Today I was so busy I didn’t have a shower until 2pm, Frank Iero’s new record is playing and I still don’t hate this layout. I feel like that is more than enough excitement for a Friday, although I might go and add something to the sidebar to really push the boat out. I haven’t not showered in the morning for months, because one of the reasons I’ve not excelled as a freelancer is that I never took myself seriously as a freelancer and I’ve tried to change that with a SOLID ROUTINE, but… today I overslept. Quite a lot.
Look, I bought extra-soft pyjamas recently and my bed is very comfortable. My body clearly needed me to stay asleep and have a really weird dream about putting my boyfriend into the path of an oncoming train. Molly from Sherlock was the bad guy. Chantal Claret was there.
I don’t have a boyfriend and I’m pretty sure Molly from Sherlock is the only thoroughly decent character in the show. But it was almost nice to neck two coffees and two teas in about three hours while I tried to remember I’m supposed to be earning money – kind of a throwback to the shitty old days when I had clients who didn’t pay for four solid months and I’d stay up late frantically Googling ways to make my Etsy more profitable.
I don’t think I’ll miss that when I go to Asia. Wait. Did I mention I’m going to Asia? I can’t remember who I’ve told.
I’m going to Asia!
In January. With my younger-ish brother and a backpack. I didn’t want to talk about it until we booked tickets, but now we have and it’s real and I need external reassurance I won’t get lost in a town in Laos or fall into one of the jars at the Plain of Jars or accidentally offend the Thai people by saying the wrong thing about their late king.
I will definitely talk more about this in the coming months, but right now I can hear my pyjamas calling and I accidentally pulled my wrist playing with dumbbells, so I will leave this here.
May your Friday evening be as ridiculously low key as mine is. And let me know if you know a good backpack retailer.
I hate the name of this series but I can’t think what to rename it, so here we go. (Yes I am on holiday right now. I did some magic. I am on a beach and probably asleep.)
Why isn’t my youth like that. Where are the denim jackets? The masses of people? The bowling alley that isn’t scummy? My local bowling alley is a shithole with way less gays – or it was in 2009, which was the last time I bothered going. I don’t much like denim jackets. Also, is it just me or are half the people in that video too young for tape recorders.
This video summed up my psyche before my psyche was my psyche. I love the word psyche.
I remembered this when I was doing the Indifferent Ignorance Retrospective and I think I should watch it more often. It should be required viewing.
Today is 25 years since the start of public access of the world wide web (thank you for my jobs, Tim Berners-Lee) and I wanted to find something to encapsulate why the Internet is so important, but to be honest I think this shit hole of a website does the trick. I can’t find evidence of what it looked like back in 2009 (shout out to anyone who put up with the luminous green type) but here are some other gems from the last six and a half years.
I am still so proud of that tagline. I only got rid of it when I started The Webways and wanted to avoid brand confusion. (October 2011)
Oh god that’s where my graphic designing started. Also, shout out to Sweet Pea! (October 2011)
I don’t know what went wrong here, but I do seem to remember archiving it on the Way Back Machine so I could remember it in years to come. High five, 17 year old me. (December 2013)
This was a total accident. I was playing about with new theme ideas, because the Bueno one (see above and every post for about five years) wasn’t supported by WP any more – I didn’t realise that I had activated a new one, not just previewed it, and couldn’t get the original back. This was as close as I could get to how it was, and I’m still not sure how I feel about those circles. (August 2015)
My Goth phase. (October 2015)
And that concludes this post, because I have to go use the Internet to look at crap people have written on a micro blogging site.
I hadn’t realised it’s been over a week since I published; I’ve been working on a long-ish post but I’ve been trying to take my time over anything longer than a couple of paragraphs so you can expect it around the same time as the Chilcot report. In the mean time, I think it’s very important that we take a moment to appreciate the t-shirt Frank Iero designed recently.
I cannot really afford to buy more t-shirts, partly because I have both an MOT and a bill for new glasses approaching, and partly because I own 34564 t-shirts and wear about three of them on a regular basis. But.
But.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to wear it. Maybe I could just hang it up above my bedroom door so it’s the first thing I see every day. A benevolent Sweet Pea dream catcher. When I get my own place I could hang it in the entrance hall as a warning to all who enter.
