But my eyes, dear, they see only you

In an odd kind of a way, it's probably time to actually do that BEST OF 2012 post.

Well, MOST READ OF 2012, anyway. 

See, I know y'all out there are reading. I have, like, pageview statistics to show that that's actually, don'tcha know, happening. Because most of the time when I'm writing for this blog I feel like this: 

I know I'm not actually writing this for any one particular person in the world, and it's not groundbreaking stuff that opens up the doors of people's perceptions, nor is it current or topical or useful, but hey, after this comes the 150th Entry, which means - yes, folks, that's right - that I've been writing this for a bloody long time. 

We've been through several transitions, here, from it starting out as a quasi-film company blog for the actual Eton Crow thing - and yeah, not much came of that because I suck at setting up an actual website even though I own the domain name, I think. After that came a lot of the Diary of a Mature Student section, which had some entertaining moments but devolved into complaining - a lot like being a mature student, in fact, so the parallel is strangely relevant. 

Then there was the ill-advised Each Day, A Film section, which I managed to keep up for a couple of months before the rising waters of deadlines overwhelmed it - and me - and it sunk. 

Since then, it's just been my ill-advised but grammatically correct - for the most part - columns. 

Lucky you. 

But let's have that best of, shall we? 

PLEASE NOTE: PAGEVIEW STATISTICS ARE ACCURATE AT TIME OF WRITING. 

Of course, if you click the links, they won't be any more. Deal with it. 

With Thirty-Five (35) views, we have: The Scott Pilgrim Column! 

My Weapon Jammed And I Got Stuck

AKA Don't Send Your Single Men To The Cinema, Mrs Worthington. I wish I'd had more to say about the film, and I also wish I knew why using Stan Ridgeway lyrics in article titles means more pageviews.

With Forty-Seven (47) views, we have: The End Of The Degree Post!
It won't be very long - you will look for me, and I'll be gone

This dream must end this world must know Your guess is as good as mine, frankly. That was written at the end of a long and difficult course, and it was, really, venting. Perhaps venting works. Perhaps Moby lyrics as post titles work. Perhaps venting accompanied by Moby works. Perhaps, as Martinson (1974) stated, Nothing Works.

With Sixty-Seven (67) views, we have: Idle TV Speculation!
This dream must end this world must know

If you want to get pageviews, Quote Dr Who in the title. Seriously. Go try it. I'll wait. Especially entertaining considering the column was about a different show entirely.

But the all-time winner, with One Hundred and Six (106) views is this:
When I wake it's kaleidoscopic lime

Which kind of confirms the Moby hypothesis. Maybe if I start using Moby song lyrics for every post from now on we'll reliably hit double digits and maybe even triple digits. 

Here's the fun thing, though; that's actually a halfway decent, interesting, thoughtful, well-researched column. So hey, quality - and Moby lyrics - apparently sell! 

It's been an odd year, folks. No doubt about it. That gets written up in the Last Column Of The Year, though, so for now let's just celebrate the fact that one of my columns actually hit TRIPLE DIGITS this year. 

Let's focus on that because the idea that I have a silent group of readers who simply read, and judge, is slightly disconcerting. 

Look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we spend

I'm having one of those weird moments where I've just spent money on something I shouldn't have, except that I feel a complete lack of buyers remorse. 

Not to harp on about it, but right now I'm broke as fuck, so it's lucky for me and my three readers that words are, technically, free. But this thing I decided to buy was

(A) Unique
(B) Part of a set I have one of already
(C) Not exactly expensive by normal standards
(D) Cool. 

The problem, really, is that I'm in a kind of weird situation at the moment with regard to money. Where I'm nominally 'employed' doesn't pay me, and no matter how much I try asking nicely, sweetly and politely, they keep dodging the question and throwing me back. 

At the same time, to find paid work that chimes with what I'm doing at the moment - and I should really talk about that more later, and would but for the fear that they might actually have the nous to read this blog, connected as it is with my youtube channel, and connected as that is with what I'm doing now, so, hi!, I guess - seems to be almost completely impossible. 

