I have just been up an attic. There were cobwebs, translucent red insects, and boxes. Some of the boxes contained old games, which I’ll probably post soon as part of the “wasn’t 80s box-art awesome” shit you’d expect of a fucking games journalist.

I found old issues of “The Zine”, a short-lived magazine from the early 90s, which was made up of voluntary contributions from readers. I’d got a piece in there myself: some navel-gazing paragraph about having a low libido, and how I didn’t actually want sex so quit cupping my nuts. This article was so over-written and earnest, it stank of a young bender in denial. Fair enough - I really thought, back then, that if I distanced myself as much as possible from the vile act of gay sex, I’d be acceptable to heterosexuals. I suppose I was a tiny Graham Norton.

The Zine staff were kind enough to forward me the responses to this article. There were quite a few - and the people who responded to the article were, in many cases, kind enough to touch my penis. It was here that I learned my most valuable sexy tip. Always have a reason for being shit at sex, apart from the fact you’re clumsy, lazy, and would rather be eating. What I’d written about having a low libido was frustrated and dishonest. But it gave me an excellent reason to fall off the bed, sneeze in his eyes, and spend 90% of the whole event fully-clothed and facing the wrong way. “Of course I’m rubbish,” I could validly say. “I don’t technically want to do any of this.”

Regressing further, another box from 1985 spat out my first erotic wankybook. It was the 17th Fighting Fantasy book, in which you - the reader! - played a superhero called the Silver Crusader. This was the time of my life when reading a description of a dwarf as “barrel-chested” started a randy slideshow in my head that made my immediate priorities change. Having badly drawn pictures was tantamount to hardcore. For months of my pre-teen life, this is the picture that would make me all excited and sad that life wasn’t the video for Take On Me. Seeing him again, over 20 years later, is a bit of a let-down. He just seems like a show-off.

There he is: The Creature of Carnage. The Creature had only one line, which he spoke in all caps. “PUNY HUMAN!” he bellowed, and both nuts came flying out of my gut cavity and started filling my body with spunk. “WHAT CAN YOUR PITIFUL EFFORTS HOPE TO ACHIEVE AGAINST THE CREATURE OF CARNAGE?” Very true, I thought. You’ve got Skill 12, Stamina 14, I’d be a loveless idiot to fight you. “MANY MUST DIE BEFORE I WILL BE STILL.”

It’s worth mentioning that I never really liked his curly hair. But it wasn’t insurmountable, for someone as deep as me. I just held the book in a way that my thumb covered his hair.

You might notice that I’ve coloured him in. That’s how much I loved The Creature of Carnage. I’d begun to worry that people would notice I was staring at the same page. I would get Appointment With F.E.A.R. out, just to look at this picture, and after a while this began to feel odd. So I got a bunch of crayons, and slowly coloured him in. I laboriously coloured in his skin. I painstakingly filled in the girders. And I coloured in his loincloth. I don’t think anyone will ever know how much I coloured in his loincloth. Whenever I looked at CoC, I developed arthritis of the heart.

My obsession with F.E.A.R. paid dividends, too. To this day, it remains the only Final Fantasy book I have ever completed. I was so proud of myself, that I wrote the word “completed” in the inside cover. This prevented me from reading through the book again, mistakenly believing that I was about to masturbate over a book I hadn’t finished.

This post is dedicated to The Creature of Carnage, and Vince Bunn.

IF YOU LOOK LIKE EITHER OF THESE MEN EMAIL ME NOW

Heyup - brief hiatus there, as a slow Wordpress upgrade got the site infected with Belgian Furniture and a javascript redirect to wp-stats-php.info. If you found yourself beset by Worms, then I can only pull my legs apart and offer you a free kick on my poor, asymmetrical nuts. In the meantime, here is some clip-art of a poorly computer.

I wrote a piece in today’s Guardian about affirmations. I’ve never been comfortable around affirmations. This is because I’ve always had the idea that I should live life as though I’m being watched by a studio audience, and shouting at yourself about how exactly you’re awesome is the kind of thing that would deserve a reaction shot from a Dulux dog.

