel this is very much a good thing. Your opinion on the matter will, of course, vary according to your opinion of the programmes in question. But I happen to like them all very much.

Friends in particular, it has to be said. Friends finished long ago now, of course, but it will always hold a fond place in my heart. I started watching it when I was back at school, and it quickly became one of those shows that I felt the need to tape every single episode of, and ended up with several bajillion VHS cassettes’ worth.

I’m not sure exactly what it is that I like about it. I think it’s the fact that the characters are very strong and recognisable — so much so that their own mannerisms have entered the realms of popular culture.

There’s also the fact that most people can relate to at least one of the characters. Amongst all my friends, I know plenty of people who are Joeys, Rosses, Chandlers, Monicas, Phoebes and Rachels. And plenty who are combinations. (I also know plenty of people who are the cast of The Inbetweeners, too, but that’s another story altogether.)

Mostly, though, I think it’s the fact that every episode is both inoffensive and amusing, easy to watch and seemingly infinitely rewatchable. The ultimate in disposable TV. Comfort viewing.

It’ll be a sad day for me if E4 ever stop showing episodes of Friends. For one, it’ll mean I finally have to bite the bullet and purchase the complete DVD box set, something which I’ve successfully managed to avoid doing for the last ten years.

In unrelated news, it’s my birthday tomorrow. I will be 30. How exciting! Or possibly depressing, I haven’t quite made my mind up yet. (Except my lovely girlfriend is whisking me away for a fantastic birthday weekend, so the event itself will be totally brilliant and awesome, so that’s pretty much decided. Hurrah!)

#oneaday Day 117: Super-Pete

One of the most commonly-asked questions from people with no imagination is “what superpower would you have if you… err… had a superpower?” Sometimes they leave out the “err” bit and maybe phrase it a bit better, but it’s been a terribly long day and I’ve written an absolute shitload of content for a number of different outlets today. It’s good to feel like I’m working!

But anyway. What superpower would I have? Well, that’s a simple one to answer because I’ve thought it over many a time: shapeshifting.

Come on. Being a shapeshifter would be awesome. You could turn into a cat and sleep all day, or use your agility to escape from assailants. You could turn into someone of the opposite sex and answer that question that’s been bugging you all these years. Yes, that one. I know what you’re thinking. You could turn into a xylophone and allow someone to play you as a party trick.

Of course, there are spectacular opportunities for wrongdoing if you can make yourself look like absolutely anyone else. The temptation to mess with people would be enormous. Fortunately, I like to think I’m the sort of guy who would be able to resist such base temptations. Except if the opportunity arose to fuck with four particular people, who are the only people in the world I hold grudges against and probably always will. Bunch of bastards.

But anyway, that aside, I would use my powers for good — though precisely how is something I haven’t quite thought of, yet. I guess I could get a job as a body double for someone rich, famous and/or important and put myself at risk of being shot. Unfortunately, of course, being a shapeshifter probably doesn’t mitigate the damage from a bullet (unless you pull an Odo and liquefy yourself immediately as the projectile hits you, which needs some seriously lightning reactions, although given I managed to catch a completely full pint glass from falling off a table without spilling any once, I think I might be able to avoid a bullet) so that might not be the best plan.

I could make public appearances for celebrities who are too lazy to go out and do them themselves. But then the temptation to do bad and wrong things comes up again. Get hired by Cheryl Cole to take her place opening a supermarket or something, and the natural urge would, of course, be to get one’s tits out and run around shouting “Wark! Wark! Cock!” Or something. You know. I haven’t really thought it through that much.

I guess it actually wouldn’t be that “useful” per se, but it would certainly be interesting to be able to change your appearance completely at will. That way you can genuinely see who is bullshitting you when they say they don’t care about appearance.

#oneaday Day 116: Hacked Off

So, Sony fucked up. Pretty bigstyle. And yet I find myself less angry at them and their incompetent handling of the situation and more angry at the fact this situation even arose in the first place.

I’m talking, of course, about hackers. Hacking, despite people not really knowing what it is outside of representations that they’ve seen in movies, is one of the things people are most paranoid about in the online age — and with Sony’s PR disaster in full swing at the minute, it’s easy to see why, as people frantically cancel their credit cards and change all their passwords on the offchance that some bearded, smelly loser (not me) may pick their personal details to commit fraud with.

In practice, it seems that a lot of hacks are committed to make a point rather than cause damage as such, whatever Introversion Software’s excellent Uplink might have you believe. But for a service as inoffensive as PSN, it just seems spiteful to attack it. Anonymous had its high-profile throwing-toys-out-of-a-pram moment a week or two ago but they claim they’re not responsible for this latest incident as they’re supposedly “on the side of the consumer”. That and everyone was yelling at them for fucking up PSN when people just wanted to get online, play stuff and buy stuff.

