Author Archives: Cas

Conformity

IKEA truck It is not often you can claim that a blog post is written because of an IKEA mattress, but every now and again circumstances conspire. Yes, this blog post was written because of an IKEA mattress. Intrigued? I invite you to read on a bit more .

I make no secret of the fact that I am a little bit weird. Weird in a good way I hasten to add, not weird in a “cross the street to avoid” way.

I was never one of the sheep at school for assorted reasons but mainly, I am mildly ashamed to admit, because I didn’t think I was good enough to be one of the flock. There, I said it. At the same time, I wasn’t quite strong or brave enough to be one of the true independents. This led to lots of break times sitting hiding in a corridor of the music school, a few good friendships with fellow not-quite-sheep, some good memories and sadly more bad ones.

I have now embraced my oddness and am much happier for it. I finally no longer want to be a baaaaa-girl, though a little part of me craves (and probably always will) the flocks approval. I find myself looking for the odd and the alternative in other aspects of my life as well, from my dress, to the films I watch and the books I read, the websites I visit, and the things I do. I try to surround myself with the unique, preferring to go without rather than opt for the mainstream. It is a bad day when I cross the path of some chav-baaaaa-girl wearing the same shoes as me.

At the same time, there are certain times that conformity is a blessing.

Like when you are buying a new mattress.

I will refrain from boring you with the full moan (Moose has lived it the past three years, and she will confirm it is tedious in the extreme) but for one reason and another, I finally got around to getting a new mattress the other week. Me and my bad back need a good, supportive mattress. It was either shell out gazillions for a full-on orthopedic spring one, or get a cheap(ish) solid foam model. Seeing as how I am moving shortly and who knows where I will end up, the latter made more sense. Which is where IKEA steps up to the plate.

The best sleep of my life was the two years in Liverpool I was sleeping on an IKEA solid foam mattress. IKEA finally do online shopping in my area. IKEA solid foam mattresses (especially this one) are affordable and comfortable. Perfect!

Till you measure your bed frame, because a UK standard double bed is 135cm x 190cm, which is five centimeters narrower and ten centimeters shorter than the closest equivalent IKEA size. You can understand this from IKEA’s perspective – they are not a UK company and they want you to buy their own bed frames. But standard sizes don’t seem to have impacted too detrimentally on the British bed selling market. One of my weaknesses is for bed linen – I just love getting new sets, and with standard sizes you know if you buy a “double” set, it’s going to fit your “double” duvet when you get it home. The alternative… Ooh, bed linen chaos! The thought is just unbearable!

So would the IKEA mattress I had my heart set on fit on my existing bed frame? I risked it for a biscuit, assuaging my reservations with the fact my current mattress has some wiggle room in it and that foam has a certain inbuilt sguidge-factor. It turns out that those 10 cm on the length are quite a lot when you plomp the mattress on the frame *gulp* Thank heaven for it being sguidgy foam and this being one of the times that brute force wins out.

So I have a divinely comfortable mattress, some student nurse is the lucky recipient of my old one (I felt a little guilty bequeathing it on anyone, but she did get it free!), and my back is already thanking me, but none of my old fitted sheets fit. I cannot help but think that conforming a bit more when I was at school would have made my life a bit more enjoyable, and I cannot help thinking if IKEA lopped a few inches off their mattresses they would sell an awful lot more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to buy new bed linen and some flat sheets. A small price to pay for a good nights sleep, but damn, I never was any good at hospital corners.

Once more into the fray

What is it about my brain chemistry that means as soon as the going gets tough, my brain packs up and decides to take a vacation in the Bahamas without me? Here’s hoping that it at least sends me a nice postcard or something.

Yes, my good friend depression is back. Yes, I have been pretending that it isn’t back for a month or so now – having been here before and done this a time or five, I know the signs, but I’ve been ostriching in the vain hope that I was mistaken and that it was all going to go away.

Yeah, so we all know that’s not going to happen, right?

When you go to the doctor to talk about one thing, sit down and burst into tears about something completely different, it’s a good indication that all is not hunky-dory in the world according to Claire Louise Kemp. When the doctor then flat-out orders you off work for a week without you even suggesting it, that’s a good indication that perhaps you are not imagining the situation.

So it’s once more onto the carousel of counsellors and yes/no to anti-depressants and bursting into tears over the stupidist things, and generally being a bitch to my nearest and dearest, whilst pretending that actually all is really well with my world and putting a brave face on it and…

Bleck.

