wow, look at that – an entry…

So anyway. Bleugh. Bleuuuuuuuuuugh! 2012 is the year of me having stupid teeth and gums. I’ve been having problems all year. At the minute I’ve got a deep-set abscess on one of the molars on the bottom right. The dentist put me on amoxicillin for a week and it did nothing. My next appointment’s in a week’s time, so I’ve got to put up with feeling like I’ve got a marble between my cheek and gum until then. Sometimes it’s nothing more than annoying, but other times – often after I’ve eaten, such as today with enchiladas and the other week with fajitas – the pressure builds and builds and it feels like my whole cheek has swelled up and gone rock hard.

But enough about that. Lately my girl’s been in that bored frame of mind, where you want something to do but you don’t want to do anything, so you just end up wandering back and forth and browsing the same websites over and over and otherwise doing bugger all. I was okay playing Fallout: New Vegas, hunting down the shit who shot me in the head, buried me and waltzed off with the package I was supposed to deliver. But now that’s got old, and I find myself sinking into the same bored frame of mind that my girl’s been unable to get out of.

Owing to both the boredom and the abscess I find myself here, on OD, writing an entry. Christ… has it really come to this?

Well it’s not all bad. I have vodka and Aretha Franklin – and a lot of Paul Weller cropping up considering this playlist is my whole library on shuffle. Not that that’s a bad thing. Though I do seem to be skipping a lot of his tracks and stopping on disco classics. Stacy Lattisaw now – Jump to the Beat. Tune.

I’m not cool enough to actually say that and not sound like I’m taking the piss. ‘Tune’. I guess you figured that out for yourself if you’re aware of Stacy Lattisaw – Jump to the Beat. It doesn’t exactly scream ‘this is where it’s at, bitches’.

Meh. I’m glad. That’d be uncouth. In its own way it is an astoundingly cool song. In its own way, in its own little world with only me in it.

Skip. Skip. Skip. Freda Payne – Band of Gold. Hells yes.

Anyway, my girl and I run this pokémon roleplaying guild on gaia. It’s been going for over a year and has never really got above six or seven active members, including my girl and myself. We host an event every Friday night, and the first Friday of every month that event is a special Team Rocket one, where all the members club together to try to foil an evil scheme.

Well, it was fun for a long time, and then it got a bit boring when one of our more active members disappeared, and then it picked up a little for a month or so. At the minute we’re in the second slump, and it’s been going on for about two months now, at a guess. I got a stern PM from one of the crew (low-level admin) saying I should buck my ideas up and get back to posting and running the guild better. So, I set up a couple of events, and nothing happened. Then the same crew member posted, and it felt like a tumbleweed blowing across the scene, with only me there to see it.

I’m pretty much done with it. Waiting for the straw that’ll break the camel’s back or – preferably – an influx of members to load the straw into the back of a van. What is this, after all? The stupid ages?

We got a new member yesterday who seems like he’s enthusiastic to post and have some fun, and he’s said he wants to meet up with my character. So, with any luck he’s the first of the metaphoric-van-driving new members.

Anyway, there’s this other member, who’s been with us from pretty much the start. He’s a dick. A massive dick. You’re happily having a conversation and then bam he just drops in and slaps you in the face. He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t realise he’s such a massive dick. But that just makes it worse.

He godmods. You know what roleplaying is, right? You write as a character (though third person, preferably) and other people write as other characters, and together you make a story. Well, I lead the story with my Team Rocket members (during events), and the other members post as their characters trying to foil me. So, say for example one of the events involves me trying to get a package from A to B. This guy, his character’s some arrogant, self-important git. Sixteen years old. My character’s a hardened criminal who’ll kill in order to complete his mission. In his mid-late twenties. This massive dick of a member will write a post in which his character just walks up to mine and pickpockets the item away. Then in the same post he’ll write that he ran away and could never be caught. It’s like he’s got this “I have to be the winner” attitude about him. All. The. Fucking. Time. So I had to start writing in stuff like “And it was chained to his wrist so it couldn’t be pickpocketed away”, to try to second-guess what cheat this massive dick would try to pull.

I think it reached a point where he started taking it personally. He started saying things out of character, like “even if I have to stay at this all weekend I will beat you”. And coming from him, it never seems lighthearted. Since he so obviously hates to lose, it feels like he’s writing it in anger – he gets furious that I out-write him and cut off all his pathetic attempts to shortcut to a win and resorts to telling me that he will defeat me. Like I’m the massive dick.

He doesn’t seem to understand that if his 16-year-old character (somehow) beats up and restrains my master criminal 26-year-old character, my character isn’t going to be around to do bad stuff for much longer. In fact, since there are only like eight or something Team Rocket members, if he got his way in four events, there’d be no body left to do anything bad in the fifth event. And yet I suspect he’d still turn up for one and expect to win again.

I actually hate him. Seriously. He doesn’t care about anyone else’s enjoyment. Sometimes it seems he doesn’t even care about his own enjoyment–he just needs to win. He will trample over a row of babies, blow up a highschool, shoot the guys on the brink of a cure for cancer and let the innocent, beautiful lead female character die in order to win, and then he’ll play his character like ‘I don’t care about winning, I just beat the bad guys because they’re bad’.

