REVIEW: Black Swan

This movie is so fucked up that it made me faint. First Requiem For A Dream, and now this? What is wrong with your mind, Darren Aronofsky? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR MIND?

Cookie Guns

A couple of friends were talking on Twitter earlier about kitchen utensils, and one mentioned a cookie gun. My thoughts immediately lept to a gun that shot mini cookies instead of bullets. Of course, reality smashed its way in just a few seconds later to remind me that such a thing wouldn't actually exist. Which makes me sad, as I bet a cookie gun would work much better than a regular gun:

Man 1: Get your hands off my woman, you no-good varmint!

Man 2: Why should I? What are you going to do about it?

Man 1: This! *shoots gun*

Man 2: Ha! You fool! Instead of a bullet, your gun shot a cookie at me! And now instead of dying, I shall eat the delicious cookie! *noms cookie*

Man 1: HA! You forgot to ask what type of cookie it is!

Man 2: Why, it appears to be some sort of chocolate chip cookie.

Man 1: Not quite. It's actually a POISON chip cookie!

Man 2: Oh no! *dies*

Just pause for a second, and imagine how much more awesome the lobby shootout scene in The Matrix would be if all the guns shot out cookies. Way more awesome, am I right?

So I'm dissatisfied; I love dissatisfied.
I love to feel there's always more that I need.

Hangovers

Hangovers are an evil, evil thing, and quite how their presence remains tolerated in society I do not know. Surely by now we should have driven them out with pitchforks and torches, cursing them for what they have done to us and allowing them to torment us no more.

Yes, I may have been out drinking last night.

Sure, there are people who will tell you that it is wrong to hate hangovers. They'll tell you that hangovers can't help what they are, that they don't have a choice in what they do in life. I can understand that hangovers may not exactly want to be what they are. But do they really have to share that misery with us? To come along when we're already feeling a bit rough and hit us while we're down? No. Hangovers serve no real purpose in modern society, and their insistence in sticking around and bringing the rest of us down has gone on for too long. We need to strike, and remove them from our lives once and for all. It needs to be done right now, for the good of us all.

Only, y'know, someone else do it. I've got a bit of a headache and need a lie down.

(Sorry. I'll try and post something proper in a day or two)

Gimme the reason why the mind's a terrible thing to waste.

Starting Up Again

So... it's been a while.

I've been thinking about starting this blog up again a bit lately. The problem is that I haven't really known what I could write about beyond one or two posts, and I didn't want to fall into the situation where I post once or twice and then promptly stop and leave this blog to die again.

I like the idea of having a blog. I like the idea of having some kind of home on the internet; a little corner of it that I can call my own. As great as Twitter is, there are times when the 140 character limit just isn't conducive to what you want to do, and you need somewhere else to collect your thoughts. The main problem comes when I try to write a blog post, and find that I end up putting down most of the topics I can think of as not being interesting enough.

What I really need is a deadline. So I'm imposing one upon myself. From now on I'm going to force myself to post at least once a week (and this time I mean it). I might post a review, or some short fiction, or random musings on something. If I get to Sunday and I haven't thought of anything, I'll probably end up writing something about whatever comes to mind first.

I'm not saying that it'll always be brilliant, and I might end up confirming my guy instinct that what I have to say isn't interesting. But hopefully it will be interesting, and more in the spirit of the name of this blog.

So, mark your calendars. Next week: the All-New, All-Different Random Thought Experiments. Prepare yourself.

Dreams of long life
What safety can you find?

Bits 'n Pieces

I have a proper blog post on the go, but I want to take my time on it, which means that it'll probably take a few days. In the meantime then, here are a few random thoughts plucked from my brain:

- The 600th issue of Amazing Spider-Man hit last week, and it's a perfect example of why the series is so good. 104 pages with the only adverts on either side of the covers, it features a 60-page lead story and more backups than you can shake a stick at. Plus it has a reference to the Family Guy 'everybody gets one' joke, and a one-page bit with Spider-Man saying 'Open fire, men! Open fire on those awful hippies! They're destroying our values!' What more do you want? :D

- It's slightly depressing how little TV I watch these days. The only thing I make a point of watching on the actual TV is You Have Been Watching, ironically a program about what else is on TV. Other than that and The Daily Show (which I really should watch more), there's really nothing that pulls me. There's a few American shows which I keep meaning to catch up on (House, Chuck, 24, erm... some stuff that slips my mind), but where's all the good British stuff? Surely there's some good homegrown stuff out there amid all the reality TV and lowest common denominator shit?

- Moving to a new room and relocating all of my books has made it clear just how many comics I've bought in the past three years. It's a lot. I've slowed down on buying collected editions, but that's been compensated for by an increase in single issues. My collection is at the size now that I should be able to sort through it and find some stuff that I could get rid of, but all that accomplishes is making me want to read it all again. If I ever go missing, just look under the massive pile of X-Men comics. I'll be there, choking on issue 38 of X-Factor.

- If you want to have some idea of what it's like to be me right now (and who wouldn't? :P), imagine this in your right ear constantly, blocking out anything else: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Fun, huh?

Previously on 'Random Thought Experiments'...

Blog: I'm fed up of you forgetting me for weeks at a time! It's like you don't care about me!
Skoot: I'm sorry. I've been a twat. I do care about you, honest. Let me make it up to you. I'll start posting at least once a week again.
Blog: *sniff* You... you mean it?
Skoot: I promise.
Blog. Well... okay then.

Skoot: So from today onwards I will write 1,000 words a day without fail.
Audience: Yeah, right...

