#oneaday Day 992: Making Excuses

It came to my attention last night that some people were missing the stickmen cartoons. This was nice to know, as I’d always wondered if anyone actually found them entertaining or not and occasionally found myself suffering from a bit of a “crisis of confidence”, thinking they were crap, not funny or whatever. I’m usually fairly confident in my creative work, but I think at the back of my mind was the knowledge that bad webcomics often get ridiculed, and I really don’t like being ridiculed. Call me irrational like that.

Of course, the pretty limited audience this blog has probably means that the vast majority of the Internet had no idea of the existence of that cartoons, so there’s that.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the cartoons, if I’m honest. I genuinely love the characters I’ve created, even if they’re silly, stereotypical and don’t have any really meaningful depth. It’s also nice to occasionally drop in a guest character based on someone I know — that has never been received negatively, even though I spend much too long worrying about whether their stickmen representation actually looks anything like them. (note to self: they’re stickmen. If you think you’re going to make them realistic, you are Doing It Wrong.)

At the same time, it adds a bunch of extra work to my daily blog posts (you’d be surprised how much I agonise over getting those crap drawings just right) and also means that if I’m away from my Mac — which has the software I use to make the comic layouts — I can’t do them easily. It irks me somewhat if I’ve started doing them daily again and then suddenly have to leave a gap. Sometimes I end up not starting again after said gap, which I think is probably what happened last time. Or possibly just laziness and/or starting to write when I just really wanted to go to bed.

I also get a bit hung up on trying to tie the strip and the blog post together, and sometimes there’s nothing funny in the post I can spin out into a comic. In particular if I’m writing about something personal or upsetting, cracking a joke about it can feel a little flippant or insensitive. (Can you be insensitive towards yourself? I guess so.) The solution to this is, of course, simply to not be too attached to the concept of the strip and the post having anything to do with one another, and dealing with situations where penis jokes might not be appropriate as they arise.

So there you are. Those are the things that go through my head regarding the stickmen, and the reasons why sometimes I stop for a little while. Since they apparently have a small but dedicated following, however, I will certainly do my best from this point on to keep them coming! (hurr hurr, you said “coming” — Phillipe)

#oneaday Day 927: On Stickmen

I draw stickman primarily for one reason: I’m not very good at drawing anything more complicated. I’ve never practiced drawing particularly hard — I’ve always enjoyed doodling and drawing stupid things, but I’ve never tried particularly hard to actually practice good technique or anything. I spent a few weeks reading up on how to draw manga-style characters a few years back, but never really got the hang of drawing things that look particularly “convincing”. My manga-style drawings always end up looking like the sort of thing a 12-year old kid scrawls in their art book in an attempt to look cool, rather than anything particularly convincing. So no, you won’t be seeing any of those here for the moment.

And then I inevitably run into various other issues if I do decide to draw more detailed characters, which I shall now demonstrate for you forthwith. Note: I am not doing this to solicit feedback, nor am I fishing for compliments (not that these pics deserve any) — simply to demonstrate a point.

Let us begin.

The first question I inevitably end up asking myself regards body image. I put “myself” in my cartoons frequently, and drawing a body makes me ponder whether or not I should draw an “idealised” version of myself (right, obviously) or a more… ummm… “accurate” depiction.

This also raises difficult questions when a friend of mine asks for a guest appearance, as I then have to make the same decision regarding how I represent them — I don’t want to cause offence, but at the same time I want them to be recognisable, and their “shape” is often a part of that factor. It’s just easier to do a stick body because everyone is equal, then, and the main distinguishing factor between characters is not something people (including me) can be particularly sensitive about, but instead the part that really matters to their “character” — their face.

Also, I’m not very good at drawing fat people. Or boobs.

Another thing I am not very good at is posing characters, as the slightly uncomfortable-looking Alex above will attest. I am fond of “arms folded” and “hands on hips” as strong poses, but these are tricky to draw. In the case of “arms folded”, I have no idea where the fuck to put people’s hands, and I’m not even entirely convinced I know where people’s arms go. I then run into mild perspective issues as I try to figure out what would be behind those arms, and it all just gets to be a bit of a mess. (I should probably do it the other way around — body first, then overlay arms on top.)

Questions of clothing then rear their head. What should characters wear? Should they wear the same thing all the time as part of their “look”, or should they switch things up occasionally? Will I ever learn how to draw bare legs beneath a skirt?