It needs to be part time, and pay okay, and be relatively understanding about the odd demands of my time that pop up here and there at the moment. 

And there simply seems to be sweet fuckall out there at the moment. 

Which means I'm eating into dwindling savings that will soon be gone, and I should really not be buying things online. 

And so we're back to the beginning of this article. 

Honestly? 

I give up. 

Can't get work means can't earn money, which means not being able to do... anything. At the same time it means mooching off of my family, which basically takes any kind of self-respect and throws it far, far out the window. 

And yet... There's this nagging voice at the back of my head that says stop complaining and the test of your character is what you do with what you have, and, well, it's right. 

I just get frustrated when people say "Oh, you need to get some bar work / administration work / clerical work" as if it's the easiest thing in the motherfucking world. Let's not forget, too, that because I'm doing what I'm doing I'm apparently not entitled to any benefits of any sort (other than the most tangential ones which, to be fair, I really appreciate like you wouldn't believe). 

This is all just idle, itinerant complaining, complements, frankly, of the season. There's a hell of a lot I need to be getting on with that doesn't cost money in particular other than the coin of the soul and, so, I guess... 

... Time to get on with things. 

I should have said it when I had credit

When I was looking for something in the loft earlier, I was confronted with something like sixty glasses of varying shapes and sizes - 'hi-ball', pint, tumbler - along with a lot of other receptacles that could, conceivably, be used as holders for candles.

A while ago, I became interested in a character called Jenny Everywhere for no real reason other than I found the idea interesting. As Inception tells us - repeatedly - an idea is the world's most resilient parasite, and I couldn't shake this one off, so I decided to make a film about the character.

I know I've featured this film on the blog before, and it's been touted around a few places as proof that I'm not just an idle dilettante - well, not completely an idle dilettante - when it comes to filmmaking, 'cause this was my show from script to nuts. Assuredly with the help of people who should have known better than necessarily to get organised in the weirdness that I brought to films - this one features quarter-second cuts of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef along with an extended excerpt of Il Triello that I'm dearly dearly hoping is covered under fair use.

It was what I'd call a qualified success - there's some really student-y stuff in there, but that's to be expected, given that I was, well, a student. I'm not a hundred percent happy with the credits, or the makeup job that would have Bergman reach for the cavalry sabre, but as films go, it's... Not too shabby. 

And that's the problem. 

I've come to accept that not too shabby is about the best I'm ever going to reach for when it comes to films, because I don't have the requisite strength of will to drive a film from beginning to completion. It'd be nice to think that maybe I might develop that, but given my experiences, I know now that I'm a student-film level producer - a procurer of actors, locations, costumes and creator of spreadsheets and call sheets, not that nebulous person called a Director, who powers on on the assumption that all that stuff's been taken care of, baby, and we'll see you at the wrap party, yeah? 

That's where we come back to my loft full of candle receptacles; while the bloom was still on the rose and the scales still over my eyes, I wrote a script for a short sequel to the above. Actually, in point of fact, it was a prequel, designed to explain how Jenny Everywhere's teleporting powers functioned - moving from location to location via The Corridor. Jenny, you see, tends to travel between universes as well as just between locations in the same world, so every Jenny uses and experiences their own version of The Corridor, a subspace area (and granted, Scott Pilgrim kind of got there first on that one, but... well... damn) filled with - you may have guessed it - candles. 

The candles were set up to mourn the passing of other Jennys from other worlds, and 'our' Jenny, being new to the whole teleporting thing - was going to be taught by another Jenny the 'lore' and the way in which it all, well, worked. 

The reason I'm writing about this now is that I'm beginning to think the number of failed, incomplete or otherwise FUBAR-ed projects I have in my bag of wishes is actually probably more in number than the number of completed projects, and that worries me, really. 

There was the film about the jewel thief and the standover man, which ended up being filmed on a dopey little SD handicam and which was impossible to cut together, and the music video for the star of that film that I never managed to get together. There was the superhero western-style stand-off, and... Actually, come to think of it, those are the only ones I've really fucked up (and no black bars on this one, because it's true as the day is long). 

