Ours, naturally: on July 6 this year (our fifth anniversary of being together), Jess and I were married at St. Matthews Anglican Church, in Guildford! It was a fairly small affair with only 50-odd people but it was totally amazing, and went off without a hitch (aside from the bit where we actually got hitched). You can see some photos of the event right here.

The night before the wedding, my brother Simon threw me a buck’s night at his house. As I don’t drink and am not into strippers, he decided to put me through a punishing series of Manliness Tests instead. These ranged from mowing his lawn, to cooking a ham and cheese sandwich on the barbeque (surprisingly difficult), to explaining exactly how a car worked (sorcery?) to smashing pieces of concrete. With my very own personalised, engraved sledgehammer.

My final score was a very acceptable 435 out of a possible 550, and Simon presented me with my very own “Approved for Marriage” certificate. Which I promptly accidentally left somewhere at the church and lost forever. Thanks Simon!

This one has to go to ours as well! Gosh, these awards are a bit one-sided. A few months after the wedding, we took off for the United Kingdom where we spent a couple of weeks jaunting through the various locales. Starting in London, we moved up through Manchester into Scotland, and from there across to Ireland, back down through Ireland across to Wales, then a few more days with the extended family in England before jetting off to spend the last few days of the trip in Leipzig, Germany with Jess’s brother Chris and his wife Hannah.

All told it was a bit more rushed than we’d have liked, and we ended up with some staggering roaming bills from Telstra due to the apparently mistaken belief that Google Maps wasn’t that data heavy. But overall it was an amazing experience – the first time Jess had ever been overseas, in fact! – and gave us a great tasting plate of the UK to return to later. We also got to meet some lovely people and eat some lovely food. Also, some awful food. I’m looking at you, any-and-all Indian restaurants in the UK.

We fell absolutely in love with Scotland, and now plan to return there at some point and buy a cottage to live in. This plan is tentatively known as “Operation: Scottage”.

In August we managed to sneak down to Busselton for a few days of quiet relaxation at a lovely little chalet by the beach. It was beautifully cold and lusciously green (although not, we would discover later, as green as anywhere in Scotland). Over the weekend we sampled many handmade delights in and around the region as well as visiting our favourite Indian restaurant, which had just opened up its first expansion down there.

The picture above is us eating at The Goose Cafe on a Saturday morning. We’d planned to take a walk down the Busselton Jetty but the wind was kicking up a storm and so instead we whiled away the morning inside the beachside cafe, by a crackling fire, eating pancakes and bacon. It was amazing.

Busselton, Margaret River and indeed the whole region are absolutely gorgeous and delightful to visit, but the sheer and utter lack of anything to do after 8PM on any given night was quite pronounced. Nearly everyone we saw had cracked open some sort of booze, and in fact a charming young pair of men walked into the restaurant while we were eating actually drinking already (and carrying a six pack in the other hand) – before casually checking with the waitress if it was okay. And, you know, that’s fine! If that’s what you’re into. But yeah, it was a bit strange to see.

Back in February – shit, almost a year ago now – we were walking home from a Comedy Night at the Charles Hotel and decided to stop in at the local petroleum dispensary for some iced cream. It was closed, alas, so we headed to Hungry Jacks nearby in the same carpark, only to find that there was a very adorable but disgustingly thin and sick-looking cat wandering around. He had a collar on and everything but no tag, and he was more than happy to eat some Hungry Jacks burger patties out of our hands and let us pick him up and pat him. After a few agonising minutes of deciding whether to get involved or not, we took him home and shacked him up in the laundry for the night.

The next day, we took him to the Cat Haven animal shelter nearby, where they told us flatly that if they couldn’t find his owner within 24 hours (he wasn’t microchipped), they would just put him down as it cost too much to keep him and he was too old for adoption. We were pretty disgusted by this attitude and left, taking it upon ourselves to walk the streets of Mt. Lawley, doorknocking and putting up “Found Cat” posters and so on. After six weeks or so of this with no result, my lovely ex-colleague from games.on.net, Brenna Hillier and her partner Nicole offered to take him in, and we shipped him across to Sydney to stay with them where he is now very fat and happy and gets lots of love and affection. All’s well that ends well.

