Wahey.

Back in black. Still netless. Living in a house in Tallaght on my own and working away on loads of new shit. Shiznit 4 is going to print vewwwy soon and it’s a killer issue. I’ve around 20 pages in it.

Amperduke is back on the list too, looking to be nearly finished or at least finishable within a month. Final page count looks to 180. Dicking around with making Flash games too. And basket weaving.

I’ll slap up loads of the new stuff when I can.

Moving out today and for the next month I’ll have no net access. I’ll be wangling net time here and there but nothing solid so emails will be lost or unanswerable.

Feel weird moving out after having pinned so many hopes on this place. I really thought that I’d be here for years, think I lasted around 6 months. I’m renting a place on my own for a month then moving in with two mates.

Check this clown out ‘freestyling’. Hilarious. Listen how he mentions putting on his hat and his scarf. Gold.

Brian you fucking thief!

One of the reasons Frank changed me over to Wordpress because the old blog was eating up too much bandwidth, I was putting up huge files and when somebody viewed one of my unjustifiably massive images it’d eat up a bit of space. By far the most requested image was in a ’seperated at birth’ and it was this particular one, BK Titanic;

My webstats say that loads of people are still being directed here everyday looking for the image and it’s not there now. I presume it was put on some corny office mailaround. Heads from all over the world, India, Singapore and Crumlin all want to see Brianer at his alcoholic finest. Webstats also say that 30 or so of the regulars visit this site on the weekends. I don’t post or check my email on the weekends as that is gay.

So Brian’s been stealing my bandwidth and I’m going to extract my fee by making him watch Emmerdale for a month in a bath full of Gavin Fridays wee wee.

Great pic though.

I have no shame in admitting that I listen to self help mp3’s. Yeah, all that ‘7 habits of highly successful people’ stuff, I lap it up. 90% of is crap and tragically funny but there are a few good ones. Hey, they all come for free and I get sick of listening to Bette Midler

I also have a sizeable collection of ‘relaxation’ sounds ranging from gentle rainfall to terrifying jungle noises, different strokes for different folks there, I can handle sparrows and woodland birds twittering away but not scary parrots and monkeys making that horrible cackling sound. During my self help download bonanza I got into self hypnosis and guided meditation, some of them are great but most of them are shit with some dude just whispering with a reverb echo effect on. I’d listen to the first 20 seconds before deleting the shit ones. I found one that sounded really relaxing and ran for about 10 mins, just right for a bedtime listening.

I’m always in a bad mood going to bed. By the time I’ve finished dicking around drawing it’s 11pm and I only get an hour of fun before having to go to bed. The thoughts of a guided meditation at bedtime sounded good.

I got comfortable and let it play, struck by the male speaker’s strange comment that ‘he’s never done this before but here we go’. My qualms were soon lost as he described me being in a beautiful meadow. I should really draw a pic of me prancing merrily through flowers but I have no Wacom today. Everything was grand, got around 5 minutes of genuine relaxation and hit that state where you’re still listening but half asleep. He kept describing my surroundings and all but suddenly the speaker is in the meadow with me, I was too snoozy to do anything but accept this and let it flow. He then describes himself putting his arms around the back of me and massaging away my tension. Thought it was a tad fruity but my inner gay told me to go with the flow.

Next thing he’s kissing me and dropping the hand. Wham! I’m awake and panicked.

Raped in the ear in my own bed. I jumped out of bed and was ready to kill somebody at this stage and wished my neighbours were playing music so I could go in and slap one of them silly. I felt violated. Sounds funny now but I was really shook up.

It is funny now. I presume it was just a recording some bloke made for his girlfriend which made it’s way to torrent land. And a valuable lesson about trusting an illegal download, who‘s to stop me from doing the same? Put up a torrent where the first 5 minutes are legit with me guiding you through a serene forest then all of a sudden a hand bursts through the ground, grabs your ankle and its Resident Evil time. It’d be a good sting.

P.s. Not gay. NOT GAY.

Drinking and spliffing, slurping and burping with my niggas on Saturday and we got to talking about Mossad abducting nazi war criminals from their adopted countries. I suggested we do the same to Bush. He’s one of the biggest living war criminals who seems to show no signs of stopping anytime soon.

The one chap there who doesn’t play video games said ‘Ah a sniper rifle’d do the trick’ The rest of us scoffed. I’m up on these things and forget JFK, if you want to see a truly audacious assassination, check out the story of Anwar Sadat. They captured it on video.Military parade and the killers bunked in and smuggled live clips. One throws a smoke bomb to mark him and the snipers let it rock.

The lads put forward many approaches to bump off Bush, most of them pure shit, some involving complex diagrams. Soon bored with the converstion I asked for a sheet of paper and banged this out in around 8 seconds.

Done a crazy amount of drawing over xmas, nothing specific just messing about watching hour upon hour of ad breaks and trying to find something to look at. Here are a few nice bits. Have loads more to put up.

