Word out

My words go on a game box. I am now special. Or a publicity whore - there's some debate.

The truth is out

Comedy genius. At last, I can cast off this feeble human form and reveal my true, multi-limbed, mandible-bedecked form to you puny, puny earthlings

Related: I now have a column in which I have to be professionally evil. My parents would be so proud, if I hadn't thrown them into that abandoned well for having the nerve to oppose me.

Flat out

Well, getting the flat-renting ball rolling was surprisingly easy; all I had to do was hand over two hundred quid to a smarmy bloke in a suit, and in return some people in a call centre somewhere will decide whether I'm worthy of paying them money every month. Ah, sweet capitalism. Assuming that comes to pass, I'll be living with Chrissy, who went to university with Alec but has since become very chummy with Kieron and Jim. Gosh, it's like living in a connected future or something.

Next stop: tell current landlord and flatmates that I'm leaving, and find replacement tenant. Neither appeals.

Your opinions are wrong

A number of people who I respect and admire have announced they actually quite like The Matrix Reloaded. I no longer respect or admire these people.

This is the first time that I've ever felt so strongly about a film in the face of such widespread opposition - usually I take the unexciting but well-reasoned view that films have good points and bad points and the whole experience is monstrously subjective anyway so hey, why should I even pass judgement? Though very unexciting in painfully weak-willed liberal kind of way, it's a viewpoint that makes for a fairly non-confrontational post-cinema experience. In this case, though, I am genuinely mystified at how people might think it to be just so damn good. Are they drunk? Delusional? Have they been overcome by the dark powers of marketing? I can't begin to understand why people can spoon down such nauseating quantities of pretentious navel-gazing, even when it is seasoned with a defence-budget special effects bill. Yes, I know the same may be said of the original, but that was shorter and had fewer sneering European stereotypes in it.

I say this with confidence as I watched the original again last night, so I no longer hate the Wachowskis quite as much as previously. I fear the general sequel-despising problem may spring from the fact I produced a mighty work of scholarly analysis on the subject of The Matrix. Well, actually, it was only a dissertation, and a pretty lightweight one at that, but it had long words and footnotes and everything. I'd re-read it to prove my point, but I have a sneaking dread that it will turn out to be vague, inaccurate, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and quite horrifyingly pretentious. I suppose that would make it actually quite prescient, but that's hardly the right sort of motivation required to send me upstairs to start dredging throught the varied strata of junk I hauled back from university, which in any case would probably open anew the vague idea that some barely-read textbooks and reams of sloppily-constructed attempts at analysis are not, in truth, in any way representative of three years spent well and wisely.

Bang on

From the yeti:

Today I was rummaging around in my spam-filter folder, and came across an email entitled "HERE ARE YOUR GANGBANG PICTURES!!!". But when I opened the email it turned out to be some complete stranger's gangbang pictures instead (!!). Oh boy, what an embarrassing mix up. Anyway, if you recently got my gangbang pictures by mistake, drop me a line so can get this all sorted out. Thanks.

This is by way of being the cheapest, laziest way of waxing funny.

A meme moment

Everything is ace, apparently.

Reload

Well, I've no doubt I'm not the first person to say this (I've been avoiding the reviews) but The Matrix Reloaded is rubbish. Two-and-a-half hours of the filmmakers disappearing up their own arses. If they'd had an even vaguely competent editor they could have excised the excesses of the monstrously tedious and overlong scenes - the dancing one, or the incredibly useless waffling off-the-shelf French baddie being particular low points - and made things both more entertaining and more enigmatic. One of the geeky attractions of the first film was the huge number of cultural references dotted around the place, but half the attraction was their being alluded to rather being made the subject of a really quite tedious five-minute monologue. The "councillor" scenes had a suspiciously strong whiff of The Phantom Menace about them (although I'll concede this is probably unavoidable) and at least three characters could have been ditched without any consequence at all.

Even the fight scenes were too long, for God's sake.

In conclusion: unimpressed. In absolute abstraction it might be a vaguely OK sci-fi ninja flick, but compared to the precision of the first on it's just terrible.

I work in technology, I do

From those nice people at NTK....

Readers with long memories may recall Carl Sagan getting
into a similar tizzy about an internal Apple project that
shared his name - until he threatened to sue. Apple's coders
renamed the project's title to "Butthead Astronomer", which
strangely failed to mollify him.

Tee hee. Since I'm referencing them, I'll also point to Bill Thompson's musings on the nature of the blog, which appear to my hungover state to be much more incisive than the similarly-themed comment by Andrew Orlowski over on The Register. I'm troubled by the possibility that this may be indicative of an ongoing assimilation, but The Register does seem to be drifting into conspiracy-theory territory quite a bit these days.

