Demiurgic

I thought I’d spend most of this post talking about writing. The first drafts of Don’t Give Up The Day Job are done and dusted. Some of them are [awesome], some of them are [good], some of them [need work], some of them are [terrible] and there is one I am [embarrassed to have my name on]. As usual, they key is in the title. And now the onus is not on me. At least not for another week or two. It’s given me a lot of time to chill out. I have hammered RIFT, though I still haven’t reached top level. Though this is mostly because I am enjoying the view as the levels and zones race by. I have finished Enslaved & Fable III and been disappointed by Riddick: Dark Athena & Dead Space 2. I have almost caught up with Supernatural. I have generally lazed about. There’ just one problem, though:

While scratching around, looking for something to do, I stumbled across an old link to my blog. And then I thought, hey, why don’t I write my blog anymore? Things did get pretty fucked up for a while back there. To be honest things are still pretty fucked up now. But I never meant to leave my blog behind. So I’m here and I’m typing away. Luckily if there’s one thing you never forget, it’s how to write a blog. Which pretty much involves, you know, writing skills. And by writing skills I simply mean the ability to string together words from the English language into coherent sentences. Of course that should, in theory, rule me out completely. But there is a certain skill to use English to form incoherent sentences and still somehow have them make sense. So I guess that explains how I can get away with being a writer. I’ll be getting back into the swing of writing my blog on a daily basis (Monday-Friday) over the coming days. So I guess this blog post is pretty much just a cop-out. Less “Hi, I’m back” and more “Hi, I’ll be back in a couple of days.!”  But that’ll do for the right now.

Today (and last night) I have spent a lot of time sorting out my music collection. In the last few years it has grown to epic proportions and, to be honest, I don’t even like some of the stuff that was in it. On top of that there were some glaring omissions from my library, such as Johnny Cash and Jane’s Addiction. Add into that the fact that some of the music wasn’t labeled properly and some of it just didn’t even have the right name (there’s nothing like listening to AC/DC, especially when Back In Black comes on, only to look down at your iPod and realise it says that Let There Be Rock is playing instead). So I’ve been having a spring cleaning.

So I have totally moved to a whole other part of the country, with a completely new social dynamic to my life. Take from that what you will. It honestly feels like I’m living someone else’s life right now. Almost everything around me has changed. Luckily I’m an optimist so I’m thinking of it as a fresh start and attempting to move forward with my life. However the last few days have been dragging me back on a trip down nostalgia lane.

I am on holiday at the moment. Chilling (literally) in Cramlington spending time with family and friends. Hence the reason why my blog posts have taken a deviation from their Monday-Friday schedule. This in itself isn’t actually a blog post, it’s just a notification of sorts that I am not posting regularly, if at all. I’m still on Twitter, tweeting away like a lunatic. Well not really. But I am on Twitter. I’ll be resuming the week-daily blog posting come Monday, when my holiday is over. Although I may post something through the week. Although since I’m not linking this to Facebook or Twitter then I imagine no-one will be reading this and I can pretty much say whatever I like. Well, the spammers will be “reading” this, but they are always here. Watching, waiting…

When I was a student I turned out at a NUS student rally protesting something to do with tuition fees. It was when I was in my first year so it must have been 2003/4. My tuition fees were around £1,000 per year and we were protesting against top-up fees. The barrier of entry for students was already quite high thanks to tuition fees costing on average more than £3,000 for a three year course. Ours was a peaceful protest. It was quite large but there was no rioting or destruction of property involved, and if there was it was isolated. But when the government comes out and says that tuition fees could hit £9,000 per year (nine times what I paid) I wasn’t surprised there was rioting on the streets.

The great thing about writing a blog, for me anyway, is that I never know what I am going to write about from day to day. I might see something or read about something and think “Oh, I could write a blog about that!” Sometimes I write a few small sections on stuff, sometimes I have a rant, sometimes I talk about important things, sometimes I talk about Triple Twitter Trauma or the Monday Morning Blues. Today my blog has pretty much been written for me by the ongoing saga of my laptop. And trust me, this is a good one.

As I am out and about all Tuesday night I have written this post in advance (Monday night) and set it up to schedule. Hopefully this should be posted at 6PM promptly and I should be able to use my super advanced smartphone to link it to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Of course the chances of something going wrong are probably 100%, so we’ll see how that goes.

It’s always nice when the weather matches your mood, isn’t it? Like this morning for example. After a fairly lousy weekend I wake up on Monday morning with a typical case of Monday morning blues to find that it’s cold, wet, horrible and I have a hole in the bottom of my shoe. As I stood in a puddle waiting for my lift and wondered why my foot was getting very cold and very wet I took a long drag from my cigarette, looked up at the incoming rain and thought “Ah, it must be Monday.”

I’m reading on various news sites that David Cameron has announced a review of UK Copyright Laws to “make them fit for the Internet age.” What baffles me about this is that on the face of it this announcement seems progressive, which is baffling as it is coming from the ConDem government. Then I realised how much money could be made from a change to a more U.S.-style approach to “fair usage” laws.