I guess it’s just like any other crime — crime shouldn’t happen, but it does, whether it’s in the real or virtual world. However nice it’d be to imagine a Star Trek-esque future where crime and war between humans is a thing of the past, it’s not going to happen — or at least, not for a long time. As long as there are people out there who feel a misplaced sense of “entitlement” — whether it’s to get their hands on software they haven’t paid for, to steal people’s personal information or just to fuck everyone else’s enjoyment up — then we can never feel completely “safe” and confident.

Which is a shame, really, isn’t it? So much of new technology is genuinely awesome when used properly. Were the threat of hacking and other technology crime not present, the capabilities of devices could be even more awesome. But as it is, so much time and money has to be spent on installing cutting-edge security into every single device we own that things are probably held back from where they could be if security wasn’t such an issue.

Oh, I know. It’s nice to want things, and some sort of Utopia would supposedly get boring quite quickly, but I’d certainly like to enjoy it, if only for a while. But it’s never going to happen — the world is full of just enough arseholes to make life less enjoyable for the majority, non-arsehole population out there.

So, arseholes, a big fuck you, and I hope your cock falls off. Into a fire. Which someone then douses with acid, mistaking it for water. And then feeds you the remains. And then jams a really sharp spike right up your bum-hole.

Yeah.

#oneaday Day 115: What a Headache

There are few ailments more infuriating than a headache. Actually, most ailments are particularly infuriating, especially ones which don’t just go away. But headaches are the kind of ailment that seem to steadfastly resist any attempts to make them go away.

And we, being inventive, resourceful humans, come up with a variety of methods to attempt to make them go away when we don’t feel like gorging ourselves on pills and potions which often don’t work. There’s the time-honoured “bury your head in a pillow and wail” approach, which doesn’t work. There’s the “hold your head and moan softly and/or grunt a bit” approach, which doesn’t work but usually attracts the attention of anyone in the same room as you enough to go “You all right?”

There’s the “I heard this thing on TV once” approach, where you decide your headache is the result of dehydration/starvation/withdrawal from caffeine/withdrawal from nicotine/withdrawal from chocolate because of something you heard in passing on a medical drama once, so you decide to drink several gallons of water/eat lots of cake/drown yourself in coffee/smoke yourself into a miasmic fog/cover yourself in chocolate. That doesn’t work, either.

In fact, very few things seem to work. Attempting to kill the headache by dulling your senses with alcohol doesn’t work. Hitting yourself in the face with blunt objects to distract yourself from the dull thumping behind your forehead doesn’t work. Cutting off your own arm doesn’t work (and then you’re missing an arm, which is just inconvenient).

In short, you’re probably going to have to resort to those pills that live in The Pill Cupboard. Everyone has a Pill Cupboard of some description. It might be part of your bathroom cabinet. It might be in your kitchen. It may share its purpose with something else. It may be a drawer rather than a cupboard. But it’s still a Pill Cupboard.

You then have to proceed through the Krypton Factor-esque puzzle that is choosing the correct pills for your ailment and hope that you don’t inadvertently sterilise yourself or anything (unless, of course, you want to sterilise yourself, in which case, go ahead, and what are you doing with sterilisation drugs in your Pill Cupboard anyway?) Said puzzle is made all the more difficult by the fact that by the time you decide to resort to pills, your headache has probably reached the point where it feels like an alien is going to burst out from behind your forehead, leaving your lovely clean walls splattered in blood and brain goo. (It probably won’t happen. But it feels like it.)

Then you have to actually swallow the damn things, which always proves inconveniently difficult when you really need to swallow them, and you end up half-choking yourself with a pill lodged halfway down your throat and no amount of water-guzzling shifting it. You resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to have a literal lump in your throat for the rest of the evening, and you climb into bed to have a sulk before passing out from sheer boredom.

In other news, I have a headache.

#oneaday Day 114: Easter Promise

Happy Easter everyone! And we all know what Easter means: chocolate. (Balls to Jesus, the only thing he ever contributed to my life was delaying lunchtime and hometime at primary school by insisting we pray to him before we could have our sandwiches, which is just a bit needy for my taste. Also, the “zombie Jesus” gag is overdone, much like zombies themselves.)

With that in mind, along with a suggestion from my leading lady (who doesn’t believe I ever use her suggestions) I thought, in that case, I would talk about chocolate. Who doesn’t love chocolate? Aside from people who are allergic to it or any of its ingredients, of course. And even then that doesn’t necessarily stop them.

Chocolate is fairly universally loved, but it’s interesting to see the cultural differences between confectionary. Here in the UK, we tend to be terribly proud of the fact that we have Cadbury’s, who may or may not have invented chocolate and have a factory in a place with the same name as one of their bars. But there’s far more to life than Cadbury’s.

