It's Hogmany 2009

I can’t believe we’re already at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and I still don’t have my promised jet pack. This living in the future sucks. I think I’ll climb in the way back machine and go see a Big Country gig.

It's Hogmany 2009

I can’t believe we’re already at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and I still don’t have my promised jet pack. This living in the future sucks. I think I’ll climb in the way back machine and go see a Big Country gig.

Boredom Is A Terrible Thing

Wance upon a evening dreary,
I heard a noise, a clamour eerie,
Aneath ma windaes oan the road,
The jabberin o some human toads,
That set ma mighty ears a flappin’,
Those adolescent lips a slappin’

Tae the curtains wie a start,
And pulled them back wie dreading heart
Ma heid ah a poked oot tae see,
Aside the barren willow trees,
A frichtful gang o neds aw mucky,
Rollin’ roon and roon wie buckie,

Ah shouted oot tae them at wance,
They best begone fae ma bus stance,
Get it up ye they rejoined,
Giggling wie the phrase they coined,
Ma face turned rid and ma teeth bared,
And Wie aw ma latent rage ah stared,
At thur plooky neds and hackitt sengas,
Lying aboot like human jenga.

Who dae ye bams think ye ur,
Tae act like such a bunch a curs?
Govan Young Team big man,
Giuzz peace tae drink oor can,
Nay! Ya bams I cried wie rage,
Begone or ah’ll lock ye in a cage,
Wie tigers, bears and deadly snakes,
Tae turn ye intae human steaks.

Now aff they went wie fearful clatter,
Wie terror that their blood tae splatter,
Doon the Govan Road et rocket speeds,
Terrors black in their wee heids,
Whit demon threatened their very souls,
Wie burying in forgotten holes,
Awa’ they cry, and don’t be slack
Less thur big man’s et our back.

Tae ma TV ah returned,
Shamed that nae ned had burned,
And switched it oan, masel tae see,
Oan the frichtfull BeeBeeCee.
Ma rage ye see had been captured,
By the Security Camera enraptured,
And intae Beadle wan two thee,
Tae show oan the accursed TeeVee.

My Eye is Bigger Than My Wii

I was surprised to find that my wee sister has gone and bought herself a Nintendo Wii. I have to admit that I was fairly sceptical about the Wii to begin with. I actually, perhaps foolishly, advised her against buying one because many of the games seemed very gimmicky at first glance. Having finally played a few different games on the console though I’ve found it very intuitive, and the controls don’t seem all that gimmicky when they’re done correctly. I’m sure that there are quite a few poor games that have badly designed motion sensor based controls that feel shoehorned in to an otherwise standard console control scheme. The Nintendo games that I played on my sister’s machine, Mario Kart and Wii Sports specifically, seemed perfectly designed for the system.

I do still think that some of the available games are gimmicky, but i suspect that’s simply laziness on the part of the developers. It’s easier to throw out a new Wii-Fit-esque clone than it is to come up with something genuinely original. It’s the problem that plagues every form of modern entertainment so I can’t judge the Wii on that any more than I can judge the cinema.  I am worried that when I passed a cursory glance at the latest Wii games available on play.com most of them were game versions of the standard post-Christmas celebrity fitness videos, but I’m going to assume that there are some nuggets of gold like Mario KArt buried under all that shite.

Just Toasty…

Marvellous.

I’m back in my flat in Glasgow for the dog day’s shift between Christmas and New Year, and it’s colder than hell here too. I thought my folks place was bad, but this is even worse. According to my room thermometer it’s 6°C right now, and that’s with the fabulous electric heating on since I got here.

I really, REALLY, REALLY need to get a new place to live as this is getting ridiculous.

S1rentals.com here I click.

Needless to say I’m not even going to start about the fact that I have to work the next three days when everyone that my job relies on is on holiday. How I love sitting for three days in the office staring at the walls.

Writing Musings

I’ve just found an old, almost prehistoric notebook of mine from the mid-nineties. What’s unusual about this particular book is that it contains quite a sizeable chunk of a role-playing game that I had put quite a lot of work on, but that I had completely forgotten about until now.

The game idea, from what I can make out of my faded teenage writing, appears to be based around a Gothic Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, Earth.It certainly seems to be set sometime in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the setting is fairly indistinct. I could argue that that was deliberate to avoid having to prescribe too much to potential players, but I think that it’s far more likely that I didn’t know enough about the period in question to write a comprehensive background section. In an age just before the emergence of the World Wide Web information like that took time and effort to research and the history section of the school library wasn’t exactly overflowing with information.

I think, from what I’ve read and what I remember, it was partly inspired by the Ravenloft setting for Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe by some of the HP Lovecraft books that one of my friend’s had. I also sense a slight hint of maybe White Wolf and their World of Darkness edging in, but the. Strangely it also bears some resemblance to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing and several similar “action/horror” movies that came out in the early to mid 2000s.

The setting and tone are very rough around the edges, and I’ve returned the thing to its hiding place lest it be purged during one of my folk’s regular top-to-bottom clear-outs, but it has intrigued me. Imagine it, a gothic horror version of London, or maybe even Glasgow. A city trapped on the cusp of a new century, but being held back by the demons and ghosts of the past. A metropolis trapped in curling, endless fog and long cold nights. Strict class divisions, strange artefacts from foreign lands that stand as horrible sentinels  in monolithic museum. Maybe an ancient evil stirs in the filth alleys and dingy workhouses. Then a lone crusader, a saintly hero or a dark anti-hero, strides out into the night to do battle with it. The fate of the British Empire, civilization and the world!

