This week sees me pass something of a 
milestone. Ali over at 12 Book has decided to go off gallivanting and galumphing across Europe; she’ll be gone for about a month. To fill her blog in her absence she asked for guest posts. I wrote one. It goes up on Wednesday 25th of April. In years to come when the world is a blasted ruin and we all live in caves or cardboard houses, when the sky bleeds acid and the very air is a noxious and cloying poison, Ali will look back on this day and say “That. That right there, is where it all began. Where it all started to go horribly wrong. That was the first, big, mistake.” Probably. I suspect that it won’t come to that though. Probably…
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
About The Rogue Verbumancer
Special Guest Star
Cataloguing
I like books. This is a fact that should come as no especial surprise. Books are one of only two vices I profess to having, the other of course being the magically revitalising nectar that is tea. Over the years I have accrued quite a substantial library, as I discovered to my peril when it came time to move house. I’ve performed a few rough counts in the past, primarily to get a rough idea as to just how much cover I needed for my contents insurance. However, I’ve never actually taken an inventory of the whole library. So this weekend, while taking a break from saving the galaxy and allowing my eyes to stop bleeding from all the pixelated violence I had committed, I decided to check out Goodreads.
Dystopia, Why?
It rained sometime during the night. The world’s been distorted into shades of wet greys and everything has a slight sheen to it. The sky’s still an ominous shade of grey as if it’s threatening to drown the world again, whether this proves to be an empty threat or not remains to be seen. Back home rain made everything seem fresh and clean, but down here? Everything seems just as dirty and foul as it did yesterday when it was dry. It’s like a particularly hideous ornament has been polished up because guests are coming round. Polished or not, they’ll still hate the damn thing. I’m once again sitting in my grotty old desk chair, it’s made of faux leather. It’s got a great big tear across the seat where the seams have split, leaving a ragged maw with atrophied lips and misshapen teeth of grey sponge. I’ve tossed a grey tartan blanket over the top to hide the worst. It’s made of acrylic and I like to snuggle into it when it gets too cold. It’s always too cold in my house. I’m choking down factory milled bread slathered in hydrogenated vegetable oil made to imitate churned bovine lactate, this is turn is coated in the black, tarry dregs of a brewer’s vat. It’s all being washed down with a tepid, brown liquid that might once have been tea. I’m a product of the lower middle-class, struggling under the yoke of a disconnected government of rich-elite who hate their population. The divide between the rich and the poor widens daily, inflation spirals ever-upward, the economy’s in recession and the living wage of the average working stiff isn’t going up. The powers that be are trying to introduce plans to monitor all forms of electronic communication. Dystopia doesn’t seem so far away after all. Or perhaps I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I don’t think anyone can argue that living in a dystopian world would be pretty awful. But why is it that dystopian fiction is so popular and so prevalent?
Girl with bow and arrow - The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games came out last week to some pretty rave reviews. As of yet I haven’t heard anyone say a bad thing about it. I was even thinking of going to see it this weekend so that I had a better idea as to what everyone was going on about. But it was cold outside so I stayed inside where there was tea. It is the most recent in a long line of dystopian films to grace cinema screens. We’ve had The Matrix, Blade Runner, Mad Max, Logan’s Run, the list goes on, spiralling all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. The world of books is littered with similar pieces, from the comic-book worlds of Transmetropolitan and Watchmen, to the familiar fields of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New world and more or less everything that Philip K. Dick ever wrote.
April’s Pictonaut Challenge
So it’s April now. April the first no less. A day many associate with frivolity, humour, japes, shenanigans and tomfoolery but at heart is basically a day about lies. Now I’m a big fan of lies, they’re useful when used properly, they protect, they comfort and they enrich. After all as Elim Garak once said “The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination.” I gave some thought as to putting together some form of ruse for April Fool’s Day. Something perhaps witty, tongue in cheek, perhaps even something believable. There were issues with such a plan. In order for it to truly be an April Fool it would have to occur suitably before midday, but midday is the time when the blog is usually posted, any such deviance from this routine would draw suspicion the lie would be obvious, flawed, pointless. I would also like to credit what scant readership that I have with some semblance of a discerning mind, an ability to see through such an obvious ruse as an April Fool’s Day prank. So in the end I decided against it. But there is something to be taken from the associated sanguinity. A lot of what I’ve written recently has been frightfully grim and dreadfully dark. Not pieces which exactly inspire a raucous case of the giggles. So this month’s picture will be something quite ridiculous.
Any Direction
Well that about wraps it up for March and with it the end of 2012 quarter 1. How time flies eh? I’m still trying to acclimatise to the “weather” that’s been assailing the country of late. Temperatures are rocketing their way into the low twenties, my face is starting to melt and I’m still suffering from the institutionalised jet-lag of the clocks going forward. Apparently the UK’s heading towards drought and hose-pipe bans again, there’s panic buying in a farcical petrolocalypse, pasties are becoming subject to VAT, a former contestant from Celebrity Big Brother has just been elected to parliament. The very fabric of the country is beginning to tear and rupture as we spiral out control towards oblivion. And all the while the puppet masters of our minority government dance about in their pants quaffing caviare and singing about how great it is to be fabulously wealthy and that the poor should stop complain and do the decent thing and just roll over and die. By and large, things progress onwards much like every other month in recent memory. I suppose I should be thankful for the familiarity, even if it’s less than comforting. On the subject of familiarity it’s the end of the month, another pictonaut wraps up. There’s things to be read. Hop to it.
