Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Updike
I was going to write something about the cartoons I've posted but I sit down at the PC to see that John Updike has died. Wish I had something extremely intelligent to say. I just feel that another good has been taken from the world. The darkness closes ever further in.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
A Conversation
Them: Hi Richard. I’m such a fan. Love and kisses. xxxxxxxxx.
Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com
Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.
Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.
Them: Oh, but I am.
Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.
Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.
Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.
Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?
Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com
Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.
Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.
Them: Oh, but I am.
Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.
Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.
Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.
Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?
Saturday, 17 January 2009
The Beauty
The restaurant was Brazilian. I assume that the waitress was too. She was also stunningly beautiful, made all the more apparent by the way she hovered in the background and on the periphery of the action. She was something of an incongruity among the showy gimmickry of the rodizio, the waiters with their red kerchiefs and swords. Straight hair tied into a simple stroke that trailed from her authentic smile, she had a clean beauty with nothing artificial, nothing added. Just beauty. The only good thing about the meal. My only point of interest.
I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.
‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.
I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.
It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.
I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.
I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.
‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.
I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.
It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.
I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.
Monday, 12 January 2009
Monday
Three new pictures in the vault. Been in a strange mood precipitated either by an approaching cold or by two days watching the Twitterers go by. It’s as intriguing as it is depressing. Large swathes of human beings have nothing interesting to say but will say it nevertheless. I’d much rather somebody spoke nonsense that read about their preparations for the Sunday roast or how many tax forms they’ve completed. I even find myself defending Wossy who can actually be funny in his Tweets. Funnier, at least, than accountants and ever-so-sincere teenagers moaning on about ‘sickos’ who pretend to be famous people. It’s a difficult balance to strike. I’m tempted to turn Him into a voicebox for aphorisms such as ‘Celebrity is oppression; a tyranny of the few over the masses’ or ‘Fame is toxic and celebrity the result’. If feels like Twitter is now becoming overrun by celebrities at the rate that rats reproduced during the great plague. Yet the truth is that I’d always choose John Cleese’s smallest utterance over the ramblings of yet another social networking guru advertising a blog about media trends. Why do people bore me so utterly? Am I just a freak?
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Friday, 9 January 2009
Friday
Stunned. Confused. After a solid 10 hour sleep -- it's always the way after Manchester -- I'm now waiting for a 1TB drive to format. I don't know what to do while I wait. After about half an hour, it's at 11%. I suppose this is only going to get longer, as we move to bigger drives. But I'm eager to get working. Only, I don't know which way to do. Him or there. I have the book to work on -- had some real progress last night in thinking about it -- plus I have my taxes to do. Ha! Taxes. I'm self-employed because I write and want to earn money from it. This time around, I have to do taxes for the magnificent sum of £110, which I earned for some cartoons about a year ago.
Hmm. Suppose I should get that out of the way. I've been putting it off for months.
Hmm. Suppose I should get that out of the way. I've been putting it off for months.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Wossy And the West
Another day of Manchester and I’m ugly and tired. I’ve also spent too much money on an external hard drive from Dabs. I’ve had enough of losing work or suffering the torture of last night, thinking that I’d lost work. I’m going to automate the damn thing with a terabyte of disc space to suck up my nonsense overnight. Not a single one of my pointless posts, cryptic cartoons, or unread blogs will be lost.
My mood is probably exacerbated by the letter in today’s mail reminding me that I have to fill in my self-assessment tax return. I’m registered as self-employed given that I did some cartoons last year for ITN, earned a little, and continue to devote a huge portion of my week to my ‘career’. Ho hum. I also thought I might have started to earn money from my book or other writings. It now seems rather sad to be filling in a tax return for a sum as miserable as my earnings so far. Are there any self-employed writers who earn as little as me? I doubt it but I’d be happy to stand them a drink.
I’ve also been trying to write something funny for the other blog but my energy runs out after about a paragraph. It makes writing this blog quite a pleasure. I find that writing the other blog almost a physical activity, like holding my breath and swimming down for a kind of deeper state from which to write as somebody else. I only had the energy to post a couple of new Twitters as Him.
Playing the Twitter game amuses me enormously. Or at least, in short periods of about thirty seconds. Twitter is like blogging but in minutia. It’s a place to write in aphorisms or to attempt to be funny through brevity. I think that’s why Stephen Fry is so good at it. He’s genuinely eloquent and always worth reading. I’m trying my best to make every one of my Twitter posts funny. It’s hard to get an idea into 140 characters but I hope my Twits are more amusing than the usual rubbish I read posted. I’ve probably moaned on about social networking before (and if I haven’t, I’d happy do so right now) but I really don’t want to read puffs for other people’s projects or links to things they find interesting on the web. I’m not actually that interest in knowing if somebody is on his way to pick up the kids. Do people really think that it’s interesting to tell me that their train is ten minutes late but they’ve bought themselves a pasty from the station canteen? As far as celebrity Twitterers go, John Cleese has it about right. He’s always worth reading. And, as I said, Fry is fun, if only to read his ejaculations. Ejaculations? Bless me! Heavens. I don’t think. Tut, tut. Shudder!
I notice that Jonathan Ross (Wossy) is enjoying his new Twitter account. 5000 followers and rising. Ah, the blessings of fame! He can’t stop offering to text/email/ring his celebrity friends to check to see if they are ‘a fan/nutcase’. Those are his words, not mine. Well, actually, they’re from somebody who asked him what celebrities think of fake Twitters pretending to be them. Interesting reply. ‘Most famous people really [l]ike their fans, but pretending to be you then that's clearly strange and unwanted’. That’s probably a good reply to the wrong question. Or at least, the premise is somewhat misleading.
Fake Twitterers are probably neither fans nor nutcases. There are a few who are probably more fun to read than the people they spoof, such as Will Self’s double who is delicious arch. Even if there are a few attempts at spoofing that are genuinely strange, most are probably just like me: people who find it laughable that a system exists by which every mental bowel movement can be recorded for posterity. Twitter is a haven for mediocrity and it’s hard not to want to parody it. That’s not to say that it sometimes worries me that I’m perceived as a ‘nutcase’. It makes for such heartening moments when people understand my game. On the other hand, I do get tired of people missing the joke and being unbelievably nice to me because they think of what I can do for them. It’s embarrassing to see it happen across Twitterspace. They turn up, big grin, slide across the room, a hand slips around my shoulders. ‘Richard, you’re looking so good... Listen, chum, I’ve got this project if you’ve a moment or two to wag chins.’
The one surprise of reading Wossy’s twitters is the realisation that some celebrities do actually live in that insane world where every friend is another celebrity. He has them all on his mobile and texts them to see if they Twitter. Charming but rather sad, I think. Celebrity is a drug and I think some people are liable to overdose.
My mood is probably exacerbated by the letter in today’s mail reminding me that I have to fill in my self-assessment tax return. I’m registered as self-employed given that I did some cartoons last year for ITN, earned a little, and continue to devote a huge portion of my week to my ‘career’. Ho hum. I also thought I might have started to earn money from my book or other writings. It now seems rather sad to be filling in a tax return for a sum as miserable as my earnings so far. Are there any self-employed writers who earn as little as me? I doubt it but I’d be happy to stand them a drink.
I’ve also been trying to write something funny for the other blog but my energy runs out after about a paragraph. It makes writing this blog quite a pleasure. I find that writing the other blog almost a physical activity, like holding my breath and swimming down for a kind of deeper state from which to write as somebody else. I only had the energy to post a couple of new Twitters as Him.
Playing the Twitter game amuses me enormously. Or at least, in short periods of about thirty seconds. Twitter is like blogging but in minutia. It’s a place to write in aphorisms or to attempt to be funny through brevity. I think that’s why Stephen Fry is so good at it. He’s genuinely eloquent and always worth reading. I’m trying my best to make every one of my Twitter posts funny. It’s hard to get an idea into 140 characters but I hope my Twits are more amusing than the usual rubbish I read posted. I’ve probably moaned on about social networking before (and if I haven’t, I’d happy do so right now) but I really don’t want to read puffs for other people’s projects or links to things they find interesting on the web. I’m not actually that interest in knowing if somebody is on his way to pick up the kids. Do people really think that it’s interesting to tell me that their train is ten minutes late but they’ve bought themselves a pasty from the station canteen? As far as celebrity Twitterers go, John Cleese has it about right. He’s always worth reading. And, as I said, Fry is fun, if only to read his ejaculations. Ejaculations? Bless me! Heavens. I don’t think. Tut, tut. Shudder!
I notice that Jonathan Ross (Wossy) is enjoying his new Twitter account. 5000 followers and rising. Ah, the blessings of fame! He can’t stop offering to text/email/ring his celebrity friends to check to see if they are ‘a fan/nutcase’. Those are his words, not mine. Well, actually, they’re from somebody who asked him what celebrities think of fake Twitters pretending to be them. Interesting reply. ‘Most famous people really [l]ike their fans, but pretending to be you then that's clearly strange and unwanted’. That’s probably a good reply to the wrong question. Or at least, the premise is somewhat misleading.
Fake Twitterers are probably neither fans nor nutcases. There are a few who are probably more fun to read than the people they spoof, such as Will Self’s double who is delicious arch. Even if there are a few attempts at spoofing that are genuinely strange, most are probably just like me: people who find it laughable that a system exists by which every mental bowel movement can be recorded for posterity. Twitter is a haven for mediocrity and it’s hard not to want to parody it. That’s not to say that it sometimes worries me that I’m perceived as a ‘nutcase’. It makes for such heartening moments when people understand my game. On the other hand, I do get tired of people missing the joke and being unbelievably nice to me because they think of what I can do for them. It’s embarrassing to see it happen across Twitterspace. They turn up, big grin, slide across the room, a hand slips around my shoulders. ‘Richard, you’re looking so good... Listen, chum, I’ve got this project if you’ve a moment or two to wag chins.’
The one surprise of reading Wossy’s twitters is the realisation that some celebrities do actually live in that insane world where every friend is another celebrity. He has them all on his mobile and texts them to see if they Twitter. Charming but rather sad, I think. Celebrity is a drug and I think some people are liable to overdose.
