Teenage Misanthropy

The Last Post

2010-08-07T00:00:00.002+01:00

Two quick raps on the door. Landsman gets up, thinking it's going to be Berko.
"Hi, there," says the man at the door in American. "I don't think I've had the pleasure."
"Who are you?" Landsman says.
"Me is your burial societies," the man says in wretched but energetic Yiddish.
"Mr. Spade is here to oversee the transition," Bina says...

So here we are. Just under two and a half years and 285 posts away from where I started, somewhat ignominiously. During which I've blogged about nearly everything I can think of, from irrational fear of buses to adorable puppies. And lots and lots and lots of things about me.

And of course plenty of things about mental health, or the lack thereof. During which time Teenage Misanthropy's been getting a pretty fair number of hits for a personal blog (somewhere between 40 and 70 unique users per day, on average, and daily pageviews up to about 120 to 150 when I've been posting regularly). So I've not been doing too badly.
Nonetheless, I think it's time to put TeenMis out to pasture. I've been noticeably posting less and less often in the past few months, which I think demonstrates that I'm not entirely committed to it any more. There's a lot of stuff here that I think I've outgrown. God, in a little under a year I'll be 20, and the name'll be obsolete anyway. Also, I'm getting sick of Blogger. It's very customisable, but clunky and very far from good-looking at the best of times. Plus, people change a hell of a lot from 17 to 19, and looking back it strikes me that I could be incredibly arrogant, stupid, spoilt, shallow, and so on.

Basically, I'm still all of those things, but I flatter myself I'm able to make them come across in a marginally less annoying way. So, this particular blog is getting the Old Yeller treatment. But the destruction of my private Alexandria is not all bad news, because there's going to be another one; I've gone to the dark side and moved to WordPress. Same sarcastic misanthropy, but in a prettier setting and with an equally stupid name.
So, time to wrap this thing up with a link to the new thing. Many thanks to everyone who read Teenage Misanthropy, or commented, or sent me fan mail (yes, amazingly I did actually get some). The blog is dead...

Applied Memetics

2010-07-17T04:25:00.000+01:00

[Exciting sexy new things are happening in regards to the blog. Watch this space. Or rather, ask me for a link to the other space and watch that instead.]

So lots of stuff is going on with the move and with me, so in lieu of a proper blog post, have a meme. It started with DeeDee Ramona, then passed on to Aethelread, and Kapitano, Cellar Door and I stole it from him. Feel free to have a go at it yourself.

1. Are you currently in a serious relationship?

I don't really do commitment.

2. What was your dream growing up?

I wanted to be a fire engine.

...you laugh, but if I'd just had the A-levels I could've done it.

3. What talent do you wish you had?

I'd love to be able to draw anything more realistic or detailed than stick figures.

4. If I bought you a drink, what would it be?

A Cosmopolitan, or failing that Southern Comfort and Coke.

5. Favourite vegetable?

What are these 'vegetables' of which you speak?

6. What was the last book you read?

Last book I finished was Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs. Currently re-reading Berlin Noir, by Philip Kerr.

7. What Zodiac sign are you?

Taurus. Stubborn like a bull, apparently. I can't really fault that, even if astrology is a large amount of bullshit.

8. Any tattoos or piercings?

None. Always been too scared to get either, and I'm not sure they'd suit me.

9. Worst habit?

Smoking, drinking, enjoying gangsta-rap ironically... take your pick.

10. If you saw me walking down the street, would you offer me a ride?

Depends largely on your answer to #4.

11. What is your favourite sport?

Fencing, to play or watch.

12. Do you have a pessimistic or optimistic attitude?

Ahaha. Ahahahahahaha. Hahahahaha. Guess.

13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?

[clumsy sexual advance] What wouldn't I do? [/clumsy sexual advance]

14. Worst thing to ever happen to you?

This one time, I listened to a Michael Buble song all the way through. I still get flashbacks.

15. Tell me one weird fact about you.

The platypus is my favourite mammal, because it's so clearly something God knocked up while stoned off his arse on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

16. Do you have any pets?

Not since I moved out on my own, unless you count the mould growing on the washing-up. I think it's close to achieving sentience.

17. What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?

'Oh fuck, hide the mould! Must conceal evidence of squalor!'.

18. What was your first impression of me [Aethelread, I assume - is that how the meme works?]?

Clever, kind, funny, and at least six other miscellaneous forms of awesome.

19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?

So, so scary. I mean, look at John Wayne Gacy.

20. If you could change one thing about the way you look, what would it be?

Ooh, tough call. Tempting to say 'ditch all the scars', but I'm not sure. Right now I'd settle for a half-decent haircut.

21. Would you be my partner in crime or my conscience?

Partner nothing. I'd be a goddamned criminal mastermind.

22. What colour eyes do you have?

Blue-greyish. They're supremely uninspiring.

23. Ever been arrested?

No. All my experience of burly men handcuffing me has been strictly consensual.

24. Bottle or can soda?

Bottle, but only if it's glass and not plastic.

25. If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?

Blow it all on clothes and shoes. There wouldn't be a penny left by tomorrow, I suspect.

26. What's your favourite place at which to hang out? [I think that's acceptable grammar]

I know it's nerdy, but I've always liked art galleries. I find them relaxing. I'm not sure if that counts as 'hanging out', exactly, though.

27. Do you believe in ghosts?

Oh, fuck off.

28. Favourite thing to do in your spare time?

See #23.

29. Do you swear a lot?

See #27.

30. Biggest pet peeve?

The Law of Universal Gravitation. Don't ask.

31. In one word, how would you describe yourself?

Ostrobogulous.

32. Do you believe in/appreciate romance?

I think it's a highly specific form of insanity.

33. Favourite and least favourite food?

Currently, tiramisu.

Anything involving tofu.

34. Do you believe in God/a higher power/whatever you want to call it?

Nope.

There's a line of Dara O'Briain's: [paraphrased] 'I'm an atheist, been an atheist for years, absolutely do not believe in any sort of a god. ...still Catholic, though.'

35. Will you repost this?

...what sadistic fucker put this question at the end?

Yet Another Gaming Post

2010-07-10T11:33:00.005+01:00

Games as art. Oh dear. I keep coming back to this one, like the proverbial dog. Of course, the short answer from a gamer's perspective is that it doesn't matter. Regardless of what we call them, games can be fun, beautiful, uplifting, depressing, life-changing even. So why the frantic scrabbling after the status of art?

Well, at the moment gaming is the red-headed stepchild of media; desperate for attention and acceptance from the older kids. It's still an immature medium (in oh so many ways), there's still a social stigma attached to it, and so people like me with nothing better to do stroke their beards and talk about emergent narrative and why we don't have an equivalent to Citizen Kane yet.
None of this matters in the long view, of course. Within, say, 20 years, nearly all of the people making up mainstream Western culture (whatever that is) will have grown up with shiny modern commercial gaming, and the wider popular perception of games will have changed from Pac-Man and Space Invaders to Gears of War and Halo. Which is just as inaccurate a representation in its own way, but that's beside the point.
This whole wordy think-piece comes up because the 'can games be art' question has been going around this bit of the blogosphere, from Kapitano and Aethelread. Plus, of course, I'm thoroughly invested in it myself; I write a series of columns based almost entirely on the contention that games are art for a most excellent webzine of win and awesome called Sublime Rush (look for Flashing Pixels, if you want to have a read). On top of that, I've been playing videogames for as long as I can remember, instead of doing healthy things like going outside.
It occurs to me, though, that I've got through four instalments of said column without ever trying to define what art is. Possibly I am not a very good writer. Thankfully, the drunken librarian that won't shut up of the internet, Wikipedia, gives us something good enough to be going on with:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions.

It might also be true to add (stealing a little bit from Kapitano's comment on Aethelread's post) that you can distinguish art from design because, in Oscar Wilde's words:

All art is quite useless.

Which is somewhat problematic. Most games are, on the face of it, useless for anything other than entertainment or diversion (and unlike novels, you can't even use them for kindling), but then there are plenty of games designed specifically to be educational (you might argue that these aren't entertaining, but then again I'm still looking for Carmen bloody Sandiego). And on the commercial side, they're certainly useful for making money. But still. If film's useless enough to make the cut, games are art too.
But there were a couple of bits from Aethelread's post that I'd like to pick up on.

...our culture is still deeply bound up with Romantic notions of the artist. The idea of the artist as a solitary figure working in isolation on a thoroughly original piece of work is one that still has a powerful hold on our collective imagination. Recently that’s been undermined to some extent – it’s been pointed out, for example, that many of the most famous painters in history only supervised some of the work produced in their name, with the actual act of applying paint to canvas being carried out by anonymous assistants – and there’s been an appreciation of the importance of collaboration in the production of all works of art. Even so, video games, being such an intensively collaborative medium, radically violate the convention of thinking of a work of art as the production of a single ‘creative genius’. There’s a similar phenomenon at work in cinema...

Which is absolutely true, of course. I can point to a handful of relatively well-known (amongst gamers, anyway) game designers; Warren Spector, Will Wright, Harvey Smith, Robin Walker, Clint Hocking, Jordan Thomas - to name a few, but none are really known outside the field, and as with cinema, while you might have two or three guys at the top supplying the vision (and it's nearly always guys - another problem right there), most of the grunt work is being done by a pool of bearded men in Star Wars T-shirts who almost inevitably seem to be called Andrew. Of course, as a film nerd and a gamer both, what I'd like most of all is for the gaming culture to start developing its own take on the auteur theory. And individual game studios do tend to develop a reputation of their own; Bioware make excellent RPGs, Infinity Ward make (or rather, made) their name in the shoot-lots-of-men-in-the-face genre, Russian developers generally make unpolished and sometimes unplayable or even downright incomprehensible works of genius (rather like the literature, really), and so on. But that's not quite the same thing. And the common-or-garden pubescent morons you find on Xbox Live don't much care who developed what unless it's an excuse for a console war. But I live in hope. Next bit:

So far as I can see, video games seem to be relatively uninterested in educating their players, or providing them with transformative experiences. I suspect people who appreciate a good game do so in aesthetic terms – that’s to say, appreciate it for its skilful balancing of the intellectual interest of the narrative, and the emotional resonance of the characters and situations, and the challenge of the problem-solving, and the excitement of the gameplay – rather than because it teaches them something. I also suspect that, when the game is better than merely good, the experience of playing it may well be transcendent – in that it takes the player away from themselves – but is unlikely to be transformative.

I beg to differ. I mean, I'll cop to most games not caring about educating their players, unless it's about the virtues of firing in short, controlled bursts or unsubtle America-saves-the-day-again propaganda. But games can be transformative. Taking the player away from themselves is one thing (immersion), and it's pretty much mandatory for a game worth its salt, and a large part of the appeal, but there's more to it than that.
To put it another way, everyone has music like that. Maybe you spent your teenage years being an Afghan Whigs lyric. Or met your future wife through a shared love of 'Across the Sea'. Had your mind blown by a combination of controlled substances and The Wall. Or cried your way through a painful bout of unrequited love with 'I Still Remember' and 'Mr. Brightside'*.
Well, all the same things can be true of games. I mean, I grew up with them. I remember playing Age of Empires with my dad as a kid. I was being scared by System Shock long before I ever saw a horror movie. The first time I got drunk at a party me and my friends ended up playing Guitar Hero. My first kiss happened after some guy and I got bored with Super Smash Bros. Melee (huge indictment of my seduction skills there, I know). This is beside the point; none of these are evidence of games being transformative, but the memories are still evocative. Everyone's got a mental soundtrack to their lives, and pretty soon there'll be a gaming equivalent.

But games can be life-changing in and of themselves, too. I know I've had my sense of humour informed by everything from Theme Hospital to Portal. A large part of my horrible personality comes from the residual bitterness you get from trying to play anything multiplayer with dial-up. Deus Ex got me into cyberpunk novels and The Man Who Was Thursday (still my favourite book). I know for a fact that I inherited my ...unique approach to problem-solving from text-adventure games. I got a vast breadth of war-nerdery from the likes of Operation Flashpoint.
OK, these aren't great examples, but for God's sake, people are getting married in MMOs. That should tell you something. Games journalist (and part of the Rock Paper Shotgun hivemind) Jim Rossignol credits Quake III for saving him from the drudgery of financial journalism in his (much-recommended) book This Gaming Life. And of course, just about everyone working in the games industry got inspired by it somehow, mostly by the work of their predecessors.
And if after all that you're still in doubt, it was Bioshock that finally persuaded me to read Atlas Shrugged, and that's a feat that all the teachers in the world couldn't perform. I still hated it, though. There's some things even art can't do for you.

* All true, canvassed from friends. One of them is mine. Shouldn't be hard to tell which.

A Red Letter Day

2010-07-04T12:55:00.008+01:00

I could see my entire life flash before my eyes, like one big gay pride parade!

Yesterday was Pride London, and I worked up the courage to go up there and spend what seemed the hottest day of the year (in oh so many ways) gaying it up and being vaguely political, in the best traditions of hipsters everywhere. Unfortunately, unlike last year, I wasn't able to take pictures of the parade because I was in the parade, and I wasn't able to take photos of cute guys because I was too busy flirting with them. Fun for me, not so much use for a blog post. Nonetheless.
I showed up a bit early, and inveigled my way into tagging along with LGBT Labour. This got me a bright red T-shirt, a brief handshake with Oona King (she's awesome, by the way, and would make a great mayor), and a three-hour stroll through central London with a bunch of fellow lefties and a small dog named Jacqueline Kennedy (a political animal, if you like). Incidentally, only amongst a group of gay men would you get the question 'Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, or just Jacqueline Kennedy?'.

Needless to say, the Labour people were muchly awesome, and I spent the parade handing out 'Never Kissed A Tory' stickers, which proved massively popular ('People of London! Accessorise those limp wrists! Socialists are cuter!'). I got my photo taken by the same gay Jedi as last year, who recognised me (the elbow-length stripy gloves stand out). Apparently I'm on Youtube somewhere from last time, but damned if I can find it. Just one step closer to internet celebrity. Part way through, I also got a cameraman following me around, so maybe I'm on the Belgian nightly news or something. I did learn that there are very few things in life that can be so irritating as a professional camera crew. 'Sorry, could you do that last bit again, only slower?' - which reminds me of a story from the war correspondent Edward Behr's excellent but disturbing memoirs, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speak English?, about a camera crew getting an Algerian firing squad to wait until the sound engineer was ready before shooting.
Anyway, we moved on, getting entangled in groups of rollerblading lesbians and drag queens, until the whole thing ground to a halt, again, because of these guys. Same slogans as last year, even the same signs, but some of my fellow sodomites must've tried remonstrating with them, because it took the police a while to cordon off the fundamentalists. I blew them a kiss again, but with a wall of police between us I couldn't get any closer than that. I didn't even hear any of what the guy with the megaphone was saying, on account of him being drowned out by applause and whistles for the parade.
Incidentally, and brilliantly, I found their sort of after-action report from last year on the interwebs.

Sizeable groups of enraged sodomites were allowed to get very close and scream their curses and threats, as well as making filthy gestures. A repeated tactic was for sodomites and lesbians to stand in front of the preachers and engage in prolonged kissing. The only reaction from the police was to snigger. The final straw was when a sodomite exposed his rear and a policeman standing a few yards away just grinned. I remonstrated with the said policeman who pretended he hadn't seen anything. I pointed out the culprit but nothing was done.

Quite apart from my making 'filthy gestures'*, I do appreciate the Met sometimes. Some of their officers were marching too, of course, and looking fantastic.
Anyway, I kept on going, doling out stickers to all and sundry (best response: 'honey, you can stick one on me any time you want'), and getting thoroughly exhausted from a combination of dehydration, heat, and skinny jeans cutting off all the circulation to my legs, but damned if I didn't look good. As my inimitable friend Maggie notes, 'Gay rights: making it okay for guys to do to themselves what women have been forced to do for ages'.
I didn't stick around for the main stage or the street party in Soho afterwards, mostly on account of being pretty much dead on my feet, but I did manage to get a couple more pictures before heading back to the boring, boring suburbs:

All in all, it was a fun day out. I'm proud of myself for making the effort to get up there, at least. It got me to thinking about politics, too. For the moment at least, I'm with Labour. They might be nigh-on useless at everything else, but they've been pretty consistently good on LGBT rights in government. Call me a single-issue voter, but there it is. Especially given that your alternatives are the various Trot factions all fighting amongst themselves, or the distinct uncertainty of the Lib Dems.
It strikes me sometimes that I'm not really built for modern gayness. In a lot of ways, I feel like I can identify more with the sort of Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward type of thing, back when homosexuality was still mysterious, sexy and dangerous. Then again, that's almost certainly vanity on my part - it's not like I had to live with it. And for all its myriad faults, pride is still A Good Thing. It might've turned from a protest into a party, and the modern gay scene can be supremely stupid in its own way (body fascism, political complacency, awful music), but the legacy of what the GLF did back in the day was to bring homosexuality into the light of day, and if the tradeoff to having to listen to broken hard-drive sound techno is drag queens in corsets and kinky boots marching through central London and royally pissing off moralising, fascistic cunts like the Zion Tabernacle, then that's a trade worth keeping, and being proud of.

* I've long believed that homosexuality is only filthy if you're doing it right.

Uh... Help?

2010-06-21T03:18:00.010+01:00

Danger, Will Robinson! This is going to be one of those posts. Long, angsty, self-obsessed, and more than a little incoherent. You may want to skip it if you don't have a lot of patience for me talking about how I've got, as the kids these days say, Issues. That is all.

* * *

I don't feel well
I've got this rattling in my chest
And the doctor says I should give it up
Because I'm clinically obsessed

So I've just finished re-reading Michael Chabon's (excellent) novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I bring this up because spread throughout it are the arc words 'these are strange times to be a Jew'. I'm not even slightly Jewish, but the fictional Sitkaniks don't have a monopoly on strangeness. Actually, a friend of mine at Croydon used to ask sometimes whether I felt like I was in the middle of an absurdist play, and that's pretty much what life is like at the moment. Although perhaps a better comparison would be Ibsen, or Chekov - gloomy, purposeless, and really quite dull.

Strange times indeed. I'm waiting on my mum's house move coming through so I can move out of the city I've lived my whole life in, to one that I don't know at all. I feel directionless, uncertain. And combined with the prospect of leaving everyone I know down here, and Fathers' Day just having gone past, it's got me in one of those awful philosophical moods that makes me write long, rambling, pretentious blog posts to no-one in particular.
I'm back on the self-loathing thing again, too. It's been a while since I indulged in a really serious bout of it, but I'm making up for it now. I blame The Bell Jar, actually. I'm dragging myself through it at the moment; it's the first time I've read it, and over the course of the first few chapters I've already flung it across the room a few times in sheer exasperation. Mostly at sentences like 'The first time I saw a finger-bowl was at the home of my benefactress' (giving Sylvia Plath some credit, it must've taken an incredible literary talent to have written that in earnest), but also because thus far it's striking me as impossibly bourgeois, pretentious, shallow masquerading as deep, and utterly self-obsessed. And then after a second, I start to think 'Oh Christ, is that what listening to me is like?'.

This is a problem with misanthropy. Start believing that people are fundamentally some variation on a theme of venal, corrupt, bigoted, violent, conceited, hopeless sickening bastards*, and you have to include yourself in one or all of those categories too. Otherwise, you're just being hypocritical. You could probably add 'hypocritical' to the list as well, come to think of it, but that's just a little bit too meta for me at the moment.
It also strikes me that I don't really know how to deal with people. That's not dislike or even contempt, more outright fear. I can go through the motions OK, when I put my mind to it, but a lot of the time I find it hard to like people, care about them, understand them, make any kind of commitment to them. And all of that goes double for myself. I don't really like that part of me. In point of fact, I hate it. Misanthropy isn't a fashion accessory for me. It's part of a grab-bag of neuroses that comprise something that looks like a personality from a distance.
Mind you, I don't think I'm wrong about people. But maybe the trick is to be able to see all of the fucked-up repugnant shit people unleash upon the world, themselves and each other, and still be able to believe the in the best of human nature. I suspect that particular feat of mental gymnastics is always going to be beyond me, though.
I'm a little bit fucked physically at the moment, too, and not in the good way. Occasional bouts of mental weirdness that are hard to describe. I start to feel wildly dissociated from everything. Slightly nauseous, too, with a strange sort of empty feeling; the best I can describe that last part as would be a headache, but stranger. That's rather underselling it, though. Things start to seem a little unreal, and that's a scary prospect.

The paranoia doesn't help. All the miscellaneous aches and pains and shakes that come with a pack-a-day nicotine habit and a caffeine, sugar and alcohol rollercoaster are immediately indicative of having caught some horrific disease or condition (neuroses of mine; it goes a long way back - probably something to do with scary experiences in hospitals with childhood epilepsy). What's really getting to me at the moment, though, is a more existential version of the same. I start to worry that I'm losing my grip on reality. Start thinking about schizophrenia. I can't really seem to shake off the feeling that something is going badly wrong. I'm familiar with the wonderful 'feelings of impending doom' that come with panic attacks, but this is different somehow. A sort of low-level fear and trembling sort of thing.
I haven't been sleeping, not really, and when I do it's at odd hours, days apart. I wake up in the middle of the afternoon, covered in sweat, shaking, with horrible images of rotting flesh in my head. That can't be normal, although it's not exactly news, either.
I don't really know what to make of all this. I hope it's just stress. That things will be better with a fresh start. I'm almost starting to fetishise stuff to put in a new flat. The strangest things, too. Aluminium giraffes, for fuck's sake. Bookends. Tat. It's the IKEA generation, taken to its logical conclusion; hold onto your self-identity with objets d'art. Maybe it's about control**. Having a space that's definably mine, to do what I want with. That would certainly explain the bewildering desire for a big mahogany Edwardian desk with a lot of drawers that lock. I don't even have anything that needs protecting or hiding like that, except maybe myself. I feel vaguely ashamed of having elevated materialistic, aspirational 'lifestyle-building' to an art form like this, but at the moment it feels like something to hang onto. 'I am a human being. I know this because I own an interestingly art deco set of coffee spoons'.
But right now, what I need is an anchor. Metaphorically, not literally. Even I'm not that kitsch. And if that means measuring out my life in coffee spoon s, so be it.

* If you grew up Catholic, you might reasonably call that original sin. Me, I call it human nature.
** Someday I will write a big long blog post about BDSM, and what it says about my incredible level of fucked-upness that I need it in my sex life, and how as with cutting, pain becomes something of a tethering element.

That's Me In The Spotlight

2010-06-18T14:45:00.008+01:00

'You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you.
This is not the worst thing that can happen.'

Ah, religion. Well, this shouldn't cause any controversy or anything. But I'm not a complete idiot, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Behind my sarcastic-bastard atheism, I can still respect the idea. Religious faith is human nature; we need to be observed and judged on our actions, and it's easier and more believable to ascribe that to gods and prophets than it is to think of it as a kind of narcissism; the fundamental vanity of thinking that anything we do matters on any kind of a universal scale. And for all the dogma, intolerance and bigotry, it's still asking fundamental questions about the nature of life, the universe and everything, and the basic message of just about any religious doctrine you care to name is always some variation on 'be excellent to each other'. So, I can get behind that much at least. Faith, to me, embodies some of the best and worst facets of human nature. You don't need me to tell you about the bad parts. But it also gives people something to aspire to, an at least nominal drive to build a better world, and that's one of the noblest parts of humanity.

