How Do I Blog?

I haven’t written a line of script in months despite the rather compelling impetus to do otherwise.

I’ve reviewed a script for a friend… but I haven’t even written up my thoughts on that yet. Settling back to normality after NYC can only cover me as an excuse for so long but sooner or later I need to admit that I have an overwhelmingly large procrastination problem.

I haven’t updated my restaurant review site in months and when I even contemplate doing so (though I haven’t been anywhere locally for dinner in a while) I cannot muster any interest so today, I killed it. The link will disappear from the sidebar. Adios www.dininginbrisbane.com (I won’t be renewing the domain in a year or whenever it’s up)

I made a bit of money on poker a month or so ago (definitely back on the up overall side now) and I took a chunk off to help pay for my NY flights. The rest is coming off soon, I’ll leave a little so that whenever I have that itch I need to scratch I can sit down and play a few SNGs and get it out of my system. My current interest level is very, very low.

I haven’t gotten a lot out of the internet recently, more and more I find myself randomly clicking links or F5ing into oblivion whenever I do browse and to be honest, it’s a waste of my time and totally counterproductive and makes me feel pretty shit when I weigh it up against what I’d rather I was spending my time on.

Anyway, grumbling about it doesn’t help but does serve to put my thoughts into focus and etched in stone that I might not pretend they don’t exist, so I’m taking some drastic steps to extricate myself from the currrent debilitating routine and hope to see some improvement in coming months.

Let’s call it New Financial Year Resolutions.

I experienced something during my two week stay in New York City that was utterly bizarre.

A misspent youth of watching movies and playing videogames had created for me a sense of familiartity to cultural icons, which in turn created a weird cognitive dissonance while I walked around NYC and visited places for the first time that, through repeated media exposure, I felt I had already experienced many times before.

Case in point, I walked into the grandiose bay-windowed hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art containing the Temple of Dendur and heard “TANGO DOWN!” in my brain. Until that moment I had been experiencing the Met on my own terms for the first time and then, quite suddenly, I walked a path I’d been down many frustrating times before in a videogame: Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear. It was somewhat uncanny to wander around and remember shooting up this entire hall with a semi-automatic machine gun and watching the many windows shatter with teenage glee.

Somewhat amusingly, the opposite of this effect happened on the flight home to Brisbane - I hadn’t made it to the Guggenheim while I was in NYC but when I watched The International (Quantum of Solace’s smarter big brother) I experienced that weird notion of seeing somewhere for the first time via the media while having the overall familiarity with the surrounding area (Upper East Side, Central Park).

I also had a certain someone gibbering in my ear for the first week about how effectively GTA4 had recreated areas of NYC, I responded with “if only they’d effectively recreated gameplay anywhere near as compelling as GTA3″. It was however funny to wander along the promenade at Brooklyn then realise I’d driven through it, ploughing through pedestrians and hot dog stands before flipping the car over the barrier into the dockland areas below.

Yes, I was in New York City with a New Yorker and we both related to the world around us through the media that had exposed us to it - even though he fucking lives there! That’s geekery, ladies and gentlemen.