Twitter for the masses

Twitter is suddenly everywhere. I can always tell when something has made it overground because the teachers start talking about it. And this week I’ve had two of them asking about this Twitter thing. But they’re not the only ones it seems. I can barely turn on the TV or the radio without some mention of it. There was the recent Jonathan Ross / Stephen Fry chat on his show. Russell Brand’s on now. So, I hear, is Chris Moyles. And today 5 live was awash with it. Mayo and Kermode’s (Wittertainment) film reviews were all over it. And once the BBC attaches to it, everyone does. But what seems like Twitter’s very own jump the shark moment came when Phillip Schofield joined in.

It’s all that Stephen Fry’s fault of course! If he wasn’t so wonderfully nice and beloved by everyone, we maybe wouldn’t have had this explosion of celeb twittering. But it’s too late to go back now!

Oh, and if you’re interested: Twitter me.

January so far …..

Well, having spent the end of December planning what a productive January I would be having, I think no-one should be surprised to find out it hasn’t really worked out that way. I’ve spent the start of the month feeling under the weather, bogged down with the same crappy cold thing I had over Christmas and suffering a bloody awful case of the January blues.

So instead of doing anything useful I spent the last couple of nights playing with the blog. Messing, breaking, putting it back together again, tinkering, changing completely, changing back, breaking it again and finally leaving it like you see before you now, with lots of little changes and a nice big new header. It’s very probably not worth the trouble it took, but I like it anyway.

Louise now claims Internet arrival …..

Pete linked to me earlier today with this:

Rich Bruton’s wife on the tone of his blog – “Sometimes you just seem like a single dad, sometimes you just plain get it wrong but most of the time you just sound like a chronic manic depressive, fucked off with everything and thoroughly fed up with the world.”

Louise’s comment upon seeing this little nugget:
“This means I’ve made it then? Getting linked by the great blogging god?”
Cheers Pete!

No words …..

That pretty much covers how I feel right now. I’ve tried to write four different things tonight. Nothing major, just little christmas writeups and suchlike. But nothing has flowed, nothing has gelled, nothing has seemed to work at all. I just can’t seem to find the words right now to do anything and it’s really, really ticking me off.

I knew the Christmas period would mean a little break from writing but it somehow seems to have robbed me of the ability to actually sit down at the keyboard and write anything meaningful. The FPI blog reviews just aren’t happening and the stuff i’m trying to write for the Fictions blog is just coming out as either simplistic shite or overly complicated rubbish. Either way I’m just not happy with it.

I have no idea what the solution is to this little dilemma. I fear it may be a case of just having to sit back completely from all writing to recharge a little more than I thought I’d have to over this christmas period and just see what happens in January.

Until then, I suppose going to sleep earlier wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

Blogging and Louise’s verdict…..

Louise and I were talking about the blog tonight and her verdict is; sometimes you just seem like a single dad, sometimes you just plain get it wrong but most of the time you just sound like a chronic manic depressive, fucked off with everything and thoroughly fed up with the world.

Then she admits to me that sometimes, when she knows I’ve had a bad few days she’ll open the blog up at work and just laughs at the misery. Laughs in a good way obviously. She knows me too well. But it’s always good, she says, to see my take on things after I’ve sat down and thought about it for a little bit.

Of course, in the interests of not putting myself into too bad a light, I really should point out that all is good in life most of the time, but how bloody fed up would you get with a series of blog posts talking about how lovely everything is, how gorgeous the world is, how everything is rosy etc etc. Plus, when I’m in a foul mood I’ll often retreat into words, whereas when I’m in a great mood I’ll often be doing other stuff.

E-mail and tab closing……

The last few nights have been absolutely fantastic. Instead of feeling wiped out and lethargic and then finally getting bits of things done in the early hours I’ve actually been able to get myself motivated, organised and productive to the point where Sunday, Monday and Tuesday saw me just plowing through stuff, head down, fingers tapping, Kraftwerk on the i-pod and loads of things being done.

Reviews are written, Thought Bubble has been written about, people I had to thank for stuff at Thought Bubble have been thanked, people I had to say sorry that I missed you have been apologised to, school work has been done. In fact, everything’s gone really well. To the extent that, each night, I’ve sat and worked at my desk and been surprised to look and see it’s not yet 11 o’clock. Normally, if I’ve managed to get some stuff done, it’s at least 2am and maybe later. Of course, realising it was 11pm meant I then had at least 2 and a half hours extra. But surprisingly, I used this time well as well.

