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.

Three's a crowd

It's been a big few weeks for me. My third set of social adventures. I can't really be relied on to get the specifics right, but it's pretty widely accepted that it had been three years since I had any sort of socialising with friends, and now I've had my third lot in a row! Also, I umm... bought three games at the weekend? OK no, I've stretched it too far.

I'm absolutely knackered now, but definitely worth it. It's so hard to express just how much things like today mean to me, for something that would normally be the absolute highlight of an entire year to just take up a single blog entry just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm just very grateful that I have friends able and prepared to help me escape into some semblance of what the real world might be like, even just for a day.

So for today's adventures, it had been decided long in advance that today's OT session would be an outing out to a (very) local tea room for some drinks and shortbread, I just decided in my infinite wisdom that it might be nice to bring my lovely friend along to share in and make the most of what would be a pretty historic outing for me. Of course, it wasn't until the last minute that it dawned on me that the bigger the scale I'd made it, the bigger the potential fall, but it all worked out more or less for the best. The snacks and company were all good, and when I inevitably get grumpy and tired over the next few weeks I can have another wonderful achievement and step forward waved in my general direction as an example of the good kind of progress I'm making.

Plus, the outing wasn't all there was to today! Seeing as its become something of a meme unto itself that I always watch Eurotrip with friends, it seemed fitting to break it out, even if there were minor concerns over whether we'd be able to find a suitable scene to pause on should parents, OT or brothers walk in. Mieke is still ludicrously hot, Michelle Trachtenberg still can't act, and Scotty still doesn't know. It really is surprisingly good considering the entire premise for the movie (and, admittedly, the only reason I bought it in the first place) is apparently “holy crap Dawn from Buffy's got hot!”.

And we had one of my home-grown leeks from the garden in our tea. I'm struggling somewhat to weave it nicely into the narrative following the previous revelation (and since for some reason my mind's lingering on the image) so I'll just chuck it out there. Leeks are tasty.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.

Football

I'm in a quite significant amount of pain today. It might be partially my own fault.

For his 12^th birthday, among other things, my little brother got a football. It was back in May, but we only just got hold of a pump so he's been keen to go out into the garden and play with it. Apparently its good for me to be doing this, I'm building up the amount of exercise I do, its improving my fitness! I'm not really sure though how much overall benefit I'm getting from standing in the same place for a couple of minutes and kicking the ball back, with the same leg. Maybe my right leg will get all toned and muscled from it and I can enter in bodybuilding contests, just always being sure to be seen from the one side. Or I could wear shorts on one side and a mirror on the other! Foolproof plan, now I only have to figure out how to do the same for my top half.

When I was younger I used to think I was pretty good at football. I suppose everyone likes to think they're good at the things they do really, but I was pretty fast and a good finisher, I scored a lot of goals. Its one of the things that from time to time occasionally bugs me now – I know fine well that I'd probably have never made it to any sort of professional level, but I never even got the chance to try and fail. Now at 23, even if I woke up cured tomorrow, I couldn't go and try out for a team – its about slightly more than just standing in the one place and returning the ball in the vague direction of a pre-teen goalkeeper, I'd have missed 6+ years of tactical, positional, teamwork coaching, its just going to have to be yet another thing I've let pass me by. Playing football generally involves those things, plus the ability to run around, let alone stand for 90 minutes at a time, so I don't think I can really claim to be any 'good' at it any more.

I got a call from a telemarketer yesterday. I was kind of hoping for some, to be honest, I figured that all I have to do is say a couple of 'quirky' things to them and that's a nice cheap funny entry for here. So, she asked me if I was interested in loft insulation. I replied no, I'd rather have some chicken nuggets. I was expecting that would throw her, she'd stutter and collapse under the weight of my sheer hilarity, but for some odd reason she was very professional, laughed and said she would too, she's starving, but back to this loft insulation. I was a bit lost at that, so I said I was sorry but I'd run out of sarcastic things to say and hung up. I felt really guilty about that. She was a nice woman, doing her job in a friendly way. There's a recession on, everyone's got to work hard, and she's probably on commission for the amount of loft insulation she sells people. Having a conscience about this kind of silly thing is a real setback to being a king of absurdist comedy. Hopefully the next one will be a pain in the arse so I won't feel so guilty about it.

I mentioned watching House in the last post – that's the latest thing that I've been recommended to get into, so many of my friends watch it that it could be a nice extra topic of conversation, a cultural reference point for me to latch onto around whatever is standing in for the metaphorical water cooler at the time. I'm not really sure it was a good idea by those friends to get me into that specifically though – now that I know how beloved he is despite being so sarcastic and grumpy, its reassured me that I've got a lot more leeway than I thought while staying on the endearing side.

Anyway, I was watching an episode guest starring Cynthia Nixon, and I was shocked to find that for the first time, I thought she was really attractive. I decided to share this revelation via text, stating that it must be because I find the character she's playing here much more attractive than Miranda in Sex and the City.

She was promptly revealed to be faking her illness, and diagnosed with Münchhausen's. I suck at women.