...following on from last blog...
It could also be why i compulsively watch fims all the way to the end - even the shit ones --> because they have an ending and whatever that may be it iholds some measure of satisfaction, resolution.

Why I don't like soap operas? - because there is no ending, nary and ending in sight...those drums at the end of each episode of Corrie don't signal the end, they signal the theme of the next episode...

"but Alfie? You can't get pregnant by anal rape...can you?" doh dush dum dum dum dum...

It is why I read so fast, and rip through series impatiently - I need the ending, the fix of having it over, the climax as it were, of any creative endeavour.

One thing I can think of that I don't like the ending of is porn - facials that look like someone slapped a salad cream dispenser at the poor girl. What idiot director thought that up? Or maybe I'm a freak, maybe normal guys out there want to see women covered in semen [shudders] Not really my cup of char ta very much.

I envy JK Rowling - the fact that she already has the last chapter of Harry Potter secerted away somewhere makes me wonder how she can possibly have any trouble writing the books. She has done the hard part - filling in the gaps is easy.

That is why the book "Only Forward" by Michael Marshall Smith appeals so much to me - it is my own dilemma, with similar characters. I have never reached an ending. It is the root cause of my disbelief in my own mortality. I DON'T HAVE AN ENDING. I GO ON FOREVER. I have never had a relationship that, when it ended, hasn't moved on to better things. My present one isn't going to end [touch wood, cross fingers, pay devil lots of silver] I have never ended, school,, no gap year, right into university, prolonging uni for a bit at Deluxe and all of a sudden I am treading water, with no chance of getting to an ending cos I am LOST in London with no direction.

I'm looking for an ending, looking for an out. If I can find an ending maybe I can rest...
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/29/2004 07:57:00 am

 
Writing
How much does writing reflect what is going on in your head? All of mine seems to begin at least with the protagonist looking for something, or someone. Occasionally beginning a journey the end of which is not clear. Most of the time he doesn't really know why, or what he is looking for. Sometimes the protagonist just stays where they begin, pontificating.

I am on a journey, the end of which is not clear to me. I am looking for something that is at present way beyond my grasp. I don't know if I even want it really. I want what I have seen of it, but things so often turn out to be different up close.

None of my stories end, not properly. I hate writing endings, they don't come to me like beginnings do. This could be because I don't have an ending in my sights. I don't know how it will end, or if it will, the best endings I write are like that, where the reader has to decide what happens.

and what you decide happens shows your outlook on life. My story about the chap on the windowsill? he fall sof at the end. The Brunette read that and took hope in the fact that when he dropped his phone it landed on an awning and didn't smash. For her, He survived. For me? It is the end for him, falling off the window and yelling "bollocks" That is all he needs, and ending, but if pushed, he's dead.

The guy in Manchester, jumping under a magic bus? The Brunette saw that as a rather final ending, death being the inevitable consequence of going anywhere near a moving magic bus under most usual circumstances, but me? I think he is still around somewhere...

I don't know what I am looking for, I don't know where I am going. I know what I have, and I know that I have more than many people do, as most of my protagonists do, but I am still restless, still not satisfied. Maybe I can't write endings for stories until I find an ending myself? Or maybe if I can find an ending for my characters I might find an ending for me?

I can't even free associate my way to an ending. I can put characters into a situation where there is only one way out and I still can't end it. I am the master of procrastination.

Maybe that is why I love theatre, especially being involved in making it. Because every night you set up the beginning, set up the middle and then wait for the end, and when it is over is when it feels great, when you are done and dusted and sitting there with a beer thinking why the fuck did I put myself through all that shit for so little gain, when you feel that sense of acievement swelling insode you and you know it was all worth it.

Maybe that is what life is like, maybe we slog through it, spening it how we will, and then at the end, we get to sit down, and have a celestial beer, and look back and say, well fuck me but I don't know why I bothered, but it sure as hell feels good now.

