Five Years Old today!!!!

Fictions turns FIVE today.

I would celebrate, but realise I've been a bit rubbish at updating recently (ie most of 2010 and all of 2011 so far). I will try harder, I will, I will, I will.

Well that was a quick two months.....

Nearly the end of February. And, as usual, blog activity here at Bruton mansions has been pretty much zero. There are many and varied reasons for this;

Work's been very, very busy - the school has a new library and somehow I've managed to fall into the role of librarian. It fills a load of time, but it's a great way of filling my time - planning, organising, shelving, the works. And the payoff has been great - a stream of children eager, desperate even, to start using the library.

The comic writing has taken up a lot of time as well. The review pile has been beaten down to single figures and hopefully, by the start of March it's going to be reduced to the magic zero.

And then there's Molly. Wonderful, marvelous, lovely Molly. Who's now completely settled into secondary school and having a great time. But I'm increasingly aware that she's not going to want me talking about her on here in great detail.

And then there's the innui. Instead of being the first thing I think of, this blog's become one of the last. Other things, at least for the time being, have taken precedence. Of course, within a month I could be back and blogging every day, and, as usual, just the act of this post has made me think I should really try just that little bit harder. Who knows.

4 Today - Fictions celebrates it's birthday

Fictions turns four today.

Granted, I've hardly been actively blogging all that much recently but still............ sort of worth celebrating. I may raise a glass.

And I promise, I really promise, that I shall be writing more here. Just out of the habit. Or maybe I have nothing worthwhile to say? (altogether now - "That didn't stop you from nearly four years of meaningless blather did it?")

Back again, but for how long?

A return to this blog is something I've been meaning to do for such a long time but everything conspires against it. The days rush past, the weeks even moreso. I go out to work, get in, have fun with Molly, maybe finish off some work work and then, once Molly's in bed, I read and I write stuff and I prevaricate and I write some more. Sometimes there's TV, sometiimes a film. Always music.

And yet, in between all that, there's no time to update the blog. It's not like things haven't happened. Molly's getting older and growing up, secondary school is sorted out, we've been places and done stuff. Life is still good up here in Pocklington Bruton mansions.

But none of it gets written down. I should really try to change that. Tomorrow. I promise.

Hello Comica......

If by any chance you're visiting this blog because of the kind mention on Paul Gravett's blog and the Comica site, I probably owe you an apology as you may be wondering where all the comic stuff is?

Well, when I started this back in 2006, I was doing a mix of personal stuff and comic stuff that I found interesting.

Then I started writing reviews over on the Forbidden Planet International blog and everything slowly changed. First I started writing the occasional piece on comics there, then I started cross posting things on comics I was writing for Fictions and eventually started writing there regularly on comics whenever I had something I wanted to say. This increased writing about comics meant this blog, which was always meant to be a general blog of me and my life, was getting choked with comic stuff and nothing else. Things came to a head recently when dear wife complained that she couldn't find any news about our daughter to show her workmates because of all the comic stuff cluttering up the place.

So much so that the amount of comic blogging going on here now amounts to no more than a notification of reviews done each week and a delayed cross post of the reviews in full, usually about 3-6 months after initial publication.

By all means have a look round, enjoy, read. But also stop off at the FPI blog for all the comic writing you could wish for.

Oh God, it's come to this.......

Oh dear, it's one of those blog posts about not posting on the blog that often.
Ooops.

In my defense I've been very busy and rather ill, never something that's meant to go together.
I'm still ill. I'm still busy and have a very busy weekend before me.

After that I shall blog once more. Or sleep. One or the other.

And whilst I think of it - what about fictions?

If you follow this blog regularly, you may have noticed I'm just not getting much up here that isn't either notifications of reviews going up at the FPI blog or repostings of old reviews every weekend.

It's annoying as hell that I'm not posting here more often, but to be honest something had to give in my life this past couple of months and blogging here was what went.

It's a combination of many things:

1. Like I said previously the summer holiday was a time for Molly and I to have fun.

2. The review work (and surprisingly, it seems to have turned into genuine work lately - go figure) takes up so much time to get done to my standards. Standards of course that I always think I'm failing at. Personally I can look back at old stuff, compare it to the new stuff and really hate either: how I used to write or how I'm writing now (or both!). But I love doing it, even though I hate it when I'm doing it - the reward is always that feeling when it all goes right - it's a great moment.

