OH MY GOOODDDDDDDD I'M BACK and there is no god

Wahey, hello nobody at all.

For the discussion portion of my thesis which I am about to embark upon, I will be posting a weekly summary of my thoughts and feeling and thoughts in order to reflect on the process and hopefully add insight to it in a sort of think-write-blog-think feedback loop and this sentence is too long.

Part One: The Thinkening

I have dribbled out a few pages of bullet points that roughly pertain to the various things in my head that are thesis related.  These are the concepts and inklings about this and that that have been loudly and interminably kicking around my head for some four or more years.  By getting them out and into a readable format, I can start to shape them into a meaningful expression of the many (some even good) ideas I've chewed over for millennia/a few years.

My oh-so-clever-plan is to massage and shape these topic into a recognisable order; once this is achieved, flow will magically follow and all our prisoners will be released.  You will perish in flames, Gozer will destroy you and your kind (what an asshole).

Anyway, ordering the topics, eliminating duplication and fleshing out the lines of thought embodied by subtopics should neatly subsume the last phase of the Thinkening.  The next phase will almost certainly follow, that being:

Part Two: The Fleshening

The Fleshening sounds like a maudlin and unintentionally humorous non-canonical fan-penned addition to the Hellraiser saga BUT while that sounds like a good idea (Pinhead bellowed a mirthless titter and, pausing for effect, farted loudly before descending into a peghole in the floor (much as bathwater might do when the plug is pulled).  Before his spiny head had liquefied and drained from the room, he uttered in that tiresomely dreadful Barry White-esque half whisper, "I weed in your clothes hamper and I'll tear your linens apaaaarrtt...."  "His once dramatic exits have rather diminished of late", thought Kirsty) what it really means is that I'll flesh out (see) each point and draw in results that are related to each point.

This should take a while but once finished, I can set about expanding on each fleshy point in order, loosening my writing muscle for the first time in years.  This should be the most enjoyable and lucid period of the whole mess so I'll be shitty if it isn't.

This third stanza will be known as

Part Three: Gettin' Swole

Gettin' swole will see ol' Skerret dipping his quill in earnest for thousands of words at a time and making the Real Writing happen.  This is the mother lode, the piece de resistance, the show stopper, the final Danny La Rue costume change.  It's Shangri La on dope, hopefully.  This part sees me adding the muscle, sinew, tendons and nerve endings to the thing, completing each section before moving on to the next (unless something really stands out as belonging elsewhere).

For now, we'll call that the Rough Guide to Finishing A Thesis 18 Months Late.

Each week as mentioned, a new series of thoughts, more localized, will be strewn about like scales from a replicant's GE snake.

Adieu, nobody.

Sketchin'

Bit phallic though.  Practice, practice, practice.



Practice.

Interview With A Vampire/Game Developer

So hello again nobody and this week it so happens that the lovely Adrian/EvilRedEye has just interviewed Shaun and I about our recent Call Connect adventure. There were many questions, all of which we answered. Any press is good when you're as lowly as we are so I'll take it. In other news, I managed to do a leeetle bit of work this week which is very encouraging.

A touch of revision, some unit tinkering and a pinch of organization (plus I fixed my blinds after planning to do it for some two years now) saw me through to Friday with a spring in my crippled step. Actually not so crippled; my weightlifting has gone up a notch and I'm feeling spritely. My knees don't hurt anymore, hurrah.

I picked up a cat today; cats are nice. I'm clearly running out of things to write which is very me. Normally I can flounder for a word in the most eloquent fashion but that capacity seems to have diminished of late (bar this sentence). I have to go now because Ellie's possibly going to come over here and read this drivel and I'd rather not be here when she does. It's embarrassing!

I'm fecking BACK

Callously whips the wind around the bare- oh fuck it. This is the year of Reckoning, as in I Reckon I better fucking do something. Once a week, either with wit or wisdom or likely neither to dispense to an audience comprised of phantasms, hobgoblins and mobfoblins (note: look up mobfoblins). And me, of course. I'm loathe to begin a sentence with the word 'and' but is that not the state of the world? Quietly and grimly shuffle along while your defining characteristics, preferences and loves are forcibly directed along a narrow path to a less than stellar doom. Fuck 'em. It's the year of me. Weekly updates to follow. Also fuck Twitter.

Re-establishing contact with an old friend, or how I learned to stop procrastinating and whatever.

I glanced at the sidebar of this very blog which is mine and noticed the frequency with which I would post something ever dwindling, twirling, twirling towards infinity. I thought it time to try and rectify this, especially seeing as I now have an actual audience rather than a pretend one (hi Kree).

So here I am, florid with an infestation of possibilities. PhD could be going better but I expect that will be the case until I finish it if I ever do. I have been doing some game development which has been both a lark and a nagging pain in my lower back. We (the Crab and I) have nearly finished a game called NEOTANK9000 which is for Deakin to woo prospective revenue sources, otherwise known as students, with. It's not groundbreaking, polished, or even very good, but it is ours and that counts for a lot. We'll create a web browser version and pop it on our website.

Once that is signed off, er, on, we can finally complete our iPhone game which we have spent close to a year (one day a week mind) producing. This is called CallConnect and harks back to the heady days of sticking phone jacks into things. You know, Before The Internet. It seems so long ago now... I used to read books, see films, engage in conversations with real people who occupied the same room or space that I did (though not exactly the same space as that would be physically impossible lest you'd employed some sort of time and space altering device to allow two objects to occupy the same space simultaneously. It's science fiction!). Those days are long gone. I have installed a speaker set inside a real doll and I conduct Skype conversations with it. Sometimes, when the light catches the gossamer thin strands of hair that adorn the soft, undulating edges of her delicate frame (they took ages to put in by hand too), I turn febrile and weep for mankind. None of this actually happened... or did it (it didn't)??

So; PhD, PC game, iPhone game, ongoing battle to hide Genevieve from my housemate. I have done very little in the way of drawing lately, which shames me, but I'll return to that once I have cleared my plate of other more immediately persistent morsels.

Praise atheism

Kree is going to read my blog

Hullo!

Ho ho hum

The difficulty I have when it comes to writing is as follows: I can't do it.

I can actually, if you can call it that, but I tend not to write the things that I really want to write. This may be because I have no precisely no idea what those things are. Do you follow? Anything I commit to paper or screen typically turns all stream of consciousness absurdist surrealism in a can which quickly becomes tiresome. Something character driven would be ideal wouldn't it?

Gathering ideas as fodder is not something I do as a rule, but poor is the man who remembers nothing, or something. Whatever. Making a note of that which I routinely observe for later use will become my new battleground, largely because it'll be a desperate fucking struggle to commit to anything that does not involve remaining quite still and ocularly occupied, or 'occupied'.

This impassioned plea to my brain will not go unheeded. Nay, shall the fruits of my advancing temporal state not be harvested? as I descend into spiralling, fruity madness, craving a gooseberry or similar. Lest the overripe mindfruit grow too fat and fall, I will dock at the base of this vast wooden edifice and arrange my hands thusly to envelop the fallen as they ripple through air and motes and then some more air. See, every damn time.