You see, people never know really what to say when you say you’re depressed. “There there, it will all be better soon” is just as irritating as “oh, stop making a fuss, it can’t be that bad” which is about on a par with the blank silence you get from some people, or the forced attempt at normalcy other people prefer to adopt. Which is nothing to knowing that the people who love you most are sitting there chewing their insides out not knowing what to do to help you.

That last is perhaps the worst part about the whole thing. Telling friends and family “here we go again” and watching their faces fall just a little bit. Coupled with the knowledge that zillions have it so much worse so why is it affecting you like this?

I don’t write this for sympathy. Sympathy is one thing guaranteed to have me dissolving into a piteous puddle of tears, and I so don’t look attractive when I cry. I write this because my first reaction with everything is to write it down and see what it looks like on the page. I write this because y’all here in blogland deserve to know what is going on in my delightfully f**ked up head. I write this because why is this part of my life any less blog-worthy than the other random crap that keeps happening to me? I write this because not being honest about things is what tends to get me in trouble in the first place. I have this bad habit of not telling people when things are bugging me, then looking all surprised when everything blows up in our faces, going “you never noticed?”

Plus I always did do my best writing when depressed.

I freely admit I’m doing the British thing of presenting a stiff upper lip to the world and not letting on to what I am really thinking. It’s happening. It’s freaking me out. I’m worried. I’m scared. But I know I will get through this. I wish it wasn’t happening. It would honestly be nice to go for a few months without some different part of me breaking. But having been here before enough times to recognise what’s happening in my head, I know I’ve had it worse. I’ve done the thing I always said I’d do in this situation and asked for help before I started drowning.

Now I just need to be patient while that help does what it does and I need to let my friends and family in past my mile-high walls.

I need to keep writing and I need to keep laughing at the world because the day I don’t glory in how truly bizarre and wonderful our little blue planet is, that is the day you really should panic. See, I’m not that worried about me. A little bit concerned and sorry for myself right now, but not overly worried. I’m scrappy. I’m cute. I’m Cas. No neurochemical glitch is going to stop ME from having fun.

Now if you will excuse me I am off to drink yet another bucket of tea and tuck into the mountainous pile of trashy chick lit I have piled around my bed against just such a situation. Times like this, you need to revisit some old favourites so I think a Georgette Heyer marathon, interspersed with some Jill Mansell for the modern take on things, is just what the doctor ordered when she said “take time to look after yourself”. I might mix in some Wyndham, Asimov, Gibson and Stephenson to stop my brain from pouring out of my ears from an overdose of pink fluff, but we’ll see how it goes.

Love, Cxxx 🙂

Sunday Roast: insert witty title here

Oy! but this has been a long and weird week. Bright Meadow was down again for most of it hence no updates or ability to comment if you had so desired. You’ll be pleased to hear that I have finally kicked Fasthosts into touch and am now residing happily on MediaTemple’s servers. Why did I wait so long? Because I am reluctant to change, despite my enjoyment of new things. I have to think about something for a long time before I finally “take the plunge”, especially when large(ish) chunks of money are involved. Add to that, it’s a scary thing, changing servers! In the end, not that scary because I had the totally angelic Tam holding my hand throughout the entire process, but still, not trivial.

But it is done now and hopefully this heralds in an era of stable uptime, which I shall mark with todays Roast and lots of shiny new content in the days, weeks, months to follow. You see, perhaps the most irritating thing about BM being down this past week was that I actually had things to post. I know!

The British Ministry of Defence has declassified reports on UFO sightings.

I have yet to use Vista or Office 2007 and I am hoping that the day I do never comes. My dream? To go from my current workplace of Office XP (*shudder*) to a workplace of blissful OS X serenity. As this is unlikely, it looks like I’m shortly going to be facing this problem. See, I live and breathe keyboard shortcuts, so to have to learn new ones is a depressing thought. I’ve been on a Mac for nearly half a decade now, and I’m still learning new shortcuts, then having to unlearn them at work… The article is so true when it says you mould your software to your needs.

One of the things I love when you find a new blog is going through the archives obsessively, getting to know the author, getting the feel of the place. Yes, I know this sounds more than a little stalkerish, but 😛 You’ll just have to trust me when I say I’m a lovely person who really isn’t scary. Well, apparently I can be scary at work – just a glower got the big-big-boss to do something (mwhahahaa!) – but I’m not scary in a stalker way. Really.

