Author Archive for Colm

Back in action

Published
by
Colm
on 9 October, 2008
in Films & TV and Games
. 6 Comments

My friends, I did something last night that I haven’t done in ages. Yes, that is correct: I am talking about schooling noobs.

Now, as anyone will tell you, full-on schoolination can only take place in a deathmatch. I mean, that’s understood. Team games are like, you can hand out leaflets to noobs for correspondence courses or whatever, but if you’re going to really give the personal touch and school the motherfucker, it has to be a free for all.

I haven’t played a proper deathmatch in ages, but was I rusty? Was I fuck. There was this one guy, I swear to god, I schooled the bastard to hard he came out with a PhD. I mean, I’m the god damn Gordon Ramsay of schoolin’ a noob here. Crossbow. Rocket. Crowbar. Done. Wait, where’s your arse gone? Oh that’s right, I schooled it right off your body.

I done messed up Burt Bacharach and all.

In other night-wasting developments, I watched the pilot episode of Fringe. The main character is a feisty female FBI agent, the kind of feisty you needed to be back in the 50s when you had to prove yourself to a load of smug men who gave you dismissive nicknames like honey and sweetheart and sugardonkey and so on, which for some reason people also do in this show even though it’s not the 50s anymore. I would speculate that it’s a feeble attempt to get us to root for her, because she’s terribly, terribly uninteresting in every other respect.

So Fringe: not so good. On the other hand it does feature that guy from The Wire and some dudes with transparent skin, and both of those are some pretty cool things. So who knows, it just might pick up.

oh yeah, a title

Published
by
Colm
on 29 September, 2008
in Misc.
. 17 Comments

Lately it seems fairly impossible to spend more than two minutes in Dublin city centre without having a can of Red Bull Cola thrown at you by zealous marketeers. I’d dodged them all til now - they have rubbish aim and I’m frisky like a mountain goat - but today I discovered that they’ve infiltrated deli counters and they’re handing them out with pies. And I’m a man who likes a pie.

I presume they’re looking to drum up sales through word of mouth, so I feel obliged to record my thoughts.

Pros: Pleasant whiff of ice cream float when you open the can. Free.

Cons: Lingering aftertaste of cheap vodka as filtered through a hobo’s bladder. Can looks like it was designed by Maurice Pratt on his lunch break.

Would go well with: I don’t know, I was going to buy a Yorkie but I got kind of disoriented.

Verdict: D+, would not drink again.

A quiet week, I know

Published
by
Colm
on 23 September, 2008
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 8 Comments

Writing writing writing.

The final changes have been hammered out on Anything But Simple, an anthology of poetry and fiction from the graduates of UCD’s creative writing MA (including y.t. and certain others). The launch is planned for 6pm on the 20th of October in UCD. We have wine. Join ussss.

Catherine is looking for submissions from bloggers and photobloggers for an anthology to be published in the run-up to Christmas, with 75% of the proceeds going to Focus Ireland. A worthy cause and a nice opportunity to see yourself in print. Submission guidelines are here.

If you have writerly aspirations you might also feel like throwing in an entry for RTÉ Radio One’s prestigious Francis MacManus Award. They’re looking for 1,800-2,000 words (my native length - chess!) and there’s €3,000 and a trophy for the overall winner. In addition, the three winners and some of the shortlisted stories will be read on air. Closing date is the 27th of October.

Bonus: Nothing to do with writing, but this is the greatest trailer for anything ever. I’d never heard of it before today but by golly I want it.

Junior Cert Stabbed On Results Night

Published
by
Colm
on 11 September, 2008
in Misc.
. 3 Comments

So says the Herald. Word on the street (I checked at lunchtime) is that the GCSEs were in Dublin for a stag do and overheard the JC making some disparaging remarks about the UK education system. Needless to say things kicked off pretty heavily and according to onlookers our boy went down “right quick”.

Reports of tit-for-tat attacks in London by roaming gangs of the Leaving Cert remain unconfirmed.

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

Published
by
Colm
on 9 September, 2008
in Misc.
. 7 Comments

I want in on this traffic spike.

I hate secret questions.

Published
by
Colm
on 8 September, 2008
in Misc.
. 7 Comments

I hate them so very, very much. Listen: if you want to set up a system whereby people can have their password reset or sent to them, then there is one way and one way alone you should proceed, and that is to have them provide an email address. If you ask them to put in a Super Secret Question!!!!! then don’t be surprised if some irate customer ends up throwing you under an elephant marching band.

I’m setting up an account now, and the options I have are:

  1. Last four characters of driver’s licence
  2. Father’s city of birth
  3. Mother’s maiden name

Are these secure? No they are not. So as usual I’m going to put in some random nonsense answer, then I’m going to get drunk and forget everything and be locked out forever. And sure, I could cut down on my drinking or write down my passwords or whatever, but that shouldn’t be my responsibility, and I resent having some website sitting there judging me on my failures. So webmasters, please… help me out here.