Another reason I dislike affirmations - and Louise L Hay in particular - is that I went out with a guy who performed them. I told him - I said “look, I’m going out with you, what else do you need to boost your confidence? You’ve bagged the biggest hottie on the block.” At this point, I’d push my finger into my belly button and make a sizzling sound, for emphasis. Then I’d make like I was going to leave, but turn around and start wagging my finger and walking in a zig-zag. “What’s the cosmos got that I haven’t got, mmm? Didn’t I take you for two for one pizzas? No wonder everyone hates you.”

Essentially, that’s why I hate affirmations. I’m too embarrassed to do them myself, and I’d rather everyone else got their sense of self-worth by sleeping with me. So, after writing 700 words about not having an opinion, my trousers falling down, and the love of a good progress bar - today feels like my first opinion that people could disagree with on any level. Other than the perfectly understandable level of why is this fat cunt being given a voice in the national media?

So, either buy the paper, or save yourself 80p and go here later on in the day. It takes a while for high-quality opinions to float to the top, see.

…of how my trousers fell down and I laughed. If you’re thinking “that’s all very well, but’s I very much doubt if it’s something The Guardian would print in their Comments & Debate section” - if that’s what you’re thinking - then I can see your point. But you’d be wrong!

Anyone buying the nation’s most well-meaning newspaper tomorrow (Monday 12th) will get the chance to read exactly such a story, in which my trousers are quite brutally ripped off. It may not be something that the nation needs to read, but it’s got to be better than this, right? Yeah?

Alternately, you could just look at this link, where the new article will appear as soon as it’s up. And my fourth piece, believe it or not, actually expresses an earnest opinion. The last time I did that, I swear I nearly wiped out organised religion.

Synthetic Opinion is my attempt to weave a strong opinion out of something I know nothing about. This one was suggested by Rob, who writes the excellent Internets Dairy. He asked:

“Log, do you think the Large Hadron Collider MUST BE STOPPED in case a tiny black hole swallows the Earth? (Remember the set of things on the Earth includes Robert Mugabe and cancer, so it is not as simple a question as it first looks.)

Let opinions be weaved from the rainbow of ignorance!

NOT UNDERNEATH MY CONTINENT
Your Mechanical Beasts Are Not Welcome Here, White-Coated Butchers Of Innocence

Last month, I was playing tig with my two children in our garden. I call it a garden, it’s more of an orchard; but it’s very important, if you care for your children, that you provide an orchard for them. I understand that not everyone has access to an Orchard as gigantic and fertile as mine, but perhaps that’s God’s way of telling you to use contraception. As they played, naivity scrawled over their faces, a brief tremor ran underneath us. Imperceptible to all but the unshod foot of the family truly at one with nature, my poor saplings were flung into the air like reckless handfuls of grass.

“Mummy,” screamed Kieron. “I have landed on some soil, and I think I’m dying!” Natalie was more prosaic still, complaining of a troubling sense of disconnect with gaia, as though the very earth was pained, and shrinking from her. The innocence of children! I hadn’t the heart to tell them that deep beneath the Earth’s crust, scientists had built an infernal atom-smashing factory that would, one day, crush everything they loved to the size of an angel’s whisper.

The Large Hadron Collidor first came to my attention during a marquee lunch at the foot of the mountain that seperates our orchard from our rock star neighbour’s jungle. I’m not against other biomes per se, but that kind of sub-tropical expanse has the unsavoury whiff of new money. My dear best friend Sandragh, who is a highly experienced astrologist, informed everyone that atoms smashed together at such high speeds are liable to create energy with a significant cosmic resonance. My dear best friend Juliiann, who has spent a long time in the fascinating and important new field of crystallological endeavour, confirmed my worst fears when she said that her amber necklace had been positively squealing for the last three days. She went so far as to produce a large prismatic shard of quartz, and everyone agreed that it looked deeply uncomfortable.

Even the scientists admit it. Normally, I wouldn’t believe a word these poisonous merchants of steel theories put forward - but if they say something that seems cosmically sensible to me, then it can only be a very important concession. What these Butlin’s Whitecoats are saying, is that when you brutalise atoms at the very highest settings, black holes will fly out like freshly cracked pepper.