Or so plenty of people have asked themselves, over the years. It doesn't help that people on some level have a need for some kind of tangible authority, I think. For most people (i.e. non-schizophrenics), it's hard to get a direct message out of a god who doesn't show up. He nice, the Jesus, but if some visible dude in a funny hat gets up on a platform and starts talking at you, you're going to tend to listen to him instead. Which brings me to Benny Hinn.

Yes, this is a real thing.
Probably better not to ask.

If you don't know him, he's essentially a televangelist, who amongst other things, makes amusingly inaccurate predictions about the fate of the world:

Jesus is coming again within the next two years.
- Benny Hinn, 1997

Jesus Christ will appear with me on the platform...
- Benny Hinn, 2000

And does 'faith healing', via the unusual expedient of knocking people over and shouting at them in a weird, borderline-dadaist accent only found in Canadian-Israelis and Scottish drunks:

So he's a charlatan. A pretty talented one, I should say, with a knowledge of stagecraft and a very fine example of the ubiquitous white suit and pompadour look. And it's also quite funny to watch, in a horrific kind of way. These are adults, after all, and if they want to pay for the privilege of being pushed off their chair by a vituperative orange shyster in the name of Jesus, that's their own personal lunacy. But what shouldn't surprise anyone who's seen Jesus Camp, is that people bring their kids to these things. This verges from horrifically uncomfortable to bizarrely funny:

It gets even worse once you look at the numbers, and see that this guy's ministry takes in over $200 million a year. Which is a lot of money to push people over. I'd like to say that this is one of those uniquely American phenomenons, like spray-on cheese, but Hinn and people like him take their respective travelling circuses all over the world, and in particular have a huge audience in Africa. It's really not too hard to draw a line from this kind of con artist, through the evangelical movement and the activities of groups like the amazingly-sinister-sounding Family to a whole wave of Very Bad Things happening in Africa, in particular Uganda. Of course, other denominations are just as guilty of this (why would you trust a man who's taken a vow of celibacy to tell you about the morality of contraception?), but evangelical Protestantism is probably the worst offender in my mind. I'm sure it gives a lot of people solace, but when you're spewing bigotry, intolerance and lies to all four corners of the earth for money, you can't expect people not to call bullshit. Oh, and just in case I didn't have enough reason to be scornful, it turns out demons and witches make you cut yourself:

This is, needless to say, tremendously depressing. Not to mention taking advantage of deeply vulnerable people for financial gain. I get weirdly protective of self-harmers as a group sometimes, which is odd considering how free I feel to mock them at others. But to quote a very wise man, I'm the captain of this leaking, half-sunk failboat, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give this fucker a pass. Mental health care as it stands now is complicated, fuzzy, and sometimes outright useless. But a lot of the time, it actually works. And in the words of MC Hawking, what we need more of is science.

Splitters

2010-06-15T14:47:00.006+01:00

By this point, I'm pretty much out of the Socialist Party. Mostly I just stopped going to meetings and answering phone calls, which is pretty much a pattern I'm used to by now. I think we can chalk it up to a combination of laziness and a distinct feeling of wasting my time. It turns out I'm not actually a very good idealist. However, I'm still on all the mailing lists, which means my inbox is periodically filled with various party things. Sometimes they're worth a look. In this case, this one'd be a very good reason to ditch the party, even if I hadn't already:

As many of you will already have heard, the racist EDL have decided to “hit” Tower Hamlets on 20^t^h June [They've now called it off, which is why I'm posting this.]

[Blah blah blah various theory bits]

We are now participating in a broad local campaign United East End, set up to organise a massive community and trade union demonstration on Sunday 20^th June. Unfortunately, the SWP and UAF are playing a central role in this which means there is no class content to their statements and Tories are on the platform of the rally they have organised for the Sunday before (this Sunday)! Nonetheless they have been forced to co-operate with other local forces [emphasis mine]

I mean, seriously. The nazis come to Tower Hamlets, and you're complaining about being on the same platform as the SWP? The mind boggles. The Tories I can half understand, given how they've been quite happy to use racism (tacit or otherwise) as an electoral tool, but the SWP? And UAF? Jesus. And we wonder why the British left can never seem to put up a united front. Petty, territorial bickering of the worst kind.
And as for the EDL, I'll leave it for Batman to tell it like it is.

Word.

Gun Enthusiasts

2010-06-03T00:07:00.010+01:00

Horrific news from Cumbria, in a disturbingly familiar pattern:

Twelve people were killed by a gunman who went on the rampage across Cumbria in north-west England.
Taxi driver Derrick Bird shot dead a colleague in the town of Whitehaven, before driving through the countryside apparently targeting people at random.

No-one really knows why yet, and my feeling is that we won't ever get a full answer. To a certain extent, I don't suppose it matters - there's no justification you could make for it anyway, and sometimes it really is as simple as someone just snapping.

Obviously, there are going to be broader consequences than just the tragedy itself. Judging by the likes of Hungerford and Dunblane, it seems likely that the weapons Derrick Bird used are going to be found to have been owned legally, and a change in British firearms law seems a probable response.
And then there's arming the police. Gadget already has a post on this, which I highly recommend you read. This should come as a surprise to no-one, but I disagree with his conclusions. The thinking is that if the officers who had responded initially had been armed, they could have stopped Bird before he killed anyone else. I realise I'm thoroughly unqualified to offer an informed opinion here, but I don't know that that's true. Even in countries where police are routinely armed, shootings like this tend to play out in the same way; the gunman kills most, if not all, of the victims in the time it takes for the police to pull together an organised response, is ultimately surrounded, and kills himself. That's been true of the most well-known spree shootings in both the US and Europe. No doubt cleverer people than me have been working on ways to stop that from happening, but by itself I don't see that routinely arming police officers is going to help.
The other problem, to my mind, is that it's not a proportionate response. I know it sounds callous, but this kind of crime is rare in Britain. Off the top of my head, the last shooting like this was in 1996, and before that 1987. They're shocking and tragic and they grab headlines, but they're also isolated incidents. Arming every British police officer as a precaution against a crime that happens on average maybe once a decade, and a precaution that's by no means guaranteed to be effective, seems rather to be overreacting.
Plus it's a risk. Despite what lovely Miss Scott taught me in primary school, I don't believe it's true that you can always trust a policeman, with the possible exception of asking for the correct time. British armed police do not have a great record, all things considered. And it's worth noting that those are highly-trained officers who are called out to firearms incidents hundreds of times a year. A handful of ~~murders~~ ~~unlawful killings~~ controversial incidents across twenty plus years is a handful too many, but it seems to me that it's exponentially less than there'd be if we issued every police officer with a pistol and some perfunctory training. Unless you're firmly in the Black Bloc, it's not a stretch to say that police are people too. People get nervous, people get scared, and if you introduce guns into that equation, some of the time people get shot.

Special relationship or no, Britain isn't America. We don't have gun crime on the scale that mandates armed police. Of course, there's a part of me that'd like coppers to be carrying guns around, on the basis of 'coolness'. I call this part of me the War Nerd, after the eXile columnist of the same name. This is the same guy that would rather British police had big scary muscle cars or sleek Italian things instead of Vauxhall Vectras, too. The same guy who thinks a UAV that can dismantle an entire Waziristani village in the blink of an eye is awesome and not just an instrument of state terror. Probably there is some subtext here. And it's all part of the human condition, I suppose. This is pretty repugnant, though, so I try to keep the War Nerd on a tight leash.
The better part of me is proud that generally, our police don't need guns. I'm proud of our police for being able to ...well, police this country with only 'an aluminium expandable stick, a few grams of pepper and some handcuffs'*. Nazis are always talking about the need to preserve the traditional British way of life, whatever that means. I reckon we can do without casual violence, binge drinking and xenophobia, but to my mind, one British tradition that needs preserving is unarmed police. For one thing, it baffles the Americans no end. Arming police makes them less approachable, more distant, more hostile, and it's another unwelcome step in the direction of militarising law enforcement (and we know what can happen when you send an army to do policing).

* Offer may not apply for viewers in Northern Ireland.

Trendy

2010-05-19T14:48:00.011+01:00

Janet Street-Porter is just one of those people who, whenever I see them on TV or whatever, I always feel a corresponding need to shout and throw things. But the worst part is, I can't even remember what she's done to piss me off so badly. It can't just have been a snap judgement on my part, can it? I mean, there must be some reason I don't like her.

...oh yeah. Thanks for the help there, Janet.

'Depression? It's just the new trendy illness!'. Yes, I can see how this might be a nuanced look at Britain's mental health. It's the 'trendy' that gets me, though. Just the sneering, ugly superiority of it, dressed up in 'Ooh, you know what I'm like - I tell it like it is, me'. No. No. Listen. Being ill-informed and loud is not the same as being forthright, or honest. It doesn't make you independent or politically incorrect, and it doesn't mean you're in some way speaking truth to power. It just makes you sound like a mental fucking defective.
This shouldn't make me as angry as it does. I shrugged off the Jan Moir thing, pretty much. But here we are, and although I've no doubt mentioned it before, I think it bears repeating:
Depression is not a fashion statement. It is not something you buy to go with your trendy new Balenciaga shoes. It is not attention-seeking. It is not an excuse for a bit of tea and sympathy. For many people, what it is is a crippling fucking illness. And if you seriously believe otherwise, you're a fucking git.
But wait, it gets worse!

I am not denying that clinical depression is a real mental illness

Well, yes, you kind of are, aren't you?

But let's take a moment to consider whether depression is common among the poor or the working class?

Fuck you. No, seriously, fuck you Janet Street-Porter. Fuck you so much for trying to make this into a class issue. But since you asked, let's take a moment to consider. In particular, I'd like to consider this study (can't find a link to the thing itself, would be much obliged for one):

Children from poor families are more likely than their peers to be depressed as teenagers, with effects that can ultimately make it harder to climb out from poverty, a new study suggests.
[...]
The study, which followed nearly 500 Iowa families for a decade, found that children in poorer families were at greater risk of depression symptoms by adolescence.

Or some of this data:

Adults in the poorest fifth are much more likely to be at risk of developing a mental illness as those on average incomes: 20% compared with 8% for men and 24% compared with 15% for women. [...] People from manual backgrounds are at slightly higher risk of developing a mental illness than those from non-manual backgrounds.

So the answer to that (presumably rhetorical) original question was in fact 'Yes, and it's actually more common'. Not that this stops Janet:

I find something very slightly repellent about this recent epidemic of middle-class breast-beating.

Well, so far we've established that it's not recent, it's not an epidemic (in fact, the proportion of the working-age population estimated to be at elevated risk of mental illness has gone down over the past decade), and it's not middle-class. I can also add that no breasts were harmed in the making of this post. So that sentence would be an example of what is technically known as 'making shit up'.
That's just the inaccuracy. Let's move on to mocking and berating people for daring to talk about having low self-esteem. Maybe after that we can challenge some paraplegics to a dance-off.

This tidal wave of analysis about why 'having it all' isn't what it was cracked up to be. Why daily life is a series of disappointments. Why sufferers feel empty and suicidal. Get a grip, girls!

[...]

But my life goes on, I haven't retreated under the duvet with a bottle of pills.

More's the pity.

Justine writes: 'If I consider my female friends, most of them have been identified as suffering from, or treated for, depression at some point in their 40s.' Well, I've conducted a straw poll of my friends and I beg to differ. Do we move in such very different circles? Isn't this 'new' depression an affliction which seems to be the prerogative of the chattering classes?

I can only presume that the concept of a self-selecting sample is an alien one here. If peer-reviewed studies show depression (and treatment for it, so it's not like you have to be middle-class to recognise it) as being pretty much universal economically, and the conclusion you come to after asking around your friends is that it's a chattering classes thing... doesn't that say more about your friends than it does about depression? This is why I love anecdata.

I'm not a complete cynic...

Yes you are. You'll be trying to flog us copies of your books in a minute, look:

...but I am a 100 per cent ruthless realist. I've written two books about my no-nonsense attitude to life. The first, Life's Too F****** Short, has been published all over the world, from Slovenia to Sweden, Spain and the U.S., and I've received a mountain of mail from people who say that my key message - that you need to strip away the c**p that clogs up your existence - made them laugh out loud.

I'll cop to my ignorance here; I haven't read Janet Street-Porter's book, on account of, y'know, life being too fucking short and all that. But I'd venture to suggest that 'it made me laugh out loud' doesn't quite mean the same thing as 'this means you're qualified to issue proclamations about mental health'. I suspect very few psychiatry textbooks have ever made anyone laugh out loud, but I have an inkling they might be a better source of information about depression than some hectoring self-help bollocks.

It's called self-empowerment and costs absolutely nothing. The whole notion of stress simply did not exist a few years ago - it's become a by-product of the ' megeneration' that grew up in the Sixties and wanted to try everything, from drink to drugs to sex.

Funny, I always found that drink, drugs and sex made me feel less stressed. The whole notion of stress being a new thing is about the closest this column ever gets to the actual truth, and it's only a brief flirtation. Street-Porter seems to be spectacularly missing the point, which is that while recognising and managing stress on any kind of organised or systematic level is new, stress itself isn't. Or are we supposed to believe no-one ever felt overworked before someone came up with a name for it?

...you can't claim time off work because you're fat. You can, however, suddenly find you can't 'cope' - and stress has become, in our work-orientated society, almost a badge of honour.

This is a form of magic, I'm sure. Every time I think it's gotten as bad as it can, it keeps getting worse. A badge of honour? Fuck me. If that's the case, I'd quite like to have my ticker-tape parade now, I think I've earned it. Except it isn't, of course. It's stigmatised and derided and dismissed, not least because of articles like this.

Stress has become so acceptable, the last government decided that the NHS would make counselling available for a whole variety of mental illnesses, from stress to depression to panic attacks and low self-esteem, totally gratis.

Thought we'd hit rock bottom with that last quote, didn't you? Well, Janet has now started to dig. But if you missed the last eighty years of Britain and don't want to know the score, look away now. 'Totally gratis' is what the NHS is for. It is kind of a thing. And just because the NHS treats something, doesn't mean it's 'acceptable', whatever that means, to the broader society, because the NHS is a medical organisation and not in the business of making value judgements.

Stress is a technical term used to describe the different loadings on a beam. Now it can mean virtually anything. My mum's generation didn't suffer from stress or depression. Instead, they just got on with the washing up, the ironing, their long hours in low-paid jobs, and - every Saturday without fail - they baked a bloody good Victoria sponge.

A pretty fair number of them stuck their heads in the gas oven afterwards, though.

Now, men are jumping on the depression bandwagon...

[...]

According to Tim, if - as research now indicates - 45 per cent of women earn the same or more than their husbands, then the male ego is under attack, and it's no wonder that more and more chaps are experiencing feelings of worthlessness and insecurity.
At this point, I'm afraid to say, I laugh out loud. The idea of feeling sorry for a bloke with low self-esteem is, frankly, risible. Let's just call it karmic revenge for all those years men have been in charge of everything.

I hate to interrupt Janet Street-Dworkin here, but if you're going to tie depression to the progress of feminism, doesn't it make sense to ask how it affects men, as well, instead of just finding it risible? First there's this huge assumption that if men are 'jumping on the depression bandwagon', whatever that means, it must be because they're feeling emasculated, a second logic jump from them feeling emasculated to this being because of women earning more, and then a steadfast refusal to consider what, if true, this might actually mean. Personally, I think it'd be an interesting thing to note about patriarchy that it pressures men into a repressive gender role (and a heteronormative one, but that's beside the point). Obviously to nowhere near the same extent as it does women, but if men are feeling emasculated in this way, then it strikes me that that's a conversation that needs to be had, and not just dismissed out of hand, because otherwise the whole anti-feminist backlash is only going to get worse.
Anyway, there's some more in this vein, but to be honest I don't think I have the patience for it. Just awful journalism from an awful person.

Electioneering

2010-05-07T08:41:00.006+01:00

Let's just get the cock jokes out of the way now, shall we?
This election has been something of a disappointment. On the campaign trail, amid early polling, we were promised a long build-up to a dramatic, exciting climax. Ultimately, however, the hoped-for Lib Dem surge failed to materialise, leaving them to make embarrassed excuses. On the other hand, the Conservatives were unable to fully implement their plan to comprehensively fuck the British electorate. But, with scenes of anger as some polling stations were unable to maintain an election, we seem to have ended up with a parliament that is disappointingly hung, and the continued (and desperately unwanted) presence of Balls.
...I think that's all of them. If you have any more, do add them in the comments.
So. Now that it's all over bar the shouting as everyone desperately flails around for a coalition that's workable, some thoughts about Election 2010. I didn't catch a massive amount of the actual coverage on the night; I was flicking from C4 to BBC1 until about midnight, then switched to the BBC, and around 2 in the morning my brain shut down automatically to save me from a fatal overdose of Dimbleby. I wish I'd had the foresight to do drinking games. Luckily, I'll probably get another chance in about six months or so.

Thought 1: No overall Conservative majority.
Ha! Suck it, posh boy*. 13 years of New Labour, which have included such notable cock-ups as, for instance, two wars, and people still aren't willing to come out for the Harris Tweed Alternative in sufficient numbers, even with a larger-than-expected turnout. What's more, Phillippa Stroud, noted Tory madwoman and social policy engineer, comprehensively failed to get elected in Sutton and Cheam, with the Lib Dem incumbent holding on by a good 1500 votes or so.
OK, so it's still not clear who's actually going to end up in government, or how long they'll be able to stay there, but being a pessimist I was expecting a Tory win, and I'm happy to be wrong.

Thought 2: Nick Clegg is going to be Very Important, momentarily.
If a Lib-Lab coalition is workable (still short of a majority I think, but it'd keep the Tories out for a while at least), that'd be deemed an acceptable level of win from where I'm standing. I saw Labour putting the feelers out to the Lib Dems pretty much all night, so there doesn't seem to be a question of any reluctance there. I suppose it depends on what the Lib Dems' price is. Electoral reform seems like the obvious answer. On the off-chance it's actually delivered, British politics will get several shades more exciting, and I'll be off to make my living as a guerrilla psephologist.
On the other hand, if the Lib Dems deal with the Tories (unlikely if you ask me, but possible anyway) there will be an explosion of very polite and moderate rage from their supporters, the likes of which has never been seen.

Semi-Thought: Gordon Brown's speech in Kirkcaldy wasn't 'elegiac', just awkward. Same as all his speeches.

Thought 3: MPs I sort of care about.
Sad to see Evan Harris losing his seat (part of an overall trend of Fail for the Lib Dems - get me on the next BBC election coverage, I'll break out my trademark Failometer), but glad to see Caroline Lucas become the first Green MP. Lembit Opik losing his seat? Meh. Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke losing their seats? Yay!

Thought 4: How I voted, and how my constituency voted.
Safest Conservative seat in the country? Not as much as it was supposed to be, but kinda. 4.5% swing to the Lib Dems (who I voted for), although unfortunately that wasn't nearly enough and Bosnia Bob is my new MP with a sizeable majority (something like 18,000). Labour got beaten into third by the Lib Dems, ahead of UKIP, the BNP, the Greens and the English Democrats, in that order. In all, the fascist BNP twunts got 2.1% of the vote - just over a thousand, and 400 more than the Greens. As predicted, UKIP proved to be far more Our Sort of People for voters here. Bah. Disappointing, but few surprises.

democracy in action, looking bewildered and slightly awkward

Semi-Thought: For all the talk of the Politics of Hope, the Politics of Fear and the Politics of Change, what the British public really embraced was the politics of meh.

Thought 5: How it's all going to play out.
Backroom deals. What used to be beer and sandwiches, although if you're dealing with the Lib Dems it's really going to be more of an Evian and paninis sort of deal.

Thought 6: If the first ten hours of it are any judge, being 19 is highly, highly over-rated.

* Coincidentally, this is also the title of my forthcoming autobiography. Available soon in all good bookshops.

Alex Kelly, Domestic Goddess

2010-05-02T08:52:00.009+01:00

Since between Nigella Lawson and Sophie Dahl, the BBC seem to be pulling out all the stops as regards food porn, I thought it might be timely to offer some cookery tips myself. Given that I'm a useless-to-outright-dangerous cook and I probably don't make very good 'posh totty' (hourglass figure notwithstanding), don't hold your breath for a TV series any time soon, though.
Let's start with breakfast. The most important meal of the day, because it tells your body you're sorry for bludgeoning it into submission with alcohol the night before. If you're into healthy eating, it should be fairly easy to knock up a thin, watery gruel and some green tea to prepare you for a busy day of sneering at non-vegans and collapsing due to malnutrition, but for me a good breakfast should strike an unhealthy balance between the main food groups of sugar, fat, caffeine, salt and burnt crispy bits. This is how it's done, in an easy-to-follow step by step guide.

1) Tie on the flowery pink apron.
For me, cooking's no fun if you can't subvert oppressive gender paradigms while you're doing it, and there's a lot to be said for unnecessary ceremony in mundane things. It also looks pretty.

2) Coffee.
Put the kettle on. If you need me to tell you how to do that, there's no hope for you. Shuffle the empty beer bottles (Corona, for preference) aside to make room for the cafetiere. Add ground coffee. There was going to be a bit here mocking people who buy Fairtrade coffee, but I've just checked and it seems I do, having missed the tiny little 'ethically sourced' decal. The more coffee you put in the cafetiere, the better. Once the kettle's boiled, add the water, stir halfheartedly and move on to step 3.

3) Bacon.
This is essential. It's most definitely bad for the environment, bad for you, and ethically just plain bad, but I'm all kinds of selfish and bacon is all kinds of delicious. Take a large frying pan. This should contain an accumulated layer of fat and miscellaneous grease that can cause you to gain weight just by looking at it. The more sensible of you may consider this a health risk, but here I refer to the bible of home economics, Discworld:

'I was only scraping the old fat out of the pan,' he mumbled.
'I see. And how long have we known each other, Sham?' said Vimes, with terrible kindness.
'Years, Cap'n,' said Harga. 'You bin coming in here nearly every day, reg'lar. One of my best customers.'
Vimes leaned over the counter until his nose was level with the squashy pink thing in the middle of Harga's face.
'And in all that time, have you ever changed the fat?' he demanded.
Harga tried to back away. 'Well-'
'It's been like a friend to me, that old fat,' said Vimes. 'There's little black bits in there I've grown to know and love. It's a meal in itself...'
-Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Wash hands. I'm untidy, not completely stupid. Add the bacon to the pan. Wash hands again to get horrible clammy bacon-ness off. Return to the bacon. I then like to employ a technique that's technically known amongst food scientists as 'burning the fuck out if it'. If the frying pan isn't periodically spitting scalding fat at your forearms, turn the heat up. Continue until the entire kitchen is filled with the smell of delicious ethical quandary, turning when bored. Repeat until bacon is hard enough that it can be shattered if hit with a spatula. While all this is going on, take a couple of slices of bread. If the bread's stale, claim it's toast. Spread approx. one metric fuckton of butter on each. Use low-fat spread if you're worried about your heart. Place the now-cooked bacon on the bread and turn off the oven. Apply ketchup to bacon in large quantities for the full coronary experience.