3. The FPI blog: I'm finding more and more that comic related stuff that I would have put up here tends to get saved and I put it up at the weekend when I post at the FPI blog. Sometimes I cross post but generally not.

4. Twitter. I don't twitter that much but find that it's often easier and more fitting to just rattle out 144 characters there than get a blog post done about something.

5. Possibly most importantly, I've had a general malaise when it comes to blogging. I'm sure there's some term for it, but I've hit some kind of blogger's wall recently. I'm hoping it's but a temporary thing and maybe in September I'll get back on the Blogging horse.

So that's it. Reasons Fictions hasn't exactly been buzzing lately. Sorry. Now back to reviewing!

Blogging. lack thereof.....

Another week gone, and another week on the blog with very little going on. Like I've said before the big problem is that I'm really trying to get through the review shelf this holiday. The plan of a review a day for all 31 days in August is just about working. So far it's 19 reviews in 21 days. Pretty bloody good.

But with that and doing a few more articles and posts over on the FPI blog, I've rather neglected Fictions this summer. But there really are only 24 hours in the day and even with my crappy sleep patterns I'm having to cut something out. And for the moment, this is it. It's not going to be empty - there's enough comic related stuff to keep going for months, but the other stuff isn't going to be popping up every day like I used to do.

Last week of term update

Final week of term: Day One.
Busy? Oh yes. I'm having to get everything done in addition to getting all the usual stuff I have to do - pupils in the ict suite, teaching, responding to all the daft stuff that goes wrong with the computers (or rather, all the daft things that staff manage to do to the computers). But despite this I'm just about on course to actually finish on time. I could, of course, actually get some things done in the holidays but I really want those 7 weeks off to be completely school free weeks.

So onwards. Four days to go. My only problem now is that I find myself absolutely wiped out. I'm coming home, crashing and only recovering enough to do either a bit of schoolwork or a bit of blogging. Reviews are almost out of the question - brain just not functioning enough for that. Maybe in a couple of days. Maybe next week. I'll just get this week out the way first.

Blog redesigns....

If you're a regular here, just having a look at the blog will mean you're well aware of what I spent my day doing today (and most of last night as well).
It's been complete redesign time here. I've been thinking about it for ages and have held back for a long time. The last mention of a redesign comes from August 2008 - so I've possibly lasted most of a year without changing it.
As usual it took far longer than it was meant to. Spent most of last night and this afternoon once I got home from school messing with the test blog I have for this sort of thing. Only when I was happy with the modified design did I take the plunge and actually drop the new template onto this blog.

Obviously I'm very pleased with it. I think it looks clean, simple and quite classy (if I do say so myself).

Tinkering, tinkering, but resisting the temptation to change that bloody template.....

Spent the last hout tinkering with the blog. But I've been really good. A while ago I promised myself I would leave the damn template well enough alone. Bloggings not a fashion thing, it's not about how good your blog looks or how flash it is. I can leave well enough alone and just get on with writing (or maybe sleep - I hear that's good as well).

But tonight the urge to tinker and tidy came upon me. So I've changed a few colours here and there, messed around with a few things, moved some stuff around and severely crunched the sidebar. With over 250 comic review sitting on there it was beginning to get very, very long indeed and a bit stupid.

So now there's a section in the sidebar marked Fictions Comic Reviews which points to this post - a complete A-Z listing of every damn review on the blog. One day Blogger will get around to giving us the ability to use pages rather than posts for this sort of thing, just like Wordpress does. But until that point this will have to do.

the blogging problem

you know, every time I actually sit down with the computer to write something for the blog I find I'm looking at the very wrong side of 2am. And I find I'm getting to the point in my life where this isn't the best time to be writing anymore.

This all comes from a decision to actually try to get up earlier in the morning, which is working by and large. But not being 20 anymore, this getting up earlier is screwing up my ability to stay up past 2 and do writing, bloggery stuff.

All of which is a sort of explaination, sort of apology to folks who read this blog and a bit of a promise to try and do better in future.

Richard is busy, come back in May.....

Okay, after a busy March getting the website done for school, April has been taken up with reviewing comics. Originally I had looked at the ever growing reviews shelf and decided that Easter holidays would be the time to really make a difference. So a plan was hatched - 16 days of holiday - 16 reviews.

