As it turns out, I need not have worried. I really like the album! OK, I’ll admit that it’s not exactly ground-breaking – it’s still heavily influenced by the later years of the Beatles, and let’s face it, Noel Gallagher was never going to release a grind-core album, but it’s different enough that you don’t think you’re listening to a new Oasis album.

In fact it’s interesting, listening to the last Oasis album, High Flying Birds, and the Beady Eye album (Beady Eye is the band formed by Liam Gallagher and the rest of Oasis after the split). You can tell exactly who was responsible for what songs on the last album after listening to the two independent ones. You can spot the Noel tracks because of similarities between them, and you can spot the Liam/rest of the band tracks because the Beady Eye album could have been lifted straight from a later Oasis record!

In short, if you’re a fan of Noel’s Oasis B-sides and the Noel-sung tracks on the later albums, you won’t be dissapointed here. It’s a good first effort by the Master of Britpop, and I hope he continues to diversify on the following records.

The reason for this rather arbitrary demand? Glad you asked! The Square are playing host to the Collectors Fair: Take 2, which is organised by my good friend Wes. Basically, he tales over the Square for the day and people set out stalls selling collectibles, music, clothes, whatever! It’s like the cool bits of eBay right there, in my local venue.

In addition to the ability to purchase cool stuff without paying P&P, and without the risk of it turning up in the post broken/nothing like it looked in the pictures/missing, you can also gawk at, pose with, take photos of, and generally schmooze with the heroic men and women of the Essex Ghostbusters (now including myself and Onion Girl)!

I’m also (not so) secretly attempting to get some other local cosplayers/costumers to turn up, so you never know who will be browsing Smithy’s record stall next to you…

If this goes half as well as the first one did then a great time will be had by all, and we’ll all go away with some masterful photos and some awesome purchases.

So come down. And bring money!

TTFN

PS: Anyone local that wants a stall should contact Wes: zombiewes@hotmail.co.uk, or call Adam on (01279) 305000

You can imagine the sort of response I’d get if I tried to pull that. There’d be feeble laughter, turning to annoyance and anger as they realised I wasn’t joking. Then there’d be complaints, disciplinarys, and if I kept it up I’d lose my job.
So why is it that when I left my house this morning after our rubbish should have been collected (only the recycling, mind! Our regular refuse has to fester for another seven days before they’ll deign to collect it), I was greeted by the pile of extra recycling we’d left out for collection, with an “advisory” notice attached to our bin. Apparently they couldn’t take the extra recycling because it was in black bin bags. The bags were untied (as per the guidelines) and placed safely next to the recycling bin (as per the guidelines) but they were black so they can’t empty them. So the people paid to collect our recycling wouldn’t collect our recycling (or as I prefer to say “Do their jobs”) because the bags that they had to empty were the wrong bloody colour!

Ridiculous barely covers this situation. Laughable, pathetic, stupid beyond belief – they help to describe it. Yet more blind adherence to short-sighted regulations enforced by local government.

What makes this worse is that now – unless I want to wait another two week for the next recycling collection – I have to put this recycling into my own car (which, unlike the vehicle given to the refuse collectors, is no designed to transport refuse), and drive it to the local dump where it will be deposited in with the general waste, completely defeating the whole point of the recycling exercise.

I really hope that a UK refuse collector reads this, or even better, one of their superiors, because I would love to discuss their idiotic collection policies (but nowhere near as much as I’d like to ram one of the uncollected wine bottles into their eye).

Apologies if all this vitriol and suburban rage is a bit much to take this early in the morning. Normal service will resume shortly.

TTFN

So we now have a new place, which we are picking up the keys for tomorrow afternoon! This will mean we won’t have to crash at my parents any longer, and that we can finally access all our stuff which is currently squirrelled away in boxes at various peoples houses.

Now, all I have to do is make it through today, and a day of hefting boxes and furniture around tomorrow, and I may finally be able to relax….

TTFN

It’s a geek lifestyle blog, which basically means its us and our friends writing about stuff which we think is cool, and will eventually cover almost every geeky facet of our world (at least, that’s the plan). So if you have a few minutes, may I be so bold as to suggest you take a quick look and let us know what you think. There’s not too much over there at the moment since we’re just starting out, but it will grow with time (especially when I start pestering more people to write for us – I’m looking at you NerdGirls!).

