Re: 22/10/10

I take it back. Listening to 38 different cover versions of 'Last Christmas' in a row is a MUCH more pointless waste of time.

I don't even like the song. I just reached 7 and thought I was too far gone to quit now.

Reality Bites

When I started writing this blog, things came a lot more naturally to me than they do now. I don't know if its just the winter closing in or if I've had some sort of profound mental shift, but expressing things just feels a bit harder than it used to. In the beginning, I was keen to document all the little things that had made up the scenery along what I had dubbed the 'scenic route' that my life had taken – now, things in my life and my mind have taken up a much broader outlook, with real tangible rewards and consequences. I have no doubt its a much better place for me to be, but things overall do seem to have taken on a much duller pallet without the time to stop and admire the scenery. Maybe, to torture my metaphor further to the point where Amnesty International will have to step in, I've exited the beautiful if random forest of my scenic route and am now heading through the industrial estate portion of my journey?

I've always felt over the years that within my mind, I was stuck at the stage where I dropped out of school, and by extension, life. That the world had passed me by, and that my destiny and path were out of my own control, that I was merely sitting and waiting to react to whatever life had to throw at me next. Dreams of escaping my situation were always just that – far off dreams that relied on ifs, buts and a myriad clauses and conditions, 3 steps away that just needed a bit of luck to push me in the right direction before I could start to work towards them. Earlier in the year, I even managed to find one that would solve everything, transplant myself from all I am now virtually back in time with a simple change of scenery, and let me start over at 17 again while the real world waited on hold for me to take all the time I needed to find my feet.

I'm not 17 though. And regardless of what I've missed, and however extensive I might think the list is, the fact is that I've grown and learned lessons along the way from whatever other sources were available. They've not been conventional, and I'm aware that I'm in no way a typical 23 year old, but the fact remains that I've lived enough to see the world differently than I did then. And as nice as it would be to put my current, low-value 'wasted' life on hold while I venture off to reclaim everything that I've missed, the fact remains that while I was putting reality on hold, it would still change behind me.

So now, a different option has come up. One that I honestly never thought I'd see, but having presented itself I feel for the first time in my life has put the power of my own path back into my own hands. Instead of going back and trying to salvage anything... I can go forward. This isn't a dream or a fantasy, happening to some alternate version of me who can just manage to go out or who is untroubled by pain and fatigue, this is a genuine chance for me to find a place in the world, just the way that I am. It hurts to give up on that dream, but in exchange for something real and tangible, I'm sure that it will be worth it.

Heavens, an update?

2010 was a hell of a year to start documenting my life.

On the one hand, I don't think I've had a single year of my life up til now where things have changed as fundamentally as they have for me over the course of this year. On the other hand, with the sort of things dominating my thoughts that I don't feel like discussing in public, it's made maintaining this blog with musings on random giraffes and pineapples a lot harder.

After almost a full decade of watching life crawl by out my window, with things finally happening to me I've been caught off guard by the sheer pace of the changes. Whenever my future and my circumstances have been discussed before there's always been clauses attached – when you're better, maybe next year, if, but, maybe. This time around, everything has piled up so quickly in the here and now – after 'swimming' the channel as I alluded to before, I've suddenly caught sight of land and washed up ashore before I can even brush up on my conversational French in my head. I'm definitely not complaining about finally getting things done, it's just very different to what I've been used to.

It used to be, even up to a few weeks ago, that I had all these grand dreams of huge gestures that were going to shake the whole foundation of my world and change everything. After all, the slow evolution of life surely couldn't apply to me and my situation, in this dead end where I was drifting along towards nothingness, right? As it turns out, maybe its a testament to my own strength that I've finally forced through some sort of method of continuing down this scenic route without the need for all the upheaval my dreams and fantasies had always required. This time there's no conditions attached, no ifs, buts or maybes – my world is changing regardless, and all that I have to do is make my stand on where my place is going to be in it.

Out of literally ALL the ways in the universe I could have spent the last hour, I'm fairly sure that winding up my ex-girlfriend and biting my toenails was the single least productive I could have possibly chosen.

