The One Year Anniversary Special!

I can’t quite believe it. It has been a whole year since I started this blogging nonsense. How do you feel? Old? Mentally exhausted? Overexposed to an incomprehensible amount of DirtyScribble action that, much like Rihanna, has left you wishing it would just piss off for a little bit and return with some new shtick? Well that isn’t going to happen. This dead horse is on fire, and I’m going to send it tumbling into the grave with a thumping Calvin Harris drop. I’ve found love in this hellish place, and no-one’s around to say this joke is roughly one year too late. A toast to DirtyScribbles!

So here it is, a post to celebrate evolution from my early stints as a naive youthful wonder into the naive older wonder I am today. If that isn’t progress, then next year I’ll hopefully achieve older with a slightly dampened dream. Then maybe a mid-20’s crisis crying into a Jagerbomb, ploughing through memories like it’s Dumbledore’s Pensieve. From there the world will be my fractured oyster, removed of its treasures and clamped around my balls, dragging me into the hopeless abyss that will be the rest of my life.

But I am a positive person. I estimate that I have roughly 5 years until my balls will be clamped. It is therefore my mission to grow this corner of the internet into my blooming garden of rambling. Full of delights that will include life experiences, gaming musings and filmic bruisings. This wonderful hive of activity will be your one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the world. Whether Man Of Steel is worth seeing (it isn’t), if the Nintendo 3DS is shaping up to be the best handheld ever (it is), and how I exactly like my crumpets in the morning (buttered, edges burnt with a spongy centre). You’ll be clicking yourself senseless.

What has happened over the past year is that some brave people have actually accepted my views and words onto their website. So whilst this will remain as my personal avenue of unedited garbling, I have increased my scope out onto the wider realms of the internet. As a little vanity trip, I’m going to link the stuff I’ve been most proud of over the past year. It’s a dick move, but this will be a nice post to reflect upon when I’m perusing through people’s bins with sea-life clinging to my testicles. So let me have this one yeah?

Planet Ivy- Games That Won’t Love Me

Game Muse – 5 Reasons Why Luigi Is The Greatest Nintendo Character

Starburst Magazine – Ken Levine Writer On Logans Run Remake

That last one isn’t particularly entertaining, I’m just incredibly happy to be helping out Starburst! There was also my work with Official Playstation Magazine and ShortList, but you know I DON’T WANT TO GO ON ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME. But that happened, I’ve got the prints to prove it. I won’t put them here though, print is to precious for these filthy walls. I’m a bit lazy too. Do you like Pikmin? Here’s a lovely Pikmin 3 picture…
As expected I’ve completely lost where this was going, but it wouldn’t be an anniversary special without some thanks. If you are reading this now, or if you’ve occasionally read posts over the past year at moments of boredom, then I would like to give you a warm verbal hug. I’m always surprised to hear people actually read my waffle. I don’t think I’m particularly awful but it’s nice to know some people can sandwich a browse here between stalking others and watching videos of cats. I feel honoured, really I do.

But enough of that soppy bollocks, the ticking clock of oyster balls is against me. Here’s to the next long and prosperous year of DirtyScribbles mayhem. Hopefully the next anniversary will bring buckets of new achievements that I can proudly parade in this little hub of mine. If not, I’ve always got this post. A beaming reminder of the heights that I’ve achieved. I’ve morphed into a really shit peacock, and it feels chuffing fantastic.

DirtyScribbles Presents… Politics.

I absolutely loathe politics.

I’m not entirely sure why it has taken me this long to realise. I truly despise politics. I’ve finally said it. Time to break off the undies, strap on a leaf and bounty around a frivolous garden looking for a gal called Eve with whom I can blossom. Oh you want to know why? You don’t? Well pipe down and sit-tight. I need a toasty rant to let off some steam and no little bugger is going to ruin it.

Little buggers. It’s a pretty fitting phrase to sum up my ongoing relationship with politicians. They have always remained a sort of depressing blur in the background of my life. That was until I took a profound interest in the topic of history, but even then I tried to avoid topics that heavily involved the words government, party and wing. The infamous grease-based mutiny at the chicken wing party of 1912 even proved too suspicious for my politically wary ears.

Recommended for Nixon haters.

Alright maybe that didn’t happen, but it sounds a hell of a lot more interesting to me than politics. Recently I have been reading Hunter S. Thompson’s fabulous book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and to say how much it revolves around the topic, I am absolutely in love with it. It’s essentially a collection of rambles throughout his journey as a journalist on the campaign trail of the 1972 presidential election between George McGovern and Richard Nixon. Whilst it is incredibly insightful as to what occurs behind the scenes of these drawn out slogs, it is most enjoyable because Thompson himself absolutely hates every minute of it.  He regularly goes off on tangents about cars or hitchhikers and generally drinks/drugs himself into a state to where his job appears mildly tolerable.

It’s not that he doesn’t have an opinion on the subject, he openly expresses his hate for Richard Nixon and Democrat runner Hubert Humphrey’s at every available opportunity. He just seems to hate the people and how the popularity of a politician can often come down to stylish, hollow speeches and dirty behind-the-scenes tactics. Obviously Thompson has a much wider knowledge of politics than I will ever hope to gain, but this book has helped me pin down what it is I hate so much about this subject that has burdened me for years.

It’s dividing, it’s crushingly dull and it makes me want to eat my own face. It encourages the sort of person that categorically divides the nation definitively under the headings left-wing, right-wing and center. It reduces our view of people to the equivalent of the hotness scale at Nando’s. It shouldn’t matter if we like our chicken mild or extra hot, at the end of the day its just a different coating of the same pissing chicken. It’s perfectly fine to support a party one election and then opt for another in the next. We are humans, we change, explore and develop. What politics does is buckle people into a world where none of this is expected. If your conservative, your supposed to blindly stay that way regardless of the state of the party or the country. It’s impractical, frustrating and it does my nut in.

I also don’t trust a profession where to appear ‘human’ is a benefit to your standing. If your not appearing human to millions of people then something has drastically gone wrong along the way. Either that, or politics has completely swallowed your soul and has left you inside feeling like an empty corpse. One that is full of rabble-rousing speeches and a desire to govern a nation. I wonder if that’s why politicians always look so dried up. Oh well I’m never going to know. Fuck you politics. You’ve just made me crave chicken.