TTFN

Brace yourselves, this may be quite long…

So, we arranged with the Estate Agent a moving date of Saturday 11th June. He contacted the current tenant of the property (who also happens to be the landlady) and this date was agreed by all, and so we all organised removal vans, time off work, the cancellation of services and utilities to our existing homes, etc. and prepared for the big day. However, two days before we were due to move – Thursday – Larter (who we’re moving in with) calls me to say there may be a problem with moving on the Saturday, but it hadn’t been confirmed yet. He was waiting on a call back from the estate agent. Anyway, after a few hours of waiting, I called the agent myself, and he was still waiting to hear back from the landlady. Thursday drew to a close with still no word, so the three of us (Larter, Onion Girl, and myself) agreed to go to the office of the agent the following morning since we’d all booked the time off work to spend the day packing the final boxes and making last-minute preparations.

When we arrived he explained that the the current tenant wasn’t just a tenant, she was the property owner, and would be our landlady when we moved in – this neatly did away with our demand that she be moved out and we be moved in, since she’d reached the end of her tenancy and Onion Girl and I were about to be made homeless (our tenancy was due to end the following Tuesday). Apparently the landlady was waiting for final paperwork (some council survey or something) to be wrapped-up by her solicitors, and had assumed it would only take them a few days. This meant that there was a possibility of us still being moved in that weekend, or Monday at the latest. This wasn’t too bad, as we’d all booked the following week off to unpack and settle in to the new place.

However, ten minutes after we left the office, we received a call from the agent with some rather grim news – the landlady had contacted her solicitors and they had informed her that this paperwork could take up to two weeks to complete. This meant no moving that weekend. In attempt to explain how this made us feel, imagine on Christmas Eve you discover that Christmas no longer exists, and then someone runs up and kicks you in the stomach. Yeah, it was a bit like that.

So, we hurried back to the agents office to discuss possible ways out of this – Onion Girl and I were due to be leaving our flat permanently in less than four days, and the house wouldn’t be available for at least a week after that… The agent (to his credit) did try very hard to find alternatives. He offered us temporary accommodation in a shared house, and even spent time with us searching on line for other properties offered through other agencies. Fortunately for us, when we spoke to our current estate agent, they were willing (and able since the new tenant isn’t moving in ’til the 1st July) to let us extend our tenancy at the Rooncave by two weeks.

This meant that our week off was utterly wasted, which was annoying, and it meant we’d now need to book yet more time off for when we actually moved. But we couldn’t do that yet since we didn’t know exactly when that would be! So, the following Saturday (one week after we should originally have moved house) we returned to the agents office, and he finally gave us something approaching good news – the survey/paperwork had been completed, and the final exchange of contracts was going ahead early the following week, meaning that we should be good to move in the 28th June (the day our extended tenancy ends at the Rooncave), if not before.

And that’s where we stand at the moment. We’re still chasing the agent to get confirmation of the exact date we’ll be moving, be it this weekend or early next week (which, now that I come to think of it, is bloody ridiculous! We’re moving at some point in the next seven days, but we have no idea when!), Onion Girl is still stressing herself mad about the whole thing, and I’m starting to wish we hadn’t bothered at all. What exacerbates the whole situation is that the estate agent has only once in the last two and a half months returned my calls. Or any of our calls. Or e-mails. Even on the Thursday morning when we first discovered there was an issue, it was Larter calling him. The agent has been utterly useless, and we will not be using the agency again (I shan’t post their name here, but those on my FaceBook will know which agency I’m talking about) because they’ve proven themselves utterly unreliable and totally unprofessional – before they even advertised the property they should have gotten confirmed, precise dates from the landlady/tenant and stuck to them. We’re their newest customers, and they’ve already nearly made us homeless (any further delays and we will actually be homeless, sleeping on my parents floor!)!

Anywho, I’m about to call the estate agent yet again and try to get an exact moving date so that I can book the time off… wish me luck.

TTFN

Suffice to say the big move didn’t happen, and but we were only told it wouldn’t happen less than twenty-four hours before we were due to load the van and pick-up the keys….

I’ll leave you with your appetites whetted.

TTFN

I swear the damn things are breeding...

And we still have most of our stuff not in boxes. This means that next week is going to be rather busy. Especially since the Onion Girl hasn’t even started packing (Aimee, the few items of yours that I’ve packed do not count, so don’t even try!), claiming that she “doesn’t know where to start”.

Tonight I should probably be doing some more packing, or at the very least doing something more than writing an idle and actually rather pointless blog, but I just can’t seem to find the motivation, so instead I’m killing time before Onion Girl finishes work by writing down some of the inane things I would probably share with my cronies if I were going out tonight.

Ooooh, did I mention my latest costuming project? Well, since the Stromtrooper armour is going to be an ongoing project to get it through clearance with the 501st Garrison, I wanted to do another easily recognisable costume that wouldn’t have to go through the rigorous inspections and checks required for my armour. And what better costume to do than that of my friends that joined the Roontrooper on his first public outing?

