Falldog

For one reason or another (mainly personality faults), I have a PC on one side of my living room and a Mac on the other. I know the PC knows it doesn’t do things with such effortless ease as the Mac. I know the Mac knows that, even all Bootcamped up, it still can’t compete with the PC as a gaming rig. I know they glower at each other when I’m not there, getting the cat to pass on messages to each other: “Tell the PC that his mass of wires are causing a terrible dusty mess.” “Tell the Mac that he can’t run Premiere Elements, and that his paltry little iMovie can’t hope to do all the things I can…”

Ah, Premiere Elements. And so to our topic for today.

I recently agreed to help a couple of friends out, filming and editing a little sketch to put on a DVD celebrating the 40th birthday of their friend Mark. The whole thing hinged around an excerpt from an old black-and-white silent movie which featured an actor with an uncanny resemblance to Mark. Their sketch needed a little clip of this dropping in. Not a problem. They provide the clip to me on DVD, I edit the rest of the sketch together with Premiere, rip the DVD, plonk in the excerpt – job done.

Except. I tried everything to rip the DVD, but my PC wasn’t playing ball. I ripped it using at least three different decrypting/ripping apps, but none provided a format that seemed to work in Premiere (which claimed to work with .avi, .mov. mpegs, you name it…). So, I then put it through a number of file converters, to see if I could make it into something useable. Nope.

I don’t want to get long-winded about this, but any number of the above things should have worked. In frustration, I switched to the Mac. Success! It ripped fine first time, in perfect quality, iMovie could read it… So, I thought, export it as a .avi file from iMovie, put that on the PC (during one of those moments when I force the two machines to talk to each other directly – the cat is good at many things, but he’s not a flash drive), pop it in Premiere, and we’re away.

Except. That didn’t work either. Premiere still wouldn’t accept the file from iMovie – be it .avi, .mov or an mpeg.

Tonight, I shall be burning the sketch as it stands on the PC to DVD, ripping that on to the Mac, and putting it all together in iMovie.

Then, I shall be opening the window and throwing every piece of technology in my living room out into the street to be picked over by hyenas and buzzards.

Well, thanks to Paul and his comment on my last entry, I’ve pretty much covered what I had to say about Ansible’s ‘mistranslation’ (very good way to put it!) of Russell T Davies’ comments about not wanting too much science fiction in his Who. Hum. So what’s left to talk about?

How about Just Cause?

Having read a couple of good reviews and feeling (most unusually… ahem) like treating myself, I picked up this Xbox 360 game at the weekend and… Oh. My. Guh… Imagine a world bigger than Oblivion and the last two GTA games combined, and all the free-roaming loveliness implicit in that comparison. With guns. And completely stealable boats, and cars, and motorbikes, and helicopters, and planes… And a parachute. An infinitely reusable, ever-ready, no-folding-necessary parachute. This world has a lot of very high suspension bridges, too. Now a spot of maths…

MOTORBIKE + SUSPENSION BRIDGE + PARACHUTE + PASSING BOAT BELOW = FUN!!!

The number of bonkers stunts you can get up to is limited only by your imagination. The makers of the game know this, too, and make it possible to get up to some crazy shit. Shoot a grappling hook at a helicopter, retract the cord so you whizz upwards, then crash through the door of the copter, chuck the pilot out, and swoosh off into the sunset! Or – and this is only possible in theory, would that I could have done this! – hop out of the plane you’re flying, edge along the wing, then jump across to another plane, break in, nick it… Bob’s your uncle. Sunday afternoon saw me giggling like a loon at the action-packed comic potential of the game.

Unfortunately, most of my plane trips have ended in screaming, flames and a messy death. Turns out I’m not a good enough pilot to take a light aircraft through the arches of a viaduct. Who knew? Jon had one go at flying and tried to land his plane in the treetops – and you can imagine how well that turned out.

On top of all this, there’s a very cheesy plot about trying to encourage a revolution against the dictator-president of these jungly Caribbean islands, while also using your mad skillz to play one drugs cartel off against another. You can drive down a road in the hairer parts of town and see fights break out, gunshot ringing across the road, or someone driving their car full-pelt at the opposition.

