A devilish Combination of Slightly Bored and Quite Hungry

I need a new forum to frequent so I can stop spending chunks of my day staring at tat on ebay. Please recommend one to me. Ideally one not incredibly over-populated, I already have football365 for that.

Cheers.

Here's a picture of me thinking about something important like the plight of whales

I've moved to a new country which means my life is instantly more interesting than it was about four months ago and should be celebrated in picture form at every given moment. That being said it would kind of be a shame if I didn’t start posting some of the pictures I’ve taken around Leeds in the last couple of months since I got here. Everyone likes looking at the sub-tourist quality photos of complete and utter strangers. In fact, Sophia Coppola made an entire career around showing extensive footage of people eating noodles.

I think I can probably do that. Like the film Lost in Translation, I can be a fish-out-of-water learning poignant life lessons in this crazy, work-a-day world. I don't think have any noodles but I probably have some Maltesers left over if that can represent my definitely interesting 20-something ennui.

So when I’m not busy being sad about stores having the wrong kind of sashimi or Bill Murray leaving me because I’m old enough to have a period, I'll start regularly taking pictures around town with my appallingly amateurish digital photography skills. Stay tuned!

 

Dane Bowers, the Tony Slattery of boy band faces. My favourite part about watching celebrity big brother is being given time to stare at your big, lovely vacant eyes while trying to imagine a better world where you were never in Another Level or balls deep in Jordan. Or largely unaccomplished and rubbish, or from Croydon.

To paraphrase Jake Gyllenhall from The Day After Tomorrow: that is a fuck lot of snow

I may not technically be a scientist but as someone who can see weather, I think I'm qualified enough to make the distinction between snow and the End Times.

This is the sort of rubbish TV has warned us about. By 2012 when the world ends and the oceans warp and time freezes into an icey fjord all that will be left of humanity will be the likes of Al Gore, thousands of meters above sea level. Al Gore in a giant kingdom of ice, saved and nursed to health by the armies of penguins who thought his film was actually quite good, surrounding him like a herd of oxen around a tiny naked calf; Al Gore suckling on their warm penguin milk while I become horribly emaciated when the bus to Asda stops running.

Nature is our primordial foe and England has been attacked by a thousand inches of its crystalline snowy death. So thanks aplenty, Global Warming and the weakling arm of the Gulf Stream. Apologies for not turning that light off that one time.

I've been doing my part fighting back against snow by helping build an Elephant Snow Man over Christmas. So impressed were the neighbours that some would stand on my lawn and stare at it for minutes, probably because the ears were impressively made by defying the laws of gravity with witchcraft.

LOOK UPON MY WORK YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR




Beyond that I'm feeling far bloody happier in England than I was in HorrorCanada so far, but more on that later.

Sure, go ahead and judge me for last night's post but if you had actually looked a bit closer you would have seen I had hidden in a secret .2pt font an entry that didn't make me look actually mentally ill. So who looks stupid now, really?

As a consolation I've drawn it out again in pictorial form:

I have a real live British phone now. Give me your number so I have someone to sobtext after I get mugged by your poor.

It's more National Novel Write When I'm Bothered, to be fair. I landed in England a week and a half ago and spent that time trying to wash weird stains out of my walls in the place I'm staying at. Now I have ten days to write my novel and make my millions, which probably won't work out that well. So my current plan is to write something over an indefinite period of time in blatant disregard of the actual point of NaNoWriMo.

The gist of my novel is a sort of reply to the unhealthy seriousness around fiction writing that you see in a lot of NNWM pieces. For example, I just read a magic realism fiction piece narrated by the continent of Antarctic, about racism. Fiction is a brutal mistress and when you're trying to get all up in her you need to know your place. So with that in mind I'm writing a novelisation of Horace Goes Skiing.

I'm leaving for England in about seven hours. But in case the wings fall off the plane in mid-air I thought I'd say it's really been a pleasure knowing you Livejournal folk, and making an account on here is genuinely one of the best things I've ever done. And when my plane explodes into the ocean and darkness falls over the earth from the loss of my awesome presence you can celebrate my memory with a giant Gera effigy and yearly bonfire, and your women can hurl themselves into the ocean as a sacrifice for my vast and unending hunger for blood.

Happy Halloween, Livejournal. Mine was spent as usual, rounding up waifs and vagrants on the street and ushering them into my manor where I sang Halloween carols at them and washed their feet with my hair. I was just about to hand out the last of the Baby Ruths when one of the little wretches piped up and ruined it for everyone.

"But why are you being so nice to us today?" he asked. "What about the other 364 days when you scream at us to get out of your yard and stop trying to touch your dog?"