4) Coffee. Again.
By this point, the coffee should have been brewing for about a year. This is good. It adds flavour. Filter it, pour it into a mug. Aspire to winning the lottery and buying some ridiculously expensive glasses instead. Add between three and seven sugars, depending on how busy the day's likely to be and how bad the hangover is. 'Optionally', add some of what's left of the bottle of good whisky you couldn't really afford and keep at the back of the cupboard to save you having to share it with guests if it looks like it's going to be One Of Those Days. If it doesn't seem like it's going to be One Of Those Days, it definitely will be. Add whisky.

5) The dining experience.
Take off the apron, sit down, eat the bacon sandwich and drink the coffee. Try not to cover yourself in ketchup, bacon grease or coffee. Start to feel approximately human. Pile the plate and mug atop the other detritus in the sink. Water the mould, if you're feeling humanitarian.

6) Nicotine.
Trade one kind of unhealthy for another and go sit outside and people-watch with a cigarette to give your body time to recover from the digestive sucker-punch you've just fed it. Go forth into the city, a little bit tarnished and a lot afraid. Or go back inside and check your RSS feeds.

* * *

How things have been: difficult. I've been neglecting just about all forms of communication due to a combination of flu, nicotine withdrawal, and good old-fashioned depression and anxiety. So if you've been waiting for an email or a text from me or a new post here, I apologise. Hopefully I'm going into a bit more of a productive mindset now. Things continue apace with the moving-to-Scotland thing. I'm still a bit clusterfucked and indecisive, and weighing the merits of staying here against a fresh start somewhere new, but my mum's arrangements for moving seem to be all falling into place. I'm glad, but it's a little bit daunting, too. I feel bad for worrying about it, because either way on paper I've got a situation people would kill for. It's just that it doesn't make me feel any better, and I'd much rather be sorting myself out. I just don't know if I can do that. It's a combination of feeling directionless about all the options I have, feeling like an arsehole for having them, and feeling trapped by not being able to do any of them. I might be being stupid here. In any case, I'll have a think about things.

What else is up: Stuff. There is a Super-Secret Thing in progess. You'll know more if anything happens with it and if I tell you. Other than that, I've mostly been watching Dr Who (I want to twang Matt Smith's red braces) and Ashes to Ashes (I'm very firmly on side with Team Keats, God help me. Daniel Mays saying 'Do we need to talk, Alex?' makes me swoon more than is wholly reasonable). There's also a Writing Thing in the works. It's early days yet, but my esteemed and brilliant colleague and I might just be onto something.
Oh shit, and it's my birthday on the 7th. I'll be 19. I want to be 15 again and do everything better. I don't know if I'm doing anything. Maybe sitting at home in the dark, stuffing cake into my face.

I Got Election

2010-04-09T07:44:00.006+01:00

So fairly soon we're going to have a general election. I'm voting for the first time, and it's a rather brutal introduction to parliamentary democracy to have Wikipedia call your constituency 'the safest Conservative seat in the country'. Figures. There's essentially no point in me voting, but I'm going to do it anyway because if you can vote and don't, that's less a protest and more taking the fact that you have a vote at all for granted, at least to me. People have to participate in the workings of government, even when they're what political scientists like to call 'completely fucking retarded'. At least I'm not going to get disillusioned and jaded about British politics, because I already am. Anyway, our long-time Conservative MP is stepping down after eighteen years of not doing much (although she did sign this, which is nice, I suppose), and the seat is going to be hotly contested by a crack team of political animals. In no particular order, meet the single least inspiring candidate list ever:

Bob Stewart, Conservatives
A retired colonel, not that you'd know to look at him. Almost certainly going to be the next MP, then spend his tenure propping up the House of Commons bar until death or retirement, whichever comes sooner. Not that I'm belittling the man's military service, it's just that being parachuted into a safe seat seems like the closest thing to an actual pension military officers get these days. It's a long and venerable tradition dating back to the rotten boroughs. At least in the Victorian days they had a choice between that and writing books with titles like 'Through the Congo With Gun and Camera'.
Almost certainly going to be elected, almost certainly going to be a completely unremarkable backbencher, perhaps with an occasional burst of bring-back-the-birch insanity to enliven things.

Stephen Jenkins, Lib Dems
Who?

...the worst part is, I'm probably going to be voting for him.

Damien Egan, Labour
No picture or link appears to be forthcoming, which should tell you how serious this campaign is. He'll pick up some votes in the more urban, old-Labour wards, probably, and then spend the rest of his time getting absolutely creamed. Perhaps not quite as badly as the Lib Dem candidate, but nonetheless.

Roger Tonks, BNP
That's right, the BNP have managed to do what the Wehrmacht never did, and bring Nazis to the outskirts of London. He'll most likely get a tiny fraction of the vote, presumably from senile old racists, but the fact that the bigoted, hopeless cunts actually have a candidate here is just downright insulting. Then again, I suppose a large part of the Conservative demographic here will be the aforementioned senile old bastards, still in thrall to Enoch Powell. It doesn't help that Beckenham is probably the single whitest place on the planet (with the possible exception of the North Pole), so no-one need ever have their prejudices challenged or anything. But at the risk of sounding classist, or prejudiced myself, I think this constituency's just a little too well-heeled for the BNP. Our racists are the net-curtain twitching type, as opposed to the my-mate-Reg-says-there's-fifty-billion-asylum-seekers-now type. Mail, rather than Sun territory. Which means lots of votes for the colonel, and not so many for Sturmbannfuhrer Tonks. Lesser of two evils, I suppose.

Also some woman from the Green Party who doesn't stand a chance, and a complete political nonentity from UKIP. See what I mean? Inspiring! Yaaaaay representative democracy. The worst part for me personally is the timing of polling day. I may well wake up the next day and get a Cameron government for a birthday present. How's that for a depressing thought?

"And the Survey Says..."

2010-03-23T16:27:00.005Z

Most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have been verbally abused and a third physically attacked, according to a new survey.
The statistics from Stonewall Scotland suggested most people did not report the incidents to the police.

Well, I'm shocked like Captain Renault. Luckily, Stonewall are on the case:

[Director of Stonewall Scotland] Carl Watt added: "As this new law [the Sentencing of Offences Aggravated by Prejudice (Scotland) Bill] tackling hate crime comes into force, we're working with the police to give people the confidence to come forward and report crime."

Excellent. How are you doing that, exactly, Mr Watt?

As part of this process Stonewall Scotland has offered every Scottish police force rainbow flag stickers to show the public the police force is committed to equality for everyone.

Oh. Well, that'll come in handy. Rainbow flag stickers, Jesus. Speaking personally, I've never met a single LGBT person with a story along the lines of 'I was a victim of X because I'm gay, and the police cleared it right up'. In my somewhat limited experience, the survey's absolutely right about most hate crimes of this calibre going unreported. And the response to this is a draft bill that's been kicked around the Scottish Parliament for the past three years, and some rainbow flag stickers. If I'm going to the police to report homophobic abuse and so forth, I couldn't really give a flying fuck if they're wearing committed-to-equality-for-everyone stickers. To be honest, I wouldn't care if they dressed up as fucking Cinderella, just so long as they actually were committed to equality for everyone/sitting in a circle holding hands and singing kumbaya. I do find myself getting awfully pissed off with the likes of Inspector Gadget at times for taking every opportunity possible to kick the shit out of political correctness, mostly because things are a lot better now than they were back in the day, and it no longer being quite so acceptable to trade ethnic jokes or whatever is a part of that. It's not that I don't believe the stories about how the police aren't allowed to ask for Christian names and such*, but where I disagree is that I don't think that's a question of hurr-political-correctness-gone-mad so much as it's bad management from the likes of the ACPO.
What bothers me is that once we kind of had political correctness, in the sense of it probably being frowned upon to, say, black up and call it wholesome family entertainment, there followed a sort of obsession with image. Which is a different thing, but it seems sometimes that one followed the other. Public bodies have to have a corporate image now, and as a result of that it seems like they've become so occupied with symbols as to neglect the actual problems in the first place. Which brings me to police services doling out rainbow flag stickers and rainbow-coloured wristbands in place of asking the difficult questions about why homophobic crime is so under-reported. It might seem like I'm aiming for an easy scapegoat here, and that's because I am, but I blame New Labour**. It's as if the lines between government and corporation got a little blurred (not least with PFI), and as a nation our political discourse got to be more spin than anything else. Margaret Thatcher may have been the Devil incarnate, and when she dies I will be queuing up at the lying-in-state to piss on her grave, but at least she was ideologically-motivated***. Whereas now, everything is airbrushed and bland and homogenised and 'compassionate' and none can escape from the horrible sight of David Cameron's giant shiny face. I don't doubt that New Labour did do some things right, and I'd much rather be living now than back in the 80s, but all the same it seems like we've gone from not caring about equality to trying to bolster it with bits of sticky plastic. Yeah, it's an improvement, but it ends up reading like all my school reports - could do better.

* I don't believe them coming from the Daily Mail, but I believe Gadget because teacher said always to trust policemen.
** Yes this is just as lazy as blaming the alleged wuurgh-political-correctness yuman-rites elf-n-safety brigade. Shut up.
*** Then again, so was Hitler. I can sense this argument falling apart around me, but I'm not bailing out now.

Square One ...Again

2010-03-07T08:37:00.004Z

These days I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus. Now that Croydon is over and done with, as Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again. I'm beginning to get a little pissed off with my own inability to stick with things, and more than that I really need something to keep me occupied. Everything else aside, I can't just stay in all day every day because I haven't got the willpower to do anything and nothing to do even if I wanted to. It's a depression magnet. I still want my A-levels, but it seems like I'm running out of options there; distance learning seems pointless, all the local sixth-form colleges will be so much like Croydon it'd make no difference, and the independent ones (which are probably prohibitively expensive anyway) aren't likely to be impressed with my recent academic activities, or lack thereof. But, to borrow a phrase the police use when they want to sound like they're doing something, inquiries are continuing.
There are other options, however. The most prominent of these at the moment is moving up north, to Glasgow specifically. This has met with some raised eyebrows amongst my friends. 'Glaswegians? Should be fun when they find out you're the privately-educated, homosexual son of a Swiss banker' was one of the salient examples. The consensus seems to be that I'll get my head kicked in. That would give me something to blog about, though, so swings and roundabouts. In any case, my mum's getting bored of suburbia and fancies moving into a croft on the shores of Loch Arse-end-of-nowhere or whatever, and the thought is that if that happens there might be just enough money left for a one-bedroom shoebox in the Merchant City for me, if I want it.
Failing that, there's always staying in London. I'm not really in London at the moment, though; I'm stuck in the commuter belt - getting into the city proper is a pain (had to be the only borough in the entire capital with no tube stations, right?), and I can't really afford London anyway. Being the centre of British culture and nightlife and everything is all well and good, but when you're paying £10 for a cocktail and you don't have a job, it's not what you'd call a sustainable lifestyle. But on the other hand, I know this city. I know people here, I know some pretty good bars, I feel confident that no matter how drunk I get at those bars I'll probably be able to navigate back to my front door* at 3am. Hell, when the light hits the streets the right way, I can even kid myself I like the place, for a little while at least.
I just need to be doing something, that's all. I need something to do with my days, and I need to feel like I'm making some progress. It's just that I can't seem to stop fucking things up. We'll see what happens. Maybe the third time will be the charm.
In the meantime, perhaps I should stop wallowing in self-pity and do something nice for myself. I'd like to buy a typewriter**.

* Or someone else's front door, but that's not the point.
** Science has proven that many gay men have a previously-unknown lobe in their brains that causes them to develop a compulsive desire for antiques and other such things in times of stress or upon reaching A Certain Age. This is the same neurological quirk that has me lusting after things like this.

2010-02-19T07:46:00.002Z

A friend of mine died recently. I hadn't known her for long enough for us to be really close, so I'm more shocked than anything else. I can't even begin to imagine what her family and closer friends have been going through. I don't do vicarious grief, so I'm not going to give her name, and it feels wrong somehow to join in the chorus of Facebook messages. All I'm going to say is that I miss her, and that even though I've never been religious, I hope she's somewhere better. God knows she deserved something better than this.
I don't think suicide is something you can fully comprehend without seeing something like this. It's so tempting to think that you could have done more, that you could have seen it coming, that you could have stopped it. It must be so much worse for the people closer to her she left behind. For my part, I'm starting to understand just how much of a waste suicide is. My friend was a kind, intelligent, and fundamentally good person, with her whole life ahead of her - and now there's nothing, save a person-shaped hole in the world and a lot of unanswered questions.

Fashion Rules

2010-02-14T11:22:00.003Z

Strange times at the Independent. More often than not it's my second choice if a copy of the Grauniad is not forthcoming, because I like having my prejudices reaffirmed the same as everyone else. If you're politically-minded in that slightly deranged sort of way that passes for normal amongst current-affairs nerds, your choice of paper is not so much a supply of information as it is something to get pissed off about over your morning coffee*. Buy the Guardian and you can wring your hands about the BNP. Buy the Express and you can moan about immigrants. Buy the FT and sneer about poor people. Buy the Mail and fume about house prices. Buy the Sun and seethe about the bloody 'elf-n-safety yooman rites brigade. Buy the Star and get really worked up about a big pair of tits. It's a lifestyle choice, really.
So I've a great deal of admiration for those bloggers on the left who go into, as it were, enemy territory to call the media on their bullshit. Me, I'm quite content to stick with the Guardian (nice and inoffensive to everything except fascists and the Queen's English), or failing that, the Indie. Sure, I'll join in the chorus - albeit as the quiet kid hidden at the back because he's tone-deaf - when the likes of the Mail , but by and large I just can't get worked up enough about it most of the time.
Curious, then, to find myself blogging about something I think the Indie have got wrong. But then, these are curious times at Northcliffe House. Most notable is the looming spectre of halfwit misogynist, racist and patron saint of black cab drivers Rod Liddle as editor - luckily, there's a Facebook group protesting this eventuality. After all, if anything's going to change the mind of an ex-KGB man (new owner Alexander Lebedev), it's got to be four thousand disgruntled broadsheet readers**. But that's not why I'm pissed off. At least, not mainly. It isn't even the usual idiocy on the Letters page:

'a few years down the line [...] our RAF gently morphs into the European Air Force, UK Arm'

'Now is the appropriate time to disband the NBPA [National Black Police Association] and the Muslim Police Association...'

(But good God, if you're going to share your prejudices in a national newspaper, at least have the decency to start with Sir-comma-new-line before launching into the vitriol.)

No, rather it's a column by Joan Smith that gives me a rather uneasy feeling. It's not quite the certainty of knowing someone's being a dickhead in print that I feel when I read, say, Rod Liddle's oeuvre. Just a small, polite voice in the back of my head. And so, after three paragraphs, I finally get to the point. The column's called 'McQueen had a sinister view of women's bodies'. And, faintly, it reminds me of Jan Moir. Maybe that's an unfair characterisation, but I can't quite shake the feeling off. Call me paranoid.
Not that I ever really blog about fashion (do you really want to know how many pairs of shoes I own? Because it's entirely too many), and I can't say I had any real affinity with, or even knowledge of, Alexander McQueen. Nonetheless, to rake the man over the coals before he's even in the ground is a state of affairs I was always taught to think of as not, as it were, cricket. Not to suggest that the dead are exempt from criticism - Hunter S Thompson's obituary for Richard Nixon is just about perfect for me, for one thing - but the man designed clothes, for heaven's sake.
But I can get over that; selling papers is selling papers, after all, and sometimes you're pressed for a column. No, what really got my attention was a tiny little phrase about three-quarters of the way through. I wonder if you noticed it.

'...his repeated use of images reflecting violence against women was shocking from a gay man' [emphasis mine]

Now why mention that? I suspect there is an undercurrent of something here. Again, maybe I'm paranoid. But it seems to me that Smith is playing into (let's be generous and say unconsciously) a well-established idea about gay men and misogyny. And whether Alexander McQueen was indeed the deranged misogynist the column paints him as or not, it seems a little unfair and, frankly, a little suspect to be going 'cor, wasn't he a bit weird?' and then to tack on a perfunctory 'tragedy he's dead though' at the end.
Echoes of Moir here, at least to me. Maybe it's something about prurient female newspaper columnists that look somewhere between forty and mouldering*** doing hatchet jobs on dead gay men in the public eye that gets my hackles up, I don't know. That plus the vein of 'course, you're not allowed to talk like this these days' so familiar from invented stories of the likes of 'Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep':

'It's not cool to break ranks and ask what's behind such supposedly "ludic" misogyny'
(Smith never actually says what's behind this alleged misogyny, presumably because the people she's writing for are way ahead of her)

'It's a taboo subject in the fashion industry'

'Rapturous fashion editors [...] avoided asking why McQueen associated women's bodies with rape, murder and trash'

All of this is a hell of an allegation to lay against a man with no right of reply, setting aside the people McQueen left behind having to read it. And just for the record? I've encountered plenty of artists, photographers, writers and the like who've used violent imagery and women in service of an artistic point, and not one of them ever struck me as a misogynist; not least because the first two examples that spring to mind are themselves women. Disturbing imagery does not a sexist make, and speaking personally I'd think about whether I had any evidence to support a claim of the calibre Smith is making beyond a heuristic jump from 'gay man' to 'hates women', stopping off at 'sexual deviant' and 'mentally ill' along the way.
...this turned out to be a rather longer post than I had anticipated. Maybe I'll have to stick to the Socialist from now on.

* A lesson taught to me at Dulwich, by the best teacher I've ever had. At one point, we were herded into the Edward Alleyn Theatre to hear a talk from some print media high-up [curious googling reveals this to have been Lionel Barber, editor of the FT and Old Alleynian - yeah, Dulwich was that sort of place]. It was intended to have been a sort of show-the-flag exercise, which was thoroughly derailed by said teacher nailing the bastard with questions that would've done Paxman proud. When I think back on the tangible benefits of a private education, a major one is having seen the editor of a national newspaper doing his best guppy impression. God bless you, Mr B.

** Yes of course I bloody joined it.

*** Sorry, that was misogynist of me, wasn't it?

Or Maybe I'm Just A Narcissist

2010-02-10T05:34:00.003Z

I hate being nocturnal. Especially in winter; I end up standing on my front doorstep with a cigarette in hand, and with between the cold, the wind blowing my hair around, and my insistent love of long black coats, I start feeling like one of those Scottish widows. It doesn't help that there's bugger-all to do of an evening in this particular suburb. There are a couple of shitty bars and a fish-and-chip place that I've taken to thinking of as The Long Dark Night of the Sole, and that's about it.
I suppose I'm finally starting to feel fit for purpose again; I'm just not entirely sure what that purpose might be. I feel incongruous. Well, more so than usual for a teenager. I was out of place at Dulwich, I was out of place at Croydon. I tried joining the revolution and felt out of place there. I tried mingling with gay youth, and felt out of place with them.
Perhaps this is normal. Alienated youth is a cliché for a reason, after all. Most of them find their niche, get normal. Work. Marry. House in the suburbs. Volvo. Labrador. Kids. Retirement. Daily Mail. Golf. Heart attack. Death. 'Nobody understands me' is just a phase you get over when you realise nobody really understands anyone, even themselves.
I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I want to. I can't be satisfied with quiet mediocrity or even quiet success; it's a big part of why depression pisses me off so much. I have an inherent need for Massive Drama of the worst kind. If I'm going to fail at something, I want to fail big - the kind of failure where people throw plates at one another, or control panels explode and everything's on fire.
I can live with stupid, adolescent rebellion - it's the fear that gets me. I could've lived with being kicked out of Dulwich if I'd got to level someone with the sort of punch that comes out of nowhere and only works in movies. As it was, I spent a solid week almost entirely in bed, crying incessantly. Then the next year hiding from the outside world, as if the stormtroopers of Real Life were going to kick my door in and start shooting up the place.
Watch too many Godard films and you'll start to believe that reality should be as well-framed and perfectly composed. And then you'll never be satisfied with anything, because it's all we want our film to be beautiful, not realistic. Or is that just me?
As should be expected by now, I blame Dulwich for this state of affairs. You tell people they're going to grow up to be leaders of men, captains of industry and such often enough, and they'll start to believe it. You'll never be able to make a man with a mindset like that sell used cars for a living, because to a mind like that obscurity is the only true crime.
This is the kind of logic that leads to people shooting their elected officials.

* * *

Of course, it's nearly Valentine's Day. Cunting bastarding bastard bastard Valentine's Day. I shouldn't really be the type to assign any significance to a commercial, celebrate-our-love-by-buying-things occasion - but, readers, I have a terrible secret. I'm a hopeless romantic. It's the last inch of me I haven't given up to cynicism, sarcasm or misanthropy. This is something I keep very well hidden. Like having superpowers. All because a pretty face and the right kind of glances are like kryptonite to me - enough exposure and the Man of Steel turns into the world's most square-jawed flying brick. All of the dry humour and the irony disappear, and you're left with a babbling, fawning lunatic who has a thing for candlelight and writes dreadfully earnest poetry.
Falling in love can seriously fuck you up. Because very occasionally, you'll meet a person who sees right through all your bullshit and the persona you've created for yourself, and sees the real you. And then you either have to kiss them to stop them telling all their friends about what a babbling sentimental lunatic you are, or slowly collapse in on yourself like a flan in a cupboard.
That's what love is about to me, and that's why being single hurts on Valentine's Day. I'm sure I could get laid if I wanted to, but that doesn't really seem like the issue, does it?

A Sabbatical In Unthank

2010-01-27T17:12:00.006Z

I've quit college to spend more time with my neuroses. I have responsibilites, after all. I have walls to stare at, and the mould in the sink isn't going to water itself. RSS feeds to read, neglected emails to reply to. Busy busy busy. Who needs academia when you have a Rhizopus houseplant to take care of?

But tell me Alex, how does that make you feel?

Like history is repeating itself. Like I can only force myself to keep at something I hate for so long before I snap, and end up wanting to flee to Belgium like Stephen Fry did.

I'm not sure where this leaves me. I might end up going out to Switzerland for a while, depending on how able I think I am to live with my dad. At least Geneva might give me something to blog about*. London is tremendously depressing at the moment; dark all the time, freezing cold, and I wake up in the mornings with a mouth that feels like an ashtray and a bad hangover. It's a sabbatical in Unthank.

'When most people leave school, they have to live by work which can't be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they're told to, and for no other reason, they'll be unfit for human society.'

* Could be worse. For a while there there was talk of him working over in Singapore. That'd have given me something to blog about, that's for sure.

C'est Vraiment Dégueulasse

2010-01-09T12:17:00.001Z

Right now, I don't feel like I'm much good at anything. And it doesn't feel like that's going to change. That's all.

Result

2009-12-23T16:11:00.003Z

Score one for civilised discussion. I spoke to the guy who broke my door; he's claiming it was an accident, which I'm not sure if I believe. But either way, he's paying for the cost of fixing it (mentioning the police was helpful), and I'm happy to leave it at that.
So, have some music.

