So as most of you know, I do a weekly Refried comic for games.on.net. My editor found this week’s comic delightful (Pure gold, mate) and in fact liked it so much that he showed it to his manager – which turned out to be a bad move. She decided that it was possibly so contentious that it had to go all the way up the chain to the CEO of Internode to make a decision on – and he said no. Given that its subject matter is a South Australian politician and Internode is an Adelaide-based ISP, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to go upsetting the establishment.
But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so click here and enjoy.
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In the middle of October, Jess and I travelled down to Newcastle. I had just won an eBay auction for ‘Ere We Go and Freebooterz, two of the few remaining out-of-print Games Workshop Ork sourcebooks I did not own. This was tremendously exciting for me; previously these books had always escaped me as I was either outbid or I could not make it to the place required to collect them. But this year, fortune smiled and they popped up in sunny coastal Newcastle, only available by pickup, and I happened to be in the right state at the right time. The seller and I even agreed to meet, fittingly enough, at the local Games Workshop store in Newcastle. It was perfect.
Little did I know, when we undertook this labour of love, that this would be the very thing that would cause me to lose my own job with Games Workshop.
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A lot of people think they’ve had the worst day, ever. A lot of them will sigh as they sit down exhausted, reaching for the half-empty whiskey bottle on the table, and say to you “Man, what a day. What a fucking day.” Some people may in fact have actually had a somewhat bad day.
Well, these people don’t know shit. Let me tell you a story about yesterday, Thursday 1st October 2009. The 100% official, swear-to-god, worst day, ever.
It all began with the arrival of a package from back home. Jess and I have a wedding to attend here in Sydney, you see, and I cleverly left all of my formal clothes back in Perth. My parents were good enough to attend to my needs and send them over, but in my infinite wisdom I left it until the last minute, and indeed told them to send the wrong trousers.
With the wedding on Saturday, there was no time to get them to send over the correct ones. We decide to quickly run out to Target and get some new trousers, foregoing showers in our rush to do so. It is quickly warming up to be a stinking hot day, and my nose responds appropriately by deciding it is going to drip relentlessly throughout all of it. We are tired, sniffly, unwashed, sweaty, hot, and probably coming down with a cold. And we’re only just getting started.
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On the road to Canberra, as we enter the magnificent rolling hills and plains around the Lake George area, I am momentarily stunned by the majesty of the vista before us.
“Wow! That’s incredible! It looks like something straight off a, uh. Hrm.”
“You were going to say desktop, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Goddammit.”
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Hello everyone. My name is Tim Colwill, and I have a problem.
Hello, Tim!
Actually, I have a number of problems. For example, my facial muscles tend to operate on a ten-minute time delay, which causes me to sometimes be unable to properly communicate emotions to people important to me. In the same manner one can look up at the sky and see the stars as they were hundreds of years ago, my face is a delightful mirror of the emotions I was feeling ten minutes prior.
Working in combination with my expressionless voice I often, to my great chagrin, give people the impression of being either utterly disinterested, monstrously sarcastic, or having actually passed away several minutes ago and now operating entirely on volatile corpse gas and twitching nerve reflexes. My thanks to all those who have frantically, and mistakenly, dialled for an ambulance. I appreciate it.
But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today I would like to talk about my unnerving tendency to not so much blur as demolish the line between the internet and real life. I have, at various times in the past done, and probably will do again in the future, the following things.
- Picked up envelopes addressed to me, fresh out of the mailbox, and gleefully exclaimed “Oooh! Email!”
- Mused aloud on the possibility of “bookmarking” delightful staff at restaurants so that we could come back to the in the future.
- While sketching from a reference book, reached out to flip the pages of the reference book so that it would not go into screensaver.
Yes, I have done all of these things. I am not proud of these things, but they are my things, and I have done them. I will probably do more of them in the future even, until the time comes when I am found curled up in the foetal position on the floor, sucking binaric dregs from a blue CAT-5 cable and cackling quietly to myself.
Still, at least when I am asked in job interviews whether I “eat, sleep and breathe the internet”, I can hold my head high and say proudly: “Yes. Yes I do”. And then I can break down in a series of embarrassed, choking sobs.
I’ll always have that.
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