I guess it's as true for any creative person as another that there are as many failed projects as successes, if not more so, but I'm just... feeling it now for some reason I can't put my finger on. 

Plus, I'd love to make a Jenny Everywhere feature film, but can you imagine the copyright problems? 

Four Years In Arcade Games

Before we leave the 1999 - 2003 period, though, I'd like to step back and talk about the problems of addiction. Addition, in this case to fruit machines arcade games, because it was a real issue when I was a student.

I wish I was joking.

Before university, I was a gamer in the sense that I had a dodgy old PC and no money for games, but played a lot of C&C and Simcity and, god, Diablo. Diablo.

These days, if you go to my alma mater, in student union terms it's just a cafe near a gym. (At least, it was a few years ago, but I really haven't been back since.)

Back in the day - and how I simultaneously love and loathe that phrase - it was the crappiest kind of boozer, the kind where you go to drink and sit on the chairs and booths that hadn't been changed for fifteen years, or out in the conservatory area where you were bloody lucky to get a seat. And you drank, and you drank, until the place started to feel pleasant enough or you passed out, whichever came first.

Around the corner, though, past the fruit machines and the cigarette machine (and god knows you could smoke there those days, before passive smoking was invented) there was a bank of arcade machines. I'm going to tax my memory here and try to fully remember them, but in my first year for certain there was a Crazy Taxi machine (with steering wheel and pedals!), a Virtua Tennis machine, and... I think... I a football machine next to them, then the stairs up to three pool tables that had seen better days before glasnost.

I'm getting ahead of myself here, though, because that was the main student union, on-campus, where you could booze before going upstairs to a nightclub that, really, wasn't; just a stage and a floor and some steps designed to kill the drunken, with a coat-check operated by an uninterested student.

If you were in your first year, though, you could spend the cost of a train ticket on glorious, glorious beer and not have to leave the halls of residence because - fact fans - it had its own bad / nightclub, i.e. a bar with a few seats and a massive dancehall area with, yes, another bloody stage.

It also had a few arcade machines, and thus was my addiction rekindled.

Sadly, it was rekindled to Windjammers.

Now, let's not beat around the bush. 

In a triumph of style over substance, Windjammers is, basically, Pong. Why lie? But it did have a certain kind of style about it, and it was kind of fun, and it was on this huge, clunky Neo-Geo arcade machine that had the distinction of offering not one but four games for your perusal. 

Next to it was a Bust-a-Move cabinet, too, but again we're kind of getting into the hazy - sadly hazy - realms of memory here. 

So when I was on-campus but out of lectures, I could play Crazy Taxi, and when I was back at 'home' I could play Windjammers, and that was, in its own kind of way, a style of happiness. 

This is basically where the story ends - the machines were replaced, over time, as they either wore out or the rental costs were too high or, in one memorable case, the entire bar closed down because the manager had been fired due to an unwavering love of vodka - but there are a couple of changes that are worth mentioning. 

Firstly, the off-campus bar got a machine called Carnevil, which was... Crap. But fun, in a crap way, if standing in a bar with a plastic day-glo shotgun was your idea of a good time. And it has the distinction of being where I met one of my oldest, best friends, too, so Carnevil will always have a bit of a place in my heart. 

Secondly, the on-campus bar - and it's kind of sad and kind of not that it's not there anymore, because let's not mince words; it was a shithole, no doubt about it, but it was our shithole, and that just sounds wrong, so let's move on - had the first two House Of The Dead cabinets, and that was all kinds of a revelation, back then. 

Looking at it now - and here you go:

It was just all kinds of crap. The graphics by modern standards - hell, by any standards - are blocky and crap, the cut-scenes are cringey, and it's just not altogether a pleasant experience. But at the time, hell, it was just cool. 

Even then we probably secretly realised it was, at its' heart, a by-rote, timings experience, learning when and where things would pop up and then trigger-pulling like a maniac, but in two-player mode, it was just the coolest, really. 

