Who is on my friends list (but, presumably, not ‘s) and planning to do NaNoWriMo? Andrew’s set up a small community for friends, and friends-of-friends to engage in mutual support and backslapping over our attempts to churn out many, many words in a very short space of time. If you fancy joining us, then speak up…

Well, that was a thrilling new experience. Apple juice up my nose. Not the pressed kind, either. I bit into my apple, and apple juice squirted right up my nose. The most troubling bit of it, though, is that it burns. I’m sure apple juice shouldn’t do that.

Still, maybe it’ll eat away whatever it is that’s causing me to sneeze so fucking much lately. Honestly, I’m fucking sick of it. I’ve been having an allergic reaction to something on a more or less constant basis for the last three weeks, and I’d really like my nose to stop tingling/running. Please.

I switched over to using Opera yesterday, and one of the casualties is Blogger, it seems. Their interface for Opera blows goats, to put it mildly, compared to how it works with IE. This is a little annoying. I live in the hope that someone out there has done something clever with Opera to help it pick up the slack that blogger hasn’t, but I’m not optimistic.

So I may look more seriously at switching my blogging tool. Again. I’ve got a paid LJ account – I could just look at embedding that into my website. Or I might try to get something like Nucleus running on here – I’ve had a half-baked version on another server for a while – maybe I should just go and finish fighting with it. Hmmm…

Thanks to a comment on Lyssa‘s LJ, I have been reminded of the marvelous Salad. Thanks to Gemm, the CD of their first album “Drink Me” is even now winging its way to me.

Hurrah for the magical electrical interwebnet, that’s what I say.

I’ve said it many times before: Come the revolution, you’ll wish you’d watched the squirrels. Well, mercifully for the rest of us, one man is watching the squirrels. And doing entertaining things with their tiny, furrry corpses. Is it wrong of me to want a 2-headed frankensquirrel? Via Ali P.

“Unless Tinky Winky is a doctor-bag carrying Scottsman who loves geometry, Tinky-Winky is nothing but gay.” Via J H-R, an important warning about the true nature of the teletubbies, and how they’re binding our youth over to serve Nazi aliens.

More of this sort of thing, please.

I can feel one of those days forming around me. The mobile mast I can see though my window is transmitting on frequencies that are filling my headphones with static and weird feedback, like some alien ambient soundtrack. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s bypassing the volume control, and causing them to transmit a levels that are audible from halfway down the corridor. Seriously. So I have unplugged them, leaving me unable to mainline the mix of, Tom Waits, mclusky and Charles Mingus that I’ve got set on the playlist, which is deeply distressing, and may result in my cracking up if something doesn’t change soon.

But worse still, I’m in a limbo of “waiting for the client” on just about every project I’m working on, so I’ve got very little to do. So, tell me of things to read. I want something to stare at that won’t make it screamingly obvious that I’m not working, in the way that playing a web game of some sort will.

I don’t know what it is about this time of year, but for some reason life conspires to throw a fistful of Edinburgh at me in autumn, just to fuck with my head. Every year. Paul’s moving back there the other day is just the latest in this year’s parade. And despite the fact that I settled in London a few years back (as in, I decided to stop trying to move back to Scotland), I’m still tempted to just up sticks and leave, and sort everything out when I get there.

I don’t think I’ll do it this year, but one of these days…

I’m organised. See, November and December are expensive months for me. Both my flatmates, my brother, and my girlfriend have birthdays in that period, and then there’s Christmas…

Here, at the start of October, I have bought/know what I’m getting for: my brother (both for birthday and Christmas) Fin (for her birthday and Christmas) Andrew (for his birthday) and my Dad (for Christmas). I’ve got a few ideas about what to get Marysia, too, although I’m going to wait and see if any better ideas present themselves in the next couple of months. By my count, then, the only person for whom I don’t at least have plans is my Mother, who, as per, will not give me any idea of the sort of thing she wants, but at least I know that M&S vouchers are always acceptable with her.

Whoever it is that’s using the orbital mind-control lasers to achieve this effect is doing a good job.

Well, that’s mostly true. Autumn is showing signs of arriving at bleeding last, so the leather coat is out of summer mothballs, and I’ve got energy again. Summer is just fatal to me. I get nothing done. I’ve had another one of those ideas that everyone I mention it to wants to see done, which almost certainly means it’ll die on it’s arse, so in an attempt to make sure it goes somewhere, I’m going to get together with my brother, and as many mad bastards as we can rope into it, and try and make a short film out of it.

At the moment, I have nothing but bad scratches of tonal dialogue, and a small pile of source material to go from, so expect to hear nothing more of this until there’s actually something written down.

In the meantime, I’m still contemplating NaNoWriMo – if I got for it, I suspect that I’ll fall a way short of the target, but it might kick the dust off some of my more painfully atrophied writing synapses. But something that gets me back into the practice of writing daily cannot be a bad idea.