Michael Sheard died yesterday. He was Mr Bronson on Grange Hill. He was also Hitler in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He was also Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back (the guy that gets choked by Darth Vader). I'll remember him as the drunk in the bowtie shouting for more whisky! The singer who wasn't happy until everybody was up and joining in. I didn't get to know him as well as I would have liked, and we definately didn't talk as much as we should have done, but I consider him a friend, and because of such, I'll miss him.

New month. Vote please. I saw the ranking get up to 44th this morning. I'd like to see it again, or better. please?

I dragged my sorry carcass into work again this morning. I have no objection to the work deal, per se, but it's the actual activity of dragging myself out of bed in the just-after-dawn hours and driving to work that grates. I know that there are a fair few people in the world that despise their jobs. I've even heard a few conversations that escalate in a Monty-Python 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch style as to who's job is worse. And yet day after day, month after month the roads are clogged, the air gets polluted and people strap on a shirt and tie and join the rat race.

I get not much more than 4 weeks holiday allocation a year, which normally gets wasted on silly things like shopping and sleep. I know some people get less than that, and some (teachers and so on) get a little more. But me, oyu and the guy over there all get pretty much the same deal. To do otherwise you'd have to have a special talent or inherit money, or be unemployed (which brings it's own brand of fun). However, there is a man who seemingly takes this figure and pisses on it from a great height, and this morning I decided to do some comparative research.

Mr Bush has an office job. By all rights a fairly important one and I would think it would be fairly well paid. Yet over the past four and a bit years he's spent over 500 days at his three main getaways. That's not counting the occasional trips abroad to little needy places around the world, like Russia or England. He's spent more time at his ranch in Texas than Mr Reagan did at his overall (335 days), and Mr Bush has got another 3 and a half years to go before he's done setting the new record. In fact, since Mr Bush took the job on, he's spent over 40% of his time out of his office!

So comparatively, that's over two working years off! Or to put it another way, over four months out of every year, there's nobody sat by his important desk, looking at his important papers, answering his important phone calls or even using his important fingerpaints. I'd love 4 months off (rounded down). I could get so much done. My settee would take on a whole new life and smells. I'd be able to sort my CDs and socks alphabetically. I could even find new and exciting reasons for not starting my great masterpeice book. Hey, if I was being paid for it I could even go travelling to all those places I didn't know I could be bored by and never wanted to see.

I went to Washington once. I found it to be one of the most dull and lifeless sinkholes on the face of the planet. God only knows what it looks like nowadays. Are there tumbleweeds floating down Pennsylvania Avenue? Does the clock tower toll it's lonely chime to itself? I hope to god nobody strolls through without an escape plan and some rescue flares.

I need a holiday.

A quick tale for geeks

I was fixing the commentary subroutine last night, due to a bug where a carriage return was not replaced, increasing the figurative number of lines on each comment, but destroying the rest of the commentary. So I needed to replace the carriage return in the comment with a [br] so that it would all end up on the one line in my flat-file. After many hours worth of playing with the string replacement tools in php i had the perfect lines of code to insert into my datafile function and yet no matter what i tried it worketh not. the same code going through two functions with the same text would always produce different answers, which blew my mind for another hour. I even rewrote the second function so that the answer would always be 'fish' no matter what was keyed in and yet the answer was always wrong. the function module was online, the test module was online, they both referenced each other properly but still it wouldn't work, no matter how much i shouted.

Silly me, I forgot to update the function call in the rebounce module when the form submits. I felt ashamed.

A quick one for you.

A while ago myself and some friends were travelling up the country. For lunch we decided to stop at a 'Little Chef'. I have no particular pride or shame in this, they serve recognisable food and they have seats. One of our number was a Vegan, and nothing we were going to say or do was going to change that anytime soon, and that was that, but being vegan she needed to know pretty much what was in the food she was eating.

"Can I take your order..?"
"Erm, yes, quick question for you. What's in the Veggie-Burger?"
"The Veggie-Burger?"
"Yes, the Veggie-Burger. I need to know what's in it."
"Oh, ok. Well let me just go and find out for you from the kitchen."
She goes.
She comes back.
"Vegetables."

I love this planet

I spent half an hour trying to get my printer to work yesterday until I figured out that it hadn't been turned off in about 3 years. Computer bits like to sleep too.

