BenPaddon.co.uk

I’ve been looking at the webstats for my three primary websites - Dream17, Jump Leads (currently my priority project), and this blog - and there are some interesting network locations popping up in my stats.

For example, did you know that Jump Leads has been accessed by no less than seven computers at Marvel, and a further 20 at Midway Games? It’s also very popular with Disney Worldside Services, but when you consider that my Dad works there it doesn’t count. The comic has also been accessed by people at Dell, Hudson Soft, Ask.com (which is more likely than not a web crawling spider), Hewlett Packard, the Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Team17 (woo!), United Airlines, Tesco, Universal Studios, Vivendi Universal, California State Government (has the Governator been reading our comic?), the BBC, Sky Television, an Air Force testing facility (perhaps they’re looking into developing JumpShips), MTV Europe, Nvidia, Sony North America, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and any number of American Universities.

My blog has largely seen visitors from ISP networks, which generally means that people are reading it from home. There are a lot of people reading Jump Leads from home too, natch, but my blog doesn’t appear to be “read it at work” material. There have been a handeful of people from the Ford Motor Company and, bizarrely, a higher number of Tesco visits here than to JL which leads me to ask: when the Hell are you guys going to open a Krispy Kreme counter in the Dunstable branch? I may not live in the UK anymore but my family is still local and if they want to yield to their Krispy Kreme desires they have to make a 45-minute journey into Milton Keynes. You have the power to remedy this grievious injustice!

Dream17, meanwhile, gets a lot of hits from German web users and a variety of German-based companies. A lot. Still, it’s nice to see regular visits from Codemasters, THQ and Team17 employees.

I feel obliged to correct a piece of misinformation I have recently learnt about myself from a friend of Amy’s who is still, rather bizarrely, a friend of mine. Actually I have no idea if this person is still a friend of Amy’s (or even if this information is accurate), but they’ve done a fairly good job of staying in touch with me since her and I broke up. I won’t risk dropping said friend “in it” by revealing their identity. For now we’ll refer to him/her as Dennis Redknapp.

Dennis informs me that Amy doesn’t like me. This is not itself a surprising revelation. But apparently, Amy doesn’t like me because when I left her it set a chain of events which ultimately led to her being in a less-than-favorable financial situation. This, too, is not new information - I’d been told about this a few months ago by another mutual friend (who I shall refer to as Dwayne Dibley) and we both had a little laugh about it. But she’s still angry about it, and presumably she’s been telling other people about it, and I supposed I should set the record straight.

Here is the situation as it stood when Amy and I broke up.

• I ended our relationship at the start of October, and I moved out of the flat we were sharing at the time. Being the gentleman that I am, I told her I would continue to pay my half of the rent for October, November and December.
• When I was informed that she wouldn’t be paying rent in December because we paid a month in advance and she would be moving out, I told her I would just be paying for October and November. She was fine with this, or at least she told me she was fine with this. My Mum, on the other hand, had overheard her talking to… someone, I forget who, saying that the new place she was moving in to was only £50 a month and the December money I had previously offered would effectively be paying seven months rent. Amy seemed rather pleased that I would be paying her rent for a large part of a year.
• Amy and I had previously purchased a fairly swanky 42″ Samsung HD TV. It cost just shy of £1,000 and while it had been purchased in Amy’s name the monthly payments had, in fact, been leaving my bank account to the tune of approximately £150 a month. Amy said she wanted to keep the TV and would continue to pay for it. I offered to take the TV and pay for the rest myself, but she said she wanted to keep it. I asked her if she would pay me the money I had already paid for the television, then. She said no. I was an idiot at the time, so I said “fair enough.”
• I also gave Amy £100 for a bike she had bought in her name for me.
• Amy then asked for my help getting the Deposit for the flat back, as the Evil Landlord refused utterly to give her the money back. Between Amy, her parents and myself we got it sorted. Amy receives the deposit of £505, which I assume she gave back to her parents.
• I gave some money to Amy’s parents to cover the cost of some of the cleaning materials, and an additional £20 (possibly 50, I forget) for the replacement of a door I had damaged by headbutting it following a particularly heated argument Amy and I’d had. I had previously been told by Amy’s Dad that I would not have to pay for the door in exchange for helping to fix his computer. Amy’s Mum requested I pay it anyway. I did, because quite frankly I didn’t want any further arguments.
• During the brief period in which Amy and I were trying to be friends, she managed to convince me to buy her a GameCube and two games, a total cost of £40 which she told me she would pay back. She didn’t. She also technically owes my Dad £60 for a special edition GameBoy Advance SP he lent us the money to buy when we were still together.
• Amy then moved into her new flat, paying £50 a month which, as far as I’m aware, included pretty much all of the bills. She signed up for Sky Digital (which I know because she told me) and BT Broadband (which I know based on the IP address and the source of the comments she left on my blog at the tail end of last year) which, realistically, doesn’t really cost more than £120 together.

