11 Predictions for 2010

Holy freaking meatballs, it's another year. I swear it only turned 2009 a few weeks back. Where did that year go? Where did any year go? Oh my god my birthday is in a few weeks and I'll be...

Anyway, hello. Welcome back. Did you have a good Christmas? Get lots of nice presents? Hope you didn't get a crappy jumper. That would suck. Hey, you know what would be fun? Seeing as how this is a new year and everything, let's have some predictions.

I hereby present my Top 11 Predictions For 2010

1. Somehow Labour will find a way to remain in power. Those guys are literally like vampires. They just will not die while sucking everything you have in the meantime. I think the only way to remove Gordon Brown and is coven from this earth is to go at him with a garlic laced spike.
2. Apple will help Sony in their battle against Microsoft. Lets face it, the video games and general recreational electronics market at the moment is massive. Apple can focus all they want on iPods and iPhones and iDontcares, but you know they want to overtake Microsoft as the number one computer company out there. Along the same lines, Sony will want their PlayStaion brand to beat out the Xbox one. What with a common enemy, those two have to have some middle ground.
3. Terry Wogan and Bruce Forsyth will fight to the death for the title of 'Britain's Grandad'. In one corner you have the softly spoken tubby fellow who will give you a Worther's Original, while in the other you have the cheeky wiry one who will tell you what your young mind conceives are a rude joke. Who will come out on top?
4. Formula One will allow drivers to listen to BBC Radio 2 while racing to give Schumacher a middle aged pastime.
5. Brett Favre will retire, un-retire, retire and then sign to pitch for the NY Yankees because his career just isn't complete without a World Series ring.
6. On another NFL theme, Peyton Manning will continue his transition into the role of 'comedic straight man.' Honestly, that guy can say the most serious sentence in the world and it's funny. Although that might just be his nose. Related – Owen Wilson will sue Peyton Manning over copyright infringement on comedic noses.
7. England will scrape through the group stages of the World Cup, win in the second round and then just as we as a country get some self belief, get knocked out on penalties in the quarter finals.
8. I'll get turned down for a US Green Card for the third straight year. All I want is to be able to stay in the States for more than 6 months at a time. Is that so much to ask?
9. Wayne Rooney, in the process of trying to teach his baby son new words, will have his vocabulary increase exponentially.
10. I will finally give in and fly all the way to Canada just to see a Colin Mochrie stand up gig. Related - Colin Mochrie will take out a restraining order against me.
11. Finally, I'm willing to bet nothing changes. Taxes will be too high, pay too low, we will all be scared about the nasty man in the shadows who wants to kill us to death and we will hide away from all this in a nice, warm cosy materialistic home pouring controlled poison down our necks. Because that is human nature.

Things I Do To Keep Myself Sane

When people ask me what it's like working from home, I tell them that it is better than being thrown groin first into an oily pit of supermodels. I don't have a boss looking over my shoulder, I don't have to get up at a set time so long as I stick 10 hours a day in and I don't have to commute anywhere further than down the hall and downstairs.

In actuality, it's pretty dull. I don't have co-workers to chat to. I don't have a boss to hate on. I just sit at my desk with a justin.tv stream going all day and mainly churn out press releases and short web content articles that don't allow for dick jokes. When you also factor in that I can often go for a few days without actually leaving the house, you get a pretty solid picture of my life. I call it the 'struggling writer' lifestyle, where as many others call it the 'sad sack' one.

To combat this, I've build up a number of protocols to keep my from bouncing off the walls in sheer madness. The 3 I use most are -

1) Facebook

I hate Facebook with all my soul. I hate the fact that it makes me feel self conscious that I only have 200 friends. The fact that I actually know all 200 of the people and could easily invite them out for a beer is neither here nor there. I also only have 98 photos. I just don't take a digital camera with me on nights out and cannot be bothered to edit, label and tag entire reams of photos.

However, I find myself increasingly using it to talk to people. Back in the day, everyone used to use MSN Messenger. Today, I have about 9 people who are still old school and are logged on at times. Therefore, I am left with little option but to log on to Facebook if I want human interaction. I hate it, it makes it look like I enjoy Facebook. Also, it makes it look like I do nothing all day as I'm always on Facebook.

2) Fish

I bought an aquarium. I will admit, I am a little bit of a fan of various animals and figured that buying an aquarium would give me something to do. Where as in an office, people often go outside and smoke or make rounds of tea to take a break, I have no such luck. I can smoke at my desk and I don't like tea. Obviously, the logical thing to do to get me away from my desk for 10 minutes at a time was to buy an aquarium to tend to.

I regret nothing. Sure, it costs £150 odd to set up a decent tank and put fish in it, but it is tremendous fun. One of my fish is even named after Nat Coombs, the guy who hosts the NFL On Five coverage after a few emails got read out on air. I recommend fish keeping to everyone and will probably write an idiots guide to fish keeping on Thursday.

3) Taking The Laptop To The Pub

I admit that this is probably cheating a bit, but it works. Although a vast majority of my time is spent doing jobs for other people, I do try to make sure I have at least a day a week where I don't have to do any paid work so I can work on my own stuff. Along with churning out some gibbering rubbish here thrice a week, I write a fair old bit of stuff that doesn't see the light of day straight away. I've got one book manuscript that is doing the rounds until someones decides to recognise my genius and publish it, I'm a solid start into another and I'm also working on a charity book.

