How I Met Your Motherfucker

About four years ago, my very good friend Ross and I (same name, woah, only just noticed) rented a film and bought some snacks - we then went back to mine to watch the film and eat the snacks. I forget what the film was, but one of the food items we bought was a decent sized tub of Toffee and Honeycomb flavoured Mackie's ice cream. It didn't seem like a girls night in at the time, we genuinely used to just have a fascination with desserts, once inventing the combination of ginger pudding and custard, which we rather appetisingly named "Ginger and 'Turd". Which in hindsight, luckily didn't catch on as our actual nicknames. Not that it would have been much worse than "The Two Rosstitutes".

Anyway, the ice cream was disgusting shit, being about 120% sugar, I had a spoonful or so and decided to give it a miss. But for some reason Ross decided he wasn't going anywhere until he had devoured the whole thing. It was a painstaking thing to witness, and I don't know if he did it just to challenge himself or if it was all in the name of value for money - but it sure wasn't because he liked it. The film had finished long ago as Ross continued to shove the now sloppy mixture of nuclear sweetness into his face, vowing that if he was going to be sick, he'd just have to do it on my mother's leather sofa, but nothing was going to stop him seeing the bottom of that tub. By the end he was a broken man, whatever pride he had hoped would come from such persistence was not there and it was ultimately pointless.

This is what I think about when I watch "How I Met Your Mother".

The worst TV programme in history.

For those who don't know about this turd-tacular masterpiece, the show is set in New York and is based on the character of Ted Mosby (the twat in the middle) who is telling the story to his future kids, in the year 2030, about how he met their mother in the first place. It's like "Friends", if it had been given an overbearing structural concept and written by a leaky biro held in the grasp of a twitching sphincter. It is genuinely set in New York though. And they are all friends.

The second main problem I have with this show is that Ted has taken six (and counting) series' to tell this story, sometimes taking clumps of episodes, sometimes seasons, and hours of life, to tell us all who ISN'T his future child-bearer. If my Dad had taken in excess of one hundred, thirty-minute episodes to tell me that he met my Mum working for my Uncle in a small Aberdonian Logistics and Transport company, mentioning every human he had ever met before her - I'd be fucking raging. And he gave me life, so he has dibs on wasting my time. This audio-visual abortion doesn't.

The worst part is, I don't give a shit who the mother ends up being at all. I've read some pretty decent murder mysteries in my time and watched a lot of wrestling too - the only way they will top the kind of identity revealing found in this two mediums is if the mother turns out to be either of his prickish buddies Marshall (left) or Barney (right). Quite frankly the whole concept is just a devious way of stopping the show ever getting cancelled, but the goods news is that it will apparently be going no longer than eight seasons. 

Eight.

Seasons. 

Fuck. I remember "Lost" got a lot better when they established an ending then started working back the ways, but this is an outrage. I'd like to know if "How I Met Your Mother" has the same online fanfare and speculation as to how it will end, but at the same time - wouldn't like to know.

So why do I continue to watch it? Because of the first main problem I have with it. The characters. They are all awful. Completely unlikable, unfunny and based completely out of the realm of realism. The only aspect of the characters I'd say one can identify with is with the charming couple of Marshall  (Jason Segel; previously liked by me in some films) and Lily (flute-pussy from "American Pie"; previously disliked by me in everything). Everyone knows that one couple that were sweethearts in school and have been together ever since. They have never suffered in love, second-guessed their choices, or actually done anything interesting at all - and you hate them. 

Well Marshall and Lily are them, except one is an embarrassing kid-like lumbering fuckwit who you wouldn't trust to take your coat for a walk and the other just needs a slap.

Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris *shrug*) is the "Stifler" of the group, who's main gimmick is that he wears a suit. He has no depth or personality and could only exist in a world where the bar you frequent every night has different hot single girls sitting by themselves. He often asks for various types of high five and his sexual conquests are about as believable as if someone looking like this...

claimed he just had sex.

Robin Scherbatsky is a woman in it, who has no idea about anything and gets away with murder at her job as a news anchor. I honestly can't remember a damn thing she has done the whole time. But the REAL villain of the piece is the main character Ted.