Finally, I have to figure out what on Earth to do with more bizarre characters such as Phillipe here. Phillipe works as a stickman because stickmen can get away with exaggerated expressions such as his perpetual gurning. But does that really work when placed atop a more “normal” (i.e. not stick-figure) body?

Looking at the pics I’ve drawn above, it actually sort of does. (Also, I can take further advantage of Phillipe’s perverted nature with offensive T-shirt slogans.) But I still find myself looking at drawings like that and thinking to myself that they’re crap, whereas I’m much happier with the way these characters come out as stick figures. Stick figures can be easily posed, manipulated, mangled and otherwise abused. As soon as you add a “proper” body to the mix, you have to think about things a little more. They’re not as bendy. Well, that’s not true, you can do whatever you want with them. But contortions are easier to draw on a stick figure than on a character with a body. Also you don’t have to worry about lighting with stick figures, whereas cartoons with “proper” bodies inevitably look better if there’s a sense of light and shadow in there.

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, every so often I get a hankering to write a visual novel, but the one thing that usually stops me before I even start is thinking “I’ll never find anyone to draw some good-looking graphics, and I certainly can’t do it myself.” I’ve contemplated making a visual novel using just stick-figure characters and I think it might sort of work — it’d certainly be a distinctive aesthetic — but then I lose confidence and think it would be the rubbishest idea ever.

What I should actually do, of course, is actually script the thing for myself and then see if I can actually recruit someone who can Do Drawing afterwards. But then I go and get into a loop where I want to “see” the character as I’m writing their dialogue, and I go around and around and around and don’t do anything at all.

Screw graphics, basically. They just get in the way.

#oneaday, Day 196: Things The World Needs Significantly Less Of

The world is full of “stuff”. Some of it is good. Examples of good stuff include trifle, Spotify, refrigerators, kung po chicken, those marker pens that smell of fruit, pianos (so long as they are in tune), friends, hot chocolate with whipped cream, people who are nice, digital cameras, the Squadron of Shame, Civilization IV, headphones with comfortable earpieces, that Original Mint Source shower gel (so long as you don’t get it on your bellend or up your arse), lamb tikka dhansak, Twitter, gin and tonic and, of course, the music from Space Channel 5.

But there are just as many—if not more—things that the world really doesn’t need any more of. In fact, some of these things I’d argue the world doesn’t really need at all. Because, in many cases, we got along just fine without them before they were invented.

Here is a selection of things the world could do with significantly less of.

1. Redundant information signs on motorways

“QUEUE CAUTION,” says the ungrammatical sign in bold, orange, backlit capital letters. Your car is not moving. Not because you stopped to read the sign. No, your car is stopped because it’s in a queue. You were aware of the fact your car was in a queue long before a sign informed you of this fact. As it happens, since the sign informing you that yes, you are in a queue appeared approximately two miles after the queue started, it feels somewhat like it’s mocking you. As such, you decide to shout at the sign.

The sign does not respond.

2. Suit jackets with fake pockets

Clothes either have pockets or they don’t. If you’re a girl and you like wearing pretty dresses, chances are you don’t have pockets very often. As such, you may well carry a handbag for the express purpose of carrying around your “stuff”. Said pretty dresses don’t tend to have pretend pockets for some unspecified purpose.

Gentlemen, on the other hand, are used to having pockets. The typical gentleman’s attire features pockets on the trousers at the very least, and jackets usually have pockets as well. So when a suit that looks like it has pockets but doesn’t comes along, that’s a sure-fire ticket to frustration city. Particularly when you try and put something in the jacket pocket instead of the trouser pocket because when you put things in your trouser pockets your trousers fall down because you forgot to bring a belt and you can’t put anything in the jacket pocket because it isn’t actually a pocket despite looking like one and ARRRGH HOLD THIS FOR A MINUTE WILL YOU?

3. People who talk about fashion as if it’s a science

Shut up. Just stop talking bollocks. People can wear whatever they want. Most people have a pretty good idea that wearing something in a fluorescent colour is probably going to make you stand out a bit, and wearing strappy shoes with big heels may well make you 1) fall over and 2) have hurty feet. When some jumped-up hussy comes on TV explaining to everyone that the particular shade of brown you see in front of you is the “perfect shade for summer” (despite it being purple last year, and yellow the year before) everyone should yell, as one, “FUCK OFF”.