Mild diversion there, sorry, I blame the big blue bouncy ball I’m using as a chair right now. The bouncing makes computing more fun than it has any right to be, but I had never considered the necessity of wearing a sports bra at my desk before…

And again, I am back. I did mention it’s been an odd week, didn’t I? As I was saying, archive-trawling can turn up some true gems, such as this one. The chicken in question sadly later died ( 🙁 ) but sad topic or no, I was still snortling like a crazy thing with some truly odd mental images inspired by this post. Trust me, you’ll never look at a chicken or an egg in the same way again.

I’ve got myself into a little photoblog obsession at the moment. I do so love finding new, gorgeous pictures with great stories behind them. And yes Moose, this is why I was asking what else there is to see around the Grand Canyon. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see that?

What are you doing on 5th July 2008? Going to Open Tech 2008? Good, I might just see you there.

You might have heard me rant in the past about how scifi/fantasy books you love have this depressing habit of being turned into lacklustre trilogies. There’s a related rant about how authors now START with trilogies, not even thinking of doing just one book, but that’s for another day. Want to know why it irritates me so much? Read this to give you a clue.

I’m not meant to be eating egg noodles because they are one of the evil foods that make me balloon to the size of the Hindenburg with no nutritional gain (bread and most other wheat products are now also in this category *sob*) bit these singapore noodles just look so tasty!

The next Joss Whedon offering. Tingly goodness.

Sometimes the original title of a post pretty much just says it all. These made me laugh… A LOT!

There were more movie trailers released this week, but I’m having a little bit of an issue viewing them at the moment, so you’ll have to make do with these two I’m afraid.
Monster Camp – the role players I know are so much cuter than this. Silly play-to-the-sterotype trailer!
Ice Age 3 – as I articulated to Moose when I saw this “but it should go dinosaurs > mammals, not the other way around!” Scrat is cute as always though

Now that is done, I am not sure what I am going to do with the rest of my day. See, normally I’m only just regaining consciousness at this time of the morning. I might even have to leave the house! *shock horror* When I looked at my bookmarks folder, I thought today was going to be a bumper day, but when it got down to the final editing process, it turns out I was really hard to please this morning. I blame waking up at the ungodly hour of 9am on a Sunday. This does mean of course, that it is the perfect time to chime in with links of your own to share. *hint hint*

(Comments with links will get coralled into moderation, but I will rescue them really, really quickly – alas I am a victim of my own success in this, and if you saw the amount of spam I’m getting, you’d understand this measure. It’s that or captchas which will happen on this blog over my dead body).

Sunday Roast: I can’t believe I left a nuclear bomb in an elevator

Hello again people. I hope you are enjoying the sunshine as much as I am right now. Ah, the joys of spending the evening sitting in a beer garden, or the afternoon at the marina having a BBQ – which, by the way, was where I was last week, hence no Roast.

Which gives us oodles to go through this week!

Before I go any further though, how many of you wonder at the titles each week? A conversation the other week led me to realise that perhaps people were reading a bit too much into them. When a guy opens a conversation with “so tell me about what happened when you picked a guy up in a cemetery?!” it tends to throw you slightly, till you work out he is referring to a roast title from a few months back. Yes, it says something about my circle of friends that he was willing to believe I had picked up a guy in a cemetery, but that is beside the point. He thought the roast titles related to something in my life and had been champing at the bit for a chance to get me to explain that one a bit more…

I felt rather cruel having to disabuse him of his notions when I explained it was just a quote I liked from Abby on NCIS. See, all the things I put in Sunday Roast titles are quotes or song lyrics from things I have seen and heard recently. Yes, I keep a book of quotes. Yes, I try and relate the quote I use at least vaguely to the roast, but don’t go busting your brains trying to work out the connection! (If you can, or you can guess where I got the quote from, then my eternal love and respect!)

Now I’ve explained that, let us get on with the linkage from the last two weeks shall we?

I need to start tagging things “only in America” so I can find them again… A prisoner in Arkansas is suing as he lost 45kg in jail. This isn’t loosing 45kg to take him to dangerously undernourished either. Oh no. It’s loosing 45kg to go down to 22 stone (that’s about 308lbs)!

As soon as I saw this article I said “Glastonbury” – off the top of my head I can count at least 10, and those are just the ones I can remember, bearing in mind it’s been several years since I went for a hike round the hostelries.