There are not enough languages in the world in which to tell this guy to go fuck himself. I suppose you could describe him as "unlucky in love" but that's not it at all, he's just the clingy moron who tells girls he loves them on the first date and would propose to anything that has a vagina and breaths. That is not a likeable trait in a protagonist unless they are fucking hysterical in their own desperation. But Ted Mosby is not. The kind of scrapes he gets himself into remind me of a retarded mate who hangs about with you and always misses the boat on what is crazy. You throw a snowball at a strangers house. He throws a a brick through his own Gran's greenhouse. How does your brain work exactly?

Ted coincidentally has the wit of a projectile brick, which is probably why he is friends with Marshall, but the whole show is just lacking any genuine humour. I have never laughed ONCE at it. Here is a woeful example of the writing - a song that Marshall comes up with to describe Barney's sexual adventures. It's called "Bang Bang Bangidty Bang" or something.

YouTube link (ignore the intro)

Imagine watching someone do that in a restaurant - you'd call the police. They obviously watched that episode of "Family Guy" where Peter sings that "Bird is the word" song continuously and thought "that was funny, let's do that". However, they totally failed to realise that Peter Griffin is a funny cartoon character with the scope to be genuinely ridiculous and hilariously dumbass, whilst they are semi-devised semi-humans, who one could only describe as "bubbly" on a online dating website.

And that bird thing was fucking annoying anyway.

But to answer my question - why do I watch this show? Simply really, to remind myself that my friends and the people I hang around with are not too bad actually. Yes, some of them maybe ice cream sadists, yes a lot of them like "The Inbetweeners", but I have enough faith in my various social circles to know that if any of them came up with a song about anything, it would be clever and ultimately out of place on "Sesame Street". One of my friends makes up bigoted poems in the character of a cockney builder, then delivers them live onstage with a plastic yellow hat for fuck sake, and it's exactly one thousand times funnier than any of the shit a team of lazy over-paid writers working on a multi-million dollar sitcom can come up with.

"Just make them say "bang" in the easiest tune you can think of"

"Mary had a Little Lamb?"

"...try the second easiest tune you can think of"

I wish death on you.

Computer Games

I can't remember the last time I watched a film and paid attention. I usually have them playing whilst I work, but the last two times I've specifically tried to watch a film, I've fallen asleep. Yes, one of those times was during the wax work action thriller "The Expendables" in the cinema. I don't think my 15 minute siesta was enough to miss out on any significant plot details though. In fact, I probably missed some Stallone-spoken dialogue that would have only clouded matters.

Seeing as work has become less frantic, the Fringe is well and truly over and having seen the advert for the new Halo game due out in a few days

.. no wait, a COUPLE of days, I have decided that playing computer games would be a pretty awesome way of spending Semptember. I just really need to switch off for a few hours and shoot the fuck out of some bad guys. And good guys too when they aren't looking.

Halo 3 is one of my top five favourite things ever made because it was beautiful and I actually got good enough to put up a fight against online American gamers who seem play 36 hours a day. I have no idea what the story behind the new one is, and frankly don't care, I have officially unboxed my Xbox 360 after about a year (roughly one day per rotational degree) and am prepared to waste huge quantities of time playing it. PLAYING. LIKE A LITTLE BOY. To make time, I am going to hugely up efforts to stop sleeping so much and me more efficient in my working hours, wasting considerably less time refreshing Facebook and mast...ering the art of procrastination.

Once this decision had been made, I have pretty much bought Kane and Lynch II and competed it within 5 hours.

As is my impulsion. The game was fast, brutal and wonderfully linear It had a clear beginning and a quickly achievable end and was just what I needed to wet my appetite for more. Within the next 10 hours (included 9 hours sleep) I had taken it back and traded it in for Red Dead Redemption. Which is not such an "in and out" affair.

The only game I have ever 100% completed on the Xbox360, is "Gun" which was a brilliant open world western and this is basically the same, but looks 33% better. Being made by Rockstar Games it is basically (no, literally) GTA: Wild West and between a few moments of awesomeness, pretty much exclusively involves travelling from A to B as the core gameplay. When you're not doing missions that involve travelling you can go watch a movie... play poker... buy stuff... basically everything I usually do on the internet whilst I'm working, except just now I'm not actually getting anything done, am I!? 'Sake.

