Green shoots of recovery

Finally, some good newses.

1. I had a job interview, first one in years. Even if I don’t get it, it still feels like a positive thing.

2. Wizards of the Coast have come across my book, and emailed today to say they want to interview me. This is massive for me – they’re the guys that keep Dungeons and Dragons alive. I didn’t expect it at all, especially as I take the piss out of them a bit in Enemy of Chaos.

3. Shift Run Stop is doing better than we could’ve imagined, I’ve just seen the stats and am very pleased indeed. The quality of guests remains top and we’re fully planning to keep it up.

4. Roo and I have been invited to appear on Sky News as Shift Run Stop in January.

5. I’m doing an interview for Wired magazine next week about my various projects.

6. One of those projects involves Newspaper Club and this excellent chap who is an absolute delight and who I’ve been meeting and bouncing ideas off, of late. He seems even more insanely ambitious about the scale of projects than I am, but unlike me, obviously has the smarts to make stuff happen.

7. The BBC online comedy people just emailed to say we should be able to go ahead with a project based on my first book that’s been in the pipeline for over a year. I’ve been summoned back to TV Centre.

8. Insurance company finally playing ball – new iPhone for me!

9. …and I recently found a rather nice review of my EOC iPhone app here

There is suddenly a lot to do.

Filming episode 5

Something for your eyes for a change. Here are some bits we recorded last night to give a flavour of what’s to come next week in episode 5 of Shift Run Stop. Roo will make the usual mini-episode (audio) tester this Thursday too. I hashed this together when I couldn’t sleep last night: your eyes are looking at Russell Davies (with the beard) Dave Green (with the snacks), me (the female one) and Roo (the other one). And your ears are listening to the new Shift Run Stop theme tune. It’s called “In Computers” and is by Robyn Wilder and her band Bambino Special!

My week of vintage technology 2. Pacman on the Gameboy Advance SP

I am good at Pacman. I know that sounds arrogant. I know it sounds like the puff-chested posturing of some kind of terrible strutting cock who wants to seem ‘cool’. it’s the kind of thing people say to impress knowing they’ll never get called on it, yeah. But in my case, it really is true. I don’t care what you think of me. I am good at Pacman, so what if that makes me ‘cool’ in your books.

My week of vintage technology 1. The Nokia 6100

As some readers will know, particularly the minority who didn’t get here by googling “The Neverending Story” (and now, those that did) my bag was snatched last week and I’ve been without various things since. One of the more unexpected effects of the jacking was a newfound respect for retro technology. Because losing an iPhone means losing an MP3 player, games, maps, mobile internet, email, instant twitter capabilities, the option of playing the under-rated G-Force game for iPhone, information about the stockmarket I have no interest in and no ability to delete off my desktop, er… and a telephone of course. I should point out I’m not an iPhone devotee. I am both aware and completely supportive of the stigma associated with the smug devices. Almost everything about the interface irritates me, I find the keyboard almost unusable. But I was given one, and of course, for someone as umbilically attached to the internet as I am, it has its uses. The frantic quest to plug this new pre-industrial silence in my life has sent me on a voyage of vintage Nokia, battery-powered chargers and hand-held computing devices, and the greatest of these is the vintage Nokia.

Q&A

Here’s a Q&A based on the questions in the Saturday Guardian magazine. As you know, I am bored, unemployed, self-indulgent, meaningless and have nothing going on in my life, so it’s only a matter of time before they do a feature on me. Anyway, I may yet regret it, but let me know if you do the same on your blog as I found it an interesting experiment and it might present an interesting sort of cross-section of a person.

When were you happiest?

I don’t really experience gradations of happiness. I am basically happy at times, basically unhappy at others. There are, however, fleeting times when I’ve been more excited than others, and a recent example of that would be seeing Magazine play at the Forum in February after being a devout fan for almost a decade and never for a moment expecting them to play together again.

My Favourite Explosions part 2.

4. Anything by Jason Bourne

Jason Bourne is the modern master of explosives improv, taking up where MacGyver left off and making world-beating weapons from literally anything that happens to be at hand, especially magazines for some reason. In the Bourne Supremacy, for example, our hero memorably deploys a deadly cocktail of rolled-up copy of Razzle, four-slice toaster and gas to blow some mother way. You can see the fireball in all its gritty glory at about 1:48 here, but sit through the rest of the montage anyway – it’s all great, there’s a load of hand-to-hand and a fair bit of parkour, and you will weep at the memory of how rock the man is.