I’ve always been against nuclear weapons, but now even more so since I found out tea is under threat! As Moose said when she forwarded me the link, you just know this story is true. It’s so British but one of our genuine concerns about nuclear war was that we’d run out of tea!

In the UK, we have the lowest privacy rating in the EU. We’re categorised as “endemic surveillance” along with Russia and Singapore. So what does that mean as we get increasingly online lives?

Not watched Iron Man yet? Why not? Go, watch it. If nothing else, Robert Downey Jr looks fine throughout the entire thing and lots of stuff gets blown up. Something for all the family. And of course, then you get out of the movie and have a great time dissecting the storyline with friends.

Orson Scott Card on J.K.Rowling and plagarism. You can feel the bile and vitriol just oozing out of the computer screen. Love it (with a few valid points thrown in for good measure)

In London through July this year? Why not check out some of the events in the London Lit Plus festival

I’ve found a new blog to read! Yay! Private Secret Diary has had me snorting over my cups of tea all week. A valid addition to the feed reader

The best bits of Twitter

Penguins in a cartoon – what’s not to love?

Want an example of what good customer service can do? From cross customer to Chief Creative Officer. Not bad going

MacGyver in the 21st century

Last year, Penguin ran the “Million Penguins” wiki, an attempt to write a collaborative novel. Now read the report on the project which attempts to bring some academic sense to the madness.

Flickr has some awesome photos of the recent art show under Waterloo. This take on Lascaux has to be one of my favourites

And now with the movies.

Finding Amanda

Brideshead Revisited

The Spirit – so I was hoping he’d have ditched the strong voiceover after Sin City, but apparently not. Still glorious to look at though

Now if you’ll excuse me, while you read all this lot, I am going to go enjoy the sun and perhaps watch some more Farscape

That Wednesday Feeling

Insomnia 2 I don’t know if you will know this feeling, but it struck me tonight. The “getting home at the end of after another blah day at work and realise you are committed to writing a blog post but lack any inspiration or inclination” feeling.

I’ve got that.

So I am sitting at my keyboard, flicking through the bits’n’bobs folder of draft posts, happy with none of them, and I have two options as I see them.

1) Screw it. I posted some fiction last night. That can count as my mid-week post.
or
2) Throw something up that is rushed and not ready because I am obliged to post today as I said I would post each Wednesday and it’s barely been a month of this new resolution and I can’t give up so soon.

Neither appeals to me. I could have set yesterdays fiction to be posted today, but somehow my occasional fiction posts are outside of the normal blog framework for me. This blog is personal (or commentary depending on how you look at it) and, whilst my fiction is intensely personal, it is NOT blogging. The stories are an extra.

Gar. So what am I going to talk about this Wednesday?

The new 9rules? Nah. Exciting though this topic is, there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said much, much better elsewhere. Though huge, massive congratulations to the lovely Esther for gaing her leaf whilst we’re on the topic. Clearly I have the best people commenting on Bright Meadow 😉

Anything else?

Well, there’s always the post I wrote in the midst of a lovely bout of insomnia on Sunday night/Monday morning, but when writing something has you in tears it is probably a good sign that it is a bit too personal to be blogged straight away. The insuing mental upheaval did have me starting to sketch again, which is a change. I have always doodled but I tend to get exasperated that my ability with the pen isn’t enough to translate what I see so clearly in my mind – I guess that is what I write; people’s own imaginations can fill in the blanks I lack the skill to describe – and that exasperation leads me to stop drawing. I like to be good at everything I do, and if I can’t do something well, I just don’t do it even if I enjoy it. So I rarely sketch, but something about Sunday night/Monday morning had me doodling away whilst I thought through some stuff.

But none of it was blog-worthy stuff, so that still leaves me with a Wednesday post and nothing to talk about.

Um. I finally caved and brought a new mattress? No. That’s really not worth blogging about. Talk about scraping the barrel!

I think we shall have to face it. This Wednesday, there really is no point in visiting Bright Meadow. I look back and realise I have taken over 600 words to say I can’t think of anything to say, but that is not new. C’est la vie.

