Festive fatigue; and where's my dinner.

I apologise for a lack of recent posts; I have enjoyed an extended period of hard-work, much sleeping and solving of imaginery problems, but I am now delighted to say that on this fateful Christmas day I have now again found the least division of an hour to once more rattle personal agrievements into public ears.

I love Christmas, and not for the presents, it's all a huge capitalism conspiracy anyway. No, it's for the little things. The gathering at stupid-o'clock to open aforementioned gifts, wrapping over-sized ribbons around my under-sized dog's necks (pictures to follow; I left my camera cable at home) and being forced to listen endlessly to the entire oeuvre of Mozart or Handel. Other highlights include crying with my sister to the emotional heights of Lost and Found, watching my Nan getting steadily intoxicated from 4pm onwards, and joining my friends at around midnight in some forsaken haunt manned by confused bar-staff. All these little things make Christmas, not the fucking indoctrinated philosophy that western society seems to believe it's all spend, spend, spend, when in actual fact it's more drink, drink, drink.

In general I love the little things in life, these are, in my opinion, happiness embodied. Grand displays of love or affection to little for me, it's your mate buying you a pint, it's holding your girlfriend's hand, it's noticing that BBC iPlayer's volume goes up to eleven. On that note I'll leave you to all get riotously pissed. I'll make a post sometime around New Year's Eve about all the great bollocks that's happened this year and how happy I am to be getting older. Not. (Insert generic Jonnie's-an-old-man joke here).

The aesthetics of athletics.

And this is why we shall all be more interested in next years Olympics.
Dear lord.

Oh; & this.

Before I forget, some more interesting tunes for your ears.

An odd rework of Florence + The Machine with dubstep undertones, by The XX.

Engine-Earz - 'Kaliyuga' ft. Jenna G, performing live.

For all you mooks going on like Emalkay's 'When I Look at You' is the best dubstep track since 'Hyph Mngo' (admittedly not that old, but what a banger), please realise that the B-side kicks the absolute shit out of it.

No time to stand and stare.

I really hate time, and timing, and "time-management." I hate the fact that my life has to be segmented into episodic scenarios; work, play, sleep. Like, I wanted to watch Spooks t'other day, but no, I didn't have time, because I had work. Or, I got home late from the pub, and I wanted to watch The Wire, but I had an early start, so needed time to sleep.

In a world where only two things are certain (to take the existentialist route), birth and death, it seems only proper that we should spend our time in between these two landmark events by filling our lives full of memories of worthwhile experiences. Actually, bugger that, I just want more time to lay on my bed and just think about stuff.

It seems only unavoidable that with the inexorable crawl of time we grow old and have to grow up. I guess there's not much point to this rant, but the point is I'm annoyed, and that should be enough. It annoys me that I haven't got any bloody vegetables because I didn't have time to go to the shop. It annoys me that I haven't seen Fantastic Mr Fox yet because I haven't found the time. It really annoys me that I probably won't be able to go to see Evil 9 or Hijak tomorrow because I haven't had the time to work out how much money I [haven't] got.

Anyway, for all my rhetoric, WH Davies says it much better:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Clichéd I know, but meh.

Shopping and F**king.

So, there's this play. It's by some fella named Mark Ravenhill, who is apparently quite good. The point however is that I went to see this play as a friend of mine is in it (in fact, I live with said friend) and it was quite good. A plethora of horror stories/warnings/chinese-whispers had already reached my sullen ears concerning the content, though, you'd probably guess what's in it from the title. What's funny though, is Jim (my friend) rims a bloke. So off we hence trundled to see said play.

It was actually pretty good. Jim is a quality actor, and most of the cast was in fact pretty convincing. The homoerotic scenes were well done; enough so that it drew an audible squeel from my mate and stretched a brow-trodden cringe across my face. As William Hazlitt would say, "this is gusto." The director seemed like a bit of a berk, lurching onto the stage at beginning, and end, clutching a half-full plastic cup of snakebite and announcing just how important he is. More enjoyably, one of the actresses was pretty hot.

If you wanna check it out the play has one more night to run (tomorrow, Thursday 25th) at the RUSU. If you don't know what that acronym stands for, you probably don't live near enough to care.

Mon dieu! T'es pas un trouillard, hein?

Just...wow.

You've been curved.

Ah, procrastination. How would we ever get any work done (or not done) without your vexatious wiles? I relatively recently unearthed the mother of all essay-killers. Hold on to your socks, as, without further ado, I give you...Curveball.

Click to Play!

(I would have published this post sooner had I not been bashing my face against my wall in anger at not reaching level 10.)

EDIT: Rather annoyingly, the game on my page is ridiculously small, and I can't edit the bloody code to make it bigger. Ah, well. Deal with it.

Long live Mr. Dentith.

Oh Mr. Oliver Dentith.



You make my world a better, and often more amusing, place to live. Keep those beats coming, they get better every time.

Doodles, beats and oddities.

First off, boom:



Well done Stephen.

Now that's over and done with I've recently been taking random pictures of the ubiquitous doodles, scribbles and general crap lying around my house. I like to think that these little pictures we nestle on to our paper-bound lives show little hints of who we really are. Perhaps that's a load of pretentious tripe, but you get the point et al (apologies for shoddy camera, remember, I don't care):

1

2

3

4

5

Saw Ramadanman, Klute and Instru:mental this weekend supported by the 2nd Drop Records boys. Night was generally sick, Instru:mental in particular providing euphoric experimental drum and bass, seemlessly mixed, that almost bordered on the 130bpm techno-like rythms of 2562, Martyn, Appleblim and co. Klute ruined it a tad at 2am by busting out some techstep d'n'b. Eurgh. Also saw Quest and Silkie on their Antisocial tour. They put out a pretty good set, not what I expected at all; in some weird realm between grime and 2-step influenced beats and south London bass-heavy dub. Place was empty though, which spoilt the vibe until a random DJ on some drug-induced epiphany started spinning some Souls of Mischief and Aim in the garden.

Look out for a 30 minute mix me and my boy Martial we will be uploading to your ears sometime in the near future, hopefully. Here's some tunes we've recently been hyped about:

Guido and Wedge - Running Away remix (If Symptoms Persist)
(Youtube link)
Sebastien Tellier - L’amour Et La Violence, [Floating Points remix] (Lucky Number)
(Label preview)
Untold - I Can't Stop This Feeling [James Blake remix] (Hemlock)
(Label preview)

Guess that's all the rambling I can fit in for now. Off to watch Channel4 in 3d...

A first post; explanation; je ne sais pas.

So this is my blog. I'm really not quite sure what is going to go in it. Nevertheless, as the title precludes, someone told me to get a blog (for later employment purposes), so I did. Hence a world of pedantic ramblings, corrections, corrospondences, quotations and musings will be unleashed upon an [un]suspecting [non-existent] audience.

If you're someone who has oddly stumbled upon this blog and has far too much time on their hands, then you should know that a) I'm a third-year twenty-something English student with aspirations to become a journalist and possibly a novelist, and b) no, I don't care. If you do know me, which you probably will, you can laugh at me in the pub later.

Recent interesting moment: I got ill and failed to see Starkey and one of my best friends in Sheffield, so, for him; "TC TC!"