just a quick note i've finally fixed my archives, so for any of you finding my older, funnier stuff on search engines, it now looks halfway presentable.
pub food is the shits on our way to taking mumfy back to essex, we stopped in a tiny little village place called covenhoe (i think) to get some lunch. i'm pretty sure that i was served microwaved beef. which is never great. all the way back home (which is a three-hour drive) i thought i was going to puke. when we finally did get back, i took a couple of ibuprofen and chilled out for a little while. eventually, the beef evacuated my body. three times. let's say no more. for the love of god.
it seems that my stepdad, just for the fun of it, has cancelled our second phone line. this means that very shortly, i'm going to be without internet access unless i can sort out some adsl quicksmart. bastard. "oh let's see - what does lawrie use? the internet! cancel that... his car! it's not fixed, so i'll put it outside to rot... he types! i'll complain loudly about the noise, despite the fact that i watch every fucking football game in the world football on the other fucking side of the house with the volume on 50 and the door closed."
gah - it's just pete waterman all over again. did i ever tell you i was supposed to audition for pop idol? tee hee. what a shambles that would have been. i was going to sing 'ain't no sunshine' (although i was appalled when will young did it; where's his soul? oh yes, he gave it to simon cowell), and possibly 'house of the rising sun' by the animals. although, having said that, john otway features a brilliant live version of this song on his latest hit. not only that, but the audience participates, and he credits every single audience member by name on the sleeve of the single. excellent.
dejected despair bollocks. i can't believe it. i didn't win the guardian's best british blog competition. never ye mind; vengance will be mine. with the one thousand pounds i didn't win, i'm going to buy a thousand rocks from my local £ everything's a pound £ shop, hunt down each one of the judges, and stone them in much the same way frightened but holier-than-thou peasants once stoned innocent-but-ugly women they believed to be witches. and the guy that won said he's probably going to buy a new boiler with the money. man, if i won (and i remind you that i didn't) i'd buy a spaceship, or even better, a 1961 chrysler turboflite.
maybe pete waterman should be thanking his lucky stars that he wasn't on the guardian's judging panel; making him eat 12" vinyl copies of every last one of his two hundred and fifty uk number one singles, while 'too many broken hearts' by rick astley plays in the background seems like a fitting way to end his mortal life; unfortunately only an exorcism could possibly pry his undead fingers from our music industry's throat. i fucking hate him.
violence, drugs, prostitutes & the mafia while sitting here wondering why amelia hasn't updated since i added her to my links (and she should, because she's funny as hell), i found a link to this pretty little article about how grand theft auto 3 is turning kids into prostitute-killing mafia hoods.
lisa bennett's misguided article states that you play a character who works for the mafia; wrong. at first you work for the mafia, then you work for the yakuza and then media tycoon donald love. along the way you can also work for dog-food producer marty chonks, hispanic gang the diablos and the yardies. i fucking hate the yardies. i hate the mafia too, but they have shotguns.
then she says the game "involves killing police officers and innocent bystanders, stealing cars, and doing drugs." well, mostly, that's true. apart from the doing drugs bit. that's a complete lie. i've searched all the gta3 sites and forums, and nowhere can i even find a cheat to get the game character to take drugs. the only thing i can think that she might be talking about is the 'adrenaline pill', which is a power-up that slows down the gameplay so you have more time to shoot people in the face.
and here's the killer question: "how many young men fantasized about beating a hooker to death before a video game suggested the idea?". well, absolutely none, obviously. apart from all those guys that... killed hookers. starting, most notably, with jack the ripper 114 years ago. and they didn't even have sega then.
worst of all is possibly this little nugget of complete fiction: "once the hooker exits the car [after the health-increasing sex], if the player wants his money back, he can dash after her, beat her to death and recover his cash. people who have played the game say that the bloody beating is done with a baseball bat that you can feel in your hands through the playstation controller.". firstly, you can only feel it through your controller if you have dualshock turned on in your preferences, and i don't because it makes your hands feel all fuzzy after a while. secondly, you don't have to beat her with a baseball bat; usually i set the prostitute on fire and watch her corpse burn. and thirdly, and most importantly of all; you don't get all of your money back. this is a gta3 myth i wish to disparage right here and now. i've killed several hookers in the game, and on only a couple of occasions have i got all of my money back that the bitch took from me.
