I'm still quite intrigued by this Bara girl from Iceland. She seems...interesting. How to introduce myself? Better put my thinking cap on.

I'm gonna make this blog secret for a while until I can figure out what it's gonna be about. Bye bye everybody.

The World Snooker Championships are on at the moment. I'm fucking addicted to it. Which is weird because snooker must be one of the most boring sports out there with matches that can go on for hours and hours. But for the two weeks of the world championships I can't get enough. It just has this vibe that is intoxicating. Plus I'm in that limbo zone between finishing college and sitting my exams. Three weeks with nothing to do but study and think of ways to avoid studying. And watch snooker, natch.

ICQ is also quite addictive. It's amazing what people will tell a complete stranger who cold be a pervert/stalker/psycho. They're stupidly trusting. Let's give it a shot. I'm gonna try saying hello to a stranger and see what happens. Better check that my personal profile is in order. First impressions count or so I'm told.

What's a good icebreaker? Let's try this,"Good evening. I was just looking around and I saw you and I thought here's someone I might enjoy chatting to. Was I right?"

Good spelling. Not too desperate. Sorta polite and receptive. Here goes.

Five minutes. No reply. Let's move one.

You know what? The internet is too fucking big. Too many chatrooms. Too many forums. Too many 'good sites'. Too many goddamn people. How are you supposed to find anything? I know it's supposed to offer you unlimited choice but it's just paralysing. Too much to see. Too much to do. I'm going to sleep.

It turns out, after more web-trawling, that Gillen has a perverted alter-ego called Sergeant Drill-Cock. Much like Bill Hicks and Goat Boy.

Should probably mention Kieron Gillen at some point. So here goes. Kieron is the closest thing I have to a role model. He is a (Christ adjectives sorta fail you at this point. Let's start with a history lesson). I like videogames. I have a PC. Hence I read a mag called PcGamer. Have been reading it for the last six years or so. It's one of the few personality driven mags out there. How much you like the guys who write it sorta affects how much you enjoy reading it. In other magazines you''ll read the contents page and read the feature or review that you're most interested in. With PcGamer you jump to the section where your favourite writer hangs out. Kieron started writing for the magazine about four years ago. He grabbed my attention immediately. Mainly because in his picture he looked ridiculouly girly. He had curly hair. What could I do? Te first game he reviewed was Thief, which set the tone for his tenure. He always championed the weirdest games. Weird but really fucking good, y'know? And the review he wrote was always searingly accurate and stupidly interesting. I swear, when he was on form sparks came off the pages. And he cared as well. The computer industry has broken into the mainstream and like any other mainstream it's loaded with corruption and filth. Kieron's face was right in this sewer. And he wanted to change it. I guess it got to him after a while. Anyway he is a genuinely nice guy. He was always talking about comics. Obscure ones, natch. One day I picked up Transmetropolitan, by Warren Spector, after Kieron had mentioned it in print for maybe the tenth time. So I sent him a personal e-mail.

And he fucking replied. Recommended a bunch of other comics I should try. Good ones. This is not the act of an uncaring hack.

This is getting out of hand. Anyway recently it has become clear from his writing that Kieron is bored with working on Britain's Best-Selling Games Magazine. Sure enough he's just quit to be a freelance games journalist and wannabee comic writer. I admire his courage. I also admire his comic writing. Because it's really good. Okay let's get to the point in one sentence. Kieron Gillen is my sorta role-model beacuse he is pretentious, intelligent, funny, passionate deep and a thoroughly nice guy.

And before you suggest it, no, I don't want to fuck him.

Great now I have the urge to email him. I just feel the need to invade his space for a moment.

Incidentally I have the urge to write something. I was watching The Thing this morning and I realised that it was totally ripping off Alien. The autopsy scene. The paranoia. The alien. Gore effects. Human incubation for said alien. And I thought, fuck me, I can rip off alien as well. So I'm gonna give it a shot. If it goes well I may post the result up here. Though I am worried about somebody ripping off my idea.