The sequel was better - especially graphically - but still retained a couple of features including the trigger-clicking (i.e. shooting as fast as possible by holding the gun a certain way) gameplay but included better boss-fights. The one thing both of them had in common was a certain financiocratic approach to completion, because the final bosses were impossible to defeat without paying to continue so, in effect, you were paying for a chance to get your name on the scoreboard. 

(Oh, sure, perhaps it was a skill thing, but that never seemed to work for anyone in our group, so... Perhaps we all sucked.) 

Over time, the drinking would get harder, and fruit machines would replace arcade games - and that was a change for the worst. But like I said in the previous post, winter is coming, and these memories are keeping me warm at the moment. So there you go, I guess! 

You're tired and edgy. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

Strange memories on a Sunday night.

This is just a memory of mine, but you can do with it as you like.

A long time ago, in a different world, it was the summer of 2000. And let's not beat around the bush; it was a different world back then. Not halcyon days viewed through 20-20 rose-tinted hindsight spectacles, by any manner, way, or fashion, but a different world, nonetheless.

My first year on the previous run around the merry-go-round that is the higher education system ended that summer. It was not a success. I was about to type that you couldn't even call it a qualified success, but I suppose you could, in that a 75% success ratio is technically a qualified success, i.e. that a pass rate of 3/4 ain't bad, I guess.

I'd made a lot of acquaintances, and a few friends, and learned a lot about a lot.

And so, on a seemingly warm summers' night in my memory, I ended up joining two of these acquaintances - two rich kids who either mistakenly thought I was one of them or mistakenly thought I fitted in around them, but they were amiable enough, so why worry - in one of their brothers' cars, a white open-top four-by-four mini-style jeep. It was, by his own admission - and take what you will from the class signifiers here - a hairdressers' car.

We lived out in East London, then, on the borders of Epping Forest in three tower blocks, and cars were few and far between because of, I guess, a combination of a lack of parking spaces, a lack of money, and the fact that driving in London is basically assisted suicide. (All right, that's a bit strong. But I didn't drive back then, so being a passenger was basically the coolest thing ever.)

It was warm enough to drive around with the top down, so we did, stopping at an Asda - if memory serves, which it rarely does these days, but still - for stuff along the way.

I had a disposable camera, and I still have the scanned photos knocking around, and it's fun to look back and see the Canary Wharf area still being built, and East London back in the day.

But looking back it reminds me of just how much of a townie I was. Not as a bad thing, but I went to university in London because of the attraction of the city, not necessarily because of the attraction of the university. Guy Ritchie also probably had something to do with it, but let's skip over that, because it's embarrassing.

Se we were driving - or, more accurately, being driven, in my case - around London on a warm summer evening, and, because the driver was a show-off, he took us right through the centre of London, by Westminster and the Houses of Parliament, then down to Piccadilly Circus. At the time, I thought the video wall there was the ne plus ultra of cool, because shiny lights and video have always had that effect on me.

My love affair with London lasted about a year, really, if we're being honest. Then the scales were slowly lifted from my eyes, via a process of slowly but surely walking downwards into my own kind of hell, then walking back upwards and out, a different (and, to be honest, fatter) person at the end of it.

But those summer nights at the halls bar, topped off by this aimless derive through the city I was coming to call home at the time, do have that halcyon ring to them at the moment. If I went back and analysed them thoroughly, it would come down to struggling with money, struggling with anxiety, struggling with coursework, and struggling with relationships.

Those warm nights were nice, though.

It's coming up on winter, here, and the forecast is if not for snow then for sheer bastard cold over the next few days. At the moment, though, I seem to be w-a-y too easily ensnared in what Gillen calls a Memory Kingdom, which, as he rightfully says, is a very dangerous place.

The thing is...

It's difficult to say and easy to say all in one, at the moment. The thing is that life is different and the same, at the moment, because thanks to a tanfastic combination of things, I'm basically going through exactly the same combination of elements now as I was then.

Like, literally. It's really odd. I know things supposedly go around and around in cycles, but this is just freaking me out that little bit.