should have been a rock legend i interviewed john butler from diesel park west today (i have to say; it's not a brilliant site) about his experiences in the music industry, and the story and inspiration behind their third album 'diesel park west versus the corporate waltz', and goddamn does he have some stories to tell. i've known john my whole life; he and my dad used to play together in the seventies, and diesel park west have often been lauded as inspiration by many people including, most publically, gaz coombes from supergrass. and no, i didn't just interview him for fun, it's for the book that kav and i are writing. for more information, use google to trawl through my archives.
in other news... there's not a whole lot of news. jon moved to leicester yesterday; i installed a tracker on gaijindesign.com and was appalled at the results. the jedi quiz gets something like ten thousand hits a week. this blog gets about a thousand hits a week. and gaijindesign gets about a hundred and five hits s week. which is a joke. i'm in two minds about how to deal with this; if the hong kong job comes through, the whole point is moot because we'll be too busy to really take on any other work for the best part of a year. but if that doesn't happen, then i've got to look at how best to prostitute my business, and that costs money.
if anybody would like to make some paypal donations to this honourable cause, i will post up pictures of my cat bob.... completely naked. he won't have a stitch of clothing on, and all of these pictures will be exclusive to my blog. now who's willing to donate? eh?
just me and my robot mumfy and her family have gone down to st. albans for the day to try on bridesmaid dresses. you know, for fun. so i'm here tinkering with a few bits and pieces; mostly with your new friend and soon-to-be-host of game.phrenzy.org, z0xi!
he'll be your little green robot guide through what i hope will be an entertaining little experimental arcade.
"lawrie is apparently straightedge which is very cool and his site reflects a kind of relaxed, distant view of the cynicism of life." says this guy in this archive post. i like it; "relaxed, distant view of the cynicism of life." makes me sound like obi-wan kenobi if he ever got really, really drunk and started telling luke skywalker stories, and then started crying and dribbling after a little while.
bite my tongue well, there it is. i have one good old moan about how there's no work and i feel like i'm banging my head against a brick wall, and then i receive a phone call this morning to arrange a meeting to outsource some flash work to me. so hooray. the key to success is obviously to whine.
also, thanks to angel (and that's 'angel' in the masculine, like the vampire. but not.) for these great new baby transformers™. they're like real tranformers, but for little tiny children who lack the cognitive capacity and hand-eye coordination to transform a robot as badass as starscream. pfft - i didn't need stupid 'easy transformers' when i was five; i had the real deal. and i knew that the theme tune was in 7/8 and everything. kids these days are stupid.
i feel blue i'm tired. tired of clients who try and screw me for some tiny amount of cash, tired of getting no queries while design companies with all the artistic skill of a quadriplegic donkey get hundreds of clients, and thenput in about as much effort into making said websites as an ostrich does into flying. i'm tired of trying to scrape together some pathetically small amount of cash just so i can get my car working and never quite achieving it because my credit card companies threaten to break my legs.
i'm a moany old bitch. i had a headache for most of today, which refused to die even after i swallowed 4 nurofen, and now i'm tired. as i just explained. advertising would be the key, but what's the key to advertising? especially since you usually get a 1% return on clients, but a 400% return on other advertisers trying to sell you shit you don't want. i spent over £300 on a yellow pages advert last year; i received one query, and about nine thousand telephone calls from companies wanting to sell me water coolers / telemarketing schemes / office space / ownership of the itv digital corporation. and you know what? so far, that one query hasn't even panned out, so i never even made my money back on that advert.
gah. 'ransom' is on and mumfy makes me feel better. swear to god; this hong kong thing better pan out.
