This post is arriving after noon so as to avoid the plethora of April Fools related shenanigans and totally not because I popped out to buy milk. The start of April is always a bit silly, hell the entire month is a bit silly. It rolls up declaring “Look! It’s definitely spring now! The weather is going to be so much better now!” And then it promptly tips it down for nearly the entire month. April is a month of lies and absurdity. Last Year I picked a fairly bizarre image for April’s Pictonaut Challenge, so I decided to stay in a similar vein this year. Combine this with the fact that today is one of the UK’s scant few public holidays, that means tomorrow the vast majority of us are back to work. So in keeping with that, and a desire for general absurdity we have Office Warfare.
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
About The Rogue Verbumancer
Going For a Walk
It is March 31st and let me just say now, for the record, I am most assuredly not going for a walk. As fellow Brits are probably well aware we’ve just entered British Summer Time, BST, Bastard-Shitting-Timechange. Last night Time snuck into my room while I slept and stole from me an hour of rest. Now I’ve got a horrible fug in my head, a slight headache and a general desire to crawl under a particularly large rock and die. I have what can be best described as a case of temporal jet-lag. I can fly half way around the world and laugh at the mere notion of travel based jet-lag, but the minute the clocks change it comes and hits me, quite literally, where I live. But you didn’t come here to read about my dodgy circadian rhythms. You came here for stories. Or because you googled something seriously weird.
High Adventure
I spent this weekend in the wilds of deepest, darkest Essex. A place which I like to think of as more or less perfectly fitting the bill of the anti-north. I was renewing acquaintances with an old friend of mine. There had been a forecast of snow, but when Saturday morning finally rolled around I did not expect to find it lying so thick and heavy. All plans to go or to do were abandoned as we found ourselves housebound. Not so much due to an inability to leave the house, but through the plain common sense that perhaps driving anywhere that day might not actually be very near the top of a list titled “Clever Things To Do.” Gravitating to the kitchen, as all right-thinking folk do, we quickly found ourselves embroiled in a tale of high adventure, with epic quests and feats of daring do as we set out the reshape the world with our deeds.
Behold! The Hinterlands of the Atlantean Kingdoms
At a Loss
Sometimes I honestly have no idea what to blog about. And today is one of those days. How I’ve kept this up for nearly two years boggles the mind. So here I am sitting in my lounge, the gloom of a British spring slowly darkening the skies and I am at a loss as to what to type. In order for there to be something to blog about I generally have to be doing something that could by considered “interesting” or at the very least, be the tangential spin-off from some writing that I’ve been doing. And recently? Well I’ve been doing precious little of either recently
So with little else to say I will tell you what I did this weekend. I bought milk.
I bought the fridge some milk. Fridges love milk.
Peak Blog
All good things must come to an end. In the time since that idiom was first coined, whole nations have risen and entire empires have fallen. And yet, despite all that has gone before, I like many others did not listen. I was seduced by the possibility that things could only ever go up, could only get bigger, that there was no downward slope. But I have paid for my hubris, now I know all too well that the possibility of infinite growth within the confines of a finite system is a quaint illusion. To believe otherwise is folly.
Since I started this blog I have been enthralled by its statistics, the bar-charts, the numbers, the global demographics. As months went by I saw those bars grow and grow. At the end of 2012 I hit an all time record of 1608 hits in a single month. Then it all started to go downhill…
March’s Pictonaut Challenge
Time ticks ever onwards. The year fades out of February and into March. The cogs of causal reality whirr and click in the heart of the great and unfathomable machine that is the universe. Winter is petering out and the days are getting warmer. Spring is just around the corner. Spring is a time of change and of new beginnings. Admittedly, depending on how you look at it, the same could be said for all the seasons but that is beside the point. The last two Pictonaut Challenges have been a bit on the grim side. All dark and gloomy, a little bit lonely and depressing, more wintery moods. I think it’s time for a bit of a change of pace and a change of scenery. With the weather starting to get milder and the evenings getting shorter I think it’s high time we pulled on our boots, put on a nice, light and airy coat, because we’re Going For A Walk.
Dead Places
It’s a sad thing to come to the end of February. February is cool. Cool in the sense that fezes and bow-ties are cool. It’s cool in the temperate sense too, but that’s neither here nor there. I do enjoy February. But all good things must come to an end. I’m closing the month on something of a high-note. I remain physiological intact, if somewhat mentally disparate, and in the last week I have been spectacularly productive. So productive that I think I’ve been the victim of some cruel and insidious trick. An anthology piece is done, and against all odds I managed to finish off this month’s wordascope in record time. The blog is now a whole two years old and I’m still going. All-in-all I think a small “woohoo” is in order.
Woohoo.
Victory At Any Cost
There are few things quite so satisfying as getting something finished. When you finally limp and stagger over the ill-defined finish line and collapse onto your back, facing the sky screaming “I did it. I DID IT!” Before descending into a fit of manic and unintelligible laughter based gibbering. That, dear readers, is pretty much what happened yesterday at about half past nine in the evening. Back at the start of January I was harping on about an anthology piece that I was hammering away at. It has been a bugbear of mine for far too long. I’m not very good at multi-tasking my projects, if I’ve got something on the go it is that and that alone which consumes my attention and energy. This of course is extremely frustrating when the aforementioned project simply refuses to be written. But with the first deadline looming at the end of the month I gritted my teeth and performed the literally equivalent of dragging someone into an alley and brutally beating them to death with an old chair leg.
A Very Small Holiday
I’m recharging my batteries at the moment. Now you’d think that would be what the weekend was for, and ordinarily you’d be right. But this weekend I took a small holiday and have subsequently taken today off. Primarily because any form of travel leaves me feeling drained, knackered, broken and decidedly inhuman. So today has become a compressed weekend in lieu of an actual weekend, a day where I do nothing except vigorously neck pint mugs filled with tea. As Elbert Hubbard said “No one needs a holiday more than the man who has just had one.”
The holiday in question was a flying visit to my old stomping grounds of Nottingham. It served a very important purpose. My body might be curled up in a small heap and groggily telling my brain to “fuck off” at the merest suggestion of movement, while recharging itself to a point where I can once again pass for human; but this holiday served to reboot my brain. Something I have been in sore need of doing.
Seriously, fuck trains.
Treachery
I have always generally been my own worst enemy. A great many of my endeavours have been ruined or hampered by my own laziness, chronic inaction, fear or doubt. But generally that has been something I’ve been willing to live with. Such things are after all generally just an accepted fact of being human. But this weekend I found new and exciting ways to bring grief upon myself. For thus weekend I discovered that I must roam this mortal realm forever trapped inside a traitor.
The Rogue Verbumancer 