Go, play with better content than mine while I go try and find my inspiration and writing ability. I think they might be stuck down the back of the sofa along with my mojo. Either that or I broke them dancing on Saturday night 😕

To the different ones

She sat at the computer and stared at the screen in front of her. Who to make the hero this time, who the villain? What meagre aspect of her normal life could she twist out of all resemblance to reality. What curl of drudgery could she wow them with this time? She was fed up with it, sick and bone tired, of being always expected to come out with something new. Or with something old, just dressed over to look different. How much of her life could she stand to see put down in print on a page, how much of her past pain would these people swallow before they realised that it was all false?

There was only so many times she could see the look in her friend’s eyes as they read her words. She didn’t want to watch any more. The thrill of seeing tears brim had faded quickly to revolt that she was shaming them so. What right did she, to tell of the pain so publicly? The days of wishing she could stand and scream on the rooftops had gone, along with the days of waiting on a miracle to end it all.

She did it by stealth, let little bits of her truth filter out, hidden in a flood of fiction. Those that cared, knew; knew what she did. She shamed them by revealing in public all those little failures that had built up into the biggest of all. Her failure to be what they had wanted her to be.

She didn’t want it any more, that knowledge of what she was doing to them, those she loved. She couldn’t even love them enough to stop, because she kept going. After all, her public expected it, waited for it. The days when she could be silent for months at a time, her fingers moving over the keyboard for nothing but work were gone. This was her work now. Now she spent her days using her pen to dig away at the scabs of normalcy, till her full strangeness lay revealed for those who chose to see it.

What had turned her down this path? No therapy had spawned this version. No guidance counsellor suggested the pen as alternative to the razor. When had the sweet girl become bitter? Her cynicism – British humour, or neurochemical glitch? Whatever had happened, this wasn’t the truth or the reality, no matter how many journalists she told it was.

It was a fine line, the distinction between author-public, and suicide-private, but it was there if you took the care, and just enough people were left to know where to look. In the past she’d tried for a full-scale abandonment, but one or two had clung on, like so many barnacles. Unnoticeable till she tried to run, and then they caused enough drag to make the difference between clear get away, and guilt-ridden confrontation.

She kept saying to them, telling them to back away, that she didn’t want them around. But still, no matter what her desires, they knew best. It actually made them proud to read her latest work. Thrilled them a little bit when they could trace the arc of reality through the space-battles, or relate a minor character to some mundane feature of a life she no longer wanted.

Tell me what to do to make it right. Tell me what to do to make the voices stop, to make the pain go away, to make it all clear.

She was tired, shattered, beaten, worn down, and they didn’t even see. Those who professed to love her best didn’t see that she was being slowly buried alive under their expectations. She knew what they wanted for her, and it was so simple, which made it so much worse. She couldn’t even live up to their one simple request. Be happy. Two words, three syllables, a rush of endorphins…

The crucial switch in her head was stuck on “off”.

Long ago she had taken to writing it down because, on the page, or on the screen, something of the incomprehensibility faded, and she was able to see patterns. She had discovered her gift at the same time as the assorted transmitters in her brain had decided to take a few decades in vacation. Her gift, when she chose to look at it like that, was that she could also make other people see the patterns. There was something wonderfully gothic about the way that she could make other people understand what was going on in her head better than she herself could.

All they had ever wanted for her and she’d failed at it. But she was good at things, good at this. So she somehow managed to translate the randomness in her head into prose people enjoyed, but that wasn’t living. She made money, but so did street-sweepers. Not everyone could write the shit they saw behind their eyes, and not, it seemed, everyone, could be happy.

Tell me what to say and I will say it to you, I will do it for you, I will burn this house down. I will burn us to the ground.

Sunday Roast: I’m going to go crazy and I’m taking you with me

Doesn’t it feel good to be back where we all belong here on BrightMeadow.co.uk? I feel good about it and as I’m moderately hungover, it’s a miracle I can feel good about anything. Before I forget, everyone wish happy (ever so slightly belated) birthday to Neko and Bibby and say hello to fulnic who promised me last night that he would start reading again. He also mentioned being awe of me, but sadly it turns out that awe can’t survive rocking out to Bon Jovi. C’est la vie.

What else is new in the world of Cas? Well, I have short hair again. Properly short. I haven’t taken any pictures yet but when I do, rest assured that I shall share. Why cut it all off? I got bored. The last time I got it bobbed it didn’t work properly and I just got so fed up with it I booked an emergency appointment on Saturday. I probably won’t keep it this short, though it is so ridiculously easy to manage right now, but it is nice not to have to worry about it getting in my eyes and I can legitimately fiddle with it because it’s called “styling”. Felt weird dancing last night though. No hair to head-bang!

