Can You Find The Deliberate Error In This Entry?
Yeah, yeah, I know what you're all thinking now - "Oh no, Runcible the fatuous!" But choke it back, for I have important wordages.
The incredibly unobservant will have noticed that I've been away from the internets since mid-November, and may be wondering why this is. I did entrust Ashley with the duty of telling everyone the reasons for this abscence, but it only really worked on DarkDreams, where there's a high chance that the post would be read by everyone. This is obviously not the case on LJ, where there are several subsectors and pockets of friends and not all of them are regular readers of Ashley's journal. So I'll clear it up now.
Basically, about a month ago my computer broke down. A month later my mum finally got round to contacting her friend who knows computery stuff and he basically said that the machine is a complete write-off. Gah and bah! We're going to see if we can find a new one in the January sales, but for now I'm reduced to using Olly's computer, which I'm sure you'll all agree is a major drop in status. The Lewis brothers computer experience is, I'm happy to report, as memorable as ever - I've been working on it for about fifteen minutes now and I have absolutely no idea what window has what in. Why is Winamp skipping tracks? What have I done to upset this vengeful security-protected god?!
This is particularly annoying because I'd made my first post at DD for a very long time a few days before my computer died, and I wanted to reassure my friends there that I wasn't just going to up sticks and forget to update for God knows how long like I'd been doing previously. Then this happens. Like I say, annoying. Also, I was planning to get people to send me their addresses for Christmas cards, but that's not possible now. So I'd just like to wish everyone a preternaturally merry Christmas and happy new year right now if I've been unable to get a card to you.
So what am I doing for Christmas? Glad you asked! The Prince's Trust have given me possibly the best Christmas present ever - no, not just a week away from their JobsGulag in between Christmas and New Year, but the chance to give my opinions on "how our service can be improved" via a short questionnaire. Tee hee hee! How do you spell "patronising fuckwits" again? Aside from that, I plan to spend Christmas at my grandparents again this year, enjoying what now feels like the definitive Christmas experience - the drunkenness, the DVDs, the awkward but secretly thrilling arguments. Bliss.
I have certain messages to particular people here. Alice! Your parcel arrived safe and sound, and I thank you very much for it. Roger and Hester! Worry not about your Christmas presents this year - Hester's is a book of what basically amounts to smut disguised poorly as serious history, and Roger's is fascinating and festive in every sense of the word.
Since it will, hopefully, be less than a month before I can update this thing again, I'm going to give you a teaser of what's to come. First, I'd like to sound a sad note (F minor 7th) about my writing. Regular readers will know that The Plan was to get Draft One of Moll Flanders, Draft Two of That Horror Project That I'm Still Not Sure Whether Or Not I Can Tell You The Title Of, and the outlines for Death of a Ziegfield Girl and Totally Not Spoiling the Title of This One done by Christmas. The breakdown of my computer has meant that, tragically, this will not be the case, and it happened at a time when it looked a lot more likely than it sounds written down on paper.
The intention is now to finish Moll Flanders and Thingummybob No. 1 before March comes, which seems like a shrivellingly long time away but is the only realistic option. News, everybody! At great cost to my wrist, I have handwritten the outlines for Death of a Ziegfield Girl and Not Telling You, Not Telling You, Ner Ner Ner and they are both among the finest pieces of writing I've ever committed to paper and/or pixels. Both of them will be scanned and placed 'pon my LiveJournal as soon as I have a regular connection again.
The other project, of course, is Housing Problems, which I'm still waiting for Olly to come up with the raw-footage DVDs of. (I've got no idea why I'm telling him off here - he's in the same house as me and as far as I know is not on the internet) I do have some plans about what to shoot next and they're all a big step towards completing this project that is, basically, my life at the moment. It'll look wonderful, like art photographs ran together.
Not that I'd know, of course, because listening to the commentary tracks on the current, utterly essential Work of Mark Romanek DVD has made me embarrassed about how long it's been since I bought a book of art, and in particular about how little I know about photography. I have two very cherished books of almost-photography in my collection - Storm Thorgensen's rundown of the best album covers ever created and a history of the Absolut Vodka marketing campaign. My books on Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali also include examples of their own photographic escapades, though these are obviously not the focus of the book. Can anyone point me in the direction of similar delights?