You'd think that if this was the case that I'm going into it with a heightened degree of personal evolution and experience that give me the advantage, and I'm hear to tell you that they don't mean dick, son. Because all the experience and evolution in the world apparently don't help with the combination of money, anxiety, coursework and relationship problems.

Shovelhandle Me, , we're suffering from a lack of levity here, aren't we? Let's have a picture of Kisuke Urahara. 

 

Doesn't that make most things better? 

Here's the best way to look at it; in the grand scheme of things, my problems are trivial. Hell, in the grand scheme of things, my problems probably don't even count as problems. They are, instead, Things To Experience, Grow And Benefit From. 

And if my memory keeps tagging me back to the 1999-2003 period, well, maybe it just needs a slap. But living in the moment is hard... 

I got another fifty seconds and I'm ready to play

I'll be honest. There's been kind of a creative drought recently. 

This wasn't helped by watching Die Hard 4.0 (I really prefer Live Free or Die Hard, but apparently that title wouldn't play over here in Free Europe, so what can you do?) because, well, it's kind of difficult to put into words. 

See? Creative drought. 

I always thought being a writer would be easy, somehow. An inside job away from heavy lifting, that sort of thing. 

But I have trouble even considering myself as a writer, even though - as you can see, because you're reading it - I'm writing right now. 

Let's start over. 

I really want to talk about Skyfall, but to talk about Skyfall would mean talking about tuning out. So instead, let's wait until I've had the chance to see Skyfall again and, instead, talk about tuning out. Without, hopefully, turning out either on my part or yours. 

I have this weird relationship with time, sometimes, and I suspect it doesn't make me unique in any way. 

Normally, it manifests as - to borrow a phrase from William Gibson, describing a character called Laney - "pathological hyperfocus". 

It means that if I'm doing something that triggers the right switch in my brain, I toggle over to this mode whereby I can go for hours at a time without even acknowledging the existence of the outside world. 

Primary examples of this are video games (normal) and video editing (less normal). For example, when Spore came out I - much to the entertained bemusement of someone else - ended up playing it from evolutionary soup to galactic nuts in the space of seven straight hours, only stopping for biological necessities. 

In terms of video editing, though, it's a mixture of hyperfocus and stubbornness, because video editing is all about solving problems until they give up and beg for mercy. 

Given examples include 12 to 14 hour stints right at the fag-end of my Last Big Project, i.e. the 29 minute film that took seven months to make. 

By the end of that I was basically - once my suite-mate had finished and handed his in - working the aforementioned twelve hour days just trying to finish and submit. But to phrase it like that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, and that's one of the conditions of the hyperfocus; firstly, it has to be about problem-solving, and secondly, it has to involve enjoying something, if only the smallest bit. 

In gaming parlance, it's called grinding - i.e. doing the necessary actions to achieve your goals over and over again. 

Then again, one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the same task but expecting different results, so film editing = insanity; modus tollens. 

I miss it, though. 

I don't have anything film-like to work on at the moment, nor do I have the equipment to do so, and I really don't have the time. 

But I do miss it. 

This is not a sane and rational confession. I'm confessing to missing frustrating, angry days spent sitting on shitty chairs in a windowless bunker shared with other people giving off that special mix of stress hormone that students have as the end of term approaches. 

You can't even claim it's a kind of adrenaline junkie thing, because there's no adrenaline until the week before the deadline. It's just frustration then solution, followed by the next problem, repeat ad nauseam. 

I appreciate that that's two latinate terms in italics in one article, but I only found out about modus tollens earlier this week, so... Deal with it. 

That's the weird, sickness kind of addiction that filmmaking is, for me, at least. You make deals with devils and work for months to put less than half an hours' student film up on the screen, then you walk away, unsatisfied. 

And then you want to do it all again. 

Can someone else explain that to me? Because I sure as donkey don't understand it. 

#Losing faith, chukkah? No way.#

So this has been a column about nothing, in its own way. But to justify that, at least I'm trying to actually keep writing. 

Bah! Next week will be here soon, and with it, many things and worlds of promises. 

Well. 

You can dream, can't you?