Oh Canada!

Right this moment, I would like to take the opportunity to applaud the writers of Lost Girl for finally - FINALLY - pulling their socks up and doing something with the show. This week's LG was epic with a side of awesomesauce on a fucking plate. No boring Dyson, no more Bo's pining over Dyson, some marvellous Kenzi-isms and all sorts of salty goodness.

Oh, and did I mention this? (CAUTION - SPOILER ALERT!):



Thank you, Canada. You will forever be more than the place where maple syrup and snow comes from to me.

Breakthrough!

To say I've been struggling with the dreaded writer's block lately would be something of an understatement. I've been plagued by the terror of a blank screen for weeks now, and deciding to just type whatever comes into my head always seems to turn into a paragraph of such utter shite that even a dog would bark at it with disgust. So far, so typical.

Then the strangest thing happened - I've been in Caffe Nero for the past hour...and I've been writing. Writing actual words that even form sentences, which are part of paragraphs that aren't completely repugnant and worthless! Huzzah! All it took was a simple switch from the blank white screen to a blank page of a narrow-lined notebook, and the rest just came. Easy.

Even weirder than the lifting of the block though was what came out through my pen. You should know at this point that I never, ever physically plan anything I write, though I usually come up with a fairly detailed plot/character outline(s) in my head before I start writing things down. What came out today though was something I don't recall even having thought about before; it's writing what I know, I suppose, but it's so weird and a little eerie that this narrative exists now when I didn't even know what I was writing before I started. I just...well, started.

...but at least now I have something to work on during NaNoWriMo! Unless my strange ideas of inexplicable origin dry up between now and Tuesday, of course ;)

Ceremonials

Okay, so I absolutely cannot wait for the new Florence + The Machine album. Really. I've been waiting on the edge of my seat for about a week now, replaying What The Water Gave Me on YouTube until my ears bleed from the awesome; and don't get me started about my singing along to said track...

I just really, really hope it lives up to expectations - though if the single Shake It Out and the aforementioned track of amazingness are anything to go by, it will - as the other album I had been looking forward to a lot recently, which came out earlier this month, was a huge disappointment.

You were expecting me to name the band/album then, weren't you? Ha. No such luck. It's too embarrassing for the internets and is indeed a very guilty pleasure. I'll give you a clue:

...don't judge me! I can't help it! O_o

Comment Is Free, But That Opinion Will Cost You

I despair at humanity sometimes, I really do. Many of these people who cause me so much despair are my fellow Guardian readers, annoyingly enough; for in the Comment Is Free pages lurks a pit of squirming, stinking prejudice, hate and snobbery.

Don't get me wrong - not all the commenters on there are completely batshit, and many of them often have valid points, but some of them are so stupid and annoying that you just want to shake them until noises stop coming out of them. Don't believe me? Have a look through as many of the 267 comments on a piece by regular contributor Tanya Gold: I blame the media for ignoring feminism in favour of makeup.

A dodgy title, admittedly, but when you get into the bones of the piece it strikes a valid point about the lack of women who would choose to identify as feminist, and the fact that the media mainly does nothing but reinforce gender/beauty stereotypes to the nth degree. What you see in that mire of depressing comments is basically a bunch of people determined to troll the article to death, without realising their troll-ness. The piece is picked apart, chewed and spat out by people who insist there is a nefarious 'feminist agenda' at work as opposed to the agenda for total equality; this approach, from people who would be pretty tolerant of my way of life and agree with many things I do, just doesn't make sense to me, and this is basically what I see every time I take a look at a Guardian blog/comment article. I don't understand how these people always disagree with what seems to me to be a sensible or valid point.

Taking The Lid Off

What with all the crazy going on in the world today, sometimes muttering to oneself with headphones in whilst walking down the street is not always the most cathartic (or healthy) way to express one's opinion. So where do you turn? Who will listen? How will you convince your colleague who has just seen your insane murmurings from across the street that you are not actually crazy? These are the questions I have been faced with time and time again, only to waste several years of increasing, sanity-related isolation by doing nothing. It is time for change: it's time to blog.

So I'd be lying if I said this was the first time I've blogged - I maintained (in the loosest sense of the word) a LiveJournal blog from when I was about 18, but found myself too constrained by actively trying to define what I was and wasn't allowed to write about. It wasn't quite a journal or a blog, just some poor confused corner of the internets waiting, nay, begging for a purpose.

Well, I've decided to let myself go - figuratively speaking, of course. I'm not that old. I fully intend for this blog to be about anything that crosses my work-addled mind. I promise everything and nothing all at once, and I positively encourage you all to sign in and tell me how stupid I am. Honestly, we'll both get something out of it in the end. Or something.