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Wednesday 5th May
I'm going to break from the traditional spoutings of random violence and in-jokes for a minute and talk about politics for a moment. I feel it's time with the general election tomorrow to express my feelings.
See, this is one of the few times that the colonies have it easy. They have two parties to choose from, the Democrats and the Republicans. Neither of which name means very much, but they're very much the left and the right of political theory and so it's nice and easy to choose between them and you know where you stand.
The Democrats believe in free-speech, abortion rights, gun control, gay rights and so on; whereas the Republicans believe in the right to have loads of guns, pro-life, tax cuts and the patriot act. It's simple, the left or the right with very little middle ground. Or you can throw away your vote on an independent.
In this country it's not so simple. You have the Conservative party that did make England strong during the 80s as well as made most people unemployed, shut down the mines, sold off the rail network to private companies and made everybody so miserable that the name Thatcher is still as close to Hitler as you can get in this country. Then you have the Labour party who created NHS direct (a concept that may well have saved my life), knocked the Tories out of power, calmed down the Northern Ireland struggles and then sent us into a huge recession and allowed the banks to do what they feel like.
So you have reasons to hate both. It's on the issues that things get muddied, or to be precise, cloned. I have no idea where either party stand on anything. They both think the hospitals are failing, so will put more money in them. They both think that schools could do better, so will invest more money in education. They both think that we should have a strong military force, so will keep them strong, probably with more money. Nobody wants to say anything about tax. They both feel the needs of the homeless, the elderly, the sick, the home-owners, the unemployed, the scroungers. Neither wants to say much about immigration. Both had their hands slapped hard during the MPs expenses scandal.
So we have a two party system that I cannot tell would be any different if one were in power or the other. How frustrating is that? They've both had the job before and they've both royally screwed the country in various ways and they've both helped the country in other ways. If you were looking over their CVs they would both be marked with 'Years of experience but a bit prone being shit at times.'
Now a few weeks ago I would have left you with that, but since then I have been bombarded from many sides with various calls of action, all leading to the same premise. Spoil your ballot paper. Don't vote. Vote Loony Party. None of the Above.
As a mark of protest all it says to anyone is that you are angry. And yes, if a few hundred thousand people do that then it will be noted that a few hundred thousand people are angry, and so the government may decide to look into it. The point being that the government of the day will be decided by people who actually vote. In essence how much action do you think a Labour or Conservative party government will take to please those people who vehemently didn't vote for them, or anyone?
None at all would be my guess.
Once a new party is in power, they will be there for four or five years, and will not care a tinkers cuss about spoiled ballot papers until the next general election. You're not a swing voter or a marginal constituency, you're not affecting the ballot in any way at all. Protest, yes, I agree fully with what you're saying it, but protest properly. Marches, letter campaigns, demonstrations. If you want to protest, that is how you do it. Now is the time to vote and with your vote you can do some good.
Vote Liberal Democrat.
We, the people of this country have a two party system because that is what we have allowed ourselves. There is a third choice, and right now you can scare the cloned two parties into thinking about themselves by booting both of them out and allowing the new boy into the ring.
I am not a Liberal Democrat. I've never voted for them before and I don't know if I will vote for them again, but simply on the grounds that I remember the horror of the 80's and I've seen the rise and fall of the Labour party. I don't want either of them until they figure out what they stand for.
I don't know if the Lib Dems will do a good job. They've never done it before but I believe that once they get in they'll think hard about doing a good job so they have a chance of staying in power.
Give them a chance and tomorrow, if your distrust and dislike of Labour and Conservative is enough to not want either then give your vote to someone who has a chance of pushing them both aside for the first time.
Vote Liberal Democrat.
Sunday 16th May
I am dictating Ms on a system that is tortuous and to do it and it forking of murder the words that are saying marshalling all part of the Minister of drought we said that and it incomprehensible bodyguards done wrong and software that I have is not recognised by when does best and win golds be stuck
The control she is non-existent and it looks like Tam translating best to a Japanese to Russia and to German to Swahili dictionary. Will it work to murder. So lacking none wanted her to go back to just typing in what I'm saying to you. But for now that this one instance this is being brought to buy dictating soft collar.
Boys recognition is a complete horror of crap goals stock ball stop all stock computer. 20
I will eventually get something like this too would because this is such that it acquired from. Golfer now I am going to have to devote the past .
Monday 17th May
Every day, I find myself staring at the screen to see what I can write today, and more often than not after distracting myself with facebook and the cheeseburger network and sporcle I discover that I've still got a page that's as blank at the end of the day as it was at the start.
And it's not like I'm not trying, I've just lost all passion, and now looking at my finances I've burned away through most of what I started with and have nothing appreciable to show for it.
My problem being that although there's plenty to do, it's all for me. In 'The slipper and the rose' (I'm not surprised if you've not heard of it, though it is a good film) the fairy godmother tells Cinderella that if she's working for someone else then everything's fine, but wishing for herself never works. And I find myself in that situation. I want to progress with this but it's all for me and the motivating factor, other than going insane of lonliness is only money. I have no deadline because I have no publisher, no partners and no muse. It's all me, and that's enough to kill anyone. Ask anybody that's been in a room with me for more than a couple of hours at a time.