Jen: *poke* Write a blog entry.
Skoot: Ow! In a bit.
Jen: *poke* Now.
Skoot: I've nothing to write about.
Jen: *poke* Now!
Skoot: Ow! Alright!

Tyler: We've only got fifteen seconds before the bomb blows up!
Skoot: Okay, okay, let's relax. We need to cut a wire.
Tyler: How do you know that?
Skoot: That's how it's done on TV, and TV never lies, right?
Tyler: It lies constantly! Don't you remember...
Skoot: There's no time to remember things! I'm cutting the red wire...

Yeah... as you might have guessed, I suck, and am made of fail. I did do the whole thousand word thing for a couple of days, honest, but then something happened which threw me off track. I won't go into details here, particularly as most of the people reading this will already know, but this has officially become a pattern with me. Stuff Happens, and I respond by downing tools and not doing anything for a few days. With the frequency that Stuff Happens, this isn't the most ideal thing, and I really need to sort myself out so that I can get back in the game.

I'm not going to do another one of those posts where I moan about my writing (or lack thereof) for ages though. I'm beginning to get sick of myself doing that, and if I feel that way I can't imagine what you're thinking. Instead I'm going to take stock of everything I've got going on at the moment.

Running To Stand Still
The novel. It's all a bit stop and start at the moment. I've written at least something on it most nights recently, even if that's not much. It hasn't helped that I've been stuck on how to do a fairly pivotal scene. Now that's out of the way I'm looking to get into a rhythm with writing this thing, with a view to finishing it by November at the latest. But first...

Untitled Pirate Detectives story
The Pirate Detectives is an idea I had about a year or so ago, and dismissed at the time for being just too ludicrous (why on earth would pirates choose to be detectives?). It popped back into my head a week or so ago with a new case for them to solve, and after figuring out a way around the madness inherent in the concept, I figured I'd give it a shot. It's relatively light and fluffy (especially compared to the other stuff I write), it should end up fairly short, and it'll help me get back into the swing of things. I'll finish off writing this before I plunge back into the novel full-time.

Crescent Rising
The thing I haven't talked about on here yet. This is a collaborative project I've started with some friends. It's all gone a bit quiet, which I blame myself for a fair bit as I pretty much disappeared from it, but I'm still interested in picking it up. There are some very interesting ideas going around, and I've love to jump into the world we're creating and have a good play around. That said, it'll probably be a short while before I pick this up, as I'll need to know how it'll fit in with everything else I'm doing.

Random Thought Experiments
This blog. I've been neglecting her a fair bit, and I'm going to turn that around. I'll do my best to post at least once a week from now on. This probably means that as I run out of things to say around writing, I'll move on to other stuff - I have been told that I should try doing some reviews online, though whether that's because people like my rants or they're sick of me forcing them on them I don't know ;).

That's pretty much it. There are a few other things bouncing around my head (like the story that I'll probably end up doing for this year's NaNo), but they're not really big enough to be anything much more than distractions from the more important things. It's certainly enough to be getting on with, now I just need to devote the time to actually getting on with it. Wish me luck!

On Motivation

Yeah, I know, it's been a while. If you agree to drop it, I won't make fun of that stain on your face. That one, on your right cheek. You can't see it? Oh man...

This is probably going to be a long post, and it'll be written inbetween other writing so I'll be getting progressively more drunk as we go on. Fairly warned be ye, says I.

I've been thinking about motivation a lot recently, specifically my lack of it. Try as I might, I can't seem to actually sum up the energy to get off my ass and do anything, 'anything' seemingly including reading oddly. I think this is mostly due to the fact that I've lost sight of the small picture. The big picture is right there in my mind; in fact it never leaves my mind - write a novel, get it published, earn enough money to be able to quit my job. The problem is that I seem to forget about all the steps inbetween where I am now and finishing the novel, and so I get disheartened when another day's writing is done and I see myself not that much closer to the goal. This leads to a lack of motivation, and before long I'm not bothering at all.

This is, obviously, wrong. A novel is a staggering thing to create. One hundred thousand words, very few of them coming easy. If you take it as a whole thing, writing between one and two thousand words in a day isn't really anything of an accomplishment. Taken on it's own though, its a fair chunk of writing, and means that at a fair rate I can expect to write the whole thing in around two to three months.

The real problem is that I don't see any reward from one day's writing. This is important, as I need to see the reward in anything I do to make it worthwhile for me. I had a job interview recently, and they asked the old staple question 'How do you motivate yourself?' My answer was that I motivate myself by the knowledge that I am doing my job to the best of my ability, and at the end of the day I have made a real difference (which doesn't really apply to my current job at all, but that's another story entirely...).

So, let's apply this to writing. Am I doing my job to the best of my ability? Well, tonight is the first night I've done any proper writing, so no, I am not. Do I make a difference at the end of the day? Well, not if I gauge what I've written against the 100,000 words target. This was different during NaNoWriMo, where I had a target of 2,000 words a day. At the end of the day I could see that I had written my daily target, and I knew that I had made a difference. This is what I need. So from today onwards I will write 1,000 words a day without fail. This is a target that's big enough to make a tangible difference, whilst being small enough to be achieveable. Already tonight I've written 1,153 words, and that's whilst writing this blog update, procrastinating like fuck and, erm, dancing in my chair to Michael Jackson ;). I'm just taking a pause before I write the next bit, which is going to be awkward but best done now while I'm in the right frame of mind (drunk, in other words).

The best thing is that I've reconnected with why I like writing. It was difficult to begin with, but once you get into the swing of things the way the sentences form in front of you is just an amazing feeling, and one I want more of. So, one thousand words a day. Let's do it! :D