The David Cameron Nightmare Seed.

Hello, people.  How are you today?  Good?  Filled with nonsense and joie de vivre?  Want to have that stripped away from you in the most brutal way possible?  Of course you do.

Look at this face:

Really look at it, ignoring its graininess^*.  Many of you know this smug, horrible avatar of greedy privilege.  Some call him reptilian, but I think that gives reptiles grounds to sue.  See those shark-like dot eyes, black with caustic ideology.  I bet you can hear his voice, spouting shit so corrosive it's easy to believe his heart doesn't pump blood, but pure bile^**.

Now imagine that face, hovering over you, flushed red^† with sweat.  Perspiration forming rivulets and running down his nose to drip into your eye.  Hair plastered to his head.  His arms shake with the effort of keeping him above you.  He grins at you in post-coital goofiness and withdraws his rapidly diminishing erection, wiping it on your thighs as he does.

He flops down onto his side with a long, drawn-out sigh.  He reaches across to his discarded trousers, fishes in the pockets, pulls out his wallet and peels off few notes.  These notes he carefully shoves into your mouth until you gag, his post-coital smile still in place, never.  As you are about to vomit he lets go and punches you in the face.

Not pretty.

Now, if you're Scottish, think about that.  Think about any future Prime Minister of any party, sitting in Westminster, erection and fists at the ready.  I could say so much more, but I'll leave that there for you to think about.

^* Maybe I should have black-and-whited it.

^** Or you're a Tory and think he's a capitalist hero, in which case I am sorry for your illness.

^† Redder, if you want to be entirely accurate.  I'm always going for accuracy.  Except for when I can't be arsed.


Will

There's actual sunlight?

My, but I like my films.  I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story.  Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.

In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films.  I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years.  It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.

You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me.  And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.

Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film.  It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.

Not something that can be said for Dread.  I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker.  Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power.  Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes.  Arrrgh!  What the fuck, man?  Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever?  You probably failed, but you weren't that far off.  You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act.  Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be.  That's something you should've learned in primary school.

At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them.  They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me.  No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just).  The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on.  But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.

Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise.  The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them.  If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV.  I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was.  You were wrong, you bastards.

The same applies to Super 8.  This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious.  I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business).  And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP.  The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.

Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go.  I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure.  Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.

I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!


Will

Hellooooo, Mister Whitescreen!

It's a common complaint amongst writers about that moment when they sit in front of the computer (or if you're archaic or doing some weird back-to-basics exercise, in front of the typewriter*) and they're faced with the blank white screen (or page, to the troglodytes).

They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls.  They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them.  It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be.  Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.

And it shouldn't need to be this way.  For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature.  You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man!  Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.

Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list.  That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking.  Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.

For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough?  Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column?  Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas?  At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings.  That's perhaps a discussion for another day.

^* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on.  These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat.  I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed.  So fuck that jive, man.


Will

A Hinter Tale.

Come, take a walk with me.

I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.

Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits; I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.

I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them to function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.

Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.

There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.

Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future, that.

I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”

There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, and then have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you a fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”

Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was fourteen or fifteen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.

I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.

I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.

There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.

News corporations, particularly the papers, have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.

In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have a comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.

Weirdly though, both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.

The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.

Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.

And no matter what the story - doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world - you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”

It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?

But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…


Will