I think it was February when Dwayne told me that Amy had recently taken out a loan. Now the maths there just doesn’t make sense.

• Rent is £50 p/m.
• BT Internet and Sky realistically only costs approx. £120 p/m.
• Cost of Samsung TV: Approx. £150 p/m.
• Cost of Laptop, which Amy bought for herself and paid monthly for herself: £30 p/m.
• Cost of her bicycle p/m, not including cost of my bicycle because I paid that to her: £15.
• Amy and I spent, on average, £20 a week on food. I assume this would not have changed. That’s £80 p/m.
• I know Amy would get special dietary cat food for the cats, but I don’t know the exact cost of each bag. For argument’s sake, we’ll say she spends £50 a month on cat food.
• So total monthly expenses: £495.

Now I know Amy earnt more than this. Much more than this, in fact. I won’t give out the exact figure, because you don’t need to know how much she’s earning any more than I need to know that I’m currently earning $23 an hour, but suffice to say these expenses fall comfortably inside her monthly wages with plenty of disposable income. Even if you take into consideration a TV License and Council Tax (which she wouldn’t have to pay anyway because of the location of the flat - above her workplace) she still had a rather nice bit of money left to play with.

I don’t particularly want or need to know Amy’s current financial situation. But I think it’s safe to say that, given the information above, it’s nothing to do with me. I offered to take the LCD TV off her hands and continue paying for it myself, even though I would be leaving the country (I know, and Amy knows, that my Mum would have benefited from a nice big television, as her eyesight is not fantastic). She didn’t pay me any money, for the TV or otherwise, when I left her. I covered my half of the rent on the flat that we had rented as a couple for the last two months, a period during which I wasn’t even living there.

The evidence is clear.

I do feel I need to stress something: I don’t hate Amy, and I don’t hold any grudges. but I am angry with her. Angry about how she treated me both during and after our relationship, and angry that she has tried to blame me for a situation I have had no involvement in.

I mentioned several times above that Amy owes me money for various items, but I don’t honestly want it. I’m not a petty man. Stuff is only stuff, and money is only money. I’m not asking for anything from Amy, except that she stop blaming me for whatever financial predicament she may be in.

So according to the BBC, a recent study suggests that children with high IQs are more likely to become Vegetarians in later life. As if Vegetarians needed another reason to feel smug and morally above everyone else. Liz O’Neill of the Vegetarian Society even says, “We’ve always known that vegetarianism is an intelligent, compassionate choice benefiting animals, people and the environment.”

I don’t hoenstly think there’s anythign compassionate about vegetarianian. Let’s take a moment to think about the lives of animals raised solely for the purpose of being eaten. They live their lives, being fed and looked after. Depending on the source, the animals may be able to walk around freely, or they may be stuck in horrible boxes, incapable of movement. But at least their lives have purpose. When they die, as all things do, their bodies will be processed, drained, packaged and sold to the public, who will then cook and eat the animals. All except for Vegetarians, of course, who walk past the packaged meat looking rather disgusted and feeling pretty smug about it.

But wait. Think about it for a moment. By walking past that meat, that Vegetarian is denying the animal the dignity of a meaningful death. They’ve robbed the poor creature of purpose. Because of their Vegetarianism, that’s one less chicken that’s going to get roasted, one less lamb that’s going to get chopped, one less rib that’s going to get spared. Which means that if the meat is still there come the display date, it will simply be disposed of. What a waste - not just of good food, but of honour and dignity. That poor animal.

It’s also interesting to see a related article stating that avoiding meat helps you to keep your weight down. Well of course - there’s bugger-all else worth eating.

I took photos of my TARDIS playset. Feel free to have a gander.

I sort of got the job a bit. I start Monday. But, today I bought Bioshock, and if I haven’t completed that by Monday I may have to call in sick.

Actually, that was a joke.

After my three-week stint working at the Walt Disney Company, I now have a job interview tomorrow for a job at ABC, who are owned by the Walt Disney Company. Wish me luck!

It worries me that this (video, NSFW) is exactly what the Internet would be like in real life.

I thought it was only webcomics like Penny Arcade who got emails saying things like “Hey, that comic was pretty good, any chance we could get a wallpaper of the the first/middle/last panel?” Well, apparently little webcomics like ours get emails like that too. Okay, I didn’t get tons. I had maybe two or three, as well as constant harassment from my friend Ev who has been asking me for Jump Leads wallpaper since before I even had an artist, but the emails asked for a wallpaper of the last panel from Page 9. Who am I to refuse them?