I decide I want to avoid the side-quests and mucking around, just smash through the main storyline, and have this baby back in the shop in time for a Halo: Reach trade in. So I  go to do a mission for some ranch-owning Lady-girl only to be told she is not to be disturbed between 5am and 11pm (game time). I look at my watch in the start menu - it's 3am. Fuck this. I shoot a man in the kneecap out of pure boredom, a bunch of guys try to kill me, so I kill them all, more guys turn up, chase me out of town and by the time I get my shit together and pay off my bounty, it's 11.30pm again. WAKE UP SO WE CAN HERD YOUR CATTLE FOR THE SEVENTEENTH TIME MISSY, OR I SWEAR I'M GONNA SHOOT YOUR DOG.

Anyway, having missed about a year of games and such, I can't believe how astonishing the graphics and animation of, particularly, Red Dead Redemption really were. It's made me think about trying to get into games development again in a pretty big way. I'd much rather me making cowboys and guns from wicked concept art than oil rigs from illegible technical drawings.

Although, I did get to do a pretty violent scene of a dumbass Nigerian hammering into a gas pipeline last week.

"I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO THE INTERNATIONAL MONEY SCAMS"

My House

I have just managed to break the flat's resident chopping board (impossible sounding, I know), so I thought now is as good a time as any to talk about my living situation. This follows a week where I melted a tupperware container to the hob and smashed two pint glasses in the biggest ever Robinson's Orange & Mango-related disaster known to man. At least I know I will get some of my deposit back in the end of the day, mainly because there is not £350 worth of damage to do in this flat, and I can not see my flatmate putting up much of a fight. I don't think he gets mad, even though I used to push his patients to the limit by constantly leaving the iron on, or the hob after I had made my tea - I was used to the reminding noise of a gas cooker - plus my rent includes all bills, so I don't really care. The bad thing is however, that any kitchen damage was clearly done by me, because as previously mentioned my flatmate does not use the kitchen. I believe he survives off his family's sandwich shop - which is just around the corner. He has his own fridge in the hallway that contains a few foil wrapped sandwiches and one litre of Volvic water. I don't even remember thinking that was strange when I moved in.

Anyway, I moved into this flat in central/West End Glasgow after leaving Aberdeen at the very beginning of the year, after replying to an ad on spareroom.co.uk or some similar flatshare website. I lined up a few viewings, saw this one and thought "yes, it's simple, cheapish, good location, very uncluttered and the flatmate seems non-mental". I saw two others, thought they were shit and basically paid my deposit and sorted it all out in one day trip down to Glasgow - like a man. I didn't take much stuff down with me, mainly my computer and some clothes and a sense of adventure and new beginnings. It was an exciting but quite lonely time for the first week or so, but all got much better when my flatmate (we're going to call him Ben) ('cause that's his name) invited me out for a few drinks at the pub round the corner. It was so good to meet new people and stuff that we went out every night, six nights in a row and had a great time. I had no job, and wasn't immediately worried about getting one.

I feel quite bad nowadays, because when this started Ben really tried to integrate me into his community and "show me a good time", but then I went and made my own friends, mostly people who do stand-up comedy and now have nothing to do with him. Such is life.

Now, every time I tell anyone about Ben they say "he sounds like a weirdo", the people who care about me say ""he sounds like a weirdo and I don't want you living there". He is not really, but here are some facts that would lead you to believe he is.
- The kitchen/sandwich thing.
- He keeps the hoover in his room and runs it twice a day, once RIGHT after his shower, and one early evening. I know for a fact the hoover doesn't work because I tried using it once, but have resorted to just dust-pan-and-brushing my carpet, which is highly inefficient, but much less frustrating than a chunky dyson that sucks the wrong way. Which is blowing, technically.
- He can spent more than 24 hours in his room without even leaving to go to the toilet.
- He plays poker online for a living. (I thought he was a freelance I.T. specialist or something, until he joined the dots for me, explaining his midday sleeping and midnight tantrums when he got robbed by some 13-year-old American.)
- He wears the same North Face fleece - all the time.

I think all his friends think he is gay, I have never seen him with a woman or anything, he is 31, and he has been living in this awful flat for 10 years (he owns it by the way - dunno how). I personally think he is just shy or something, but there have been a few incidents that have shown an awkwardness and total discomfort like when his mate stole his phone in the pub and texted me "Hi Ross, I like to watch you when you sleep. See you tonight. xxxx". I cottoned on immediately, but you have never seen anyone so embarrassed in your life. And I do hope he was embarrassed - not busted.