Here’s our dog Rosie, carefully and lovingly patting the neighbour’s dog Gugle, who came over to be babysitted while they were out for work. Pretty fucking adorable.

This year, when my editor Bennett Ring left games.on.net, he nominated me for the role of caretaker/interim editor while they searched for a new full-time editor. I gleefully put my hand up to be that editor, and was pleased as punch when they decided to choose me to take full-time care of the site permanently in November this year. It’s basically the best job in the world, I’m not going to lie.

One of the perks of the job is that sometimes people in PR at video game companies send you nice things. Alan Moore at THQ for example sent me the one-and-a-half metre long replica chainsword from Space Marine, that you see in the above photo. He did so after ringing me up to sadly inform me that I couldn’t have one as they were exceptionally limited, so needless to say I flipped out like an excited schoolgirl when it showed up at the door. What a delightful troll he is.

Taco Salad. Make tacos as usual (in our case, per the directions on the Old El Paso taco kit), except replace “taco shells” with “bed of corn chips”. Adorn with toppings and serve, shoveling the ingredients into your face at high speed.

Perhaps a fairly farcical topic for me to discuss as I have all the tonal sensitivity of a tub of yoghurt, but it’s been a pretty musical year for me! I not only purchased a CD (just one, mind you) but even went to a music festival for the first time in living memory. John and I spent a delightful afternoon at Groovin’ the Moo in Bunbury which, despite the overhanging aroma of cooking cow pats and the tendency to be happily hugged by drunk bogans, was a pretty awesome experience. The highlight of the afternoon was of course Gotye, whose new album Making Mirrors also came out this year (predictably, it was the one I purchased).

As far as iTunes is concerned, my number one most-played non-Gotye song of the year is “Focus” from the Frozen Synapse soundtrack. So I’ve embedded that above for you. As far as the internet is concerned however, the number one hit of the year is of course “Snakes”, recorded by MC Chilly J and remixed by Jess. It’s probably the best song ever made. Listen to it here (or download it here as an iPhone ringtone).

Thanks for a great 2011, everybody! It’s been up, down, and shaken all around. Here’s to more frequent and less erratic blogging, continued health and happiness, and having another puppy to add to our family. We’ll be picking this little girl up some time in February. Isn’t she adorable?

I’ve been having the biggest craving to play Neverwinter Nights 2 lately, but I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. Finally, the urge to play became too great, and I sat down to install it while I wrote this blog entry. I open the box, and the CD isn’t in there. It isn’t in there! Where the HELL is it?! I’ve lost it. I don’t know where it is. That shits me enough. What shits me even more is that I have to buy it again, digitally. Which is okay, apart from the massive 11GB download. But no, what shits me is that the whole game, plus the two expansions is only $19.95 on Steam. And it’s not even on sale. I still have the sticker on one of the boxes from the FIRST time I bought it, and it was $49.95 on it’s own. ARGH. I know, I know, I’m essentially complaining about how cheap shit on the internet is. But it shits me that they make us pay so much money at launch and then still it for next to nothing later.

Anyway, annoying. But I’m not meant to be talking about annoying things today! That was yesterday! Today I’m meant to be talking about what makes me happy.

I realised today how vague all these questions are. Tim suggests that’s part of the exercise. But I’ve also noticed how self-centred they are. Basically, sit down and talk about yourself for a month. It’s not really what I had in mind, but I didn’t look too closely at each day’s question because I wanted it to be spontaneous. Oh well, if you’re still reading, I guess you must like me!

