Old Hat

And so I sit here trying to think interesting thoughts, but the synapses refuse to spark. My hungry eyes comb the room for potential blog topics... there! Just outside of my peripheral vision.. a stray sock! I'll blog about socks! No.. that's rubbish.. the sort of thing a bad observational comic might wax trivial about on one of those 'An Audience With..' shows.. "Socks.. right.. we all wear them.. except when we're wearing sandals..right? Now...how come.. right.. we never have enough? They're always disappearing, like maybe they have a secret club, or are being taken by sock pixies or something? Am I right?" I'm not a fat and redundant Northern stand-up, I'm a skinny and insubstantial wannabe starving artist in Brighton.. I need to blog about something either hip.. or achingly pretentious..

Like, could I pull off wearing a beret?

I was given a beret as a gift by a former friend and house mate, it's genuinely French (both the hat and the person in question) and utterly beautiful, but tragically I've been too cowed by the opinions of others to wear it outside the house. But sod the opinions of others, sod them to bits, I could wear it ironically; the beret is such a potent signifier of artistic preciousness it would look like satire (or Sartre).

Berets are a throwback to an outmoded form of hipness, a bygone age of beatnik chic; dickheads still wear stupid hats, only now flat-caps and trilbys are the haute couture (incidentally, I recently met a drainpiped airhead in a Laines vintage shop who insisted on pronouncing that phrase as "horticulture"- I shit you not), but trilbys lack the irony of the beret, as well as the class.

Imagine how wacky I'd look in a beret! I'm keerrrazy I am!

Yup.. should have written about the socks...

Next time:

Bob blogs on the subject of his faded grey boxers.. how many holes is too many?

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Regeneration

OK, so I'm getting over my chronic head cold and as a result I'm less bored and so my blogs will inevitably become less interesting and more unfocussed and rambling. Today's entry is a sort of list of stuff which I've come to realise or have found interesting recently.

.Music

I finally bought and subsequently listened to the seminal Radiohead album OK Computer about 12 years after everyone else (including my own mother and presumably hermits who dwell in the rings of Saturn). And it's good. Not quite as good as everyone has been saying, but excessive hype always renders the superlative underwhelming. Previously I had lumped Radiohead with all those whiny, depressive bands I used to hear clogging up the airwaves on the Burger King radio while I pushed those frozen patties onto the grease-stained conveyor belt and through the hellish gates of that infernal broiler, bands like Snow Patrol and Coldplay, awful, awful wank. Now I know the truth; Snow Patrol and Coldplay are to Radiohead, what Chlamydia is to sex. An unpleasant derivative of the actual act itself. A smelly, painful discharge. I think further listening is probably in order to properly appreciate the album, but so far it's all good.

Additionally, Absence by the drone/shoegaze/hip hop group Dälek may be the best album of last decade. So get it. NOW.

.Emulators

Since fashion, politics and the economy are all hell-bent on emulating the eighties, I figured why not do the same with video games? I recently torrented MAME an arcade game emulation engine. It's ace, pressing 5 inserts 'coins' and although I'm only a short walk from Brighton Pier, it's brilliant to be able to congeal slowly in my own filth, while my room grows around me, blazing my way through arcade classics. I've also discovered perhaps the best game on the planet. Alien vs. Predator the arcade game, unlike the watered down PG-13 movies, this is balls to the wall horror and action, pure geek pandering. You can play as one of two different Predators- modelled after the original classic look and the pointier looking monster from the terrible Predator 2 (you know, the one where Danny Glover looks "too talented for this shit")- or Predator protagonist Dutch (who now inexplicably sports a MASSIVE GIANT ROBOT GUN ARM). The whole game is utter fan wankery.. you can pick up and use the famed M41A Pulse Rifle from Aliens and the Predator's throwing disc, there's even a boss fight against the Power Loader... I was doing OK until I came up against the sentry machine gun turrets from the (far superior) director's cut of Aliens at which point my head actually exploded from an overdose of illicit geek love like that man's in Scanners.

I've just realised that I've used the word 'wank' an inordinate amount of times in this blog, which is pretty telling. After all I haven't left my room for about 4 days..

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"Whooooa I'm afraid I can't do that Dave, dude"

And so the blogs continue with some regularity, much like a bowel movement or a tic..

And I'm still ill, in fact my blogging thus far has been rather like Louise and Tim Arthur's heartbreaking account of living with terminal cancer Shadow in Tiger Country but less ultimately life-affirming and with more puns (and hopefully a happier ending).

Anyway, today I'm blogging about irritating computer programs; first and foremost Google Chrome. It's more efficient to use than Firefox and certainly glossier, but there are a handful of things which really irritate me about it, the hipster Too Cool for School attitude for starters.

"Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed" for example, sounds less like a program experiencing an error and more like a hippie on hallucinogens who thinks he's a web browser having an out of body experience and describing it in the third person. And it's disconcerting.

Even more irritating is "Aw, Snap!" which wasn't even a phrase I had really heard until it popped up in the middle of a window when I was trying ineffectually to load the Guardian crossword. At first I thought it was a reference to the titular card game and had to resist the instinctual urge to slam the Queen of Diamonds down on the keyboard, but Urban Dictionary tells me it's a "disheartened response to a negative situation." Google Chrome is using a cultural lexicon I'm not even familiar with, and it's making me feel uncool.

Anyway, I don't like my computer talking to me in this fashion, it feels over-familiar and awkward. I want my computer to be an ice-cold processing machine with perfect logic circuits, I want it to say "Hello... Rob" in that weird disjointed way that Sci-fi computers do and not "hey dude"; I want HAL 9000 not Arthur Fonzarelli (incidentally, if Chrome is The Fonz then Internet Explorer is a stuffy science teacher who wears too-tight stone washed denim on his day off and listens to Michael Buble, I'm not sure what that makes Firefox.. maybe the weird kid in the corner who picks the scabs from his elbows and eats them?).

And Facebook is almost as bad. There's something distinctly creepy about a word like "Oops" being used in conjunction with "something went wrong" or "fatal error," it sounds like the fevered mutterings of a butter-fingered serial killer who just accidentally stabbed a prostitute in the wrong eye socket.

And on that note I'm off to spend my Valentine's Night playing retro video games on a Megadrive console emulator. So maybe my web browser is cooler than me after all.

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All the World's a stage..

..shame I had to be cast as the back end of a pantomime horse!

ROFL!!!!!1 etc.

Well they do say open with a joke (although this really depends on the context).

Seriously though, maybe it's just my high fever or the claustrophobia of not really having left my room for several days but I think I've just had an epiphany. What if human life is just a big soap opera being staged for lazy and stupid omnipotent beings? Gods who long ago stopped pulling the strings behind String theory and now apathetically pick at the fraying threads of the arm of the sofa? I know, incendiary stuff right? I'm confident that nobody has ever had this thought before.. that not one person in history has ever questioned the potentially facile nature of so-called empirical existence.. in fact, just to make sure, I'm going to do a google search..

Oh.

They have forums?

OK, I was being slightly facetious, but I'm bored and possibly deranged. I've never exactly been the outdoors type or particularly social but just 48 hours of convalescing in my room has pushed me to the very apex of histrionic mania. Perhaps as a direct result of this I've taken to watching videos of Glenn Beck freaking out about Liberal conspiracies on youtube. I think I prefer Glenn Beck to Bill O'Reilly (which is like favourably comparing one form of venereal STD to another). Admittedly Beck's mentalist rants are scarier, he accuses Barack Obama of racism and openly weeps on screen, but O'Reilly's bellowing condescension (oxymoronic or merely moronic?) makes me so incandescent with impotent rage that I have to punch the nearest inanimate object (which is usually something crucially important or with great sentimental value... like my crotch..hence the impotence).

Plus I find it bizarrely hilarious to play Dropout Boogie by Captain Beefheart over footage of Beck talking. Maybe I'll even make a youtube video of exactly that.

To plagiarise a quote from Withnail & I (well I am a student after all..); "I must be ill.."

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The Return

I just reactivated my blog and it's all the fault of my sinuses.

From behind a mountain of mucus-damp tissues and empty lemsip wrappers, I re-emerge, to begin my exodus from the discomfort of the material universe and all the pain relief medication that entails. Back to blogosphere! (or blogsphere, or blogdom, Blogsville USA or whatever trendy buzzword the mainstream press has used to label the online blogging community this week).

A cursory glance at my blogging history (or blogistory, or blegacy) indicates that my previous blogging entries have long since been taken down. This is a shame as I was hoping my witless ramblings would be archived for posterity, so cyborg kiddies decades from now could one day read those few screeds of irrelevant nonsense and be mildly amused. I would be a footnote on a page of the great iTome of blogging mediocrity (a large work.. with many volumes..).

Sadly not to be. I just don't think the Powers That Be were ready for my controversial opinions on the architecture of the Brighton pavilion, and the entry I wrote regarding pendulous ballbags in loose-fitting boxer shorts was just too hot for The Man to handle..

Luckily this also means I can repost many of the jokes or observations I've made in earlier entries since they are backed up on my computer.

Ahhhh self-plagiarism... it's good to be back..

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