The gang kinda let me down today. We were all so wasted from staying up late finishing our essays that we were tired and grouchy and ill to be our usual selves. Not the best way to celebrate my last philosophy lecture ever. Anyway, I'd better make up some names to protect myself from my dear friends' wrath. So, uh...Rick just went home again. Had lunch with um, Patricia and Lucy. Yeah that'll do. So I was telling them that I had discovered this weblog stuff over the weekend. I was all set to launch into a spiel on why I was blown away by it, but I had stuffed a piece of pizza in my mouth and by the time I had swallowed it (my mouth was suddenly devoid of all saliva) the conversation had moved on to dresses or something. So I will just put it down here. For posterity.

I think the first thing that impressed me about this medium is that it's instantaneous. You have an idea. You go to a pc and it's up there for the world to see. Which is the second thing, you potentially have an enormous audience out there. Thirdly, you also get this funky tortured artist thing going, "look at my precious words up here, not for money or fame, but just because it has to be said." You can be the individual against the world, decorating your own little island with whatever you want. Which is another thing. You can do whatever you want. You aren't restricted by wrod counts, or subject matter or what anyone else thinks. You can just please yourself. If someone reads it and gets it. Cool. If they don't you can tell yourself you don't care. Which is what I'm gonna do. It's a weird feeling. You're putting yourself out into the world but there are so many other voices shouting that you'll probably never be noticed. It's very private and completely public at the same time.

Enough of my waffle. I have to go watch Friends now. I know it's lame but I can't think of any good excuses at the moment. Let's just say I'm doing it to sate the child I was when the show first started and was cool and funny and fresh.

Man, that is so lame.

Bus Journey Vol.1

You know how a dog smells when it gets wet? Well, it applies to people as well. It was hammering rain this morning so the bus was a little more popular than usual. When I stepped onto the bus the smell really hit me. Wet, sweaty people sandwiched into a long metal can don't create a very enticing aroma. It was one of those one single decker buses. The seats were all filled so there were people standing. The weird thing was that they were all scrunched up into the front half of the bus. So if you were willing to squeeze past a bunch of strangers you could enjoy all the space in the second half. And people in the front half just sort of stare at you like you're nuts. Gotta love that public transport.

Mutant Quiz

Stop Press. Just took the ol' Mutant Quiz over at The Spark and it turns out that I am 44% Mutant. I always knew I was different. But don't take my word for it, listen to the experts,

"Mutant Wannabe! Well, we've got good news and bad news. The good news is that you've definitely got some latent mutant powers. The bad news is that if you didn't have experts like us on the case, you'd never even know it. Your mutant potential needs to be developed, coaxed out like the last drop of toothpaste from the very bottom of the tube. Keep doing your thing, and one day that mutant ability just might show itself. If not, might we suggest attending a fine institution like the Xavier School for Gifted Students. We hear their biology department is excellent."

I was rooting around behind my steroe and I found my old Nine Inch Nails album, The Fragile. I listened to it regularly when I was in secondary school but had kinda forgotten about it. I put it on for a listen and I was surprised to see that it still held up pretty well. It could have been the worst kind of pre-adolescent, introspective, self-important garbage ever committed to compact disc but it's actually intimate, exapnsive and genuinely different. Kudos to the child that I once was.

I wonder if Trent Reznor is still banging around?

It seems he is, although he doesn't have an official site. And his fans are really weird. Bet they like black a lot.

Just took that stupid test again and I got 97%. I have this unstoppable urge to nail tests. What do I win?

" Mutant! Who's a mutant? You are! And we're not talking just any, run-of-the-mill mutant. You're a mutant to the Nth degree! So now comes the tough part. You need to use those mutant powers for good, not evil. If the world needs saving, you need to be the one doing it, cause if not you, who? So strap on that suave, leather costume, find yourself a sleek jet of some sort, and get moving, because you, my friend, have work to do!"

Felt like crap when I got up this morning. I'm no expert on nutrition but I reckon that chinese take-away I had for dinner was a bad idea. Cue stomach cramps and a pain in the top of my head. Then I woke up and ate the leftovers. I have no idea why.

So I was checking out this site that Warren Ellis uses to store weird stuff on the internet that he comes across, here. This one entry caught my eye, "This just in: Bara, in the Icelandic National Tae Kwon Do Tournament, beat the living shit out of the opposition, who was stupid enough to claim they could kick Bara's ass." I was intrigued. What is a Bara? Why is it involved in Tae Kwon Do? Why can nobody beat its ass? Well, turns out Bara is a female, web-obsessed, literature student from Iceland. Seems that she designed Warren's website for him. Anyway she has a blog of her own and the first entry has a reference to Bill Hicks. So let me just summarise this. She studies books. Likes martial arts. Gets Bill Hicks and lives in Iceland, which makes her totally inaccessible. Yup, I'm in love.