Exciting Times

2009-12-21T10:17:00.003Z

I had a party on Saturday night. In hindsight, this was possibly ill-advised. What leads me to that conclusion is that around midnight one of my neighbours came to my front door with a cricket bat and smashed the glass in. He was shouting quite a lot, the gist of which was that we were to turn the fucking music down. This is problematic on several levels. For one thing, I don't much like living next to someone who thinks an appropriate response to loud music is to come over with a bat and indulge in a bit of criminal damage. For another, the door needs fixing. It also means I have to get the police involved. I don't mind the last part much, because it might just enable me to find out what the fuck he thought he was doing. More than that, it sends a message that I'm not going to be intimidated, and that there are consequences to this sort of thing. But it's a fucked-up situation generally. I thought this was a relatively good area.
Aside from that, the house is trashed and I'm in no condition to attempt cleaning it. So, never again.

Surprising Levels Of Insight Detected On Popbitch

2009-12-18T16:57:00.003Z

Click to embiggen:

The Disconnect

2009-12-09T05:19:00.000Z

What I Should Be Doing This Morning

Getting up at six in the morning. Suppressing a panic attack on the tram into college. Handing work in on time. Getting A-levels. Smoking like a warehouse fire. Pretending to care about functionalism or how badly Khaled Hosseini writes. Coping.

What I Am Doing This Morning

Staying up since six in the evening. Being stupidly nocturnal and not really bothering to fix it because I'm grateful to be sleeping at all. Drinking a lot of a cocktail of my own devising*. Reading some more Roland Barthes. Shaving for the first time in two weeks. Looking like a tramp anyway. Going out to buy cigarettes and maybe a paper when it's light, then coming straight back home again. Watching old movies I've seen a billion times before to cheer myself up. Bursting into tears for no clear reason. Watering the mould growing on all the plates in the sink. Shivering because the heating's still broken. Bumping into furniture because most of the lights have gone out. Wondering if there's a knack to this whole 'responsible adult' thing. Not texting people back when I really ought to. Murdering my way through Renaissance Italy in Assassin's Creed 2. Eating too much processed food. Having panic attacks. Feeling guilty about not going to college. Listening to a lot of Regina Spektor. Cutting. Feeling bad about it. Pondering the difference between having a sex life and having a love life. Coming to the conclusion that it's candles**. Not being able to write.

What I Really Want To Be Doing This Morning

Throwing a dart at a map of the world and then travelling to the place where it hits. Hoping it doesn't hit Swindon. Searching for meaning. Getting lost in a strange city. Not speaking the language. Looking for adventure and diversity in a world which is becoming homogenised, Americanised and paved-over and where the only people who call themselves adventurers are engaged in pointless voyages from one gin and tonic to the next. Coming back with my shield or on it. Risking a stupid and pointless death. Avoiding a stupid and pointless death and getting a good story out of it. Telling overzealous policemen to take their goddamned hands off me, because I'm a personal friend of the British ambassador. Lamenting the fact that since we've mapped out the earth so fully, there's so much less mystery left in it. Continuing to believe, despite all evidence, that over the next hill there may very well be a giant fire-breathing dragon. Being chased out of at least one town by a mob wielding torches and pitchforks. Leaving a trail of broken hearts and unpaid bar tabs across the world. Living without the internet. Not feeling the need to be part of someone else's hierarchy. Running out of money. Getting drunk with new and interesting people. Driving recklessly over some manner of wilderness in a car that's slowly falling to pieces. Learning some kind of violence, then punching anyone who calls any of that 'backpacking'.

* * *

This is the disconnect between my reality and my idle flights of fancy. Have some relevant indie-pop that really, really wishes it could be Belle & Sebastian when it grows up:

* Lots of brandy, a bit of Triple Sec, then topped up the rest of the way with Coke. Try it. It doesn't have a name yet. Suggestions?
** Plus having someone to drag round Ikea on a Saturday afternoon.

English And History

2009-12-04T18:18:00.002Z

Modern Warfare 2 is mostly horribly written, but there's a moment which bears some relevance to my current situation. Towards the end of the plot, one of the characters (funnily enough, this guy) more or less goes into full ham mode, and starts issuing these huge, purple speeches about the nature of war. So far, so overwritten war-porn, but he mentions something about how when you're sure you're going to die, it clarifies your thinking wonderfully.
Same sort of thing going on in meatspace, albeit with a lot less death and war and so forth. I find it quite a comforting thought sometimes to think that we as a species are adrift in an amoral and uncaring universe in which nothing we do matters in the grand scheme of things. Of course, the problem with nihilism is that it's not really a philosophy you can keep up 24/7; you can't be nihilistic about going down the corner shop to buy milk, can you? Assuming you're not French, it's impossible to spend all your waking hours filled with existential angst and ennui - you'd never get anything done. But in small doses, it's quite liberating.
What I'm getting at with all of this is that the college situation may be becoming untenable. Today was the final deadline for the first piece of English Lit coursework, and to get a 'comfortable A', all I'd needed to do was write it out again, minus a few brackets, go into Croydon, hand it in, then walk right out the door again. Couldn't do that. I'm recognising the signs from Dulwich; those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, or so I'm told. I feel like I'm going to repeat it anyway. And yet, emotionally I'm quite divorced from the whole thing. That's different. I don't know if that's just because I have more perspective about it, or just because I'm feeling less and less willing to fuck myself up over a set of fairly arbitrary exams*.
So, I don't know. I'm considering options. It turns out that what I'd really like is to spend some time on a remote mountaintop with a very fast internet connection and a year's supply of games, DVDs, books, vodka and weed, have food parachuted in by the UN, and be a blogging hermit. If misanthropy means anything, it's the right to tell the rest of the world that you're taking your ball and going home.

* If anyone really thinks A-levels are more about testing competence in a subject than ability to follow arbitrary instructions and memorise canned answers, they are asking to be hit with The Big Knobbly Stick Of Truth And Justice (That Also Has A Nail Through It).

Season's Greetings

2009-11-30T07:12:00.004Z

The genius of the hole: no matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with depression. You can spend as much time and energy as you want trying to get away from it, and it can always drag you straight back to where you started so easily. I didn't write it. I wish I had, because it sums things up perfectly.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm not very good at education, or much else for that matter. I'm doing the best I can, but lately that doesn't seem to be enough. I should be leaving for college in about five minutes, but there's no way I can handle it. Getting out of bed was enough of a struggle, for fuck's sake. The prospect of twelve stops on the tram with some fat-arse commuter pressed up against me in order to get to a piece of architecture straight out of Stalinist Russia and learn until it's dark again? Not that enthralling when I'm feeling halfway normal, even less so when I'm on the verge of tears within moments of waking up.
This is why I resent depression. I'm looking at the single best way of making things better for myself, and I can't fucking do it. And if I'd never had to deal with this shit in the first place, I'd be at university by now. I'm so fucking sick of the whole goddamned thing. Sick of making excuses for myself, sick of feeling so tired all the time, sick of nightmares, sick of people who ask stupid fucking questions, sick of being single, sick of not having any money, sick of not being able to write properly, sick of needing a drink when I get home in the evening because it's the first time all day I feel like I'm off-stage, sick of feeling like someone I'm not, sick of Croydon, sick of concrete buildings, sick of professional NHS dickheads who come up to you on the street to badger you about stopping smoking and tell you to 'go and die then' when they don't convince you, sick of seriously considering it, sick of hands that won't stop shaking, and really, really, really sick of motherfucking Christmas.

Found Poetry

2009-11-29T14:31:00.002Z

Always a bad idea. Rearranged from this. Alex Kelly, 17½.

Awake, possibly
Morning: feel awesome
life nice, reading books, writing emails
enjoy home days; fuck college week

tonight: actually night
drunk, apparently
London makes terrible sounds
drinking, fucking, watching stupid people (alex)
cigarettes, vodka, panic
pretty police
maybe love/party tomorrow
instead, rain found

anyway, mind doing little, 'course
head finally gone
trying white death?
lovely, yeah

listening music, probably review
stop wikipedia, youtube, internet news
they're mean world plus money
blog!
please?

read, talk, follow, look
front band
time hours

post idea!

Today In Threatening Letters

2009-11-22T14:33:00.005Z

Croydon College Library

Dear Mr Alexander Kelly,
The following items are now overdue and should be returned. You are currently being charged fines on these items on a daily basis. Please ensure that these items are returned to the library within 14 days OF THE DATE OF THIS LETTER, to prevent further action being taken against you.
Other options available to us, should the items not be returned include
-Formal disciplinary action under the College's "Respect for All" policy
-Suspension of your access to Learning Resources Services
-Referral of the matter to debt collection agency to recover our property

Author: Mathews, Tom Dewe.
Title: A History of Censorship in British Film

XXXXX XXXXXX
Library Operations Manager

My current fines total just over a pound, and they're talking about sending in the bailiffs? Come the fuck on.

This Week In Dentalists

2009-11-15T23:56:00.003Z

I'm in a frankly indecent amount of pain at the moment, and it's all the fault of the Toothache Of Death. Which is all my fault, tracing it back, as two years plus of drinking, chain-smoking and poor diet have been about as good for my dental health as for my mental health. It may also have something to do with not having seen a dentist for years and years; this is because dentistry comprises a sizeable part of the list of things I'm scared to death of. Which, incidentally, also features:

Clowns
Killer robots
Words that have a Q not followed by a U
Commitment

Anyway, when I was a kid I was so terrified of the whole thing I needed a general anaesthetic to have fillings done. Then again, I was a really nervous kid. Of course, you might well ask, 'Alex, why the fuck are you so freaked out about dentists, of all things?'. To which my response would be, 'You never saw Marathon Man, did you?'.
In any case, I anticipate something like this happening. For the moment, though, constantly feeling like an angry man is jamming needles into my jaw is rather taking the shine off the whole happy-jolly-imminent-Christmas-spirit thing for me. Then again, I suspect I'd feel that way regardless, given that everywhere I go seems to be blasting irritating Christmas songs at me. Nothing says enforced goodwill to all men than Jingle Bells played through a tannoy eight hundred times, after all.
Everything else is ups and downs, college included. The only interesting thing going on at the moment is my Film Studies coursework; at some point soonish, I'm going to have to film an original two-to-three-minute sequence or trailer, based on ideas I've nicked from other, better films (you're more or less told to do this). I'm thinking noir. Suggestions on a postcard to/brick through the window of the usual address.
More later. Now, I need to try and get some sleep. Not that I can sleep anyway, but that's not the point.

The World Turns Too Fast

2009-11-07T17:27:00.003Z

So, things are still going. I'm not dead, or giving up on the blog; it's just that college is taking up a hell of a lot of time. Primarily this has been time spent wrestling with the vending machines in the Media Department (I vonted orange! It gave me lemon-lime.). Oh, and coursework. But mostly vending machines. Even so, it's not been that bad. Last week I was all set to write a 'bloody hell, this is really getting to me' post, but this past week's not been too bad at all. Apart from leaving home and coming home in the dark, but that's just a seasonal thing. What's inspired this change of heart, strangely enough, has been Film Studies. For a subject that was originally a second choice, it's turned out to be the only one of four I'm genuinely eager to learn more about. It's even fun, and that's not really something I can say about any of my other subjects. Sociology's interesting enough in that I knew next to nothing about it previously (plus, I can taunt/provoke my fairly-homophobic* class), but it's not the same thing.
Plus, I actually seem to have a social life now. No idea how that happened, other than that tequila was involved. I'm not going to get all Sally Field ('You like me! You really like me!'), but it's meant that I've been a lot more confident. Consequently, a lot more irritating, but at least I get to make facetious comments in class now.
Mentally, the state of the union is mixed. I'm still having the occasional depressive moment, but it's not been sticking around for long enough to be that much of a concern. What does worry me is that the propensity for it is still there; it's almost like the really bad depression is dormant, waiting for something that taxes my nerves enough to send me right back to square one. That the length of these depressive episodes is shortening and that there are fewer of them is heartening, and tells me that I'm learning to cope with it a lot better, but the intensity of them hasn't improved a great deal, which suggests to me that to a certain extent I'm in this for the long haul. It's much the same with self-harm - I'm getting the urge less often, but it's the exact same feeling when I do, and I doubt I'll ever be rid of it entirely. I don't know that that's the result I was hoping for, but as a famous war criminal once said, you go to war with the army you have.
I'm also having some boyfriend troubles. More specifically, lack-of-boyfriend troubles. I'm not exactly planning to settle down and get a house in the suburbs, but there are times when I want something a bit more significant than just drunken idiocy/infidelity (see also Walk of Shame). Unfortunately, Croydon isn't exactly bursting at the seams with opportunities (I double the gay population every time I come in in the morning), which leaves me with clubbing or the interwebs (I haven't had the time for the gay youth group lately, and even then it's not a dating service). Since I don't like meat-markets or being murdered, I've something of a dilemma at the moment. Answers on a postcard to the usual address, preferably with the heading 'Alex, I am a beautiful effeminate male model with a wonderful personality, an IQ of 200, amazing [censored] and [censored] with a [censored] like a firehose, who thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread. Will you go out with me, please?'.
...well, it was worth a try, wasn't it?

* And they are. I was going to be all hearts-and-minds, right up until the point when someone told me being gay was 'my fault'. At which point I resolved to do to that logic what Nixon did to Cambodia. The end result of this was me giving a presentation on the sociology of homosexuality from marxist and feminist perspectives, which led to the better part of 30 people all staring at me like a dog that's just been shown a card trick. It was priceless.

Partay!

2009-11-01T19:06:00.002Z

Well, I am hosting a party in my tiny, tiny house, and the Francesca whom you may remember from a couple of posts ago (if you were paying proper attention) is endeavouring totake on my identity and compose a blog post. Fun diddly um pum pum!

Shall I tell you what Alex is really like? Hmm, all right then; he's lovely as fuck! Interpret that as you will.

See ya laters alligators.

The Bums Will Always Lose, Mr. Lebowski

2009-10-30T03:09:00.001Z

Of course they will. That's the point.

It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:
Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:
From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

So, I have had some drinks and am about to be very pretentious. But fuck, everybody's pretentious in their own way; the best you can hope for is to be pretentious in the service of the right ideas. I think the problem at the moment is that all the dramatic ideas floating around are heinous bastardry, in one way or the other. Call that a simplistic worldview, but it applies pretty well to the islamists who think blowing up an aeroplane is martyrdom, the neoconservatives and 'muscular' liberals (the ones still around) who think blowing up a wedding party is collateral damage, and the white supremacists who think Britain would be a lot better off without all those nasty brown people. Marxism is dead*, and liberalism is pretty uninspiring at the best of times. In any case, there's nothing quite like a meeting of a handful of grey-haired, grey-faced trade unionists still holding out hope for a popular uprising against a society that, to paraphrase an old situationalist slogan, won't let them die of starvation but risks them dying of boredom, to turn you off the future of socialism in Britain.
Possibly the problem is that my generation missed the boat for the 60s. The world is just as much of a bordel now as it was then, if not more so, but there doesn't seem to be a sense that anyone's going to do anything about it, brief Hope For Change idolatry aside. Maybe it's just me, but the bastard spawn of late-stage capitalism** seem a bit too jaded to start throwing paving stones. You can go on all the protests and the marches, write terrible songs, even (God help you) read the philosophy, but the inspiration just isn't there. In which case, maybe the best course of action is a retreat into bohemianism; have another drink and forget about it. Lose yourself in drink, drugs and sleeping with a different stranger every night of the week. So much for being realistic and demanding the impossible.
Of course, all the same problems Marx had about class and inequality and so forth still exist. I'm going to finish with a very immature joke about the class system in this country, which the old German probably did not have in mind when he was writing Das Kapital. I know this to be absolutely true, because I just made it up. When I was at Dulwich, there was a local comp down the road. I think it's probably some manner of academy now. In between the two schools was a pub where, amongst others, the local girls would congregate. One night, a guy from Dulwich chats up one of these girls, and she responds favourably. He takes her somewhere private, and being something of a gentleman, asks if she would like to see his 'member'. She tells him to go for it, and he disrobes. The girl takes a look and, recalling her experience with the comprehensive-school contingent, says, 'Ohhhh. It's like a cock, only smaller!'.

* Note that this hasn't stopped the corpse from shambling around.
** Watch this, and despair for everyone raised on MTV. Also the genre that spawned Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash being reduced to rich white girls 'hip'-hoppin''. But, y'know, feel free to tell me that I'm not allowed to have opinions about that and that I should stick to indie-rock.

Was It Bad For You, Too?

2009-10-09T17:12:00.004+01:00

My latest review for Stereokill's gone up (actually it did on the 4th, but what with everything going on I'd missed it). It is not, how you say, favourable. I don't actually like writing bad reviews (as in, reviews of things I rate badly; I write badly-written reviews often enough that I've become desensitised to it); I'm fine with ranting against the general population, but I'm not so much of a sociopath that I get a kick out of criticising individual musicians or bands.
In any case, Dave Hughes has a response here. The most pertinent bit:

Also, people who are turned on by “harmonica abuse” and poor vocal capability will still have to listen to the CD to find out about its content, themes, style, instruments and political viewpoints (my own, not Evan Greer’s).

Which is fair enough. With the proviso of not wanting to start an Angry Internet Man fight, I would say that I had a fairly restraining word limit for that piece, and that if I went in listing everything I was looking for like a hipster singles ad, that'd have left me no room for an actual opinion. That, incidentally, is as much of a review process as I've got; listen to the album, write down what strikes me. Which is what I did.
This is all sounding a little defensive, isn't it? The best I can say is 'no hard feelings'. Although perhaps that's a little rich. Let's just hope this doesn't cause as many problems for Stereokill as, say, this did.

I'm Not Dead

2009-10-04T18:05:00.007+01:00

Disappointing, right? Anyway, I'm just busy. At the moment, busy with a Powerpoint presentation (I know) about the Birmingham campaign (not that Birmingham, the other Birmingham). As a topic it's fascinating, but it's common knowledge that Powerpoint can make just about any subject into the dullest thing ever.
Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I started college, which is actually not bad. It's very much unlike Dulwich, for which I'm profoundly grateful. Met lots of lovely people there, including Francesca, who is wonderful and awesome in all respects and never forces bloggers to be complimentary about her. Ever.
As for the academic side, things are going about as well as could be expected. Film Studies, in particular, is turning out to be rather wonderful. I managed to escape from Psychology (you haven't been shouted at until you've been shouted at about the textbook definitions of independent and dependent variables) into Sociology, but I haven't actually started the latter yet, having been off the past few days with Super-Deadly Flu Of Death.
In terms of mental healthiness, I think I'm doing OK. I've only had to flee from one lesson in the midst of a panic attack, and amazingly managed to go this far with no self-harm (unless you count cigarettes or alcohol). Probably the most important thing is that being in full-time education is making me feel more like an actual person again. In this case, a person who hates his commute and so forth. But you take my point.

Meanwhile, back at the kolkhoz...

Subversive socialist activities continue apace. I and a couple of comrades did a bit of leafleting at East Croydon station for Socialism 09, which went surprisingly well. A remarkable number of people took leaflets, and only one person told me it was crap. Furthermore, I didn't get my head kicked in. No actual revolutions started yet, but oh well.

In the news...

Ageing ex-Hitlerjugend member brings the Spiritual Toxic Waste Tour to Africa, condemning 'spiritual toxic waste'. Apparently political colonialism is over, which shows a rather charming naiveté on the pontiff's part when it comes to China's business in Africa. Also, materialism is a greater threat to African peace and prosperity than war, famine or disease. A greater cynic than I might point out the role of the Church, and the current pontiff in particular, in perpetuating some of that disease.

Sour-faced, intellectually-lazy, faux-rebellious art bitch doesn't want to pay tax.

Anyway, that's about all for now. More later, and more often. Promise.

I'm A Student

2009-09-05T14:53:00.003+01:00

My new ID card tells me so. It's right there in big white letters, above the obligatory embarrassing photo and the NUS logo. I think this means I have to spend my afternoons watching Countdown now.
That's right, higher education fans, I've insinuated myself into Croydon College. My first day is on the 14th. Just got back from the enrolment day, having signed up for AS levels in History, Psychology and English Literature. Goverment and Politics was full (my bastarding luck), so my fourth is Film Studies. I nearly did Meedya Studies instead, but then I remembered this.
Yes, Croydon College! This ain’t no online school, its the real deal. The self-described 'only "GOOD" college in Croydon', which now I've named I can't be libelous about. But the campus looks nice, it's easy to get to, I can get A-levels, and I think I'm comparatively unlikely to get my head kicked in, so it's all good. Seems a lot less formal than Dulwich, I get Tuesdays off, and by and large the rules boil down to 'don't do anything illegal, don't forget your ID card, and don't smoke'.
Obviously it's going to be a bit of an adjustment from sitting around all day and occasionally doing some hack writing, but I think (I hope) I'll do OK at it. I did manage to get top marks in the numeracy and literacy assessments, which at least proves that I haven't forgotten how to count.
Oh, and they even gave me an alarm clock with 'The early bird catches the worm!' on it as part of my welcome pack. I'm living the dream, folks.

Recovery

2009-08-20T06:01:00.004+01:00

I think I've just had the nearest thing an atheist* can have to a religious experience. I've been sitting out on my front porch with a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a book (Lucretius' De rerum natura - I don't think I've got to the best part yet), watching the sun rise. I've been awake for the better part of three days, and it's gotten to the point where I can't quite tell what's real and what isn't. So I've been sitting there, disheveled and slightly foxed, watching smoke spiralling into the cold morning air and contrails from jets tracing lines across a clear dawn sky, and just generally enjoying myself. A few months ago, weeks even, that would've been downright inconceivable. My point being that for a moment I was filled with appreciation for the essential beauty of the universe and the goodness in the hearts of all men**.
I'm telling you this because the other day, someone called me pretentious. Just imagine that.
My business with CAMHS is finished. I have one last session with my therapist in mid-September to tie up loose ends, but apart from that I'm no longer their problem. In all honesty, I couldn't be happier with this state of affairs; I don't feel that I really need them any more. My therapist seems to think that I'm a textbook case, actually - I've ticked all the right boxes and said all the right things, but more importantly I've been going out and meeting people and doing interesting things of my own accord. The self-harm has tailed off, and my mood's beginning to resemble that of a so-called normal person. I'm going to an enrolment day for sixth-form college in the beginning of September, and to top it all off there might even be something on the cards relationship-wise.
If you were so inclined, you could call this the start of a new era. I wouldn't do that; I think it's a completely artificial and arbitrary distinction to make that'd have no tangible effect on how I would approach things or what would happen that was beyond my control. Nonetheless, things do seem to be looking up (although I'm aware that they could just as easily come straight back down again), and perhaps that signifies a more general change in my outlook.
In any case, you could see this as something of a retrospective post. I've been burning bridges with my past lately, and that's obviously going to affect this blog as well. FSM knows that I've used this blog as something of a repository for all of the bitterness and regret I've been feeling. Whether that's been helpful or not isn't really something I can answer. What I do know to be true, though, is that people change. I've certainly come a long way from who I was when I started this. For one thing, I've learnt to be OK with having regrets - after all, how boring a life would you need to have for you not to regret anything?
One of the tags I've long been using for generalised mentalness posts is 'will Alex triumph over adversity?'. The answer, if you needed it, is no. No one ever does. But I'm still here, and that's good enough, especially given the times when it's been too close to call.