I made it and did so early. So, true to form, instead of being satisfied with that I figured I'd go for the really stupid idea of 30 reviews for April, 1 a day. This immediately put me behind schedule by 3 days. And now it's the 28th - although for me it's still the 27th until I go to bed - and I've managed 25 reviews so far. Impressive beyond belief really, but still disappointing to think I'm probably not going to manage the 30 in 30 I was after.

Unless, of course, I just concentrate everything on reviewing and leave everything else aside. Which is why I'm going quiet for a couple of days. Maybe. Although usually when I say that I'm popping up here every couple of hours with something or other. We shall see.

weird twitter things and when job meets online stuff....

Training day yesterday including an hour with me banging on about the new website, the forthcoming Learning Platform, developments in the network and a lot about the future direction of school ICT and how we have to keep up with the emerging technology that our children treat as standard.

Hence a chat about social networking in all it's forms. I had planned to include a little 5 minutes on Twitter. Except it appears our school internet provider has blocked it over the holidays. Damn.

However, the few mentions I made of it prompted the inevitable comments of: "what's the point of it?" to which I did the usual reply and talked about how useful it is when you start to use it but looking it from the outside it does look quite silly.

Well, someone was listening to the training at least. And later that night I got a follow email telling me that the boss has joined and is following. Well that was unexpected. Paranoia follows. Checked blog for work mentions - completely clear of direct references. But still the question of what to say at work about the twitter thing. In the end we had a joke about it and boss has reassured they have no interest in snooping, they were just enjoying doing new ict stuff.

But it's a strange feeling when you realise people you know actually know what you do online. It happened before when I started the blog and Nostalgia & Comics folks and friends were suddenly emailing and talking to me about the stuff I was writing. Ended up taking me a few weeks to stop deliberately censoring myself on the blog and write naturally again without thinking about what people would be thinking about what I was writing. It's happening again slightly. Twitter use has reduced, swearing a lot on twitter stopped and mentions of gin reduced severely.

It's a strange online world it seems.

Late night thinking - of websites and reviewing

Weird night last night.
After a month where I've just been incapable of putting anything even remotely interesting together on the screen about the comics I've been reading, I sat down last night and wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more.

In the end I came out of the trance with three near fully formed reviews. Pretty much done. A little polish and checking and they're complete. Three. I've written the grand total of 5 so far this month and then, in just one night, I near enough double it.

Of course, I know the reasons I haven't been writing. All last month I've been doing what seems like hard labour on the school website. It's coming to an end now. Or as much of an end as these things ever do, I'm sure that, if I wanted to, I could spend every hour of every day in perpetuity adding more and more stuff to the website. After all, with 7 years to cover and a host of subjects and topics, there's plenty to do. But the first stage is done now. All of the essential stuff is on there, all the school information; the school day, what the uniform is, how we deal with children who've fallen over and banged their head or cut their knee. It's all there. And then I've extended it. we've got wonderful galleries of the children's work and loads of photos of them doing all the fun stuff that they'll remember far more than learning how to write and add stuff up. We've also turned the website into a learning resource in itself, with page after page of links, information and activities on a host of subjects and topics. This is the bit that could be extended as far as I want to take it. Just looking at the syllabus makes me shudder to think how much stuff I haven't covered. Each year has at least ten subjects and each of these subjects probably has another 10 units in the year. A lot of things to cover. And in time, I'd love to have a go at getting them all on there.

But time isn't on my side. once the website is finished and goes live, I've got next half term set aside to do all the jobs I've not done this last term while I've been devoting myself to the website. There's a new email system to set up and train the staff on. That should be fun. We've used the old system for years. It's the simplest system in the world and there's still staff who can't deal with it. So the new one is going to terrify them. Then there's the blogging. We've got a school blog but I haven't had any time to do anything with it so we want to get the Year 6 class blogging to their heart's content. I really want to see them doing loads and eventually think we'll let them off the leash with it and have them not only contributing but editing and publishing themselves as well. Hell, even the head has said that she wants her own blog. (Now, all I need to do is find a good educational use for Twitter and I'll be happy).

So that's next half term done.

After that? Well, that's the not so good news. After that, I really have to get started on the Learning Platform. If the website was a big project, the Learning platform is a project that stretches out in front of me to the horizon and far beyond. I've been saying to all who will listen that it's going to take me years to get it done as i just can't dedicate the extra time to it in the way I have with the website. That was working towards a definite, short term end point. When I started the website build in January, I knew it had to be finished and launched in march, so the extra hours didn't matter that much. The joy of getting it done, of crossing something else off the list made up for it.