It turns out Penguin don’t want me *sniff* I lack the experience they require. It does make you wonder how the frack you are supposed to get the experience in the first place, but hey, I wasn’t expecting this to be easy. The next round of applications are being prepared even now.

Which brings us in our usual circuitous fashion to the roast for this week. Yummy linky goodness.

Got a piece of technology designed for a kid to use? Why not be novel and let the kids review it

Sadly rebooting Bright Meadow has lost me my stats history so I can’t share all the weird and wacky search terms that have brought people to this blog (though Christian Chiropractors does stick in the memory). What are your oddest search terms?

I gave up on my dream of being an astronaut a long time ago (health issues disqualify me if nothing else) but I still secretly cherish the belief that one day I will be in space. Have you got the right stuff, seeing as how there is a shortage of astronauts in the EU.

It has been a little over four months since I sat on my first Razr, necessitating a replacement. At the time, I had only had it a week and I loved it – it was so slim, it fit in my wallet, it had a satisfying cthliunk when you closed it, the keypad was all sci-fi-y. Now I’ve lived with it and I loathe the bloody thing. Yes, it still fits in my wallet and has a satisfying cthliunk, but that sci-fi-y keypad gets up my nose. It has no memory so it is stupidly sluggish to run, when it wants to run at all. It randomly decides to change things (like a whole week where it didn’t let me know when I had a missed call or voicemail – I was wondering why no one seemed to love me that week, till I checked my messages!) and the menu system is just the most unintuitive thing this side of the Fasthosts control panel! But I can’t get rid of the damn thing because there is no phone out there that does all that I want it to (and that I can afford). Not that the Razr does what I want it to either, but it (more or less) lets me make calls and texts. So I totally agree with this article. Completely and wholeheartedly.

I get a bit of schtick at work because I rely on my paper to-do lists at the same time as banning post-it notes and insisting that people email phone messages and jobs to do. I just know that I plan my day better on paper, whilst if people keep giving me things to do on scraps of paper, they get lost. The blend of electronic and paper works for me. Could it work for you too?

I remember the day the CCM brought two of these beauties home. Yes, two! And you could join them with a cable to duel at Tetris! Talking of Tetris, does anyone know if you can get it on the newer Nintendo models? My mum is a Tetris fiend, but she can’t use our old Gameboy (yes, it still works) any more because it is too heavy and big for her RSI.

JK Rowling is wrong – a decent analysis the lawsuit Rowling brought against the print version of the online Potter Lexicon.

Their stupidity at not hiring me withstanding, Penguin are doing some pretty sexy things at the moment playing with the idea of literature on the internet. The last “We Tell Stories” story, ‘The (Former) General’ by Mohsin Hamid is probably my favourite. Not strictly for the story itself, but for the approach. I have this really exciting idea to take the week 1 idea with Google maps, and mash it up with the multi-linearity of week 6, bringing in other multimedia (pictures, video, external websites, etc). Sadly I lack the technical skill or time to do this, but is there anyone out there who might take the challenge up? Please?

If you could get OSX on non-proprietary hardware, would you ditch Windows? Yes. In a heartbeat. I love the look of my PocketCalculator, but it is getting to the end of its life, and I just can’t afford to get a new Mac. I refuse to go back to Windows so I’m in a bit of a fix!

Mac Slocum has hit the nail on the head when he calls for ergonomic design of ebook readers. Note Scoble’s rant at the “flappy paddle thingies” for how irritating bad design can be.

Confused with all the different sorts of ebook formats and readers? I know I frelling am! Here’s a handy guide

The other week I twittered my sheer exasperation that I couldn’t find any good new blogs. I was trying to step outside the 9rules family because I don’t want to the run the risk of getting a blinkered view of what’s out there, but found I was drowning in the sheer amount of crap that is out there.
Steve Lawson jumped right in with some great suggestions including –
David Byrne’s Journal
Where Did It All Go Right? by Andrew Collins
Thanks Steve!

I could bang on for hours for the reasons behind the work I do, but I won’t because this isn’t the time or the place. This article should give you some context though

Just two trailers this time, so Abi, try and ration them 😉
Henry Poole is Here
War Inc

Which brings me to the end of the rag bag of links I have found this week. I am off to drown my hangover in endless cups of tea – you sit back, have a lovely weekend, and why not share fun stuff you’ve found in the comments as well?