Something I read, once, about the blues: you sing the blues so that you can wake up tomorrow in order to sing the blues again. The blues is reaffirmation of your own existence. To feel the pain of existence – whether it is by singing the blues or by self-harm – is to at least reaffirm that fact that you’re still alive to feel that pain. If you hear your voice clouded by tears, singing a sad song, then you must still be there in order to sing that song. And even that simple fact that you’re capable of feeling that pain means that you’re still around. That these things are not too great or too heavy to bear.

Any time that I can hear my own voice is time that I know the weight of the world is not so heavy it cannot be borne. My mere existence reaffirms the fact that such heavy things are not enough to pull me under.

To quote, roughly:

Hamlet wonders of the point of life. Whether all the pain and the trouble is worth it. Whether life is worth all the pain and the struggle.

And the blues answer to Hamlet is this – I’m here. Everybody knows I’m here.

A modification – I’m here. I know I’m here.

This isn't a leaving post. I still have things I want to say, and I still want to be part of the group of fellow bloggers and friends that I've found by doing this. But I would offer an observation: The blog is called Teenage Misanthropy. Why do you think I qualified it like that?
Not to imply that misanthropy is a purely teenage thing. But I only have another couple of years of being a teenager left. I feel like I'm on the cusp of something new. Something different. I don't anticipate that there won't be problems. But the fact that I've gone through some fucked-up circumstances and kept going makes me feel pretty fucking bulletproof for the future. Whether the misanthropy I've been carrying around for the past year and a half or so is going to be a part of that remains to be seen. Maybe it's part of my basic character, or maybe it's a part of me I'll end up losing, laughing at the memory of it when I'm 20 or 30 or 50 or 70.
Course, it might turn out to be completely academic; I could always drop dead when I'm typing th

* Taoist on the weekends and bank holidays.
** At which point I remembered that Chris de Burgh is still alive, which rather tarnished my newfound state of enlightenment and brought me crashing back down to my normal baseline misanthropy. But for a moment there I was the Buddha of suburbia.

The Committee For The Propagation Of Virtue And/Or Net Curtains

2009-08-11T16:58:00.004+01:00

A talking point I've heard a lot in the past is that Britain is 'sleepwalking into sharia law'. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the readership, that this is true. Just not for the reasons Melanie Phillips thinks it is.
You see, the today I was reading Richard Littlejohn's latest screed, and amidst the gypsy stereotypes and outright lies, a poll in the side column caught my eye*. The question on this particular poll is 'Would you pay a private police force to patrol your neighbourhood?'. Assuming piss-takers like me haven't been rocking the vote, the results are 55% yes, 45% no. If that idea doesn't terrify you, you haven't been paying enough attention. Not just the idea of a private police force, but a private police force retained by Mail readers. So now you see. Sharia law, middle-England style.
Terrifying Vision Of The Future, #198: I find myself in somewhere like Tunbridge Wells in the near future, with a paramour. A little old lady sees us, and points, letting out an unearthly scream. Then the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and/or Net Curtains show up, and it gets all 'y'all ain't exactly from around here, are ya boy?'.
Look, the idea of the state as monopoly on legitimate use of force is not one that sits well in my lily-livered, liberal mind**. But it's also true, and I'd sure as hell rather have a police force like the Met, which for all its problems is accountable to government and the law, than outright rent-a-cops. It's the same thing with the military, where you end up with incidents like drunken mercenaries shooting their colleagues, or worse.
In any case, perhaps this poll is symptomatic of an increasing divide in British society between Us Decent Folk and Those Other Fellows. Then again, maybe that'd be a good thing. We can let small-minded bigots rehome themselves in mock-tudor enclaves, and once they're all there we could build walls around them and leave them to curtain-twitch themselves to death. Ah, a man can dream, can't he?
We just have to take comfort in the fact that most of the people who voted 'yes' in that poll most likely emigrated to Spain years ago.

* These are usually quite amusing (or enraging, depending on your ability to take the Mail seriously) if you know how to read the implied question. As a representative example, you can take 'Should lottery money be restricted to registered charities?' to mean 'Should filthy, thieving, pikey scum be taking your money?'.
** It's not even a very good monopoly, The State keeps putting hotels on Mayfair.

A Fete Worse Than Death

2009-07-29T18:26:00.004+01:00

A reliable source in the outside world informs me that it's currently something called 'summer'. About this time every year, Suburbanham Council get to pretend that we're not actually living in a generic middle-class London suburb, but in some bucolic village. They do this by cleaning all (most) of the sharp objects and used condoms out of the closest thing we have to a park, and holding a fete. They're not fooling anyone, it's fucking dismal.
I hate these English pretensions towards rural stuff. It plays into this view other people (Americans especially) have of Britain as some kind of antiquated theme park, populated exclusively by morris dancers and old women bicycling to church. By comparison, my view of Britain as a whole is as a beautiful, vibrant, diverse, tolerant, modern country with a bewildering affection for Marmite.
I saw a blog the other day in which an American was blethering about having gone on 'a bike tour of Medieval England'. To which my natural response is, no, you didn't. Unless you're in possession of a functioning time machine.
Worse than that, the cheese-rolling. For fuck's sake, the cheese-rolling. And other assorted yokel entertainments, such as putting a ferret down your trousers or marrying your cousin. All around the world, newsreaders are finishing up stories about horrible tragedies along the lines of '...eighteen people were badly maimed by the goat. Finally, on a lighter note, let's point and laugh at some stock footage of Englishmen throwing themselves down a steep incline after some glorified dairy produce. Look at them. That's their Olympics, that is.'.
Oh, we try and cover it up with the word 'eccentric'. But there's eccentric and there's deranged. And it all leads to this idea that the entirety of this country is a copy-pasted version of five square miles of the fuckmothering Wirral.
...more tea, vicar?

Things That Have Been Bothering Me Lately

2009-07-16T15:34:00.002+01:00

In no particular order:

The ephemeral nature of youth and beauty.
The concept of truth.
Whether or not I'm gaining weight*.
Whether or not feeling such concern for my appearance makes me a superficial corporate whore.
The feeling that everyone in the world but me is out having fun.
What's going on with Aethelread.
If telling people I got my scars in a sword-fight/duel is funny or just pathetic.
Having forgotten how to multiply fractions.
Why anyone would drink Jägermeister voluntarily, ever.
Wanting a copy of ...And The Ever Expanding Universe by The Most Serene Republic.
Not being able to watch The Ashes because I don't have Sky Sports.
Not wanting to pay money to a billionaire Australian tyrant in order to watch The Ashes.
If I can get away with just listing my neuroses instead of writing an actual post.

* Up from 55kg to 59. All of which seems to have collected around my stomach. You may not think that's a lot, but to my mind I look like Nicholas bloody Soames.

Pride, Courage, Lesbians On Rollerskates And The Great Big God-Damn Book Of Judgement

2009-07-04T16:17:00.032+01:00

Hell of a title, don't you think? So, I'm a man of my word (when it suits me) and when I said I'd go to the gay pride parade in London today, I meant it. I've been twittering about it the whole time, and now I'm back, trying to collect all of my thoughts.
The most important thing to say is that I had a fantastic time. Even if you're one of those weird heterosexual people, I can't recommend Pride enough; it's an absolute spectacle. On a personal level, I'm really pleased that I managed to get up there and enjoy myself in spite of all the anxiety I was feeling beforehand, because it would have been really easy for me to talk myself out of it.
So I got to the start at Baker Street early, in time to watch the floats setting up. I had a couple of cigarettes and watched people arriving. This was what it was like ten minutes after I got there:

click to embiggenate these, by the way

By way of comparison, this was it about an hour and three-quarters later:

I kept milling around in Baker Street until 1pm, and managed to take some interesting photos in the process.

Some bloke stopped me to moan about 'the glorification of the gays' in a thick northern accent, and then walked off when I asked exactly what was wrong with that. Apparently the National Front were around somewhere; I didn't see them, but they must have seen me because at one point I heard a characteristic Neanderthal voice directed at me. We didn't have any more meaningful conversation than 'Oi, gayboy'. I've had worse invective directed at me than that, lads. Try harder next year.
Anyway, the parade was a little bit behind schedule so I walked amongst my brethren for a few minutes. In the process, I saw a drag queen with awesome boots, a mostly-naked DJ working out of the back of a milkfloat, and a large group of lesbians on rollerskates. I didn't get any pictures of them, unfortunately. In addition, many, many very pretty Londoners. By the end of the day, I was starting to feel more than a little inadequate by comparison. I also got my picture taken by a gay Jedi and a photographer from the British Museum.
Which leads me to one of my resolutions; next time I go to Pride, I'm not going on my own. I mean, it was fine, but by the time we got to Trafalgar Square I was seeing couples everywhere, and it was beginning to get to me. So, I have a major boyfriend-want going on. I shall have to either badger the youth group people about the youth group, or just start getting out more on my own.
That's not very relevant, though. The parade finally moved off, although it was start-stop for a while. I think the stewards were having to push people out of the way of the fire engine at the front. You'd think it'd be hard to miss a bright red truck covered in rainbow flags and balloons, with lights and sirens on. This was the front of the bit of the parade I was in:

It was looking a lot like rain at this point, which would have made for a) the world's largest wet T-shirt contest and b) several cases of hypothermia. Luckily, the weather held, proving once and for all that God, who totally exists and takes an interest in weather, is on our side. It having quite literally not rained on our parade, things got going. Here are some police, policing:

Eagle-eyed viewers will be able to detect that by this point, I'm not actually in the parade. This is because I'm a fucking idiot, and in the course of wandering off to get photos found myself stuck behind the crowd, and the crowd-barriers, for most of the parade. Which brings me to resolution two: stay. in. the. fucking. road.
The parade moved on, and I managed to get a few photos over the tops of people's heads and so on:

The parade's not actually moving in that last one, as the police had stopped it for a second. The reason why the police had stopped it for a second were these lovely people:

You can't see him all that clearly, but the bloke in the grey suit was the preacher. He looked (and sounded) like a mix of Ian Paisley and Dave Allen. Very disconcerting. Anyway, he was up on a pulpit with, I think, 'Zion Tabernacle' on it, shouting through a megaphone. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what he was saying, but I recall him telling us to 'be careful what you say, be careful what you think' and mentioning that it all went down in God's Permanent Record, The Great Big God-Damn Book Of Judgement (my words, not his).
I would have remonstrated with him, but there was an immobile line of police between us. They were visibly counting the minutes until their shift ended. Ultimately I settled for standing in front of the christianists for a while until the parade caught up, blowing kisses at them. This didn't go down very well.
The best part was that once the parade finally got going, everyone turned round and crowded back to the barriers to cheer it, leaving the preacherman to keep on preaching to our backs. I kept moving, and as I got further away from the counter-protest they gradually got drowned out by whistles and sirens (the firemen in the big gay fire engine up front were having fun with them, clearly).

the big gay fire engine

The time the parade had been stalled had put me right at the front, so I got some pictures of the fucking massive rainbow flag, and the political-types:

The placard-bearers were the Homintern. Best slogans: 'Fuck "no politics"', 'Homosexuality is a heterosexual concept anyway', 'fluff is not a lifestyle: gays must vote', 'I am not Graham Norton'. Worst slogan: 'BBC: Being gay does not equal rubbish'. Sentiment's right, but I feel it needs some work.
By this point we were nearing Trafalgar Square, a guy had just kissed me in the middle of the street to the point where I practically needed a crowbar to separate us, and I got a good look at the marchers who were actually marching:

They looked awesome, for the record. And kept their rhythm over the noise of a samba band. Alas, I didn't manage to get photos of the Navy, Police or Ambulance Service. I have one, blurry, weirdly-angled photo of the MoD people, much like Loch Ness monster 'proof':

We got into Trafalgar Square, but I didn't get any good photos at all. I did see them rolling up the über-pride flag:

The parade finished there, and I didn't stick around for any of the after-events (Resolution #3: Afterparty), as it felt a bit like pushing my luck. The heat was nearly killing me, for one thing. This was the main stage, though:

Oh, and this made me smile:

All in all, I'm really glad I went to Pride. I think it's important, not just to me but also politically. Plus, it was fun. I'm glad I made the effort, and I'm, well... proud that I managed it.
On the train home, I saw an old beer ad painted onto the wall of a house. Very faded, but still legible. In big white letters, 'TAKE COURAGE'. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

All Of Your Children Are Lesbians And It's All Madonna's Fault

2009-07-02T12:03:00.007+01:00

I really meant to post more often, honest. I've just been so lethargic. It was the heat wot done it, your honour. Old people are dropping dead, birds are spontaneously catching fire in mid-flight, and so on. Given that fleeing to Canada or Russia isn't really practical, I suppose I just have to put up with it. You should know better than to assume that'll stop me complaining, though.
On the plus side, I finally managed to get all the paperwork done for sixth-form college applications. It was a lot more work than it needed to be, but it's been long enough since I actually thought about education last that it was never going to be an easy transition to make. Now it's just a question of waiting to hear back. If you're curious, I applied for AS-levels in English Literature and Language, History, Government and Politics, and Psychology (ya rly). That means dropping any kind of foreign language, but I figure I can always get qualifications in those later, even if it's just going to night school or something. To be honest, I had entirely too much choice in terms of subjects. For a while I was considering Sociology, but then I realised that I'm insufferable enough already.
There's something else potentially very interesting planned for the near future as well, but it'd be bad form to talk about it at the moment. Keep watching the skies. No, I don't know for what either.
So, for the rest of this post, I need something that doesn't take a lot of effort (what with the heat) but also gives me a sense of satisfaction. Let's give the Mail a kicking.
Actually, I found this via the wonderful Tabloid Watch, who beat me to it. Nonetheless, I feel that the more people you have calling the Daily Mail out on their bullshit, the better.
The shorter version of the article is this: celebrities are turning nice middle-class girls into lesbians. Or at least faux-lesbians:

Olivia and Lara had their first kiss at their friend Clara's 15th birthday party. That is, they first kissed each other [shock-italics in original] then. They'd both kissed boys before, and they will do so again, because neither girl considers herself a lesbian. But after a couple of drinks, they thought it would be fun to see how it felt to kiss each other.
Both girls come from smart homes with professional parents, are well-spoken and attend a well-respected Inner London day school.

Their close encounter occurred recently at a smart private house party, and was described to me while I was researching an investigation into teenage behaviour - during which this intriguing and disturbing trend came to light.

I can't speak to 'intriguing', obviously, but I fail to see exactly what's so disturbing about two girls kissing. I find the tone of the article disturbing enough, though; it reads like one of those 50s public-information films about the lavender menace. There's the rather prudish mention of alcohol, of course, but it's the class obsession that reveals most about how Mail hacks view their typical reader's mindset. This idea that we should be shocked because it's not just teenage girls kissing each other, but teenage girls with names like Olivia (ugh) and Lara. Why, those could be your children, Mail reader! You send them to a decent school and think they're safe from everything you don't like in the world, but you take your eyes off them for a second and all of a sudden it gets all Gestern und heute.
Anyway, this is all the fault of celebrities. No-one even knew girls kissed until Katy Perry wrote a song about it. Prior to Madonna and Britney Spears kissing on live TV, all lesbians looked like k.d lang. Now respectable girls are doing it!
In all seriousness, though, I really can't see there being a reason for this article beyond simple homophobia and victorian moralising. There's a bit at the end about it being a kind of 'pretend sexuality':

'Nowadays, the term lipstick lesbian pretty much implies someone who is pretending to be gay,'* says author Judi James, who has written extensively about celebrities.
'It describes the female, publicity-hungry celebrities who are desperate to get their pictures in the paper and who engage in kissing each other to do so.'**
'For them, the options to get coverage are: one, fall over and show yourself in a state of embarrassing undress; or, two, kiss one of your female friends. It's a posture; an attention-seeking measure.'

OK, so these girls are just 'pretending to be gay' (incidentally, 'has written extensively about celebrities' may be the best set of expert credentials ever). I really don't see how that's 'a teenage trend that will disturb every parent'***. I don't mind straight people 'pretending to be gay', anyway. Makes a nice change from gay people having to pretend to be straight.
There's some suggestion that girls are being peer-pressured into it by the dread celebrities, but that's more than a little [citation needed]. Besides, of all the things for teenagers to be peer-pressured into, I'd say this would probably be amongst the most harmless. I'll leave you with another paragraph from the article. The tone in which you read it on first viewing is a good measure of how close you fit to the homophobia the Mail expects from its readers:

For previous generations, exhibiting any type of gay behaviour was certainly considered 'harm done'. Being teased for being 'lesbian' was one of the more cruel taunts that could be hurled at a teenage girl. But today we're witnessing the emergence of a growing number of young girls who are willing to experiment with their female friends.

Frowning disapproval? Hand-wringing mewling about the decline of society? You'll fit right in.

UPDATE: Nice to see some of the Mail commentariat have taken a break from their usual 'Lesbians? Send 'em back to Lesbia if they can't fit into my outdated idea of British society' line for a moment of sanity. Some examples:

This is just ridiculous. Who are these paents who are 'worried'? I'm a parent, and I'd much rather my teenage daughter kissed a girl and liked it than felt coerced into having sex with boys, as the less 'sexually confident' girls of previous times did.

Oh my God, who in their right mind would be "disturbed" by this?! Girls have been kissing each other since the dawn of time, not since 2003! And why is it only a problem when "middle class" girls do it?

One big problem about this article - it assumes that being gay is a bad thing.
So what if girls want to kiss each other?! Or boys want to kiss each other?
If they don't like doing it they will stop!

* No it doesn't.
** No it doesn't.
*** Presumably 'every parent' excludes parents of out, gay children, who I'd imagine are fairly used to their offspring kissing members of the same gender.

Review: Prototype

2009-06-20T03:07:00.004+01:00

If there is a god, they don't want me to review Prototype. In the course of playing it through, I had two distinctly unpleasant panic attacks, right before the game decided to break itself, uninstall Steam (?!), and then cut to a BSOD every time I tried to start it. But I am a relentless machine of pop-culture writing, so I battled through these obstacles to bring you this review.
So. Prototype, or to give it the correct marketing-wank title, [PROTOTYPE], is an open-world game in which you play a superhero-less-the-hero-bit fighting the US military in New York, as a rather nasty virus spreads across a quarantined Manhattan in arguably the worst possible instance of cold and flu season. The marketing hype made a great deal of promising gory, over-the-top combat (throwing cars at helicopters, for instance). But hype is hype, and rarely accurate, so the question is how well Prototype delivers on its promises.
Not very well, to be blunt. In a sentence: It's a pretty good idea, hamstrung by poor design decisions. Some things come off better than others; the parkour-inspired movement works very well, and it's a lot of fun to be running along the side of a skyscraper before jumping an obscene distance into the air and gliding onto the next rooftop. It's not as palpable as in, say, Mirror's Edge, obviously, but it flows well and it's fun.
Unfortunately, it's somewhat let down by the environment. We in the murder-simulator community have been spoiled by GTAIV, I think; we've become so used to the exceptional rendition of Liberty City in that game that the likes of Prototype's New York feel stale and anodyne by comparison. It doesn't help that for an open-world game there's really very little to do in Prototype's world; there are a handful of side-missions, all variations on the same basic four or five themes, and some Crackdown-style agility orbs to find, but other than that you're more or less restricted to going from one mission to the next.
The graphics, too, look a little dated. I'm not one of these people who insists that every game has to make my jaw drop to look at it, but it really doesn't help the perception of the game-world as being blocky and bland.
The combat is disappointing in many ways, partly because you can see what the developers were going for, which makes it even more galling when it goes awry. Aside from the inevitable escort missions, the inevitable protect-the-annoying-support-character-for-X-amount-of-time missions and the remarkably annoying tendency of enemies in the late game to rely on attacks that knock your character back, essentially taking control off the player for a few precious seconds, Prototype has what may be the worst-designed boss battle I've ever encountered. You're stuck in Times Square, slowly chipping away at the health bar of some colossal zombie-virus-thing, while fending off infinitely-respawning enemies. And they make you do it three times in a row. It's either shameless padding or terrible design, but it's immensely frustrating to play.
The story is nothing hugely special. The basic concept isn't a bad one, and again you can see what the developers were aiming for. It's just let down by a protagonist more wooden than a logging camp, and a stubborn refusal to let the player actually care about any of it. The one thing that does work well is the web of intrigue. Basically, this entails finding certain people in the world who know things relating to the plot, and taking their memories (it works better than it sounds). The short videos of what these people know are done quite well, and given more material and better writing to work with, could have been something special.
Anyway, to conclude, if you play Prototype you'll have fun hurling cars at helicopters and gliding around the world for a while, but sooner or later you'll get bored of that, and once you do there's really very little game left under there. It'll keep you occupied for a few days, but I doubt you'll be all that likely to come back to it. Maybe rent it or pirate it, but I wouldn't buy it.

i was going to find screenshots but i couldn't be arsed
take this as representative of my opinion of this game's importance

Fighting Monsters

2009-06-18T18:22:00.006+01:00

Gaming industry, I have something to tell you. Well, frankly, I'm concerned for your well-being. We all are. Your friends, your family; the people who love you. This isn't a blog post, gaming industry, it's an intervention. We think you need to acknowledge your nazi problem.
...I know you don't think you have a problem, but you have to be honest with yourself. How many times have we heard you say that you could 'quit any time you want', and then watched you go back to texturing yet another Tiger tank?

we've all seen it

How many times have you told us that you were 'working on a new IP', that turned out to be another chance for you to indulge your obsession? Lately... well, lately it's gotten so bad that you stopped giving them proper titles, just strings of jingoistic buzzwords so you could make each one quicker and move on to the next fix. Maybe you don't believe me, but think about Call Of Duty. Medal Of Honour. Company Of Heroes. Men Of War. Those don't mean anything, gaming industry.
Maybe it's just because you saw your big brother Film experimenting with nazis, but he grew out of it. Sure, Tom Cruise is still making wank like Valkyrie, but there are all kinds of films now. Films about all kinds of places and all kinds of things. Different, interesting films, not one of them using the phrase 'Hände hoch, Amerikaner'. Film doesn't need to hide from the world behind a snarling 8-foot SS trooper.
We love you, gaming industry, and we can't stand by and let this addiction ruin you. The people here, we've seen what you're capable of. You're talented, young. You have years ahead of you. We can't let you throw that away for yet another version of the Normandy landings.
I've seen you produce things of genuine brilliance. Games that have made me laugh. Games that have made me cry. And best of all, games that have made me think. You can't get that when you're shooting nazis in the face. There's no reason to limit yourself like this, my friend. There are literally billions of people we could be shooting in the face. Maybe one day we can even make popular, professionally-developed games that don't involve people shooting each other in the face at all.
It makes me worry, too. If you keep portraying nazis as almost cartoonishly-evil caricatures, we risk forgetting all the lessons we should have learnt from their existence. It's the same as people who refer to nazis as 'monsters'. It misses the point. The nazis were people. Nothing more, nothing less. To say that people who perpetrate atrocities aren't people, or are somehow less than human, is to imply that the people you do consider human could never perpetrate atrocities. We know that isn't true. What's more, to suggest that the likes of the Holocaust are only possible when people attain some kind of almost demonic level of evil is to miss that the Holocaust happened in large part due to ordinary people doing evil things without a second thought. The nazis, and all that they brought into the world, were and remain a complex historical phenemenon, which deserves to be understood in order to prevent it happening again. This is, of course, hard to convey when you're just using them as cannon fodder.
Not that I can't see the reasons for doing so. For one thing, the Second World War is not seen as a hugely morally-ambiguous conflict, at least in Europe. Gives the Americans the chance to potray themselves as Big Damn Heroes™ (with a supporting role for us Brits), toppling an evil bastard leading an evil bastard regime. That act hasn't been as successful lately, though. So if you're a developer looking for the opportunity to make a Big Damn Hero™ game, you can either craft a fictional war (difficult) or hijack a real one (easy). So you go looking for wars. Can't use the current unpleasantness, or things like this happen. Can't use Vietnam, because that didn't end so well. Can't use Korea, because neither did that. And to go even further back, you can't use the First World War, because it's depressing. So you're left with Hauptmann Nazistereotype waving back at you.

not, strictly speaking, historically accurate

Not that the cannon-fodder thing matters by now. Nazis are stock characters. One thing I thought was interesting was the different reaction the inclusion of Japanese enemies got in Call Of Duty: World At War. Then again, that post I linked to was very much a dissenting opinion. Most people, I suspect, never gave it a moment's thought. People are very willing to use the 'it's only a game' defence here, and I don't buy it. I think it plays into all the stereotypes of gaming as an immature medium for immature people. The idea being that if it's only a game, it doesn't matter. This happened, too, with N'Gai Croal's take on the Resident Evil 5 racism controversy (don't try and tell me gaming doesn't have a race problem, either).
Games can be more than that. I do believe that games can be art. It's just a question of getting us to the point where a Pathologic can sell as well as a Gears Of War. Gaming industry, in large part this is something you should be doing. And a good start would be checking yourself into nazi-rehab.