I puzzle myself.

Published
by
Colm
on 5 September, 2008
in Writing
. 2 Comments

I take a lot of notes. I’m swimming in them. This is largely to do with how jotting down ideas and thoughts and sketches is vastly, vastly more entertaining than the donkey work of proper writing. Plus, after a few years documenting every flash of genius that slops out of your noggin you have an impressive stack of books and scraps to lay around you while you slug cheap wine and jump around and shout things like “Yes!” and “Quite true!” and nod sagely to yourself and pretend you’re producing masterpieces.

Some writers claim you should always have a notebook handy, but they’re amateurs. You should always at least five. I’m hovering around seven these days, including On The Go, On The Go In Limited Capacity Trousers, Cutting Sociopolitical Observations In 500 Words Or Less and both Short- and Long-form Miscellany. You get bonus points for scrawling things on napkins and small pieces of driftwood and suchlike.

There’s also my mobile. I used to rely on this pretty heavily, but it loses its attraction when you start getting heavily into the habit of prancing around stacks of paper. Potential for being strewn becomes the primary criterium for note repositories. And of course, you have the character limit, which means you can lose a lot of detail. Still, I get some use out of it, generally when I’m drunk and in a crowd of people and whipping out a notebook would make me look like a proper poindexter.

This has its downsides, frankly. Witness:

all these ripe whatever fields had not happened, but there was an opportunity

Buh? There’s a classic short story in there, no doubt, full of high adventure and charismatic characters and Serious Themes, but chud me sideways if I know what it is. Then there’s the following, from 5.01am on the 20 October 2007:

Staying with a friend who’s a bit queasy, seeing dumptrucks pass by and a naked asian guy.

I like the capital letter and full stop there, as if it’s actually supposed to be a sentence and not just something I dreamed at the bottom of a jaegerbomb binge. I was in Galway at the time for a friend’s birthday, so maybe that clears things up. Maybe I just happened to see all those things in the middle of the night? I don’t know. Help me out here.

Electric Picnic

Published
by
Colm
on 27 August, 2008
in Misc.
. 11 Comments

Who’s going? We are, and we’re towing the monstrosity that is Wayne Manor.

You wouldn’t know it from the camera trickery in his films, but Christian Bale is actually 70 feet tall. Also, there’s an entire wing of the tent cut out of the picture. It’s seriously massive. We reckon it’ll hold in the region of 500 people but obviously we’ll need to run stress tests, so feel free to shanghai some friends and head along of an evening. (If you’re on Facebook, you can even make it official.)

There will be signposts.

Other late-night entertainment includes Antics in the Fosset’s Circus tent, which will be a good old dose of sweaty indie choonage guaranteed to get your gizzards in a right dancy funk. The silent disco is always a laff riot too, if for no other reason than it’s great fun trying to figure out what channel everyone’s on. What else? Oh I don’t know, but one thing about EP is that you’re never more than five feet away from an intriguing mash-up of fire, juggling, jazz, citrus fruits, unitards, flare guns, sparklers, swizzle sticks and drug-crazed Hungarians. Good times are rolling.

The Western Front

Published
by
Colm
on 21 August, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 5 Comments

Rather than field sixty emails a day about the fate and status of ill repute, I might as well lay things out here. While there have been no new posts since approximately 1983, the future of the project is very much established and fixed and all such similar things. What we are experiencing at the moment is the usual summer hiatus, which is slated to last until the full summers’ quota of proper decent weather has been fulfilled. This was a negotiated stipulation in Mr Fournier’s contract from the beginning of the outset, and one we are determined to respect. In any event we can’t particularly complain, as Eli has much of a similar outage lined up for the coming winter evenings, during which time he is in the court-mandated habit of distributing hot port to homeless Asian sailors (or in their absence, redistributing the bottles into more personal avenues).

Despite all this there is between little and no reason for anyone to fret about a lack of reading material, as manifold other projects are underway. While many of these are behind closed doors at the minute and will probably remain so for the forseeable, cash settlements notwithstanding, the mere fact of their existence is expected to be of great comfort to the average reader. Should it turn out that the marketing gurus have miscalculated on this point, feel free to pick the nearest convenient billboards and assume they are part of a vast and thoroughly entertaining viral marketing campaign, the oblique and succulent mysteries of which will doubtless occupy you for weeks on end.

In the more immediate meantime, be sure to stay tuned for news of my upcoming sitcom project. It’s a bold and genre-bending opus that will fry your tiny little minds with its sheer unfettered twelve-gauge 40-proof five-alarm wit and sparkle; think of it as Saved by the Bell meets Grey’s Anatomy meets Shaft in Africa. Ladies and gentlemen, I call it Hippo Campus.

Too good to last

Published
by
Colm
on 19 August, 2008
in Music
. 2 Comments

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

God damn it, the RIAA. Give us a break for once.