I wrote this in 1993, when I was 12 or 13. It's obviously based on the character from the Fighting Fantasy series. It is also perhaps the worst piece of 'fanfic' ever written, and I did it before it was cool.

Warning: bad jokes, terrible grammar and Dungeons & Dragons cliches galore await you, should you click here.

File is a jpg, about 1mb in size. 

Now that I've got a moment to make a proper entry and the desire to do so, I'm not sure I've got anything to say.

I suppose I'll just do one of them random updates that do a disservice to the term 'blog' then! Not keeping a diary anymore, this is the only way I'm going to know what I was upto when I was this age, when I'm 64 or so.

Okay... We got Muse tickets this morning through the ultra-mega-covert-secret presale thingee. Well, it's not really that secret, and I sent texts to five or six people telling them how to get theirs, so even if it was at 9am, it certainly wasn't by 10. 

For the next two week's I'm going to be interning at Yahoo!Xtra, apparently in their marketing department. I'm not sure how I ended up there and not in news, but with their latest disaster probably not entirely sorted it should at least be interesting.

I'm also working all this weekend, so no break for me till... shit, I don't want to think about it.

Need the money though, as we're moving house in two weeks. I'm not sure I've mentioned that yet, but yeah. Off to Mt Albert to save money, and hopefully bike into town each day and lose some belly. At least that's how I'm justifying continuing to eat crap at the moment.

If you feel like buying me a new iPod, cause mine is dead, I wouldn't mind a 160GB iPod "Classic" as they've been re-labelled. I still prefer to call them Man's iPod, as opposed to the Nano, or Woman's iPod. Tariqa wanting a 16GB Nano or Touch and me wanting the Classic proves my point, and if we're an exception, we're proving the rule that I'm right. Or something.

My Ryan Adams review is now online (opens PDF of Te Waha Nui Issue #19 page 21). My original was over 900 words, believe it or not. Graham Reid (our tutor this semester) helped me hack it down to a manageable 400 or so - "no one cares about this... that's not important... I have no idea what you're talking about here, so it can go.." 

I also did an opinion piece on religion that appears here (once again a PDF) that has apparently caused a bit of a stir amongst the more faithful on the course. They've banded together to write a rebuttal I hear, which should be amusing. Some of them are cool people who enjoy a good debate, but one or two really are so brainwashed, any questioning of their beliefs, or even the very mention of agnosticism sends them into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance.

Alright, I'm off to do a Facebook purity test and continue to lose at Scrabulous.

It's almost been too long since the fact to talk about the Ryan Adams concert hasn't it? Ah well. I've written a massive long review which I'll link to once I know what I'm doing with it (probably using Graham Reid's advice and cutting it in half somehow).

Uni is still hella busy. Hence the lack of posts...

My iPod died on the weekend. It's had a good two-and-a-half-year run, but now whenever I turn it on, it has a sad face. I can't make it happy again. Went to buy an 80gb video iPod cause I can't live without one anymore... but even offering to pay a deposit, the finance company declined me! Grrrr. I've never missed payments on an HP or anything ever. Sucks. Now I have to wait a few weeks and save up. But then we're considering moving, so if we do I'll have to wait a bit longer...

But moving if it happens will be to a cheaper place, which is good. With a lawn too, so the cats won't have to journey across the roof of the building to get into the great outdoors, as they currently do.

If you haven't watched the video I linked to the other day (previous entry), I highly recommend you do.

Got another story in the Waikato Times - this one about a high school surfing championship. Mmhmm. This Thursday they're publishing my Brunettes review, and also a review of Scud Of Freedom, my latest recording... which is appearing next to Chuganaut again, as it did in Nexus (a few posts back).

I've got another metric assload of CDs and magazines for sale - loads of guitar/music mags, some computer ones, Top Gear, Listener/Time/New Statesmans, etc etc.

More on the way later in the week. The ones that say "buyer must pick up" I'll make an exception for friends if there aren't too many (postage costs will be included then of course).

Sweet.

I was going to write more, but got distracted by this. Anyway, I just wanted to say YAY I finished mastering the new album, and it sounds awesome. WAY more accessible and flash-sounding than anything I've done previously. YAY!

I'm going to steer clear of continuing yesterday's train of thought, basically because I've been too busy to think about it since last night. We're at the business end of the semester all of a sudden, and I've spent all day today putting together not only parts of the design of our course newspaper (Te Waha Nui) but a couple of news stories, one of which has gone from being a "I need another story to fill my quota that might get published in our crappy AUT student mag" story to "back cover of an internationally distributed and award winning newspaper" story... pretty much all thanks to May Lee's awesome photo. It's great how far a story can go if you have the right picture, isn't it?

Then as I'm writing my second story of the day, on the inclusion of digital tracks in the NZ singles and album charts, the new My Chemical Romance video comes on. Somewhat predictably, it's Teenagers, but what I didn't expect was the excessive censoring, which left it sounding like a round of bingo in places (the progressively-leave-out-letters song Bingo, not the housie-gambling kind).

Seriously - is there a need to bleep out the word shirt?! Or any point in taking out the word murder, when the title of their 2005 DVD set is Life on the Murder Scene? And in an album detailing the thoughts of a dying cancer patient, is removing the word gun from a song three million or so people have already bought really going to solve anything?

But shirt?!?! WTF?

Kent's nearly finished the special effects on the Kitty Hawk Big Stick video, so that'll be up on our myspace and youtube fairly soon hopefully. You can watch the original cut here, if you haven't seen it already. The new version has flames and lasers and stuff, drawn frame by frame. It's seriously awesome.

Tariqa's written an entry on the Mercury Energy customer death story. I overheard some classmates talking about it this morning, berating the company for cutting off her power. Though I'm not normally one to defend large and profiteering corporations, I had to point out that if Mercury had been advised she needed the machine to live (notably, the Manukau chief medical officer doesn't believe she did), they'd have told her to make arrangements prior to cutting off the power, and that telling the contractor on site meant nothing, as he wouldn't have been a Mercury employee anyway.

As an ex-call centre employee for a large power company, I can tell you customers behind on their bill make up all sorts of fanciful stories (ie. lies) about why their power shouldn't be cut off - so even if someone did tell him, which I doubt, he probably would've dismissed it as yet another cry of 'wolf' without much hesitation.

Basically this sounds to me like a pretty tragic series of events where no one really is at fault; but watch the Herald awkwardly nail Mercury Energy to the cross over the next few days anyway.

One last thing - and one more reason to hate the Herald - not only does their new website not work properly in my Opera browser, but now they've begun spreading out their articles over several pages (probably in order to get more page hits, and therefore more advertising dollars). I fucking hate that. IT'S THE INTERNET, YOU FUCKING RETARDS. You have all the space in the world! You don't need to stop half way through a paragraph to continue on another page. My finger doesn't mind scrolling, but my eyes and brain hate waiting.