And with this in mind. I repeat a request i made before I insulted any readers i might still have, and I entreat anyone who bothers to read this, whether they are known to me or a random punter from randomville, Texas, or Ohio, or South Brattislava or even Painsville, a wonderful place in Ohio I hear, to please leave me a last line for a story. don't care if it is lame, dark, funny, whatever. I would like to write stories that know where they are going.

That is why "and they all lived happily ever after" is such classic ending, because every writer in my position wants to end up with that as the last line of their biography.

ON a slightly different point, given that you have to have undergone psychoanalysis for a long time in order to be a psychoanalysis, this explains the huge majority of ex-fucked up people that are analysts, cos they get it for free form the state. How stupid is that? I want to be a shrink, but the only way I am going to get to afford it is to go nutso, or become a down and out alky on the streets with a personality disorder. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL, that is what I want tattoed on my forehead...

Night all...
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/28/2004 10:52:00 pm

 
Briochure
comedy typo or small booklet dedicated to informing and exciting about the possibilities of Brioche...who can say?
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/28/2004 09:24:00 pm

 
Spyware gone?
At last I have bitten the bullet and got rid of the spyware that was plaguing my pc...2020bullshit and suchlike. Of course it stopped Kazaa working, but then it also stopped my computer freezing on load up...

Instead of Kazaa I have gone for a file sharing program that doesn't have any spyware. I liked the reasoning on the page that I found to help me get rid of spyware. Kazaa has spyware in, Kazaa Lite has less commercial but possibly more dangerous spyware in, plus it allows Kazaa to expand their network, bacause the lite users still come up on the network as Kazaa users, so Kazaa can charge more for its spyware because the network is huge. So if you thought you were sticking two fingers up at Kazaa by using it apparently you are not.

So I have switched to Gnucleus, running on the gnutella network. I have tried this before, but last time I tried there seemed only to be four users on the whole network, and two of them were me...so I quit and started using Kazaa, but now people seem to have woken up to this. I certainly have. The program isn't quite as straightforward to use as Kazaa, although that would be cos I am used to the Kazaa layout, but the selection of trax coming up is good, and a good proportion of them are downloading, wheras in Kazaa I used to have a high proportion hanging around not downloading for ages...


- posted by Buntifer @ 4/28/2004 07:51:00 am

 
Smell of Rain
I have probably mentioned this before, but I love the smell of rain on dry hot ground...It is like an essence of damp dust perhaps, I don't know what causes the smell, but it smells the same on the continent, in America, in London and Manchester, Barbados and India, the smell of rain hitting ground that has been arid for a few days.

In other news, remind me frequently that I don't like whatever the crap is that Cream of Tomato soup leaves in your mouth, the taste of the soup is nice, but it is a transient and all to hastily forgotten pleasure when I realise that for the rest of the day my mouth is going to taste like I had cream of tomato soup for lunch. YUCK
URGH

Even the beer monkey isn't this bad, and I always burn my tongue...
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/27/2004 05:18:00 pm

 
The Brunette's Story
The fumes in the room were acrid and suffocating, but warm in such a way to instigate immediate docility in my brain. I waved the smoke out of my face and looked around me. I couldn't see why people came to these things any more. The music was loud and obnoxious, and I couldn’t see what I was looking for.

I always seemed to be searching for something these days. Since I came to the city. I had an outsiders way of looking at the workings of the metropolis and so I saw things in ways that the people born and bred in the city couldn’t. It was so hard for them to look each other in the eyes, after so many years of mistrust and violence. I could stand in the midst of a crowded square and eyeball everyone who passed me. Maybe one in twenty would notice I was watching them, maybe one in fifty would exhibit any curiosity, and maybe one in a hundred might glance up and actually look at me.

The club pulsed with people, everyone moving to a common rhythm. People at the bar with their faces illuminated by the low blue light behind, people on the dance floor only there for flashes, strobing in and out of existence. First darkness, then a writhing mass of bodies, then darkness again. I preferred the dark.