Errata

Oh yes... seeing as Grill has posted for the first time in quite a while, I shall start mentioning names here (something I've initially avoided, but I thought, well, sod it) and see if he ever notices it. Can't tell him outright, see, as that would ruin the thrill of the chase. Oh, and in the interests of character defamation, he's a complete pussy in the passenger seat as well. I mean, yelling like that - they're both as bad as each other. Hail Richard and Beccy for maintaining a clear head.

Use your powers

X-Men 2, then. S'alright. I can't decide whether the highest compliment I can pay it was that Alec wasn't reduced to a gibbering, catatonic wreck (which I nevertheless got to witness first-hand thanks to his frankly over-the-top reaction to my driving) or whether it actually has merit as film. I'm leaning towards the latter, really - there were some nice ideas, lots of explosions, the acting was over-the-top but hey, they're mutants. With that sort of thing informing the film it's a marvel (ahem) that they made it through without descending into self-parody.

Sod it, this isn't entertaining. I'm going to go away and write something really dull, stop listening to this music, and then come back when there's some wit and sparkle going on. For a witty and entertaining read, why not instead try these folks? Currently on hiatus, but they'll be back and there's invariably something worth seeing.

Look upon my works

Has anything interesting ever been committed to PowerPoint? I suspect that even if someone was attempting to pass on the secret of immortality, the simple act of putting it on a crude, clip-art strewn series of slides would be enough to render any viewers catatonic. Perhaps this is how spies communicate, or something. Ahem.

You had to be there

Well, I find the closing line funny. It's an all-caps vaguely literary chatroom geek thing.

From the often-entertaining bash
Xapz: war soon
Xapz: Maybe tomorrow
Xapz: We've pulled out ambassadors
m0swald: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/03/04/iraq.usa.shirt.reut/index.html
Sh0rty: :\
Sh0rty: stupid americans :|
Sh0rty: canada > all
m0swald: my giant american pee pee would rip your canadian-wang-trained females apart!
Sh0rty: :o
m0swald: I'm american, therefore my wang is gigantic. at least, that's what the media tells me
m0swald: not to mention, I'm TEXAN, so it must be doubly huge
m0swald: I assume it's true, too. because every woman I've shown it to has giggled in terror!
m0swald: IN TERROR

Oh yeah: more work. Hoo boy howdy, more work.

Oh the humanity

Dan: You must remember that as an Oxford Graduate and a Man United fan I am universally loathed without being in any way understood. Well, apart from most ways.

Well written and more entertaining

Boy howdy, am I ever in trouble with freelance work. Not yet, as evidenced by the couple of hours I've just spent perusing websites of varying degrees of perversion instead of actually working, but I will be, oh, tomorrow. Work commences in a minute, but first:

Personality. There's a thing. A highly dangerous thing to my mind, but then of course absence of personality is also dangerous and, more importantly, dull. Personality can be dull, of course, but at least there's some effort going on there and eventually like personalities will be found with which the dullness may interact with. This knowledge is of little use or inspiration when confronted with dull personalities, but it's helpful to keep it in mind.

Anyway. I shouldn't have broken this up by inspecting some internet-based displays of personality, which has not only prompted gaping holes in my argument but also directed me to some entirely hideous personalities, the like of which I hope never to meet unarmed or in front of witnesses.

Anyway: Goddam personalities.

Until I started this job, my irrational habits were confined to fairly conventional stuff like "driving too fast", "drinking too much", and "collecting very cheap but largely useless motor vehicles I have neither the time, money or inclination to do anything with". You know - standard pecadilloes that anyone suffers from, things that have an amazingly high chance of bringing pain, suffering and despair but you nevertheless take on anyway, because you are stupid and lazy. Well, that's my excuse, although this may well be because I lack the intelligence or the energy to investigate further.

Since I've started this job, I've cut down on motor vehicles but the void has been more than filled by drinking too much, which leaves no space at all for the latest sordid compulsion: freelance work. Despite that fact that I lack the time and, far more importantly, the facilities to do it people persist in offering me work and I always - always - say yes despite the fact that I already have a packed schedule of drinking, floor-waxing, cheetah-polishing and God knows what else to do. Thus hours of hair-pulling tension as I sail past the deadline to the polite but razor-edged emails of the commissioner, followed by a faint but inescapable nausea that floods my very being some five minutes after I've finally handed it in as it occurs to me that fuck, I bet that was really rubbish, I mean I've had to really rush it. I must be doing something right as they do keep coming back, but the last one was a biggie and I really do think I screwed it up good and proper. I'm now sat here awaiting the frenzied fury - for this is far, far too important to be merely funny if I've got it wrong - thinking "shit, maybe I should actually spend a bit more time and money on this sort of thing". Except I won't, such is my conviction that I've killed off the source and I shouldn't spend money on it.