Sure, I've got a contract with RG magazine, but that only works if they have something they want me to write, which they currently dont. In fact, go out and buy issue 76, it's on the shelf right now. Page 34 has a lovely amusing piece about the Zombie Pirate LeChuck from Monkey Island 2 that I wrote, but you wouldn't know it because I'm not credited. Not on that page, not on the inside front cover and not even on the inner back cover where they list all contributors. They just plain forgot me.
Plus I'm writing for A8 dot com. Which is fine if it wasn't for the fact that last week they shut off all payments to writers because of a lack of sponsorship. And now, those of us that said we would stick by them are under even greater pressure to produce more articles because of other people dropping out. Did I mention this is for free?
I can't sell the VAGUE bible since there isn't the market for it and the QUAD book, including Starship Thingy and Bullet Dodgers looks like a no-go either since it would take forever to get going at this rate and who's going to buy that.
Leaving me with a novel or two to write. A novel, I should say, that has barely had a page added to it since September, possibly before that. Even though I spent a fair chunk of last weekend with a whiteboard working on plot, I haven't actually put much in the way of pen to paper all last week since I couldn't actually get the right words to stick since my brain has stopped trying to be creative.
So, cheery as it sounds, this leaves me broke, jobless, miserable, lonely and without clear drive or motivation or ability. I have no idea what I'm doing and no idea of how to achieve anything.
And this is a good day.
Tuesday 18th May
So, yesterday I was listening to a comedian I enjoy and she was going on again about legs. Now she mentioned legs a lot in her comedy, leading me to believe that she values legs above any other body parts when it comes to her jokes.
Which got me to thinking, what is the funniest body part? Would it be the eyeball, the arm, the legs, or maybe an internal organ like the spleen or the pancreas or the gall bladder? Is it even the humourous bone in the arm? It sounds a bit obvious, but is it true?
So I came upon an idea, which I could then put to friends of mine. If you were to take every body part and separate them and put them onto a sliding scale where would each body part come in reference to its comedic value in relation to any other.
It was at this point that I realized I had taken a slightly creepy turn, and that I was chopping up corpses in an effort to find that humourous content. This, I considered, might be going a touch too far..
Where would it end? Is there much further you can go with this? Am I going to start suddenly considering genocide? Is nothing taboo in my brain anymore? Or have I already crossed the line?
I suppose that I'll know more when I start performing this in front a live audience. See how many people keep their lunch.
Wednesday 19th May
I suppose I should explain Sundays post. I have been dabbling for a while with the idea of using voice recognition software. Unfortunately most voice recognition software packages cost a few hundred pounds. So I wasn't going to go out of my way to pick one up.
Then came last week, where I find myself taking more boxes from my dad's house. In one of these boxes was some old software I had ignored for a few years including the voice recognition package called ViaVoice 98 which run under windows 95. A bit old, but how much can voice recognition software change in that time?
Still, with high hopes, and not at all sense of foreboding I installed it on my current machine and got down to training it to recognise my voice. I went to the basic training, which included 100 lines of dialogue. I did the medium training, which included another 150 lines of dialogue. In fact, I did the entire training which was a grand total of 476 lines of dialogue.
It only took me two hours.
Then I told the machine to learn my voice, a process that would take approximately 2 to 3 hours. Luckily I watched for the first few minutes, because the system failed pretty much instantly. I pressed it again. And again. And again. And again.
Windows vista doesn't like ViaVoice '98.
After 2 hours I had to give up on the training. But strangely enough the programme would still work without being trained. So I ran it, leading me to dictate what you ended up reading on Sunday.
Not to be too deterred, I searched the web for free voice recognition software because there must be some out there. Something like the fifth link on Google was a link to a forum where one user had posted that dragon was much better than the free voice recognition software on windows vista. My windows already has a voice recognition system in it?
I nearly punched the wall.
So since then I've been trying to teach my machine properly in up to date software how to recognise my voice. It is slow and agonising process, but we'll get there in the end.
For example, I just dictated this entire post using this system. And some words didn't need to be corrected at all.
Thursday 20th May
I don't understand Twitter.
It's not blogging, it's not even commentary. I don't get it. It's not even a thought process, it's a short bubble of smug from someone who thinks their thoughts are worth listening to.
Now if you're announcing updates to something then I can see the point, with 'new picture/comic/weblog/something' up on my site, go look. But surely that's something you could do on your own website. Is it really that too difficult?
But no, there are thousands upon thousands of people feeding twitter with no more than their regular day-to-day activities. I go to the toilet myself. I eat food. I sleep. I do all these things myself, I don't need to know when somebody else is doing it. What possibly makes you think that I would want to know that?
It even affects people that I like and respect. They access it and share everything, thinking that people care, and they do!
WHY?