In related news, I’ve discovered something that makes me happy just lately. And that is having projects. I’ve always wanted to have a hobby or something I can work towards, but I guess I always got too meta and started thinking I needed a hobby for the sake of a hobby, and not just because I enjoyed doing something. I also lacked the imagination to come up with anything, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the space of a few days I’ve been working on a few projects at once, and it has been SUPER satisfying! There is, of course, this blog. It’s been around for a while, of course, but actively posting in it everyday is a new experience. I’ve also been working on sort of an art project with Tim. It’s basically just our names on a big piece of wood, but we’re decorating them and making them look awesome. I think I just officially finished my name today, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I ripped up old sheet music and sort of pasted it on randomly to cover the letters, and then painted over the top of that. I wanna say it’s like papier mache, but it’s not really, cause it’s just a single layer of paper, and it looks classier. The slightly yellowed sheet music is a really nice touch, and I painted with Tim’s Warhammer paints, specifically the foundation paints, which gave the paint a really nice thick cartoony sort of colouring, without the paint itself being too thick.

Unforunately, I think I really got the hang of painting on them on the last letters, so that’s a little disappointing. But as I said, I’m still thoroughly chuffed with how it turned out. I’ll post pictures when Tim has finished his part and it’s all stuck together. Hopefully it looks awesome.

My other project will only last a day or two, unfortunately, and that is Skittle-vodka! Which I have lovingly dubbed Skittlebrau. I am infusing vodka with Skittles for Debari’s going away party, and hopefully it will taste awesome. I’ve always wanted to do it, ever since I discovered the recipe, but have only now finally been able to do it. I’m about half-way through the process at the moment, the skittles are steeping in the vodka at the moment. I’m pretty much going to leave them until tomorrow, then I just have to strain them and chill them and they’re ready to go.

Good times.

Anyway, apart from doing things like that, creating things with my hands, I guess you’d call it, I think a lot of things make me happy. I’m a fairly happy person! I mean, I do suffer from depression, but I think that that gives me an even greater perspective from which to view the things that do make me happy, and to appreciate them more.

Let’s see. I like to learn! I like learning for the sake of learning though, not so much the structure and cramming of formal education. I mean, I’ll get back there eventually, probably when I’m back in Sydney, but I like just learning things for the sake of the knowledge itself. When I was an insomniac I would lie in bed and hit ‘random article’ in wikipedia on my iphone. That is a great way to learn about a lot of different things. I mean, you might have to press it a couple times to find something actually interesting, and not just like, a backwater town in Indianapolis. But when you do, it’s great! I learned about poets and great battles and historic events and all kinds of things.

So there you go. Learning makes me happy. I like playing video games! Nothing quite beats that feeling of knowing you have a great videogame to play when you get home, with a meaty storyline you can’t wait to uncover. I suppose in that same vein, reading also makes me happy. But probably not as much as videogames. I reaaaaally like videogames.

So there’s that. Videogames.

I guess all this sort of makes me happy on a fairly superficial level, though. If we’re going to talk about what really makes me happy, you can’t really get higher than Tim. Just being near him makes me happy. To even a deep psychological level. The time I’ve been with him has seen a dramatic change in my personality, my depression, my self-esteem. He literally makes me happy. Not just, you know, is funny and cheers me up. But he makes me happy. And that’s something that I’ve never felt from anyone else. Not my parents, not anyone. That’s not to say the rest of you don’t make me happy! Dont’ get me wrong. But I’ve never been with a person that makes me happy just from his very existence.

I guess that’s why I married him!

And Rosie. Man, if only she knew how much pleasure I derive simply from her being alive. Silly puppy, she is scarfing down her food as I write, and she ate it too fast again. I wish I could show you guys how affectionate Rosie is when no-one else is around. She gets distracted so easily that sometimes I can’t even call Tim in to check it out without ruining it. But sometimes she just wants cuddles and comes and puts her head in my lap and falls asleep, or tries to sit on my lap even though she is way too big. She is so affectionate, but other people don’t really get to see it, because she just spazzes out when there are people nearby. She really is a beautiful creature, and she makes me very happy.

Ya wanna know one more thing that makes me happy? It’s pretty weird. Maybe not so much ‘happy’ as a very deep-seated contentedness. It’s a bit weird, and very specific. Okay, well, it all date back to when I was in high school. I was horribly depressed in high school and I didn’t even know it. I wasn’t diagnosed until I’d left, but looking back, I think I’ve been depressed since I was about 12. I remember a doctor trying to tell me once when I was like, in year 8 or 9 and I just didn’t believe her. “Pshaw! Depressed! Not me!” Anyway, so I didn’t have a great time in highschool. I mean, I wasn’t really bullied or anything, a lot of my demons were of my own creation. But I didn’t have a great time. It wasn’t made any better by the fact that my home life was pretty stressful too. Dad was usually pissed at me for something, and if he wasn’t, I had to tiptoe around to make sure he didn’t start. So I found a lot of solace in sleep. I slept a lot.

