Warming Up

Delighted to see that the stone clearer kickstarter rewards are coming through. Everyone so far seems delighted. As they should, because as always, our rewards are fucking excellent.

OK, only mildly disappointed the second lockdown starts on the very day my new book was hitting the shops. You can, of course, still get it in all formats wherever you get your books. But it’s still a little unlucky. I guess there are people who are being hit worse.

Also I make the prediction (in a book completed in June) that you will be reading it during second lockdown, so that turned out to be a pretty bang on prediction for those of you reading it on publication day.

Get the audio book and ebook here (for example) 

There’s 200 hardback copies of The Problem With Men with a signed bookplate with a cock drawn on it and a special November 19th badge available for just £10 (cheaper than Ian Amazon can manage) at  Go Faster Stripe.

Snap them up.

I caught the end of Revenge of the Sith today (we continue to take the kids through all 9 films and maybe the various other movies in the franchise - I think they like it, they were fighting each other with big swimming noodles tonight saying one of them was Darth Vader and the other was Anakin Skywalker - now that would have been a fucking twist).  I continue to spot the flaws in these films (and I am not sure I ever saw parts 2 and 3). My favourite bit today was The Emperor appearing as a hologram to the separatist leaders and saying very pointedly that Darth Vader would “take care of them.” But he said it in such a pointed manner that he clearly meant it in the sense that they were about to be killed by Vader. I hadn’t seen this before and I called it and the thing is, so should the Separatist leaders. They 100% should have replied, “Why did you say it in that weird way, emperor?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh you did, there was air-quotes all over the sentence. Is Darth Vader going to kill us?”

“No.”

“You’re even saying no sarcastically. Jesus, why were you prepared to blow your entire plan for the sake of making an actually pretty lame joke. I mean, get behind it. You can deliver it without lacing it in irony and believe me as we’re all being slaughtered we’d be thinking, “Oh… oooooh,  when he said “take care of us” he meant “”take care of us””. But now, because of your insistence on making a Doctor Evil style joke we’re bolting the doors and not letting that cunt in. You’re a rubbish evil emperor.”

I was also a bit confused about why Obi Wank a Nobi didn’t kill Darth Vader properly. Not only because he sort of needed to do that to protect what little remained of the Jedi, but also because his old pupil and “brother” was apparently slowly burning to death. Had Darth Vader been a dog then Ewen Macgregor would have bashed his head in with a rock, but he just walks away from melty Vader and assumes his work is done. It’s horrific morally and stupid and spoiler alert, Obi Wank might regret that later. 

Before making friends with Vader when he’s a ghost. Who comes back as the younger version of himself, whilst Obi Wank is the old own. Obi Wank must not have realised he could do that.

The kids were gifted magic wands by a family friend today. I had to spend all day pretending to be turned into things. It was OK actually.