I was looking for a woman. I asked after a woman that was more than usually tall, perhaps six foot eight, with titian hair. A striking woman, green eyes and beautiful. A hard woman to miss. An inch of titanium plating her cerebral reasoning. A woman that didn’t want to be found. Sixteen parallel chips running in a cooled environment under that hair, a heatsink in a beautiful disguise. The bartender had seen her, he had nodded me into this corner of the club.

The fire door behind me slammed shut, puffing the smoke around me slightly. I span and dropped my glass, making for the sound. She had six hours before my time ran out. She couldn’t hide that long.

I was a country boy, raised in the wind-farms of the south. I knew space and green, albeit punctuated by huge whirling arms. The city was my playground, not my home, and like a child I enjoyed its embrace for the time I spent in it. I enjoyed my time out of the city all the more. I now knew the city well, but this woman I was chasing had the schematics that the architects drew in her head, she had every revision to the city plans that had been made over the last eighteen to twenty years. She knew every detail about the city, to a depth and degree that blew my petty knowledge into smithereens. I had one advantage, and that was that she didn’t know where she was going. I didn’t know that either, but I could guess at the directions she was likely to have taken, and from this bar, she was hitting the rooftops.

The fire escape opened onto a set of stairs climbing into the dark. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and started the climb. At the top I thought I could see movement. She would be heading east. A great avenue of rooftops opened up from this escape, leading like a ten lane highway to the east, to the river. She wouldn’t get away. She had one chance to turn from the flow of the rooftops, and if I could distract her till she was past that then there was no getting away from the fact that when the roofs ran out, the only place to jump to was the water, and robots don’t like water.

I hit the roofs and slipped, the rain had wet the tiles, and both she and I would be risking our necks chasing down these dark highways. I could see her figure moving sluggishly in the distance. She was an indoor model, not designed for the outdoors. Her lush hair was plastered flat against her cranium as she lurched from leg to leg, dragging her body away from me.

I tried calling again, to try and get her to stop. I didn’t want to see her shot down, and if I could talk her back to me then the company would take her back. She would have her chips wiped, but the hardwires would be left where they were, and studied I should think. She had shown great initiative, she had also directly contravened no fewer than eighteen directives set down in stone to stop the robots from doing precisely this sort of thing.

She had found, somehow, on the local intranet in the house where she worked, schematics for her build. This put her employer in a whole lot of shit as well, that was why he was pushing for her to be gunned down before she was able to let that information out anywhere else. What was interesting, and the reason for my involvement was that the gentleman in question had absolutely no reason to have these plans on his computer, which made it industrial espionage. My brother, who ran this police precinct had called me and told me I had six hours to find the girl before the guys with the guns came in. The employers of bots didn’t have to have them brought in kicking, they found it cheaper to pump the bodywork full of lead and take the chips back themselves to new bodies. They were the expensive bits after all.

She had reached the junction. I called after her. She couldn’t run from the sharpshooters, they would have been given access to her privacy records, and could thus track her precise position anywhere in the city bounds. She was too far from the walls to escape them.

I saw three figures in the corners of my eyes, and waved them back behind me. The bastards were early. I didn’t take my eyes of the girl. She looked at me. I could see the fear in her eyes, and I could see her wondering whether to run. I shook my head slowly and held out my hand.

“They’re here now. You have to put yourself into my protection.”

She looked over my shoulder. I could see more shadows arriving behind me. Her employer must have had more clout with Central than I had given him credit for. There must have been two dozen still lurking behind me. I could hear footsteps, and see movement, but I didn’t dare take my eyes from the girls face.

She shouted, an eldritch malevolent shriek that tore my head in half and rammed my eardrums into the pit of my stomach. I felt sick. The tones shook round my head. As I stood, dazedly trying to steady myself she walked right up to me and put her arm into mine. I couldn’t tell what was happening. She turned me round gently and I saw thirty or so robots leaving the roof.