American chocolate, for example. American chocolate is a breed on its own and they don’t always get it quite right. Take Hershey’s Kisses, for example. Sweet name, little individually foil-wrapped rabbit droppings of chocolate that end up not really tasting quite as nice as they look. Plus you’ll be finding those foil wrappers for months afterwards, since despite the fact that it’s not especially great chocolate, you’ll find yourself snacking on them throughout the course of the day, particularly if it’s Christmas and there’s a big bowl of them on offer.

Then there’s unusual stuff like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I like these, and they’re pretty much unlike anything the UK has to offer, so it’s nice to enjoy them if I get over to the States. They’re almost cake-like in shape and presentation, but they’re chocolate. Wonders will never cease.

Canada has the Coffee Crisp, which I can’t remember a great deal about aside from the fact that I enjoyed it very much when I had one.

And in the interests of balance, non-UK types, may I educate you in the finest British chocolate has to offer (in my opinion, anyway.) Some of these may be available in your neighbourhood, but I thought I’d share them anyway.

The Mars bar is pretty universally known, but it’s actually not that nice when you get down to it. Sweet chocolate with bland nougat and gooey caramel. Not bad, but far better with the inclusion of peanuts to turn it into a Snickers, formerly Marathon. Snickers is also notable for being the only chocolate bar advertised by Mr. T. Mars, on the other hand, is notable for people battering and deep frying it in chip shops, producing a snack which would probably kill you of heart failure after about two bites.

Cadbury’s chocolate, as previously mentioned, is generally a good bet. You can get Dairy Milk bars in enormous 1kg sizes, too, which is more chocolate than you’d ever need unless you’re the sort of woman who swears period pain can only be cured by ludicrous amounts of chocolate. Or indeed the partner of a woman who swears period pain can only be cured by ludicrous amounts of chocolate.

Fruit and Nut takes the Dairy Milk formula and adds two extra ingredients which you can probably guess. “Fruit” is a bit of a stretch, since it’s just raisins, really, but it adds some interesting variation in texture. And if you want to eat something that’s basically a Fruit and Nut bar with different, slightly inferior chocolate, you should try a Yorkie Biscuit and Raisin — somewhat oddly marketed as being “not for girls”, a campaign which to this day I’m not quite sure how they managed to get away with.

If you have a sweet tooth, then Galaxy chocolate is difficult to beat, particularly if you manage to encounter the Galaxy Caramel or Truffle varieties. It’s pretty sickly-sweet, though, and will probably make you feel rather ill if you eat too much of it.

Bournville, too, another Cadbury’s product — this time dark chocolate — will definitely make you feel sick if you eat too much of it, as I discovered to my cost one day at university. Turns your sick black, too, which makes you feel like a swamp monster.

Boost bars used to be tasty, chocolate, shortbread and caramel type things. Then, at some point during my fourth year at university, they decided that turning them into the chocolate equivalent of a can of Red Bull would somehow be a great idea. My friend and I were passing by the promotional ladies in the student union concourse, so we gathered a few of the new-school Boost bars — now with added Guarana, whatever that was — and tried them out. Of course, we’d had some of the Union coffee bar’s famous quadruple espressos just moments earlier — it was early in the morning and we were expected to go and talk meaningfully about Dido and Aeneas, after all — so adding a caffeinated sugar hit to that probably wasn’t wise. As it turned out, it wasn’t. My friend and I spent the course of the seminar looking around like startled squirrels and suffering from severe cases of the hand-shakes. And not in the greeting way. Generally speaking, if you have a come-down from a chocolate bar, it’s trying too hard.

There are plenty of other pieces of chocolatey goodness on the shelves of UK newsagents — I haven’t even started on chocolatey things that come in bags rather than bars, for example — but those were the first that sprung to mind. Not necessarily the best — and certainly not a patch on stuff from actual proper chocolatiers such as Hotel Chocolat and Thornton’s — but comforting, pleasant, chocolatey.

Happy Easter. Enjoy your chocolate, and stop just before you’re sick. Please.

#oneaday Day 113: Colonel Gaddafi’s Chicken

Very often, drunken conversations simply degenerate into “I love you, I do, you’re like my best friend and totally awesome and we should totally do this more often like, y’know?” And that’s fine, and to be expected.

But sometimes, if you’re with the right people, something magical happens. Fortuitously, the people I was attending the wedding with yesterday happen to be the right people for something entertaining to happen when discussing things.

We were sitting out in the garden of the wedding venue gazing up at the sky and getting frustrated at the security light that kept going off and coming on every few minutes if we sat too still and then made a sudden movement. Some shooting stars were making an appearance every few minutes and all in all, it was a thoroughly pleasant evening.