The other incident involved me strolling back from the bathroom wearing pink underwear (not important). He came out of his room, got a flash, then did this bizarre Mr Bean type turn around/retreat thing, with his eyes glued to the floor. There was probably someone in your year at school that did that all the time - you know the kind. But anyone I know would have said "nice pants, bender" - but most people I know are very comfortable with their sexuality. And fairly crass.

I can not really describe the social atmosphere of the flat. It's about as welcoming as Edinburgh. The whole flat has about 8 things in it, bare walls, a couch in the tiny living room, a toilet in the bathroom - that's about it. So we are both pretty much locked away in our bedrooms all the time and it sort of reminds me of those film scenes where two people would be dining, both sitting at opposing ends of a horrendously long table. An open bedroom door means, "I am out, you may download lots of stuff" - for some reason, when one of us downloads, the other's internet goes to crawling speed, it's a huge pain in the arse when you need the net to work, like we both do. Meanwhile, a closed door seems to mean, "Do Not Disturb", so we actually text each other in the rare occasion we need to share information - but to be fair, it is mainly to say "are you downloading something?"
"no"
"k"

So I am looking to move out, but still with in the West End of Glasgow, I'd rather not move in with a stranger again, but looks like the only way for now. Not being horrendously desperate to move I have a little more scope to be pernickety with which rapey Gumtree ads I follow up. The only flat I've been to see in the 3 months I've been looking was with a chap called Wilf, who was a bit of an old hippy. I was quite up for it, but the flat looked like a car boot sale had been sick in the hallway, and the bedroom that was going to be mine was literally the size of a double bed, with a double bed halfway up the wall. I'm too old for cabin beds - plus he had an Apple Mac in the living room. NEXT.

Just to finish with, I am finally making an effort to watch The Wire. Ben actually raved about it, when we used to actually talk to each other, and he gave me the first season to watch on disc. Having been dry of a TV show to be obsessed with for some months now, I'm going to plunge in until I become as smitten as everyone else has been with it - inevitable watching the entire thing in one time-sucking, square-eyed week. And I suppose I'll do some work too.

Artist01/Album01/Track01-Intro.mp3

Hello.

My name is Ross and I am starting a blog today because I have literally watched every program on BBC I-player and 4od that is currently available, caught up on anything remotely unimportant on Facebook and have a bet with myself that I won't keep this up any longer than September.

I will start at the beginning with why it is totally necessary that I don't leave my computer and why I don't just go outside or talk to a human being. Basically, I need to work, because I have done nothing for the last two days. I work as a 3D animator, technically freelance, but 100% of my work is for a company in Aberdeen called Viscom - who mainly do work involving oil rigs, helicopter safety and other such energy industry related ventures. I am very lucky to have this job and basically got the opportunity through my friend Terry, who does the same sort of work - but much better. The reason I am so lucky, is that I have come to realise that personal contacts is the only way to get a decent job these days, but the strange part about it was that I lived in Aberdeen for 24 years before moving to Glasgow in January 2010 to try and find a decent job, then I landed this baby three months later, and they actually trusted me to work remotely from Glasgow - from my bedroom - which I do. Suckers.

Even though I am fairly confident no-one from work would ever have the intuition or interest to find this blog, I am not going to take any risks in going into too much detail about it. My whining about the production process of making a small "Hearts and Minds" film about some pipe-laying in Nigeria is not going to be terribly interesting to anyone else - and despite their faults, the people I work for are nice people. I'd like to share some of my work, but am not entirely sure how they feel about that either. I will share this link http://www.viscom-aberdeen.com/viscom-helps-deliver-gas-specialists-message.html to show you the project I am currently working on. Ignore the bit about completion being in July - bless them - it won't be done until September. Not my fault.

The advantages of the job (can work when I like, good pay, doing what I love(ish), one metre commute to the office) far outweigh the disadvantages (total lack of routine, computer tantrums, constant guilt that I should be working and very little human interaction) and I'm just relieved (slightly less than my Dad) that I am finally making use of my 2.1 in Design for Digital Media that took up four easy going years of my life. It will not be a job that I can keep up forever, mainly because I would be a nightmare to live with a partner/girlfriend with my disjointed schedule. Not only would it be a pisser for me to watch my dearest come home at 5.30pm and forget about their work completely, but they would probably find it utterly infuriating to see me continuing to lie in our warm and cosy bed, resetting my alarm for 10am then snoozing for a further 36 minutes after that. I have basically given up on trying to start working early, I just don't have the discipline. Another reason this job only has a certain longevity is that I basically live like a student. I can just go out drinking when I like. Between my regular ten hour sleep sessions and my vulnerability to a cider-fuelled night out, I can't decide if I'll live to 100 or be dead before I'm 30.

