#oneaday Day 884: Just Write

I have written a veritable bucketload of words today (including this 5,000+ word epic for the Squadron of Shame) so you'll forgive me for taking "the easy option" and indulging in some freewriting again this evening. (Technically I guess it's not truly freewriting if I go back and add a link to that sentence I just wrote after the fact, but eh. I'm going to call it freewriting and there's nothing you can do about it, really.

Today has been a fairly quiet and unremarkable day, as most days tend to be. There's nothing wrong with that, of course; having remarkable days all the time would quickly make them unremarkable and thus boring, and you'd get yourself into a cycle of increasing awesomeness, whereby it would take more and more remarkable things happening on a daily basis to make you determine that you had indeed had a "remarkable" day. So yes. Today was fairly unremarkable, which is fine. Though it did see the arrival of our new, massive, comfy sofa, so that was nice. And I guess that qualifies as something vaguely out of the ordinary, though whether I'd actually call it "remarkable" or not is up for debate somewhat.

Today I reviewed Zynga's new game Ruby Blast on Facebook. As per usual for Zynga, the game lifts game mechanics from other titles wholesale, though in the case of Ruby Blast the game isn't a straight clone of Wooga's Diamond Dash (its primary inspiration) but instead combines it with the "Diamond Mine" mode from Bejeweled 3. It works pretty well, though it does all the things about social games that probably annoy you if you're not already engaged with that particular part of the market. It has an "energy" system to throttle how much you can play, it continually asks you to share things and invite friends, and there's something just "off" about the aesthetic that makes you want to strangle the personality-free main character. Objectively, however, it's not a bad example of a social game — it's fun, quick to play, likely to earn a fair amount of money and actually encourages people to play together with a weekly leaderboard a la Bejeweled Blitz, which still rules the roost for social puzzle titles as far as I'm concerned.

What else did I do? I wrote up that epic Squadron of Shame article I posted earlier. That was the result of an extended conversation between me and my good friend Mr Alex Connolly, who makes his home all the way over in Japan. It's pretty awesome that we can have such an in-depth conversation across thousands of miles and then publish the (lengthy) results for all to see. The piece even got a shout-out from the developers of the game we were discussing, which was nice.

I also put my foot down on Facebook and determined that I am not going to put up with the facile social marketing crap that most "brands" tend to indulge in on Facebook. My new policy is that the second a game/company/other brand posts something inane, like "what are you having for dinner tonight" or "I like ________" then I will immediately unlike them. This will have little impact on their user figures, but I'll feel better about it. This kind of social marketing is apparently A Thing, and me saying it is stupid (it is) is not going to make it go away, sadly, because it's proven to be effective. Just look at any brand page asking an asinine question about what colour sauce you prefer on your kebabs and you'll see several thousand "Likes" and at least a few hundred comments, possibly more. Meanwhile we struggle to get people out of the house to vote for things that actually matter. Oh well.

I'm not sure where this rambling is going but I haven't stopped typing yet so I may as well continue for now. It's been quite warm today, but the night has become a bit chilly. I have the window open as I type this and the cold breeze is actually quite pleasant. I popped into the bedroom to see Andie before I started typing this and it is incredibly hot in there — way hotter than the rest of the house. I'm not sure why, nor do you, my readership, care. So I will stop talking about this nonsense forthwith.

I have had the song "Winter Wrap-Up" from My Little Pony stuck in my head all day. This is partly due to the fact that the other day I had to review a Facebook "virtual world" where it was possible to choose YouTube videos to put on the walls, and naturally (naturally?) the first thing that sprang to mind was PONIES PONIES PONIES. As such, I haven't been able to get that earworm of a song out of my head ever since. It's not a bad song. It's catchy. It has silly lyrics, but let's not forget it was part of an episode of My Little Pony, so we can forgive it a bit of silliness I'm sure.

I am closing in on a thousand words so I will be stopping soon. I am going to end this post with an embedded video of Winter Wrap-Up so you can all suffer like I've been suffering. It's just a shame I can't make it auto-play. Oh God, do you remember Web pages that auto-played MIDI files and other stuff? Thank heavens we moved beyond that. Now, we just have superfluous Flash animations and other crap. But it's been a very long time since I visited a website that had a background MIDI. I sort of miss it. But at the same time, any website that did do that would doubtless get mercilessly mocked. It would probably be a viral sensation these days, to be honest, but for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway. That's really nearly a thousand words now so it's time to stop, and the only thing that remains for me to do is this, as promised:

Yeah. Yeah.