Fashion is not a science. You know what is a science? Science.

4. The adjectival phrase “must-have”

If you took the term “must-have” at face value and immediately purchased everything described as such, you would be very poor indeed. “Must-have” items often tend to be expensive and/or pointless, and there is some crossover with the world of people who talk about fashion as if it’s a science.

No, that handbag is not a “must-have” item. It is something that someone rich who likes gaudy silver handbags might enjoy purchasing.

Genuinely “must-have” items for acceptable functioning in modern society include: water, underpants, trousers/skirts, shirts/blouses/t-shirts, shoes, a toilet (arguable, given the stench coming from some doorways in Southampton on a Friday night), soap, deodorant, food of some description.

5. Extremism

If you are a terrorist, you are quite possibly an extremist. You hold an extreme viewpoint, and in your case, you’re prepared to die for it.

But extremism isn’t just about terrorism. It’s also about the people who bring out the tired old “Britain is full!” line when talking about immigration. The people who believe that all Muslims are terrorists. The people who use the phrase “YOU’RE IN ENGLAND, SPEAK ENGLISH”. And on the other end of the spectrum, people who describe anyone with an opposing viewpoint to their own as a “Nazi”. People who go on a march for a cause which isn’t entirely clear to anyone except themselves. People who protest for the sake of protesting, rather than actually having something worthwhile to protest about.

All of you, just stop it. Shut up. You both sound ridiculous. And as for you, Captain Terrorist? Attention-seeking of the highest order. Grow up.

6. Companies whose purpose their own employees can’t explain

I’ve told this story a number of times before, but there was a time when I did some temping for a local “loss adjusting” company. On a side note, this was the only job I’ve had which literally bored me to tears on several occasions. And that’s not an exaggeration.

Anyway, the point is this: this company dealt with issues so boring that no-one else would ever want anything to do with them, let alone have a burning desire to enter that profession. But the sheer string of companies that charged exorbitant rates per hour that their “cases” went through was ridiculous. In one case relating to tree-related subsidence on a property adjacent to a Transport For London-owned railway, the clients made a claim to the insurance company, who contacted the loss adjusters, who sent in some engineers to look at the damage, who sent in some builders to give a quote for repairs who hired some solicitors to sue Transport for London for the costs and then hired some draftsmen to write up said costs who then hired some other solicitors to recover the costs from someone else who then… I fell asleep by this point.

Ask an employee of a company like this “what do you do?” and if they spend more than three seconds thinking or going “umm”, then that company doesn’t really need to exist.

7. Doorstep salesmen

“Hi! Would you like to…”

“No. Goodbye.”

*SLAM*

There are many, many more things the world could do with significantly less of. Evil people. Cheaters. Assholes. Murderers. Men who walk into shops with their shirts off. R&B singers. Jedward fans. Types of cigarette. Brands of bottled water. Rapists. People who flash their fullbeams at you when you’re in the right-hand lane going 90+ mph overtaking people on your left. Onions. County council employees. People who use the word “fuckin'” in spoken sentences the same way people use “lol” when writing. People who use “lol” as punctuation. Aniseed.

I could go on. But I won’t.

#oneaday, Day 133: Lazy Days

Everyone has lazy days. Days when nothing – nothing – gets done. And sometimes there’s not even a reason for getting nothing done. Just pure laziness. Or possibly your body telling your mind that it’s quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and would it mind awfully if it just sat here and atrophied for a few hours KTHXBAI.

It starts innocently enough. You sit down on the sofa. Perhaps you wanted a quick breather. Perhaps you’ve just had a phone call that went on for so long that that pacing-around-the-room thing that everyone does with mobile phones got a bit tiresome. Perhaps you were about to watch some TV. The circumstances of how you got to the sofa are about to become completely irrelevant.

At some point during your blissful reverie, something of earth-shattering importance will occur to you. Perhaps there’s a letter that you need to post today, or you’re running out of toilet paper and the shop is closing early for refurbishment today, or maybe you’re out of milk, or perhaps you actually have something useful to get on with. Whatever it is, your mind can’t stop thinking about it. A feeling of lurking panic starts to set in. What if you really need to take a dump and there isn’t enough toilet paper? There’s no-one else in the house so you can’t ask anyone else to go and fetch you some. Could you sink as low as using a towel or a newspaper? Or would you want to wash your shitty arse in the shower, like some sort of incontinent old person, only without a nurse to help you with the hideous process? The feeling of panic builds and you almost feel obliged to get up.

