I drew hats.
Hello fartknocker. Under pressure of numerous requests and vague threats to update my fucking shit (motherfucker), I'm doing just that. The main reason I have not updated is because I've been experiencing a "creative slump" lately, bought on by the fact that I'm not really anxious or frustrated about anything. I'm feeling pretty great. As Klein observed when her artist friend encountered a creative block, "contentment is the enemy of invention". So I'll just rattle on and on about boring toss nobody's going to read. That ought to shut people up.
I turned 20 a week ago. I'm not a teenager anymore, but I can't say I feel much different. I am still jobhunting, still the same height, my hair is still atrocious and my back is still covered in agonising Black Death-style spots, and I still think you have a shifty look about you.
Business as usual, except I have a zero in my age for the first time in ten years. Cor, fancy that! Oh, and I'm also now addicted to flapjacks. Flapjacks are to me what TEH DONUT is to The Internet's Mark. You should try them, especially yogurt-topped Blackfriars flapjacks. They are sixteen kinds of dope, dogg.
It's an axe. Feel the weight.
I've been getting back into history lately and I have become a Viking fanboy. I can't get enough of reading about those guys, with their beards and bravado and debauchery and longships and healthily take-it-or-leave-it attitude to their excellent pantheon of completely fucking psychotic gods. Oh, and their capacity to kill stuff for basically no reason at the slightest provocation.
I might do a post totally dedicated to them sometime. Anyway, I had a Viking-themed birthday and recieved tons of Norse-centric gifts. Put together, my friends and family purchased me all but one of the sets in the gorgeous new Lego Vikings range, and my dad bought me a big, beautiful, goddamned Viking AXE, which is one of the best birthday presents I've ever recieved. It's properly weighted for fighting so it's a joy to swing it around, and the composite iron/steel blade can be sharpened if I so desire. I am praying for a zombie outbreak at this stage. I also recieved some neat books from my brother, including the Judge Dredd story 'America', which is now my absolute favourite Dredd book ever.
Claudia is suitably amazed
Post-birthday I paid a clandestine visit to Claudia in Birmingham for various activities. We visited various shops and eating establishments and generally had a gay old time, except totally heterosexual. I will not see her again for a month as she ludicrously claims to be going to "America", in the genuine belief that it is actually a real place. People will believe anything they see on TV these days. She has promised to buy me a load of tourist souvenir tat from Washington and New York, and she'd better, because I am not letting her back into England otherwise.
Joe lieks teh alcohol.
I then went to Little Joe's "manor" and we drank lots of alcohol but I don't think it worked because I didn't proposition a barmaid then vomit on her tits and wake up the following day feeling like I wanted to die, which I gather is what's meant to happen when you get drunk. Needless to say I was disappointed. We then watched Viking-tastic action film The 13th Warrior and went out and drank more. I really enjoyed seeing Joe again and also my new-fangled ability to drink ALCOHOL in PUBS with A FRIEND, but I still don't like the fact that one is quite literally pissing one's money up the wall on intoxicating liquids when one could be spending that money on DVDs and useless merchandise that'll last you a lifetime or until you get bored of it and take it down Oxfam. I passed an Oxfam recently and the window display was absolutely chock full of Star Trek videos, merchandise and spinoff books. Someone, somewhere, has died a virgin.
That same day, I visited Woolwich's newly-opened GameStation store, and braving the dense clumps of unmoving human refuse I am reliably informed are called "chavs", I discovered a copy of Max Payne 2 for £7. I think that's about the right price for it. I got through the whole game in less than a week and found it to be a sporadically enjoyable experience. Certain sections of the game were so much fun I found myself quickloading after I'd wasted all the goons so I could go back and do it again. But many bits had me biting holes in the upholstery out of frustration as I arbitrarily died time and time again. That is no fun. I find it oddly perverse to make a game that gives you the ability to slow down time and behave like a movie action hero but then discourages you from doing so with extremely unforgiving gameplay and skimpy amounts of health and ammo. The environments are pretty boring as well, with repeated visits to a fun house modelled on an imaginary Twin Peaks-style TV program that's all over the game despite the fact that exactly nobody is likely to give two shits about it besides the guy who came up with the idea and thought he was a right old clever clogs for doing so. Pah. The ragdoll physics are great fun though. Shotgunning some mook into a pile of boxes and watching them fly everywhere never, ever gets old.
Hunter S Thompson lieks teh alcohol too but he is worried because he has lost his hat.
And finally, dear old dead Hunter S. Thompson was finally laid to rest last week, shot out of an enormous cannon as per his will. They cremated him first obviously, they didn't just fire a decomposing body into the sky and wait to get sued by the poor bastard whose front lawn gets splattered in maggot-riddled Gonzo giblets. Anyway, it was an appropriately unique sendoff for a unique man. I doubt we'll see his kind again any time soon. He was a product of a particular time in history, a one-off, never intended for mass production. Always wearing the right coat while travelling outside the realms of possibilities. He was old for a man of such tastes, and I knew he had to go sometime soon, I just wish he'd died in a more spectacular fashion. Blowing his face off with a shotgun has a suitably classical, Hemingway-esque quality to it, but I'd much rather he'd died in a hail of police bullets after a final mescaline-induced freakout or somesuch. I'm afraid Thompson may be remembered more for his drug-addled sociopathic behaviour rather than his journalism, and this would be a horrible shame.
Reading his work is like having your brain enhanced without the benifit of the substances which he himself regularly huffed, smoked, injected, drank or otherwise mutated himself with.
Ah well, If there's a Heaven, and I hope to God there is, I know he's up there, drunk off his ass and smokin` shit. I hope you enjoyed the ride, Doctor Thompson.
In other news I've heard that Mr. Jerky likes Orc Points:
