The perks of being a wallflower.

And I thought I Edward Cullen was the most marvellous fictional boy in literature.

Charlie.

The titular wallflower, the boy who writes in his diary that manifests as this book, the character I've most been able to identify and empathise with in my entire life.

Inspirational, is the only word I can really describe this book as. As I write this it's 3am, or thereabouts, and all I want to do is... something, anything, something productive. I can't wait to properly start the day and make something, or plan something, or do something. I want to find somebody else who's read this book so I can talk to them about it. I read somewhere that 2 people decided not to kill themselves because they read this book, and I was always skeptical of a book having that kind of power, but I can see why. It's because the book makes you feel the way Charlie feels, such as when he says goodbye to his friends, you feel sad as though it was you, but the important thing is how Charlie helps you understand that it's okay to feel like that.

My personal favourite part of this book is a moment where he is told that being a friend is about being yourself, and not about moulding yourself around what your friends want. And to be a good friend is to be honest, and to not change how you act around anyone.

I don't really know why I'm writing this down, as the only people who'll read this probably know all this anyway. I just think it needed to be said... or at least, I needed to say it. Whether it has any effect or not, I needed to clear my head.

Quotes from the book;

I guess I realised at that moment that I really did love her. Because at that moment there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter.

This one kid with crooked teeth named Leonard called me "teacher's pet" in the hallway after class, but I didn't mind because I think he missed the point somewhere.

The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with nostalgia.

This could well be the only blog I write that has any real meaning behind it, so in that respect, it's unique. So I'm keeping it as safe as I can in as many places as possible, because right now, in the wake of reading this book, everything's so... okay, and I want to be able to remember this feeling because it probably isn't going to last long.

As it stands...

... I am the only one of our original 3 bloggers to at least have attempted to do one every day. So far Skank has missed two days where I only missed one, which was due to a party, a damn good party too.

Yesterday I officially began my christmas break, two weeks with nothing college-ey to do, just chores and other menial tasks. Hopefully I can catch up on my reading and my sleep, while also getting presents, money and damn good food.

Today I began reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I love the first... bit (it doesn't come in chapters) and cannot wait to read it all, I've heard so many good things about this book that I'm sure it will be a letdown, as is the case with most things that are hyped these days.

Well, I'm off to kill more zombies and then recover more, until tomorrow!

Nothing to report

So here is a string of sentences.

I'm thirsty. It's 11pm. I'm going for a shower soon. I'm a badass at flying helicopters on GTAIV. I'm really freakin thirsty. I still haven't listened to Boyce Avenue. I have one day left at college. That day consists of one lesson. That lesson consists of work that I've already finished. I've wrapped some peoples presents. I haven't wrapped other peoples presents. I finally found a present for my mother. I'm really bad at wrapping presents. I'm not really looking forward to tomorrow. I'm going to get a drink now.

Goodnight.

Jumping in puddles

All in all, pretty average day. Pretty average work finishing up, pretty average mock exam, pretty average card games.

I've been worrying about my temper recently, I think it gets out of hand sometimes and I dislike the idea that I'm pissing people off when I'm around them, so I'm gonna work on that, starting now, and try to be a better person.

Two days left! And a total of 3 lessons, 2 technically, since Personal Tutor Session doesn't actually count as a lesson does it? Either way, I'm nearly done, despite the fact we have no christmas tree and I haven't wrapped anybody's presents, I can't wait for the christmas break, some proper sleep and lack of responsbility will do me good I think.

Finally sent my finished UCAS form off today as well, which is exciting, I suppose I'll start getting uni rejections soon, nothing I can do about that now.

If you're gonna blog...

May as well put something with substance in it, whether the substance is good or bad. You know who I'm talking to.

3 more days of college and counting, should have all my work done by tomorrow with luck, thus leaving me two final days to chill, or be assigned random useless work by my teacher, I guess we'll see. Oh what an interesting day that will be.

Finished Twilight today, Edward really is wonderful. I'm not sure how exactly she spawned 3 more books from this series though, but I'll start finding out tomorrow when Skank brings me the sequel, before that I'm gonna bomb some more Prowlers. I feel under pressure knowing there's a queue of people after me who are waiting to borrow this book.

In other news, Sophie asked me to mention her on this, so uh... Sophie, she... exists. And is female, supposedly.

This is all I have to say, sleeptime!

A comedy of horrors

I like it here, in the exact spot I'm in now. Everything's just... okay. Ignoring the fact I have college tomorrow. Things don't bother me as much as they do when I'm out and about, I suppose this has something to do with my preference to be physically alone but still talking to people. I dunno, I would say more on the matter but I can't focus on anything too well at the moment.

Four more days of college until christmas break, hopefully a nice relaxing time, but I'll miss my friends. So I'm gonna do my best to get out of the house as much as possible over those two weeks. Speaking of christmas, I have to wrap presents, quite possibly my least favourite part of christmas.

If you haven't seen Thumbsucker, you should.

I ordered The Perks of Being a Wallflower today, along with the many books I've recently ordered and will be getting for christmas, that's going to be a lot of fun to digest (not literally)

(Untitled)

Drunk drunk drunk durunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk durunk drunk dunk dunk

Not actually that drunk, jhyust a little, typcing may be somewhat illeggible, I guess I@lll find oyut tomorrow.

Mr Brightside is playing, and yuh... that's it, we played Buzz! It's fun, thoyugh takes forever top set up, it felt good to pie Steph outtathe gamne twice

I literally have njothing to say here, just had to do it before midnight.

SDober blog tomorrow! Goosd to gety back into routine

Will the real Batman please stand up?

The Dark Knight arrived! My joy is inexpressible, but I've decided not to watch it yet (a feat I consider similar to not opening your christmas presents as soon as you see them) as me and the family planned to watch Batman Begins and TDK back to back at somepoint, I'd like to preserve the wonder until then.

I nearly fell asleep before, when it wasn't even 11pm! What on earth is wrong with me? Snapped out of that one, it isn't done to fall asleep before 2am on a caturday morning. So I've decided to finally start writing something, I've had a lot of ideas bouncing around up there for a few weeks now, so I'm going to try and smush them into something coherant, then reward myself by watching Peep Show and drinking ribena in bed.

Went out to see Madagascar 2 today, it's uhh... different, like the first one was I suppose. Good blend of adult/kid humour, with a couple of neat political jokes thrown in there. On the whole it had a much grander story than the original, an almost identical ambiguous ending, and about triple the story arcs. I'd recommend it if you like the first one, then again I dunno who I'm recommending it to as the only person who's going to read this was there at the same time I saw it.

Halfway through Twilight! Edward Cullen is actually amazing, like... phwoarrr... That's all I'll say on his delicious subject.

Drunken blogging tomorrow! Gotta look forward to that one.

The mathematics of Christmas.

Let's assume that Santa only visits those who are children in the eyes of the law, that is, those under the age of 18. There are roughly 2 billion such individuals in the world. However, Santa started his annual activities long before diversity and equal opportunity became issues, and as a result he doesn't handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children. That reduces his workload significantly to a mere 15% of the total, namely 378 million. However, the crucial figure is not the number of children but the number of homes Santa has to visit. According to the most recent census data, the average size of a family in the world is 3.5 children per household. Thus, Santa has to visit 108,000,000 individual homes. (Of course, as everyone knows, Santa only visits good children, but we can surely assume that, on an average, at least one child of the 3.5 in each home meets that criterion.)

That's quite a challenge. However, by traveling east to west, Santa can take advantage of the different time zones, and that gives him 24 hours. Santa can complete the job if he averages 1250 household visits per second. In other words, for each Christian household with at least one good child, Santa has 1/1250th of a second to park his sleigh, dismount, slide down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, consume the cookies and milk that have been left out for him, climb back up the chimney, get back onto the sleigh, and move on to the next house. To keep the math simple, let's assume that these 108 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth. That means Santa is faced with a mean distance between households of around 0.75 miles, and the total distance Santa must travel is just over 75 million miles. Hence Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound. A typical reindeer can run at most 15 miles per hour. That's quite a feat Santa performs each year.