I also spent 2 hours e-mailing people about this and that and stuff to do with life, the universe and roleplaying. Add onto that an hour or so tweaking the website and then another couple of hours with some artwork for the comics.

Yup, gotta admit that this is the second week without any comic, even though Eddie and Miko are now back from France. Thing is, on the plus side I've got a shitload of new pictures I was cutting out and colouring in (in photoshop), but my fucking camera's gone missing again. It's no use having all of the props for a fragfest tournament if you don't have the setting to play it on, and there's only so many times I can use that section of carlisle castle wall before somebody notices.

So the comic comes when the comic comes, I had a schedule of three a week, and it's been pretty good up to now, but with not a great deal of feedback or response, I'm settling on something a little easier for myself while i get a batch done, then you can have them. If you've got a problem with that, you should come right out and say it.

Other than that, come back tomorrow, i've got something i wanna say about the kids in the hall.

New on Site

• The LINKS page has had some tweaking doing to it, especially the Webcomics.
• The new roleplay GALLERY. Other people's pictures featuring classic rpg humour. Only 1 so far, that will change though.
• A review of AMBER, a Diceless Roleplaying game by Roger Zelazny, written by Peter King as featured on our new Credits page.
• An all new easter egg... hidden somewhere...
• And not forgetting that the UNI-VAGUE, the student roleplay soc at Manchester Metropolitan University have now got their own site.

Oh yes, and don't forget that today is "Talk Like A Pirate Day"

A while ago, I wrote a little peice about obscure references to books and the secret collective knowledge of them in a blog entry here. But since them I've been seeing and then watching for the opposite phenomenon. Items, lines, quotes and ideas that have permeated into the common conscience of a large chunk of humanity, but without a decent explanation as to how.

I'll give you an example, hopefully you'll get the idea. "I CRUSHA YOUR HEAD" with the action of holding fingers to the eye and pinching them closed over whoever's head you're squinting at. I've seen this done a few times recently and I cannot believe that everybody I've seen knows where it comes from or would recognise it if you mentioned it to them. I know it, because I was there and saw it. It's from a canadian sketch programme called The Kids In The Hall from the late 80's and had some fantastic bits, not just Mr CRUSHAYOURHEAD but the office trappers were also great and loads more.

What I'm getting at is that some phrases and actions take on a life of their own effectively dropping their origins like a teenager ignoring the existance of their own parent chaperoning a school disco. "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" is an old cybernet line, and if you've been on the net for a while I'd be surprised if you'd not heard it... but yet most people that quote it wouldn't be able to tell you it's from a game called ZERO WING, they just love the line. And it doesn't just stop there...

The fact that BIG BROTHER and ROOM 101 come from George Orwell's book 1984 is fairly common knowledge, but you'd no longer have that association in your brain when talking about either of them, and then there's phrases which obviously mean something, but the specific origin seems lost, "Thats GOTTA hurt" and "I've fallen and I can't get up" must have come from somewhere but the origin is irrellevant now.

Finally, there's the sort that I love best, those that have a life of their own, but acknowledge their roots, like calling Mother once a week or planning the trip to Jamaica or Sweden. "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS" is always a favourite, and I'll leave it to you to work out where it's from and why, but in case you're still lost, I'll give you this phrase that has stuck with me from that classic film of office politics, Toy Story - "You're a sad, strange little man, and I pity you." and I think we can all learn from them.

Kilroy was here.

I'm sorry if you've tried to access the comments section, for they are currently closed. I have had to shut them down for now until I can implement a better security system than the one I had in up until last night.

Simply put, to create a comment, I needed to create a small space on the server where users would be able to change the contents of that folder, although I niavely assumed that it would only be through the use of the functions I had written.

While looking through the stats last night I discovered hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of shite and videos in that space that I had created for feedback. To say I was unimpressed would be an understatement, and so I shut it down. I'm now researching security. And acid baths.

To whoever it was that decided to use my serverspace as a private lockup, I want you to know that your files have been binned, the door is locked and I hope that you and your family die of leprosy and nob-rot while I piss on your corpse.