The real question isn’t ‘should I get a Sweet Pea t-shirt’. It’s ‘where can I make one with my own dogs’ faces’.
This year has some new categories and tough competition!
Books of the Year
I’ve stopped trying to pick one.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, which I thought was going to be about whiny teenagers and is actually a lovely story about twins with great names who go to university in Nebraska. One of them writes a fanfiction that has thirty thousand hits a day. Whatever you think it will be like, you’re wrong. Read it if you’ve ever read or written fanfiction.
Or How to Talk to a Widowerby Jonathan Tropper, which I read in Greece. It’s about Doug, a 29-year-old widower who hasn’t left his house in a year except to buy Jack Daniels until his sister comes to stay. The characters are incredibly real and although they’re not nice, you want to spend time with them… I wasn’t sure at first but it is A*.
Blood of Olympusby Rick Riordan. Because Nico and Reyna got their airtime and it was beautiful.
And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. I tried re-reading this recently and I couldn’t because after the first page I remembered how much my stomach was tied in knots the whole flipping book. If I could write like anyone, I’d pick Khaled Hosseini. The power to make your readers cry, man..
The True Lives of My Chemical Romance by Tom Bryant. I read this the Sunday after the #revenge10 meetup in Camden, which was the fist time I’d been able to listen to live MCR since MCR ended. It was lovely hanging out with other fans and not having to explain or justify how much I love this band. The book made me sad in a lot of ways because it opened a window to the inside of MCR, and it was contrary to the image portrayed by the media (and maybe the band) at the time… But by reading the entire history, told objectively by someone who understood and respected the magnitude of MCR, I felt like I could really start to enjoy MCR again. Listening to songs didn’t make me sad any more; I was genuinely excited for the guys’ new work. So thank you to Tom Bryant! Also I met him at #revenge10 and he is a good dude.
Best New Musician
Lorde. Lorde Lorde Lorde. I ignored her stuff for ages because I was bitter and twisted that someone younger than me had a) such great hair and b) worldwide success. I am now over that. Partly because girls should support girls on their quests for awesomedom, and partly because her music is excellent.
Best New Album
Stomachaches.. Hesitant Alien. May Death Never Stop You. Come on, was I going to pick anything else? I haven’t bought anything else! I am turning into an old lady when it comes to new music. I hope to change this in 2015 buy physical copies of the music I like.
Live Show of the Year
King Lear (amateur production) in my town. Lear almost dropped Cordelia. Unlike the Sam Mendes production, there was a little room for audience participation – mostly because there was all of 50 people watching and you could make eye contact with most of them.
Most Interesting TV Event
Eurovision… Conchita winning was pretty brilliant in itself, but I think this part of the show may have been the most entertaining for the viewer:
It was very hard to narrow the nominations down this year. So I haven’t.
The purportedly Muslim group calling itself Islamic State. You sirs are giving Islam a terrible name and you ought to be ashamed. My knowledge of Muslim theology is not as thorough as my knowledge of Christianity (A Levels, huh) but I’m pretty sure the Quran is not telling people to behead aid workers and use people as slaves.
Vladimir Putin and his inner government group. (I am not sure what the Russian name for that is.) Do you actually think no one minds or has noticed that you’re rebuilding the Iron Curtain? Please stop. I would like to go to Eastern Europe and Russia in my lifetime without feeling like I’ve stepped into 1965.
The citizens of America who think it is 1965. It’s not. Shooting people is not even remotely a good thing. Shooting them based on their skin colour is even worse. You’re embarrassing your country.
Okay I think that is enough for one post. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions for different winners or new categories? I couldn’t think up a category for Chantal Claret’s Pledge campaign, for example, or one for Lola, the chimp who does Gerard Way’s PR. 2014 has been an action-packed, sometimes-hilarious-but-mostly-depressing-news-stories year!
Despite the plethora of wonderful ideas you all had for how I could celebrate Indifferent Ignorance turning five, I have come up with my own celebration. It’s called Five-ish Ways to Celebrate Five Years of Blogging and is coming to an Internet-connected device near you between now and November!
I say five-ish things because I’m not completely sure if a couple of them will come to fruition or when, so check back regularly to see which number we’re on.