A comprehensive summary of what I've been up to this past week

When I Grow Up

Is there anything more depressing than logging on to MSN and seeing 0/67 contacts online? Stop having a real life, people, get on the internet and entertain me! So in the absence of either human contact or anything resembling adventures to share, I'll just have a moan about something instead. Today's topic poses the question... is the Pussycat Dolls' When I Grow Up the single worst song in the history of recorded music?

“Now I've got a confession / When I was young I wanted attention”

That's perfectly natural – its called the Terrible Twos. Most toddlers grow out of it. Its most certainly not endearing to persist through childhood, let alone into adulthood.

“I promised myself that I'd do anything / Anything at all for them to notice me”

Yes, you became strippers. Oh, sorry... burlesque dancers. You take your clothes off for money. This is not an achievement or something to be proud of.

“Now I ain’t complaining, we all wanna be famous / So go ahead and say what you wanna say”

Well since you gave me free reign, OK. You're talentless whores who can't sing whose entire careers are based around almost – but not quite – getting naked. And that's just for starters.

“You don't know what its like to be nameless / -”

Actually I'll just stop you there before we go through the entire song lyric by lyric. Are you seriously suggesting that the majority of your audience doesn't know what it's like to be not-famous? Are you trying to paint some sort of picture of a bleak, horrible world where everyone is famous except you and are asking for sympathy for that fact? I admit we seem to be well on our way with your X Factors and Big Brothers, but until everyone in the western hemisphere has had their 15 minutes (which should be around, ooh... 2016 or so) you seem to be using some sort of backwards moon logic here. Or maybe they're just 'before their time'. But if you were going to travel back in time to a simpler world, before the Oil Wars and before every man, woman and child had been on reality TV, would the song you submit for recording as your own really only be THIS piece of drivel? Surely there will be some pieces of artwork in the future worthy of bringing back with you and claiming as your own genius beyond “When I Grow Up”, or Simon Cowell's got a LOT more to answer for for his assault on our culture than previously thought. And don't even get me started on the finer points of my time travelling 'songwriter' theories – I have my suspicions about Freddie Mercury, for one, but that's another topic for an equally boring day.

"But be careful what you wish for cos you just might get it"

Yes, this is a popular trope throughout our recorded history, but how is it relevant to this scenario that you've laid out for us? You've failed to put forward any sort of downside to receiving the fame and attention that you've apparently craved since birth, so what's the moral of the story? If you want something badly enough to take your clothes off for money, then... you might just get attention after all? While as a straight male I am honour-bound to applaud this example, as a staunch feminist (stop snickering at the back, you!) I can see more than a few minor holes to pick in it. Which I just have.

So yes, in conclusion, a group of strippers attempting to become popstars have failed to add significantly to our musical culture, and have annoyed me in the process. Who could have foreseen that?

Mayday Parade did a pretty cool cover of it though, from one of the 'Punk Goes Pop' albums. It's worth checking out, I suppose.

But still. Grr!

Swimming the Channel

In a stunning piece of foresight, it seems that my prediction that time would pass regardless has come to fruition. Who could have seen that coming? While I might not be any closer to understanding the world, my efforts in surviving it have at least taken another step forward.

If I wanted an easy out to explain away my lack of updates, I could try to claim that for the first time, I've been actually living in the world instead of sitting back and describing it, but as neat as that might sound its not quite true. Things have been charging forward at a relentless pace, and while I seem to be doing a great job of at least keeping my head above water while the current sweeps me along, things are still proving hard to analyse and appreciate the scope of what they mean when I sit back to rest and reflect on them.

I might have mentioned it in an early post, but before I started this blog I was racing along at a rapid pace with my going out progress, chipping away minutes at a time before finally hitting a wall and getting slapped back down to reality when I over-stretched myself getting to the local garden centre. Up until then everything had seemed so easy and simple, but that just... knocked my confidence, reaffirmed what I'd tried to forget about how difficult getting to where I want to be would be. It was as far as I'd ever gone, the limits of what I could manage if I pushed myself and really suffered for it.

So on Tuesday, in a half-asleep daze, I wandered back to the milestone, sat around on it, and went for a little sightseeing walk of the surrounding countryside. The barrier's been shattered, and I just... don't quite know how to analyse it. There should be trumpets, flower petals falling from the sky, instead its just another thing that I was supposed to do, so I let myself get swept along by the current towards it. I haven't swum the channel, I've just washed up on the beach at Calais after falling off the dock at Dover. I survived without drowning, but next? The Atlantic Ocean awaits?