MasterCard What Now?

Well, surprise, surprise. It seems that the Clydesdale Bank shifting me from a Maestro card to a MasterCard Debit card does have some added advantage after all. It could be, without a hint of irony, the greatest single advantage ever in the history of banking. Yes friends it seems that a great swathe of online retailers don’t even have an OPTION for a MasterCard Debit card. A few, like Amazon, have got a MasterCard option to be sure, but does that option cover both credit and debit varieties, or only the credit ones? Some types of services are restricted specifically to debit cards. The National Lottery website won’t accept the card because it believes it’s a credit card, and their rules prevent people using credit cards on the site as party of their, very responsible, gambling policy. I’m not sure about Play.com right now because their site doesn’t have a drop down box to describe the card type. I guess I’ll just have to plug the card details in and hope for the best next time I try to order something.

Well I’m sure it’s an advantage somehow…

Merry Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas Folks!

Oh, and Simon Cowall, GET IT UP YE!

Screenplay Musings 24/12/2009

Well it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m reliably informed that it’s currently -6°C outside so I’m locked away from the family working hard on my screenplay. Not that I’m antisocial, but I’d rather avoid the inevitable deluge of Christmas compilation shows that the TV companies plaster our screens with at this time of year. When I was younger a good film, or TV show would stimulate my imagination and get me racing away to write something, but as I’ve grown older I’ve found that crap TV has an equal, but decidedly opposite effect. I guess it’s true what they say, “TV does rot your brain.”

As I said in an earlier post I’m currently working hard to complete a treatment for my idea based around the two twenty something glasgow slackers discovering an abandoned alien spaceship. Well that’s the plan at least. So far I’ve only managed to squeeze three and a bit pages from imagination to typed page. “Grey Kodiak you slacker,” I hear you say, that’s not exactly a good start to your vaunted change in work ethic is it?”

Well no, no it isn’t, but I have a reason for the detour honest. You see I’ve come across a problem in my premise, one that I had tried to address unsuccessfully in several draft attempts, and eventually tried to ignore entirely. That probably wasn’t the smarts way to deal with it either now that I think about it. The problem can be summed up by the gut reaction of one person I told the current log line summary to:

Two Glasgow slackers discover an abandoned alien spacecraft and through it manage to bring meaning and worth to their otherwise dreary lives.

“Sounds cool,” he said, “but how did the spaceship get there in the first place?”

“Damned if I know,” I said.

“Bit shit that,” he said…

After describing the basic idea ofthe story to a few folk I’ve gotten a similar reaction from about half of them. The rest seem to be split into thinking that it doesn’t matter how the ship got there, or that that it’s better if it remains a mystery to add some dramatic tension to the story.

Naturally, to my own annoyance, I’ve found myself sidetracked by the question of how the ship got to where the two main characters discover it. I’ve hummed and hawed about writing a cold open that shows the origins of the ship, but this seems to take crucial initial screen time away from the main characters. It also seems a bit incongruous to go from what would be, by necessity, a CGI laden spaceship section straight to a regular boring old Saturday night in the lives of the characters. To do that, and have it impact properly I would have to substantially rethink their goals, motivations and perhaps the entire story idea which I’m unwilling to do until this first treatment is written.

At the moment I’ve taken a slightly perverse decision to write a short story, for my own reference, that details the origins of the spaceship in question. It will, of course, delay production on my treatment for the actual script, but it might add some necessary colour and detail into my script that might otherwise be missing.

If you children are very nice I might even post it up at some point.

Activation Stations

Is anyone else sick of this “card activation” crap from the banks? I can see the reasoning behind phoning up and saying that you’ve received your card in principle, but really it just seems a thinly veiled excuse to try and peddle unwanted crap. I phoned up today to activate my new Clydesdale Bank MasterCard Debit Card that they so excitedly heralded in the letter I received a few weeks ago. Low and behold the number doesn’t go through to the Clydesdale call centre, but to third party: a company by the name of CPP. The operator on the end of the line was pleasant enough, but I couldn’t help but wonder at the irony of a third party being involved as a go between for confirming receipt of my card. I presume, and sincerely hope, that CPP have only very limited access to account information because it seems to me there’s little difference between phoning them up, and getting Manky Jimmy the town layabout to phone the Clydesdale on my behalf.

The first time I had to call one of these things I didn’t even realise that I wasn’t talking to the Clydesdale Bank itself. Well not until the real reason for having to go through a third party manifested itself. CPP are in the business of providing card insurance and identify fraud insurance policies. As soon as the operator has dispensed with the two second job of asking for your name, address and date of birth to activate your card they launch straight into the sales script. The worst element of this badly disguised thing is that the bank gives you no alternative manner to activate your card. If you don’t call, and set yourself up for the sales pitch, then you’ve automatically shot yourself in the foot because your original card will stop working within six weeks of the new one being issued. In the meantime you’re stuck because the new one won’t work until you phone to activate it.

Now all credit to the CPP operators as they stop the pitch, wish you a merry Christmas as and ring off as soon as you tell them you’re not interested, but I wonder how many people have sat and listened, or even taken out the policies simply because they thought they were dealing with one of those “nice folk at the bank.”

My dearest banks, I appreciate that card activation is an important safeguard, but could you do it without the involvement of a third party and the associated hard sell.

Please?