Living the Vileda local
Blee. [(c) Dr. O.]
Some infection or other is doing its level best to sneak up and render me stupid. However, I shall defeat it via the power of a warmed-up metabolism that seems to run best on strong tea and fresh raspberries.
(I was in Sainsbury's last night, post-gym. Always a dangerous time to buy anything, since endorphins makes a chap cheerful and extroverted and all the fresh things smelled extra wonderful. Mmm. Leeks. And random Belgian beer, which didn't smell of anything much more than glass and pricetags. But the raspberries, oh god the raspberries. Sod chocolate, give me a punnet of fresh ones and I'll hoover the set down before you can say 'Five daily portions'. Strawberries are nice, in a kind of prosaic everyone's friend way, but good raspberries have that tiert edge that makes them less popular. Good.)
[/Alasdair]
Infection-wallah can't be working that well, since I've been making old code work on new kit in a state of not thinking about what I'm doing too hard, otherwise it won't work. Ha!
So anyway. Was in Forbidding Prices. (not through choice, too many comics and figurines, not enough books. However, I suspect that part of the skiffy market is determinedly Long Tail, so high-street anything is going to be mostly first half of SFX rather than second half of Interzone.)
Still, came away with a free Batman comic (Ebay! $Ching! Apparently! Which makes me feel slightly guilty, since the people who crowded round to admire when I won the thing were nice at me. Not a cat-piss bloke in nasal range. I feel like I'm betraying the enthusiasms of a basket of kittens.) and a recent M(M)S. (So that's a second night of frankly bloody unnerving dreams wherein my subconscious seems intent on explaining just how much of a fuck-up it thinks I'm making of my life. Jayzus. When you wake up in the morning and have to spend about ten minutes separating reality from dream-based paranoia, just so you can face getting out of bed, something is clearly very wrong. I may not know much about fashion, but I do know that I'm not going to attack an ex-housemate with a brick over the issue of rivets in jeans. Or indeed want to dynamite a scary house that doesn't exist anyway that wasn't built next to a place I've not lived since 1986. All a bit previous. I'm supposed to be on my side.)
P. reported that over in the figurine section, some small child had taken to a model of the Colonial Marine spaceship from Aliens (or similar) and its parents were carefully explaining that it wasn't a toy for playing with.
Which of course is monumentally fucked up. Of course the blasted object is for playing with. It's for running round the garden going 'Wooooooosh!' and taking imaginary voyages to the pirate planet hidden on the dark side of the apple tree to do battle with the killer clockwork robots. It's certainly not for keeping in a box on a shelf by some balding fuck with a companion set of (boxed) Stargate 'action' figures.
The whole 'collectible' market/concept can piss right off, frankly. It's been noted in journals[1] that collecting anything is likely 'an attempt to impose order and meaning on an otherwise random and uncaring universe'. I can see collecting pictures of industrial buildings. In that the fun and adventure is the act of travelling hither and yon, looking for strange examples of water towers or acid vats, but miniatures of Star Trek knives in lovingly crafted presentation cases? Not near me you don't.
Oh, and I'd really like a new Dodge Challenger. Though not in orange.
[1] Sayle, A. Zarate, O. Geoffrey the tube train and the fat comedian. Mandarin. 1987.
Some infection or other is doing its level best to sneak up and render me stupid. However, I shall defeat it via the power of a warmed-up metabolism that seems to run best on strong tea and fresh raspberries.
(I was in Sainsbury's last night, post-gym. Always a dangerous time to buy anything, since endorphins makes a chap cheerful and extroverted and all the fresh things smelled extra wonderful. Mmm. Leeks. And random Belgian beer, which didn't smell of anything much more than glass and pricetags. But the raspberries, oh god the raspberries. Sod chocolate, give me a punnet of fresh ones and I'll hoover the set down before you can say 'Five daily portions'. Strawberries are nice, in a kind of prosaic everyone's friend way, but good raspberries have that tiert edge that makes them less popular. Good.)
[/Alasdair]
Infection-wallah can't be working that well, since I've been making old code work on new kit in a state of not thinking about what I'm doing too hard, otherwise it won't work. Ha!
So anyway. Was in Forbidding Prices. (not through choice, too many comics and figurines, not enough books. However, I suspect that part of the skiffy market is determinedly Long Tail, so high-street anything is going to be mostly first half of SFX rather than second half of Interzone.)
Still, came away with a free Batman comic (Ebay! $Ching! Apparently! Which makes me feel slightly guilty, since the people who crowded round to admire when I won the thing were nice at me. Not a cat-piss bloke in nasal range. I feel like I'm betraying the enthusiasms of a basket of kittens.) and a recent M(M)S. (So that's a second night of frankly bloody unnerving dreams wherein my subconscious seems intent on explaining just how much of a fuck-up it thinks I'm making of my life. Jayzus. When you wake up in the morning and have to spend about ten minutes separating reality from dream-based paranoia, just so you can face getting out of bed, something is clearly very wrong. I may not know much about fashion, but I do know that I'm not going to attack an ex-housemate with a brick over the issue of rivets in jeans. Or indeed want to dynamite a scary house that doesn't exist anyway that wasn't built next to a place I've not lived since 1986. All a bit previous. I'm supposed to be on my side.)
P. reported that over in the figurine section, some small child had taken to a model of the Colonial Marine spaceship from Aliens (or similar) and its parents were carefully explaining that it wasn't a toy for playing with.
Which of course is monumentally fucked up. Of course the blasted object is for playing with. It's for running round the garden going 'Wooooooosh!' and taking imaginary voyages to the pirate planet hidden on the dark side of the apple tree to do battle with the killer clockwork robots. It's certainly not for keeping in a box on a shelf by some balding fuck with a companion set of (boxed) Stargate 'action' figures.
The whole 'collectible' market/concept can piss right off, frankly. It's been noted in journals[1] that collecting anything is likely 'an attempt to impose order and meaning on an otherwise random and uncaring universe'. I can see collecting pictures of industrial buildings. In that the fun and adventure is the act of travelling hither and yon, looking for strange examples of water towers or acid vats, but miniatures of Star Trek knives in lovingly crafted presentation cases? Not near me you don't.
Oh, and I'd really like a new Dodge Challenger. Though not in orange.
[1] Sayle, A. Zarate, O. Geoffrey the tube train and the fat comedian. Mandarin. 1987.