The first thing is on Tumblr now, because I thought it would be funny if my first blog celebration was held on my scrubbly little non-blog (I don’t get out much). Plus I need to post it before I go to Greece. It hurts my heart to part with MCR possessions, but it turns out that a couple of the magazines were spares anyway, and those posters deserve to be put up somewhere, hence the giveaway.
The next four or so things will be revealed in good time, ie when I’ve put them together. Right, I’m off to drink some coffee and celebrate entering my last year of teenage-dom. I’m kind of bummed that I’ve only got a year to change the lyrics of Teenagers to “we” instead of “they”, and only a year to use “I’m a teenager” as an excuse for being rude to people, but so far 19 is looking peaceful and productive.
Probably because I’ve done little but write copy for zoos and look at MCR merch.
Don’t worry if you don’t much understand the whole Roman Empire/Republic of Rome shebang – just watch the entire Star Wars series in story order (not order in which they were made. I know that means starting off with Jar Jar Binks but that’s the price of education I’m afraid). Alternatively you could read the Heroes of Olympus series, which explains things pretty well (again, I recommend starting with Percy Jackson and the Olympians so you have a clue who all the characters are. They’re short, it’ll take a weekend tops).
Speaking of old Seaweed Brain – why Francesca, how did you make that connection? – Uncle Rick’s newest piece, Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods, is out in the US today. The English one is out already but has been ignored by me in the shops because the US is the only version with John Rocco’s art and I’d rather save for the extortionate shipping and get a cute cover plus illustrations than blow the last of my Waterstones cards on the ugly one.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, psh.
Speaking of significant dates.
31st October is kind of a big deal this year, because – as well as being Frank Iero’s 33rd birthday – it marks five years of this place being open for business.
Five years.
You know a lot of marriages don’t last that long? I’m going to be cracking out the decent booze to celebrate. Only joking, I’ll probably reminisce about luminous green font and wonder where the hell my life went.
But seriously, I do kind of want to celebrate. The average life expectancy for a blog is three-to-six months, so these bigger landmarks should probably be shouted from the rooftops.
From shitshilarious.tumblr.com
I’m just not sure how. I mean, in an ideal world I would have an Indifferent Ignorance t-shirt (or more specifically, many t-shirts which you guys would also have) or cute yet punk rock badges. But the world ain’t ideal so until 500 people comment every week I’m going to presume I’ve not got an audience big enough to viably produce ‘stuff’.
But I really do want to do something.
Maybe a zine of my blogging pearls of wisdom? A video blog (seems redundant)? A giveaway of… short stories?
Maybe just a collection of my five favourite GIFs.
I’m kind of bummed out that no one’s really picked up on the irony of the WWI commemorations being immediately followed on news bulletins by info on the Gaza war… I’m also fed up with being bummed out so I’ve been watching Frank’s new video for intestine-filled kicks. Is it also ironic that Frank’s a vegetarian?
Anyway, I’ve been tapping away at commissions and etching out a legit portfolio site, which you can expect to see in roughly 3.7 million years or when I’ve got the cash to replace the standard colour palette with something I like. Business is a little slow at the moment – possibly because everyone’s on holiday, possibly because they’ve all been mesmerised by the Commonwealth Games and haven’t yet left their sofas.
[Insert imaginary GIF of a diver diving off the 10m board here. I thought it would look cool because their twisty dives are brilliant and hypnotic but there is not one fucking GIF of a single diver in action. So here is an entire YouTube video. Please go to 3 minutes 40 seconds to get whatever the fuck I was aiming to post about two hours ago before 20 tabs Googling Tom Daley drove me mad. The rest of the post was finished two hours ago. Two hours. I’m going to have nightmares about search engines.]
Anyway. I was thinking that it would be cool to do little flash fiction giveaways every week, to keep my mini story muscles flexed (my friend Jay has asked me to do 5k words on a prompt inspired by Cloud Atlas, a book I haven’t actually read. Expect it in one-to-two weeks!).
So if you fancy reading something shorter than a Vice article but longer than the phrases on coffee mugs, leave a comment with an idea or phrase and I’ll rustle something up!
Francesca's Thoughts 