I'm no closer to understanding what it, or anything else outwith my control around me means, but for just now I've placed my trust in others that doing what I'm 'supposed to do' is what will help me in the end. I can't really see where this road leads or how it eventually connects to my final destination, but I'm trusting my guides for now. By the rest of the world's scale of progress, its been a monumental week.

Just Dance: part 2

So let me get this straight. You've got a woman who's dazed and confused to the point where she admittedly "(I love this record baby but I) can't see straight any more", is disoriented ("whats the name of this club?"), her shirt is inside out and she seems to be missing her keys and phone?

She's been mugged! Telling her to 'just dance' is the worst advice you could possibly give, get her to a police station or at least an A&E!

Thinking

I've been meaning to update for the past week, but I've found it a bit hard to. I've said before that I didn't want to turn this into a diary and share every last detail of my life, but over the last week my thoughts have been a bit dominated by something personal that I didn't really think was appropriate to broadcast on here. I'm alright and there's nothing that anyone needs to worry about, I've just had an awful lot to get my head around and think about that's making it a bit hard to idly chat about anything else.

It's still been a 'positive' progressive week regardless though, another OT session, another outing, all went well and I continue to move forwards, whether I can fully comprehend it or not. Next week I start my new magic wonder pills, so if they work then I might just be able to measure my progress by more normal standards than my current skewed scale.

And I remain very thankful for my background noise, I don't know how I would have got through this week if I didn't have something I could sink my hours into while I try to process things.

Time passes

It's often given as a measure of 'how far I've come' whenever something goes wrong and I manage to get through it. Back at the start of the year, one of the real turning points for me was after so much else had gone wrong, we got snowed in with no power for a few days, and it even surprised myself just how much I rose to the challenge. I always say whenever things are hard to get through that time just goes by regardless – whether you're happy and looking forward to it or dreading every last second, the time will just tick by and the world will keep turning around you, so long as you just keep breathing in and out all things will eventually pass.

It was the release of Civilization V on Friday, one of the games that I mentioned in my pre-order post a while back; it was the one that I had the free map for via Game. The disc came on Thursday, but since this is the digital age of bonus exclusive, digital and encrypted content, the game wouldn't even let me install it until midnight on launch day. Midnight GMT, that is. Why they felt the need to display that when we're not actually in GMT for British Summer Time, I don't know, but either way, it was only an extra hour to wait.

An hour later and we had stage 2 of the problem, with the game refusing to run. Eventually after several reinstalls and driver updates, I gave up at 3am, and got up just 5 hours later when my mind refused to switch off of the problem solving mode it had drifted into in my semi-sleep. Fortunately though I had managed to stumble across the solution, so at long last I've got the background noise back that I've been bemoaning the lack of over the past few weeks. Really, its been a lifesaver.

The problems rapidly shifted to the foreground though, since an outing was needed to get a parcel posted, only already a week late. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I was only actually able to get it posted at last because I could use the padded envelope the game came in, so one thing rolled nicely into another on that count.

Things were... bad, though. Hopefully for the last time, since this week I should be starting some new pills to help eliminate that, but still. The outing itself went perfectly and I got my achievement, will hopefully make a friend's day tomorrow with post and I've made another one of the baby steps towards normality that everyone seems to think is so valuable. What's stuck with me though, instead of the 'good' parts, is the way that I felt before it, the sense of impending doom that took so much to conquer that was attached to something so utterly mundane as driving for 2 minutes to post a letter.

I've laid all the foundations so that hopefully, just by getting by and breathing in and out, the wheels have been set in motion to drag me along forward to the place I want to eventually go. It's all I can do to just keep at it, knowing that the time will be there regardless of whether I am. Sometimes, when it comes to posting parcels or solving computer errors, things work out. And sometimes, for reasons that we can't influence as time marches on regardless, they don't.

Onwards and upwards

I received a very... helpful email this morning. It was from play.com, responding to my third complaint (submitted 6 days ago) and finally passing on my code for my free horse. If you had been paying attention, you may have noticed that my last entry said a similar thing. It would appear that that one was in fact the ORIGINAL email, promised to be sent within 72 hours, finally arriving after 23 days, and this one was just them finally getting back to me after complaining about it repeatedly. Needless to say, I'm not exactly impressed by my first time shopping experience with them, and I don't think I'll be going back. But then... Gran Turismo 5... they DO have a nice pair of very shiny black cars...