My Favourite Explosions part 1.

My Dad works at explosives factory and I was brought up with this stuff. The guinea pigs lived in an old ammo box. I remember playing with motor cases when I was very small and we had always the best firework displays on the estate, complete with military flares. But though I have always found them interesting and exciting, it never made me fearless about explosions.

For me explosions are obviously the best part of any film, especially the gas explosion which is the most insidious of all – that silent creeping time bomb which might strike at any point and where it seems the air itself catches blaze. There’s no way we can’t fear combustion: even when it’s tiny it’s bigger than us and the opposite of us, with our soft desperate fleshy efforts to hold all the bits of the world together as if it means anything. Explosions are the continual threat of rug-sweeping surprise in a physical world we think we have roughly under control. So indiscriminately, terrifyingly, suddenly devastating, and worst of all when we don’t expect them. They’re always a possibility, they booby trap the constructed warrens of security we roam, but they intrude on us from a different time and space.

Game over, Twitter

I’ve pulled the plug on my Twitter account for a bit. Or rather, turned the light off, but left it plugged in.

It’s partly because it’s not helping my current mood be reminded how busy and successful everyone else is at four second intervals*, and it’s partly because I’m just not very interested in Twitter now. I liked the old fashioned chat-room simplicity of it when I signed up three years ago, but it’s not really like that anymore.

For one thing, I can see it succumbing to commercial pressure to add Facebook-like bells and whistles… and as you might have gathered from the other things I’ve written about on this blog, none of that interests me at all. Personally, I like the sandbox – the feeling of inventing your own rules and games. Twitter has been the most beautiful demonstration of the fact that if you leave people to themselves for long enough, they will start to play… and not just play along the prescribed structures – but invent new play. Because there’s only so many ways you can go with noughts and crosses, and increasing the number of people playing never changes the unmoveable rule-bound game in the same way it can change – actually write – the unwritten game. People-power can invent things, but it can’t argue with maths. So let us play.

Making the game that doesn’t exist

I’ve made two books, loads of websites, several magazines and a couple of podcasts. It’s been a sequence of interesting rooms and I’ve picked up essential pieces of equipment on the way… but the neon arrows are pointing at a new door, now. Because there’s something I’ve never done but have been thinking about for a while. My first book was based on one of my websites, the second is half-way to being a game (as you probably know if you’re here) – and for all its terrifying strangeness, the idea of making an actual computer game feels like the natural next step. I can see why Douglas Adams was attracted by the prospect too. It seems like it could be tremendously creative.

To my – maybe naive – eyes, there are other obvious attractions. The industry is enormous. There might be money available… and unfortunately money has to be a consideration. In spite of my on-paper achievements (hmm), I’ve had very little luck persuading anyone to give me any money to do their bidding for the best part of this year. It’s hard times for anyone, but those of us who tread more esoteric paths do continual battle against the army of sensibly qualified socially-functional superstars. An exciting battle, often, but a hungry one too. So with nothing to lose, I am pushed and happily pulled into a new project. And I thought I’d write thoughts on it all here, in the interest of our Big Brother age, work-for-you transparency and because I’ve realised that if I don’t have an (even imaginary) audience hanging on my words I find it very hard to motivate myself to get anything thought, let alone done. In this echo-chamber of my head.

Who pays the A Team?

Leila: God Supernanny makes the kids go in “reflection room’. It’s not a hall of mirrors sadly. This supernanny thing reminds me of a question that came up yesterday. “Who pays the A Team?” Like, where do they get all their money. They only ever help poor people. Who pays the Supernanny?

Peter: The folk who they do the jobs for? Didnt they get a load of money in the first place?

Leila: they are contractors. But you never see money change hands. Also i’m not that comfortable with the idea they’re doing this for money rather than a sense of moral righteousness. They’re basically hit men. They’d do anything for the right price.

Peter: well they probably invoice them and do a bank transfer or something.

Leila: Yes. They probably have paypal. Or BACS

Peter: i like their positive portrayal of the mentally ill. If only they were all like Murdoch