So basically, what I’m getting around to is this. I would get home from school, make myself a coffee and a sandwich, eat it in bed and then go to sleep. So, 100% to this day, I get this really comforted feeling when I eat the combination of peanut butter and, specifically, Moccona’s Mocha Kenya instant coffee. Bonus comfort points if I eat it while wrapped in a blanket.

And that’s why I keep Mocha Kenya and peanut butter around to this day.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What we have here is a classic case of very popular internet forum mindset – specifically, confusing the right to free speech with the right to act like a toolbag.

It’s trolling.

I’m serious – what else can you call it when a bunch of non-Muslims who live comfortable Western lives, and whose freedom of speech is not threatened in any way, deliberately and enthusiastically engage in an activity that they know will be offensive to others? Offensive to people who have never personally done anything to offend them?

It’s trolling of the highest order; textbook in execution, industrial in scale, and dripping with extra lashings of the misguided self-righteousness that only the greatest breed of troll – the unwitting – can summon.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. But let’s examine it in more detail.

Draw Muhammed Day has its roots in the Jyllands-Posten controversy of September 2005, during which the Danish newspaper of the same name printed twelve images of the prophet Muhammad. Some of these were deliberately offensive, depicting Muhammad as a terrorist and oppressor of women, and some were completely irrelevant. Needless to say a lot of Muslims found this offensive – as the newspaper knew and intended that they would – and a lot of protests followed. Some of these protests were completely outrageous, violent and disproportionate, which made it even easier for the “supporters of free speech” to convince themselves that they were doing the right thing and Muslims just “couldn’t take a joke”.

Then nothing much happened for a while, until April this year when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone received death threats through the Internet after they aired an episode depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. Complaints were submitted to Comedy Central and they pulled the episode from air.

Bad idea, Comedy Central. You upset the Internet.

Cartoonist Molly Norris created this cartoon espousing a “Draw Mohammad Day” as a joke and it caught on like wildfire, specifically across social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube. Norris was horrified the overtly racist overtones the “event” was quickly taking and immediately distanced herself from it, even going so far as to publicly condemn it, but it was too late. The Internet was angry, and there’s nobody who can take up a self-righteous cause and convince themselves that they’re making a difference like an anonymous man behind a computer screen.

So thousands and thousands of drawings began to flood in on May 20, the official “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day”. Some of them trying to be respectful. Some of them trying to be funny. Many, many of them trying and succeeding to be horrifically racist.

All of them offensive.

Doing something that you know will deliberately offend somebody else deeply proves nothing about free speech. If I went up to a man on the street and explained in great detail about how much of a syphilitic whore his wife was, I should expect that he should get angry about it. If I stroll through a funeral parlour during a moving service, farting wildly and shouting about how the deceased enjoyed carnal relations with donkeys, I should expect that those people at the service would get angry about it. And if I tried to say, as they advanced upon me with murderous rage, that I was just exercising my right to free speech and they should all get over it, I highly doubt that would carry any weight at all. They would be finding small pieces of my body clogging nearby drains.

Yet apparently, knowing that Muslims believe visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad to be deeply blasphemous and then doing it anyway, it is okay to act surprised and say “Woah Muslims, get over it, free speech lol”.

Having the right to free speech also comes with the responsibility of knowing when to exercise it meaningfully and respectfully. Yes, I have the right to put pen to paper and draw the prophet Muhammad. But I have the responsibility to realise the effect my actions will have on others who share this society with me, and I choose not to exercise that right. I’m willing to put money down, that nobody who took part in Draw Muhammad Day has a single Muslim friend in real life. It’s easy to deliberately upset people on the Internet, but it’s not so easy to have to look your friend in the eye the next time you meet, knowing that you’ve deeply offended them and their beliefs.