I’m reassured that the black holes this tiny wouldn’t completely annihilate my children. Sandragh, who is very open-minded, admits that an atom-sized black hole, placed a few feet behind your head, would even exert a gentle gravitational pull that would be like a surgery-free facelift. And Shiva knows, we girls need all the help we can get! But the contraption required to hold these unstable cauldrons of dark energy in place would probably resemble a harness - and are we really willing to be ridden around by astronomical phenomena, in the name of vanity?

The point is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and I can’t see how finding out is going to help my Kieron and Natasha survive in a future of obesity timebombs and Frankenstein carrots. In a world so full of data, wouldn’t it be nice to leave a few pockets of factlessness, and allow them to be filled the the precious beauty of human imagination? You don’t need to smash electrons into each other to watch a basket of puppies having a kiss, and nature doesn’t need robotic “science” or so-called “atoms” when she’s conjuring the miracle of childbirth.

I’m not one to blow my own trumpet - but like my spirit guide Nathaniel says, if you let anyone else blow it, you can never be sure they won’t flob some green in the pipes. He’s very coarse, but you can’t choose the voices that whisper in your head. However, you’ll have to believe me when I say that I am almost definitely the most sensitive and emotionally intellectual person in the world. And if something makes me uncomfortable, you’re just going to have to trust me when I say that it will cause the death of every last one of your children.

NEXT, IN SYNTHETIC OPINION #3

Can you write 700 words on the subject of “things that are sluiced” without hesitating, deviating or repeating? -Tyler

I believe in fate. I believe that the universe bends itself around me, because I am important. Nothing is trivial, once it has been perceived by me - when I clap eyes on something, it becomes a part of my destiny, because I am… well, I’m an intergalactic nexus.

So, when I found this flyer on the pavement, I knew that life had already written my future, and to fight it would only end in tragedy. What follows is select transcripts from my time with the Boppin’ Bunnies.

DAY ONE: SIGNING UP

Me: Hi. I’m here to join the Boppin’ Bunnies.
Mrs Shepherd: Excellent. We accept children from nought to five.
Me: I am threety-four. This will do, for your purposes. I will require exclusive use of a lavatory cubicle and vigorous affection. Here is my coat, don’t look in the pockets.

DAY TWO: JOINING IN

Michelle: Do you like horses?
Me: They are the best of all the animals, Michelle. You know that.
Michelle: You’re big.
Me: Fuck you.

DAY THREE: SONG AND DANCE

Stephanie: Why aren’t you clapping? This is the clapping song.
Me: Yeah, and this is the finger I’ve had up in my arse.
Stephanie: Aarrr! That’s a rude word!
Me: It’s a rude finger, baby. It’s a rude fucking finger.

DAY FOUR: A REVELATION

Me: It says here, you were formerly known as Jive Bunnies.
Mrs Shepherd: Yes.
Me: Why’s that then? Why’d you change it?
Mrs Shepherd: We… can’t say.
Me: I smell hot goss, and it’s coming from your pants. Spill, bitch. Scream!
Mrs Shepherd: Seriously, I’d be up to my tits in trouble if I said owt.
Me: SCREEAAAAAMM. SCREAAMMMM. screamscreamscream
Mrs Shepherd: OK I’ll tell you. The name was stolen from us by Angelina Stonebra, the leader of our bitterest enemies. God didn’t give their pre-school playgroup a name, so they stole ours.
Me: I’m going to get your name back, even if it means punching a three year old in the knickers.
Mrs Shepherd: If you do this for us, I’ll hoist up my petticoat and give you a two minute trolley dash.
Me: You know I said never to look in my coat pocket?
Mrs Shepherd: Yes?
Me: You can look in my coat pockets now.
Mrs Shepherd: It’s a packet of Rennies!
Me: You can have one if you want.