But no! Why should you get up? You’ve been working your arse off all week for little to no gratitude from the people that you work for. So you’ve earned this little sit down. You shouldn’t feel obliged to do anything. So you don’t. You say to yourself – possibly out loud – no. You are going to sit here until you’re nice and relaxed, or at least until Top Gear has finished. Then and only then you might think about getting up to post that letter.

“But the post goes at 4pm, and it’s 3.50 now,” says your mind. “If you don’t post that letter today, the council are going to charge you eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds for the privilege of another letter asking you where your eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds owed in money that they paid you by mistake actually is.” You close your eyes and block out the whingeing and nagging that your own mind is setting about you with. This is your time. Besides, the postman will come again tomorrow, and you can always change the date on the letter to look like you posted it earlier and it actually got lost in the post and then feign ignorance when the council start hammering on your door and bringing the bailiffs round.

You decide to give up trying to be productive and you lean back on the sofa in a more relaxed posture. Perhaps your mouth falls open in an expression of gormless contentment. You stare into space for a little while as the light starts to fade outside and you wonder if you probably should get up and cook something, but you’re not sure you can be bothered. You’d phone for pizza, but you don’t have any cash, and ordering one with a debit card is always such a hassle because they always phone back and say it hasn’t gone through and you think your card’s been declined because you’ve got no money but it’s actually them just typing the number in wrong and oh for heaven’s sake being by yourself sucks and wouldn’t it be much better if you had someone to talk to or cook dinner for? That might get you up off the damn sofa.

There are only two possible outcomes to this scenario once it gets to this point:

The first possibility is that you achieve victory over the soporific powers of the sofa, stand up and get something done. You post your letter, putting it right into the postman’s hand just as he is emptying the postbox into his big bag. Then you go and buy toilet paper and milk and order a pizza. Your evening goes swimmingly well, and you collapse into bed satisfied that you have spent your day as productively as you possibly could, with a much-needed break in the middle for a little quiet time and reflection.

And the other possibility is, of course, death.

#oneaday, Day 128: Leveraging the Monetization of Excellence

Dear Businesspersonages of the World,

You don’t half talk a load of bollocks. Whether you’re sitting around a boardroom table with a cup of petrol masquerading as coffee, standing in front of an overhead projector training people who aren’t listening by patronising them (in the English way, not the American way) or writing job advertisements, your language is full of shit that doesn’t mean anything. In case you weren’t aware, the English language has been around a lot longer than the double-breasted business suit and so was already adequately equipped to allow clear communication between individuals, or even large groups of people, through the media of writing or speaking.

Therefore, I must please ask you to remove the following words from your vocabulary forthwith:

Leverage

Use. USE. You don’t “leverage social media applications to crowdsource popular opinion”, you “use Facebook to see what people think”. I have no idea where this word has come from and I see no reason for its existence other than to keep websites like Mashable in business. I guess people use the word “leverage” to mean “use really hard”. But I say again, the simple word “use” has been perfectly well-equipped for this purpose for years. And the word “leverage” has been quite happy with its original meaning of how much, well, leverage you can get on something. Like leverage on a boulder that you’re trying to push down a hill. Or leverage on a glued-down tabletop that you’re trying to remove. (I don’t know why you’d want to do that, but you need leverage to do it.) Leverage is not a verb. So just stop it. Or I will see how much leverage I can get on your arse with this crowbar.

Monetize

I understand that this is the 21st century and everyone wants to communicate as efficiently as possible. Therefore that oh-so-cumbersome three-word phrase “make money from” appears to have been replaced by the much more elegant word “monetize”. Was this really necessary? Again I point the finger at Mashable, whose favourite question about websites appears to be “how will they monetize this”? Were I writing an article about, say, Twitter, I would ask the question “how will they make money from this?” It’s just as clear. Yes, it uses a couple more words, but it sounds infinitely less pretentious. “Monetize” sounds like something a money robot would do. It’s a bit sinister. Imagine the money robot coming into your bedroom in the middle of the night and monetizing you. You’d wake up as a big pile of dollar bills or pounds sterling or the currency of your locality, unless the money robot was made in a different territory in which case it would probably use its own local currency. Which would make it terribly difficult to get anything done. Also, people would want to spend you all the time. So please stop this too. Or I will monetize the violation of your rectal cavity with this crowbar.

