The year is whizzing past faster than I care to think about. It seems like only yesterday that I was being told my contract was going to end early and here I am, two months later, about to start a new one.

I know I’ve been a neglectful blogger recently, not only in terms of content delivery but also in reciprocating comments or even pageviews. It’s going to get worse before it gets better and I’m likely to be even more absent over the next 4 to 6 weeks than I have been recently. Unless, that is, my new client foolishly decides to furnish me with a laptop. Otherwise it’ll be April before I get one of my own (as getting one before means I miss new legislation regarding capital expenditure plus VAT benefits and other blah blah blah tediously dull stuff that will save me a wadge of readies - stuff I wouldn’t have known about if it wasn’t for Lyle so cheers matey, I’ll be buying a beer and toasting your health the cash I’ve saved!)

On the plus side, being away from home means I get to go the cinema* more. Woot and, indeed, yay!

*They do have cinemas in Nottingham, don’t they?

My current contract ended today so we had a bit of a piss up last night and I’m not feeling altogether clever today but anyway, it’s over and done with and I don’t have to do that commute anymore. I get a week off and start a new contract at the beginning of March. I don’t quite know how I manage to fluke rolling from one job to the next without much trouble but there we go.

The downside is that it’s in Nottingham - which is not to cast aspersions on the place because although it’s inhabited by delinquents and reprobates and although everyone keeps telling me that it’s got the highest rate of gun crime in the UK, it is, reputedly, a pleasant location in which to domicile oneself. The downside comes in being 100 miles away from where I live which means commuting is pretty much out of the question (4+ hours a day? Fuck. That.) so I’m going to have to be away from home for the forseeable future.

That’s the forseeable future for the next three months which is over the end of April/ beginning of May which is when what happens? Anyone? What happens at the beginning of May? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller? Yes - that’s right, the birth of my second hatchling. So it’s highly convenient that I might get a call at, I don’t know, 2am and have to jump on my motorbike and hare home like a crazy-mad person.

There have been easier arrangements.

So mucho shito to sorto outo which predominantly is going to revolve around accommodation and finding out what the seediest parts of Nottingham are so as not to find lodging there.

Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

Just been updating my CV again.

When I say update, I mean entirely fake rewrite so that it looks like it’s more of a fit for a job spec I received on Friday. Curiously, after seeing the vacancy on the job boards, I saw it again this morning via a different recruitment agency but with an entirely different salary range. I know it’s the same job because it’s exactly the same wording but the salaries offered are totally different. Which just goes to show that recruitment agencies are lying bastards.

Speaking of lying bastards, that Gordon Brown - what a cunning stunt!¹ I swear to god that last years budget shafted everyone. I’m sure there’s a small percentile of the populace who are going to be better off at the new income tax and NI changes but fuck me - what he giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other. Then again, this comes after a weekend of going through my company accounts, setting up payroll schemes, working out expense claims, taxable income and figuring out how much I can get away with while screwing the bastards at HMRC calculating what is the minimum contract rate/permanent salary I need to be able to maintain a house full of starving hatchlings.

Who’d want to be an accountant (asks the software developer!)

¹This may or may not be a spoonerism

So it’s been a funny old week in that it’s passed quickly and without incident and suddenly I’m a week older with nothing to show for it. Wait - that’s not quite true. I went to see “No Country For Old Men” on Saturday (which brings my tally of films seen in the cinema over last 30 days to 3 which almost equals the number of films I saw on the big screen throughout the preceding 9 months) It’s a fantastic film. Go and see it. Then come back here and we can talk about it.

On the job front, I was due to leave my current contract tomorrow but as of yesterday, have a three week reprieve which is handy because contracts in my line of work have been a bit thin on the ground unless I want to go to Paris. Or Germany. My ability to speak French far surpasses my skills in German (which are non-existent) but still amount to little more than being able to ask “Ou sont les toilettes?” so I failed on the requirement to be able to parlez dans le Francais Businessomatique or something. That being said, it’s looking likely I’ll get an interview for a job with a good rate of pay that my CV is more than a match for. The downside being that it’s at the other end of the country which would entail being away from home in cheap-as-shit accommodation during the week for the best part of the next three months (IF I get the contract!)

The two implications of this are i) I’ll be in a contract away from home over the time that Hatchling #2 arrives and ii) the idea of shooting one of my shorts between now and then has evaporated into nothingness as weekends will, understandably, be devoted to quality family time. Verily doth the cookie crumbleth in this manner. The other implication is that I’ll have plenty of free time in the evenings to write. Or run. Or write and run. Or write while running. Or run then think about writing. Or build some of the websites that I’ve got to work on. Although that requires a laptop (very much like the one I didn’t buy on eBay this time last year) which I won’t be getting until April because of the tax benefits in waiting.