For all of these things, I don't need the Internet, email and such. Nor does it matter if I'm under the influence while writing them, as I edit my work to a stupid degree at times. So I pack up my laptop and head off to the pub.
Speaking of which, it is beer o'clock. See ya'll later!

My Top 10 Favourite Websites

Right then children, after yesterdays little sojourn into the serious, let's have some fun. This will be a bit like one of those times at school when teacher announced that you would be watching a video instead of doing actual work. God, I loved those days. And it was usually in either Geography or History as well, two of the most god awful boring subjects there are. No offence intended to Historians or Geographers. Deep down I'm sure you're cool.

Today, we are going to have fun in the form of links. Links to some of my favourite websites mainly, the sort of stuff that makes up my RSS bar. I know it's a bit of a cop out, but its fun and easy. It also means that the stack of press releases building up for me to finish off turning into articles won't crush me like a little bug.

Shall we get started? I think I'll do these in a little top 10 list counting down my favourite sites.

10 – Prey Tell

I can't make out if Prey Tell is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) or real. If it is real, it's amazing. It it is an ARG, it was one of the most captivating out there. You can feel the tension, the need and desperation. You easily want to read on and the whole website is a masterpiece. Check out The Skinny to find out the background, and read it through from the beginning. Masterful.

9 – Ctrl Alt Del (aka Cad-Comic)

Tim Buckley's successful tellings of two gamer best friends inter sliced with one off strips satirising the video games industry. I will admit, I'm a bit of a huge gamer and so love this strip. The characters are well defined and it is quite nice seeing the story telling evolve from the absurd to dramatic. There is also a nice animated series that accompanies the strip should you feel like spending a few hard earned bucks extra.

8 – The Listverse

I love The Listverse. I think I like accumulating knowledge and although you can't exactly take everything you read on the internet as gospel, The Lisverse is always pretty accurate. There you will find lists detailing everything from the wonderful, unbelievable, cute and funny to the disturbing, disgusting and downright macabre. Well worth a good old fashioned SWF browse.

7 – The BBC

Ahh, the good old Beeb. I know that this site is probably visited by most people at least 7 thousand times a day, but the fact it is regularly my most visited website I thought warranted a spot on the list. News, articles sports and the ever wonderful BBC iPlayer. What more can you ask for?

6 – Kissing Suzy Kolber

Now, one of my pet hates in writing is people who just swear for swearings sake and call it humour. It isn't big, it isn't clever and it really isn't funny. That is, unless you write for KSK. Between the merry gang of writers, spearheaded by Big Daddy Drew, their foul mouthed ranting, rambling and genius analysis of the NFL makes for one of the most entertaining websites out there. Although you do need to be an NFL fan to appreciate most of the humour, and being keyed up on the internal site memes doesn't exactly hurt either, I have learnt so many new swear words from that site it is unreal.

5 – Shutdown Corner

Lets get the two NFL sites out the way back to back, eh? Shutdown Corner is actually the NFL blog run by Yahoo! over at their American website. Usually, the inbuilt anti-establishment part of me says that as it is controlled by a major corporation, it will suck. Actually, all of the Yahoo! Sports Blogs are pretty amazing. They have them for basketball, ice hockey, tennis, golf, baseball and a few others. Well worth checking out, even though they are pretty high on the American-isms.

4 – Questionable Content

This is without a doubt my most favouritist webcomic ever. There are currently over 1,500 strips and watching the evolution from the first to the latest in terms of character development, artwork improvement, cast depth and storytelling is a joy to behold. Oh yeah, it is also funny as hell too. Much like CAD, QC was first conceived as a vehicle to poke fun at a specific niche culture. For QC, that was the indie music scene. However, in the 1,500 strips which followed it has evolved into something well beyond.

3 – Justin.tv

I probably shouldn't admit that I use Justin.tv seeing as it is both pretty much illegal and a bit hypocritical of me as I work in a royalty based industry, but still. I love it. My big problem is I spend about 12 hours a day in my office at home. I don't really have any co-workers or anything. So I find it quite nice to just stick on a JTV stream in the background and listen. I can pop up on the chat if I'm having a break and natter on. Oh, it's all jolly good.

On an unrelated note, I do other stuff while I'm working in order to keep me a bit sane. One of the things I do is play poker. I admitted this in front of a potential client once. Didn't get that contract...

2 – Modern Drunkard Magazine

I love this site. Although it varies immensely on how often it is updated – sometimes regularly every 6 weeks and sometimes 9 months apart – all of the content is golden. Modern Drunkard Magazine is a publication that fully supports the finer aspects in life of being a lush. If you picture a 1950's advertising guy wearing a snappy suite and a fedora while drinking martinis, that sums up this website. It is downright drunk fun. I guarantee after a browse you will fancy a wander down to your local pub. Or a quick flight to Vegas. Depends how the night turns out.

1 – The Daily Mash

Imagine The Onion but aimed at a UK based audience. That sums this site up. It shamelessly mocks the news and just needs to be read to be believed. My two favourite headlines this year have been 'Everyone Dead By Tea Time' (also the title of the Mash's new book) and 'Survivors Of Pork Flu To Enjoy Nice Summer'.

That is a nice summation of where I spend my internet time. Have a browse, have a click and I hope I've introduced you to something new. See you Sunday!