Alright, so a week on. What has happened?
1) Guitar Hero 3
Well, still haven't conquered Hard, but have finished off all songs on Easy at 100% and am galloping through Medium on 100%, so not despairing yet.
2) Twitter-izing self
Gone very badly and have committed Twitter suicide. Sick of watching other people's lives passing before my bored eyes. Maybe will return to the fold when I have something to Tweet about.
3) Searching for free stuff in London
The weather's been nicer, so parks have been of more use, but other wise an EPIC FAIL.
4) Mentally cleaning
Still in the theoretical sphere, I fear. Although I did take out the recycling, which has to count for something, somewhere.
5) Watching television to remind self of outside world
Sadly, Assumpta died on Ballykissangel on Friday (Monkey was touchingly concerned for the distraught Father Peter, and when the bereaved priest wandered distractedly onto the bridge after his lady love's demise, Monkey shrieked in an extraordinarily anguished tone: "Shit, is he going to jump?!"). It was very sad. Meanwhile (as predicted) I have given into the allure of Cash in the Attic. Can anyone explain why it is so damn difficult to turn that thing off halfway through? Even if I try to walk away I only make it to the kettle before I find myself dying to know whether that candlestick made the £100 needed to pay for the contributor's scooter, or whatever. Hours and hours and hours of television watching, although strangely the outside world seems to be slipping away from me rather than retaining any sort of clarity.
New:
Enjoying fame karma
James Corden is depressed, Mathew Horne is exhausted. Considering their relentless PR offensive for their lamentable comedy and film efforts have left the entire nation both depressed and exhausted, I feel this is only fair.
Spider Solitaire
Either this has got harder since I was at university, or I have got stupider. I spent almost two hours playing it yesterday afternoon, and only won one game (although I think another was pointlessly thrown away by a premature movement of a 7 of Spades, but once I realised the drastic consequences of it I couldn’t be bothered to go back and change it). My Win Percentage is the grand total of 8%. To be fair, I haven’t played much for three years but in the four years I squandered cheerfully at university I played it daily and I’m sure it was easier to win the bloody thing then. Or have I lost my Spider Solitaire-orientated brain cells? Is it another Windows Vista plot to create insecurity about your intelligence (like the conspiracy to hide Select All so intricately that it takes a full 25 minutes to find the first time)? I also don’t much care for the weird slurpy noise it makes nowadays when you drag a card. When I eventually won, it was a pyrrhic victory as I realised it was dark outside, dinnertime and I had achieved NOTHING. Apart from some CGI fireworks going off on my laptop and perhaps a measly addition to my pathetic record against what is, after all, a reasonably basic Artificial Intelligence. What will happen when the actual robots come? How massively talented at Spider Solitaire will they be? Combine that knowledge with the superheroic intelligence (some may say sabotage) displayed by Super Mario Kart when it notes you are about to win a 150cc circuit, and they will be unstoppable.
Pointless nostalgia
Alright, so I am now incapable of playing Spider Solitaire. That’s okay, it wasn’t a skill I’d put on my CV anyway. Now I’ve won one I can hopefully move on and accept it is just another door closing between the husk of a human being I now am and the gambolling innocent who used to lope around quiet quads in dappled summery afternoon sunlight, which is how I now picture I was at university. At that time, I never believed anyone when they informed me those would be the best days of my life. “Jesus,” I’d say, looking around me. “There must be something better than this.” Well, you would think, wouldn’t you? But it’s not true. Immensely talented people talking to you about immensely interesting things for just four hours a week in an immensely beautiful place surrounded by other immensely young and energetic people is, as it turns out, quite the highlight. I want to back to my university town and thump every navel-gazing student there, the self-centred bastards.
Along with the expiry of my Young Person’s Railcard and the infrequency these days of being ID’d when buying alcohol the latter two factors are perhaps just signs of my creeping age and not an electronic conspiracy after all. Like the disbelief I maintain that a DJ on Capital FM is actually called The Baseman, making me sound extraordinarily like my beloved mother as I exclaim: "He's a grown man called what?".