In Memoriam
I’m not emotionally equipped to deal with most things, least of all death. Last Tuesday, slightly before half past nine in the evening, I received a phone call and through stifled sobs was told that my friend James was dead. It’s the sort of news that knocks the wind right out of you. It was one of those moments where life pops up and shouts “Oh hi there! You’re not using that heart are you? Great! Now let me carve it out of your chest with this comically large spoon. And since I’m here I may as well take your digestive tract too. You don’t need that. Thinking about it I’m sure you can manage just fine if I just hollow you out completely.” When life decides to take a swing at you it always swings in with the haymaker. I’m never quite sure how to react to a bombshell like that. I probably spent an hour just staring off into space trying to get my head round it. Even now, almost a week later it hasn’t really sunk in. Part of me still believes it’s all just an elaborate joke. Denial makes it easier, it makes the unbearable just a little bit easier to swallow. It tides you over until the pain isn’t quite so sharp, until it’s just a little easier to live with. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Despite the inevitability and ubiquity of death, humanity seems to try so very hard to avoid recognising it as even there. Bit the bullet, bought the farm, shuffled off their mortal coil, pushing up the daisies, checked out, cashed in their chips, the list goes on. We avoid it because it hurts. It hurts like all manner of hell.
Vocabulary
I HAVE COME FOR YOUR NOUNS!
There are a great many things wrong with the English language. It’s an unwieldy and bloated monster of a thing, a linguistic Yog-sothoth and just as ubiquitous and just as malign. All that finds itself in its path is destroyed, consumed and repurposed. It is a language of empire, of colonialism and of tyranny. It is my mother tongue and for that I count myself immensely grateful. I dread to think what it’s like to actually learn English as a second language, especially considering how much of a mess of it we native speakers make. Our syntax is a twisted bastardisation of something faintly Germanic and our verb conjugation is, at its very best, completely nonsensical. It has rigid and unbreakable rules that must be followed, but only if you feel like it. It has a vast and intricate system of grammar that is almost universally ignored. We have in excess of four hundred homophones in regular use and perhaps most annoyingly of all, just as soon as you think you’ve got the entire thing licked, when you finally think you can say “English, thou art Conquered! Thou art like unto my bitch [yo!]” it goes and changes. It is fluid and ever-changing, forever in flux, it cannot be mastered or tamed and it cannot be killed, it is a lexical Lambton Worm. But all of this is not without its upsides.
One of those Moods…
Last weekend was weird. Seriously weird. Not through any particular event but just from how it felt upstairs in the brain department. Even walking home from work on Friday night I could feel myself slipping into what I refer to as “one of those moods…” It’s hard to explain what one of these moods is like. It’s a bizarre and surreal no-man’s-land between anger and depression. It wells up from deep inside and just takes over. It feels like flying and falling at the same time. It swings pendulum like from one extreme to the other. On Saturday afternoon I was on the back-swing from misery when I started to get angry, really angry. When anger rears its vitriolic head I tend to get very vocal; I tend to get very… political. My friends love it when I’m like this, they derive immense amusement from my directionless, shouty rants against the injustices of the world.
This is exactly what happened this Saturday. With all the feckless stumbling and hypocritical posturing in the modern political world there is no shortage of things to be angry about. So I opened up a big fat can of righteous indignation and went to war on my keyboard.
RAWR!
“A Man’s Got to Have Rules”
There’s a problem with Callis. The problem is that, on a fundamental level, he is a truly awful person. He after all kills people for money, and he rather enjoys his work. This in of itself would not inherently be a problem if he was a supporting character or a bit part, but I had to go and make him the eponymous star of a series of short stories which I’ve been writing for the last two years. This means that I have to undertake the arduous task of some how making the reader connect with him. How you get a complete stranger to related to a cold-blooded murderer is not something easily done. I don’t even know if I’ve been successful in achieving this. I’d like to think that I have. I like Callis as a character, but that might just be speaking to the state of my diseased brain-meats.
One idea which occurred to me was that he have his own set of “rules,” not an entirely original idea I’ll admit. The way I see it, even bad people need to have rules they abide by. If they don’t then they’re hardly going to be able to function even on the fringes of society.
March’s Pictonaut Challenge
So here we are again. The start of another month and time for more wordascope based shenanigans. We find ourselves in March today, a month I generally feel signals the start of Spring. Spring’s all right I suppose. There will however be no pictures based on, nor tangentially related to: bunnies, eggs, flowers or a seemingly all right chap getting nailed to a big tree because some Romans got drunk and thought it’d be “a right laugh”. As most gamers know there are more important things happening this month.
It was quite clear that last month’s picture had quite a heavy fantasy feel to it. I thought it only fair that this month I should swing to the other end of the spectrum and throw out something distinctly more sci-fi in nature. There is also another reason for this. March 6th finally sees the release of Mass Effect 3 a sci-fi computer game which I am rather looking forward to playing. It’s an action-RPG affair with a storyline that has enthralled millions, some folk on the internet have even gone so far as to call it “The most important science-fiction universe of our generation.” Like Skyrim it also involves everything going horribly pear-shaped because of the appearance of a vast, all-powerful, malevolent entity. While Skyrim had dragons, Mass Effect has evil, robotic, space-cuttlefish (and no, I am not joking in the slightest); adventure and heroism of a sort then follow. Needless to say writing will suffer to some extent.
The Rogue Verbumancer 