:: update :: more people are killed anually by donkeys than die in air crashes. and other such facts here.
night time stories i try and read as much as i can; put me in front of a table with a tv remote and a decent book on it, i'd go for the book every time. unless i was on the tv at the time, being awarded the nobel prize for blogging (unfortunately this award does not yet exist, but if it did, me and my selection of hand-picked throwing rocks would guarantee a win). i've read something like thirty books by stephen king, most of them at least twice. i have read books by other authors, but my first 'real' book was by king (actually, the book was thinner, written under stephen king's pen name richard bachman), and i've been hooked since i was twelve years old. one of the more recent ones i read was a book called hearts in atlantis, which is a wonderful, complicated story that alludes lightly to (as does much of his more recent work) the dark tower series.
anyway, me and mumfy went to the video store to get out 'unbreakable', since we'd both only seen it once and wanted to know where m. knight shyamalan appears (he's searched by bruce willis for drugs). while we were looking, emily pulls out a video of 'hearts in atlantis', starring anthony hopkins. it looked promising, s we decided to get both films. oddly, hiring two videos and a paying a surcharge for a late buffy video about a month ago only came to £5.50. somebody can't do their maths. so anyway, we skip home and watch 'unbreakable'. then i remember that i finished my book last night ('the drawing of the three' by guess who?), and so decided to watch 'hearts in atlantis'.
before i go on, i must tell those of you who don't know; stephen king writes fantastic stories. pretty much all of them get turned into films. after i've read the book, i'll usually watch the movie just out of curiosity. four of these films have been any good: 'the shining', 'shawshank redemption' (from the short story 'rita hayworth and the shawshank redemption'), 'the green mile' and 'stand by me' (based on the short story 'the body'). most of the films have been fucking abysmal: 'the dead zone', 'tommyknockers' (i watched that with a look of absolute horror on my face; a studio paid money to get this produced? well, apparently not), 'thinner', 'the stand' (although it wasn't terrible), and a film called 'night flier' based on a short story of the same name, which i haven't even bothered to hire for £1 because it makes me cringe just looking at the cover.
so 'hearts in atlantis' was an ambitious film to make. the book has unavoidable complexities, but those few films that were good conversions have given me faith, and the fact that anthony hopkins wouldn't appear in anything too rubbish... and yet i can't decide if i like it or not. i can't decide if it was good or not. it was very well-made, and there were at least two brief moments where tears welled up in my eyes... but it was incomplete. they took the first part of a much larger story, and discarded the rest. when the film ended i sat up suddenly, shocked. i felt as if i'd been cheated, somehow. admittedly, it would have been a hard story to follow if you didn't know it already, and it would have been an incredibly hard story to put to film, but it could have been b>beautiful if they'd tried.
ok, i think i've made up my mind. it was a really good movie. you should hire it out. and if you've read the book, at least i've prepared you for the... shortness of it (although i think it's about two hours long as it is).
goddamn i needed to get that off my chest, otherwise it would have gnawed at me all night.
harry potter! again! it never ends! anybody remember when i went a bit nuts over crazy religious people and their reaction to harry potter? well, it turns out there's a real wizarding school in austria. read all about it here. now, this goes far beyond the boundaries of a simple book that may or may not tell children how to conjour up flying cars / drink their pet's blood / worship satan; oh no, this is a place where people can learn to be evil, and receive a certificate in evil doings. i, of course, am joking; feel free to go and spend six whole terms learning rituals that can magically make leaves turn to rust and fall from the trees around october time, because even this won't make you evil. but there will be others in the coming days who most certainly will not be joking about this school and it's attempts to lure children into the slimy mouth of beelzebub, where their souls will be eaten and regurgitated as evil minions. with a bit of devil-sick on them.
my bass player's boobs thanks to my bass player paulie for this interesting little nugget. he has no site as of yet, but is learning the dark art of flash.
paul is on the far right. i'm 'fast eddie 262', the one looking scared
would you come and see this band? by the way, every pair of glasses in this photo belong to me.
josh hartnett or ronan keating? you decide tee hee hee. rich has come up with an excellent poll to find jon's ultimate looky-likey. starting with james from north and south, i think the poll should be extended, offering a new celebrity comparison each week (although i do think comparisons to josh hartnett are wildly inaccurate).
i went to see signs last night. with all the best intentions in the world you could try and forget about comparisons to unbreakable and the sixth sense, but m. night shyamalan has already developed such a characteristic style in the way he tells his tales that comparisons are inevitable. there's also the way he has adopted hitchcock's quirk of appearing in his own films (i only found out yesterday that he was apparently in unbreakable and the sixth sense, but i've no idea who he was in either film), although his role in signs seems almost pivotal compared to hitchcock's transitory appearances in his own films. again, no comparison should really be made between the two, but is a pretty obvious one.