So in short, everything is going well. When you look at my concerns shortly before my computer breathed its last, they were essentially to complete Housing Problems, to write until my wrists hurt, to stay on at this job for the forseeable future, to become more into photography and to find a free-love commune whom I could live in everlasting sexual and socialist nirvana with. Housing Problems is in sight, I do indeed have cramp in my wrists, Mick is deliberately defying the Prince's Trust and keeping me on at work and I've got a good lead on an underground polyamorous network in Barnsley.
That's not the deliberate error, by the way, it's a lie. The two things are quite different.
My cultural life is in rude health too. Recent DVD acquisitions have included Season Two of Frasier, Season One of Curb Your Enthusiasm, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, 11"09'01 (probably slightly fewer laughs in that one) and the aforementioned Mark Romanek DVD. I've seen a lot of films at the cinema too, but I bet the only one you care about is King Kong. Rather than make this entry even longer with a full review, I will say this; it is supremely wonderful, and even those disappointed with Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy will be pleased with the relative lack of shakycam, the increased focus on comedy, romance and actors, and the general awesomeness of the whole thing. It's so beautifully obvious that he loves the original, and in Kong's reduction of three T-Rexs' skulls to wallpaper paste he even surpasses it. It is far too violent and scary for little kids, but that's parents' fault for assuming that "12A" is equivalent to "U". And it features a gang of marauding Mongolian death worms, for all you Forteans out there! See it, you clever, clever people.
Right, I'm going to see if I can answer the last month's worth of e-mails and LJ updates in one go. Wish me luck, and I hope this has adequately updated you on pretty much everything that's been going on in my life. Before I go, a quick round-up of the trailers I saw before Kong, as it was a bumper batch of very high-profile films. Match Point's full length trailer looks worryingly generic, Just Like Heaven must have something to it to attract such a classy cast, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is, The New World looks absolutely laughable, Brokeback Mountain will kick, fuck ass (in that order) and Mission: Impossible 3 appears to be called MIIII. And that's yer lot!
The deliberate error? F minor 7th is, of course, a chord, not a note.
The incredibly unobservant will have noticed that I've been away from the internets since mid-November, and may be wondering why this is. I did entrust Ashley with the duty of telling everyone the reasons for this abscence, but it only really worked on DarkDreams, where there's a high chance that the post would be read by everyone. This is obviously not the case on LJ, where there are several subsectors and pockets of friends and not all of them are regular readers of Ashley's journal. So I'll clear it up now.
Basically, about a month ago my computer broke down. A month later my mum finally got round to contacting her friend who knows computery stuff and he basically said that the machine is a complete write-off. Gah and bah! We're going to see if we can find a new one in the January sales, but for now I'm reduced to using Olly's computer, which I'm sure you'll all agree is a major drop in status. The Lewis brothers computer experience is, I'm happy to report, as memorable as ever - I've been working on it for about fifteen minutes now and I have absolutely no idea what window has what in. Why is Winamp skipping tracks? What have I done to upset this vengeful security-protected god?!
This is particularly annoying because I'd made my first post at DD for a very long time a few days before my computer died, and I wanted to reassure my friends there that I wasn't just going to up sticks and forget to update for God knows how long like I'd been doing previously. Then this happens. Like I say, annoying. Also, I was planning to get people to send me their addresses for Christmas cards, but that's not possible now. So I'd just like to wish everyone a preternaturally merry Christmas and happy new year right now if I've been unable to get a card to you.
So what am I doing for Christmas? Glad you asked! The Prince's Trust have given me possibly the best Christmas present ever - no, not just a week away from their JobsGulag in between Christmas and New Year, but the chance to give my opinions on "how our service can be improved" via a short questionnaire. Tee hee hee! How do you spell "patronising fuckwits" again? Aside from that, I plan to spend Christmas at my grandparents again this year, enjoying what now feels like the definitive Christmas experience - the drunkenness, the DVDs, the awkward but secretly thrilling arguments. Bliss.