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Scrub That Order To Panic ...
Well, that was a fun couple of hours...
Turns out that the anti-virus software had tampered/corrupted my BIOS settings and the PC was booting from the wrong device. Sounds simple now but at the heart of the maelstrom, where I panic because I think of two weeks work lost, it wasn’t so straightforward. It took me a little while to figure it out but it’s a good lesson learned. Tomorrow I will be taking my half-hour at lunch and I’m going to see if I can find myself a reasonably priced external drive. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this before but I should have a second hard drive running parallel to my main PC with software to back my important directories up at night.
Heading to bed, relieved though still pretty annoyed with myself. I should have got more work done these two weeks. A few dozen cartoons and some blog posts isn’t enough to help push me beyond this job.
Turns out that the anti-virus software had tampered/corrupted my BIOS settings and the PC was booting from the wrong device. Sounds simple now but at the heart of the maelstrom, where I panic because I think of two weeks work lost, it wasn’t so straightforward. It took me a little while to figure it out but it’s a good lesson learned. Tomorrow I will be taking my half-hour at lunch and I’m going to see if I can find myself a reasonably priced external drive. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this before but I should have a second hard drive running parallel to my main PC with software to back my important directories up at night.
Heading to bed, relieved though still pretty annoyed with myself. I should have got more work done these two weeks. A few dozen cartoons and some blog posts isn’t enough to help push me beyond this job.
[Expletive Deleted]
It's like my main PC knew I was feeling moody because I'm back in work tomorrow. Why else would it choose tonight to lose/corrupt/destroy its own hard drives?
I did a virus scan tonight and it detected some threat which it immediately deleted. It then asked me if I want to reboot, which I did, and then it tells me that there’s no system disk. Hate to think of all the work I’ve lost. And before anybody says it, I know I should back work up. And I do. Just no so regular as to make this really painful.
When I bought the machine, it was already set up to use the two 250Gb drives in a Raid0 array, which means that it put the two drives together to create a single drive that was just under 500Gb in size. This array has now disappeared, along with... I don’t want to think about it. Writing, cartoons(!), emails and email addresses... I knew over twelve months ago that I should have reconfigured it to use drive mirroring. Now it’s come back to bite me. Hard.
I don’t suppose anybody has any ideas on how to recover that data? Or am I lost? To make matters worse, I won't be able to do a thing about this until Friday. I have a feeling that things are going to be really quiet around here for the next week.
I did a virus scan tonight and it detected some threat which it immediately deleted. It then asked me if I want to reboot, which I did, and then it tells me that there’s no system disk. Hate to think of all the work I’ve lost. And before anybody says it, I know I should back work up. And I do. Just no so regular as to make this really painful.
When I bought the machine, it was already set up to use the two 250Gb drives in a Raid0 array, which means that it put the two drives together to create a single drive that was just under 500Gb in size. This array has now disappeared, along with... I don’t want to think about it. Writing, cartoons(!), emails and email addresses... I knew over twelve months ago that I should have reconfigured it to use drive mirroring. Now it’s come back to bite me. Hard.
I don’t suppose anybody has any ideas on how to recover that data? Or am I lost? To make matters worse, I won't be able to do a thing about this until Friday. I have a feeling that things are going to be really quiet around here for the next week.
Typical
For years I've bought the 'Artists and Writers' Yearbook'. Then I stopped buying them since I never found the bloody things helpful. Last year, I had a change of heart and bought a copy of the 'Writer's Market UK', which has proved similarly useless. Only now I need a copy of the 'Artists' part of the Yearbook and I haven't a copy in the house.
I'm in Manchester for two days -- I can't believe I'm back so soon -- which will at least give me a chance to pick one up, along with another packet of this HP photo paper. That's if I take half an hour for lunch and work through until five, catching the later train home. The temptation is always to get the eight hours out of the way, to get home earlier...
I'm collecting all my drawings together and keeping them in a folder. I have about thirty printed out in high quality (they do look stunning), and a dozen or so more to tidy up and print. I have no idea if they're worth anything but I have to live in hope. Especially when I have two days of proofreading leisure reports ahead of me in Manchester.
And just when I was getting back into the routine of writing and drawing...
I'm in Manchester for two days -- I can't believe I'm back so soon -- which will at least give me a chance to pick one up, along with another packet of this HP photo paper. That's if I take half an hour for lunch and work through until five, catching the later train home. The temptation is always to get the eight hours out of the way, to get home earlier...
I'm collecting all my drawings together and keeping them in a folder. I have about thirty printed out in high quality (they do look stunning), and a dozen or so more to tidy up and print. I have no idea if they're worth anything but I have to live in hope. Especially when I have two days of proofreading leisure reports ahead of me in Manchester.
And just when I was getting back into the routine of writing and drawing...
My Gaming Biography
I’m continuing to discover the energy-giving properties of peanut butter which today resulted in a couple of new cartoons (I'm very proud of the parrot), a Madeley post, some tinkering on ‘the book’ and now this post. There was also some less cerebral action taking place on the PS3 where my love for computer games has found a new outlet in the ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’.