#oneaday Day 883: Freewriting

I have no idea what to write about today. So I've decided to just start typing and see what comes out. Doubtless it will be a ridiculous flow of consciousness nonsense post, but eh. What can you do.

I've used this technique before, of course. It's called "freewriting" and it's a good technique if you're planning on perfecting your creative writing craft. Well, maybe not perfecting, but it's a good means of practicing the art of getting ideas out of your head and onto the page as quickly as possible. This is an important thing to do, as ideas, if left unchecked, float around your head for a day or two and then dissipate without warning, often before you've had a chance to do anything with them. I find that I can generally hold A Good Idea in my head for up to a week at a time, but if I don't do anything about it (even if that "anything" is simply "make a note of it to come back to later") then it is gone forever. Usually. (Sometimes if it's a particularly powerful Good Idea, then it will be back with greater force. This is usually a sign that I should Do Something About It.)

Talking of creative writing, I downloaded an app for the Mac called Scrivener yesterday, and spent a little bit of time going through its tutorial and fiddling with it. It's a "writer's toolbox" sort of application, taking the approach that programming environments do for application development, only for creative projects. You have a "binder" in which you can organise the various bits that make up your work, and when it's all finished you "compile" it into its finished product, whether that's a short document or a full-length novel. There are all manner of different handy tools in there, including a corkboard where you can rearrange virtual notecards, the facility to store all your research within the single Scrivener project file and the ability to split your work up however you see fit for later recompilation. It looks pretty good, and I'm going to make use of it. I'm thinking that if I actually organise myself to start writing something, I might be able to finish it. Whether or not that will be sooner rather than later will depend on my own enthusiasm for the project and whether or not I'm able to maintain momentum. I made a start today with a couple of character sketches, so we'll see where I go from there. No, you're not getting a sneak peek yet.

And now I'm running out of things to say again. I have broken my freewriting streak by replying to someone on Twitter, which was an error on my part. I shouldn't leave Twitter open while writing. It is distracting. Everyone knows this. Perhaps I was thinking that it would provide me with inspiration for something to write. I guess it sort of has, now. You're probably wondering what I tweeted about. Well, it's all in the context, but I told Aubrey "Chupacaubrey" Norris that she is the "secret boss of PR". She was lamenting the fact that she wanted to be the Final Boss of something (Penny Arcade Report's Ben Kuchera had been referred to as the "Final Boss of Games Journalism" a few moments earlier) so I said that to be nice. Also she is awesome, and a fine example to the rest of the industry.

Anyway. I think that's enough for now. Sorry for the lame post (I'm not sorry at all) but it's very late, I'm tired, I just finished Quest for Glory II at last and now I want to go to bed. Maybe after I've sent all my Pocket Planes flights on their merry way.

Night night.

#oneaday Day 132: Sleep Tight

(Aside: "Sleep tight"? What the hell does that mean? For one, it implies you can somehow "sleep loose", which sounds suspiciously like bollocks to me. But I digress.)

Sleeping's a strange thing, really, isn't it? It's something natural and instinctive — so much so that it's pretty much impossible to explain to someone how to do it. I know I can't. I know that I can't even explain it to myself, and the more you think about trying to get to sleep, the less able you are to actually do it. "Trying to sleep" becomes "lying in a dark room with your eyes shut trying not to think about anything and failing".

Because that's impossible. You can't think about nothing. It's actually impossible. There is no way you can completely clear your mind of absolutely everything, because even if you're picturing darkness or a black wall or something, you're still picturing something, not nothing. And your consciousness of the fact that you're not clearing your mind, the fact that you're thinking of something, not nothing, that makes things worse.

It gets even worse when it's late and you know that you actually need to get to sleep otherwise the following day is going to be hellish, especially if you have to get up early. Not only do you have the pressure of trying to clear your mind and get to sleep (and inevitably failing) but you also end up opening your eyes every so often just to check how much time you're wasting when you could spend it sleeping.