Long chats such as the group of us had are often called “setting the world to rights” but I’m not sure the vision of the world we ended up painting was in any way “right”. Here’s the most important things we came up with:

You can wish on bats as well as shooting stars, but bats would rather get on with doing their own thing than grant wishes.
It’s easy to Photoshop in a shooting star — in fact, you can do it in Paint.
Mishearing “spy satellite” as “spice satellite” leads everyone to the natural conclusion that there is a madman somewhere in the world planning to release a selection of herbs and spices into the atmosphere, let them burn up and effectively curry the world.
This didn’t sound like such a bad thing.
Because it was a secret blend of herbs and spices, “The Colonel” came up.
“The Colonel” was not intended to be a reference to Gaddafi, but the image of him cooking chicken and attempting to curry the world was too amusing to pass up.
Ergo, Colonel Gaddafi is now in charge of KFC.
Gaddafi would use cumin as his weapon of choice to release from his spice satellites — ground, not seeds, to allow for greater dispersal.
Gaddafi also uses bats as spies, and they report back on the wishes people are making.
The bats are somewhat embittered by this and just want to be left alone to get in people’s hair and stuff.
Coming soon to iPhone: Colonel Gaddafi’s Angry Bats.
The bar was shutting at midnight, so we should get another round in.

There was a twisted kind of logic to the things we discussed. Though it was more “twisted” than “logic”, really. Still, it gave us all a good giggle at the time, and that’s the important thing.

#oneaday Day 112: Standing on Ceremony

It was the wedding day of my friends Ben and Amy today. It’s been a long time coming and they’re going to have a very long and happy life together, I’m sure.

One thing that struck me during the ceremony, though, was how odd ceremonies as a concept are. Very formalised and based in tradition, they’re a far cry from the way you act in regular day to day life.

And I guess that’s the point; a wedding ceremony isn’t something you do every day (hopefully) so it stands to reason that something should make it extraordinary. So why not infuse rings with meaning and symbolism, and why not insist that people are facing each other at the correct time, and why not delve into Old English when necessary?

It’s all about tradition. Concepts such as marriage and the like are almost as old as society and civilised living itself. To modernise them after they’ve been the same (or at least similar) for so long would be to break with years, decades, centuries of tradition.

That doesn’t mean people don’t do it, of course. Unconventional weddings are great fun to be a part of. But there must be a reason that so many people choose to do things in the “traditional” and apparently antiquated manner. For all the trappings of modernity we have these days, it seems that there are some traditions and ceremonies that we still respect.

I wonder if we’ll still be theeing and thouing in two hundred years time? Smart money’s on yes.

#oneaday, Day 111: Chaos, The Battle of Wizards

It’s a sad but true fact that returning to the games of your youth usually ends in disappointment as you realise that gaming has moved on a lot, and those games never got a re-release on Xbox Live Arcade or the like for a very good reason — they’re not very good.

But there’s a few exceptions. Specifically, anything made by Julian Gollop is still just as fresh as it was back then.

How do I know this? Thanks to the Elite ZX Spectrum Collection app for iPhone. This app features a decent Spectrum emulator and a selection of games, most of which can be bought via in-app purchase in packs of six. One such pack is a Julian Gollop pack, which contains five fantastic strategy games and one utterly awful bouncy-ball atrocity, the less said about which the better. At least — hopefully — after that, Gollop figured out what he was good at and what he wasn’t.

The games included in the pack are Chaos, Lords of Chaos, Rebelstar and its sequel and Laser Squad. I can’t remember what the bouncy one is called but it involved catching balloons and wasn’t fun at all.

The strategy games, on the other hand, are another matter. Chaos is the simplest of the bunch, with Teletext-quality graphics and feeble beep-and-fart type sound effects, but it’s an immensely competitive game that supports up to eight players. It works well as a “pass the phone” game, too. And casting a Gooey Blob that gets out of hand never gets old.

The remaining games are all fundamentally very similar, featuring the same basic gameplay mechanics and gradually-improving graphics. In fact, if you’ve played the X-COM games, you’ve played these games too. That’s no bad thing, though, because X-COM is awesome. Featuring turn-based multiplayer action, they’re, in many ways, virtual boardgames that don’t demand any throwing of dice or getting out a billion pieces or avoiding bumping the table or spilling curry on them or anything like that. And the Spectrum controls, while a little clunky, manage to work pretty effectively on the iPhone app. It helps that the keys are labelled, rather than my first experience with Chaos on a PC based emulator, where my friend Sam and I spent a good half an hour or so attempting to work out by trial and error what keys did what.

So if you’re jonesing for more X-COM and don’t object to playing on a touchscreen, then grab the Elite ZX Spectrum Collection and the Julian Gollop pack. I can guarantee that you won’t be disappointed, and you’ll be surprised that retro gaming can still be fun, deep and rewarding rather than vaguely upsetting.

Day 459