Let's take for example three people I actually respect and enjoy their work. Ben Croshaw (Yahtzee), Charlie Brooker and Stephen Fry and take a look at the world-shattering insights that they would like to tell the world.
Yahtzee -
"Story in local MX newspaper: OLD MAN LOSES LAST PIECE OF 5000 PIECE JIGSAW. Not so much a slow news day as a stationary one, I guess."
Yes.. and yet you then share it with us!
"Urgh, I think my beard has receded into my face"
So, you're sharing your freakish nature too.
"I would only ever cosplay as someone who dresses like a normal sane human being, rather than, say, a performance artist from space."
And you don't want to do cosplay either. Groovy. A great insight, thanks.
Charlie Brooker -
"Wonder if coalition govt will turn out like one of those TV crossovers where Magnum meets TJ Hooker, ie fun for 3mins then dull."
OK, one sensible philosophical thought. The entire rest of his twitter feed is updates as to his radio and tv shows and then 90% is replies to other people's twitter feeds. So for every bit you read that you understand, there's 20 that are gibberish to you. How useful.
Stephen Fry -
"England World Champions!!! How often do you get to type those words?"
Never, Stephen, Never. Though he's talking about cricket and surely cricket fans already know?
"Waiting outside Danny Baker's studio. About to do his Five Live radio show. Wish I had sliiiiiightly less of a head...."
I never want to know anything about Danny Baker. Ever. But thanks for letting me know I could listen to you, even if it involves hearing him too.
I love these people. I would pay good money to actually spend some time chatting and discussing life, the universe and everything with these people. But this isn't that sort of context, it's surely just a shouting contest with the sky.
I don't understand it, and if I ever decide to break down and use it, then please feel free to link to this very blog. Just to prove what a self obsessed freak I am.
I admit I have an ego. Sorry, wrote that wrong. I admit that I have an EGO, but still, isn't there a limit?
Friday 21st May
I have a polar bear in my freezer.
I didn't put him there, he just turned up one day, and every time I open the door he critiques my choice of frozen food. He'll always chide me for buying the cheap option and keep pushing at me to buy the branded stuff. It's not like the fish care who murders them, skins them, dices them and pops a tasty breadcrumb coating on the resulting mush is it?
I'll be honest, it's a little bit worrying. I would have thought that a polar bear, no matter how small might have better things to do than lurk about in my freezer. And it can't be good for him in there. There's no lights unless I leave the door open, all of the food is frozen and I can't imagine it being very well ventilated.
Poor feller, I've tried to get him to come out, but he keeps wanting to talk about either fish fingers or his feelings, neither of which I feel suitably qualified to handle.
I've even tried luring him out with a fresh fish, but that didn't work. He started asking me where it was from and whether it was farmed or not. Would you have guessed that polar bears had a healthy obsession with fish ecology? Well I suppose it makes sense.
Next I'll have to try teasing it out with a giant glass mint for it to stand on.
Thursday 27th May
I'm going away again.
Norway beckons again, as do the people who missed my presence from the trip last year. And yes, I made them say it. And then made them say it again. My ego really is that fragile.
Anyway, without the evil overlords of the working environment demanding my time and doling out vacation-days like they were precious gifts stolen from Mount Olympus, and without the money involved in having an actual wage. Well, without very much money at all, actually.
We're mixing it up a little this time. The festival in Bukkoy, the Viking festival I've told you about before, is only four days long. What we used to do is get the ferry from Newcastle to Haugesund which takes a day, or slightly less on the way back since it's downhill, and then a few days messing around after the show. We'd stay on the island, make Father Ted, Big Brother and Lost jokes. That, and the inevitable trip on the fast boat to Bergen.
Not long after my last trip they cancelled that ferry service. So now you have three choices.
You could NOT go. I did that last year, and was verily vilified for it.
You could fly over, but that would involve leaving behind all of your kit, making you stand like a tit in a field on an island in a frock and nothing to do while thousands of Norwegians ignore you studioiusly. With no tent.
You could drive. South through England, ferry across to Denmark, drive across the ridiculously long bridge to Sweden then northwest to Norway and across to the island. It's around about a thousand miles. And then a thousand miles back.
Guess what I'm doing.
Yes, in a week's time I shall be travelling through Scandinavia on my way to educate Norwegians in how to be a Viking, and I'll be doing it all the way with my new sidekick, the author. I won't name him here since I don't have his permission but all I'll say at this point is he is a noted author with a few books under his belt. And I'm privileged enough to go on a 2000mile road trip with him.
Of course I'll be tapping his brain as much as possible on the journey until such point as I gain his secret of super-brainy-ness or he gets so annoyed he slices off my head and drops me in a fjord.
Anything could happen.
Sadly though, I shan't be blogging every day while I'm over there for the simple reason that I won't be taking my laptop with me like I did to Greece. So I might leave you with some interesting links for you to chew over in the dark desolate gap I'll be leaving in your lives.
I shall however be giving you a full travelogue when I get back.
Assuming I'm not lying headless at the bottom of a fjord, that is.
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