Then you realise your phone's by your bed, so you figure a quick round of Bejeweled Blitz/couple of levels of Angry Birds/few weeks on Game Dev Story/couple of attempts at Tiny Wings/an episode of Cause of Death is just what you need to make you drop off. And so you play for a bit, and your eyes get heavy, but then you figure "what if someone's said something interesting or exciting on Twitter?" so you check that, then look at your emails, then possibly send an email or two to people you've been meaning to email for ages but never remember to in the daytime. By now, your brain is full of words and jumping birds and Special Agent Natara Williams and so there's no hope of you getting to sleep any time soon, so you go and get yourself a drink and/or a sandwich and/or a jammy dodger and then repeat the whole process over and over again.

I envy those people who can just keel over in pretty much any context and start happily snoring away. Clearly I need to sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber approximately three miles away from my phone and any other electronic equipment.

#oneaday, Day 344: Bullshit Filters

One of the biggest challenges in creative writing is overcoming your own personal bullshit filters—those parts of your brain that point out what you're writing is complete worthless nonsense and garbage that no-one in their right mind would ever want to read.

My own tolerance for nonsense is pretty high, as my enjoyment of JRPGs and love of Bayonetta will attest. But even when I'm writing creative stuff myself, I end up picturing some variant on Comic Book Guy reading what I've written and saying "BUT THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!" I guess I have bullshit filters by proxy, as if I were writing stuff purely for myself, it could make as little sense as I please.

One simple way to overcome your own bullshit filters (whether or not they're proxies like mine), though, is to watch some movies or read some books. When you see how much nonsense other people—published people who actually get paid for their bullshit—put out, you'll feel a lot better.

Let's take Tron: Legacy for a moment, which I went to see the other night. This is a movie built almost entirely on nonsensical premises. Why are the programs in the computer personified as humans? Why do they behave in a human way? Why do they need vehicles? And given that the main distinguishing feature of one group in the movie is that they act "more human", what, in fact, is the difference between them and those who are already acting pretty human? How does a virtual projection of an aircraft stall at altitude in a virtual environment which presumably has no air? THAT WOULD NEVER HA—

Stop. Tron: Legacy isn't a bad movie despite the fact that all of the above issues are clearly nonsensical plot holes which spectacularly fail to be resolved by the end of the movie. I enjoyed it very much and intend going to see it again. In fact, Tron: Legacy is a movie which actually benefits from you specifically not trying to read too much into it. The reason the programs act human? Because it's relatable. The reason they drive vehicles? So there can be awesome action sequences. The reason a virtual aircraft stalls at altitude? Because it's exciting. Nothing more than that.

So it is when you're writing. Not everything has to be laced with hidden meanings, metaphors and commentary on the human condition. In fact, some of the best "hidden meanings" come about completely unintentionally, as an unconscious communication on the part of the author, an unconscious expression of something deep-seated in their mind that comes out in the things that they are writing. A window onto their soul, if you will.

Of course, some people can transcend that kind of writing and deliberately do clever things. But then they probably get labelled as "pretentious" and don't get appreciated in their own lifetime. And everyone wants to be appreciated in their own lifetime, right?

So, the next time you're writing something, take care that it makes sense, sure. But if you want to write something which initially appears to be "stupid", think about the rest of what you're writing too. Does it make sense in context, however "unrealistic" it might be when compared to reality? If so, then there absolutely is no reason that the Blood Sausage of Agamemnon can't turn into a semi truck at the push of a button when combined with the Amulet of Lindor under a full moon.

And if you still feel what you're writing is ridiculous, go watch Tron: Legacy.

#oneaday, Day 178: Communal Blogging

Each sentence in this entry will be written by a different person.

And then they all had massive rump steak.

Fucking gaga!!! Silly mirror ball! Why does she look like glitter barbie threw up on her and then took a crap for good measure??!!

And then it got out of the flower pot and it ran away.

But then, the matron said, it was doomed to failure!

Whathchu call me mutha fucka!!!

Ultimately the result is group sex but with monkeys from longleat

Didn't umderstand tight jeans double Ds make the boys go WHOOP WHOOP

WHY DO I KEEP SEEING CARTOON CHARACTERS

WHY SO SERIOUS?!?!!

We are dancing, oh yes indeed. Riverside, motherfucker.