Excellence

Mottos used to be inspirational pieces of text, usually in Latin to make people look clever. Here are a few examples:

Natura Artis Magistra (Nature is the Teacher of Art – Amsterdam Zoo)
In Somno Securitas (In Sleep there is Safety – the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland)
Ex Obscuris Lux (From Darkness, Light – American Association of Ophthalmology)
Vita donum Dei (Life is the Gift of God – Royal College of Midwives)

Here is the motto for Purbrook Park School in Hampshire:

Working Together Towards Excellence

Somewhat less inspirational, I’m sure you’ll agree. It implies that the school is, you know, all right, but not what you’d call “excellent”. The word “excellence” is constantly used as something to strive for which is never actually attained. Therefore, I suggest that it is actually utterly useless. You may as well put “Working Together Towards Some Of The Children Here Actually Leaving With Some Qualifications And Not Getting Knocked Up And Living On The Dole At The Taxpayers’ Expense While Daily Mail Readers Get All Upset And Blame Immigrants For Taking Jobs That You’re Too Lazy To Get Anyway Because You Couldn’t Be Arsed To Work Hard At School”. Although admittedly that’s somewhat less snappy.

So please stop using “excellence”. Otherwise I will strive for excellence in the infliction of pain in and around your anus with this crowbar.

Self-Starter

You use this an awful lot in job advertisements, don’t you? Usually coupled with “confident” and “motivated”. What exactly is a self-starter? Can you tell me? Is it someone who can actually tie their own shoelaces? Someone who knows how to boil the kettle and press the button on the toaster so that the coffee and the toast are ready at exactly the same time so you have hot coffee and hot toast instead of boiling hot coffee and dry, cold toast or burnt toast and tepid coffee? Is it someone who runs like those new cars that don’t have an ignition key and you just press the button to start them up? Is it a person who doesn’t run on clockwork? Because most of us don’t run on clockwork, so I’d argue that most of us are self-starters. If we weren’t, we’d spend all our time lying in bed wanking, if we could be bothered. So please stop it. Otherwise I will demonstrate how much of a self-starter I am by, without any outside intervention or assistance, performing an amateur colonoscopy using this crowbar and a late-90s Handycam.

Fit for Purpose

No. It’s not “not fit for purpose”, it “doesn’t work”. What’s wrong with “doesn’t work”? I’ve been using the words “doesn’t work” for years. See this old pair of headphones? They don’t work. This remote control? It doesn’t work. This battered old PC? It doesn’t work. It’s pretty clear that none of these are working as intended (and that I should probably throw out some of these things that don’t work or at least replace the batteries) but I have never once felt the need to describe them as “not fit for purpose”. Similarly, the shirt I purchased from Primark who seem to think that XL-size gentlemen are actually more like S-size gentlemen was “too small”, not “not fit for purpose”. The fact that when you drop a mobile phone onto a concrete floor it tends to shatter into a million tiny pieces doesn’t make it “not fit for purpose”, it makes you a clumsy idiot who should know when to put your fucking Blackberry away. So please stop using this, otherwise I will show you just how fit for purpose this crowbar is for inserting into businessmen’s arses.

There are many other words I could continue this letter with, businesspeople (and don’t even get me started on why you use the word “persons” instead of “people”) but I have already written over 1100 words on the subject and I imagine that you have some important leveraging to get on with. So please remember what I have said, otherwise I will be paying you a visit with my friend the crowbar. And no amount of ergonomically-designed comfort-leveraging chairs will make sitting down comfortable for quite some time when I’ve finished with you.

Yours sincerely,

Pete

#oneaday, Day 119: Things I Thought Were True, But Aren’t

When you’re a kid, you pick up what you think is “knowledge” from somewhere. God knows where – probably a combination of things you thought you’d overheard your parents saying (but had inevitably misheard or misunderstood), things you’d seen in the media and things your friends had told you were absolutely, positively 100% true because their big brother said so and their big brother knows everything about the world because he has got a girlfriend and a car and goes to secondary school and you don’t.

Some of these things are myths perpetuated by society to give more meaning to particular events. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Santa. Jesus. (Sorry.) But others are just plain wrong, and sometimes you don’t get corrected on them until much later. And sometimes you don’t ever get corrected on them.