DAY FIVE: IN THE LAIR OF THE ENEMY

Me: Hi, I’d like to join the Jive Bunnies, please.
Mrs Stonebra: I’m afraid there are no vacancies. We have all the children we need for our dark sacrifice tonight.
Me: GASP

DAY SIX: THE AWESOME VOCABULARY OF THE HECATOMB

Me: So…  we wait until she’s killed all the children?
Police: Yeah. Otherwise she’d just say they were strapped to that dais as part of a game.
Me: Oh look! She’s just plunged a kris into that one’s chest. Shall we arrest her?
Police: Nah. It’s got to be unreasonable force. That one had it coming.
Me: I hope this builds into a satirical take on how the justice machine only moves to action when a white, middle-class girl is threatened.
Police: That would be politically sweet. Let’s do that.

DAY SEVEN: THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

Mrs Shepherd: Everything is as it should be, thanks to Log.
Me: Rennies for everyone!
Police: I’m afraid there have been some serious developments. I’d like you to accompany me…
All: Uh-oh!
Police: …to Alton Towers, where Mylene Klass will be giving everyone medals.
All: Cheer!
Me: Hang on… not Myleene Klass, the notorious medal thief?
Police: That’s her!
Mrs Shepherd: Here we go again!

I promised to write a 700-word opinion piece on any shit you care to suggest. The only rule is that I can’t research a single thing. The first suggestion came in from Adam…

“What about that hot button topic for 2008 - the US Presidential election?”

No sooner said than done, Adam! And to celebrate this inaugural opinion, I have included an animated gif of Hillary Clinton trying on a few new hands. That crazy cow just can’t settle on “the hand for her”. You should see some of the ones that didn’t even make it onto her snap-on attachment hole, though! They would have shaken your very root. Right up to the vinegars.

This Was Supposed To Be Fun
Why have you stopped my election from being excellent

Facts are great, but after a while they stop being fun. Say, you’re enjoying a game of Swingball with your best friend, who is a vet. Suddenly, someone rises from a nearby deckchair, and informs you that over the course of his career, he has negligently caused the death of over two hundred Springer Spaniels. An unwelcome distraction, for sure - but then, if you’re easily distracted you have no place playing Swingball. Far worse, would be the sense the you’re playing a kind of rotary tennis against a man who doesn’t know his way around a Spaniel. A stupid, irrelevant fact has just ruined the game.

The less basic and rudimentary a fact, the less fun it is. Take my imaginary friend, the vet. That simple fact is lovely – he has probably seen a cow’s fanny, and I can draw pictures of him squinting at a giraffe and saying “I’m Sorry, It Has Got Very High Mumps”. The more information I find out about his job – that his assistant is called Maureen, that he is unlikely to ever diagnose a giraffe, and that he’s fatally shit at Spaniels – every fact I learn takes me into a world that’s more complicated that I care to learn about. The fact that it’s important to him just makes it annoying.

With this in mind, here are the facts that I know about the American Election, in ascending order of whatever, get over it, Jesus.

1. A black man and a woman are going to have a fight, and as far as everyone can tell, it looks like they mean it.

Hillary Clinton is a woman! That means she has cables running to her big, tanned nipples that are capable of firing out milk. If you don’t think the idea of someone running the world with lasers of milk pissing from their chest isn’t awesome, then I honestly don’t know what to say to you. Legislation brought in for approval would be dabbled with an approving squirt, and evil budgets would be obliterated by a machine gun burst of white staccato squits.

This is all old and stupid hats to us Brits though, we had Maggie Thatcher. We remember when she took the free milk from those poor schoolkids, and poured it into a mechanised tit that she used to rush through the anti-union legislation of the eighties. But even in her most unpopular moments, we - the British People - would never have asked her to fight a black man. Who can imagine the special powers that each candidate could draw from their respective stereotypes during the final rounds? It’s an excellent and probably racist scene to imagine. It’d probably climax with Barack channelling the powers of the Omegahedron through his Burundi Wand, while Hillary straddles his neck and tries to strangle him with her fallopians.

At this level of understanding, anything is possible, and the American Election is possibly the second most exciting thing in the world, after walking into a zero-gravity chamber full of St Bernard puppies, all rotating on a different axis.

2. Another man says he wants to fight the winner.

This is the first fact you’ll encounter in the American Election that is boring. His name is so unremarkable that you might as well simply let your mouth hang open instead of saying it. I can’t think what he looks like, I don’t know anything he’s said, and if you want me to feel something about him then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Everything’s already 40% less fantastic.