I rarely (if ever) talk about my gaming activities. I suppose it’s not something I’m particularly proud of admitting to. It’s like saying that you like to sit watching Coronation Street with a large box of tissues and some Cadbury’s Roses. Well, I don’t watch soaps, I’m not so keen on chocolate, and I have no idea what the tissues might be for. But give me a packet of pistachios and a good game and I’m set for the evening.
I began gaming way back when computers first hit UK homes. I was among that generation of programmers who began with a BBC Model B, which all of its 32kb of memory. I taught myself BBC Basic and then 6502 assembler, discovering every ‘peek’ and ‘poke’ of the machine's operating system. (I once got into trouble at school for writing a program that enabled one machine to take over another. A friend abused the power I’d given them by sending messages across the network to the teacher using another machine. It was the only time I got into serious trouble at school but they did ‘punish’ me by putting me in charge of the network and allowing me to do an ‘A’ level in computers. I suppose it was their way of keeping me out of further trouble and curtailing my career as a hacker.) My early enthusiasm for all things ‘geek’ was beat out of me at university where I spent three years learning to program in Cobol (such an ugly language -- I hated it!) on an old Vax system. It was hardly a cutting edge course but I didn’t have cutting edge exam results. I was always too busy teaching myself how to program. On the third year of the course, we touched on assembler language and they introduced us to the concept of pushing and pulling from ‘the stack’. I’d done that when I was about 12. No wonder I hated the course and came away with a lousy 2.2. The only thing left of my computer proficiency is that I’m pretty good at hacking my way around HTML, SQL, PHP and whatever is thrown at me. I keep telling myself to learn C or C++ and get a decent job as a programmer but I have neither the time nor motivation. I used to be red hot at Clipper and dBase IV but it all changes too quickly and when things went ‘object orientated’, I couldn’t be bothered to start again.
Gaming comes from my early love of computers. Back then, I’d sit for hours pressing down cassettes into tape decks to get games to load. I’m probably one of the few people who still have an original ‘Elite’ badge after attaining that legendary rank on the BBC (‘Right on Commander!’). Then disk drives came along with the five a quarter inch floppy on the BBC and then 3.5 on the Atari ST. I celebrated my first hard disk when I bought an Amiga 500 (a great machine!) before I finally moved on to PCs, a slight detour to and from Macs, and then to the consoles.
I suppose I feel slightly self-conscious about admitting to my history of gaming because the majority of computer games are so poorly written. Most but not all. I recently finished playing ‘Far Cry 2’, which on TV is advertised as a generic shooter, when, in reality, it’s a less then generic shooter with lots of references to ‘Heart of Darkness’. Good writing makes the world of difference but it’s so hard to find. This year I’ve been blessed with a few exceptions. I finished ‘Fallout 3’ (I had already played 1 and 2) and found the post-apocalyptic world surprisingly fresh. I finished ‘Mass Effect’ on the XBox 360 and cried my eyes out at the end, something I’ve not done in such a long time. I always enjoyed the wit of Lucasarts adventures (the Monkey Island series or Sam & Max) and regret that adventure games have become a rarity these day. Fable 2 was fun but not particularly gripping, though Stephen Fry provided a welcome touch of humour.
The thing I look for in games isn’t the repetitive tasks that make them addictive as much as the mental problems I need to overcome. It’s the thing that most people who knock gaming seem to forget. It’s much less passive than TV and the best games are really just large and complicated logical problems that need solving. ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’ is one such game, which brings out the military strategian in me. I can spend a relaxing couple of hours deploying my troops to make flanking manoeuvres or conserving my forces for the right moment to push home an advantage. It’s also one of the most radical looking games I’ve seen in a while. It has some fancy techniques for producing a cross-hatched effect on the cell-shaded characters. I love to see great programming. Reading great code, like following a great mathematical proof, can be like poetry. I just wish I were better at all three.
There: another little known fact about me. I’m a one-time geek, now a ‘graphics whore’, and I’m proud of it.
I rarely (if ever) talk about my gaming activities. I suppose it’s not something I’m particularly proud of admitting to. It’s like saying that you like to sit watching Coronation Street with a large box of tissues and some Cadbury’s Roses. Well, I don’t watch soaps, I’m not so keen on chocolate, and I have no idea what the tissues might be for. But give me a packet of pistachios and a good game and I’m set for the evening.
I began gaming way back when computers first hit UK homes. I was among that generation of programmers who began with a BBC Model B, which all of its 32kb of memory. I taught myself BBC Basic and then 6502 assembler, discovering every ‘peek’ and ‘poke’ of the machine's operating system. (I once got into trouble at school for writing a program that enabled one machine to take over another. A friend abused the power I’d given them by sending messages across the network to the teacher using another machine. It was the only time I got into serious trouble at school but they did ‘punish’ me by putting me in charge of the network and allowing me to do an ‘A’ level in computers. I suppose it was their way of keeping me out of further trouble and curtailing my career as a hacker.) My early enthusiasm for all things ‘geek’ was beat out of me at university where I spent three years learning to program in Cobol (such an ugly language -- I hated it!) on an old Vax system. It was hardly a cutting edge course but I didn’t have cutting edge exam results. I was always too busy teaching myself how to program. On the third year of the course, we touched on assembler language and they introduced us to the concept of pushing and pulling from ‘the stack’. I’d done that when I was about 12. No wonder I hated the course and came away with a lousy 2.2. The only thing left of my computer proficiency is that I’m pretty good at hacking my way around HTML, SQL, PHP and whatever is thrown at me. I keep telling myself to learn C or C++ and get a decent job as a programmer but I have neither the time nor motivation. I used to be red hot at Clipper and dBase IV but it all changes too quickly and when things went ‘object orientated’, I couldn’t be bothered to start again.