She looked at me and made the gentlest of motions with her head. She had done what she came to do, and I hadn’t managed to stop her, but then nobody had told me that they could use their vocal chords to information dump binary information into other robots.

- posted by Buntifer @ 4/26/2004 08:36:00 pm

 
Please

- posted by Buntifer @ 4/22/2004 07:55:00 am

 
COME ON YOU USELESS BUNCH OF SLAG BUCKET GIMPOID FUCKHEADS!
FINE, FUCK YOU ALL.

qvd
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/20/2004 12:52:00 pm

 
Short stories
Give me first lines. One story per person. I make no promises as to how long it will take for each one but I will write each person a story.
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/15/2004 09:40:00 pm

 
BLUES = THE TRUTH
and there are five or six short films by famous directors on BBC4 at 9 o'clock on thursday. I must get these videoed and thought I would post here to remind myself.
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/12/2004 10:47:00 am

 
CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE
turophilia - Love of cheese

so there it is clinical, there is nothing I can do about it. I demand tax relief on cheese purchases, or a cheese pension when I get older.

State cheese pension would be pretty nasty tho, it would be like having Aldi mild cheddar once a week, maybe i should set up a private cheese pension, which would afford me greater pleasures, morbier four times a year, yarlsberg at Christmas, and three fondues a decade moving up to four when I make it over a hundred.

Raclettes only for special occasions, but smoked cheese on a regular basis. Healthcare option which provides emergency squeeze cheese on a drip should I ever be unable to masticate the hard stuff, and brie patches, for when I need the hit, but the company doesn't allow it...

I wonder if I could get them to let me take cheese breaks at work, people get it for smoking, so I should be allowed fifteen minutes eery two hours to go and eat cheese. I could even demand a specialised area.
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/10/2004 09:19:00 am

 
Shit..lots of it....everywhere
I’m going through another of those periods of quiet despair, where I look at my life and find that there is nothing majorly wrong with it, in fact there are quite a few things that are right with it, but there is only one thing that is majorly right with it (the brunette) and there are a few things that a minorly wrong with it. The rejections are still rolling in, the better the job the sooner they let you know they don’t want you, and conversely there are those letters that turn up in the mail that I don’t even recognise the company name on, but they just thought they’d drop me a line to let me know they don’t want me working for them, just in case I did think of applying.

The brunette is away for the moment, which may be the cause of my latest patch of blues, so I have the house to myself and a great new computer game, really f*cking awesome in fact. Pandora Tomorrow kicks so much ass. But it isn’t as much fun when I can play on it all evening etc to my hearts content, and after having played it for six hours solid, it is dark and I am seeing Timorese terrorists lurking in the corridors, worse, I am imagining Sam Fisher standing feet away from me in the dark drawing a bead on my head, and I don’t have the Brunette to chase the nasty men away. I watch tv, and when I see people I can see what they would look like in night sight, I can see the crosshairs on their temples.

The only contact I have with the outside world is through the internet, and ASBOs shouting as they walk back from watching the football having imbibed too much lager.

I am once again in a dead end job, where I can see myself in thirty years, still doing the same things, sitting next to the same football crazy loony next to me wishing I had had the presence of mine to throttle myself when I was twenty four. In fact maybe I should have throttled the woman next to me…and the one next to her.

Homicide comes easy in this job.



I watched Good Will Hunting last nigth as well, and while I found it enjoyable I found it horrifying that they portray Robin Williams as having a dead end job...If teaching in a college is a dead end job then what the hell does that make working in some scummy office, I mean, I know that the American education system sucks ass but WTF? I have a dead end job, teaching in a college is something I would aspire to, but no...to film makers thats selling yourself short.

And to me, a member of a generation ruled by films, what does that say?
- posted by Buntifer @ 4/05/2004 12:26:00 pm