What happens when we take into account the payload on the sleigh? Assuming that the average weight of presents Santa delivers to each child is 2 pounds, the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons -- and that's not counting Santa himself, who, judging by all those familiar pictures, is no lightweight. On land, a reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Of course, Santa's reindeer can fly. (True, no known species of reindeer can fly. However, biologists estimate that there are some 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, we cannot rule out flying reindeer.) Now, there is a dearth of reliable data on flying reindeer, but let's assume that a good specimen can pull ten times as much as a normal reindeer. This means that Santa needs 214,200 reindeer. Thus, the total weight of this airborne transportation system is in excess of 350,000 tons, which is roughly four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

Now, 350,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, and this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The two reindeer in the lead pair will each absorb some 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. In the absence of a NASA-designed heat shield, this will cause them to burst into flames spontaneously, exposing the pair behind them. The result will be a rapid series of deafening sonic booms, as the entire reindeer team is vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Meanwhile, Santa himself will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. That should do wonders for his waistline.

Christmas is indeed a magical time.

Failed!

Planned to blog every day... I missed it by (as of writing this exact sentence) 11 minutes.

I'm laid on my floor, why is the floor more comfortable than bed? It makes me feel kinda childish, and for some reason as though I don't have to get up tomorrow... (today) which I obviously do, silly floor.

Madagascar 2 tomorrow, I've been excited for this since... well, they announced it? Such a great film, I hope they can keep it up with the sequel, which doesn't seem difficult to do with animated films for some reason. While on the subject of film, The Dark Knight still hasn't arrived, bummer.

Ever find it weird when you discover things about people that you didn't expect? I discovered someone with a love for literature! I mean, I have literature buddies, but they're the kind of literature buddies who study English literature at University and know Ernest Hemingway's back catalogue. This is a whole new opportunity for nerdy conversations and deconstructing... anything! She's gonna read this too, and think me such the fool, but it's ace! So I don't care.

Well, this blog is now 20 minutes late, I consider that bedtime!

"I've blogged six times you plank, today's the one week anniversary of blog!"

Yep, absolutely momentous occasion, I made it seven straight blogging days! That's the first hurdle, from here on out, it's smooooooooth sailing.

On sunday I may have mentioned that I bombed all my christmas shopping on Play.com? I can't remember, anyway, despite ordering like a million things (estimated) they've sent them all out individually! What genii they have there. I also ordered another shirt from TWLOHA, just because their shirt designs are some of the best I've seen. Simplicity wins!

Now, to something I haven't talked about, money problems! I got bits falling off my ship, I got crew that need payin' and a powerful need to eat sometime this month... Well, not so much, I just couldn't resist the Firefly urge, anyway. I have to feed myself for this week and next, pay for a "night out" (i.e. cinema) this friday, and I just gave half ma weeks moneys to Skank, for the christmas meal, so essentially, unless I start surviving on lint and spare change, I'm screwed until january.

Christmas soon! I can't wait, purely because I'll finally get to read Slaughterhouse Five and Rant, they've been on my reading list all year, and I just never got round to buying them. Speaking of reading, I'm gonna try and bomb through Twilight for the first time tomorrow, see what all the fuss is about, I have the distinct feeling I'll be underwhelmed.

S'all from me, goodniiiight

Hard work makes for happiness and relaxation, who knew?

Nothing to report, it's monday, and the first day in a long long time that I ate breakfast before college and it actually gave me energy and made me not hate college so much, winner! So yeah, breakfast is good, eat it.

Monday is a relatively busy college today, more deadlines this week, for friday again, plus the uber deadline for next friday so gonna be busy for the next two weeks but then it's christmas time! Yay, and such, as mentioned previously I'm ready for Christmas, at long last.

Skank 1 fails, as she was ill, *hangs head in shame*, and lunchtime was made infinitely more fun by the fact that we reinvented all our regular card games with the twist of only being able to use 1 card! Probably won't catch on, but it was good while it lasted.

That's all I got, until tomorrow!

As I write this

I am failing to pwn on Gears 2.

Carmine may be my favourite character, but there's a reason he got killed, pathetically, in both games.

I've started listening to Mew today, who are completely underappreciated, and I don't even know anyone else who knows them, how?! They're actually fantastic, make me think of Sigur Ros and Coldplay having a baby. Anyone reading this should deeefinitely check them out. Something which I am now going to facilitate.