It’s a living, breathing, supremely violent world. It is, quite simply, the campest video game I think I’ve ever played. And I love it.

Back at a happier, more fun office this week – though there’s only two of us doing the work of four today, and there’s a little niggle at the back of my throat that whispers cruel promises of a cold. Still, after a quiet (and alternately hugely frustrating and satisfying) weekend, I’m feeling much more myself.

I’ve finally given in to the build-up to the wedding and realised that I can’t fit everything in to the next three weeks that I want to fit in. One particular thing (it was meant to be a surprise for Jon… well, more of a terrible shock, so I won’t mention it till I’ve told him face to face) has felt the fiery wrath of the kybosh: one of those simultaneous ‘hooray, I don’t have to do it!’ and ‘aw, I was looking forward to doing it’ moments. Still, there are plenty of other things waiting in the wings to take its place. Weddings. Tut.

I’m somewhat irked by this, too. Scroll down to the first ‘As Others See Us’ piece, about Russell T Davies and his desire to not sci-fi up Doctor Who. I wish I had more time to write about it today, but I don’t. I will return to it, though.

Science-fiction fans beware!

What the fuck is wrong with you?! As if what you did to poor Pluto wasn’t bad enough, you do this to history’s favourite lesbians. Am FURIOUS.

I’m not in the best of moods at the moment. Feeling tired and blue, I’m working in not the best office I’ve ever worked in, and there’s been some serious shit involving one of our gaming group which has upset me and a lot of friends. Then, last night, watched an incredible documentary about manic depression, presented by Stephen Fry: in among the celebrity sufferers, there were a couple of ‘ordinary’ people with terrible, terrible symptoms, real tug-at-the-heartstrings stuff.

Anyway, all this week’s stuff was percolating away in my mind on the Tube this morning, as I thought a little more about the novel I want to write for NaNoWriMo. My poor old mind folded one bit from the documentary into the plot I have planned, and I suddenly realised what a terribly bleak, woefully sad book I’m planning to write.

I need a hug. My brother feels exactly the same. I was just chatting to him on the phone, and we’re both blue as blue can be. I’m decided to put it down to the change in season, which is ironic, as I’ve been waiting for summer to end since May.

Dear man sitting next to me on the Tube this morning,

I’m sorry. I feel awful about it, if it’s any consolation. But I don’t suppose it is, since you were the one left behind, clearly the source of the problem…

Maybe I should explain.

Only last night, I had had a conversation with the Mrs about how I had once misread a newspaper headline when I was on the Tube. I was only half paying attention, and I thought it was suggesting you could win a ton of drugs for your child to imbibe in a world-famous theme park, when in fact it was actually offering your kid’s class a trip to Disneyland. I hadn’t seen the lines of the headline in the right order, and I’d got confused. Anyway, I don’t think I was confused about you, was I?

First of all, you were standing at the end of the carriage by the door, scribbling little things in a tiny notebook. London is full of odd people, so I didn’t think anything of it. But then, the seat next to me became free, and you took it. Obviously, as you continued to furiously scribble away, I wanted to sneak a look at what it was you were writing. It just seemed to be a list of disjointed phrases, a stream-of-consciousness tirade. Some of it suggested poetry. But then you turned the page, and wrote three things I could see quite clearly:

The hole in the wall

A cash machine

A world of cruising

Hello, I thought. And when I sneaked another look, one of the phrases following that included the word “homosexual”. Now you’ll forgive me for jumping to conclusions, but you were writing about a glory hole, weren’t you? (If you don’t know, Google it – but don’t say you weren’t warned.) I suddenly realised that what you were probably up to, on that sweaty little Northern Line train to Mill Hill East, was writing poetry about the seedier side of gay life. You dog!

But then you made an annotation, and it all went horribly wrong. You see – just to fill you in on the background to my reaction – there’s a thing between me and my friends which goes back a few years. You know how the… happy ending in a porn flick is sometimes called a “money shot”? Well, we’re wont to use the exclamation “Money everywhere!” when we’re being a bit euphemistically rude about sex, on screen or in real life.