Not so with the Learning Platform. For a start I'm just not that enamoured with it. The mechanics behind it, the ways you go about creating it seem really overly complicated and counter-intuitive. In these days when you can set up a blog in an hour and be publishing to your heart's content from then on, the Learning platform has a development cycle of years, not days. Sure, it has to integrate a lot of data, but even the basic page building software is clunky, difficult and time consuming. Plus it's a system that's definitely been developed to be a secondary school solution. It's then rather been retro-fitted (badly) to work at a primary school level. There's too much text on it, too many instructions, too many far from obvious hoops to jump through to get to where you want to go. How are my super Year 1 class going to manage this? They're great, but they're not up to that yet.

So once the Learning Platform build starts after half term in May, that's it for me. All my time gets sucked into it. Just not ALL my time like the website swallowed up. The Learning Platform is strictly a work thing. The plan I have is that I'll do very little Learning Platform at home. Given that even the most optimistic trainer talks about at least two years to get it properly working tells me that to get really heavily involved and bring it home every night is a guaranteed route to insanity.

The funniest thing about the Learning Platform? In theory, my role, once I've done the basics of setting it up, should be limited to maintenance and upkeep. All of the content, all of the actual stuff on the Learning Platform is meant to come from the teachers. Remember? These are the teachers who haven't gotten to grips with the simplest email system in the known world after 4 years. Again, it's a secondary school solution applied naively to a primary school environment. In any secondary school each department is more than likely going to have one young thing who fancies themselves at the forefront of interactive digital learning and is willing to take on their department's section of the Learning Platform. In a primary school, in my school, I'll be lucky if I get two members of staff willing to do anything with it. Like I said at the last training session, the developers are living in a dream world when they confidently tell us administrators of the Learning Platform that most of the content, most of the work, most of the load, will be taken on by the staff. No. It will be me that ends up doing it. I know it will. I'm resigned to it. But I'll be damned if I'm bringing it home.

Now, in a rather roundabout way that brings me back to the opening salvo. Reviewing and writing. In the past couple of months of getting the website done I've seen myself get less and less creative, more and more tired, more and more time got given over each night to just finishing that page or just tweaking the way that page works. Until this past fortnight I've done nothing. Not one word of reviewing and very little blogging of note. And although that might seem like no big deal, I really miss it. the old adage of writing being a horrible task, something no writer enjoys is true. But likewise, when they tell you of the payoff of basking in the glow of knowing that something is done, written, finished. And knowing it's good. That's wonderful.

And, at 2:35am on a Monday morning, that's where I am. Three reviews done and this lengthy tract of blogging. Happy. Tired. off to bed in a moment. But happy.

More birthday thoughts....

It was the third birthday of the blog yesterday and originally I had put this up then, but writing about the final DFC rather took over yesterday so I thought it best to move it.

Just looking through the first few weeks of doing this, it's amazing how horrible some of the writing is (and for all I know it hasn't really improved that much in the time since). But what I am proud of is how quickly this post on Wacky Warehouses appeared. In fact, here it is again - think of it as a birthday present:

Wacky Warehouses and the like........

God I hate them. On the plus side they're lovely for Molly and I can get a cup of coffee and a sit down. But the shit you have to put up with.....

If you didn't want children maybe you should have taken a little more care with contraception? Moronic parents with a pint in one hand and their mobiles glued to their ears whilst their 8 offspring wander around the wacky hitting my child. But heaven forbid the parent who points this out. The little chav devils can do no wrong in their chav parents eyes.

Of course, I say Chav parents, what I should have said was chav parent. Singular. Seemingly always singular. Which is not to say I have anything against single moms. But experience and observation lets me make some hideously sweeping generalisations about this.

Take, for example, the single mom in front of me. I'm assuming she's a single mom of course. But she's with a bloke and her child keeps calling her mom and him dave so it's either step dad or boyfriend or she's picked a really dumb place to have an affair.
Her: Chav, horrible, cheap chocolate brown velour tracksuit, hair pulled harshly back onto scalp, designer label clothes and shoes, two mobiles on the go constantly.
Him: short, shaven headed and having that vaguely threatening manner of a football hooligan in waiting. The sloping brow, the dull, lifeless eyes and the slightly disbelieving looks at anyone who flaunts their ability to read. Of course, the deciding factor is the crap birmingham city chain round his fat, corpulent neck.
Why do single moms always seem to go for this sort of bloke? Why do they always cling onto them in public, mauling each other with the same level of passion your laborador uses to greet you. Of course, after a little while this passion will transmute into violence and they'll spend hours wasting police and hospital time.