"Because," I bellowed, revelling in the look of doe-eyed panic on his face as he recoiled in terror, "humanity simply doesn't have the patience or the willpower to maintain so much selfless affection for an entire year, and anybody who even entertains the notion that they do is clearly an imbecile. If we didn't allot specific dates for compassion and peace, then you wouldn't even be getting your fucking kit kat, so why don't you just thank your lucky stars we're good enough to give you a Halloween at all!"

And with that, I removed my embroidered slipper and administered a beating the likes of which give wastrels nightmares

The human is at heart a selfish creature and expecting more than 5 or 6 days of empathy a year is wholly unrealistic and naive.

And so it should be!

Good news! It's only taken four and a half years of repeatedly having my plans crushed but it looks like I'll be in England in a bit less than two weeks. The other good news is that instead of spending a lifetime trying to create some kind of makeshift industrial shack out of tin in Burley it's looking like I'll be heading down to live in London a lot sooner than I thought; living it up as one of those slightly sullen and desperate looking Creative types, just like you.

I've mostly been spending the last couple of days having a minor breakdown about how possible it is to even get writing work. I spent the last three months doing manic fifteen-hour writing sessions on more or less a daily basis for a few side projects and freelance jobs but now that I'm beginning to send out my CV and portfolio for any relevant work things are looking hairy.

Game Journalism seemed like a slightly viable career path until I realised there's no way in hell paying companies would buy my weird pseudo-comedy reviews and that it's likely my writing style is completely incompatible with any professional-level workplace. Even beyond that, finding journalism work that will provide me some kind of steady income seems nigh impossible.

I'm starting to get genuinely panicked about this because hell, I couldn't even get a job at my old university's paper because the entire thing was this massive cronyistic event. If I wanted to throw out any basic principles I could maybe pull a few jobs on the novelty basis of being a girl but game journalism already has its Leigh Alexanders and Ellie Gibsons, it already has its scathing comedy writers in Yahtzee and Erik Wolpaw, and the last thing anyone should want is a weird second-rate impression of the two done by a fucking Canadian kid from a backwoods suburb no one's ever heard of. I really don't know what exactly to do about it.

To be fair I don't even like reviewing, it just sounds vaguely possible and the only way I can really think of to continue writing for a living. I could keep trying to churn out this Choose Your Own Adventure and try to reach the comedy fiction goal that I'm secretly hoping for but that seems even less possible. Especially now that the fucking insect-bodied Leila Johnston has ripped that plan from under my feet with her rubbish comedy gamebook. I kindly asked gideondefoe to get one of his comedy writing friends to adopt me as a kind of pet ingenue but knowing my luck the only one who will take me will be someone like fucking Gina Yashere because she's such shit and will just continuously talk at me in horrible accents until I cry and cry and suffocate myself in all of the bills I couldn't pay. I'm going to end up roaming around penniless, hungry and alone, then get sold to some sort of Bristol glue factory to die.

Everything sucks. I hate everything. And I feel a bit sick.

In a thousand years time archeologists of the future will be carving up the Internet for relics of the 21st century and they will find my journal and in a museum they'll give me a plaque and it will say Emily Gera: Woman who barely showed up to class but still inexplicably graduated.

Can you spot the difference?

Before graduation:





After graduation:





The difference is I am clearly definitely smarter now.

I need money and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is offering it.  Right now as we speak I have about 500 pounds to my name, plus cash for a plane ticket, and they have a writing contest on at the moment that ends the day I ought to be leaving for England so I thought it was probably a sign that I should try and send in some sort of work.

The prizes range between four and six thousand dollars for works of poetry, creative nonfiction and short fiction and I figured I would try my hand at the latter. It's probably a problem that I've never properly written fiction before though, but they didn’t seem to have any specifications about how exactly they prefer entries to be styled. I even bothered to check out the previous winners section but they seemed to mostly be poignant stories about people dying so I just wrote a couple of short stories about magician Derren Brown fucking things instead.

 
----------------------------------------

Derren Brown is hurdling through the prism of space. He’s dipping his palms into the rings of Saturn like they’re skinning through a placid temple pool and he’s got his cock out. Derren Brown is naked in space and releasing his spores into the universe like a dandelion. He’s spawned 13 generations of flies on the moon of Titan by wanking into a jar and leaving it over night.

Every earthling full moon he spreads his arms and soars into the clear pink skies of Saturn’s icy moon to mate with the fly queen of that generation. It’s a delicate process, he says, but he’s a gentle lover. And they fahcking love it, he says. Derren Brown doesn’t discriminate between the sexes not out of lust but largely because he can’t tell either way.

