Nanowrimo starts tomorrow, and naturally, I’ve timetabled myself up with work for the whole first week. Brilliant timing. Ah well, most updates for now are going to be story entries. Also, check the widget and site on the sidebar.

Finally got round to launching the Death Ray. You’ll be seeing some interesting stuff on Jelly Pufflemur in the next couple of days, I can assure you.

- Got dumped the other day.

- Drinking sorrows last night.

- Insides hurt.

- Ow.

- Post is three days late because of Wordpress messing me around. Even more fun.

My e-lawyers have gotten back to me, and it seems I have a perfectly good case against Jelly Pufflemur. The e-writ should be with him by the end of this week, but that’s  just too long for me. I’m a busy man. So I intend to set my death ray to work.

My death ray, by the way, isn’t a real death ray. You’re thinking of a laser cannon, and I haven’t even drawn up the plans for that.

You’ll see what it can do soon.

So yeah, I’m shutting Jelly Pufflemur down.

We have been at war on and off for umpteen million years, but only this morning, the despotic warlord JM Hoffman overstepped the mark by too much. Let me tell you what happened.

Out of sheer desperation, I arranged an interview for a Christmas job sorting post for the Royal Mail, a horrible job only made easier by a.) them seemingly employing anyone who can hold a pen b.) paying money. These two things meant I navigated their nonsensical application website, before being told I had an interview on Monday 14th October. Having arrranged it for 9am so I could get a decent shift, I went off to bed last night (Sunday night), alarm set nice and early, and fell asleep nice and late due to a bit of web design I’ve been working on recently.

Three hours sleep later, I haul my arse out of bed, negotiate a rushed breakfast, a crazed bus, and the unfortunate tummy that dislikes the previous two being combined. I get to the sorting office, get told to wait and someone will be right down… and no-one comes right down for half an hour.

You don’t need me to tell you what he told me when I showed him my confirmation email. It was Tuesday 14th October. So I’ve wasted a morning, and I’ve got to do it all again tomorrow.

This, of course, can only have been the work of that fiendish, dictionary-snorting megalomaniac JM Hoffman’s doing, so I have summoned my e-lawyer (Summon Parasite, casting level 15), to rid the earth of that travesty of a Tripod page. And if all else fails, I have a death lazer.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

As long memoried people will remember, I loves me some Slipknot. One of the first articles I wrote on the Internet was a pictoral review of The Subliminal Verses. So much so, that I was going to release a compilation of blog updates called The Moronic Verses, without realising that such an unnessersary book would be self-fufilling in name. But the album was good, their best by a good lead, and so I was pleasently surprised when I found out they’d released a new one when I was busy being told how much horses smelt this holiday.

With a title like All Hope Is Gone, its either going to be an awesome album, or a rather lacklustre one. Wikipedia tells us that we were to expect something with all the experimental properties of The Subliminal Verses, with the brutal heaviness of Iowa. And?

Erm, no.

The Subliminal Verses was a wonderful move for Slipknot, blending wonderfully quirky new sounds into something quite like their old sounds, and by fuck it was good. All Hope Is Gone, however, is a band that made a move, found it worked splendidly, and had no idea what to do with it after that. There’s supposed to be a lot more political undertones in there, but I just heard a large number of words that I could have written in Year 11. Politics and music are very comfortable bedfellows, but you have to do it whole-heartedly, and I don’t think Corey Taylor did in this one.

We didn’t get the bloody-minded madness that was Iowa, but we do occasionly get Corey chanting whatever the title of the song is, like happened in some songs in Iowa. And it didn’t really work then.  And these sounds didn’t have the same  quality as TSVs new sounds. They just sounded… bland, I’m afraid. A band who’ve done many mad things over ten years, and are starting to run out of ideas. Its very depressing, getting all excited over a new album, then being… not disappointed, it was still quite good, but not awesome. I will tell my girlfriend, another devoted maggot, “Slipknot released an album when you were down here with me”, she will say “Really?”, and I will say “Its not very good”. And I will write pointless sentences like that.

