The Last Thing I Want To Do/Rick Wakeman had Talent in a Previous Life

I don't really know why I'm doing this. After a solid week of churning out War & Peace-sized tracts of copy at my arbeit the LAST THING I WANT TO DO when I get home is to fire up my laptop and blog about my boring life on the internet.


Don't get me wrong, I love my job and I love loudly informing people of how wrong they are via the web but there's only so much 2D life I can take before repressing the urge to bury my mobile phone and pull my Freeview box out of the wall before running away to live the life of a mad hermit in the woods. This is in part the main reason why it's taken me so long to get a blog going, despite encouragement from friends (cheers guys, 'preciate it).

Someone once said to me that it looks good for your career as a writer if you keep a blog in your spare time. Apparently. I'd say actually getting paid work for an online media company specialising in said field would be a much brighter and shinier feather in your CV cap, but what do I know... I suppose it didn't help that the person who offered me this advice not only didn't run a blog, but was also UNEMPLOYED (and at the time of writing this remains so).

Keeping a blog in 2009 is like printing a zine in 1999 - it's fun and a good place to develop one's wordcraft. Blogging has obvious merits if you're planning on working in an industry where a eye for concise and accurate copy and the ability to be to a QWERTY what Rick Wakeman is to a Minimoog will come in handy. Brushing up on basic HTML can't hurt either, which I reckon will be a skill as necessary in the next five years or so as knowing how to send an email was ten years ago.

One of the last people I worked with (who was a manager) didn't know how to forward emails and instead resorted to copying and pasting emails from contacts into an MSN convo window. Manager didn't last long and is now working for the Council somewhere, which also says a lot about the hiring standards of local government institutions.

I've been off of here for a while mainly because I've been working overtime at my job (and the LAST THING I WANT TO DO when I get home is...) which means my head hurts. I've been shackled to two glowing grinning screens for the past week and my eyeballs feel like they're made of hot sandpaper. I want fresh air and conversation with my 3D friends.

Speaking of 3D, I saw Up on Monday. In 3D. Via big black glasses which balanced neatly on top of my real ones. It's fantastic and easily the best Pixar/Disney collab since the glory days of Toy Story. After a hundred utterly charmless computer animated fun-abattoirs (literally in some cases) it was a great reminder that CGI films can be done well. It had more than just a touch of Miyazaki about it in terms of it's pace and direction and the fact that it's main character was a pensioner who travelled around in a flying building with a small boy and hound as companions (Howl's Moving Castle anyone?). Go and see it NOW, in 3D if you can. It's worth the extra couple of quid you'll have to pay for the ticket, trust.

On that note, why doesn't Odeon print out tickets on cards any more? Fuckers.