Gaming comes from my early love of computers. Back then, I’d sit for hours pressing down cassettes into tape decks to get games to load. I’m probably one of the few people who still have an original ‘Elite’ badge after attaining that legendary rank on the BBC (‘Right on Commander!’). Then disk drives came along with the five a quarter inch floppy on the BBC and then 3.5 on the Atari ST. I celebrated my first hard disk when I bought an Amiga 500 (a great machine!) before I finally moved on to PCs, a slight detour to and from Macs, and then to the consoles.
I suppose I feel slightly self-conscious about admitting to my history of gaming because the majority of computer games are so poorly written. Most but not all. I recently finished playing ‘Far Cry 2’, which on TV is advertised as a generic shooter, when, in reality, it’s a less then generic shooter with lots of references to ‘Heart of Darkness’. Good writing makes the world of difference but it’s so hard to find. This year I’ve been blessed with a few exceptions. I finished ‘Fallout 3’ (I had already played 1 and 2) and found the post-apocalyptic world surprisingly fresh. I finished ‘Mass Effect’ on the XBox 360 and cried my eyes out at the end, something I’ve not done in such a long time. I always enjoyed the wit of Lucasarts adventures (the Monkey Island series or Sam & Max) and regret that adventure games have become a rarity these day. Fable 2 was fun but not particularly gripping, though Stephen Fry provided a welcome touch of humour.
The thing I look for in games isn’t the repetitive tasks that make them addictive as much as the mental problems I need to overcome. It’s the thing that most people who knock gaming seem to forget. It’s much less passive than TV and the best games are really just large and complicated logical problems that need solving. ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’ is one such game, which brings out the military strategian in me. I can spend a relaxing couple of hours deploying my troops to make flanking manoeuvres or conserving my forces for the right moment to push home an advantage. It’s also one of the most radical looking games I’ve seen in a while. It has some fancy techniques for producing a cross-hatched effect on the cell-shaded characters. I love to see great programming. Reading great code, like following a great mathematical proof, can be like poetry. I just wish I were better at all three.
There: another little known fact about me. I’m a one-time geek, now a ‘graphics whore’, and I’m proud of it.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Saturday, 3 January 2009
My Last Words On 2008
Moving on means that I've been very busy writing content for another of my blogs. It’s a blog that I haven’t yet publicised here or anywhere, and I still have to decide how to launch it into the real world. It needs the right kind of exposure; a nudge not a push. The premise is very funny but it’s not a true blog. It only provides ‘back story’ to something else I have in mind. I’m also somewhat reluctant to move on from Madeley, chastened by Selena Dreamy’s generous words: ‘If you want to drive a man to become a radical destroyer of his proper genius, just give him half a dozen blog.’ Well, let’s just call it half a dozen plus half a blog.
While looking to link this other project into the blogosphere and find it some unsuspecting readership, I came across the following. It’s an article about the collapse of The Friday Project (or TFP as it’s become known in my darkest mutterings).As some of you might know, it’s a story very close to my heart. This is the last time I hope I'll feel motivated to write about the last year but I write this for myself. Just to put it on the record so I don't forget.
The piece awoke some of the bad feelings I had about my dealings with TFP. Yet I should make it clear that I never had bad feelings about the people. Clare Christian was always polite, friendly, helpful, and, much more important for any writer, supportive. After the collapse, she clearly regretted what had happened. I was sorry that she felt so sorry. I felt sorry that her business had collapsed and that she was suffering the fury of other unpublished bloggers who treated her as thought she was the anti-Christ. I might have had reasons to be angry but that's not my way when it's a case of good intentions failing in the real world. Was I too sympathetic? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt others. The whole business was regrettable. I had to just dust myself down and move one. It was another lesson learned the hard way.
Yet the news that my novel wouldn’t be published was the beginning of a year of hell. I had taken a proof-reading job for two days a week in Manchester. I thought it would only be for the short term. Now it’s a year later and my role has expanded from proof-reader to include IT support, graphic design, designing Powerpoint presentations, reformatting documents. I like the people but the hours are too long in front of a computer screen (8 hours without much of a break). It is slowly destroying me. My eyes have really been suffering lately and my spirits are shot.
The book’s cancellation also marked the beginning of the months when my father collapsed with an aneurism and I was visiting him in hospital, trying to help him recover his speech. There were good moments, bad moments, and then the end. I remember one Thursday in October, standing without an umbrella in the rain on the end of the platform at Manchester’s Oxford Road station. I was sobbing like a child. I’d just been told that there was no hope for my father. Everything about my life came together in that one moment. It was the worst moment I’ve ever known. I’m still not right. I still cry when I come into the house at night. I cry if I’m alone with my thoughts for too long. Everything I feel now is the product of 2008 and I’m happy to put that year behind me.
Yet, before the truly bad things happened to me, there was the novel, which I’ve never really talked about. The article, published months ago when I was too busy to care, sours whatever lingering good feelings I had about The Friday Project. Not because of my own sense of abandonment. I’ve had enough of those in my life. What disappoints me is the talk of excess. There’s money owed and monies paid. Huge amounts of money; debts of over £1 million. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. I made nothing from my book and lost only the months it took to write, rewrite, proofread, and prepare for publication. And my debts aren’t in the millions -- yet. But I still think of what I really wanted from the publishing deal. What would have made me happy as a writer? £10,000 a year, perhaps. I could have written one or two very funny novels a year, made my name, living poor but happy. Was it too much to expect? Or weren’t my ambitions big enough?
‘Publishers are wary if you’re too prolific’.
That was the advice of the only literary agent I’ve ever spoken to.
It was around the summer of last year. After the book was cancelled, another blogger (who probably wouldn't want me to name but who was unbelievably kind to reach out to me) asked her agent to talk to me. I had a phone call from Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh. Walsh was impressive from the moment he began to speak. He was articulate, interested and interesting, and with the kind of rich melodious voice that made my own Lancashire accent seem like the flooded gurgling of a peat digger stuck in a patch of boggy marsh. This was the man, mentioned in the article, credited with landing the biggest deals for bloggers. And he told me at once that there was ‘no novel in Richard Madeley’. Of course, I thought he was wrong and I still feel that he’s wrong. I also believe he was more concerned about issues of copyright, rather than the idea for a book. I tried to explain how it was satire and quite flattering satire at that. In this postmodern world, I still think that a pseudo-biography could work very well. If Sue Townsend can write two fictional accounts of Queen Camilla’s life, I don’t see why I couldn’t create a book set in a fictionalised world of celebrity, Bill Oddie’s owls, and Jeremy Clarkson’s rocket car. However, that was a book I was thinking of writing. My finished project was still looking for a home. I sent him a copy of the manuscript to ‘What Ho Proles!’, the novel that The Friday Project had abandoned.( Incidentally, I had restated the original title ‘What Ho Proles!’ after TFP had made me change it to something that would clearly not attract readers of Wodehouse. They had managed to slip some bad language into the title, to make it sound ‘funnier’, like their other humorous books such as 'It Is Just You - Everything's Not Shit' and 'My Boyfriend is a Twat'.)
So, my manuscript was in the hands of an agent and, naturally, I’ve heard nothing since.
I suppose my novel is still out there. Forgotten. It’s the way of the world. Or so I tell myself. I’ve wasted three years of my life blogging, waiting for a break. Compliments keep me going but... Well, I’m still confused as to how the publishing world works. I go around Borders and Waterstones at Christmas and notice that they are heavily promoting humorists. Funny writing sells. Or so it seems. Yet where did TFP go wrong? Was it because they assumed that comedy is anything with ‘shit’ in the title? Or was it that they tried to ride the gravy train known as ‘misery memoirs’? The article describes how Rachel North’s book had 'projected sales of more than 30,000' but 'underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies'. And this after she’d been on Richard&Judy talking about her story. I hate to think what the projected sales of my own book would have been? 500? 600? Half a dozen?
My problem with The Friday Project wasn’t that they had the wrong business model. It was that they were selling the wrong books. There was nothing in their catalogue which I, as a regular reader and book buyer, would go out and purchase. They relied on impact sales, not on the slow success of an author publishing a series of books. They were all about one off hits. Perhaps that says something about my own book. In terms of their humour books, they seemed to rely heavily on the Christmas market – the stocking fillers bought as a joke but left unread. Yet my book, even retitled, was never going to become another ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’. It was sub-standard P.G. Wodehouse with some Tory politics thrown in. Perhaps it was no surprised when it was dropped. Perhaps I should be thankful that it never made it to bookshelves.
In the end, I confess that I don’t understand any of it. I see that the Friday Project intends to begin again as an imprint of HarperCollins. They’re beginning with a book about ME. An uplifting title, I’m sure. They clearly know what they’re doing this time around. But if they want a misery memoir, perhaps I should write extensively about my bad year. I have a tale to tell, which they might find quite close to their hearts.
While looking to link this other project into the blogosphere and find it some unsuspecting readership, I came across the following. It’s an article about the collapse of The Friday Project (or TFP as it’s become known in my darkest mutterings).As some of you might know, it’s a story very close to my heart. This is the last time I hope I'll feel motivated to write about the last year but I write this for myself. Just to put it on the record so I don't forget.