This clip is priceless. Gavan Friday poncing around Ballymun with a Canadian film crew, claiming that he and Bono are from there. Yes, they both grew up in Ballymun but not in the Towers as he implies. What a wanker, both he and Guggi have exhausted whatever careers they had, real or imagined, and now trade solely on their friendship with Bono.

Click on the clip and read the YouTube comments. All very true. I reckon he never thought anybody in Ireland would see it.

Check out the two women who shout ‘Here, are you Bono?’ ‘No I’m Gavan Friday, ever heard of me?’ and in unison ‘No’.

That says it all.

But he still gets a large amount of press. Last time I heard him he was explaining what an influence the Virgin Prunes are on contemporary bands! The Virgin Prunes, they had at least one goodish track but they were hardly a big band, well maybe in the Ballymun flats they were or in the fucking deluded mess which is his mind.

So both him and Guggi are getting a dissing in Shiznit 4. Here’s a preview:

I’ve been thinking alot about marbles this week. They are so easily forgotten from my massive list of childhood gems because they never had their own cartoon or song and were ultimately disposable. But unlike Thundercats and He-Man, marbles are the one toy that I played, my Da played and his Da played.

( that’s my Da playing marbles with Christy Brown and Phil Lynnot)

What makes them strange is this; everyone played them but EVERYONE played with them differently. The names given to each variation were never uniformly agreed and they changed from clique to clique. Everyone agreed on catseyes and steelies but after that it was a free for all. I used to get my 7-up’s and green frosties confused and always insisted that green frosties were worth more than 7-up’s, a friend pointed out to me that they were exactly the same.And they were.

This is the crux of the matter, perceived value. We’d only play for keeps and the rapid calculations of how many catseyes equalled a chalkie or whatever were done on the spot and confused the shit out of me. If two lads told me a whitey is only worth two gulliers I’d probably believe them. It was all a dizzying taste of economics and market trading. But there were so many holes. Firstly to enter the market you needed some float, a bag of easily obtainable catseyes would get you in, to move up the ladder and get some good marbles you either had to play constantly with shrewd bartering or do what lazy kids like me could do, buy or steal precious marbles.

And this shows more problems, besides the fact that you could basically accquire a fortune of marbles without ever playing them and just spending pocket money on them, the head of the marble foodchain was the Steelie and the T-rex of Steelies was called the King Steelie. But you couldn’t buy them and the market depended on scavaging and trading to get them. In my particular marble circle we all received pocket money which would replenish the catseyes and allow us to trade/play. There was one poor kid who never had any money and played like a shark, every game counted to him and he built up a fair collection through hard work. This was a grand set up until said poor kid started to produce King Steelies, 2 or 3 a week, the size of golf balls, besides physically smashing our marbles he obliterated our collections in straight trading and became quite the Baron.

His brother was a mechanic or something and that’s where the Steelies came from. I used to think this was unfair but now see it as the perfect balancing mechanism to our market; we could all afford to buy stock and gamble, the poor kid (David Fletcher if you must know) had no money but had the acumen and one the asset that all we needed, King Steelies.

I broke into a neighbours house to steal such treasures. He played alot but was a speculator, I suppose we all were, gleefully showing off a piece that would never be put into the game and kept safe in the collection. He had five of these weird white ones, slightly larger than the average marble with a ghostly blue hue. I wanted them. There was a communion or confirmation going on in our house and him and all his familiy were there. Knowing that his house was unattented and knowing where he kept his stash, I forced the front door and bailed up the stairs and ransacked the fucker’s room, I laughed because his Ma would make him clean up the mess I was making. I grabbed the 5 marbles but decided to take only 4. A small act of mercy and a reminder to him of what he lost. But I could never display them in public and eventually off loaded 3 of them.

But back to the crazy discrepancies, the rules of play were just as fluid as the naming. Until I moved to another part of Tallaght I had never played Shores. Kids would smash open the little shore covers outside every second house, fill them up with grass, define the oche and throw marbles in. The ritual of putting in your stake of an agreed number of marbles into the shore before playing always seemed very manly and exciting. Sore losers and chancers would always hit you with some lingo before starting ‘No rebounds, no tax’ or whatever and these rules could be invoked and made up at any stage.

I was talking to the walking Wikipedia that is my Grandad yesterday and his memories of marbles were strikingly similar, the rules and mode of play would change from street to street. He said ‘marble season’ was just one of the yearly cyclical fads that included conker season, tops season, rounders season etc. Got me wondering, do the current generation of kids play this way? Probably. Surley conker battles have been replaced by Yu Gi Oh duels and the trading of cigarette cards which dominated my Grandad’s youth have found a replacement in Pokemon cards. I saw a dude in his 30’s a few years ago down in Bushy Park excitedly gathering chestnuts while his two kids looked absolutley bored, they probably had their gameboys in their pockets and thought their Da was an idiot but they’re both sides of the same coin.

I’m now looking into doing further research on marbles, besides the funny parts of arbitrary rules I think the whole marbles thing can teach kids alot about supply and demand and all that boring shit called commerce which affects us all.Maybe not, but I learned a whole lot more from bartering some catseyes than pouring salt on snails and humping my pillow

———————————-