Le chien mange le sauce de pomme pour protege le neuve desin

Heeeeeeeeeee deeeee managgggggaaaaaaaaaaaa immmmeaaaaaa say, nanannaaaaaawaeeeeeeeede. The circle of life.

Oh hell no!

This is going terribly badly, but it pretty much sums up how tonight is going with the drink flowing freely like paradise city if the drink flowed freely instead of the girls being pretty.

Nothing is real, everything is permitted.

Something smells like the straining from the devils jock strap. Ecuador!

Dance music is terrible, but somehow becomes awesome when you're drunk…. Ecuador!!

Its here I loop the loop
Insanely Whoop de whoop
Cuz my rhymes are fly
Make you touch the sky
Yeah……….bitch

WTF??? I don't get it! Make it stop?! Fizzy make feel nice!

Fizzygood! I think that's a good place to stop. This doesn't make sense. A hearty thank you to Elana, Kalam, me, Richard, Graham and possibly some other people I've forgotten. Thank you for participating in this hideous experiment. Good night!

#oneaday, Day 165: I'll Job You In A Minute

The astute amongst you will have noticed from the frequency of my tweeting, Facebook updating and the fact I had time to draw several cack-handed Paintbrush portraits of a few friends today that I still am not in possession of gainful employment. The supply teaching seems to have dried up, too—and yes, I am chasing them up before anyone even thinks about nagging me about it—so there's not a lot to do each day except do the rounds on the Internet desperately trying to see if there are any jobs worth doing.

Job hunting, as I've said before, is a distressing, depressing experience. Jump onto a jobseekers' website and you're confronted with the possibility of "OMG THOUSANDZ OF JOBZ 2 CHOOSE FROM!!" and only then do you realise you have absolutely no idea what sector you're qualified to work in. A huge list of job types appear in front of you, and not one of them seems to quite fit with what you want to do. Am I interested in "Printing and Publishing"? Or "Media"? Or "New Media"? Or "Web Content"? Or "Information Technology"? God knows.

So you tick all the boxes. Then you get told you're only allowed to tick three at a time. So you pick the three that you think are most relevant and tell it to search. It soon becomes apparent why you're only allowed to tick three boxes. That's because ticking just three boxes gives you roughly thirty-two thousand listings to look through, the vast majority of which are miscategorised. That's not a word, according to the spellchecker, but I'm officially coining it here and now.

I digress. The fact is that there's a ton of jobs listed that have nothing to do with the categories they're listed in. How is an "IT Sales Executive" anything to do with the "Travel and Tourism" sector? Answer: it's not. Bored or underhanded recruiters simply inserted the job listing into EVERY category to ensure it gets seen, thereby making the whole category selection process in the search procedure utterly meaningless.

"Use the keyword search!" you may say. But the truth is, I have no idea what keywords to search for. I look for "writer" and all manner of unrelated nonsense comes up. I look for "journalist" and all the PR jobs which say "this post is not suitable for a journalist" come up. I look for "KILL ME NOW" and a job in Asda comes up. I may have made that last one up.

It occurred to me today that a lot of the work I've done recently—paid and otherwise—has come about via social networking. My current regular gig writing news for Kombo came about through a friend who worked on the side – the fine and hairy Mr Jeff Grubb – and my past work on promotional materials for Good Old Games also came about via responses to tweets.

Are we getting to the stage where the traditional job advertisement is becoming meaningless? It's entirely possible. They're already filled with nonsensical jargon that is presumably designed to sort out the people who can do the job from the people who can't. But in these days of easy connections between people online, that personal connection is much more important, it seems.

So with that in mind, you have over 165 days of material with which you can get to know me pretty well. Who wants to hire me?

No? All right. Here's a video of a cat.

#oneaday, Day 120: Education, Edducaytion, Eddyukayshun

Schools are "failing our children". So say various government watchdogs, quangos, hypocrites, rhinoceroses and jabberwockies. But aforementioned bodies (some of which I may have made up a little bit) don't take into account that it's their fault in the first place that schools are "failing our children". Not to mention the fact that there's also a lot of blame to lay at the feet of both the parents and the kids themselves before you start pointing the Finger of Justice™ at the hard-working teachers and other school staff who are trying very much to make the best of a bad lot.