* * *

Bloggery-type stuff: Things have been going OK. So OK, in fact, that I have nothing to write about. I think I'm going to write some things about gaming to pass the time. I have two ideas at the moment. I've just finished Prototype, so there's a review of that coming. And I also want to look back at Far Cry 2, perhaps as a means of addressing the racism-in-gaming thing I mentioned here in more detail.

Dear British Electorate

2009-06-08T12:03:00.001+01:00

Shame on you.
Kisses,
Alex

A World Of Pain

2009-06-05T09:00:00.000+01:00

So last night I watched a documentary called A World Of Pain: Meera Syal on Self-Harm. Let me just refer to my notes (yes, I took notes). My word, I seem to have scrawled the words 'patronising bitch!' down at one point or another. I think that was about a quarter of the way in, after the phrase, 'What makes [self-harmers] cross the line? Could it be something to do with our mental health?'.
I don't mean to suggest, of course, that you shouldn't explain the basics of what self-harm is and why people tend to do it, but when it takes you 15 minutes to get there, and most of those 15 minutes have been talking about Meera Syal, that's probably a bad sign.
I'm not out to do a hatchet job, because I really wanted to like this documentary. It's just a pity how appallingly bad it is. It's an earnest piece of middle-class hand-wringing with no clear idea of what it's talking about and all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the kneecaps. Plus, they actually used Jeff Buckley's cover of 'Hallelujah', which should give a general idea of both the tone and the level of imagination at work here. Also, as I find I have written here, 'The Smiths! Fuck's sake!'.
Anyway, the first bit tries to explain why self-harm is more common these days, what with the impending Mental Health Crisis Doompocalypse Of Death. We have the revelation that teenagers now are perhaps feeling a tiny bit more pressure academically and socially, as well as finding out about Meera's book, Meera's TV adaptation of the book, Meera's birthdate, what Meera's horrible friends think about it, and the wonderfully revealing sentence (as Meera is talking about her adolescence), 'if I had a problem, I just opened Jackie magazine'. Which is nice.
We also touch on why self-harm has become more generally known about, and it turns out it's all Diana's fault: 'since Diana's confession [to having self-harmed], it seems like self-harm has become mainstream [...] I don't remember celebrities displaying their apparent [words cannot do justice to the tone this word is delivered in] self-harm scars like Amy Winehouse'.
Um. Just so we're clear? I didn't start self-harming because of Princess Diana. Or Amy Winehouse. And come to think of it, I don't believe self-harm has become mainstream; the looks I get when I go out in short sleeves would seem to indicate otherwise. And it's not as if self-harm has become more known about because of any larger trends in the spreading of knowledge between now and the 70s, is it? I mean, just imagine if people could find out about things on some kind of interweb thing. It'll never happen, though, so clearly it's all down to the sloane bint.
After all this bollocks Syal finally gets around to talking to actual teenagers, asking them if they know people who self-harm and why it's (apparently) more common. The same sort of reasons come up: competition and the media (Meera plainly does not like this idea). One very eloquent girl mentions the kind of pressure to live up to the sort of social ideal a lot of the media are in the business of perpetuating. I don't recall, but I may have mentioned that in an earlier blog post; it's definitely an argument I can see the merit in, and it's not as if talking about media responsibility is to automatically assume BBC1 is broadcasting subliminal messages telling people to cut themselves.
The film is generally long on empathy and short on actual detail or facts, so it's only a small mercy when we finally get round to seeing someone who has self-harmed talking. About half of that interview is comprised of soft-focus reaction shots of the interviewer. Anyway, this girl talks about self-harm as a choice; a not particularly good coping mechanism, but a coping mechanism nonetheless. Obviously, I have a few bones to pick with that idea, but prior to this the view of self-harm is very much of this Terrible Thing That Is Happening To Our Babies And Must Be Stopped, so it's nice to see some more reasoned views.
Another thing I was going to mention was how unusually specific this film is about self-harmers. First, you pretty much have to be female (takes 57 minutes before anyone even mentions guys who self-harm, and Syal doesn't talk to any). Secondly, you can't really be over 19 (The completely-missing-the-point award of 2009 goes to the phrase 'Self-harm is often associated with angst-ridden teenagers... but sometimes angst-ridden grown-ups do the same').
Continuing the 60-minute guilt trip, we have another quote; 'Who else is at risk? Anyone living outside of a secure family unit...'. As if you can't self-harm if your parents are still playing happy families. Also, those questioning their sexuality, and British Asian women. This is where it gets a bit complicated. I'd like to think there isn't a cultural or ethnic basis for or propensity to self-harm, but it would seem that the numbers don't really back this up. Syal goes into some of the possible reasons why British Asian women are disproportionately likely to self-harm, including a possible lack of independence, the culture clash, and different cultural ideals and expectations of women in Asian culture. I can't really argue with this, mostly because it's not my place to; in terms of my cultural background, I'm from a curiously schizophrenic mix of middle-class social climbing and working-class Catholicism. Half popery and half pot-pourri, if you will. In any case, the logic in this bit seems sound and it was actually interesting, thus making it the highlight of the film.
By this point, we're 38 minutes in and we're just now seeing Meera talk to someone who actually treats self-harm, in the form of a university nurse who looks after students' health, physical or mental. We find out (again) that it's all about Pressure. Which doesn't quite answer the question. If self-harm is more common, which is difficult if not impossible to actually prove, why are more people turning to it specifically instead of other ways to cope with pressure? Are they? None of these questions come up, leaving the whole thing rather superficial. Don't even ask me about prospective answers to the great big self-harm epidemic we apparently have now.

Syal: Why are more adolescents self-harming?
Nurse: ...pressure?
Syal: Oh.
Syal: Well, what can we do about it?
Nurse: You could try actually talking to your kids once in a while.
Syal: Oh.

(Not an actual quote, but it might as well have been)

Then we get on to the mistreatment of self-harmers in A&E, which means that Meera gets to use her guilt-tripping reaction-shot superpowers for good instead of evil. Later a consultant is wheeled out to lie about whether or not it still happens.
Finally we're into the final stretch, and we go to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in South London, where Meera talks to a very articulate and intelligent patient by the name of Louise, about things like harm minimisation and so on. This bit's actually quite good. And that's more or less it. Add a few mopey songs, and a director obsessed with contrails because they look a bit like cuts (lines tend to), and that's A World Of Pain. Watch it if you want to, but don't expect to learn a great deal from it.
To finish up my ranting and moaning about it, I'm going to get all high-and-mighty and talk about how I'd approach making a film about self-harm. First and most importantly, I would talk a hell of a lot more to people who self-harm and people who treat them. Secondly, I would at least try not to bring my misunderstandings and outright stereotypes into it. And thirdly? Thirdly I would never, ever, ever use 'Hallelujah' on the soundtrack.
Last words of advice? Don't take self-harm too seriously*. It's not the end of the world.
Music: Queen - Under Pressure, Los Campesinos! - This Is How You Spell, "HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics"
* Yes, I know I've been guilty of this in the past. Won't stop me lecturing people on it, though, because this is New Media and no-one expects that to be consistent.
I have never laughed so hard at a 'this programme features harrowing images from the start which some viewers may find disturbing' announcement.

Biggles Kelly Flies Again

2009-05-29T21:33:00.001+01:00

Keyword Analysis

2009-05-21T01:11:00.006+01:00

Yes, it's time for another session of Alex Stalls For Time. I mean, Reads From His Keyword Analysis. People have got to my blog by googling these things. On purpose, as far as I can tell. I had originally assembled these into a poem, stealing ideas wildly from la, but it turned out horribly.
So instead, what I'm going to do is try and help these people find what they're looking for, or at least delve into their twisted psyche.

'Misanthropy' - Comes up a lot, variously spelled - as you'd expect. Disappointingly, I'm halfway down the second page of results on Google for it, so apparently I either need to do some search engine optimisation or I need to actually get some readers*.

'dealing with misanthropy'/'coping with misanthropy' - A fairly common variation. I've always maintained that misanthropy in and of itself is not something that needs dealing with; that it's a reasoned, philosophical position. But then, what would I know, I'm a bitter and twisted husk of a man, right?

'terminal misanthropy wikipedia' - In a nutshell, why internet diagnosis is bad. I'm fairly certain misanthropy is not going to kill you. Unless they mean the misanthropy likely to be incited by spending any significant length of time in an airport or bus terminal, which can certainly feel lethal.

'how do you communicate with someone who feels sorry for himself' - Well, I would guess by empathising with them, offering them sincerely-felt sympathy, and then just saying what you want to like any other person. Or, you could always take another approach I'm familiar with, namely judicious application of violence followed by an exhortation to 'pull oneself together', or some such. Either/or, really.

'giving in to a whining teenager' - I'm really not much use at giving parenting advice. I will say that all teenagers are manipulative to a certain extent; it goes with the territory. I suppose if you're really keen to avoid giving in, you could make them earn whatever it is they're whining about, but occasionally acceding to a bit of mild emotional blackmail doesn't make you a bad parent. No shame in losing to the best, etc. It's perhaps somewhat ironic that this led to my blog, though.

'pro self harm' - Disturbingly common. I'd like to think that the post this most often leads people to takes an appropriate line. Or if not appropriate, at least keenly felt.

'vanessa felts poem' - Be careful what you wish for.

'sentence of womanish' - I'm still not entirely sure what this one means. If it's 'sentence' in the linguistic sense, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a womanish sentence, unless you want me to get into talking about the Romantic poets and how they talked all poofy and stuff, cause real men speak in grunts and swearing. Then again, if it's 'sentence' in the judicial sense, that makes even less sense. But it's the internet, so we can't discount things on the basis of weirdness. It does make me wonder how and why exactly a judge would go about sentencing someone to be 'womanish', whatever that means in the first place. Maybe if you were charged with irrational fear of commitment.

'anarchists on misanthropy' - Well, I don't think you'd want to go to, say, Emma Goldman for a quote about misanthropy. I'm given to understand that she was rather partial to the human race, a philosophical weakness on her part I'm prepared to countenance on the basis of her politics. Perhaps you'd be better off with one of the more depressing, more bearded, more Russian types of anarchist thinker, but I don't think it'd be a stretch to say that anarchy requires a basic sense of idealism as regards human nature. So, your best bet is to wait until the next anti-capitalist protest comes to town, then collar the nearest gentleman in a black hooded top with his face covered, throwing things at the police. Granted, he's unlikely to actually be an anarchist, but he'll certainly call himself one and you stand a fairly good chance of encountering some misanthropy. Or at the very least, miskhíropy**.

'teenage life is no fair' - No argument here.

'drinking and the teenage mind' - As I see it, the teenage mind tends to enjoy drinking. Perish the thought. Personally, I'd be more worried about drinking and the teenage liver, but I'm in no position to lecture.

'teenage copyright infringement liability' - Sorry, intellectual property laws still apply, in all their lunacy, if you're under 18. At least, I think they do; I wouldn't really fancy testing it, which is why I buy all my music and games legally. I don't tape things off the radio, either; it's killing music.

'dealing with diffcult parents CAMHS' - To be honest, if my kid were being treated by CAMHS, and I had a problem with the way they were doing their jobs, I'd probably be a difficult parent too. They might be wrong, but you can't really begrudge them their feelings in that situation.
Then again, if I worked in CAMHS I suspect I wouldn't be too happy about someone screaming their grievances at me, well-founded or not. It's a conundrum, and one reason I really don't envy the people who work in CAMHS.

'bnp funnies' - Ooh, ooh, I know one. A former BNP member walks into a pub. He leaves a black holdall next to the bar and walks out again. Inside the bag is a nailbomb, which explodes and kills three people, including a pregnant woman, and injures seventy more. What a card, eh?

'person that always feels sorry for himself and thinks others should help them' - Well, you've come to the right place.

* If you're really curious, I average between 30 unique visitors (on a slow day, when I've not been posting for a while) and 180 unique visitors (when I've pissed someone and their friends off) per day. It averages out to about 85, maybe 90. Most of those are just people coming from Google Image Search, as opposed to actually reading the text.
** Ham-fisted (ha) attempt at 'hatred of pigs'.

Can't Stop The Signal

2009-05-17T17:34:00.003+01:00

So, I'm still around. I just haven't really had anything good to write about lately, as things have mostly been mind-numbingly dull. That might change with a bit of luck, though, for my therapist Has A Plan. In the meantime, I've given myself a kick up the arse to actually make the effort to get out and see people a bit more. As an extension of that, I'm going to start sending off applications to sixth-form colleges tomorrow. I'm blogging this so I'll have to apply, or else I'll have lied to you, my wonderful readers, and we can't have that. Besides, there's precisely fuck-all strenuous about sending off a form, the anxiety is purely at the prospect of having to go to an interview or an induction day or whatever. We just have to hope that I haven't forgotten everything I learnt at Dulwich, including how to ride out panic attacks.
Hrm, what else? Well, I watched Serenity and loved it, thus taking me one step closer to being a complete stereotype. I also have two new crushes, namely Nathan Fillion and Nathan Fillion's coat. OK, so I probably wouldn't attempt to have sex with the coat, but you know what I mean.

Other thoughts: The Operative is an absolutely fascinating character (and brilliantly played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Kaylee is both very shrill and very annoying. In Serenity, at least, nearly all her lines consist of something along the lines of 'Waaaaaaaaaaaa I'm the only one allowed to have feelings'. I'll admit, this is hardly likely to make me popular with fans of Firefly. Luckily, I haven't seen any of the series itself (the torrent's 70.7% downloaded), so I'm speaking from a position of blissful ignorance.
Anyway, that's basically all I've got to write about at the moment. I'll try and avoid leaving gaps between posts so often, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I don't want writing for this blog to feel like a chore or an obligation, after all, so it's easier to just wait until I've got something to write rather than try and make myself come up with something that's inevitably going to be worse for it.
Oh, there was one other thing. I don't know if you've been following l'affaire second-home allowance (Moatgate?), but I was pleased to note that Nadine Dorries MP has gotten caught up in all of it. She's a vile, hypocritical liar, as has been documented by far more eloquent and politically knowledgeable people than myself. Really, any further exposure of widespread corruption amongst MPs is just icing on the delicious, delicious cake.

A Quote

2009-05-10T16:00:00.003+01:00

Second Note. Just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle classes is the public-school system . . . How perfectly it expresses their character - far better, for instance, than does the university, into which social and spiritual complexities have already entered. With its boarding-houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence of good form and esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers . . .
And they go forth [the public-school boys] into a world that is not entirely composed of public-school men or even of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts.

- E.M. Forster, Notes on the English Character (1936), quoted in Stephen Fry's Moab Is My Washpot

A Womanish, Wilful Heart

2009-05-06T12:34:00.005+01:00

I did warn you this post was coming. In any case, the title phrase appears in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and not in a favourable light. Misogyny aside, I'm here to defend the wilful heart. But first, a bit of background. Our man Marcus A was a Stoic Roman philosopher-emperor. Stoicism is/was a school of philosophy that posits that a man's fate is predetermined, and that the surest route to a happy existence is to choose to live in accord with nature. Stoics were really very keen on the use of reason to achieve a kind of emotional temperance; the idea being that a Stoic sage would be imperturbable, and able to formulate a reasoned, passionless response to any situation. That's not to suggest 'completely emotionless', more like 'level-headed'.
Anyway, as a Roman aristocrat and as a Stoic, certain themes are bound to emerge in Marcus' work. Some are very noble; humility, justice, service. Others less so; there's a lot of mention of duty. All very well if you're an emperor or a soldier, but I don't believe a plumber has a moral duty to fix pipes as if his life depended on it.
But really, my main problem with the Stoic line of thought is the insistence on emotional sobriety. At the risk of sounding like I'm not taking this entirely seriously, I get the impression Marcus Aurelius wouldn't have been a lot of fun at parties. That aside, you could summarise my argument in one sentence: 'some things are worth being intemperate for'.
Love, for instance. Corny though it sounds, it's one thing you can't reason. There's a line in Meditations, 'never be swept off your feet'. I feel sorry for anyone who never has been.
Likewise, the insistence on simplicity. Simplicity is of more use in some things than others. After all, it would've been simpler for Michelangelo to do the Sistine Chapel in white gloss. Occasionally, there are more important things.

Stoicism holds that one's fate is already determined, and that you should choose not to fight against it pointlessly. I don't believe that. I believe that the future is a combination of the results of our chosen actions and random chance. The latter, I think, is more dumb luck than any mystical kind of all-guiding force, whether you call it fate, God, or whatever else.
After all, our decisions only have value if we choose them. Otherwise we're just being fed lines in the school nativity play of life. There's no point in being patriotic, or honourable, or kind, or fair, just because you believe it's in tune with some nebulous kind of 'Nature'. Surely, it's far more important to act in these ways because it's right? After all, assuming Nature has predetermined fate, some of the time evil will win out. To which the Stoic response is, shit happens. Get over it.
I disagree. In that situation, I think it'd be better to fight fate and lose. Yeah, you'll lose. But you'll be losing for all the right reasons.

Binge Drinking! Binge Drinking!

2009-05-04T09:33:00.005+01:00

I went drinking (socially, mind). This is what happened, occifer.
At the moment, my brain feels like a cliché in Star Trek. The Enterprise gets hit, siren goes off, everyone clutches their badly-mocked-up consoles and whatnot, and then the captain shouts, 'Damage report!' to no-one in particular; whereupon, the computer starts listing all the damage - Deck 4 on fire, Deck 5 filled with tribbles, and so on*.
'Damage report!'
Well, I'm about as hydrated as Western Sahara (and about as stable), I can't remember anything (in my defence, things only got really fuzzy after the fourth vodka), my stomach is making noises like a grizzly bear caught in a mangle, my head feels like a tiny yet very angry man is jabbing needles into it from the inside, and I feel great. Sort of.
I mean, I feel terrible. But it was worth it, and I deserve everything I get for mixing beer, vodka and Jack Daniels. Actually, quite a lot of vodka. Really, that was the mistake. In my limited experience, I find beer to be a kind of creeping drunkenness; you can see it coming. Vodka, in contrast, sneaks up behind you and hits you in the back of the head with a blackjack. You take one drink, and all of a sudden you find yourself lying on the floor, two hours later, laughing like a madman and shouting about fractals. Well, either that or I just don't know how to pace myself. But I didn't throw up, end up in A&E or get anyone pregnant, so I'd say things went well.
Anyway, my point is that I went out and did something socially, and actually had fun without worrying about it. Granted, I wasn't worrying because I was drunk, but the point is that I know the sky isn't going to fall in if I don't worry about these things. In addition, the fact that my social anxiety was so easily shaken by, essentially, fermented potato drink, tells me that it's not as insurmountable an obstacle as I've sometimes thought.
Therapy should be interesting tomorrow. Maybe my therapist can get to write a scientific paper on this; 'Alcohol: A holistic and solution-focused approach to mental health'. Wouldn't be very effective if your problem was alcoholism, though. So, not a perfect system, but it's got more evidence to support its effectiveness than homeopathy, and you can get that on the NHS.
And the best part? As I was... existing on the train home, it went past Dulwich College, and I saw that someone had vandalised their sign. Some days are just good, you know?
My next blog post will probably be a serious philosophical analysis of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and indeed Stoic philosophy as a whole. You think I'm joking.
* On Deck 7, Sulu is stalking around, shirtless, greased-up, and armed with a foil. On Deck 10, the computer's vocal and syntax banks are being irreparably bleegle warble yargle.

We're All Going To Die

2009-04-26T14:07:00.003+01:00

Well, obviously. But a bit sooner than we've planned to*. Turns out Eeeeevil Foreign Flu Of Death™ is going to become a pandemic and wipe out the human race. Naturally, the media are taking a restrained, sober view of this story, so as to avoid panicking people.

Killer pig flu threat to UK: Fears grow of worldwide pandemic as 81 die in outbreak

I rather like how the Mail On Sunday assumes its readers won't be interested unless they work in a British angle. The worst part is, they're probably right.
You know the best part about being a sarcastic bastard in times like this? It's a win-win situation. If I turn out to be right, and the inglorious history of the human race isn't brought to an end by a bad case of the porcine sniffles, I get to laugh at people falling over themselves to retract all their end-is-nigh sentiment. If I turn out to be wrong, I'm dead anyway, and no-one's going to be left alive to laugh at me.
You have to admit, it does sound like a rather fitting end for the same species that's covered 120,000 square feet of nature with lagoons of toxic pig shit, though. Apparently the humble pig is more inventive when it comes to revenge than we gave it credit for.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with an oink. Possibly.
Music: The Dead Kennedys - Triumph Of The Swill, Bad Religion - Infected
* I always wanted to go aged 100, from a heart attack induced by years of alcohol and cigarettes, while in bed with a pair of 18-year-olds.