So, when you added your note next to the second thing on that list, and bearing in mind I knew full well what you were thinking about, I just couldn’t help it…

A cash machine – where we get our money

Everything kind of collapsed in my head, and I couldn’t stop the laugh. And I think it was the sheer surprise that I had laughed so loud and so suddenly in the middle of quite a crowded train that made me laugh more – and then I think it was at that point that I really lost control.

So I got off the train, giggling like a loon, feeling horribly embarrassed. I waited, a little uncomfortable, for the next train, and completed my journey. But ever since, I’ve been thinking of you. Of what you know that I must have known, and of the fact that you probably thought I was laughing because you were noodling around with filthy gay poetry first thing in the morning. And of the fact that everyone in that carriage we shared must have been able to conclude I was laughing at you, and probably spent the rest of the journey looking askance at you, wondering what was so funny.

So, I’m sorry, man on the Tube. I hope the rest of your day got better – and I hope the poem turns out well.

yours,

David

1) We don’t spend enough time looking up. Try it, next time you walk down a street: aim your eyeline above the heads of everyone else, somewhere into the exciting distance. You’ll feel better for it. I did, this morning, on my way to a freelance gig in an office I’ve never worked in before, on a day full of promise and wonder…

2) Some people need to get a lesson in manners. I know, as a freelancer, I’m the lowest of the low, but believe you me, loves… Your job is not so spectacular, exciting or life-changing that you need to have that kind of attitude. All you do is phone press officers and ask them to email you photos.

The promise and the wonder have melted away – you may have noticed – to be replaced by an “ah, well, it’s not for ever”, the common cry of the disgruntled freelance sub. Anyway, I have amused myself with the following two extracts from my current employers’ style guide:

Quotes within single quotes should be double

eg, ‘Molly said to me, “You mustn’t do that.’ ”

… and:

Apostrophes

Possessive: Did you know Jack’s car (belonging to Jack) was a right off?

Petty little things that cheer me write-up.

Writing-wise, I’m not having a good week at all.

I’m meant to be writing a feature and while lots of words have been put into a document, not very many of them are any good. Nor is the order they come in. Nor any of the sense they’re making. It’s like they’re stumbling zombie words, shambling aimlessly around the shoppingmall.doc in hopes of finding a tiny scrap of brains – and if they find it, they eat it, and that’s the end of that.

I’m trying not to get frustrated by it, but I’m not really succeeding. Working at home isn’t helping in the slightest, either, for while I’m being good and limiting things like Xbox access and random net surfing, I still think my mind is in a “no work happens at home” zone, and it’s refusing to cooperate. (And what doesn’t help is that the deadline for the feature I’m trying to write is officially “oh, whenever”. I set myself the task of writing it this week, but the permanently holidaying gnome at the back of my mind is giggling with joy and sometimes it’s hard to hear myself think.)

So, this all bodes well for future productivity. Harrumph.

For the last 15 minutes, I’ve just watched a lesbian give three people a grilling about a door which had been left open. I love this show.

(I am working, I’m just watching some telly while I do it.)

As a freelancer, you have to do what you’re told, so when they tell you to chance the caption on the Steve Irwin picture, you do. But Energy: Steve Irwin just doesn’t have the same piercing incisiveness of my original.

Anyway, forget my naughty captions – someone should have a word with whoever chose the pictures for the piece. The main shot is of Steve holding both his arms out, some distance apart, with flat palms facing each other across his torso. The kind of pose, say, an angler might use to demonstrate, “You should have seen it – it was this big!”

I’m sure it was, Steve.

There’s talk from his fellow documentary makers that the actual footage of Steve being stabbed by the stingray and subsequently dying might make it to the airwaves somewhere. Probably in his home country of Australia. My first thought was “But that would be madness!” – but no more mad, I suppose, than offering him a state funeral.

I mean, really, you can’t make this any funnier but, by God, the Aussies are trying.