Extra! Extra!

Here! Have some blog news.
The Milnesy & Wivell Blog: The Official Blog Of The Show, the official blog of the Milnesy & Wivell show, has been blocked by my school's wireless internet network. This makes me laugh; this is not a general blog-blocking procedure that my school employs, but a specific ban on that blog in particular. I know this because my blog hasn't been blocked (hence this - I'm at school right now).
So what has caused my school to block the M&W blog? I have a theory. Mr Ross Milnes, author of the rant-tastic Mind Of Milnesy blog, also contributes to the Milnesy & Wivell blog (hence its name - duh), and in a moment of passionate fury posted a furious and somewhat sweary rant, directed at Big Brother. By all means check that out - it's so hate-filled, it's funny. My theory is that the school network picked up on the blue language and blocked the blog (Ross' blog is also blocked, so this is highly likely).

This makes me laugh. You see? Politeness pays.

Twitface

It's funny how we sometimes do things without thinking. Occasionally, the lack of conscious thought proves to be a disadvantage, like when someone crosses the road without thinking and becomes another road safety statistic. More often, however, we do things without thinking simply because the reasoning behind it goes without saying; the mentality of the decision is so seemingly straightforward that the brain bypasses 'ponder' mode and just gets on with the job.

Usually, such decisions come and go. Some, though, do not; the decisions where we opted not to do something, where the option to change our minds lingers, does not always disappear into obscurity as quickly as others. On the occasions when such decisions, made without thinking, are suddenly brought forward, once again, to the centre stage of our minds, it is interesting to explore the thought processes that initially occurred when the decision was first made. Sometimes we learn why we didn't dwell on it.

I say this because such an occasion recently happened to me, and I discovered that the reason I decided what I decided, without thinking about it, was because thinking it over would just get me unnecessarily angry and worked up. And lyrical. Hence this. Sorry about that.

The other day, someone asked me "Why don't you connect your Twitter account with Facebook so that your tweets will appear on your Facebook profile?" This threw me for a moment, as the concept, as constantly evident to me as it was and has been for ages, hadn't really jostled through, and to the front of, my hypothetical to-do list and announced itself as a practical and logical idea at any point; it sort of hung about, in the areas of my mind that teetered on peripheral, close to plummeting into the abyss of discarded ponderings, and never really drew attention to itself. Basically, what I mean is that without ever dwelling on my reasoning, I never considered connecting Twitter to Facebook as a good idea.

So I was taken aback slightly when this person - a real-life human being, with opposable thumbs and a digestive tract - suggested the idea to me again. This idea, something that I had always known about but had ignored because common sense told me to, was being dragged through the crowd of thoughts, into the spotlight of my conscious mind, by someone who showed no hint of irony or sarcasm in their facial expression or tone of voice. This person was being serious. And it caused me, for the first time, to take a long hard look at my decision and try to understand the subconscious reasoning behind it.

Twitter and Facebook are not the same thing. Not by a long shot. Sure, they 'borrow' ideas and gimmicks off one another, and some people (trying, no doubt, to be hilarious) say that it's getting harder to tell the difference between the two websites. Take a look at Twitter and Facebook; compare them for yourself and you can clearly see the differences.

Facebook, for a start, is MASSIVE. Not just in an 'everyone's got it' kind of a way, but also in the sense that there is so much to do on Facebook. You can not only post updates, you can play games, get in touch with long-lost acquaintances and... well, the list goes on. It goes on for a long time. So we'll leave it there.

Twitter, on the other hand, really only has one function: sharing. Whether it be sharing links, gossip, news, personal information (in a 'how has your day been?' kind of way, before you start thinking like that) or a funny joke, Twitter handles it exquisitely well, employing the brilliant 'retweet' and 'hashtag' functions. Sharing such things on Facebook, on the other hand, can result in a few 'wacky' friends commenting underneath with some barely-comprehensible attempt to be funny and no consideration for you, the poster. As the notifications go up, the aura of outward integrity of the thing you posted goes down. Tut, tut, tut. Best tweet it, then.

When you're on Facebook, you feel like you're in a kind of social bubble; no matter how eventful your time on Facebook may be, what happens in the bubble stays in the bubble, and outsiders are likely to never know it ever happened. Of course, with the amount of friends the average Facebooker has, and the amount of other friends those friends have, the closed-endedness of it all isn't as noticeable. But it is there. It's like being in the internet equivalent of a large village in Norfolk. That witty retort you posted, no matter how brilliant, will, if you're very lucky, be read by a friend of someone who 'like'd or commented on it, but ninety-nine percent of the time it will end there, if not much sooner. And your desperate attempt to be noticed grinds, as inevitably as ever, to a halt.