The only thing that Draw Muhammad Day has conclusively proved is that some people don’t deserve the right to free speech. And that it’s easy to drape yourself in moral righteousness and confrontational attitudes from behind the safety of a computer screen. I should know.

I’m not trying to upset anybody who took part in or supported Draw Muhammad Day. I’m just exercising my right to respectful and well-meaning free speech.

Oh, and before anybody jumps in with the well-worn line about “But we show pictures of Jesus all the time and Christians don’t get angry!”, stop for a moment and consider that it’s not actually blasphemous to depict Jesus under the tenets of the Christian religion. In fact it’s encouraged.

That said, I’d be interested to see how any Christians who took part in Draw Muhammad Day would react, if there was a “Draw Jesus Fucking A Dog” day. Free speech indeed.

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.

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.

You see, while we were waiting for the seller, I took the opportunity to converse with and get to know the manager and staff at the Newcastle Games Workshop store. We chatted about this and that, about how their store was doing, what it was like to work at my store up at Castle Towers. We got along. When they asked me what brought me down this way, I gleefully exclaimed – over the moon as I was – about how I was finally going to pick up these Ork books that had eluded me all these years, and that I had arranged to use their store as a meeting point with my eBay seller.

It turns out this was a huge mistake. Because you see, the first thing that the Newcastle manager did upon seeing my manager at last week’s manager’s conference, was to step over and inform him that one of his staff – he even remembered my name for the occasion – had used his store as a meeting point to purchase goods over eBay.

Apparently the fact that the item in question was an out of print supplement from eighteen years ago and that eBay is the only place it can be found was irrelevant: I, a Games Workshop staff member, had purchased Games Workshop goods from eBay and was publicly announcing it at a Games Workshop store.

The Newcastle manager also went on to add that I had “acted like a smartass” by discussing the Ten Commandments of Customer Service with him and his staff. Specifically, when I was first approached by him, I congratulated him on completing the First Commandment (“Acknowledge and approach everyone who enters the Hobby Centre”) and introduced myself as a fellow employee. Now I don’t know if Newcastle has some fucked-up personal definition of “smartass” but where I come from, that’s called breaking the fucking ice. Finding common ground. Starting a conversation.

At the time he laughed and we got along fine, as did the other staff member whom I had roughly the same conversation with. I was not to know that the hypnotic conditioning in his brain had kicked into overdrive, and that my name, rank and serial number were being filed away to be reported later.

After spending maybe ten or fifteen minutes in store, I realised the seller was late and decided to go stand outside to look for him. I made my excuses and left; not knowing that when this whole story would be reported to my manager, the ending would be completely fucking rewritten to the Newcastle manager asking me to leave the store.

I had no idea of any of this at the time; in fact I had no idea up until today, over two weeks later when Jess and I went into my store to do some painting. My manager had asked me to come in so he could speak to me personally before he drew up the roster for the week. I jokingly asked when I arrived if I was being fired. He looked at me sadly and said “Yes”.

After having the whole ridiculous farce of a situation (complete with bonus alternate ending courtesy of the Newcastle manager) explained to me, he went on further to add that in any case he didn’t think I was a very good “fit” with Games Workshop – primarily, because I was not loud and energetic enough. You see it’s very important, at Games Workshop, that you make the hobby fun and exciting – which according to the company policy, means shouting all the time, something I struggle with. And Games Workshop take their shouting their “fit” very seriously; through some contacts, I’ve actually had the chance to read the Little Red Book, which is the top-secret management handbook written by the CEO of Games Workshop himself, Tom Kirby.

At the time of my hiring, I mentioned to my manager that I possessed this illicit knowledge. Recalling this fact, he used it to illustrate why I was being fired.

You see that top left corner? That, he explained, was where I was. Talented, yes, but not a good fit. “You’ve read the book, Tim,” he said, “You know what Games Workshop policy is about this.” Oh yes, I do.