To my loyal readers, I apologise and I'll see what can be done

Imagine a toddler. Imagine a toddler doing it's first poo in it's potty. Imagine the pride of the toddler being so great that they have to grab handfuls of it and come show you. Imagine this toddler then wandering through the house searching for you while calling your name and smearing over everything it can find with the specific intention of giving you a hug. Imagine you're holding a dinner party for a few close friends at the time.

Can you imagine that? Well that's my review of TittyBangBang, BBC Three's new cutting edge comedy sketch programme. It's got that big lass from The Smoking Room and Mine all Mine in it, and that's about the closest that I can get to saying anything nice about it.

It glorifies in the putrid and takes great pride in being as tasteless as possible. Think what you like, but I loved Bottom and other such things, but a sketch about making people smell the seepings from dodgy breast enlargement surgery isn't funny, it's just puerile shit.

I think the problem comes in that they're trying new things, and ignoring blatently what has worked in the past, namely the stuff people find funnny. They probably also had one or two good ideas which looked good on paper, and you can spot those a mile off, and they're still not funny.

Take for example the Police Coroner and her assistant. They're both randy necrophiliacs and start fighting over which one gets to hump the rigor-mortis afflicted corpse. A nice enough idea, but all you get is a quick bit of shoving and then a fully clothed woman bouncing on a dummy in the most unrealistic sex scene since Basildon started a dirty sex channel.

The whole thing is a shocking pile of crap, worse than The Catherine Tate Show and needs to be dropped now. Plus they need to burn any tapes with it on and most of the cast and crew, and especially the writers.

Next time it's on, instead of watching it, take a shit yourself, it'll be more enjoyable and you'll have acheived something by the end.

Some might say I've not been updating stuff on the site as often as I should, and to me, that's really cool. It means that people are actually coming and reading what I've got to say, and if you feel there's something that's lacking, drop me a quick e-mail, it sometimes works and you may get what you're after.

But you've got to accept that it's my site, and I've got a lot to get on with both on and off the site. Any update schedules are of my own accord and any stylings are my choice. I'll quite happily listen to constructive criticism but I reserve the right to ignore any abuse about how shit you think something is, in fact I reserve the right to mock your family and fill your house with buckets of donkey droppings.

Please don't forget that I'm not asking any money for any of this, there is no Paypal Donation button anywhere on this site yet, and may never be. I'm doing this for my enjoyment just as much as yours though appreciation for it is always welcome.

If you're after a thought or two though, I can provide you with a list of what I do try and update and work on when inspiration hits. Oh yes, and don't forget writers block, boredom and brainfry all have a hand in delaying most stuff on site.

Stuff that needs looking after on site...

• Blog stuff, like what you're reading now
• The comic, of which after a short break restarts on wednesday with a new storyline.
• George Foreman Invents of which my imagination started struggling with a while back. I shall return to it and try and get it running again.
• Ask Cthulhu is fairly new, and quite fun.
• THE LIST. I am brooking no arguments or commentary about the list. I like it and so do others. I don't care if you don't.
• THE ROLEPLAY SECTION. The original reason for the site is where I'm focussing at the minute. I've even got a few other writers involved and it's starting to build once more.
• Occasional random pages, functions and securities, including an all new interactive roleplayer quiz.

Stuff I've got going on outside of the site...

• WORK. Four letter word, you might know it.
• I'm sorting out the office christmas party, three events with over eighty people at each.
• STUDENT VAGUE has a new batch of students in and so I'll be roleplaying with them on a tuesday night.
• I've got a new night school course on Advanced Web Design for the year. We'll see what I can improve on as the year goes on.
• The Vikings Historical Reinactment. And not forgetting next years celebrations of 940 years since the Battle of Hastings
• Writing a new card game called Six Ninja Monkeys of Dooom. More on that later.
• Writing RPG articles for IRM.
• Writing stage play(s), film(s) and short stories.
• City of Heroes. (Union Server. Character = Doc Silver)
• And lets not forget my video gaming, films, very occasional tv, freinds, home improvements, cinema and finding time to just do nothing at all.
• Sleeping. oh, and preparations for next year's Bed Appreciation Day.

So in a nutshell, that's my life as it stands. I hope you enjoy the bits you see. I hope that I can amuse you for a breif period. And if not, I'm not keeping you here, the doors thataway.

Take care, I'll see you around