That freedom is, tbh, awesome though. I can make appointments for stuff with out a thought, take days off to go to the cinema at 2pm and basically do what I want, which is a fabulous asset to have as an amateur stand-up comedian. I predict 80% of this blog will be talking about stand-up. I started it when I moved to Glasgow and would be a frustrated hermit with out it. Nearly all the friends I have made down here are through stand-up and a gig in the diary is always something I look forward to immensely. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is obviously the big dick that everyone is stroking just now - I've been through about five times so far and done six gigs, I will probably do a review of it all at the end of August.  For now I am playing The State Bar on Holland Street in Glasgow this evening for the first time and am focusing on that, and the new Glasgow-specific intro that I have been dying to try for a while. MUCH more to come on that throughout - lucky you.

I currently stay in the West End of Glasgow, very close to the City Centre, but am on the look out for somewhere new. My flatmate is a nice but awkward character, who has an even worse routine than mine. Where I sit at home modelling virtual lifeboats and pipe-laying equipment, he is in the other room making his dosh from online poker, a professional pastime he has been indulging in for the last three years I believe. I have quite a strict endpoint of 2am for working, after that it stops. He seems to do anything between midnight and next midnight, and like me watches endless films and TV series whilst he earns. This week I have msotly been hearing the theme music from Curb Your Enthusiasm emanating from his oversized bedroom. It's actually a hilarious set up we have, we text each other rather than go knocking on each other's bedroom doors and he never, and I mean never, uses the kitchen. Again, I will at some point flesh out the details of my small basement dwellings, but for the meantime all I can say is that we don't have a functioning living room because he uses that as his bedroom, leaving what is clearly the second bedroom as a cramped, shitty living room, with a noisy boiler in it. It's a generally a horrible, dark and empty place to bring people back to. For the third month running I am aiming to move out on the 31st, but looks like it will have to wait again.

Finally, I feel I should explain the blog title "Enter Fadman". I have relatively few belongings with me down here in Glasgow, most of my stuff is in Aberdeen at my Dad's house, but what stuff I do have fits in one bookcase type thing. The other day my friend pointed out that the items on the bookcase are an excellent cross section of all the phases I have been through, mainly in the last few years. And they were totally right. I have always known that I go through fads, get obsessed with things very quickly, indulge in them ferociously, then get bored and ditch them. A few examples from the bookcase include:

- Halo 3 for Xbox (played obsessively for 6 months in 2007)
- Creatine (I went to the gym three times a week for four months and adopted quite a strict workout routine and ate pretty fucking healthily - then just stopped)
- Books called "Cracking the Short Story Market", "Complete Guide to Film Scoring" and "The Illustrated Guide to Blackjack" (a few creative ventures that lasted about a week each and a reminder that I spent about three unemployed months in Aberdeen as a casino fiend. Not a very good one though)
- A bow tie (I do a stand-up routine about being in a barbershop quartet. Well I was, for about six combined months)

Other fads have included Battlestar Galactica, mustaches, learning German, learning Spanish, going down rivers in rubber dingys, Rammstein, keeping fit (recurring), learning Russian and Sandy Toksvig. The list goes on.

A sort of "current fad" breakdown can often be found by my bedside which currently includes a book on reading body language that I bought immediately after digesting the BBC series Sherlock that was recently on. There is also a slip from the Royal Mail telling me I missed delivery of my beard trimmer this morning (because I was in bed) and have to go to the depot to pick it up. I have an identity crisis every month and feel the need to change my hair and/or beard at a moments notice - I consider this as a sub-fad, which I tried to stop when I moved here so that people would always recognise me, but things don't always work out like you want them to. The main test is to see if doing a blog is a fad, because it is one that I have been through a few times before. I wasn't surprised when blogger.com had recognised my e-mail address. I previously used it for a blog on music reviews (a fad that actually lasted nine months in 2009) and to blog my final year project at Uni. That one lasted a week and was mostly screen shots.

That is it for now. I am going to finish some work, have some Chili Con Carne and practice my comedy set for tonight.

"When I first moved to Glasgow, I thought an Orange March was a whole month of 2 for 1 cinema tickets."

Wish me luck. I'll need it.