Derren Brown dips his cock in the highest quality of American cheese whiz and spreads eagle on Titan’s white frost meadows, enticing them with his sugar-peach skin.  They fahcking love cheese, he says.  He flies through space at 180 miles/hour with his arms outstretched , shrieking into the midnight black Nyeeeerrooommm ehn ehn ehn ehn ehn fighter jet noises. It’s how he fucks too. His lungs inhale the vacuum black of Space and convert it into the purest mountain air and then he is the loudest thing in the universe.

Derren Brown does this all from his living room. He orders KFC and fills his mouth with chicken tenders until he loses consciousness. Derren Brown astral projects himself into the beating heart of the universe with hot chicken and a smoke bath of chowder. Then he shoots into the sky honey golden and naked. Derren Brown puts his cock on your face while you’re sleeping.

A week before their meeting he turned his wrists up to the sky in a blood offering to his brother Moon. Blood dropped to the ground like marbles and onto the grass outside of his terraced house. Brent called out from the kitchen asking if he’d like some tea, that’s his life partner. Brent is a dragon. Derren said “No” and called back toward the open window “What was it the bank wanted?” but Brent wasn’t listening. They haven’t been in love for months.  

Derren Brown began to pray to the dragonlord Al’Kor and watched his bloodied lawn as the stained earth reformed around him into symbols and words then sentences. These sentences directed him to the lowest cost flight to Europe’s dark heart and on Wednesday afternoon he reached the ancient Steppes by Ryanair. 

He didn’t say to Brent when he’d be back. When Derren left he quietly left out the back door, counting every footstep and creak. Brent cried when he knew Derren wouldn’t have heard him.

 From the black Steppes Derren took a taxi to a large house in the West End and at around 2pm he met the gaunt vampire. He was invited inside to the vampire’s sterile, rock lair in town centre. The vampire was just installing new heated floors and apologised for the mess. Derren said “It’s no problem!” and they smiled at one another. Then they spent all day sharing their interests over tea and had overall a lovely time.  When he returned home Brent was gone, as were his things. He left a note but Derren didn't read it.

Due to a strange turn of events my laptop has died and I'll be in England in four weeks.

I've already told amuchmoreexotic about my week as Gera: angel of death. The bottom line was District 9 is pretty good but not quite worth totalling my car and briefly getting trapped inside its fuming, chemical-fire interior as I make a left-hand turn at an intersection. It was a mindless accident. I started edging out when the light turned green and waited for the van in the oncoming lane to go, which in turn just sat there uselessly. Sadly I misconstrued his gesture of motionlessly doing piss all at a green light as "letting me through" when I should have naturally read it as an attempt to crush me like a baby egg. By the end of it we had collided in to one another and I was trapped in his minivan autobot fist, not quite sure what to do while smoke collected around me.



Kind of smoke, anyway. If you want to split hairs there wasn't an actual fire. When airbags deploy they explode in to your jaw with Jake LaMotta force, expelling pounds of dust that typically cover the bag to keep them from overheating within the car. Being punched by a bag of air into lockjawed submission isn't that bad because any sustaining internal injuries take days to show up and inevitably die from on a couch months later. Being hit by a pound of blistering dust hurts immediately. Imagine Hiroshima, because it was almost like that but I had to pay a fine afterwards. It's a kind of overwhelming stinging pain mixed in with my sobbing terror at dying in Western Canada.



The whole event made me feel a bit bad for my cat who I've mentioned once before. He was an ancient, orange mess that would bulimically shitvomit after every meal while oozing stuff out of his back and then generally refuse to die year after year. Which isn't to say I didn't adore him. Plato was a brilliant cat and a real rogue back in his prime. It's just that for the last two years he's smelt of piss and that tends to put a damper on any relationship. It's obvious he was on his way out the door this week though, because he hadn't been eating for days and his breathing wasn't right. So on Friday I thought it might be nice for him to come into my suite and hang out with me while I watched tat on googlevideo. I pet him and he purred but he was a mess; thin and gulping for air after every purr. I picked him up and his stomach was distended. We went into my living room and he sat on my lap gasping louder this time, likely because of the way my gentle Josef Mengele hands picked him up and I assume his body couldn't handle it. He began to panic and tried to jump off of the couch but it was clear his back legs weren't working. His claws began to get caught up in the rug because he couldn't retract them and he continued to try and crawl aimlessly forward. Assuming he was clawing for a bowl of water nearby I brought it to him and tried to dab a bit on his mouth but he kept thrashing around, grabbing hold of my xbox container with his teeth to pull himself forward. I began to try and pick him up to put him on hard ground but his legs were stuck in the carpet and he continued gasping. I got around him, holding him with one hand and using the other to pry out his claws from the ground by which point I noticed him not moving. He spasmed a bit but he was very obviously gone. Fairly gruesome.