Disposable Heroes Of Hippocrates

2009-04-25T11:38:00.003+01:00

18 soon. I'm not sure I want to be. 18 means being an adult. Being an adult means responsibility, and we all know how well I deal with that. 18 is a reminder that the passage of time has not halted while I've been cutting myself off from the rest of the world.
I am very conscious this is not something most 18-year-olds worry about. Maybe I'm just having my mid-life crisis very, very early.
Plus, there's this business with CAMHS. I've got a meeting with Dr. Twattington-Puffball soon, and presumably he's going to take that opportunity to make sure I never darken his doorstep again, and become adult services' problem. Somewhere in the midst of all of this bureaucracy is a referral to an LGBT youth group, which will no doubt end up missing in inaction. Of course, this'd be a lot easier if I actually had a CPN to talk to about any of this, but oh well.
So, I'm worrying about CAMHS and the CMHT when I really don't want to have to be; but then, ideally I wouldn't be worrying about any of this stuff. Clearly then, it's more about making do with what you have.
I just never expected depression to take so long; I never thought I'd be in this sort of state for what you might quite reasonably consider to be the world's worst gap year. I suppose it beats fucking off to a developing country and doing some they-don't-call-it-white-man's-burden-any-more charity work in order to feel appropriately superior and altruistic, though. I don't want to get off topic here, but I'll start taking those trips seriously as philanthropic efforts when they send one into a warzone. 'And in this photo, Tarquin's being shot at by twelve-year-olds with AK74s'.

probably unlikely to be going to Exeter next year

Anyway. Yes, it is nice being perpetually on the verge of a barely-coherent leftist hate-piece, thanks for asking. It's like being bizarro-Michael Savage. Just count yourself lucky I never used the phrase 'the giant modelling claws of the patriarchy'.
To wrap things up with, I'm going to link you to the poetry (haiku, mostly) of a good friend of mine. It is excellent, and I recommend you read it post-haste.

Now let's see who gets the allusion in the title.
I mean, I don't like to congratulate myself (ha), but I was proud of that pun.

Gissa Job

2009-04-24T14:01:00.003+01:00

I feel like I ought to be doing something productive with my time. School, or work, or something. I know better than to expect myself to instantly be able to do something like that, but that doesn't make me feel much better.
I think perhaps there would be something I could do on the internet, even if it's just hack writing. As an aside, one thing I stumbled across was the UN online volunteering thing, but most of the stuff there requires skills I don't have; if I recall correctly, one of the things they needed done was finding a 4x4 for an NGO in Ghana. Which I think you'll agree is a pretty damn cool thing to be doing, but presumably requires a bit more work than five minutes with Google.
So, what's brought this on? Well, I'll be 18 in a couple of weeks' time. I realise it's a fairly arbitrary thing, but being, for all legal purposes, an adult is something that I didn't really see coming, at least not this quickly.
Other than that, things have been improving a bit lately. Finally got my internet back, and I'm just now feeling a bit more like myself after a rather nasty bout of depression, with a side order of panic attacks. Not sure if that's just me adjusting to living on my own or what, but I think I'm over the worst of it. Therapy is dredging up some things I'd rather forget, as well. I suppose that goes with the territory.
Right now, the closest things I have for plans for the future are to get my last bit of underage (social) drinking in soon. You can be reassured that I won't be drinking myself to death as soon as I can buy booze legally, though, mostly because I can't afford the Leaving Las Vegas route.
In blogging terms, I think I'll keep doing what I've been doing; aimless wittering. At some point in the future there will be reviews of Art Brut vs. Satan and Bat For Lashes - Two Suns, unless I decide to flog them to someone for money.
And if that career plan doesn't work, there's always prostitution.

Normal Service Resumes

2009-04-23T18:45:00.005+01:00

A REAL Man

2009-04-13T08:53:00.004+01:00

Metrosexual twigmen who admire your shoes are all very well in good times, but when the going gets tough, what you actually want is a REAL man.
- some hack

A REAL man. Dangerous phrase, that. So what makes a REAL man? Well, here was me thinking it was having both X and Y chromosomes*, but apparently I'm behind the times. Apparently REAL men are muscular, hairy morons who are good at violence and DIY. Is this not just as poisonous a gender stereotype as the ditzy woman or the loyal housewife?
There's a nasty sort of implication in the Mail article that if you aren't built like a brick shithouse, or display any other traits that belie something other than machismo, you aren't a 'proper' man.

In the Nineties we had Jarvis Cocker of Pulp. Now he just looks like a girl - and not a pretty girl either.

See?

In fact, he looks like a girl on the run from an eating disorder unit.

Tasteful. There's another bit where she goes on about James Blunt. First of all, and we must make this clear, I despise his music. I think it's bland, generic shit with nothing at all behind it. But her evidence for citing Blunt as part of this generation of girly-men is that she met him once and was taller than him**.
I don't know if you know this, but James Blunt used to be in the army, and served in Kosovo. I think you'll admit, that takes balls. Figuratively. My point, though, is that it ticks all the boxes as manly behaviour: guns, tanks, violence, and so on. There's, perhaps, a lesson there about not being able to judge someone's character on the basis of first impressions. Does our hack learn this valuable life lesson?
Does she fuck. It goes on in this manner for a while, before this gem:

When did we start thinking masculinity was threatening?

I'm not sure we ever did. When did we start thinking femininity in men was threatening? Or masculinity in women? Because we've had those for years. How about, when will we learn to regard gender in more than these narrow, pre-conceived notions?
If you prefer your men to be muscled and testosteronerific, grand. But don't force your quasi-fascist framework of 'x is manly and you are not a man's man if you are not/do not do x'. Because if you do, someone might just as readily decide that, for instance, journalism is not womanly and you're not a 'proper' woman if you work. Or vote. Or think.

A man in a skirt? What went wrong?

You might as well say (and I'm sure at one point the Daily Mail did), 'A woman in trousers? What went wrong?'. If a man wants to wear a skirt, why the fuck shouldn't he?
I don't have a beard, I don't have a lot of muscles. I've worn eyeliner and nail polish. I know how to dress myself and I'm fucking useless at DIY. I couldn't take Kate Moss in a cage match and I cry at the end of romantic movies. And to borrow a Franz Ferdinand lyric, this is what I am, I am a man. They didn't end that line with 'so go fuck yourself, you patronising, ignorant, vainglorious bitch', but I guess it'll have to do.
* That's a limited definition, too, now that I think of it, since it'd necessarily exclude transgender people. But it'll do, by and large.
** And since when has height been part of fashion? You can't change it. And besides, many short men are angry motherfuckers who will cut you if you mention their height.

Schrödinger's Blogger

2009-04-10T00:56:00.004+01:00

If you shut a blogger in a small, isolated environment (for example, an empty one-bedroom house in suburbia), and provided them with an internet connection that would work or not work based on the decay of a piece of a radioactive substance attached to the router, the blogger (due to quantum superposition) would exist in a simultaneous state of blogging and not-blogging (assuming the Copenhagen interpretation), until anyone read his blog to find out.
In other words, I'm back. Finally I have a working internet connection and a working PC with which to use it, and I'm staying on my own at my Dad's vacant tax-haven in the UK. Living on my own has restored a little bit of my joie de vivre, so I think I'll be able to write here more often. And, failing that, I can do what I'd be doing without an internet connection: lie on the sofa eating junk food and watching daytime TV*. Granted, that's not an ideal situation, but ideal is just that, which means I'm settling for small steps and aiming for some kind of full-time education in September.
So, to kick things off anew, a statement that will anger everyone, everywhere: Bishops don't know when to shut the fuck up and acknowledge that they aren't relevant any more. Two separate stories on BBC News today, in both of which a senior clergyman does a why-oh-why-oh-why kind of thing about the state of British society to get their name in the press.
If I have a look at the TV guide and moan about there being nothing good on, it's not going to make national news. Apparently you're making a profound comment on secularism in British society if you do the same thing while wearing a dog collar. I'd perhaps venture to suggest that the reason there are fewer religious programmes on the BBC, if indeed that's the case, is that no-one was fucking watching them. And from a more cynical point of view, God does not help collect the license fee.
In other news. Young people 'demeaned', says condescending old man. Apparently the suggestion that some people may be having sex while indulging in the demon drink does not mesh too well with the Archbishop's outdated ideology. The idea, then, that those people who do have casual sex would perhaps benefit from information about sexual health is not a popular one.
And then there's some more bollocks about abortion being presented as an 'easy solution', a token olive branch for the gays, sort of, and a last dig at the idea that faith should not be taking a commanding role in education.
Hate mail to the usual address.
* I took to watching The Bill. It was so bad.

Anthills And Emos

2009-04-06T15:10:00.006+01:00

Lovely summer's day today, albeit hot enough that birds were spontaneously combusting in mid-flight. The builders are back, still listening to Heart 106.2 FM and demolishing walls and ceilings. Luckily, I don't have to hear any of this, as I've exiled myself to my Dad's empty house in the next copy-pasted suburb over. This leaves me incommunicado for a couple of days at least; I'm typing this on a tiny iPhone keyboard, so apologies for the inevitable spelling mistakes and such.
Just got back from second CBT session - we haven't actually gotten into the therapy proper yet; mostly it's just me whining for an hour. But still unreasonably helpful and productive. Suburbanham is filled with school-kids on their holidays, and most notably, the emos are out in force. Was enjoyable walking amongst my mopey brethren.
This is going to have to be a short post, given how much of a pain in the arse the iPhone keyboard is to use. So I'm going to end there, and keep doing Twitter and emails until I have a working computer again.
Abrupt endings FTW.

Foxes Vote Hound

2009-04-03T11:17:00.003+01:00

Gays and lesbians 'more likely to vote Tory'

Gay and lesbian voters are now more likely to vote Tory rather than Labour, a poll has suggested.
The survey of 1,800 gay men and women found 30 per cent said they intend to vote Conservative at the next general election.
[...]
Labour and the Liberal Democrats each took 18 per cent of the vote, while 17 per cent said they will not vote and nine per cent were undecided.

What?
Look, I realise that the next election will be fought over what's left of the economy, and I realise that Gordon Brown has been a spectacular fuck-up in government, but the Tories? Really? As if that's going to make things better.
I mean, if your response to a financial crisis caused in part by a financial elite recruited on a nepotistic basis and given way too much free rein, and your response is to want to see a Conservative government elected, I'm sorry, but you need to look at exactly how you came to that conclusion. And then start headbutting the nearest wall until you realise the utter and complete futility of British politics.
The fact that these are gay voters only makes things worse. Yes, the Conservatives have suddenly become 'compassionate' and gay-friendly, but it seems to me that people have been very quick to forget what they've gotten up to in the not-too-distant past. I don't think it's a stretch, either, to suspect that once David Cameron gets into government, the sheep's clothing will come off and we'll be back to the bad old days.
Sigh. Rant over.
I suppose I should just be grateful none of them said they were going to vote BNP.

pictured: compassion

Down With The Sickness

2009-03-30T21:18:00.003+01:00

I think I've come down with something nasty. Aside from the mentalness, obviously. I feel like death. All in all, this didn't make for an ideal state in which to get dragged to CAMHS this morning, but I came out of there skipping gaily down the street. Metaphorically, you understand. I don't dance.
No, really. There's a team from the UN on hand at all times to make sure I don't. It's like how the man in the iron mask had two guards with him everywhere he went, with orders to shoot him if he took off his mask. Only with more moonwalking.
Anyway, my point is I met this woman who does cognitive behavioural therapy (not sure if she's a psychotherapist, a psychologist or a psychiatrist), and things went really well. I admit to being skeptical about CBT; I still am, really - given that it was only the first session we didn't really get into the therapy proper. But I can't tell you how much of a difference it makes to have someone to talk to at CAMHS who listens to you, and is actually helpful.
It's a huge change from the likes of Dr. Twattington-Puffball, at any rate. So, on balance, things are still pretty shit. My head's still fucked, I'm still depressed, and I'm fairly certain I've got some kind of martian space-virus from hell. But it feels like I've made tangible progress today, however small, and that's invaluable.
To be honest, I didn't really have anything else I wanted to talk about. So I think what I'm going to do is respond to some emails and some comments, and then spend the next few days under a duvet, until I can be sure my immune system has bludgeoned the man-flu equivalent of the Predator into submission.

In Which Alex Feels Sorry For Himself (Again)

2009-03-29T13:29:00.002+01:00

Tough times, as you may have guessed from the frequency of new posts. There is no worse death than the end of hope, says Pelagius, and I think the weird old fucker was onto something. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this. Idling, I mean. Having been booted out of Dulwich, spending the rest of my natural life watching shit TV and killing time on the PC sounded like a good idea, but after a year and a half (or was it two? Time has an elastic property in times like this) it loses its shine, believe me.
The problem is hope. Hope for change, to purloin a presidential campaign slogan. I want very much to be elsewhere. If nothing else, I want to be back in control of my emotions. It's gotten to the point where I've largely forgotten what living without depression was like.
I want to be getting out and doing things, but aside from having nothing to do and nowhere to go, I'm just not up to it mentally. The problem is, you can't solve this kind of isolation with grand, sweeping gestures. You have to go about it one step at a time, even if it's just going for a walk or whatever, which makes me feel like a failure for having to think about it at all.
I want to be able to step outside my front door without having to plan and worry and check and worry some more and re-check and panic and cut, every time.
I don't see that happening, at least not in the near future. Whether I like it or not, this isn't a situation I can get myself out of alone, and between my CPN leaving and the referral to the CMHT, the support I need to be getting is fucked.
I'm not sure where that leaves me. On a sinking ship, baling out water with a thimble, maybe.

War! Huh! Yeah!

2009-03-26T18:11:00.004Z

What is it good for?
Absolutely nothin'!

Granted, that song does miss out a couple of things war is good for, lining the pockets of defence contractors being the one that springs most readily to mind.
Anyway. The new Call Of Duty trailer makes me uncomfortable. I should perhaps offer some background information. I've played a lot of videogames, and as such I've played a hell of a lot of videogames set in a modern war. Along the way, I've picked up enough assorted trivia to be able to tell you the difference between an M16 and an M203, or how to describe what was historically known as the Four Fs system for infantry combat tactics. However, it's worth noting that I've always tried to remain conscious that these things are trivia, and that as realistic as war games purport to be, there will never be anything capable of accurately replicating war in all its horror. Which is something for which we should be profoundly grateful. To think otherwise is to be the marine in Aliens who's done 38 combat drops (simulated).
The new Call Of Duty trailer makes me uncomfortable because as much as I've played games about war in the past, I've enjoyed them in the full knowledge that they bear only a superficial resemblance to reality. And as immersive as these games are, that's all they are.
The new Call Of Duty trailer makes me uncomfortable because I'm not sure I want to be part of something that makes terrorism a feature of what is ostensibly entertainment.
I don't know. In games, I've done plenty of horrible things. I've run over enough people in GTA4 to keep the local hospitals in business for years. I said it myself. These are only games, and I shouldn't be taking them so seriously.
But as games get closer and closer to realistic looks, and tackle darker storylines, I think this is a conversation gamers need to be having.
I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm just saying, it makes me uncomfortable.
Perhaps the question here lies with Call Of Duty 4, the first Modern Warfare game in the series. I've written about it before, here, along similar lines. The key question was, and remains, how conscious were the developers of what they were doing? Because that AC130 mission had the potential to have been an incisive satire on modern war, or another piece of oo-rah jingoistic militainment. Maybe it doesn't matter what the developers' intent was, just how you as the player interpreted it.
That also raises the question of whether games have to be fun. I recall one games journalist (don't remember who) arguing against that by saying, if I recall correctly, that upon having watched Schindler's List, you probably didn't want to crack open another beer, rewind the tape and watch it again. That sounds about right to me.
Perhaps, then, I'm just being over-sensitive. It's OK for games to make us feel uncomfortable, and equally so for them to be tackling this kind of subject matter. It's just that the contrast between overt new-game hype and real-world serious issue was not an easy thing to swallow.
Wouldn't it be ironic if we in the West had responded to terrorism based, in part, upon an ideology that suggests our culture is morally debased, by commercialising it?

Rambling

2009-03-25T21:35:00.002Z

Do please forgive me for the terrible video quality. YouTube is being... recalcitrant.

And if politics is helping other people...

2009-03-24T13:29:00.005Z

then my political career is pretty fucked
because the truth is I don't like people all that much

It's hard to write interesting things when nothing interesting is happening. Who knew?
The economy's still comparatively fucked, Richard Littlejohn is still suggesting British troops bayonet people he disagrees with, et cetera, et cetera. Things are similarly boring in the Teenage Misanthropy Secure Undisclosed Location, too, so instead of an actual blog post I'm just going to point you in the direction of some political blogs I like. Hopefully that should satisfy your need for new content, or at least cause you to become so enraged by my political views that you forget how lazy I'm being about writing new things.
Go forth and read:

In the interests of balance, if I were to point you at a conservative blog it'd be Iain Dale's, and if I were to point you at a libertarian* blog it'd be The Devil's Kitchen.
* A very wise and most likely apocryphal man once said, 'I'll start taking libertarianism seriously as a political ideology when you can put two libertarians in one room and get them to agree on what libertarianism is'. Or maybe he was missing the point.

A Short Poem

2009-03-22T19:25:00.003Z

So. Farewell then
Jade Goody
Pig-ignorant racist.

It would seem that
You are dead

But are you?

You could live on
in the hearts
of vacuous people
with nothing better to do
than mourn someone they never knew.

Thanks to a society
as incontinent emotionally
as you were
verbally.

Apologies to E. J. Thribb (17½).

The Whiskey Priest

2009-03-19T12:20:00.004Z

Things have been... complicated. I know that's the mating cry of the Lesser Spotted Angsty Teenager, but I mean it. The précis is that my head's fucked. I don't know whether I'm happy or sad, suicidal or filled with life, which way is up, what the date is, or the name of the prime minister.
Looming large in the rhetorical rearview mirror is Father Kelly the whiskey priest. That's the aspect of my personality that allows me to get away with castigating people over self-injury, and then go running back to it when things get messy.
Obviously that's not all that's going on, but at the moment I'm not feeling particularly well-equipped to write that well, so forgive me if I don't make much sense.
So first of all, I've got the house to myself for the next few days. I realise that sounds like a recipe for disaster, but actually I'm quite enjoying it. The peace and quiet is a nice change, if nothing else. That I like the absence of other people should hardly come as a surprise to regular readers, anyway. I did have an appointment with my CPN yesterday, but he didn't show up and I've not had any phone calls. I'm taking this to mean that one of his other patients has taken it upon themselves to attempt a balancing act on the top floor of the local car park. Or something. Probably just as well, anyway, in that he's saved me a half-hour of dishonesty.

'Yeah, um, I think my mood's been OK'
Liar.

'I haven't self-harmed this week'
Liar.

'No, no thoughts of anything more serious'
Lying, lying liar.

Oh well. I think I'm entitled to a little misinformation, given the circumstances. Or not. But who cares, this is Fr. 'Deception's just another word for tact' Kelly's show for the moment.
Everybody cheats, everybody lies.
Speaking of which. A little bit of background: Alex Kelly is my real name. I've been comparatively far more honest on this blog than I have with people, so you'll have to take my word that everything I've written on this blog is true. That said, it wasn't always my real name; I changed it a few months before I started this blog, by deed poll. In doing so, I dropped my dad's name for my mum's maiden name, and changed my first name into the bargain. Don't read anything into that, I just plain didn't like the name I was born with. If you heard it, you wouldn't like it either. But you won't*.
Anyway, in my rather limited correspondence with my dad, it seems this whole process slipped my mind. Funny how things like that can happen, don't you think? I could say I was waiting for the right moment to tell him, but I wasn't. Problem is, my dad's now found out about this from my mum (accidentally on her part, I should add). I don't know how he'll take the news, but I expect a passive-aggressive letter par avion any day now.
So, what else is going on? Well, retail therapy. I've got a few books in the post, and a lovely shiny new keyboard that I've just blown all my money on. The books are A Gay History of Britain, Brewer's Rogues, Villains And Eccentrics, and American Gods by Neil Gaiman, since I'd heard it lauded on radio by someone lovely.
I think that'll probably do for now. More later, probably.
* Oh for fuck's sake, it was Chris. There. Now you can stop thinking it was Reginald or something.

Review: No One Lives Forever 2

2009-03-18T03:12:00.004Z

Or: Why Master Chief Is Everything That's Wrong With Gaming

Just so you know, I'm writing a lot about games and music because I'm not talking about more serious things. It's called escapism. Anyway, I'd like to tell you the story of one of the best games I've ever played. Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I'll begin.
First, it's important to note that this is an old game. Old as in released seven years ago, making me -holy Jesus - 11 when I first played it. This review came into being because I saw this rather brilliant LP of its predecessor (an equally distinguished game, for the same reasons I'm about to laud this one), and realised I'd forgotten just how good it was.
Which leads me to explain the subtitle of this review, just to quiet the Halo fanboys for a moment. Master Chief is everything that's wrong with gaming because he's almost a complete nonentity. I've never believed the idea that the player character should be a blank slate for the player to project themselves onto* - given the choice, I'd much rather have a well-rounded character; if they're written for well enough, it shouldn't be hard to empathise with them anyway.
As game characters go, 'vaguely jingoistic faceless warrior' is not what you'd call well-developed. The problem is that in FPSes especially, the player will almost always be pulling the strings of a white male with short brown hair and possibly stubble. These come in 'grizzled marine', 'grizzled space marine', 'grizzled criminal' or 'grizzled mercenary' flavours. The problem is that this is what non-gamers tend to think videogames are about; it relegates gaming to the status of a childrens' toy, casts all gamers as the sort of drooling racists that populate Halo 3 servers on Xbox Live, and ensures that any gems of genuine imagination or profundity are almost certain to be swept under another wave of generic shooters populated with gung-ho hard men and silent protagonists.
The No One Lives Forever series was always one of those gems, and because most people are idiots, most people didn't buy them - hence why the developers, Monolith, are now working on a continuation of the FEAR franchise instead. This franchise features an unseen, non-speaking protagonist fighting enemy soldiers who are, quite literally, clones. In generic office and sewer levels.
I don't suppose you can blame them for knowing what sells.
Which, several paragraphs in, finally brings me to the game I set out to talk about. NOLF2 (saves me typing out the full name) is the antidote to generic shooters. If you asked me to describe why I liked it in three words, I'd go for 'different', 'innovative' and 'unique'. OK, two of those are very close to being the same thing, but whatever.
It's set in the late 60s, and the protagonist is an appropriately glamorous superspy by the name of Cate Archer as she fights the eeeeevil organisation HARM. That's two things to note right there that set it apart from the crowd. People could (and no doubt have) written theses on gender in gaming, so it seems a fairly banal observation that a female lead character is far from usual. That goes double for first-person shooters, which have always tended to capture the imagination of more gung-ho types. Heaven knows what psychologists would make of that. Depressing as it is that a woman protagonist can still be considered different enough to be interesting** (or to threaten sales - I'll get onto this later). The second thing is the setting. No space aliens, no Second World War, so that's two big marks up there. Instead, what we have is a bright, campy 60s feel, that to the best of my knowledge no other game has attempted before or since.