The piece awoke some of the bad feelings I had about my dealings with TFP. Yet I should make it clear that I never had bad feelings about the people. Clare Christian was always polite, friendly, helpful, and, much more important for any writer, supportive. After the collapse, she clearly regretted what had happened. I was sorry that she felt so sorry. I felt sorry that her business had collapsed and that she was suffering the fury of other unpublished bloggers who treated her as thought she was the anti-Christ. I might have had reasons to be angry but that's not my way when it's a case of good intentions failing in the real world. Was I too sympathetic? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt others. The whole business was regrettable. I had to just dust myself down and move one. It was another lesson learned the hard way.
Yet the news that my novel wouldn’t be published was the beginning of a year of hell. I had taken a proof-reading job for two days a week in Manchester. I thought it would only be for the short term. Now it’s a year later and my role has expanded from proof-reader to include IT support, graphic design, designing Powerpoint presentations, reformatting documents. I like the people but the hours are too long in front of a computer screen (8 hours without much of a break). It is slowly destroying me. My eyes have really been suffering lately and my spirits are shot.
The book’s cancellation also marked the beginning of the months when my father collapsed with an aneurism and I was visiting him in hospital, trying to help him recover his speech. There were good moments, bad moments, and then the end. I remember one Thursday in October, standing without an umbrella in the rain on the end of the platform at Manchester’s Oxford Road station. I was sobbing like a child. I’d just been told that there was no hope for my father. Everything about my life came together in that one moment. It was the worst moment I’ve ever known. I’m still not right. I still cry when I come into the house at night. I cry if I’m alone with my thoughts for too long. Everything I feel now is the product of 2008 and I’m happy to put that year behind me.
Yet, before the truly bad things happened to me, there was the novel, which I’ve never really talked about. The article, published months ago when I was too busy to care, sours whatever lingering good feelings I had about The Friday Project. Not because of my own sense of abandonment. I’ve had enough of those in my life. What disappoints me is the talk of excess. There’s money owed and monies paid. Huge amounts of money; debts of over £1 million. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. I made nothing from my book and lost only the months it took to write, rewrite, proofread, and prepare for publication. And my debts aren’t in the millions -- yet. But I still think of what I really wanted from the publishing deal. What would have made me happy as a writer? £10,000 a year, perhaps. I could have written one or two very funny novels a year, made my name, living poor but happy. Was it too much to expect? Or weren’t my ambitions big enough?
‘Publishers are wary if you’re too prolific’.
That was the advice of the only literary agent I’ve ever spoken to.
It was around the summer of last year. After the book was cancelled, another blogger (who probably wouldn't want me to name but who was unbelievably kind to reach out to me) asked her agent to talk to me. I had a phone call from Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh. Walsh was impressive from the moment he began to speak. He was articulate, interested and interesting, and with the kind of rich melodious voice that made my own Lancashire accent seem like the flooded gurgling of a peat digger stuck in a patch of boggy marsh. This was the man, mentioned in the article, credited with landing the biggest deals for bloggers. And he told me at once that there was ‘no novel in Richard Madeley’. Of course, I thought he was wrong and I still feel that he’s wrong. I also believe he was more concerned about issues of copyright, rather than the idea for a book. I tried to explain how it was satire and quite flattering satire at that. In this postmodern world, I still think that a pseudo-biography could work very well. If Sue Townsend can write two fictional accounts of Queen Camilla’s life, I don’t see why I couldn’t create a book set in a fictionalised world of celebrity, Bill Oddie’s owls, and Jeremy Clarkson’s rocket car. However, that was a book I was thinking of writing. My finished project was still looking for a home. I sent him a copy of the manuscript to ‘What Ho Proles!’, the novel that The Friday Project had abandoned.( Incidentally, I had restated the original title ‘What Ho Proles!’ after TFP had made me change it to something that would clearly not attract readers of Wodehouse. They had managed to slip some bad language into the title, to make it sound ‘funnier’, like their other humorous books such as 'It Is Just You - Everything's Not Shit' and 'My Boyfriend is a Twat'.)
So, my manuscript was in the hands of an agent and, naturally, I’ve heard nothing since.
I suppose my novel is still out there. Forgotten. It’s the way of the world. Or so I tell myself. I’ve wasted three years of my life blogging, waiting for a break. Compliments keep me going but... Well, I’m still confused as to how the publishing world works. I go around Borders and Waterstones at Christmas and notice that they are heavily promoting humorists. Funny writing sells. Or so it seems. Yet where did TFP go wrong? Was it because they assumed that comedy is anything with ‘shit’ in the title? Or was it that they tried to ride the gravy train known as ‘misery memoirs’? The article describes how Rachel North’s book had 'projected sales of more than 30,000' but 'underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies'. And this after she’d been on Richard&Judy talking about her story. I hate to think what the projected sales of my own book would have been? 500? 600? Half a dozen?
My problem with The Friday Project wasn’t that they had the wrong business model. It was that they were selling the wrong books. There was nothing in their catalogue which I, as a regular reader and book buyer, would go out and purchase. They relied on impact sales, not on the slow success of an author publishing a series of books. They were all about one off hits. Perhaps that says something about my own book. In terms of their humour books, they seemed to rely heavily on the Christmas market – the stocking fillers bought as a joke but left unread. Yet my book, even retitled, was never going to become another ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’. It was sub-standard P.G. Wodehouse with some Tory politics thrown in. Perhaps it was no surprised when it was dropped. Perhaps I should be thankful that it never made it to bookshelves.