Sunday boring sunday, I doubt it'll surprise anyone that absolutely nothing happened today, except I watched Home Alone and are finally in the christmas spirit! So much in the christmas spirit that I in fact bombed all of my christmas shopping in about 20 minutes on play.com, in the process buying myself The Dark Knight (=D) and another Chuck Palahniuk book, man I love that guy, but it's far too early in my blogging life to write my many many many thoughts and musings of Chuck, and postmodernism/nihilism in general, one day, but not today.

Well, there's only two people who'll read this, so, see you tomorrow!

Just poked myself...

...in the eye

...with my thumb

What my thumb was doing anywhere near my eye, I have no idea.

I've come to the conclusion that I have no energy anymore cos it's winter, I've read about something like it before, but can't for the life of me remember anything about it or what it's actually called, I think I'm gonna get less late nights and sort out a proper sleeping pattern.

I can't begin to describe how much I love Saturdays, (not the girl band), get to sleep in to a crazy hour, get to stay up to a crazy hour the night before, and go to sleep at a crazy hour, Saturdays are all about crazy hours evidently.

Christmas month... has been since I started this damn thing, and yet I don't feel festive still, maybe it's just the college work been burying me, we'll see. I still have to go "christmas shopping", the reason for the quotations being that I only have one idea for a present for someone, and that's my sister, because she told me what it was. I've never been good at buying gifts, maybe I should hire a PA...

Anyway, that's all I have to say on this (sadly) uneventful evening, let's see what otherwordly pleasures tomorrow will bring.

Howard Moon! Former male prostitute

"It's friiiiday, field trip day!"

... Having said that, I'm going to start watching Madagascar before I type this.

Gotta love fridays, long day at college (thus making one feel accomplished), followed by a night of gaming (both good and bad), and then watching films (see above) until the early hours of morning, as I have nothing to do tomorrow, score.

Today I learned that Ben Gibbard wrote What Sarah Said after his girlfriend died in a car wreck, that song had always been emotional but now it's on a whole new scale, comparible (in terms of heart-wrenching) to Sigur Ros (side note: Untitled 3 is amazing).

It's been a fuck of a week, I think deadlines may be my least favourite thing in history, surpassing even Metallica and bananas. Just when I thought we'd cracked it, we get told our work isn't good enough, thankfully someone else has decided to film over the weekend and edit on monday so it technically doesn't effect me at all, it would have been nice to not have that hanging over my weekend though, ah well.

I'm doing my best to update this every day, but life isn't terribly interesting and nothing new happens much so it's difficult to find the inspiration, once I get to uni next year then I'm sure I'll be ganking the hell out of this thing.

Oh, I write music in my spare time, and record it too, instrumental stuff mostly, as my voice has been known to set off a car alarm or two, I guess there's nowhere better than here to upload it when it's done so uhh... watch this space!

In conclusion, I'm currently downloading Fallout 3 (from Steam: i.e. legally, you pirate hunters) and that should be done by midnight, thus defining my entertainment until the sun rises.

Until tomorrow!

I'm watching Sin City with my parents in the room.

Weirdest, evening, ever.

College was pretty badass today I guess. I promised myself that when I started this I wouldn't fill it with "my day went like this" blogs, but I've broken that promise already, meh. The most memorable part of today would be the power cut afflicting the whole campus, riiiight in the middle of Mike and Swarley's editing... people forgot to save their work. Lesson learned, albeit in the midst of much anger and quashed emotional pain.

Other than that, can't argue with 3 hours sat talking about the intricacies of the bra and the technology behind it, other topics including; how to confuse men with your bra, how best to impress a woman when you're undoing her bra, and how freaking awkward it is to go into Ann Summers with girls.

BTEC deadline tomorrow, panic time, see y'all later.

Initial blog

So, first post... sweet. I don't have any real motive for making this, I have no message to spread to the world, or anything to contribute to the web, just... felt like it I guess. The reason for the somewhat depressing layout is that black is easier on the eyes than stark white, so consider it less gothic and more saving you from blindness. Also I like to think it's minimalist, I don't see how a blog could have a complex layout, but if it ever happens, it won't be on this one. So, that's pretty much all I have to say, (except my helicopter flying skillz on GTAIV are pure badass) I guess I'll update this tomorrow, if I remember to.