Perhaps an upside of this advancing age is that I no longer have the self-confidence/arrogance/flagrant idiocy to believe that I can, on some basic level, work every piece of equipment I come across by turning it off, unplugging it, smacking it or just playing randomly in the Menu screen. Oh no, those days are well gone, and disasters resulting thereof have been chalked up to experience. Our DVD player’s warp core has been damaged, or similar, and I’m waiting for Monkey to come home so he can magic it better. In the meantime I’m typing this, drinking tea and taking perverse pleasure in listening to the travel news. Mwahaha no tube travel for me, oh no. (No money, you see.)
If I hear “Broken Strings” by James Morrison and Nelly Furtado on the radio one more time, either me or the Freeview box is going out the window. Argh! Shut! Up!
Showing posts with label Unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unemployment. Show all posts
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Watching the Wheels
The rain is falling in London town, the wind is blowing, the air is cold and all of this is perfect pathetic fallacy for my state of mind.
The television industry is in a death spiral, I am told. Certainly it seems likely that there will be no work winging its way to me now until the commissioning editors get their 59p budgets at the start of April to make the three new programmes which will be made in 2009.
At the start of last week, I was very positive, mainly because I was on holiday in Slovenia and it was lovely (albeit bloody freezing), and partly because last week was my first week of freedom from my previous series. But I have now begun to feel a sneaking despair. The cause for this despair is best illustrated by my top 5 activities for this week:
1) Guitar Hero 3
Hours of playing this wretched game and I still can't do a song on Hard. To add to frustration, I can't get 100% on Knights of Cydonia on Easy. None of this makes sense if you haven't experienced the fury of shaking the guitar like a fiend to get star power, only to drop a note with a soul-shattering clang.
2) Twitter-izing self by force: looking to Fry and Webb for example
Have attempted to get into Twitter, which I'm still of the opinion that it is largely a waste of time (this could be because I'm not doing or thinking anything which rises above the level of Crashingly Dull). I still find myself pondering "why?" Do I care that Stephen Fry has just gone to bed in Bali? Well, no, not really. Of course, my own Twittering would be: "Watching Ballykissangel on ITV3 - James Nesbitt is the evil husband who steals Assumpta from Father Peter!" I didn't actually tweet that, but I swear to God it was the most interesting thing I learned all week. Compared to that, Stephen Fry's adventures are far more interesting, as was Robert Webb's entertainingly outraged reaction to Zoe Williams' article in the Guardian. Zoe Williams has been in a death match with Lucy Mangan for years on the paper vying for position of most vacuous and soporific columnist, though Zoe has the edge on unfocused rage and uncomprehensible leaps of logic. This particular column, notable for having no real point, as well as making no real points in pursuit of whatever original aim she lost along the way, seemed to have the thesis that David Mitchell is in some way destroying Radio 4 but hosting a moderately entertaining quiz "The Unbelievable Truth" which doesn't have a rigid enough scoring system to satisfy Ms Williams. The fact any quiz on Radio 4 apart from Brain of Britain that has any scoring system at all surprised me. Her argument, such as it was, spun off into total obscurity because part of Mitchell's offence was That Mitchell and Webb Sound was quite funny. Anyway, Robert Webb really went for her and it was not only justified but amusing. I have no idea if he regrets it now, but even if he doesn't I felt it was a salient warning to myself, a Twitter naif and a gobby cow, that discretion is even more key on Twitter than on Facebook. I've had a couple of near-disasters on Facebook that would go nuclear on Twitter. Not! That! I! Have! Anything! To! Say!
3) Searching for free stuff in London, failing
Being unemployed in bad weather is no fun. Parks are a no go. Art galleries and museums are only entertaining for so long. My equally unemployed friend and I spent hours sitting in Cafe Nero at Seven Dials with one coffee each. You cannot sit anywhere inside where you can talk for free. Apart from maybe a station. Or your flat, though frankly I am going to start going crazy if I spend much longer then. It's got to the point I go to my mother's house just in order to stare at a different four walls.
4) Mentally cleaning
I was almost bored enough to clean the flat. Almost, but not quite. Monkey seems to have taken the cue to go back to a "Mad Men"-esque frame of mind where he suddenly no longer seems to feel the need to do basic things like picking up pasta he's dropped on the floor. "You're here all day," grumps my knight in shining armour when this is pointed out. It's annoying, because he's right.