I quit being a full-time teacher. Twice, in fact. I'm not going to make that mistake a third time. Fool me once and all that. Currently, to pay the bills, I am enjoying the life of a supply teacher. This means that I can choose whether or not to sleep in every morning or maybe be woken at the crack of dawn by a phone call saying some festering scumhole school in the very armpit of Southampton is short of a teacher for today and could I possibly go along with a chair, a whip and a net and see if I can do anything with them? There are two very simple equations to bear in mind here.

1. sb = 0(£) + 100(j) where sb is "staying in bed", £ is money and j is joy.

2. nsbapcdtvfssvas = muchos(£) – 5000(j) where nsbapcdtvfssvas is "not staying in bed, answering phone at crack of dawn, visiting festering scumhole school in very armpit of Southampton", £ is money and j is joy.

So while equation 1 leads to a gain in joy, it does not lead to a gain in money. Indirectly, in fact, it tends to lead to a decrease in money, as staying at home often leads to wandering out in search of coffee. However, while equation 2 leads to an increase in money it leads to a substantial hit in the joy department. And no, that's not a euphemism for your dangly parts.

But I digress in talk of made-up maths. I was about to tell you what is so very wrong with education. Particularly primary-level education, as that's where I've been spending most of my time recently. So let's do another list, shall we? Good. I know how you like lists, particularly if they're illustrated.

1. Overcomplicating everything.

I remember when I was at primary school. A tick meant "correct" and a cross meant "wrong". If you were lucky, you got a brief comment, like "Good." or "Lazy work." depending on whether you'd done good or lazy work.

In the school I was working in today, they had a "marking key" on the wall. A squiggly line meant "look at this". A straight line with a "sp" meant "spelling mistake". A circled letter meant "you should have used a capital letter". A circled empty space meant "you have missed some punctuation". A caret meant "you've missed a word out". And then and only then did the key reveal that, yes, tick means "correct" and cross (or dot, now) means "wrong".

Seriously? These are eight- and nine-year olds we're dealing with here. Some of them can barely read, and you expect them to decipher that babble? Not only that, but then every book is expected to have a comment in there which, at the very least, says something inane like "Well done! You have shown me you are able to use connectives to join sentences together!" or "Congratulations! You successfully subtracted two things using the written method!" or "Super! You were able to recreate the entire Nutcracker Suite through the medium of rectal flatulence!"

Which brings us nicely on to…

2. Using unnecessarily high-level language.

Remember: eight- and nine-year olds. Do they really need to know terminology like "learning objective" and "success criteria"? I am yet to meet a child who actually knows why they write down the learning objective and success criteria other than "it's the stuff we copy at the start of the work, innit". The sole purpose for it is so when the inspectors come to play that the teachers can point proudly at the various learning objectives and say "Look! They've done this!".

Bollocks.

3. Making unnecessary work.

Oh silly me. I made a mistake. The children shouldn't be copying the learning objective and success criteria. The teacher should have prepared them all in advance, trimmed them to size and stuck them in the children's books for them. Bear in mind at this point that a typical class has about 30 kids in it, each with at least five books (literacy, numeracy, "topic", science, art) and each day typically has four or five different things going on throughout the course of it. So hey, with all that to plan, what's a little extra cutting and sticking into ninety different books?

4. Dumb-ass theories that make no sense.

There are too many of these to count. Phonics is one. Anything involving behaviour management is another. Take a quick detour and go and watch this, including the stupid interactive part. The first shot of the class and the obnoxious children in it is the most accurate depiction of what it's actually like to be in a classroom. However, the supposed "strategies" for dealing with the class are complete bollocks. Giving the teen who thinks talking about fucking his classmate's mother a "positive note" if he sits down and gets on with his work? Don't make me laugh.

5. Pressure, pressure, pressure!

I was talking to someone the other day – I think it may have been Rhiarti – and talking about how the imagination of young people is stifled these days. UPDATE: Yes, it was definitely Rhiarti, right here, in fact. So yes – the imagination of young people is stifled by the fact that they're expected to learn all these million-and-one different techniques which there's no way in hell are going to stay in their tiny heads. I remember "writing" at primary school being all about writing stories. Now, they're expected to write Reports, Explanation Texts, Instruction Texts, Recounts, Narratives and all manner of other things (all inevitably capitalised, too) rather than, you know, just being able to sit down and write to express themselves. Even when they do get the rare opportunity to write a story, it's inevitably got such a long list of completely arbitrary success criteria for them to fulfil that any semblance of creativity has been battered out of them by the end of their school career. Which is sad.