if you want an excellent storyboard version of signs, then here's one by the guy who's better than your kids.
i feel pooky apologies to jon who rang me yesterday asking for a lift because he was lost in leicester after viewing his new accomodation, and i had no way of getting to him. i have a car. it's a 1984 mini city (note: that link is for foreign people that don't know what the hell a mini is - it's not a picture of my car).
i bought the mini when i was 16. i'm 24, and i've never driven it. clever, eh? for about seven of the past eight years, it has occupied a space in my parent's garage. then my stepdad, being an ass, decided to move it outside (although, to his credit, he did at least cover it in a plastic tarp) for no other reason than to wind me up, as far as i can tell; nothing has occupied the space that my mini took up. i passed my driving test a little over 18 months ago, but have never had the cash to get my mini seen to, or inspected, or insured, and so emily pretty much drives me everywhere.
speaking of miss mumfy, she's going back to university in a little over 2 weeks time, and i'd really like to be able to drive down to see her every weekend, but until some existing clients pay me some fucking money, or until hong kong shower me wth thousands and thousands of pounds (cross-my-heart-wish-on-a-star-i-hope-i-may-i-hope-i-might), my little mini will remain in it's tarp-covered spot.
alternatively, i could set up a little paypal donation spot here, and see how many of you love me enough to donate many hundreds of pounds/dollars/yen/rubles/euros (bleurgh)/chocolate gold coins to me and my mini cause. and you do love me, right? right?
sick of it all since i've updated my layout, my referral log is refusing to give me nearly as much information as it used to, but i'm still getting pr0n from the search engines. so, i have vowed to eliminate any reference to people's bits, even inadvertantly, and purge the search engines of the filth that is apparently on my site.
speaking of search engines, i was trying to view a page on tripod orignally from brainsluice, but it was overloaded, so i tried viewing this google cache of it. look carefully, excellent stuff.
also, i found this absolutely gorgeous (but unfortunately-titled) flash table tennis game; pingis. the intro section kinda makes it look like you might be playing against george w. bush, though. and coca-cola actively tries to stop people drinking water with a scheme called h2no.
see? together, we can make a difference as paul pointed out in my comments, "that copying mofo" who stole from jon did indeed change his layout. he also changed his most recent, rather cocky post to something utterly unrelated. you see what happens when you refuse to let a thing rest? i'd like to thank anybody that did send out an email; you made a difference, and jon was so happy, he cried.
(i actually made that up, but it's probably true)
unfortunately, we've had no such luck in persuading craig to return and finish his story. for shame. and for anyone looking through my archives... um, yes, the old template still apears to be in effect there, although this is not blogger's fault; it's mine. i only just noticed today, and i've just been far too lazy to make the update. my excuse is that last night i pulled a big yellow pus-bogey out of my abscess, sprayed quite a lot of blood into emily's bathroom sink, and nearly threw up/fainted/cried a couple of times, so today has been my day of rest. much like god, but more sickly and less omnipotent.
your children are shit for those of you that have children... bleurgh. you're old. what are you doing here? joke. seriously; if you have offspring, well... i am better than your kids.
also, if you read back a couple of entries, you'll notice my reference to a gentleman named zakh who ripped off jon's site. it turns out that he doesn't really think he ripped it off because "the html is different" and "the layout is different". what mr. muppet fails to understand is that phrenzy.org is written in php, and if you view jon's source, the header says "feel free to look at my code, but dont steal it. web design is about originality, its about personal expression. not how well you can rip off someone else's idea". and zakh's 'design' and phrenzy are about as dissimilar as the premise behind transformers: robots in disguise and go-bots, where jon is, quite obviously, transformers. but not the dinobots or constructicons, because i always thought they were rubbish and not real transformers.
what our dinobot-iq'd friend fails to realise is that there's no 'partial stealing'. he freely admits that he robbed the graphics from jon's site, but insists that everything else is original (aside from the layout of said graphics and the colour scheme of the site).
this is a direct quote from his site, just after he put up his rip-off of phrenzy: "im not going to keep layouts up that look like everyone elses". um... hello?