5) Watching television to remind self of outside world
Thank God for ITV3 (Ballykissangel, Heartbeat), ITV4 (The Professionals, The Sweeney). But most worryingly, the fact Lewis and Primeval have come back is amongst the most exciting things to have happened to me all week. Why am I such a fan of ITV suddenly? I have no answers. But it has got to the point that I'm considering a career in the police force. Looks kind of interesting. More interesting than lying on the sofa thinking about jobs I don't have anyway.
The television industry is in a death spiral, I am told. Certainly it seems likely that there will be no work winging its way to me now until the commissioning editors get their 59p budgets at the start of April to make the three new programmes which will be made in 2009.
At the start of last week, I was very positive, mainly because I was on holiday in Slovenia and it was lovely (albeit bloody freezing), and partly because last week was my first week of freedom from my previous series. But I have now begun to feel a sneaking despair. The cause for this despair is best illustrated by my top 5 activities for this week:
1) Guitar Hero 3
Hours of playing this wretched game and I still can't do a song on Hard. To add to frustration, I can't get 100% on Knights of Cydonia on Easy. None of this makes sense if you haven't experienced the fury of shaking the guitar like a fiend to get star power, only to drop a note with a soul-shattering clang.
2) Twitter-izing self by force: looking to Fry and Webb for example
Have attempted to get into Twitter, which I'm still of the opinion that it is largely a waste of time (this could be because I'm not doing or thinking anything which rises above the level of Crashingly Dull). I still find myself pondering "why?" Do I care that Stephen Fry has just gone to bed in Bali? Well, no, not really. Of course, my own Twittering would be: "Watching Ballykissangel on ITV3 - James Nesbitt is the evil husband who steals Assumpta from Father Peter!" I didn't actually tweet that, but I swear to God it was the most interesting thing I learned all week. Compared to that, Stephen Fry's adventures are far more interesting, as was Robert Webb's entertainingly outraged reaction to Zoe Williams' article in the Guardian. Zoe Williams has been in a death match with Lucy Mangan for years on the paper vying for position of most vacuous and soporific columnist, though Zoe has the edge on unfocused rage and uncomprehensible leaps of logic. This particular column, notable for having no real point, as well as making no real points in pursuit of whatever original aim she lost along the way, seemed to have the thesis that David Mitchell is in some way destroying Radio 4 but hosting a moderately entertaining quiz "The Unbelievable Truth" which doesn't have a rigid enough scoring system to satisfy Ms Williams. The fact any quiz on Radio 4 apart from Brain of Britain that has any scoring system at all surprised me. Her argument, such as it was, spun off into total obscurity because part of Mitchell's offence was That Mitchell and Webb Sound was quite funny. Anyway, Robert Webb really went for her and it was not only justified but amusing. I have no idea if he regrets it now, but even if he doesn't I felt it was a salient warning to myself, a Twitter naif and a gobby cow, that discretion is even more key on Twitter than on Facebook. I've had a couple of near-disasters on Facebook that would go nuclear on Twitter. Not! That! I! Have! Anything! To! Say!
3) Searching for free stuff in London, failing
Being unemployed in bad weather is no fun. Parks are a no go. Art galleries and museums are only entertaining for so long. My equally unemployed friend and I spent hours sitting in Cafe Nero at Seven Dials with one coffee each. You cannot sit anywhere inside where you can talk for free. Apart from maybe a station. Or your flat, though frankly I am going to start going crazy if I spend much longer then. It's got to the point I go to my mother's house just in order to stare at a different four walls.
4) Mentally cleaning
I was almost bored enough to clean the flat. Almost, but not quite. Monkey seems to have taken the cue to go back to a "Mad Men"-esque frame of mind where he suddenly no longer seems to feel the need to do basic things like picking up pasta he's dropped on the floor. "You're here all day," grumps my knight in shining armour when this is pointed out. It's annoying, because he's right.
5) Watching television to remind self of outside world
Thank God for ITV3 (Ballykissangel, Heartbeat), ITV4 (The Professionals, The Sweeney). But most worryingly, the fact Lewis and Primeval have come back is amongst the most exciting things to have happened to me all week. Why am I such a fan of ITV suddenly? I have no answers. But it has got to the point that I'm considering a career in the police force. Looks kind of interesting. More interesting than lying on the sofa thinking about jobs I don't have anyway.
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