Take these five examples. I know they’re all nonsense, but there are at least three of them I haven’t seen compelling evidence against. So if you’d care to set my mind at rest about any of them, please feel free.

1. Car crashes always cause explosions.

Hollywood can take full responsibility for this one, since almost any movie involving a car crash inevitably ends with one or both of the cars exploding into a ball of flames while our intrepid hero manages to get out just in time. So when I was being driven to a piano lesson by my mother one night, and a car misjudging a peculiar junction bumped into the front of our car at less than 20mph (hardcore, right?) I was terribly surprised to not suddenly be engulfed in flames and smoke and be battling for my life. Pleasantly surprised, I might add – even more so by the fact that we could drive off after the accident, because the second thing I assumed about car accidents at the time was that they caused your car to immediately die. However non-severe the accident was. Scrape a lamp-post? Uh-oh, better start walking!

2. Someone throwing a cigarette out of their car window and it passing underneath your car will cause your car to explode.

I am genuinely quite paranoid about this to this day – not unreasonably I feel, as we’re taught quite early on that cars run on quite flammable materials and as such probably shouldn’t be in close contact with anything that is, you know, on fire. To this day, any litterbug smoker flinging their fag-ends out of their window hasn’t been successful in detonating my car behind them but surely it’s only a matter of time.

3. Using a mobile phone anywhere in the vicinity of a petrol station will cause the petrol station to explode.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that three out of the three irrational fears so far have involved explosions. I don’t have a particular explosion phobia – although like most people, it’s not something I would choose to stand next to – but it occurs to me that no-one gives you a particular education in the things which do and do not cause explosions. This is clearly a failing of the current education system and should be rectified with a new section of the National Curriculum immediately.

Oh, right, mobile phones. Well, there are signs everywhere in petrol stations telling you what you shouldn’t do because petrol is flammable and blah blah blah. And the instruction to switch off one’s mobile phone is always right under the instructions to switch off one’s engine and to not light fires or smoke. Therefore, it’s a natural assumption that the mobile phone thing also has something to do with fire. It probably doesn’t. But to tell you the truth, I don’t actually know why you’re not supposed to use your mobile phone in a petrol station. It’s the sort of thing I think of every time I see that sign and then never bother to ask anyone about.

4. Having been to the place depicted in a TV show makes the TV show approximately one thousand times better.

Okay, sometimes this is true. If you saw Jack Bauer storming a hotel you’d stayed at, that would be pretty cool. But having suffered through many, many episodes of pensioner-based “sitcom” (and I use the term loosely) Last of the Summer Wine when I was little, and then having visited Holmfirth, the Yorkshire village where it is set, I can state with some confidence that this is simply not the case. In fact, I recall being rather disappointed when I discovered that the café in the series was actually a hairdressers in reality. Oh, and the programme still wasn’t funny.

5. Noel Edmonds is watching every house in the country.

Bearded light-entertainment twat Noel Edmonds (now in charge of the utterly pointless Deal or No Deal) used to have a show on Saturday evenings called Noel’s House Party. It was a variety show of the type you don’t really get that much any more, unless there’s some sort of charity gig like Comic Relief or Children in Need going on in which case they draw the format out over the course of approximately fifteen hours. One of the segments on the show was called Gotcha, where Noel would look right at the screen and start talking, then click his fingers and suddenly on everyone’s TV screens, there was a family sitting together on their sofa looking all “OMG!” while Noel was all “LOL!” and the audience was like “ROFL!”

I can’t even remember the point of the segment. I think it involved Noel talking to the family through their TV set and possibly they won a prize or something. The only effect it had on my young self was inducing a state of almost total paranoia while this show was on. As soon as the Gotcha segment started, I started looking around to see if I could spot any hidden cameras. Leave aside the fact that we clearly hadn’t had any visitors from a TV crew to install said hidden cameras at any point. I always wondered why the family was surprised. Maybe Noel’s team broke into the family’s house in order to install the hidden cameras, which just makes them even worse, given the fact that I know I’d be utterly terrified in a break-in situation. But you never saw that in the papers, did you? “Noel’s House Party team in hospital after shotgun break-in incident”.

Fortunately, I no longer think that Noel Edmonds is watching me. Probably for the best.

Super-Important Edit!