When it comes right down to it, I still don’t know why I was fired. I can see why I might have been told it wasn’t working out a few months from now and perhaps asked gently to leave, or just quietly given less and less shifts until I quit of my own accord. But fired?

If enjoying the Games Workshop universe enough to collect all their sourcebooks is a crime, if trying to find common ground with other Games Workshop staff through entirely reasonable conversation is a crime, if being loyal veteran of fourteen goddamn years is a crime, then lock me the fuck up, you guys. Because I will re-offend.

–

UPDATE: Holy shit that’s a lot of comments. If you’re reading this, could you please leave me a comment showing me where this is being linked from? I’m dying to know. Thanks!

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.

We have organised to meet up with Sarah, Saturday’s bride-to-be, at her house. She is going to hang out with Jess and keep her company while I go into work three hours early (to what is only a three hour shift in the first place) to organise my cash-register login details and learn how to use the thing to actually sell products to customers. I am led to believe this is an important part of retail work. I am told this will only take about half an hour.

Thanks to Target, we are able to pick up pants quickly and easily, and then pick up Sarah. We are late and stressed, but that’s okay. A quick tour of her house follows and then we are off to the shopping centre in which I work. I leave the two lovely ladies in the food court and saunter off to work, arriving on time and expecting to jump straight in to training and learning.

Instead, I find that the assistant manager who organised the whole thing is off sick. The actual manager is on the phone, just back from holidays, and continues to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes while I kill time in the store. When I am actually able to speak to him, he professes confusion and says he is trying to organise my login details now, but it needs to be done synchronously with an IT Guy in head office and that said IT Guy may not be free to do it for up to an hour.

Enraged, I ask what “it” actually involves. It turns out I am just going to have to speak to the Guy to provide a password for my cash-register logon. I say that this is crazy: if I just need to talk to the Guy on the phone, he can call me on my mobile anytime, and exit the store saying that I will be back when my shift starts. By this time it has been forty-five minutes and absolutely nothing has been done, though I have taken a peek at my upcoming hours for October – which were promised to be “pretty intense” due to the school holidays, only to discover that October sees me working a whole six extra hours, in total.

Sarah needs to get back to her house, so we take her home. Once we get there, I receive a frantic call saying that I need to be back in the store because the policy is that I need to speak to the IT Guy on the store phone, while being physically located in the store. Jess and I swear violently and leave Sarah’s house to go back to the shopping centre. On the way back, I flip through the Myer gift registry for the Saturday wedding (something else we left until the last minute). Once we get to the centre, I toss the registry on the dashboard in the car and forget about it. This is important.

I head into work, still with over half an hour until my shift is to start, and begin to finally learn the things I need to learn. Jess waits around in the store for a while, and then decides to go down to Myer and grab some gifts for the wedding from the gift registry. The layout of the shopping centre means that Myer is about a ten minute walk away. She makes this journey only to realise that I have left the gift registry in the car, and hikes back again to accurately inform me that I am a cocksucker and she is going to go read in the car, and get gifts later.

When she gets to the car, the growing heat of the day has made it fairly uncomfortable to be in, even in the covered carpark. She reads for a while and then decides to use her laptop, which uses its blast-furnace like heat output to turn the inside of the car into a tiny sauna. Sweating in rage, she flees the car and decides to head down to Myer again. When she finally gets there, she discovers that Myer’s catalogue is mind-fuckingly insane and the products on the gift registry either do not exist, are wildly more expensive than listed, or are available, but only in damaged boxes.

Meanwhile, at work, I have actually sneezed so hard I split my lip open along some sort of geostructural fault line. It bleeds profusely and continues to bleed for about two hours, or almost all the remainder of my shift. Combined with my running nose, I am being slowly driven insane. My shift ends and I flee the premises towards Myer. It is 8:30 PM and the shopping centre is closing up. I trundle towards Jess at top speed.

We meet up and she regales me with tales of shittiness, while I continue to apologise profusely for leaving the gift registry in the car. We realise we are both hungry, and decide to get some corn-in-a-cup (it’s delicious, and nutritious!) from the nearby corn store, only to be informed that the corn store is out of corn – in fact the last corn-in-a-cup was just sold to the customer before us. We turn to the bubble tea place a few metres away, and desperately ask to order bubble tea. Unfortunately, they are out of pearls and in fact, they only just sold their last bubble tea.

