Alasdair Watson

There’s someone out there with a seriously twisted sense of humour. Group Hug is an anonymous confessional, and, like all such things, you find that either people are vile or pathetic bastards, or that pretending to be vile or pathetic bastards gives far too many people their jollies. Reading it is like dunking your mind in a sewer, and is certain to make even the nicest person bitter and cynical about humans. Or possibly just teenagers.

But, as I was thinking this, I came across an entry which reads “I’m going to ask my boyfriend to marry me in February (because it is a leap year). I have been planning it all for months and I have been DYING to tall someone!! Thanks for letting me get it off my chest… I hope he says yes!“, which I thought was a nice subversion of the ghastly intent of these sorts of thing…

Lungs: 0. Worst of cold now gone. Some mucus remaining. However, the disease has done its bastard usual, and settled in my lungs, leaving me in for a week or two of a painful cough.

Wondering idly what do do tonight – not in the mood for telly (when am I ever?) but housemates will have things to watch, so will be in my room. May watch Ninth Gate. May go to bed early. Should probably try to get some work done. I’ve got three options I’m considering for NaGraNoWriMo (Have given up on the idea of doing prose. Will instead be writing a 100 page graphic novel.) in varying stages of readiness for writing, and if I’m going to do one of them, I really need to finish the bones of it – what I have now are ideas for themes and possible characters, but no sense of theme, no spine to hang the thing from, so I really ought to spend a while buried in the thing and see what I can beat into it.

On which note…

I have a cold. I am, in typical male fashion, a right moaning bastard when I have a cold. Aside from the feeling tired all the time, which drives me up the wall, and the blocked up nose, and the brain that just won’t work, what really bugs me is that I can’t taste anything.

I have just eaten a sausage and onion roll with hot salsa. Did I taste anything? No, not really. My mouth is tingling a little because of the chill, but I failed to taste the sausage or onion at all, nor the garlic, or lime, or even more than a hint of tomato in the salsa – just the chilli. Last night, I had a whisky. Glenfiddich fifteen, to be precise. I’ve got a reasonable palate for whiskey – normally, I can bore the unwary passer-by with waffle about honey and vanilla tones, the smoke in the aftertaste for up to fifteen minutes.

Last night, I might as well have been drinking Bells, a drink which I hold to be only one step above rat poison. I wouldn’t even mix it with coke.

I want my sense of taste back, dammit.

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.