Yes, Onion Girl and I have joined the Essex branch of the Ghosbtusters! My friend Richi founded this particular group, and it seemed like a no-brainer to sign up – especially since I was a huge Ghostbusters fan as a child. We’ve already started ordering our kit, and hopefully by the time we move we’ll have the essentials of two uniforms, and will be ready to start attending events, and look at building our own proton packs!

Sewed on by yours truly

Wow, in writing that sounds even more geeky than I thought! Oh well, I played a gig on Sunday which makes up for it because it meant that I spent time not thinking about geeky sci-fi stuff. I also survived another birthday weekend which included Quasar, early mornings, and enough alcohol to kill a bull Elephant.

O, I think you’ve put up with enough of my chatter for now. I’ll let you all get back to your Friday evenings.

TTFN

The one that springs to mind most readily is Dungeons & Dragons – the ultimate nerd game! Onion Girl, myself, and handful of others started playing a couple of years back. It was light-hearted fun, where a sense of humour (and tolerance for the absurd) was probably more important than your own D20. For one reason and another, the campaign got put on hold. Originally it was to be on hold for a couple of months – that was nearly two years ago!

Obligatory picture to break up the blocks of text!

The other hobby I’ve neglected – even though I’ve probably spent hundreds, if not thousands of pounds on it over the years – is Warhammer 40,000. Another super-geeky pastime, I know, but I got into it as a kid before I knew the harsh realities of the school hierarchy, and before I knew the worlds view on men that play with toy soldiers…

I used to spend almost every evening/weekend playing, building, or painting my armies. My next door neighbour at the time (He Who Shall Not Be Named) also played and was as obsessed as me, so it was ideal. Even played at a few local events. And then the usual things happened – I discovered alcohol, girls, rock and roll – and although I still occasionally bought new figures that caught my eye, and would spend a rare evening painting, I stopped playing (probably doesn’t help that the one guy I knew who had an army and would play with me behaved like a scumbag and is now Excommunicae.)

A second picture to break up my text

But now I’m sat here after reading one of innumerable blogs about Warhammer 40k (Strictly Average to be precise), and I really want to be rolling dice, fighting epic battles, and generally geeking it up like I was fifteen again!

Haha, you’re probably not going to believe this, but as I was writing that last paragraph I got a text from our Dungeon Master asking when we’re available to start playing D&D again! It’s a sign! The Heavens have aligned, and the cosmos has spoken!

Looks like all this nostalgia isn’t for nought after all!

Anyway, that text and the ensuing replies have totally de-railed my little steam train of thought, so I’ll draw to a close here before I just start rambling.

TTFN

Back in school and as an adolescent, name brands were everything. I order to be cool, all of your non-uniform clothing had to bear the logo of one designer brand or another. I remember dreading PE lessons for three months because my Dad had decreed that I should have some cheap trainers for school to save me wearing out my more expensive ones. He bought me an awful pair of nameless trainers from our local market, and that was all I was allowed to wear for PE. He told me that it wasn’t the shoes that made the man, etc. which all sounds very good when you’re a grown man and confident in yourself. When you’re a fourteen year old boy desperately craving acceptance by your peers, it tends to ring hollow.

So I spent those few months trying to sneak my ‘decent’ trainers into school for PE, and when I failed at that, trying my damndest to hide the garishly coloured things by sitting on them, hiding behind things, or just keeping my feet moving as much as possible. Eventually my mother prevailed upon my Dad to change his stance, and I joyfully disposed of the horrid things sometime later. This incident has stuck with me, and although an extreme example, it demonstrates the sort of craving for brand names that dominated my time as a teenager. Outside of school the shirts were all Ben Sherman, the Jeans were all Levi 501’s, and the shoes were all Kickers moccasins (for my social group at least). Although the actual brands and styles changed over the years, the necessity of designer labels didn’t.

If I look through my wardrobe now, although there are brand names and designer labels in there, they weren’t bought because of that. They were bought because they looked good, or because I liked them at the time. Some of my favourite items of clothing are either second-hand or of no discernable brand. Even those that do bear a famous name don’t usually display it openly – it’s confined to a small tab sewn inside the garment somewhere, away from the prying eyes of the public. With me these days it’s all much more about style than brand.

This could all very easily be attributed to me growing up, and being less concerned about other people’s opinions of my clothes and superficial things like whose label is stuck in my t-shirt, but I’ve seen the same thing happening to other people, both of my age and younger.  And I also still know people who place high value in the brand stitched into their jeans, or the printed logo on their shirts, which serves to muddy the waters somewhat. Has there been a general paradigm shift in views towards clothing? Or is it just my paradigm that’s shifted?

I really have no idea.

TTFN