However, tonight has been a bit disappointing.

My mistake was sitting and watching the England v Germany football. Feeling increasingly sleepy all the way through the second half I nodded off to miss the end and woke with a horrible headache and feeling really out of it. This has only really worn off in the last half hour.
So tonight has been spent trying to clear a bulging email inbox, writing replies and messages to folks and then dealing with trying to close a huge number of tabs that Firefox has open at the moment.

That done, I can now settle down and start working.
Or I could go to bed.
I think I know what the answer to that conundrum will be. And I think you do as well.

Having a week off. Sort of.

I’m having a week off.
Except that’s a complete lie. I’m still at work mon-fri. Still overwhelmed with work to do at school. Still trying to kill the review pile by my side.
But because it’s the Birmingham Comics Show next weekend I’m putting up a load of the small press reviews here and at the FPI blog in the next 10 days. So nothing but reviews and review notifications and a bit of news here for a week.

As for anything else. It will have to wait.
The plan is to blog a bit, but spend a week and a bit finishing reviews, doing school work and catching up on sleep.

That’s the plan anyway. Bet it goes wrong almost immediately.

I has bizness cards……

I finally took the plunge and got around to making myself business cards.
Decided to do a compare and contrast between Vistaprint and Moo.com (thanks to Pete for the heads up on Moo).

Moo first – 50 cards, £14.48, 2 sided. Upload up to 50 different photos for the front. But I settled on what I think is a nice enough design, the graphic novel shelf motif that adorns the top of this blog.

Vistaprint – 250 cards, about the same price I recall; as I didn’t like any of the “free” designs (that’s free but have to pay postage so not free) I went for the premium range and I’m fairly happy with them as simple, get the message across cards.

But I still prefer the Moo ones. Of course, my wallet says go for the Vistaprint.

Redecorating the blog

I really must stop doing this. Every so often I’ll look at the blog and feel like it needs a bit of a redesign. Of course, this is because I’m bored of it. I imagine most readers are just there to read the thing and don’t, in all honesty, give a rat’s ass about what it looks like as long as the text is legible. I’m also well aware that most folks nowadays are reading blogs and feeds via Google Reader or Bloglines or some similar feed reader. Which means none of that careful design and formatting gets picked up anyway.

But anyway, I was looking at it and decided it was time for a change. Usually this just means a bit of messing with layouts and colours, but this time I made the mistake of looking at new templates. Four hours later I’m happy with how it looks with it’s new clothes on. As is always the way with these things, the little things took the longest time. But I like it. It’s stripped down and simple, clean and easy on the eye (or at least that’s what I think)

I did remember this time to take a couple of careful backups of the previous template which means, in theory, I can jump back to it in a while when I get fed up with this look.

Any problems with it? Like it / Hate it? Comments, Twitter & E-mail is there for your pleasure.

PROPAGANDA 100

Over at the FPI weblog I do a little review thing called Propaganda. The name comes from the regular review sheet I used to do in pre web time for Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham back when I was the long serving (and 19 years is definitely long serving) Saturday boy.

I’ve just hit the absolute milestone of 100 posts. Which I’m actually pretty chuffed about. Okay, so technically post 100 was just a post about getting to 100 posts, but seeing as some of the early reviews consisted of at least 5 reviews all together as one, I figure some leeway’s allowed.

What I decided to do in my idiocy for the 100th post was to carefully cross reference all of my reviews (and all of the other comic reviews on the site) and create one of those magical WordPress pages us Blogger folks are so jealous of. Of course, being Blogger, all we have to do is wait long enough and they’ll roll out their own version of pages.

But what a bloody fuss. Okay, so it’s a huge list of links. But the formatting just kept dissolving into gibberish. I’d put it in, set it up, hit save. Then look at it and wonder why it decides to apply paragraph formatting and breaks almost at random
on an almost arbitrary basis. After much messing, I figured the best thing to do was just get the whole thing into notepad (perhaps the best bit of software Microsoft have ever produced) and do it there. Then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. Thankfully that all worked. But what a fuss for such a little thing.

Still, 100 posts. I’m very pleased indeed. Hopefully at least 1 or 2 are even worth reading.