a curious aside since i spent most of my day doing this, i'd like to give a little tip to non-pro users whose blogger template is not working or not saving properly: don't edit your template in the blogger template editor. if you're going to make any changes, go to template, select the whole thing, copy it out, then hit cancel. then paste it into notepad, make your changes, select it all, go back to template and paste it all in. then save, and make a completely new post; editing an existing one doesn't always work. fuck knows why it has to be so convoluted, but it's the only way i've got it to work. that's why i'm making this semi-random post now - i just changed the link to rich's new site (which, by the way, looks tasty) because emotionalhardcore exceeded it's bandwidth limit. how in the fuck did you do that, rich?
thank christ for that after a tedious hour crawling through my code to find one missing semicolon, and then another hour or so fiddling with a tricky little graphic, chasing a couple of broken links and forgetting to add my counter, i've finally got the new site up. the comments template should be working properly now, too. welcome to my new, partly french, mostly orange home. do you like?
by the way, if you spot any broken links, please don't fucking tell me for at least a week. i feel rank right now, and will probably get jon to mailbomb you.
i have no warez, porn, mp3s, animal sex, britney spears naked pussy teen sex fucking only slightly better than showing up on everyone's search for pr0n and photos of a large penis (why come here? mine's the size of a small, shrivelled, slightly damp mushroom that was left in the back of the fridge for eleven years), i am number one for 'fucking n00b'.
what a beautiful day so, here's how it lays out: i woke up this morning (duh-duh duh-duh duh - that, by the way, was a written representation of a blues riff. ha. ha.) feeling like i'd eaten an unskinned hamster but not swallowed it completely, but just before i managed to shove it into my mouth, the hamster hit me round the back of the head with a wooden mallet. this is all thanks to my new, lovely, shiny red abscess. i take a shower, racking my brains trying to think of exactly what the fuck i had to do - something important that i wasn't supposed to forget (and so, as the gods will it, i forget entirely)... then i remember. i've got a meeting in twenty minutes. i rush out of the house, just make it to the bus stop, and i'm in town with time to spare.
this, ordinarily, would be quite a happy circumstance, were it not for the fact that it's absolutely pissing it down with rain. so i go to starbucks, where i was supposed to meet this potential client. and i wait. for 50 minutes. and he doesn't show. so, i run down the road to the closest cybercafé and check my email - five unread messages. bollocks, me thinks. but not one of them is from this potential client - he just disappeared without a trace. no phone call, no email - just a total no-show. ordinarily, this wouldn't concern me too much, but as it is, i'm soaking wet, i'm in pain, i've got a hole in my shoe so my sock is getting wet, and there are obvious allusions to my previous post about common courtesy. all of which makes lawrie a great big pissed-off piece of wet, infected meat. nice.
also, i have recently exchanged a couple of emails with an american guy called jim bianco concerning the inevitable war to be waged on iraq. until i was asked, i had no idea i had any kind of opinion on it. turns out i do, and a pretty strong one at that. try this; sit down and just think about it for a couple of minutes. then post your opinions; my american friend is wondering if anybody gives a fuck.
me & my third nipple i have a third nipple. in my mouth. no, seriously, i appear to be growing one on the upper part of my left boob, because - that's right, friends and neighbours - i'm getting another abscess. immense pain, here i come!
in other, better news, i am already in the process of redesigning this blog to coincide with my crossover to movable type. having read the faqs now though, i'm not 100% sure my host does support the file_db perl module. i did ask, but they are supercrap at returning phone calls. to be honest, i was quite happy with this design, but jon persuaded me into it... and i didn't really take much persuading. he also told me his mom would beat me up unless i redesigned.
i am in an favourable mood - which doesn't mean that i feel good or happy, necessarily; rather, i am going to ask you for some favours. the first one i will ask of you is this: visit myboot, read the 'she hates my futon' stories, and then bombard craig mitchell with emails until he returns to complete this fucking great serial. i've had a few people mention this over the past couple of months, and i'm a sucker for a great story. which is why he needs to finish it.
oh for god's sake ok; at first, it was amusing, but now it seems that all of the search results that bring people here are for porn. i. am. not. a. whore. however, i come up ninth on a netscape search for 'nice film about fucking a whore'. i mean, who seriously thinks up this shit?
thank christ that my girlfriend is on holiday right now, because i don't think she'd be too impressed with me coming up number one for 'sunday blowjob emily'. and of course, what day would be complete without the obligatory search for 'photos large penis'.