I got another package in the mail today, one of my games arriving a day early! And unlike my experience with other retailers, I've got a nice email sitting in my inbox already promising my lovely map of the Americas, all ready to install the second I've got the game set up. But then, that leads me to my next problem, and my next reason for grumping – the bloody game won't even install itself until midnight and the official launch date. I'd accepted that I wouldn't get to play it until then due to the fancy high-tech copy protection, but not even able to INSTALL it? Meaning that at midnight, I can finally put the disc in the drive... and spend the next 2 hours getting it configured and patched, and faced with the choice of leaving it til morning or pulling an all nighter. Considering that the last couple of nights my mind's seen fit to keep me awake til after 5 anyway, the latter option might just be more appealing...

I've still been technically 'continuing my progress' towards my grand dreams and schemes, and even today I could say that I've made another big step towards making it all real. But I don't know, maybe its just the winter drawing in and depression taking a bit more of a hold on me, but it all feels just that extra bit further away. In the early stages its all about the purity of the dream and focus on the changes that achieving it would bring, but the longer I have to dwell on it the more holes get picked in the practicalities and the further away it all seems to be. I'm pretty sure I've done everything right in setting it all in motion, now just like everything else I have to wait for that little seed to take hold and grow before I can get to the eating the metaphorical fruit. When you're dreaming of home-grown apple pie though, you don't tend to consider how much dirt you need to get under your fingernails to get there.

The horse(man) cometh

And lo, on the 23rd day the heavens did part, and David did receive unto himself his long-missing steed. And he did nameth him Steve, and there was much rejoicing.

P is for...

It would seem that my limit is 20 days to wait for an email about a missing free horse. Today makes 3 full weeks and two emailed complaints, so yesterday I had finally had enough of waiting for it to 'sort itself out' and decided to take matters into my own hands, and actually call the play.com customer services number instead of waiting for them to get back to me.

I had been pre-warned about their call centre being based in the Philippines, and while the lovely girl on the end of the phone spoke excellent English, it was apparent that she was having a few minor problems understanding my Scottish accent. The problems arose when she was trying to confirm my address, and we got to the postcode...

After listing the first letter as F, she promptly read S for sierra back to me. I had to think quickly on my feet, and in fairness did a decent enough job fishing out “Freddie” to confirm it. The problem now was that I had many more letters to go, and my lack of confidence at dealing with phone calls was being shaken further by being put on the spot and being tested on my knowledge of police callsigns from The Bill. Sensing my floundering, this was the moment that my mum decided to 'helpfully' step in, to help fill out the rest of the code with... sierra for S. Thanks for that! Clearly my wild arm and eyebrow flailing successfully communicated that she was not helping, so she quietened down, leaving me alone to desperately plough the darkest recesses of my mind to find a K for Kilo, and a P for...

…

PIE!

I don't think I'm going to be allowed to live that one down. In my defence, it's not easy to be put on the spot like that, especially with an audience! Were I looking to glean any minute positives from it I could claim that being able to both make the phone call and deal with the scenario taking a turn for the unexpected is further proof of my progress, but for some reason I suspect any attempts to bring that up might be shouted down in a fit of giggles in favour of the very minor faux pas.

And by this point its barely even worth mentioning that my third submitted complaint altered nothing and I remain without my lovely imaginary horse. Sigh sigh.

Backwards birthdays

Don't you hate it when you wake up in the morning feeling like... wait, wait, stop, I've done the Ke$ha joke before. Start over!

It's been a full 7 years now since I dropped out of school (and, by extension, society), and yet in my half-asleep dazed state this morning I still managed to whimper “but mummy, I don't WANT to go to school, I'm tiiiired!”. I'm just never going to be free of it, am I? I'll be 83, dreaming about that damn school bus. Assuming science doesn't find a cure for dreams by then, that is.

