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.
Tag Archives: Pictonauts
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.
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.
Faces in the Woods
So that’s February done and dusted then. Today’s post is coming to you from that strange a magical leap day that tacks itself to the end of February every four years. A place of wonder, mystery and Gregorian convenience. For me, at least, February has not been a month conducive to much writing. I do most of my writing on lazy weekends, sitting in my jim-jams, in front of a computer, drinking tea and slowly tapping out the odd word here and there. There were scant few such weekends this month. I’ve been off on a series of mini-adventures, gallivanting off into London to sample the musical styling of a German metal band and then a jaunt back to my quaint former home of Nottingham for a good old dinner and booze-up. The latter left me a little drained. I took Monday off from work planning to finish off this month’s wordascope in a blizzard of frenzied activity. Instead I spent the whole day sprawled on the sofa trying to work out if I was feeling sick or just really hungry. I eventually concluded it was a bit of both, although it was not so much “gut-rot” as it was, perhaps “gut-mould.” Any time in the evenings over the last few weeks was rapidly devoured by odd bits and bobs like cooking, and more recently work. Specifically defining my goals for the coming year in the strange and alien language of Managerial Moonspeak.
Although I feel as if I’ve made very little progress writing-wise this month my computer seems to disagree. There’s a file sitting snugly on my hard-drive that seems to contain about 2000 words, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Can’t really complain about something like that can I?
February’s Pictonaut Challenge
So we finally arrive for but a brief and fleeting visit to the greatest of all months, February. I like February, not simply because it is the month of my birth (although I suspect that does bias me in some way), but because February is unique, flexible, changeable. February doesn’t play by anyone’s rules. With perhaps the exception of the rules of the Gregorian Calender, but you don’t mess with him, for he is well hard. February is the cool month, standing out from the crowd with it’s 28 days. Were February a person it would wear a leather jacket and have the strange and arcane powers of jukebox necromancy. It’s is also literally cool, well more cold really. The temperature of February being, on average, lower than the rest of the months of winter. Winter, of course, being the greatest of all the seasons, and even though having to pay for my own heating has lessened my love of winter, my love of February remains strong.
Not all people share my love of February however. An Old English word for February was Solmonath which means mud month, which if we’re honest is less than flattering. Although wikipedia tells me that the Finnish, for February is helmikuu, meaning “month of the pearl” which is quite beautiful. My blatant theft from wikipedia aside we should probably get down to business. What with it being the first of the month and all, you folks probably want a picture for the Pictonaut Challenge. You can be so needy sometimes!
The Reliquary
So here we are at the end of January, another month pissed away into the onrushing winds of merciless time. Time is such a dick sometimes, strutting around like it owns the place. Abstract concepts, eh? They’re bastards the lot of them. My futile struggles against the crushing inevitability of existence aside, it also means that it’s time to draw another instalment of the Pictonaut Challenge challenge to a close. So there’s a lining to this cloud. Whether it’s a lining of silver or a lining of a slightly less shitty brown on a wallowy, brown cloud of shit depends entirely on your point of view. Either way, you cannot begrudge my claim that there is, at the very least, some sort of lining.
So then, The Reliquary? What did you make of it?
January’s Pictonaut Challenge
Today is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time for contemplation, reflection and meditation on what has been and gone and what is yet to come. It is 2012, what wonders await us all? With it being the first of the month it’s time for the Pictonaut Challenge begin once again. If you’ve recently made a resolution to do more writing this year then the Pictonaut Challenge should serve as a nice little start. Only a thousand words a month, hardly anything in the way of rules and no real pressure to perform, how can any right thinking writer resist?
A new year always carries with it a little bit of mystery. No one really knows what’s in store, it is unknown and unknowable. This month’s picture has an air of the unknown about it, something I think is most fitting to the dawn of a new year.
The Psychedelic Lady
So we’re finally here at the tail end of 2011. A year which has seen us frail and feckless humans stagger from crisis to crisis, lurching drunkenly through the year. Annus horribilis would not, in my opinion, be an inappropriate description. Riots, civil unrest, violence and economics once again threatening to destroy modern civilisation, it’s been a bit of a shit one if I’m honest. But as ever there is always the faint and guttering light at the end of the tunnel that is hope. Hope that next year will be better, that next year we’ll do things right, that this will be the year we’ll all pull together and make the world a better place. Inevitably that won’t be the case, but it’s nice to hope. Hope keeps you going.
I expect that, as I write this, a lot of you will be donning your glad rags for a night of revelry, drinking, debauchery and the fabrication of embarrassing moments that, come the dawn of 2012, you’ll want to pretend never happened. As for me I’ll be spending the evening in a darkened room, treating tonight like I would any other night: whiling away the hours until bed through a form of procrastination that I have elevated to a high art. It will also be the first time I’ve spent new year’s eve sober in nearly a decade, I’m sure this will prove to be a spectacularly novel experience. In the intervening period between now at the tolling of those twelve strikes at midnight it’s time to draw a line beneath December’s Pictonaut challenge.
The Rogue Verbumancer 