I'd describe the feel of the series as The Avengers (minus that twat with the umbrella) mixed with earlyish Bond (minus that twat with the dinner jacket), cut through with - whisper it - a sense of humour. I can't tell you how much of a difference that makes to the schizophrenic War Is Hell/War Is Fun message of, say, Gears of War.
Which brings me neatly to 'innovative', to which I'd add 'clever'. Your standard FPS mechanic is this: you are A Good Guy. Bad Dudes are in the way of The MacGuffin. Shoot and kill them. Progress. I've always enjoyed when game designers screw with established mechanics (hence my love for Bioshock), and the NOLF series does that, to a certain extent. For one thing, it makes stealth an option, while retaining the choice to just shoot everyone in your way if you want to. To aid that, several appropriately 60s-spy-movie gadgets are available. My personal favourite was the ability to fire glue to stick an enemy to the floor. Needless to say, that isn't something you'd find in most games.
Of course, they had to go and bollocks it up, didn't they? The closest thing to a sequel NOLF2 ever got was a standalone expansion pack by the name of Contract JACK. Presumably in response to what the masses wanted, the developers killed the atmosphere, removed all the best characters, and churned out a generic run-and-gun shooter (by way of contrast, the first NOLF game had you engaged in a mid-air shootout after falling out of an exploding passenger jet, in order to catch up with a falling enemy goon and steal his parachute) that wasn't even that good in that regard.
I like a lot of games, but I can only think of a few that have made me properly grin while playing them. NOLF2 was one of them, and if you ever get the chance to pick it up from a bargain bin at Game or whatever, I urge you to do so.
To make my point in pictures, compare and contras t.

* OK, OK, there are a few exceptions. MMORPGs, for one. But I don't play MMORPGs because I don't like people, so I'm not counting them in this already massive generalisation.
** Triply so when the average woman in videogames looks like this.

I Think I'm In Love

2009-03-14T22:44:00.001Z

Hats? Guys wearing makeup? Misanthropy?
<3

Sorry, What?

2009-03-13T20:13:00.003Z

A day after Kretschmer shot 12 of his former schoolmates and teachers in the small town of Winnenden and then three in nearby Wendlingen, feelings run high among those who shoot as a sport and hobby.

[...]

Kretschmer's father belongs to a shooting club just like the one in Volksdorf and passed on some of his skills to his son.

The family is said to have had a private firing range set up in the cellar of their house.

[...]

"The actual problem is violent computer games," says Georg Stiel, president of the club in Volksdorf.

Wolverines!

2009-03-12T14:43:00.005Z

I am excited for World In Conflict: Soviet Assault, and the return of the '80s Cold War gone hot setting*. Have an HD trailer.
Actually, watching this I had a bit of future-shock. I mean, when I first started playing videogames as a kid, the state of the art looked like this:

you can almost see the voxels

The realisation comes that we're living in the future. OK, maybe we don't have jetpacks yet, but I'll settle for pretty flashing pixels if they're in a high enough resolution.
* Hence the title. Shame on you if you don't get the reference.

I Am Jack's High Blood-Pressure

2009-03-10T18:22:00.008Z

Richard Littlejohn. Richard fucking Littlejohn. Just one more shit-stain in the already brown trousers of The Daily Mail. On the backhanded recommendation of a commenter at the rather brilliant MailWatch, I had a look at his latest column.

And why a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender month, anyway? Why not a Foot Fetishists, Spankers, Sadists and Masochists History Month?

This should go well.
Well Richard. That would be because, fun as S&M might be, it doesn't hold a great deal of historical significance, nor has anyone rounded dominatrixes (dominatrices?) up into camps, as far as I know.
Oh, I see. You were being facetious. Conflating the (fairly mild, if you ask me) various sexual depravities there with LGBT people. Which is the kind of malicious lie that's behind everything from the gay kid getting beaten up after school to the gay couple not being allowed to kiss in public.
A photo is included of a bigoted cunt who pulled his children out of school for LGBT History Month. He could perhaps have written an angry letter, but that wouldn't get his face in the paper. His kids are sitting either side of him, and if I'm honest they look like they couldn't give a fuck. I mean, they're kids. What does this mean to them? A month off school, I suspect. And I found myself thinking, knowing it was wrong, that wouldn't it be funny if one of them turned out to be gay? Not just gay, but gay. The unmissable kind. Because it's all very easy to consider LGBT people as in some way othered and separate, but it's an illusion.
The problem with us is that we're a minority it's impossible to contain. And what's more is, the more control you try to exert, talking about a 'homosexual lobby' or a 'homosexual agenda', the more control you'll lose, because you're dealing with a minority where what defines us is not the colour on the skin but the feelings in the heart. It's like fighting the tide.

Parents who choose to tell their children about homosexuality only when they feel the time is right have to be pummelled into submission, using the full might of the law if necessary.
This isn't education, it's cultural fascism.

This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism. This is cultural fascism.

This is cultural fascism.
You couldn't make it up.

I Am Ill, But I'm Not Dead

2009-03-10T16:12:00.003Z

...and I don't know which of those I prefer.

Frankly, my patience is wearing a little thin. Be that with the NHS, with myself, with being mentally-ill, or just with other people, it all adds up to the same thing. Namely, one of those mandatory teenager spells where you're in the huff with the world and all the people in it.
Amongst other things, I've got Internet access shakier than a Parkinson's sufferer in an earthquake, and the house is filled with workmen blaring Heart bloody 106 point bastarding 2 FM. And on top of all that, they're going to have to start knocking down walls, because it transpires that the house was originally built with the strategic use of wafers.
Unfortunately, I haven't gone completely goth and painted my room black, but I've done the next best thing and come up with some appropriately cynical poetry, if you can call it that.
Other than that, I've been spending my time wrapped up in books, mostly more Christopher Brookmyre. I'm beginning to suspect I'm addicted. Similarly, all of this tartan-noir has kind of made me nostalgic for Scotland. Which is a rather more-Irish-than-the-Irish-themselves sentiment, given that I wasn't born there and I've never lived there for any length of time, but whatever. I'd say it was a family thing, but I don't like my Scots relations any more than I like the English ones. If there's anything deterring me, it's thinking what abortion of an accent would come out of mixing my public-schoolboy manner of speaking with anything north of Kensington. Probably something vaguely Morningside*. Either that or I'd end up talking like Loyd Grossman, and that's something to be avoided.
So I think it'd be safe to say that things haven't been going well. But what the fuck, I'm still here, and I super-ultra-double promise I'll post more regularly from now on.
* The kind of place (I'm led to believe, by an obviously-biased Glaswegian mum) where the typical welcome is 'you'll have had your tea, then'. Domain of breakfast rolls and Miss Jean Brodie.

Review/AAR/Blether: Empire Total War

2009-03-05T08:21:00.011Z

OK, so. Empire: Total War the latest in the Total War series, in which you take a country in the given period of history, and lead it to victory by a combination of real-time strategy style battles, anda larger-scale, turn-based campaign map. Rather than do an ordinary review, I thought I'd run through a quick attempt at the Grand Campaign, as a sort of introduction.

This is the opening screen for the main campaign bit (click to embiggenate). You'll notice (or not) that I've got the difficulty set to easy, because I am terrible at strategy games. Really. I mean, I enjoy them, but my general battle plan is to line up my troops, march them at the enemy, and watch. In other words, I think like a Soviet Field Marshal, circa 1942. This may go some way to explaining what happens next. Also, the victory conditions are on the left side. You start in 1700, and by the end of 1799, you more or less have to become the world's only remaining superpower. We're not going to meet those conditions. Ahem. Now, may I have the next slide, please?

This is the campaign map. You can see the cities laid out. The redcoat represents an army. The more gold things to the side of the flag, the bigger the army is. Likewise with the navy (the ship, obvs), but with blue things. It's basically Risk, but more byzantine.
The plan, such as it is, is to not bother fannying about with colonies and just invade France. I'm aiming for Paris, but will no doubt get booted back to the UK pretty quickly, effectively making this history's most violent duty-free fags-and-booze run.

With that in mind, the Duke of Marlborough and 571 of his mates pitch up at Calais. The French apparently don't take too kindly to this. The three buttons along the bottom there decide whether I fight the battle, the computer works out who won and the casualties and such automatically, or the Brits flee like frightened rabbits. Worth noting that even though I have more men and a better general, the balance of power (the red-green bar) is against me. Even the computer has no faith in my abilities.

I decide to fight this one myself, for King and Country and such. My battle-plan, as always, is lining the men up and walking them slowly towards the enemy. I call it the Haig strategy.

Frenchmen! And with cannons. This may prove... problematic. I grab the nearest cavalry unit and invite them to do their best Charge of the Light Brigade impression.

Sadly, it all goes to shit when they run headfirst into a band of French cavalry with pointy sticks.

Mercifully, the shooting-gallery tactic appears to be working splendidly. Also, I must say that the graphics in this game are really very pretty indeed.

Tiring of the lead surprise with extra lead, the enemy leg it.

I win, and celebrate in true Georgian style by downing a couple of pints of gin and setting fire to Calais. Having nothing better to do, I start another fight with the nearest French army. Due to a gin-related judgement impairment, I deploy my forces with their backs to the enemy, and lose about a third of my expeditionary force/raiding party. I also discover the reason for the balance of power bar malarkey earlier.

It transpires that a sizeable number of my soldiers (who I shall dub the Fighting Boozehounds) want to be excused games because they don't actually have rifles. 'Pikemen' my arse. I make the best use of them I can by suicidally charging them into some French line infantry.

Sadly, things don't end well. I mourn the loss of the brave soldiers by downing a couple of pints of gin. Of course, the other new thing in Empire: Total War is the naval combat. In the other Total War games, whenever navies clashed, the game auto-resolved it and handed you the printout with the numbers of losses and such. Not so this time! To seek revenge for Britain's noble alcoholics, I go looking for the nearest French fleet, to introduce them to the might of the Royal Navy. I moderate my anger by downing a couple of pints of gin.

Ah. See, the might of the Royal Navy are actually outnumbered here. Apparently, I make as bad an Admiral as I do a General.

This never happened to Horatio Hornblower.

Anyway, that is that. The game is far more wide-ranging in scope than I've mentioned, given that it covers the entirety of Europe, and most of the Caribbean, India and the eastern Americas. Fundamentally, though, the bread-and-butter mechanics are the ones I've been failing so badly at. Regardless of my ineptitude, it's a very good game, and if you enjoyed this review-thing, then mayhaps give it a look.

Semblance Of Majesty

2009-03-04T05:16:00.002Z

Sorry for the lack of updates, depression has a nasty habit of getting in the way. Anyway. The important thing is that I'm still going, in a dynamic, emergent, social-networking, web 2.0 sort of way. To be honest, I'm not sure what that means either, but it's all the rage.
Lately I can't really seem to concentrate on anything. I know that goes hand-in-hand with depression, but it's not really something that's come up for me before, so it's taken some getting used to. It's kind of lifted over the past day or so, though, so hopefully I'll be back to something approximating normal (at least by my standards) soon.
If nothing else, I should be able to write something, because my pre-ordered copy of Empire: Total War is in the post, and another slice of flashing pixels to distract from the futility of existence is always a welcome thing.
At some point further vlogs should happen, once I've gotten the motivation to actually film and edit them and such. Again, this isn't a thing depression lends itself to well.
This is all getting to be a bit rambling, so I'll end there, and go to watch the first Star Wars film (as in Episode 4) on DVD, cause I've never actually seen it all the way through, and it's denting my geek credibility. Actually, I rented Wristcutters: A Love Story as well, but that doesn't seem like a great idea given my current mood.

Self-Injury Awareness Day

2009-03-01T02:41:00.002Z

is today. If you weren't aware before, you are now.
Sorted.

Whine

2009-02-27T15:44:00.000Z

Not Dead

2009-02-27T10:25:00.004Z

So I've had a bad few days, as you may have been able to guess by the lack of updates. I'm hoping to do another vlog soon (probably recording tonight, uploading overnight as slow internet is slooooooow) to tell you all about it, assuming you're interested. In the meantime, have some music. I could never really get into the Pet Shop Boys, but this song embedded itself into my prefrontal cortex as soon as I heard it and refused to leave.

Red Brick Monstrosity 2: Electric Boogaloo

2009-02-23T16:31:00.003Z

So I've got an open letter/blog post in response to all the slagging off of my old school I did in this post (and quite a few others). If you're not directly involved, I'd personally advise you to steer well clear of this post, because there's a lot of emotion and a lot of history, and if all sides aren't careful to at least try and maintain the appearance of civility, this could turn into a real trainwreck.
The whole thing can be read here (actually now that I think about it, maybe Teenage Apathy would have been a better title), but I'm going to excerpt bits of it, rather than just respond to it en masse and blind you with a wall of text. Letter is in italics, response in normal.

...The rumour mill is awash with...rumours about your departure from the school.
Glad to hear it. Some of them might even be true. Actually, tell me a few, I could use a laugh.

You said you "despised the place". Well, we despise you.
Can't say fairer than that I suppose.

Not because of your homosexuality, not because of your decision not to wear rugby shirts, drink heavily and "network". No, we despise you because you despise us.
Well, now that I've taken to misanthropy, I despise everyone. Back in the day, however, I don't think that was quite true. More on this.

In the five years we spent with you at the college you never once engaged us in conversation other than as lesser beings. Somehow we were in some way beneath you.
This is the most salient point in the whole thing, so I'm going to spare you the other times it's brought up and respond to this bit.
Thing is, if you're calling me superior, I don't really have a way to observe that impartially. I certainly didn't think I was, or remain, better than anyone. Not consciously, anyway. Quite the opposite in fact; for a lot of the time I was there, my self-esteem was at rock bottom.

You see, misery and self-loathing breeds anger and superiority.
Anger I'll grant you. Superiority is a hard thing to gauge, and I think we've both known plenty of other people at Dulwich just as elitist and snobbish as you claim me to be, who have gotten along fine.

The thing is, by and large, we have had the same experiences.
O Rly?

We too have attended the "SPS". We too have been ostracised, mainly for our smoking.
Should it not tell you something about Dulwich that that happened?

You are angry, and rightly so about people making homophobic comments towards you. You have been branded as a "gay" and for that we are sorry. The thing is, in telling the world about your troubles, you have branded every single member of Dulwich College as a rugby playing, hard drinking stereotype.
Fair's fair, I put my hands up to this one. In part because it's easier to write about, but mostly just because there were (and are) a lot of people who fit that stereotype precisely, and in hindsight they're the ones who stick out and therefore form the basis of my thoughts. I think I owe the ten of you who don't an apology. That might have been a little facetious, but I am sorry for tarring the whole place with the same brush.

Basically, we are truly sorry about any hurt you may have received from the College. If you have ever felt that it was in part or even wholly responsible for the mental breakdown you suffered, we apologise as much as we can apologise for our own actions (although we accept any apology we make will not make up for the suffering you have felt).
That's very kind of you.

However, we feel it is important that you understand that the points you have made are not wholly accurate and we present another argument.
Certainly, and that is your prerogative. Strange as it may sound coming from me, I welcome debate on this.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that. Unless anyone wants to respond to the response, write a response of their own, or ring me up and threaten to burn my house down, that is.

Woe Is Me! The Perfect Crimson Symphony Aligns Across My Capillaries!

2009-02-22T14:45:00.004Z

OK, so I was reading Lola's latest, and I got curious. I wondered if there was a self-harm equivalent to pro-Ana and pro-Mia sites. Well, I can say for one thing that the phenomenon is not nearly as prevalent. Or at least as overt. If you google 'pro self-harm' or 'pro cutting' (actually the second one's results are mostly carpenters), most of what you'll find is heavens no we're not pro self-harm disclaimers. But there are a few places (mostly with a crossover audience from the very same pro-ED places).
It's worth noting at this point that as a misanthrope I find it helpful to apply Sturgeon's Law to humanity: 90% of people are shit*. Accordingly, the people in these groups are almost always idiots. I realise I should probably be sympathetic and oh they've been misled and inner demons this and tormented that, but fuck 'em, they really piss me off.
Thing is, they're living up to the stereotype. Which is all well and good, but it makes people think that all people who self-harm are teenage girls with stupid hair and names like Kristyn and Emilee who go on about the perfect crimson agony of it all. If I may be permitted to play them at their own game of cutting oneupmanship, these are the people who cut themselves once. With a butter knife**.
I wouldn't mind, but for three things: that it makes it harder for people who aren't a 16 year old girl with a misspelled name to seek treatment, they make it easier for people to stereotype people who self-harm, and that they are incredibly, incredibly thick. I mean, serious cranial injury thick. Deprived of oxygen in the womb thick.
So, yeah, they get on my nerves a little bit. I think I gave up all hope for the future of the human race about the time I entered one site's 'gallery of pain' (castle thunder) and saw a sketch of a furry with anime hair, bleeding, entitled Angel Bleed In Silence. Now I might have written some wank in my time (actually I'm surprised I never used the title of this post), but for fuck's sake.

art

Thought I wasn't going to post it, didn't you? Well, I went there. I mean, Christ, just look at the fucking thing. Incidentally, a warning. If you were offended or triggered by the prior image, don't have looked at it.
I've always been disinclined to believe the received wisdom that self-injury is 'a cry for help' or 'attention-seeking', in part because I worked very hard to avoid having anyone know about mine. That said, some of these people make me wonder.
To a certain extent, I empathise with wanting to find somewhere on the web SI-related that won't preach to you. I mean, I think TWOLHA and RYL are cunts too, but gathering together your own little cutting party/circle-jerk? Probably not the healthiest alternative.
And they have such bullshit reasons, too.

1) It's not hurting anyone.
Well, it's hurting you. I mean, that's rather the point. Not to mention your family and your friends (although personally I couldn't give a toss about either of them, but it's the principle).
2) Let me just quote this in its entirety.

i dont know if this is appropriate...but... i took a bath last night. i cut and let the blood drip into the water. it was beautiful.

This, along with all the other wordy bullshit about how it's artistic and sensitive and all that bollocks. You are not Sylvia motherfucking Plath. Blood is not beautiful or of any particular significance. Quite the opposite, in fact. I like to think of it as a reminder that we're all meat on the inside. Granted, that seems a little over-dramatic too, but it beats hubris.
I want to slap these girls (and it is always girls). Actually, let me amend that. I want to slap these girls with a brick.

it's educational

I want to slap them with a brick, and tell them not to be so fucking stupid. Self-harm is not harmless. Given that it's pretty much responsible for me being expelled from school and shut out of the only job I've ever wanted, I'd say I have some unresolved issues on this matter. But more than that, it's a symptom of all kinds of mental-health issues, all of which can be helped by seeing a professional. A lot of the preachier self-harm help sites are cunts, but at least they're well-intentioned cunts. And at least they don't try and assign any great sense of drama to something that is fundamentally mundane.
It's Self Harm Awareness Day on March 1st. I might write something special for it, or just repost Love Is Not The Movement, because it's one of the few pieces of SI-related writing I've done that I feel genuinely proud of having written.
* Would I place myself in that category? Well, I could hardly be objective, could I?
** There's always an element of competition when self-harmers collide. Maybe it's because everyone who self-harms wants to feel at that moment that they're the worst-off person in the world, and they don't like having those illusions broken. I know I didn't.

Manifesto 2: Attack Of The Manifesto

2009-02-21T23:04:00.004Z

15) Free and fair elections will be held, but any constituency electing a BNP councillor or MP will be automatically re-named 'Twatsville'.

So it transpires that they elected a BNP counsellor basically down the road from me. The irony is not lost on me. I didn't mention this earlier because this is the first I've heard of it - I don't pay much attention to local politics because all the wards/constituencies I've lived in were inevitably safe Conservative seats.
Oh well, let it never be said that I'm not a man of my word - Twatsville it is. Never liked Sevenoaks anyway.

Review: Grand Theft Auto IV - The Lost And The Damned

2009-02-19T22:31:00.004Z

I rather liked GTA 4. It took what had originally been a mindless-but-fun series of adolescent murder simulators, billed itself as a sequel, and then crafted a surprisingly dark, gritty piece of storytelling.
Things seem to have worked out fairly well - the GTA series has gone all mature, but when (not if) I want to be playing the juvenile-but-fun equivalent, there's always Saints' Row 2 (although on one occasion it surprised me with drama as well). It's a good split.
Anyway, I've finally gotten around to finishing the first bit of (buzzword alert) episodic expansion content for it. It's called The Lost And The Damned, and it's available from the Xbox Marketplace thingy as a hefty gigabyte-and-a-bit download for about £14. The idea is that it provides about eight hours of new content, with a new protagonist and a new storyline that ties up some of the loose ends from the original game.
It succeeds quite well in that regard - the new missions are well done, and the writing, while not quite up to the standard of the original, is still pretty damn good. The tone definitely hasn't gotten any lighter since the main game (witness in particular a rather harrowing incident involving the basement of an Italian restaurant, a blowtorch and a Stanley knife) - the story focuses on The Lost biker gang during the same time period as the main game; it starts with the release of their long-incarcerated leader, and things begin to go south very rapidly from there. The writers have managed to squeeze a surprising amount of complexity into a fairly small amount of time (I managed to finish the main bit of the expansion, without fucking around with ancillary repetitive bullshit, in about 7 hours), spending most of the time focused around two incidents that go past fairly quickly in the main storyline; a botched heroin deal, and the arrival in the (NYalike) city of a shipment of West African conflict diamonds.
One thing I would complain about The Lost And The Damned's story is that it's a little bit more linear than GTA IV's. In fairness, that's not saying much, as you could hear the gear-change into drama mode whenever the writers made the protagonist make A Significant Choice (the only kind he ever gets to make) in the original. But still, there's only one real decision to be made in this expansion, and it doesn't really affect anything that I noticed.
I'm picking on the writing for two reasons. One is that videogames are an underappreciated artform (and they can be an artform*), and a lot of what makes a good game great is writing. Witness KOTOR. The gameplay was frustrating, the interface was unintuitive, and the graphics were horrible, but it was an excellent game because it presented the player with very developed, very human characters**, who it became easy to actually care about, which meant that the decisions the player made had a much greater impact.
The other is that the gameplay of the GTA series has been more or less unchanged since GTA 3 (not, confusingly, the one before GTA IV - GTA IV is actually GTA #10). Generally speaking, you'll either like it or you won't - it still boils down to driving fast cars/bikes and shooting armed goons. That makes me sound like I'm criticising it, but I'm not - it's a very simple formula that's been honed to perfection. The Lost And The Damned isn't really any different from the original game in terms of how it plays, though. There are a handful of new weapons, some of which are a lot of fun. None of them are exactly revolutionary, mind. They still go bang when you pull the curly metal bit, I suppose.
If you can afford to waste £14 for eight hours of casual violence, you could do worse. It's by no means essential if you liked GTA IV, although it does shed some light on bits of the story. If you've never played the original (you can't play the expansion without it, obvs), it remains worth a look, particularly if you liked the film Layer Cake. It's that kind of thing. It doesn't have a great deal of replay value, but I had fun with it.
* A man chooses! A slave obeys!
** Actually, my favourite character is HK-47, who is probably the least human it's possible to get.