The framework and background time fillers have, as predicted, been slightly lacking this week, so I'm very fortunate that I've been able to be amused by some of the apparently backwards happenings around me, starting with a lovely parcel I got on Tuesday! See, I always thought that you were supposed to RECEIVE presents on your birthday, instead I've been sent a lovely bonus one from Alex before I've even sent hers! My parents seem to have got the whole birthday concept a bit wrong too, considering that they got a nice watch for the wrong brother. He might well need it now he's a big senior at school, but isn't a watch meant to be a 21^st sort of present? Maybe they thought if there were watches all round I'd feel left out, so just decided to prioritise the littlest son. Ha, now he knows how it feels!

You know, I'm not entirely sure I've got the right message out of watching House. I'm sure the writers thought they were getting across a responsible message about the dangers of painkiller abuse, instead I seem to have taken the view that it took him 5 years to have any adverse effects from them, therefore a month or so of scoffing them like smarties isn't going to do any damage. Actually come to think of it, the “being mean to a girl for an extended period of time until she finally admits she wants you” moral of the Cuddy arc has worked out pretty well for me too.

Oh, and for all who laughed under your breath about my hatching Bulbasaur eggs last entry? Calm nature with perfect HP, Defence and Special Attack IVs, making it one of the best in the world on the day that its revealed grass drain moves have received a power boost for the next gen. HA.

Life In A Northern Town

It's the medium brother's birthday on Wednesday, so he's home for some bonus chaos! The bar has been set with his first story about his feuding room-mates – I'm not sure how you're supposed to react when you walk into the kitchen to catch the tail end of an anecdote that ends with “so she bought a paddling pool, but it got filled with beans so she threw a pineapple at her but it missed and broke a window”. Student life in Glasgow, apparently! Next item on the agenda: surviving the grandparents visit for his 'special day'.

So, the pope is about to make his first visit to Britain in almost 30 years, amid a storm of controversy. Meanwhile, Susan Boyle is preparing to perform for him. This is the country that produced Shakespeare and The Beatles, and apparently now the high point of our cultural achievements in 2010 is... some woman that sang on Britain's Got Talent. If only he'd arrived a week early we could have gone the whole hog and stuck him in Ultimate Big Brother. "Day 35, 9:15pm. Chantelle and Brian are in the garden, boasting to Benedict XVI about the footballers they've blown in the toilets at China White."

I had a thought. I have quite a lot of them during the days, but this was a particularly profound one. Imagine there's a girlband. Lets call them.. the Wednesdays. Now, 4 of them are really keen to do a sexy photoshoot in their underwear for FHM, but the 5^th one is shy and doesn't really want to. But the offer was only for the whole band to do it... that's a lot of peer pressure, and something pretty major to end up getting forced into! I'm sure there's some sort of moral to this story, but as usual I'm not entirely sure what it is.

And while we're on the subject! Imagine a pair of identical twins. One is shy, one confident and outgoing. The confident one does a Playboy shoot. Does the shy one get embarrassed that now everyone knows what she looks like naked?

I do realise that this makes me look like some sort of deviant sitting about all day thinking about embarrassed nudey girl scenarios, but its probably still better than what I've actually been doing. Hatching hundreds of Bulbasaur eggs relaxes me, ok?! And I'll be laughing when I see the benefit of my master race of superior genetic plant monsters. In 9 months. When the game I'm doing it in preparation for actually comes out.

Oh and the fact that my horse has failed to materialise on day 16 goes without saying, of course.

Clouds

When I woke up this morning, (as well as feeling distinctly un-like P. Diddy, because that's not even a thing), I was struck by a thought, something incredibly profound and meaningful that I thought would make an excellent blog entry. Unfortunately for me and the world... by the time I was awake enough to organise my tangled web of thoughts into something resembling words, I'd forgotten it. I'm sure it was nothing earth-shatteringly important, just... actually wait, this is my blog and its completely unverifiable, so no, it WAS earth-shatteringly important, on a scale of solving the energy crisis or bringing peace to all faiths. Which only serves to make my later ponderings about clouds all the more mundane in comparison.

Have you ever really thought about clouds though? Like... really thought? If you took the concept of an ever-changing sky in abstract, it would sound like something out of a sci-fi novel. The ground beneath their feet on this mighty new planet was uniform and constant as far as the eye could see, but when they turned their pressure-helmets towards the heavens the canvas above danced with colours and shapes, transforming seemingly at random through epic phases of clear and dark streaks and patterns, infinite in their variable majesty! We just never really stop to question something that is and always will be.