Feeling pretty good about myself. Just finished my last philosophy essay of the year and of my life. Next year I'll be studying pure English. Three years of philosophy was enough, thankyouverymuch. And I came out of it with more questions than before. Go fig. Of course that also means it's the end of term soon. I used to look forward ot the summer holidays. That was when they were only two months long. Now they're four months and I kinda hate them. All my college friends are away doing stuff and I'm stuck working in a McJob so that I have money to spend during college. It sucks. (Oh no the poor little student has to work part time for the summer so that he can live like a waster for the other eight, hanging out in coffee shops, seeing movies in the early afternoon, talking pop culture with his friends, lying out in parks and laughing at suits on their lunch break slugging espresso and chowing down on a quick ciabatta. Poor little student - The Real World) But not this year. I'm gonna get a good job. One tha will challenge and stimulate me. Where i will meet amazing people. Ha. Ha. It'll be the old old grind of the last few summers. Better enjoy the rest of term while it lasts. At least I'll see the gang tomorrow.

Ha. It worked. Clearly, I rock. One more time, for luck. If you're reading this, then you're probably bored. I apologise.

Success! Now if I can just move the little bugger down below my text I'll be laughing.

Okay that didn't work. Let's try this.

Alright let's see if I can get this counter thing going.

Assault on Posterity

Here is my first post. I guess I should clear something up about my username, aciddave. This is not gonna be a page about recreational drugs. I've never used drugs and, having seen Requiem for a Dream, probably won't be trying them for the forseeable future. No, aciddave was my thirtieth attempt to get a username that hadn't already been snagged by some claim-jumping no-nothing. Here are my favourite names that were taken:

1.Dope Fish - paying tribute to the important influence that computer games had on my adolescent development. Dope Fish was the Easter egg from most of id Sofware's games. He would turn up when you found a secret in one of their games, like Doom and Quake. He seems to be undergoing a resurgence thanks to his appearance in Max Payne, brandishing two pistols and chomping on a cigar.
2.Dave - my name, hence my attachment to it.
3. Space Ranger - I love Toy Story and I tend to use this phrase to describe people who don't spend all of their time in our atmosphere. I'm thinking of my old boss, who was also called Dave, coincidentally. He always seemed stoned but probably never has been.

On with my pointless story. So I was trying to think of a name that was even vaguely original. Then I thought back to previous attempts at online authorship. About five years ago myself and two good friends tried to make our own game site. Being painfully shy bookish types, we adopted anonymous monickers to prevent our secret project from being traced back to us. I think the one I cose at the time was barney, a reference to the unfortunate security guards that populated Half-Life. Whcih is another video game. You might as well get used to that. But to be honest my friend Brendan had a much better one. Brendan is what you might call a rather cynical bastard. In our small group we took to referring to him as 'Bitter Old Brendan'. This was eventually reduced to the acronym, BOB, for brevity. He insisted that BOB was too ordinary and that the full name should be citric BOB, to reflect just how bitter he was. Which may have been inspired by the classic Simpson's episode, 'Lemon of Troy'. Better get used to that as well., I guess. Like a pancake thrown at the wall, the name stuck, for a while. So my name aciddave is a tribute to that old, forgotten nickname and that best forotten website.

As for the name of the Blog, 'Where is my Mind?', well it means three things:

1. It's obviously an old Pixies song, representing my love of alternative guitar rock groups.
2. It's also the song that plays over the end of 'Fight Club', whcih is porbably my favourite film. It has everything I love in a film - black humour, violence, social commentary and subtly homerotic fist fights.
3. Finally it's a pretty accurate description of what is bugging me at the moment. Who am I? Where am I going? Mother, what will I be? And other existential worries. I'm a philosophy student so what do you expect?

Please note, I hate reading over stuff that I ahve written so you'll have to put up with all the spelling rerrors, bad grammar and poorly-thought out metaphors.

And that is all you're getting for now. Whoever you are.