But to carry on, the best song on the album was… a bonus track, a remix of Vermillion Pt2. Yes, a song from their last album. Basically, I’m surprised it got so far up so many charts, and I think they’re going to be hanging up the masks for the last time after they’ve toured this one. Unless I’ve been wrong for six years, they stopped being truthful about being in it for the music, and they want to wring out something I don’t know. Album not amazing, me inarticulate. Boo.

Judging by this months site stats for now, it seems the only people searching for my wretched hole of the Internet are people who think I’m some sort of mine of Space Marine information. Such people evidently haven’t realised that said Codex is now very out, and its much easier to go and buy it, or at least hit up a reputable torrent site. When I’ve bought the right arm, we’ll see what my He’stan conversion is.

Until then, here’s some more nonsesne about Nanowrimo.

I’ve scoped out most of the ideas I want to use in my story now, which is always good. The main one being that its going to be done in a similar style to the works of the absolutly legendary Tom Sharpe. If I can pull off a fraction of what he can do with about 50,000 words, I’ll be happy. Nothing this, there’s a number of conventions I have to remember when doing a Sharpe.

• The book must be set in England, or at the absolute bare minumum, have Englishness as a central theme.
• In the fine tradition of British comedy, two of the main characters (usually the first two characters introduced) do not get along, but are stuck in a situation (marriage, working together) where they are forced to coexist.
• One of these characters will set up a cunning plan to make the other one look stupid, and get said other character out of the way of something.
• A combination of circumstances, bad luck, the other character reacting, and the other character setting up his own cunning plan will create a chain of snowballing misadventures.
• By the end of the book, any cunning plans have long since gone out of control, and ended up causing problems on a national scale, so that the government has to get involved in what started as two schoolteachers having a fight.
• There will be a character from the Army, usually a general.
• A character wil hang-ups about his sexuality will be advanced on by a fat, sexually vocarious woman, who will not get the cock she craves.
• A common setup for jokes will be a character saying something, then the book seguing into another characters actions, or another scene entirely, using a play on those words. For example:
• “Micheal dear, I thought you’d stopped smoking!” said his wife, smelling the smoke. He perhaps had stopped smoking, but his hat was smouldering in a corner where he’d thrown it.
• Only its done so its actually funny.
• Usually, by the end of the book, the status quo is completly restored, everything returned to how it was at the start of the book, just with a character or two locked up or blown to pieces.
• It will be a better book than any you’ve ever read.

There we go, how I can fail to do well with a plan like that? Apart from giving up by the end of the first week, of course.

I love horror, me. Nothing more wonderful than seeing people getting ripped to pieces, terrified out of their minds, by everything from supernatural monstrosities to simply being in the wrong place with the wrong people. Even wonderfully horrible 80s horror works fine by me, although I’d quite like to hang with the script writer for the original Hallowe’en, since he must be about five by now.

However, as most people with eyes and a working cerebellum can tell you, you try wanking off a successful franchise of anything, especially horror in this case, and you end up with a pile of wank and not much else. Although in this scenario, we’re imagining a load of wank coming from wanking off a franchise is a bad thing. My metaphors have been terrible lately. As is any attempt to keep a horror franchise alive. Freddy and Jason only managed to get to Freddy And Jason by sheer virtue of it beiing a big crossover thingy such as it was.

I think I’ve wandered a bit then, so lets return to my premise: make too many sequals of a film results in the last ones being horrible, and dragging down the awesome earlier films with it. Think Freddy, think Jason in space, think those Leprecaun films that nobody paid attention to after Jennifer Aniston ran off and joined a sitcom. Exactly.

But, as you may ahve expected from my long rambling intro, this isn’t a problem that’s staying in the past. Look at… well, every film in the cinema right about… NOW! LOOK NOW, YOU’LL MISS IT! FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS CHECK THE FILM LISTINGS!!!

Lots of sequals, right? Lots of crap as well? Exactly.