And of course it goes without saying that even after a fortnight, I'm still without my horse.

Spare some change?

Day 13. Big Brother is no more. And David still DOES NOT HAVE HIS HORSE.

Sigh, all in all this has been 'one of those weeks'. I'm pretty sure I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I was expecting the next fortnight or so to be tough, and if I didn't, well... I was certainly thinking it quite loudly. And yet, as I definitely did say, every single time it still manages to catch me by surprise when things turn out a bit rubbish. There's only so many times I can say that I should have learned before I just have to shut up and ACTUALLY learn it. So expect another moaning entry next week complaining how I wasn't expecting to be this tired after doing something embarrassingly trivial!

I suppose by the standards that I'm supposed to be working to, I've made yet more progress this week with more outings, but when the rest of the web is filled with joy and excitement about the steps into the world with new college terms and adventures to be had, making it for 7 instead of 6 minutes in the car to buy some crisps just feels all the more hollow by comparison. It's been a decade now in this rut, and to be honest the chipping away at it isn't good enough. Things HAVE to change. I can try building things up on this twisted scale of 'progress' towards 'normalcy' for the rest of my life, but I will ALWAYS be behind because of where I've started from and the limits to my progression.

Since I've started this blog, I've tried to move past the differences in my life to the norm, to accept and embrace the fact that I've had circumstances forced on me that have shunted my outlook sideways and make the most of it. I think it might be time to take that a step further. I'm not getting any younger.

Feelin' Fine.

DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY

DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY
DAY 11 WITH NO HORSE MAKE DAVID STABBY

Girl Frightened By Boogeyman #3

Day 9 in the big brother house/since the order was placed. David has gone on a murderous rampage, because he STILL HASN'T RECEIVED HIS FREE HORSEY!

I was surprised to receive especially positive feedback for my last post – apparently lyrics, music trivia and nudity is a good direction for things to go in. I'll keep that in mind for occasions when I've got very little to say. Like today!

I've been pondering – has there EVER been an actor or actress who left a soap because they felt they were getting 'too big for it' who went on to do something remotely credible? I was (pleasantly) surprised to find that one of the cute girls who used to be on Emmerdale has successfully managed to crack Hollywood with a breakout role as “topless totty who gets eaten by crocodile” in Lake Placid 3. For further viewing, see Candice off Corrie's stunning performance in Boogeyman 3 – I was particularly moved by the harrowing scene where she was frightened by the boogeyman while showing her bum. I'm surprised she didn't receive any Oscar attention for it.

Trivia fact for the day: Craig David's 7 Days video was reshot for American release, almost frame for frame, but with a black actress in the love interest role. Apparently they were 'uncomfortable' with the original British version where a black man was dating a white girl.

Untouched... unhinged.

Don't you just hate it when you wake up feeling like P. Diddy? Oh wait... no. Because that's not even a thing!

For the last couple of days I've been using up all my writingness and creativity on real-life, pen and paper stuff instead of this. If I had a few more followers it might be a bad trade off, but seeing as a third of my audience will see the benefit, its probably worth it!

This is such a boring lull just now, with all my last wave of projects taken care of but their replacements to work towards still a couple of weeks away. I had hoped that one of my game deliveries might help fill some of the gaps, but most annoyingly I've had to use some of my writing allocation to send them angry emails for not sending me my free in-game horsey! It may be minor, but I bought from that shop solely on the basis that they'd give me free stuff, so I want it fulfilled damn it!

Did you know?: That Tatu's All About Us was in fact written by The Veronicas, before the record company reassigned it to the Russian pair? Isn't there something a bit off about that that it was originally written by and about sisters, and then co-opted to be about lesbianism?

Talking of the Veronicas (neither of whom is called Veronica, but still), one of them had a nudey picture scandal. Oh heavens! In this puritanical day and age, no less. Someone must inform the elders! However, it was made somewhat worse by one of their fan forums organising a “post your own nude pics in support of Jess” thread, requiring the poptart herself to intervene begging them to call it off. I think that might possibly be the most misguided show of support I've ever seen. But still, full marks for the execution.