Still, at least it should free up some drinking time.

One of my less savoury habits (which are legion, by the way) is perusing random weblogs. Crass voyeurism aside, this is bad because I take a perverse delight in those that are manifestly the work of fools, because it makes me feel better about myself - I can indulge my desire of omniscience . Although, come to think about it, I suppose that's just another flavour of voyeuristic thought - it seems that one of the major attractions in that creeping cancer of popular thought that is "reality" TV is the "my God, this man/woman/indeterminate is so stupid". Anyway, I digress. I should point out that I delight in those that are the work of talented people as well, but because admiration is invariably tempered by envy it somehow lacks the compulsion of looking at those of lesser mortals, the sort of thing where ludicrously offensive yet massively touchy teenage goths hold forth about why they can't understand people stare at them all the time. Livejournal is a particularly rich seam of this sort of stuff, should you be a conisseur - just click on the Random button on their homepage.

That said, quite often even the most appalling tripe will have some genuine, hearfelt emotion or tragedy behind it, which makes the whole thing if not tolerable, then explicable, and I feel guilty about having intruded on their sadness despite the fact that by throwing it up on the bloody Internet they're inviting censure, derision, and ton after ton of mass-mailed spam. However, every so often I come across something that is so ghoulishly dreadful that I can't help but return to it, like the site of some particularly horrific accident (not that I carry out repeat visits, but that's ooh-look-slow-down-there's-some-blood response is something I've yet to see any human overcome).

Thus it was that I happened upon the blog of someone who, apparently, wants to be a journalist. Or a screenwriter. Nothing wrong with that, certainly, particularly given that I have partially-realised leanings towards both these activities and I'm painfully aware that I'm not, in fact, that good at them. Nor was it particularly misspelt or grammatically inaccurate, thus lending itself the sort of sledgahammer irony meted out to three-year-old "Proffesional Web Design Site!!" by such folk as Something Awful and Portal Of Evil. Dictionary wise it's A-OK. No, the problem I have is that the guy in question is just frighteningly talentless, and he combines this with such a bright-eyed and thoroughly distressing policy of total disclosure it's almost painful to read. I mean, he can string a sentence together very well, but the subject matter is horrific and there's just no knowledge underlying the exercise at all. It's appalling. But compelling. And what's worse, he's amazingly keen and very dedicated, so its almost a certainty he will be writing for money at some point. There is no justice on this earth.

(PS: Should you, dear reader, if you exist at all outside of my fond perceptions, wonder why there's no link, it's because I'm just not unpleasant enough to tie the person to the drubbing I've just given them. Alright, I'm a coward. You'd better send people over here to read this and go "My God, what a dick, etc.)

This isn't intended as a followup to the last post. I just felt like expressing my sentiments about this, and it's a bit too odd for a group email, you know?

Thus:
Sell poison through use of asinine advertising strategies.

God, but I hate advertising. Advertising and all those who dwell within it. And as for alcohol, well, don't get me started. Again.

About last night

Alcohol is a thoroughly terrible drug. Not merely in the sense that it rots your liver, destroys your brain cells, makes you emotionally unstable and strips away your carefully-cultivated humanity to leave you, invariably, a much less pleasant person - these are all valid points as to the nature of it's evil, although from the personality point of view it's very much a case of subjective opinion. Not that I become some kind of crazed and offensive loon when I'm drunk - at least, I don't think I do. But therein lies the big problem for me: I can't remember things. I've only the faintest recollection of occasional detail - and that I'm none too sure about, it's very much a case of shapes in the smoke. I wasn't even all that drunk, not by my far-reaching standards. But I was in a good, gregarious social gathering with some intelligent, witty and stimulating people last night, and now I'm sat here, blinking at the monitor with my slightly itchy eyes, very concious of the substantial amount of alcohol still swilling through my much-polluted bloodstream, trying to recall what the hell it was that was so interesting about the whole affair. It may be there wasn't anything; a lot of drunken buffoons gabbing on about nonsensical topics - but I don't know, and it annoys the shit out of me.

It is with the heartfelt dedication of the hungover that I declare that I'm not going to get drunk for, like, ages. And it is with the gloomy self-loathing tone of the inner consciousness that I mutter, sotto voce, that this dedication will only last until this evening. And then I'll fancy a pint. Bugger it.