3. Super-delegates are being used to reinstate the smoky back rooms and hidden decision-making processes that gave the Democratic party a bad name in the past.

That clattering sound was the pan lid of my interest. First, it made me think “Typical! Politicians!” which is the single least thrilling thing a person can think. Secondly, they’re called super-delegates, but their only superpower appears to be the ability to vote for who they like, and even we’ve got that. Finally, though, it’s rubbish because it ruins the first, excellent point. If you’re going to fix the fight, do it in a cartoon fashion. Put horseshoes in boxing gloves, use suits of armour and massive magnets. Not in some pervasive, creeping and utterly reliable way that would make the public feel a bit shocked if they didn’t already assume that everything was already fundamentally broken.

4. The winner gets to rule the world.

Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I was watching Highlander. If you’re going to take the piss, I won’t bother.

In Synthetic Opinion #2, I shall be answering a question on which I have even less knowledge than American Politics:

Log, do you think the Large Hadron Collider MUST BE STOPPED in case a tiny black hole swallows the Earth? (Remember the set of things on the Earth includes Robert Mugabe and cancer, so it is not as simple a question as it first looks.)

To finish off, here is a decade of UK political opinion distilled into one moderately compressed image.

A few weeks ago, I wrote 700 words for the Guardian. It was a glorious exercise in public self-castration, in which I exposed myself as the ill-informed prickwit that I quite frankly am. Since then, I’ve written a piece about how much I love progress bars, which I hope cemented my reputation as the Comment & Debate section’s moronic fluff correspondant. I’m currently awaiting response from my third piece about “Embarrassment”, which I’ll put up here if it gets rejected.

What’s become obvious, is that I need serious practice at pulling authoritative opinions from my arse. So, if anyone is still reading this blog after my crazy days of neglect, this is my challenge and my promise; I will write a 700-word opinion piece on any subject raised in the comments. And boy-frigging-howdy, I will be plumbing wells of passion you never knew I had. I will be searing. I will be sensational. I will be bereft of useful information. To make it in this game, I reckon I’ve got to churn it out like a cocksure fraud - so I won’t research a fucking thing.

Look at this shit, I wrote this back in 2005. If I can write 1,000 words about putting on a sock, I reckon 700 words about the Palestinian conflict should be piss-play. So go on, you glorious titmice - get commenting and commission me into orbit.

(This blog post was this man’s idea.)

Here’s how to enjoy St David’s Day - first go out with a Welshman, then go to the pub.

http://www.disappointment.com/welsh

There’s a 12-page booklet in there. It’s a pdf, if you fucking please. Also some photos, which you won’t be interested in unless you’re a mate. Which, I admit, is probably all of you.

Whenever I have an opinion, I tend to find it pretty embarrassing. Being wrong’s humiliating enough, but when you’re wrong about something you were dumb enough to frankly care about, it’s like pressing a heart-shaped cookie-cutter against your chest and making a noisy display of ripping yourself slightly open.

I’ve done it a couple of times on this blog, with religion. Can’t stand the thing, but I’d never tell my mum to stop believing her dad isn’t in Heaven, so there’s weak. I also seem to remember Twiggy got me frothy once by saying there’s no excuse to be fat. How can you say that, Twiggy? Have you not tasted how delicious food is? What are you supposed to do, just lick it?

Both times I was left slightly mortified by having a real thing that represented something I believed out there. If I were to imagine myself as a boss battle - and I do - then you’d have to plough your way through a six minutes Parodius level of self-deprecation and whimsy before reaching a glowing red chicken nugget of sincerity that you destroy with the whiff of disagreement.

So, when I was asked to write something for The Guardian’s comment section, I was kind of paralysed by my own unwillingness to be contradicted, so this is what I came out with.

Read it, and comment on it - make me look popular, please. Yeah, even you, freaky comments stalker who’s forced me to ban three IP addresses. And call that fourth-commenting cunt a retard who completely missed the point, yeah? As if the world needs more pricks gobbing off about what they reckon.