[EDIT: “Mike” in the comments below has graciously pointed out that the segment in question was not, in fact, called Gotcha but was actually called NTV. I apologise profusely for this gross failure to check my facts properly before writing. But, to be honest, the prospect of trawling through footage of Noel Edmonds was so repulsive to me that I couldn’t face it. So consider this an official correction and apology. Thank you, Mike, you’ve done the world a service by remembering Noel’s House Party so we don’t have to.]

#oneaday Day 116: Dear The Internet

Dear The Internet,

I am writing to you to express my concern about several people who spend their time on you. Not in a sexual way. Actually, sometimes in a sexual way, but that’s beside the point. The fact is, there are people out there who do annoying things. I am aware that this is not your fault, nor are they doing it specifically to wind me and only me up. However, the fact is, I am wound up by them and I would like you to stop them, please.

People who comment first on things should be applauded for their tenacity. Assuming they have anything worthwhile to say. However, unfortunately, the sort of person who enjoys pointing out the fact they are the first to comment on something rarely has anything useful to say. This then has the knock-on effect of causing the following commenters to assume that the thing that has been posted is the sort of thing only enjoyed by twats and, by extension, is not something over which a reasonable, thought-provoking or entertaining discussion might take place. Please see what you can do to stop this happening.

The immediacy with which information is available on you is astounding. During the last paragraph, I was able to quickly look up the word “tenacity” to ensure it was, in fact, the correct word I was thinking of. (It was.) However, this does not mean that more lengthy prose no longer has a place in society. Whether on a message board, a blog post, an online news article or a Wikipedia article, the saying “less is more” is not always true. Consider these two sentences: “Pete is a dude.” and “Pete is an awesome dude who likes video games and music, and has also recently taken to punctuating his blog posts with MS Paint stickmen representations of himself and numerous other anonymous people.” Which of the two sentences tells you more about Pete?

As an aside, however, this does not mean you should ever allow your denizens to use text-speak in order to cram more information into less space.

Laughter is the best medicine, but it is not punctuation. We already have some perfectly good punctuation marks to use. Here is one: a colon. And a full stop. And oh look – a dash! And an exclamation mark. But what about a question mark? Or some sort of slash/”quotation marks” combination? All of these things are fine and serve to make our written communication more clear.

“LOL” is not a punctuation mark. It means “laughing out loud”, something I genuinely doubt people are actually doing every time they type “LOL”. I’ve heard a lot about privacy concerns around you, so could you make use of some of these loopholes to watch people through their webcams and squirt deodorant in their faces if they type “LOL” and they’re not actually laughing, please?

I’ve bought things in the past. I once bought a copy of Oasis’ first album Definitely Maybe the day before their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out. I didn’t know any better at the time, as I was just getting into popular music, but I wasn’t annoyed, because Definitely Maybe is a good album too. I was quite impressed that my friends at the time didn’t feel the need to take the piss out of me for this, because they too knew that Definitely Maybe was still a worthwhile purchase even though the next album was on the way.

So if I buy something these days, could you see if it’s possible to stop people saying what I’ve bought is not very good and suggesting something better instead? I happen to like the thing I bought. That’s why I chose to buy it over the thing they’re recommending. Maybe I spent a little more. I’m fine with that – I can deal with the consequences. I’m sure their thing is really good too, which is why I’m not suggesting that they buy the thing I bought instead of the thing they bought. Do you see?

Finally, Internet, I believe that one of your most exciting features that you told everyone about when you first appeared on the scene was the ability to bring the whole world closer together. Terms like “information superhighway” and “global village” were coined for us to all imagine one big happy family holding hands and enjoying things together.

I like this idea. Happy families are nice. We can enjoy things together. So would you mind doing something about the people who feel the constant need to say something sucks because the thing they think sucks does almost the same as the thing they think doesn’t suck but maybe not quite as well in their opinion? Because that just invites other people to show up and say the thing that the other person thinks sucks actually doesn’t suck because they think it doesn’t suck and the thing that the other person actually thought didn’t suck really sucks instead because the other person is a douchebag and their mother is a homosexual?

I have all the things that some people think suck and others think don’t suck, and I don’t think any of them suck. Could you spread a little bit of this love around please?

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, Internet. I’m sure it will provide you with some helpful feedback on how to make yourself work better. You might need to fire a few people, though.

Yours sincerely,

Pete Davison