And possibly worse are the Harbourne mums and dads.
You all know the sort..... just insert your own area (West Bridgford mums for Nottingham I hear)
Middle class or at least want to be, organic/ free-range / hand-reared bioyoghurt, alternative remedies, packed lunches of celery sticks and carrot puree, french at 6 months, violin appreciation classes from birth, that sort of thing.

Just go down to the Botanical Gardens and observe the playground, it's all liberal attitudes and swirly chiffon skirts and desperately trying to outdo every other Harbourne mom there by signing your child up for Mongolian Yak farming courses or whatever is in-vogue that week.

They seem to find it impossible to discipline their children. At least the bloody chavs can't be arsed. Harbourne mums are worse, they've made a conscious decision to neglect this rather important aspect of parenting.......

"Little tarquin doesn't mean to kick everything he sees and run around shouting like a monkey on acid, it's just his nature."
Absolutely, his nature is to be an arrogant and aggressive fuckwit, just like his dad and an ignorant, pompous harpy like mommy.

And at least Chav kids are only running around MacDonalds causing havoc, Harbourne mom's little angels run around the restaurants I eat in.
And that really wont do.

Happy Birthday to Fictions - 3 today

Happy birthday to blog. Three years doing this. Gosh. Seeing as I'd never managed to keep a diary beyond the second week of January before that's rather impressive really.

First post: here. Comics, moaning about comics and a pilgrimage to visit Mrs Thatcher's grave when she eventually does the decent thing. (Having her go mad was entertaining enough, but it's boring now. Would like her to get on with it please.) So that was obsessing about comics and ranting from the start.

Fictions talking about Fictions

I've been slightly lazy recently with the blog. There's been an awful lot of reposted reviews from the FPI blog and a lot of quickie comics link posts popping up and very little of actual me.

Okay, some of this is a matter of necessity. I decided a long time ago that I'd repost all of the reviews I put up on the FPI blog up on Fictions to make sure that they were all in one place. My place. And because I've been doing a lot of reviews for the FPI blog and not posting them up regularly they'd all rather built up. So I decided to get them all onto the blog in one go. Or at least over a very short period of time. This is the reason why it seems like there's been one a day for a long time.

It came to a head when Louise complained about it, saying she'd been on the blog at work trying to find something about Molly to show to someone and couldn't find her way through all of the comics stuff. So it's time to change it back a little and make it a bit more of a balanced blog about my life, parenting, ranting about various things and comics. So from now on the reviews will get posted up at weekends only. That way I'll actually have to write a little more in the week, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

Twitter for the masses

Twitter is suddenly everywhere. I can always tell when something has made it overground because the teachers start talking about it. And this week I've had two of them asking about this Twitter thing. But they're not the only ones it seems. I can barely turn on the TV or the radio without some mention of it. There was the recent Jonathan Ross / Stephen Fry chat on his show. Russell Brand's on now. So, I hear, is Chris Moyles. And today 5 live was awash with it. Mayo and Kermode's (Wittertainment) film reviews were all over it. And once the BBC attaches to it, everyone does. But what seems like Twitter's very own jump the shark moment came when Phillip Schofield joined in.

It's all that Stephen Fry's fault of course! If he wasn't so wonderfully nice and beloved by everyone, we maybe wouldn't have had this explosion of celeb twittering. But it's too late to go back now!

Oh, and if you're interested: Twitter me.

January so far .....

Well, having spent the end of December planning what a productive January I would be having, I think no-one should be surprised to find out it hasn't really worked out that way. I've spent the start of the month feeling under the weather, bogged down with the same crappy cold thing I had over Christmas and suffering a bloody awful case of the January blues.

So instead of doing anything useful I spent the last couple of nights playing with the blog. Messing, breaking, putting it back together again, tinkering, changing completely, changing back, breaking it again and finally leaving it like you see before you now, with lots of little changes and a nice big new header. It's very probably not worth the trouble it took, but I like it anyway.