All this is the tip of the iceberg. Don't even get me started on the "three stage lesson", on "thinking skills", "thinking hats", Bloom's Taxonomy, starters, plenaries and all manner of other shit.

So, in summary, a lot needs to change. But unfortunately, all of the things above, which are quite obviously and clearly dumb and stupid, are the sorts of things which men in suits with clipboards think "get results" and "show progress". Well hooray for progress. Somehow we managed without it for a long time. Why can't we go back to those days, for the kids' sake and for the sake of the poor, anxious teachers constantly on the verge of nervous breakdowns?

#oneaday, Day 113: Mini-Memes and Offensive GIFs (NSFW)

I have no idea who Bernard Pivot is. The only thing I think of when I hear the word "Pivot" is the array of moderately-to-extremely offensive stickman animations entitled Battle of the Sexes that my friend Sam and I produced using the piece of software of the same name (Pivot, not Battle of the Sexes) while we were back in university, a selection of which you can see at the end of this blog post. That was a very long sentence, wasn't it? Never mind.

Anyway, the reason I bring up Bernard Pivot is Daniel Lipscombe's recent post of the same name. Apparently something called Inside the Actors Studio always featured a questionnaire by Mr Pivot that everyone featured would answer. I'm sure Daniel can explain it much better than I can, so go and read his post for more details. I'm just going to answer the questions in a memerrific manner.

Yes, I'm feeling lazy. But I did go and dig into archive.org to go and find those GIF files, previously thought to be lost. I'm good to you, I am. So allow me a little laziness, particularly as I had a job interview today and had to spend seventy-five fucking pounds getting the train to Brighton (65 miles). Ripoff!

I appear to be procrastinating against answering these questions. It's not deliberate. Here goes:

What is your favorite word?
"Ostensibly". I'm not sure it's actually my "favourite", but I certainly use it a hell of a lot. I guess you could say that ostensibly my favourite word is "ostensibly". Maybe. But that would make you a prat.
What is your least favorite word?
"Accountability". Nothing good ever comes of someone using that word. See also: "leverage", "monetize", "transparency", when not used the context of discussing a physical object that is not opaque.
What turns you on?
Porn! Errm, you didn't mean it like that, did you? An in-depth and deeply, deeply nerdy conversation would be the next best thing.
What turns you off?
Staff meetings in hot, stuffy rooms. I can't help my eyes getting heavy. I've never actually fallen asleep in one but I've come perilously close lots of times. Also, spiders.
What sound or noise do you love?
That bubbly sound when you put a straw in a glass of drink and blow.
What sound or noise do you hate?
Bits of polystyrene scraping together.
What is your favorite curse word?
COCK! Said with aplomb.
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
I am currently profession-less, technically, unless you count supply teaching. In which case, video game journalism, which I'm sort of doing already anyway. For something completely different, I wouldn't mind doing something involving driving.
What profession would you not like to do?
Anything that involves sick, poo or blood.
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
"Well done for surviving My many challenges that I have thrown in your way! You win my Grand Prize."

Do have a go at answering these questions in the comments below because I like comments and they make me feel loved and appreciated. While you wait, here are some offensive GIFs involving stickmen and women. I present Battle of the Sexes, a 2005 production of Angry Jedi and Rampant Goose. Click the pics to see the animations, since WordPress doesn't seem to like displaying inline animated GIFs, at least not in this theme.

Episode 1: First Meeting

Episode 2: Anyone for Tennis?

Episode 3: Man's Best Friend

Episode 4: Uneasy Alliance

Episode 5: Raging Horn

Episode 6: Supermale

Episode 7: Kiss and Make Up

Episode 8: Big Sister's Story

Episode 9: Happy Home

I'm sorry. 🙂

#oneaday, Day 87: Staying Up The Latest

I don't know why I like staying up late. Perhaps years of doing so have buggered up my body clock beyond all recognition. But I know for a fact that I can happily occupy myself until two, three in the morning without feeling any ill effects. Okay, sure, sometimes actually getting up the next morning is a traumatic experience, but for the most part there are few ill effects.