here's a hint for all you wierdy porn surfers out there: if, on your search, a blog turns up in the search results, chances are that it's not got what you're looking for.
bollocks right about now i'd like to mention people that receive emails, or telephone calls, or even regular snail-mail letters, but don't have the common fucking courtesy to return them. granted; all of us, every once in a while, will enter a brief fugue state after reading a few emails and, for whatever reason, we might forget to reply immediately. even i am guilty of that. but i do make a conscious effort to try and reply to every single email i receive (however this does not include today's visitor who sent me three emails, two of which said "hello!" and one of which said "fdfdsdf sdfs dfsdfs" - i have all of your email addresses, buddy-boy).
and yet there are some individuals who appear to make a very deliberate effort to excommunicate people for no good reason whatsoever. and when i say "people" i mean, primarily, "me". i quoted for a site for a local college. it was quite a big quote, but they said they were happy with it, and after they received a written quote from me to submit to the local education authority, work could begin. so i dutifully sent out my written quote the very same day.
a week goes by.
having heard nothing, i send an email asking them to confirm that the written quote had been received. no reply. 3 more days go by, so i try calling; there's no reply, so i leave a message. the following week, i have not only not received a reply email, but i also haven't received a return telephone call. so i send another email, this time to the school's general enquiries address. guess what happened? they apologised profusely, and gave a me £5 gift voucher. really? no. i heard nothing. and this pattern continues for a couple of weeks. i sent at least three emails, and left the same number of phone messages, and i don't hear shit. so this week i went mental, and i finally spoke to someone today.
lawrie: "hello, it's lawrie from gaijin design. i was just ringing to confirm that you had received the written quote for the l.e.a., and i was wondering what the state of play was with the website."
other person: "oh, hello. yes, i think everything happened while i was away, but as far as i can determine, your bid was unsuccessful and we've gone with another company."
l: "but... i came in for an hour-long meeting about the design of the website. i was told you were definitely going with us. and even so, why has no one replied to any of my messages?"
op: "well, obviously a lot happened during the holidays, and your bid was unsuccessful."
l: "that doesn't actually explain anything, or even make any sense."
op: "..."
l: "you bastard. i know where you live."
op: "..." [click!]
l: "hello? i'm going to get you while you sleep! fear me!"
[dial tone]
so, if someone could please buy me this set of steak knives as soon as possible, then i can get on with exacting my revenge. thankyou.
damnit shite. tom coates has started the 'not best british weblog' competition, and now i wish i had entered that instead, but i can't. i would have sent him two mince pies. damn my own vanity. it has a red robot in the logo and everything. look:
i would like to add that to my template, but a) i'm not entirely sure where it would fit, and b) i can't fucking edit my template anyway. thanks to the advice of danny (who, by the way, is an excellent photographer), jez (who is also a great photographer), and michael (who has probably taken photos...), i am switching over to movable type in the next couple of weeks. thankyou all for saving me from having to use my own brain.
mutant porno it seems that, between jez and myself, coming up so high for abnormally large reproductive organ searches, we could make some freak porno movies that could only be legally sold in the sewers of amsterdam.
hectic stuff: mumfy is going on holiday tomorrow. for reaons that are none of your business, her dadoo can't go on a last-minute deal thing that mumfy's parents had booked, but her mom still wants to go. and so they're off. i'm probably still going to spend most of my time at emily's house anyway, because her bed is comfy, and my house is starting to feel like an office; my stepdad blatantly doesn't want me here, and i feel like, if i don't get well enough away from my computer after doing my work, i might fall into the screen.
i've seen lots of signs that have amused me recently, and i *might* make a little gallery of photos i intend to take of these signs. and perhaps i'll call the gallery 'signs', in tribute to the eagerly-awaited m. knight shyamalan's 'signs' (first place on google for 'signs', here i come). also, i have made the decision to switch from blogger to either greymatter or movable type, since i haven't been able to change my template for the past two months and it's driving me bugshit. does anyone know anything about either of these blog tools, and whether i'll be able to port all of my old blogger archives over to them? answers on a comment please, addressed to lawrie, 1 lawrie lane, lawrieland. doesn't lawrieland sound like the greatest theme park ever?