Thanks to the aforementioned 'retweet' function on Twitter, your brilliance can be seen by loads of people, people that neither you nor your friends have ever heard of, and thus the bubble of closed-endedness is popped. I once asked David Mitchell a question on Twitter, and he answered it! That would never have happened on Facebook, because if you're famous and on Facebook, the amount of notifications you are likely to get will probably cause your computer to explode. Well, probably not. I'm not a computer technician.

So in conclusion, I will not let Twitter post my updates on Facebook; I like my ability to post something on one website and not the other. Some things I come up with suit Twitter more than Facebook, and vice versa. There is no grey area, as far as I can see; they're unique and different to each other. And taking two bright splashes of creative and distinctly original brilliance and mixing them up into some sort of muddy, bastardised 'Twitface' seems a little unfair.

An Update: Not all these blog posts are witty essays

I am proud to announce that the first episode of The Milnesy & Wivell Show has been completed. Now all I need to do is finish trimming the soundtrack of episode two, talk nonsense for the soundtrack of episode three, animate episode two, edit the soundtrack of episode three, and animate episode three. No problem.
Episode one will be released on September, so look out for that, then. Actually, I'll prompt you, so never mind.

As you were.

Bog Blog

 ...
 'Ere!

I was on the toilet a moment ago, and noticed that the toilet roll was the really cheap kind. My family are not posh people or anything - far from it - but we usually get slightly softer toilet paper; fairly cheap fare, but still quite soft. This stuff wasn't even trying to be soft. I looked at this abomination, this rough, unholy harbinger of seemingly inevitable arse pain, and sighed audibly. This wasn't going to be fun, I thought.

Well, it turns out that there's nothing to worry about. The difference between the 'quilted' bog rolls and this stuff is simply too minuscule to bother dwelling on. It did the job. I wasn't walking like a sumo wrestler afterwards.

In fact, my whole view of the scenario changed. My chief comfort-based concern permanently extinguished, I began to admire the cheap toilet paper. Here was a roll of processed tree whose purpose was to wipe arses. It wasn't embarrassing itself by exhibiting the delusions of grandeur that the more expensive brands clearly have. It knew its place, and didn't try to big itself up with adjectives like 'luxury', 'absorbent' or 'three pounds fifty'. Good on it, I say.

I appreciate that the past few paragraphs have probably baffled you somewhat; yes, it is an unusual topic for a blog post - it's not just you. It was just something that occurred to me, and if it keeps you blog-gogglers sedated for a few more days (or weeks...), then all is dandy and there be nary a quibble.

CYA L8R

Well. Here I am.

So, what's happened to me recently?
I'm afraid not a lot has happened to me recently. The Summer Holidays are underway, and I have done precisely nothing since I left those school gates on Friday 16th June. This is the main reason for the lengthy space of time between the last blog post and this one, for which I can only apologise. Alas, I am the type of person that, artistic pastimes aside, does very little of any interest until something of interest comes my way; in other words, I don't go out looking for interesting things to do - I don't actively seek them.

Well, it just so happens that something of interest - of considerable interest - came my way last night. Well, the night before last, as it is now seven in the morning (yes, insomnia, you win this time) and so the past few hours now officially take the place of Sunday night as being 'last night', so... I'm sorry, I digress. Sunday night. Something of interest came my way. 'Sherlock' came my way; it's the new BBC series, written by Doctor Who's Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and it's absolutely marvellous. Sherlock Holmes, set in the 21st Century, done magnificently.
Benedict Cumberbatch: a man whose name is only equalled in terms of awesomeness by his acting.
So yes. I'm no television reviewer. Watch it, if you haven't done so already. If you did watch it, watch it again. I did.

Right. Elsewhere in my memory banks...
Oh! I'm currently animating the first series of The Milnesy & Wivell Show, which is the secondary reason for the aforementioned lengthy space of time between the last blog post and this on; I have been working constantly for the past week - more than is healthy for a typically productive person, let alone my good-for-nothing self - making the most of the lack of school to get as much animating done as possible.
The thing is with animation, the better you do it, the longer it takes. This goes for most things in life; a rushed cake may taste unsatisfactory, or a car made in a hurry might shed its wheels at an inopportune moment and unexpectedly introduce its driver to a nearby wall. Slow and steady wins the race. Good things come to those who wait. And so on, and so forth. I've been animating the M&W Show to quite a high standard of quality (if I do say so myself), and it has therefore dominated my life this past week. I have done loads, though! Episode one is nearly complete, which, for animation, is pretty speedy. So well done me.
Here is a little preview picture for you. Please note that the actual series is in colour - I made the photos in the picture sepia because that's how I roll (anyone who has seen my Facebook profile picture can vouch for that). So sorry if it's misleading in that sense.