By this point every second word coming out of our mouths is a furious expletive. We rage over to the food court and get in line at KFC for some “Mashies”, because we both want to try them. Unfortunately it appears that KFC was staffed exclusively by vacuous morons that night, as we were left in line for ten minutes and completely, blatantly ignored by no less than four counter staff before being served. In fact we were ignored to the point that the lady who queued up behind us was pulled out of the queue up to the front counter and served ahead of us.

In keeping with the pattern established today, the woman orders Mashies. In fact she wants a large one. And it just so happens that there was only enough left in the warmer to fill a large box. Jess ragequits the queue. I stand there out of spite, forcing them to serve me and make up an entire fresh batch for me. This takes another ten minutes.

We finally get our Mashies and head back to the car. They’re not even very good. In fact they sort of taste funny, but I am fucking ravenous as I have not eaten since 2:00 PM and scarf down all of them. On the way home, we remember that we need to get petrol, and pull into a service station.

Jess goes to fill up the car, only to realise the pump has malfunctioned and backfired, soaking the side of the car, the ground and her skirt with petrol. A lot of petrol. Things just keep getting better. I go inside to pay, while she heads off to the service station toilet to try and dilute the petrol with water and wash as much of it off as possible. I pay and head back out to the car, only to receive a surprise phonecall from Jess: “You know how this is the worst day ever,” she says. “Well, I’m locked in the fucking toilet.”

Locked in the fucking toilet.

I run inside to the counter and explain the situation to the clerk, who throws me a key and says something about “they’ve been having trouble with that door”. Taking the key, I run over to the toilet and try to open it. The key doesn’t fit in the lock as it has been damaged. The handle won’t turn, and the door barely gives. Jess and I have to shout to hear each other as trucks are barreling by on the road ten metres away. Eventually we are able to communicate that there is no fucking way to unlock this door, and I just begin repeatedly yanking at it, trying to force it open. Empowered perhaps by adrenaline, or a dreadful resentment at the universe, I wrench the door open, mangling the lock beyond repair and freeing Jess.

Taking the key back inside, I try and explain what happened to the clerk again, who only shrugs and says “Yeah, that door is pretty broken”, explaining that they reported it to head office weeks and weeks ago but nothing has been done about it. This does not exactly placate us but there isn’t really anything we can do, so we storm out, to finally go home.

Once we get home, we finally sit down and relax for a few hours, thinking that the day is finally over. But the fates have one last surprise in store for us: when I go to return Jess’s mum’s bank keycard to her, I can’t find it. Anywhere. We search the room, the car, the driveway, the garage. It is nowhere to be found. Up until now were starting to come to terms with the day, as all the shitty things that had happened had only affected us. But now, on top of all this, we had lost the keycard.

We pile into the car and drive out to the service station, thinking it must, surely, have come out of my pocket during my frenzied wrenching of the toilet door to free Jess. The clerk we talked to before has gone home and the new guy doesn’t know of any cards that have been handed in, and we can’t find it anywhere searching around the grounds of the station.

Desolate, and truly fucking infuriated, we return home, only to find the keycard lying on the floor under a pile of clothes.

Worst.

“Wow! That’s incredible! It looks like something straight off a, uh. Hrm.”

“You were going to say desktop, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Goddammit.”

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.

1. Picked up envelopes addressed to me, fresh out of the mailbox, and gleefully exclaimed “Oooh! Email!”
2. Mused aloud on the possibility of “bookmarking” delightful staff at restaurants so that we could come back to the in the future.
3. 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.

If you’re having trouble recognising me, I am the attractive ponytailed Adonis sitting on the right hand side. I think we can all agree I have a bright future in game reviews, if not actual successful game play, or any manner of timing and co-ordination.

