To do!

Before I go any further, a quick follow-up to the Rome review. Now I’ve finished the series, I kind of feel there are a couple of things I can’t let go unsaid, first and foremost that James Purefoy is, whatever I may think of Mark Antony, a brilliant actor. Seriously. If you’ve seen it, I doubt you’ve forgotten the scene in which he finds out Cleopatra has killed herself without him. (EXCEPT SHE HASN’T spoilers. Another thing the series might be playing up very slightly just for the Romeo and Juliet parallel – their last moments are a lot like the way Shakespeare tells them in Antony and Cleopatra, and less like what historians say. But it’s good drama, and a chance for the actors to do wonderfully, so that’s fine.)
Actually that’s it.

RIGHT! TO DO!
Now, I’ve done lists of stuff I plan to do in the future before, in the hope that I’ll somehow be motivated by the existence of said list to actually do them. This has, invariably, not worked. BUT I’M GOING TO DO IT ANYWAY.
To be honest, the reason I haven’t already done reviews of most of these is because I haven’t finished them yet. That didn’t stop me with Rome, admittedly, but the difference there is that I already knew what would happen at the end, so the plot didn’t really factor into it too much. So, things I plan to review once they’ve finished:
House of Leaves
A Song of Ice and Fire (not that even the author’s finished that yet, maybe I’ll do it in books)
The Fades
Fresh Meat
Derren Brown’s The Experiments
Misfits

Some of those I can probably finish within a couple of weeks. Obviously some of the TV shows won’t finish for a while, so don’t expect them for a fair old long time. I’m considering doing some of them in segments, or doing a sort of halfway review so I can be stupid about the series because I don’t know how it ends.
So… yeah. Hopefully, these should be putting in some appearance soon. Although, of course, what usually happens is that when I say I’ll do something, that is virtually the only thing I don’t do.

Also, you should check out the blogs I Will Grant You and Raspoopin, which are by my two best friends and utterly bizarre.

Lies

I lie a lot.
It took me a lot of tries just to write that sentence.
That’s a lie – rewrote it in my head a hundred times (also a lie) but wrote it down first try.
I don’t know why I lie. Most of the stuff I lie about is absolutely irrelevant to everything. I mean, what could I possibly gain from lying about how long it took to write a sentence? Nothing. But I lied anyway. Sometimes I don’t even notice until after I’ve said it that I lied; it was just a reaction, something I did instinctively, and from which nobody benefited, especially not me.
So let’s start with some things that I know to be true.
My name is Chris Durston. I think, therefore I am. I am an atheist. The name of the person I love the most in the world is Michael, and I acted like a bastard to him earlier for reasons I probably would have lied about if I hadn’t stopped myself.
See, a lot of people have decided lately that the best person to make all of their problems go away is me. Which is fine, until I start caring. Like, really caring. And then when I can’t help them, which this morning I couldn’t, I care about that too. But that’s my fault. That’s my problem, and I was a complete arse to him because I got upset about something with which he has virtually nothing to do. Because I couldn’t help one person, I was a twat to another. That doesn’t even make sense. That makes less than no sense.
A very wise friend of mine said to me that misery is optional. And she’s right, it is. I don’t need to be miserable about any of this, and I definitely don’t need to take it out on other people. I don’t need to put it on the internet for everybody to see – and here’s where the lies start getting complicated. Because I don’t feel like I want to tell everybody this. This is my problem. But obviously I do want to tell everybody this, or I wouldn’t do it. Have I really lied to myself so much that I can actually fool myself? I lie every day, although never about anything important. About stupid stuff that doesn’t mean anything or have any bearing on the world, like what I had for breakfast. The only reason to lie about that is for the sake of the lie itself. So why do it? I DON’T EVEN KNOW. And yeah, that upsets me a bit, too.

I think I only wanted to do this so that I could say sorry to everybody who ever reads this. If it’s the one I want to read it, then… actually, I don’t know if I do want him to. Another weird meta-semi-self-lie, almost conspicuous in its irrelevance.  The point is, and perhaps I just want to write this on the internet so that those I really need to say it to don’t see it, and a bunch of people who’ve never met me might think a little better of me for it:

I’m sorry. For everything.

Including this. Next time I write – if that ever does come around – I’ll try to be a bit more entertaining, although most of what I say will likely be lies.

The Second Return! (the remake, part 4: resurrection)

Having failed entirely and, frankly, spectacularly, at maintaining this blog recently, I’ve decided that I should really put more effort into it.

That’s right, humble and most esteemed reader.

I’m back.

And nobody cares, but I’m doing it anyway.

I’ll be doing a bit of writing for the excellent Day-7 as well, so hopefully that’ll spur me on to actually doing some stuff. Can’t guarantee anything – well, I could, but we all know how that went last time. At least, I do. I’m not sure anybody other than me has ever read anything on this site, but I’m alright with that.

Ahh.

After the astonishment to myself and anybody who might happen to read this that was me actually writing an article this week, I’ve only gone and not done Quote of the Week. Maybe I should just make it so that it’s updated on Monday. Anyhoo, this week’s is:
‘Every mystery ever solved has turned out to be… not magic.’
-Tim Minchin

New leaf?

This week I’ve actually managed to get Quote of the Week done on Sunday, so maybe this is a good sign of things to come. While I’d like to think that’s the case, I somehow doubt it; seems I’ve somewhat run out of stuff to say. Oh well.

Anyhoo, this week’s quote:
‘The cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn’t.’
-Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw (yes, this is the same man who gave us such gems as ‘It is nice to see one series of game has not succumbed to the scourges of modernity, but that is only because Pokemon has not budged an inch in fifteen fucking years.’)

So from now on, I think TNR updates can probably be considered ‘rare’, in that I’m only going to write when I actually have something to say from now on.

Consistently inconsistent

Well done, me, on promising to do at least one article every couple of days, and even promising a new regular feature, and not following up on those promises. Good job. Still, if you can rely on me to do one thing, it’s to not get Quote Of The Week done on Sunday, and instead do it on the Monday. So, this week’s quote: ‘Stop looking at the walls, look out the window’, from the wonderful Karl Pilkington.

Bodacious quotacious

This week’s QOTW:
‘There’s an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.’
-Douglas Adams

Starting tomorrow, I hope to follow up yesterday’s article with a full new feature entitled ‘Theory of Awesomeness’, in which I analyse what makes awesome stuff so awesome. Good times.

Update

Having missed yesterday’s Quote of the Week update, here it is in retrospect:
‘Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.’
-Mark Twain

Too much missed

There’ve been a few subjects I’ve been meaning to write about for a while but never quite got around to, so I thought that if I wrote them on here I might be more likely to actually get some articles done. So here we go, probable upcoming article topics:

Games as art
Meaningless lyrics
The comfort of nothingness

Wow. Less than I thought.

And since I missed the Quote of the Week yesterday, this week’s is:
‘Whatever success I’ve had, I always like to top it.’
-Bernie Mac

The Return: The Reprise (Part II)

After a long and, I’m sure, unwelcome absence, I’m back.

The reasons for my absence are manifold and boring, but it mostly comes down to work and college getting overwhelming. Anyway, I’m here making my triumphant return to the world of blogging, with a pocketful of dreams and the self-imposed target of writing an article at least once every two days.

The Quote Of The Week archive’s been updated with all the quotes from all the missed weeks, the most recent being this gem:
‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music’
-Aldous Huxley

First full triumphantly returning article with full fanfare: tomorrow.
Hopefully.
I’ve got a party.

If not, Saturday.
Hopefully.