On a lighter note I've sent in my settlement Visa to the UK and went for my biometrics scan/Voigt-Kampff test. It involved taking my fingerprints with a futurecomputer and having my iris' scanned with a webcam. Unfortunately I was told I'll get an official OK in 3-4 months time rather than 2 months like I had read so that's a bit of a pain in the ass. All the more time to work on my Choose Your Own Adventure tome I guess.

Hello there, fancy a nice cup of coffee? My favourite part about coffee are the bits that solidify at the top in an extra crunchy layer of mutated cream scum. When cream has the consistency of sand six days before its due date: that's when you know you've spoiled yourself with quality.



Yes, sandcream; that is my favourite part.



The other best bit about being piss poor is how potatoes come with fully functioning eyes

Remember the Top Secret game blog that was so Top Secret I refused to let anyone actually read it while accidently linking it to about twelve people? It's turned out to be largely rubbish but instead of deleting it like a sensible person I'm going to continue churning out an industry of posts. So if you fancy reading a Corlimey carbon-copy that caters to about 4% of your actual interests then click here, or here, but not here.

Like any great written work Gerablog is my fun-filled Sisyphean struggle to write things that don't cause me to piss gallstones of embarrassment. It was originally going to be a deadpan academic games studies blog which pretty much devolved into a mound of Sims crap the second I started writing the thing. Oh well!

It also offers you hours of fun while you to figure out how in the hell to pronounce my last name, because you can trust that however you're saying it: It's wrong.

Oh and I have a Twitter now which is briefly explained here.

I'm probably right in saying that if Thomas Hardy had been a 21 year old girl he would have scrapped Tess of the d'Ubervilles' season-based conceit for an oeuvre about poodles.

When the ENIAC had first been built in the 1940s it looked like a giant spice rack and both baffled and confused the masses to such an extent that scientists had to paste lights on its side, flashing at random and pointless intervals, just to convince onlookers that it wasn't actually doing nothing at all. This is the legacy of all technology: Complete, mental bewildering confusion.

So much like the ENIAC, trying to get Google video-chat to pissing work involves blindly hitting the same button over and over again like some sort of spacker Fonz repeatedly trying to punch a juke box until it finally turns on. Because it never TELLS you that it's in the process of working. Even the troubleshooting bit is a bit weird. It's basically a box that is meant to display some sort of webcammy image so you can test to see if it's working. But what if the image is black, Google?! What does that even mean? Oh you forgot to put that part in your FAQ? Oh no worries, I can just check on Google OH WAIT.

Luckily Skype is one of those rare technological gems that actually does bother to work when you ask it to. It also comes with the added bonus of reminding you that you haven't actually physically spoken to anyone outside of your house in five months and through the magic of technology projects your stupid floundering mole-face to the lovely social graces of other real actual functioning people. But aside from spending the latter half of the day frantically smoking to keep from obliterating myself with stupid over-analysis it was a very nice day over all. Cheers for that.

In any case I now have Skype. Oh hi, I might talk to you but probably not because I'm a terrified idiot.

A friend of mine who I haven't actually spoken to in about a year apparently got married the other day; posting photos up on Facebook of the ceremony which included dressing his white terrier thing up as a tiny man.



Sort of like this. Even a dapper dog has eyes like he's seen too much. In fact all costumed dogs seem to have that sort of I've-been-to-Nam,-Fucker look to them so the end result never really works. Dapper dog will just sit there looking like he's spiked your punch with arsenic, then spend the next eighteen minutes trying to tear his hat off with his face, shitting himself. Still, for some reason or another this look manages to be socially acceptable in high-end functions. There's a similar philosophy with kids.



Look at that posh fucker. He looks like he'd foreclose your house then try to diddle your wife, in fact overall adorability reaches a factor of zero when you realise he's just dressed up like some kind of Bret Easton Ellis asshole. And yet it's this sort of gaggle of dogs and kids who are dressed like weird suited cretins that beat me out of an invitation.

Right, if I ever get married I'm going to dress up as a kid in a suit wearing a dog suit of a dog dressed like a man just to carry out this baffling mixed metaphor. My cake won't actually be a cake, it will be a hand painted to look like a cake, and parts of it will actually be bits of cake because the sense of utter confusion derived from that will be veryfunnyandironic, and I will marry that hand and it will be my husband. In fact, if I ever get married I'm going to invite no one other than a fucking chorus of terriers in blackface.