In the end, I confess that I don’t understand any of it. I see that the Friday Project intends to begin again as an imprint of HarperCollins. They’re beginning with a book about ME. An uplifting title, I’m sure. They clearly know what they’re doing this time around. But if they want a misery memoir, perhaps I should write extensively about my bad year. I have a tale to tell, which they might find quite close to their hearts.
Friday, 2 January 2009
Tractors
So who wants to collect tractors? The ad on TV says that each week, I’ll be able to collect a new model of a piece of farmyard heavy machinery. There are dozens and dozens to collect. If you like tractors.
Tractors...
I’ll trying to think of something interesting to say about tractors. Proper bloggers would know what to say. Some might even own a tractor. They would comment on farming subsidies and how there aren’t enough tractors in the country because of Gordon bloody Brown. Only I can’t think of something interesting to say about tractors. My attempts at being ‘me’ and a ‘real’ blogger are failing miserably. It was easier being somebody else. I could make something up about tractors.
Didn't somebody once write a good poem about a tractor? Or am I thinking of Adge Cutler? He really was worth listening to. I’m no fan of the Wurzels post Adge. But, if you think about it, Adge was probably the closest thing we’ve had to a British Tom Waits.
Hang on. They sang about a combine harvester.
So, in the end, I didn't actually have anything interesting to say about tractors.
Bugger.
Blogging Meltdown
Generally, it isn’t wise to make resolutions. They are fragile things, likely to break under the merest cheesecake or a must-buy hardback. However, I’m starting the year intending to carry on blogging as myself, a couple of times a week. ‘And this is me,’ as Mike Yarwood would say. Of course, we always knew it was him. He was to impressions what David Cameron is to conviction politics. But I really do mean it when I say ‘and this is me’. In fact, not only will blogging as ‘me’ be great, I’ll be a better version of ‘me’ than you’ve ever seen.
No doubt about it: ‘me’ will be something special. Naturally, I intend to be far less honest about my bad moods and my bad luck. No more late night posts about the neighbours. I’ll also cut out all the moaning and anecdotes about how life in the North tends towards misery, compiled into a compendium of gloom. Instead, I’m hoping to reinvent myself as a genial sort and pose as a briar pipe smoking Tory, with just the occasional wry little post on political scene, popular culture, and the worthy things that my colleagues in the blogging community get up to.
Oh, 2009 I salute you! You are the year when my nose will be rank with the sweet aroma of flattery.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Elton John
Elton John sounded rough this morning. But perhaps I’m not the best man to judge. I always think that Elton sounds rough. Sit him behind a piano and microphone and he reminds me of bullfrog trying to swallow a fat bluebottle. He’s the antithesis to everything I want from my music but I didn’t particularly warm to the sight of the cloying loveliness of the Tarquins and Theresas smooching in the audience as dear Aunt Elton coughed up his lyrical syrup. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me but I don’t do ‘sweet’. I also don’t go in for large toothed, high income, big collar, Range Rover driving accountants snogging their pearly perfect wives/girlfriends/secretaries on my TV while I’m still trying to digest my morning yoghurt.
I was also feeling tired. I’d been woken at 7am by the children playing in the bedroom next door. The great benefit of living in a semi-detached house is that we can all enjoy the noises of children playing whilst their parents sleep off their New Year’s festivities in whatever strange bedroom or bedsit they’d found themselves.
Despite the above, I am in a better mood. Yes, I sometimes get up feeling cheerful and today was one of those days. I put this down to now being on the other side of the ‘festive season’. I’ve also just finished a sketch of Elton’s lead guitarist which I’ve posted over there, for the few of you who have asked to get in (I do need your email address to invite you in). I’m quite pleased with it, having been studying my Ronald Searle to get the face just right. I’m now going to spend my day printing out gags. I bought some quality HP inkjet paper and have the ‘Artist and Writer’s Yearbook’ beside me. I have no idea how to go about this process of submitting cartoons. I also think that most of mine are too surreal to get accepted. However, I’ll give them a try in the belief that with a new year, anything is possible.
I was also feeling tired. I’d been woken at 7am by the children playing in the bedroom next door. The great benefit of living in a semi-detached house is that we can all enjoy the noises of children playing whilst their parents sleep off their New Year’s festivities in whatever strange bedroom or bedsit they’d found themselves.
Despite the above, I am in a better mood. Yes, I sometimes get up feeling cheerful and today was one of those days. I put this down to now being on the other side of the ‘festive season’. I’ve also just finished a sketch of Elton’s lead guitarist which I’ve posted over there, for the few of you who have asked to get in (I do need your email address to invite you in). I’m quite pleased with it, having been studying my Ronald Searle to get the face just right. I’m now going to spend my day printing out gags. I bought some quality HP inkjet paper and have the ‘Artist and Writer’s Yearbook’ beside me. I have no idea how to go about this process of submitting cartoons. I also think that most of mine are too surreal to get accepted. However, I’ll give them a try in the belief that with a new year, anything is possible.
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