Now, to my point. Saw 5 is being advertised in those popup things in MSN Messanger. Saw Five. And while its saying its the last one, like fuck it is. For what was a very good reason. The first Saw was awesomely terrifying. A wonderfully twisted new antagonist, operating behind the scenes, setting horrifying traps to test his victims. And the traps themselves! Fuck me. Add to that, how they had all the subplots tying into, reinforcing, the main story of the two guys locked up in the bathroom. And the twist! It was so obvious in hindsight, yet so cleverly woven in there. When that fucking film came out, I was being dragged into girls bedrooms to check for axe murderers! I’m never dragged into girls bedrooms! Not even the girls who want me in there in the first place!

No I didn’t get booty in exchange for murderer hunting, you think I actually understand women?

Saw 2, not too shabby. Basically, Saw, only a bit grander in scope, and a bit less awesome. Not bad by any stretch, but certainly not its predecessor. Only I didn’t see the twist coming from a mile off. The traps were a bit less imaginative. The first one being a gun mounted in a door. A gun. That’s just lazy.

Saw 3, and by this point we can see the franchise wobbling quite badly. The twist was seen from miles away, almost paraded around on a stick. and while the traps were awesome, they didn’t feel as well explained as the last two films. They were just gory and elaborate. And for good measure, they decided to kill off all the antagonists. No Jigsaw, no Cutting Girl, just dead. And I haven’t seen Saw 4, but I can imagine the only way it can have gone without starting to parody itself would be carrying on the third film as if Jigsaw had planned he was going to be killed. Otherwise, its ridiculous.

Even with that, there’s no ground for a fifth Saw film to cover, save “bring people into cinema”. They’ve done it all. All. Far as I can see, some guys wearing Jigsaws skin as a mask. Imagine how you’d have felt if they released a Friday the 13th film if someone had just taken Jason’s mask and pretended to be him killing people. Then wish Bon Jovi would go back to the big hair again, and wonder what that sad sounding grunge music is.

I think I had a point there, but nobody needs a fifth Saw film, especially not the people who make Saw.

Its that time of year again. The site has been ressurected, crashed, and rebooted, there’s still a month to go, and still thousands of people have found it and signed up again. As have I.

Yes, Nanowrimo 2008 is upon us. And I’m going to see if I can actually do it. I did have a try in 2006, but it basically ended up being a copy of another guys story. Not this year! I have a vague idea that simply rips off a published novel instead!

If you’re desperatly bored, you can find my profile here, and as the time approaches, I’ll add it to the sidebar, then replace it with a special page for exerpts when November starts. There should then be daily updates here, but all will of a novelly bend.

OK, you can all run off and play now.

So, I mentioned when I started again about my web designing tendencies, and naturally you’re not interested at all. If you were, I imagine you’d ask “So what’s come of that then?” Well, so far, not a lot. Lets make a list, and curse HTML for its stupidly formatted list tags.

• Nobody seems to want to hire me yet, since I’m currently a scrawny student doing not a lot. Dogg needs more portfolio. Which seems a little stupid, but its the world, no job no experience, no experience no job” thing. But this being the internet, any sod can put up a site. So I’m working on that now.
• But since my main client is my family, that’s a bit difficult. I’ll have to start sneaking links to my web design portfolio in relevant sounding text. Like that.
• But yeah, main bit of web design is still here, and on the site in the links. And that’s not making much money, since the upkeep of the other one is paid for by me not being chucked out on my arse.
• I’m about to start learning how to make things in Flash, though, so not only is that another cool thing for the CV, it also means I can make cool Flash things to put here! Pimptacular!
• I’m going to start making another family-business website in about a month, and webmastering for an old one sometime soon.
• Ironically, I made the first version of the second site I mentioned there, but they replaced it with a package of some sort. Still using a logo I made in fifteen minutes in Paint, mind.
• I’ve made them a newer one now though, and it looks so much nicer.
• More excitingly, I’ve been contracted to make a website for the last guy on Earth you’d expect, except for the fact that its actually bloody obvious. I’m really excited about this one, because its going to be an awesome website, and its more things to put on the CV.
• I hate Javascript.

That’ll do, I’m out.