Okey dokey then. Good day.

The funny blog entries are back!

Hello. I use italics to make my greeting sound dry and edgy. Nyah.

Right, on with the blog thing. I was asleep a moment ago. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking 'I bet he didn't do much if he was unconscious', and you'd be right. Unless I not only had an amazing dream but am also able to recollect it, how could I turn the concept of having a nap into a narrative worth reading? The answer, dear readers, is I can't. But it padded out the blog a bit, didn't it?

No, the interesting thing, the thing worth blogging about, happened before I was enveloped by the numbing duvet of slumber. I was laying on the bed (so you can see how close this event was to my falling asleep), and I could hear the self-loving strains of some young American band radiating from my sister's laptop in the other room. She doesn't, in my humblest of opinions, have a very good taste in music. She'll listen to music she likes the sound of (usually awful), but most of the time she'll spend every waking hour listening to tunes that are popular with her friends (usually suicidally awful).
You know the sort. The singer is invariably a bratty girl (that Lavigne lass falls under this category, fans of shit music) or a boy that sounds like he's been kicked so hard in the testicles, they have re-entered his body, are bouncing around in between his internal organs like a couple of Super Balls, and he's singing to keep himself from going mad. They sing about 'love' and 'emotions' and 'miscellaneous hormonal misdemeanours' (I made up that last one for comedic effect, by the way - I'd take my hat off to a group that managed to successfully place 'miscellaneous hormonal misdemeanours' into a song), and some occasionally burst into a tirade of shouting, accompanied by squealing electric guitars and whatnot. I suppose this is what constitutes 'music' nowadays, eh? Hm.

Anyhoozle, I was listening to involuntarily overhearing the music, too tired to do something about it but too awake to immediately evacuate myself to the Land of Nod. And then it happened.
There was a part in one of the myriad of endless droning songs that actually sounded good.
It was only brief, mind. Perhaps a line or two. But somehow, the music, the lyrics, and dare I even say it, the voice, seemed to fall into place and fit together into something quite nice. Almost immediately afterwards, naturally, the inanity commenced. But it rattled me somewhat.

TWO REASONS WHY THIS RATTLED ME

1. One of the artists on my sister's play list produced a moment of aural professionalism.
2. I noticed that one of the artists on my sister's play list produced a moment of aural professionalism.

The second point, despite its numerical status as the secondary point here, is actually the key point, and the point that will drive my narrative further.
If I was just hating my sister's music because it was my sister and it was her music, as I have long suspected, I would have shrugged off that fleeting moment of musical mastery, and thought nothing more of it. But I didn't. I sat up (well, almost) and took note.
I can only conclude from this that I am secretly wanting my sister's music to be good. I am subconsciously listening out, in optimistic hope, for some good sounds to emanate from her speakers.

Now, not only does this mean that I'm not the stubborn, curmudgeonly bastard I had secretly suspected I was for so long, but also that her music, overall, is genuinely terrible. It's not just me.

So there!

Cursed to a life of aero-apathy

It's the Waddington Air Show today. I'd go, as I have done most years prior, but... meh. Just meh.
I'm not an aircraft buff. All planes look the same to me, and people who can identify a plane by the shape of its nose cone, or whatever, nearly bore me into unconsciousness.

The only real appeal the Waddington Air Show had, for me, was the challenge of getting in without paying. Every year, my dad and I would devise a brilliant scheme, each one wackier than the last. I don't know why, but it's just lost its novelty now. And I don't give a crap about aircraft, so that was never going to be a redeeming strength of the show to lure me back.

I assume the Red Arrows will be their, doin' their thang. They practise over my village and have done for as long as I can remember, so they're of no interest to me. Seeing a group of professional aerobats creating a heart out of smoke, and then piercing it with a smoke arrow, is an everyday occurrence to me, which is a bit of a curse. I can't ever appreciate the Red Arrows in the same slack-jawed way the rest of the country can.
Ho hum. Might just slob out today. Or animate. Whatever.

So sorry, Waddo. No offense, but I think you're boring. And I suspect I always shall.