I've even pulled a couple of all-nighters in the past, but usually only when necessary. Okay, sometimes when I'm alone in the house and there's a really good game/film/DVD box set to get through. But mostly when it's necessary. The last one, I think, was before a trip over to Toronto to meet several members of The Squadron of Shame. We'd recorded a podcast shortly before our trip, so being chief edit dude, I took it on myself to get it done before the trip. And I did.

I think my favourite staying up late memory, though, is the time I was at university and received a text message from a friend at approaching 2AM.

"Are you awake?" it said.

"Yes," I replied.

"Good," came the message back. "Because we're downstairs. Want to come to the beach?"

I turned off my computer – I think I was playing Baldur's Gate II at the time (a game I am yet to finish, incidentally) – and headed downstairs. Sure enough, there was the car, ready to go. And we did indeed head to the beach.

Now, those of you who know Southampton will know that, despite being on the waterfront, there are no beaches. So "going to the beach" involves a not-inconsiderable drive through the New Forest, which gets rather dark at night-time. Still, we made it safely in the end, and found ourselves on a completely deserted beach after 2AM.

It was strangely eerie and beautiful at the same time. The night was cold but clear, so the moonlight lit up the beach quite nicely. It wasn't the nicest beach in the world – very few beaches in the UK are any more – but it was our private little hideaway for that short amount of time we spent there.

No-one had the guts to actually go for a swim, but a few among our number had a paddle before running out rather quickly due to the extreme coldness. Eventually, we tired of the dark beach and went home having not really achieved anything, save putting a memory in our minds that will last for a very long time.

There's a How I Met Your Mother episode called "Nothing Good Happens After 2AM". It is nonsense. Awesome things happen after 2AM.

#oneaday, Day 81: The Unspoken and NSFW Language of Gentlemen

[Warning: This post involves crudely-drawn pictures of dicks and the discussion thereof, and is thereby probably unsafe for work.]

There are two unspoken understandings between men. One of them is this:

[EDIT: Dear Channel 4. I'm trying to promote your material. Why not let me embed a video of one of the funniest scenes to ever be shown on television? Grrruuuuu.]

And the other, less safe for work one, is this:

I have no idea what it is with guys and dick drawing. But there's something universally understood by it. Perhaps this sketch wasn't far from the truth:

…though to be perfectly honest, I don't remember that lesson myself. Maybe it gets erased from your mind, like Men in Black.

I do remember, though, sitting next to a kid named Daniel in my first year at secondary school. It was a Humanities lesson and for some inexplicable reason we took it on ourselves to draw at least one cock on every single page of a textbook called "Discovering the Past". And we succeeded without being spotted. It was a triumphant moment for the pair of us, and one we never quite managed to recapture the magic of. The book just lent itself to obscene drawings. On one page, there was some sort of flask which Daniel thought was ideally suited for a bell-end to poke out of the end of. And for some inexplicable reason, he added a speech bubble reading "I SCREAM! I SCREAM!"

That image has stuck with me for many a year. I'm not quite sure what I should make of that. And you're probably not quite sure, either. I apologise.

Still, the fact is that doodling cocks on pieces of scrap paper is something that remains appealing to a large proportion of the male population. There are those who do it and admit to it, and there are those who do it and don't admit to it. If you speak to a man and he denies ever having drawn a crude todger on a bit of loose paper, he's probably lying. I personally consider it a sign of close friendship when you're able to not only hurl light-hearted obscenities at each other verbally, but visually too. Of course, there's absolutely no question of any real tallywhackers being whipped out – that would be, as the kids say, "a bit gay". But if you're with male friends, at a loose end – particularly when you've been drinking – and there's some loose paper around, just see what happens. I have numerous photographs of whiteboards we had in our house that will attest to this. No, I won't burn your eyes with those right now.

I should probably be faintly ashamed of my sex's predilection towards drawing its own genitalia. Knobs aren't, after all, the most photogenic things that there are. But in some ways, it's nice to recapture that inner child with a childish doodle of a dong.

I hereby apologise for the crudeness of the above post. But I have been drinking. And I needed something to write about. And since our drunken game of Munchkin tonight involved just as much drawing of obscenities on pieces of paper as it did actually playing the game, this seemed as good as anything.

Good night to you. *tips hat*