Uhm....right. For the next thirty days, starting tomorrow (Nov 1st), this site will be where I post my attempt to complete NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind this challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, which means I'll have to try and post about 2500 words a day for the next four weeks. This may not work. I may not have time. I may sit in front of the comp ...

I've long held the theory, mainly generated from my experiences watching live gigs in small venues, that it's nearly impossible to hear what a live band is supposed to sound like if you haven't spent some time listening to their studio recordings- and I held this belief simultaneously, without contradiction, with the opinion that live performance is the most powerful way to experience music. I th ...

...

"I guess your liver must be taking a bit of a beating here in London?" "Oh, no, we drink far more in San Francisco. This is actually a bit of a break for me." "Really? Wow. It's hard to imagine a worse drinking culture than London's." "It's not worse." "But you said you drink more?" "Yeah. Plus like the drinks are cheaper, and they give them to you in bigger servings, and the bars don't close ...

You will find this in the 'Life' section of the Tate Modern. ...

There's a great scene in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, where the titular menace comes rampaging into a garden festival. The owner of the 'Garden Supplies' stall slaps up a hastily scrawled 'Angry Mob' sign over the word 'Garden', and quickly starts selling pitchforks and spades to the townsfolk. The whole scene is probably less than two seconds long, and by the time you've regist ...

Because sometimes you're in a meeting and forgot to bring a pad to doodle on. Because you can taste the care. ...

I considered substituting this review with a photo of a big pile of dog poo....cause that's what this movie is. Other visual representation options might include: some sweaty dead monkey balls, a high powered vacuum cleaner, an anthropomorphic sickle & hammer masturbating all over the Hollywood sign, and so on and so forth. Night Watch has two plots, barely related to each other. The first is, th ...

So I went and checked out the new installation at the fantastic Turbine Hall, under the Tate Modern. It's called 'Embankment', by Rachel Whitehead. It's not much to look at from the outside, but once you're actually inside the thing, it's a lot more fun. There are lots of nooks and crannies to explore, and a million different angles to view it from. Not as cool at The Weather Project, but defini ...

My flatmate said he'd buy me lunch if I could think of five obscure trivia questions about Hamburg before the bill came. Which of course sent me to God: What is an interesting fact about Hamburg that isn't on Wikipedia and not many people would know. Thanks! BONUS ROUND! Now that I know someone who actually works at AQA, I texted her a similar question. I got the following results: From: AQA [6 ...

I've always been very wary of cross-gendered authorship. Not that I'm against it, I mean, I read cross-species books sometimes, and I don't have a problem with them. It's just that I'm very suspicious of the accuracy with which a male author can portray the female experience (and vice versa*), particularly when that experience relates to prostitution (as, curiously, it so often does when a man de ...

Here's an odd thing: A script that's smart and funny, but also about something at the same time. Or perhaps odder- an 'issues' film that's not too busy beating you over the head with the issue to be both clever and amusing. Structurally, Lord of War reminded me a lot of Goodfellas- the narrator, Yuri Orlov, gives a voice-over as he takes us through his history as a gunrunner from his youth to the ...

As constant readers will know, I'm somewhat obsessed by AQA, the text-messaging service that will answer any question you send it. In fact amongst friends I'll often refer to AQA as "God". As in: "Does anyone know if there's anywhere on Finchley Road that sells Coal?" "I'll just text God. He'll know. He's omniscient." [and I do] [and he does] So you can imagine my jaw quite literally (I sa ...

I know it shouldn't matter, but it's funny how certain auteur directors can be crippled or advantaged when they try to make a film against type. For example, when David Lynch made The Straight Story, it was so completely normal, so the opposite of his usually dense and incomprehensible plotlines, that is seemed positively bizarre. David Cronenberg, director of such classic mind-bending films as ...

There's really two Serenitys, and I'm afraid I can only review one of them. The first Serenity is what you would see if you had never watched the show, didn't know there was a show, didn't care about these characters. If this is you, I went with several friends who saw this film and said they enjoyed it. Go see*. The second Serenity, the one I saw, is what you'd see if already watched the show, e ...

"What happened?" "We got burgled." "WHAT?!? What's been taken?" "Sophie's laptop. Mark's laptop. Nothing else." "My stereo?" "Nope." "The DVD player?" "No." "Nothing else?" "Just two laptops. They even left digital video cameras that were just....sitting out in the open. It's super-wierd." "Was it forced entry? What happened?" "No, nothing forced, just...gone. We live on the third floor ...

.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; } .flickr-frame { float: left; text-align: center; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } If anyone gets home on the Finchley Road, be advised that a water main has burst, creating this cool, unsightly bulge in the middle of the road! Traffic is shut down for miles. You'd best be avoidi ...

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten up so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull. ...

So I've been playing this game, Dawn of War, recently, and I came to something of an impass. I started in this valley, and every time I tried to get out of it, bad guys would start raining down on me and slaughtering me at the mouth of the valley. And I tried every strategy I could think of, I tried rushing guys to the mouth, I tried setting up turrets at the mouth, I tried hanging back and waitin ...

This post over at Eschaton (which means, interestingly enough, 'The End Times') reminded me of a conversation I had with Rob in Croatia: "Did you donate to Sarah's charity-run thing?" "Yeah, I've been donating to all manner of charity things recently, like, runs and moustache-growing and tube-hikes and sailboat races and, y'know, like, I respect that people are trying to do good and help make th ...

This meme, which I encountered simultaneously on several different blogs, is just too magic-eight-ball-cute not to do. I should caveat that my iTunes at work only has a couple of albums on it, and they all happen to be different to my iTunes at home, oddly. 1. What do you think of me, Random Music Player? Lighten Up, by The Beastie Boys Uhm, okay. 2. Will I have a happy life? Martha's Foolish ...