It’s like, ‘fuck you! If you don’t care about winning, fuck off and let someone else win for a change! If you don’t care about beating the people I’m in character as, don’t threaten me!’

Whatever. If memory serves I try to curb my use of profanity while writing on here, but I can’t be bothered. The head I used to use while writing on here has fallen by the wayside, it’s been so long since I properly used it.

The disco searching continues, and my girl’s commented on it. Sort of. She said ‘you’re very picky tonight’, which isn’t exactly commenting on the disco searching, but you know what I mean, I’m sure.

Boring bit for a lot of you: football (soccer). The English Premier League comes to an end this coming Sunday, and my team (Man City) only have to match Man United’s result in order to be crowned champions for the first time in my lifetime.

We’re playing QPR, who need to win if they’re to have any hope of avoiding relegation, so they will be fighting just as hard as we will for all three points. A draw probably won’t be good enough for either of us.Unless United draw or lose against Sunderland, who’re mid-table and have practically nothing to play for. (That’s me trying to tempt fate and lure Sunderland into putting on an amazing performance.)

I’ve been a City fan all my life, following them all the way down to the third tier of English football and back up again. Only meaningful trophy we’ve won in all those twenty-seven (nearly) years is the FA Cup, which we won last year. I probably wrote an entry back then, going on about how big a deal it was and how happy I was.

Every time I think about the upcoming game I get nervous. It wouldn’t be too terrible if we missed out, mostly because City are well-known for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory–for standing on a rake, getting hit in the face and shooting themselves in the foot, much to everyone else’s enjoyment. Having lived with that all my life, I’ll be more surprised if we win than if we lose. Plus, a few weeks back we were eight points behind United and I said the words “it’s over now, the title’s United’s”. Coming from that to being in pole position is pretty good, even if we don’t get anything at the end of the season. However, while I and most City fans are gracious in victory, and wouldn’t gloat too hard at United – our bitterest rivals – if we won, United fans aren’t nearly as nice. Most real United fans are arrogant pricks who don’t know the value of success because they’re used to it every fucking season. They generally don’t applaud others’ victories, because in most cases they were in the running and feel they should’ve been the ones to walk away with the top prize. And so, if they do snatch the title, they’ll relentlessly bang on about how we have to keep waiting for a Premiership title, how we’re just noisy neighbours who’ve bought their way to the top (as if they haven’t), and how we’ll never be as big a club as they are.

To be honest, I’m a little sad that we’re where we are because of foreign investors. I’m a little sad that we’re now one of the top teams in the country. Even though prick United fans teased us and mocked us for being shitty in the past, we were proud of our club. We were proud to be there, trying our best, and sometimes pulling off remarkable results – like when we were 3-0 and a man down against Tottenham in one of the cup competitions and went on to win 3-4. Those occasions were really amazing. We would achieve something against all the odds, and it felt great. These days the other side are always the underdogs, but we haven’t been accepted as a “big club” yet. We seem to be treated with all the bad points of a small club and all the bad points of a big club, but none of the good points of either. We’re mocked because we haven’t won anything, but we’re sneered at because we’ve pulled ourselves out of the squalor.

Whatever happens, I’ll be proud of my team. Whatever happens, United fans will put us down. Either way I’ll still wear my shirt, and either way I’ll probably get heckled for it by strangers in passing cars. Doesn’t stop me being nervous as hell about it, though.

Moving on. Last time I posted OD was having problems (no, surely not?), so I don’t think it showed in anyone’s bookmarks. Either that or y’all just couldn’t be bothered to note, which is preposterous. Regardless, moving on from Synth #33, which is just a hobby thing that’ll not go much further than it’s already gone anyway, I’m back onto The Hy’Thormian Script. God knows which of you have already read it, which of you have said you’ll read it and then have found yourself short of time/enthusiasm, which of you haven’t heard me mention it before and which of you fit into any all or none of the aforementioned categories. Doesn’t really matter, in any case. Point is, it might be ready to be sent off to agencies, but I’m nervous, ala Marty McFly; the agencies might not like it, and I don’t know if I can take that kind of rejection. I know, I’m definitely going to get rejections. It’s practically a mathematical certainty. But, y’know, I’d rather know that it’s good, from hearing other people’s feedback on it, before I go putting my head on an agency’s block with it. So, with that in mind I’ve asked my friend Fuller to read it. He read book one (now book five), back when I was in college, and he raved about it. So I’m hoping he’ll actually read this one, and I’m hoping he’ll have things to say. I’ve also asked my older sister if she’ll ask her fiance’s mum to read it (since she’s a wannabe writer too), and I’ve asked Hannah, who read books one and two (now five and six) while we were at uni.

Stupid question, but are there any other takers? If you’ve got an e-reader you can almost certainly whack it on there. Give a few pages a glance, and who knows, it might get your attention. Then if you read the whole thing, you just have to drop me a line saying if you thought it was any good, and if you’re in a generous mood, you might even tell me what you liked/didn’t like about it.

Well, that’s all, I think. I’ve got to roleplay kicking the butt of previously mentioned massive dick, and no doubt battle him again getting my own butt kicked, so that he can gloat, move on to the next grunt and spit out the exact same line he uses every time: “You can’t beat me. Be smart and just give up. I don’t want to have to hurt your pokémon.”

Chore…