Speaking of short films - Wormwood is highly unlikely to happen just yet, irrespective of whether I’m away or not. The main reason is that I want it to do it as well as I can but feel that I need more practice behind the camera first. The supporting reasons are that it’s quite an involved script and has a lot of elements that will cost (as previously mentioned) in either time, money or resources. It might also take more than a weekend to shoot so will need vast amounts of production and logistical planning. Instead I’m going back to my original original plan (Plan A, revision 7, release candidate 0.93beta) and redrafting a script that only has 3 main characters and 2 siginificant locations. It’ll much easier and cheaper to film and I don’t mind doing it with my own camera.

In other news: The Writer’s Strike still going on although the DGA have come to an agreement with the AMPTP that may or may not bode well for future WGA negotiations. And this just in - Tom Cruise is a total nutter and Jerry “That bloke from Sliders” O’Connell is a very, very funny man. (The linked site is a video site dedicated to comedy videos and was set up by Will Ferrell of all people. With some of his friends. And Judd Apatow. A good way of killing time if you need to. Better than killing someone else. Or yourself.)

I know I promised that I’d do the whole AvP thing before the weekend. What can I say? I’m the Prince of Darkness and my promises mean nothing. You’ll get it, don’t worry and hopefully it will be worth it! Hell, if I manage to actually finish writing out how Predator is a metaphor for a mid-life crisis and infertility then it’ll definitely be worth it.

In the mean time, I’m recovering from having a small operation on my occular implants. I spent most of the mid-morning strapped to a chair with Clockwork Orange style clamps turning my eyelids inside out and a crazed, wild haired doctor* brandishing needles and scalpels in the vicinity of my glazzies. It all seems to be okay and as far as I can tell, the gunk oozing over my cheekbone was neither vitreous or aqueous in it’s composition so that’s alright then.

And finally: I took part in my first race of the year on Sunday - a five mile multi-terrain run around some local woods. Very hilly, very muddy, lots of fun. Managed it in a respectable time for me so am pleased with that, despite feeling like I was going to have coronary failure half way round.

What have you been up to?

*In truth he was a rather charming young doctor, clean shaven and well mannered enough to call me “sir”. More importantly, he had a very steady hand.

Owing to some extreme fuckups on the part of two different broadband providers and, for a change, none on my part, I’ve spent most of the last couple of weeks without any ‘net connect. Hence the radio silence. But I’m away at a very nice hotel spending some quality time with the S.O. and they happen to have wireless connection so I’m making the most of it for now.

So Happy New Year and I hope your resolutions are, indeed, quantifiable, measurable and achievable. I haven’t worked what out what mine are yet, apart from a) losing 1.5-ish stone in weight and b) learning to spell. That’ll probably do as in 5 or so months time my life is going to be turned upside down again and it seems fruitless in making any plans when there are so many butterflies flapping their wings in distant parts of the world, determined to make my life interesting in ways unidentifiable.

For example, only this morning I got a call telling me that my current contract was going to end sooner than anticipated because, well, I’m not sure what the real reason is but it might be to do with clash of characters and one of the characters involved might be me. Or it’s more likely that there’s a lack of funding for a project that’s currently running about 6 or so months late (even though there’s no official deadline) and my leet haXXor skillz invoke a premium rate so are first for the chop. It’s mixed blessings - glad to be off the project but not relishing having to stand on the metaphorical street corner prostituting myself out to the highest bidder again. It’s hardly the weather for it either.

Back soon when you will be victim to the last two of my Top 20 games list (possibly post-dated to be pre-christmas) and some more invective filled blathering about nothing in particular.

I thought I had written about my fascination with this game before but although I mentioned it here, here and here, it turns out I haven’t. Mortal Kombat is still the only fighting game I really enjoy and I’m not ashamed to say that it is because of the violence, the fatalities and the characters. The likes of Tekken, Soul Calibur and others may dominate from a technical perspective but it’s Kombat all the way for me.

My first encounter with Mortal Kombat was via a demo disc on an Amiga magazine way back when. I loaded it up for a laugh and got totally hooked, so much so that I had to go out and buy it. My housemates and I used to regularly play it (and I used to regularly whup their scrawny arses while playing the mighty Scorpion via judicious use of spear throw, uppercut and flying kick). Shortly afterwards, the university union saw fit to install Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcade. There was no hope for me after that.
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There’s a sort of religious discussiony type thing going on at Jon’s. Here you get a little doodle of an idea that I always wanted to explore more.

Biomechanical Messiah:

So, it’s december already. I’m busy doing stuff at the moment (like site redesign, procrastinating, displacement, reviewing archives, merging databases and investigating short film funding) so in lieu of anything informative or interesting, here are some trees.

(Click to embiggen)

This little blog entry here is indicative of just what a genuinely top bloke Mr Neil Gaiman actually is.

That is all.