I have certain messages to particular people here. Alice! Your parcel arrived safe and sound, and I thank you very much for it. Roger and Hester! Worry not about your Christmas presents this year - Hester's is a book of what basically amounts to smut disguised poorly as serious history, and Roger's is fascinating and festive in every sense of the word.
Since it will, hopefully, be less than a month before I can update this thing again, I'm going to give you a teaser of what's to come. First, I'd like to sound a sad note (F minor 7th) about my writing. Regular readers will know that The Plan was to get Draft One of Moll Flanders, Draft Two of That Horror Project That I'm Still Not Sure Whether Or Not I Can Tell You The Title Of, and the outlines for Death of a Ziegfield Girl and Totally Not Spoiling the Title of This One done by Christmas. The breakdown of my computer has meant that, tragically, this will not be the case, and it happened at a time when it looked a lot more likely than it sounds written down on paper.
The intention is now to finish Moll Flanders and Thingummybob No. 1 before March comes, which seems like a shrivellingly long time away but is the only realistic option. News, everybody! At great cost to my wrist, I have handwritten the outlines for Death of a Ziegfield Girl and Not Telling You, Not Telling You, Ner Ner Ner and they are both among the finest pieces of writing I've ever committed to paper and/or pixels. Both of them will be scanned and placed 'pon my LiveJournal as soon as I have a regular connection again.
The other project, of course, is Housing Problems, which I'm still waiting for Olly to come up with the raw-footage DVDs of. (I've got no idea why I'm telling him off here - he's in the same house as me and as far as I know is not on the internet) I do have some plans about what to shoot next and they're all a big step towards completing this project that is, basically, my life at the moment. It'll look wonderful, like art photographs ran together.
Not that I'd know, of course, because listening to the commentary tracks on the current, utterly essential Work of Mark Romanek DVD has made me embarrassed about how long it's been since I bought a book of art, and in particular about how little I know about photography. I have two very cherished books of almost-photography in my collection - Storm Thorgensen's rundown of the best album covers ever created and a history of the Absolut Vodka marketing campaign. My books on Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali also include examples of their own photographic escapades, though these are obviously not the focus of the book. Can anyone point me in the direction of similar delights?
So in short, everything is going well. When you look at my concerns shortly before my computer breathed its last, they were essentially to complete Housing Problems, to write until my wrists hurt, to stay on at this job for the forseeable future, to become more into photography and to find a free-love commune whom I could live in everlasting sexual and socialist nirvana with. Housing Problems is in sight, I do indeed have cramp in my wrists, Mick is deliberately defying the Prince's Trust and keeping me on at work and I've got a good lead on an underground polyamorous network in Barnsley.
That's not the deliberate error, by the way, it's a lie. The two things are quite different.
My cultural life is in rude health too. Recent DVD acquisitions have included Season Two of Frasier, Season One of Curb Your Enthusiasm, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, 11"09'01 (probably slightly fewer laughs in that one) and the aforementioned Mark Romanek DVD. I've seen a lot of films at the cinema too, but I bet the only one you care about is King Kong. Rather than make this entry even longer with a full review, I will say this; it is supremely wonderful, and even those disappointed with Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy will be pleased with the relative lack of shakycam, the increased focus on comedy, romance and actors, and the general awesomeness of the whole thing. It's so beautifully obvious that he loves the original, and in Kong's reduction of three T-Rexs' skulls to wallpaper paste he even surpasses it. It is far too violent and scary for little kids, but that's parents' fault for assuming that "12A" is equivalent to "U". And it features a gang of marauding Mongolian death worms, for all you Forteans out there! See it, you clever, clever people.
Right, I'm going to see if I can answer the last month's worth of e-mails and LJ updates in one go. Wish me luck, and I hope this has adequately updated you on pretty much everything that's been going on in my life. Before I go, a quick round-up of the trailers I saw before Kong, as it was a bumper batch of very high-profile films. Match Point's full length trailer looks worryingly generic, Just Like Heaven must have something to it to attract such a classy cast, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is, The New World looks absolutely laughable, Brokeback Mountain will kick, fuck ass (in that order) and Mission: Impossible 3 appears to be called MIIII. And that's yer lot!
The deliberate error? F minor 7th is, of course, a chord, not a note.