For those who don’t know, I used to do a (semi) regular webcomic by the name of Refried. I was looking back through the archives last night, and aside from the odd cringe or two, it really made me want to pick up the webcomic gig again. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this; it’s been almost two years since I stopped updating Refried and so I’ve had quite a reasonable amount of time to consider my position. So much time in fact, that I apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove my car off the webcomics highway into the blissful ditch of real life.

This of course begs the question of what I should do to get back on the horse, if you’ll forgive my wild switching of metaphors. As far as I can tell, I have several options.

1. Refried, Redux: Do what you know, as they say. The only problem I have with this is that I’m not really too happy with the Refried formula. When you boil it down, it is basically just another video game comic with a slight autobiographical bent, and that saddens me a little. There are enough shitty video game comics out there, and even though I wouldn’t exactly call what I did shitty, it’s still basically an oversaturated market that comes replete with its own ultra-dense fanbase and bullshit viewer expectations. On the other hand, I fucking love video games. So maybe I should just accept that.
2. Apathetic Randomness: I spent far too long slaving over every line, every colour, every shade on the Refried comics. I was driven to do this because I am a perfectionist idiot, and I understand that. It’s not too bad to be this way, but when you’re on the internet you can afford to be less picky. There are dozens of comics out there with less complex art, or no art at all, who are ten times as successful as I ever was. I could probably pretty easily push out a shittier comic at least once a week with no trouble at all. The only downside of this is, of course, that I would hate myself a little. But again – maybe I should just accept that.
3. Warhammer 40K: I know the Games Workshop universes back-to-fucking-front. You can’t play these games as long as I have, particularly Warhammer 40,000, and not have absorbed outrageous amounts of fluff and meta-game knowledge. And when you combine this into a comic form, which I have tentatively tried in the past in the form of guest comics, I think I have a recipe for myself to be fairly (or even very) successful. There is one main problem with this: it’s not my intellectual property. Games Workshop protects its IP with the viciousness of a cornered wolverine and I would never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to publish any comics I did featuring Games Workshop concepts, nor sell merchandise or profit from their IP. There are ways I could get around this: Jess has suggested a comic set in the universe of “WarAxe 300,000″, which would work nicely. And sure, I’d probably feel a bit creatively unfulfilled since I’d be basically playing in somebody else’s sandbox, but it’s a sandbox I’ve known and loved for a very long time. So maybe I should just accept that.
4. Original Work: For probably about a year on and off I’ve been developing a concept in my head, which I have shared with some of you. It’s called Spitfires and Six-Shooters, and you can find some concept sketches of it my sketchbook if you dig back far enough. It’s a story I’d love to tell, and I think it would make an excellent comic if I ever went through with it. Out of all the options I think this is the one I’d prefer to tackle, but it’s also the hardest by a long shot. There’s so much work to do before I could even start storyboarding, and yet I know that the sweetest comicky fruit is growing at the finish line. So maybe I should just accept that, too.

Yet even a list like this is another way of putting off that first tentative step. And by creating this list, I’m overlooking the possibility that I could easily do multiple of these things at once, if I could just get over my outrageous perfectionism. A while back Nick threw up a link to The Cult of Done Manifesto, which really struck a chord with me (so much so that I made this wallpaper for myself). It’s a little bit pretentious, and I think I have a ways to go before I can buy into it fully, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

On today’s episode of Aluminium Chef, you will learn the following things:

1) Putting a Cadbury Creme Egg in the microwave to make it all “nice and melty” to go over your ice cream will result in a loud, ear-piercing shriek as the gooey creme filling bursts forth, geyser like, from the chocolate shell and sprays all over the inside of the microwave.

2) The gooey creme filling will be superheated to a temperature comparable to that of molten lava as it exits the chocolate shell. Touching the gooey creme lava will cause first degree burns to your fingers.

3) As the filling that decorates the inside of your microwave slowly cools, you will discover that it is almost impossible to clean off. You will spend at least fifteen minutes furiously scrubbing as you hold your hand in a glass of cold water, incredulous with pain and rage, alternating under your breath between vicious swearing and confused denial.

4) Thoroughly cautious, you will gently touch the now-empty but surprisingly intact chocolate shell of the Creme Egg, only to find that is in fact stone fucking cold.