It’s always nice to get emails like that from people because it means someone is actually reading the comic, and likes it enough to want it to grace their desktop. I see web stats, and I see people visiting the website, but nothing beats good ol’ human communication.

Since moving to the US my lifestyle has changed noticeably. My diet hasn’t changed quite so much but I haven’t done quite as much walking as I used to. It’s not helped by a large number of factors - for one, LA is a bloody huge place, and while I was quite able to walk from one end of Luton to the other (a two-hour walk, incidentally) I doubt I could walk from one end of Los Angeles to the other without a) falling over from exhaustion, b) falling over from dehydration, or c) falling over from exhaustion and dehydration. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the streets and roads in this area - Sunland - don’t have a sidewalk. This is not a city that was built for pedestrians. The heat is the worst part. It’s so warm here at the moment and I find it exceptionally hard to focus either my mind or body.

So yesterday I made a decision - I was going to walk. Just for the Hell of it. I decided I was going to talk for half an hour in any direction, and then walk back. That way I’ve spent an hour just walking, which is bound to be good for me. That’s pretty much what I was doing while I was working at NTL - walking for roughly an hour a day to get to work, and then getting a lift home. It kept me in a reasonably fit condition, and I see no reason why it would fail me here. So I put on some Factor 70 Sunblock, clipped my cell phone and my iPod to my belt and, to the lifting tunes of the Feeling, went out walking.

The last time I did this, I didn’t do it with exercise in mind. I also didn’t have my iPod. I just went out because I wanted to get out of the house, and I ended up walking for about five or ten minutes before I turned around and came back. I felt out of my element. This time, though, I was resolved. It was exercise, and it was enjoyable, and I was so wrapped up in the experience that I didn’t even notice I’d passed where I got to the last time until I’d passed another “landmark” further down the road. The landmark in question? A Burger King.

It’s a bit sad, and perhaps a little telling of American cuisine, that the only buildings I could really use as landmarks were fast food restaurants. I must’ve passed half a dozen of the things. And I did, in fact. I can tell you what they were, too. In order: El Pollo Loco, Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Jack In The Box, Subway, KFC. Those are, at the very least, the recognisable franchises. I know I passed at least two others but I can’t for the life of me remember their names. I also passed a Starbucks, but you can’t really call that fast food. They’re just as common as fast food joints, though.

I walked past all of these buildings and more. I walked past a park and a resturant, Cocos, into a retail park. That journey took me about twenty or so minutes, and I decided that was probably far enough. Any further than that and I wasn’t sure I’d know where I was, so I went into Ralphs, the supermarket at the far end of the retail park, and walked around there for a while before I bought a bottle of Fruit Punch Gatorade and headed out again.

I was warm, and I’d bought the drink because I needed it. But I couldn’t actually open the bottle. It refused to budge. It seemed as though the lid had been fused to the bottle, perhaps due to the outrageously high temperatures it became exposed to the moment I set foot outside. I used my hands, my arms, my teeth, but I couldn’t get it open. So I popped into Jack In The Box on the way home and picked up an Oreo Milkshake.

It seems I can’t go into a place like this without someone noticing my British accent and proceeding to talk to me. Not that I have a problem with it - I like meeting new people and hearing what they have to say. I spoke to three American teenagers who decided they were all called Bob. When they asked me my name, I told them I was Dwayne. Then I told them I was Not Dwayne. Fun times. I also spoke to an elderly American couple who had not long ago come back from a trip to Ireland, and a tanned, scruffy-looking chap from Glasgow who has lived in the US for 27 years. He seemed happy just to be talking to someone who wasn’t American, and he loved to laugh. He did. He’d laugh at anything either of us said, and that, to me, made him great company. Up until the point when he mentioned he’d been arrested a couple of times for having “a good time”. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but he laughed it off so I laughed with him.

You really do meet the strangest people in this city.

My shoes didn’t enjoy the walk, though. They’re cheap - I’d bought them for £12 from Shoe Zone in Luton before my trip to the US Embassy in London, purely so I wasn’t wearing shoes that set off every metal detector in the place (and also at the airport a week later). They didn’t do much to protect my feet from the elements, and I think the soles may have begun to melt. Clearly, they weren’t designed with long treks in mind. I did consider, briefly, popping into the shoe store in the Retail Park and buying another pair, but I only had a $20 bill on me, and I’d invariably end up buying shoes of the same or lower quality as the ones I was wearing. Not ideal.

I got home maybe twenty minutes ago with my milkshake in hand. It wasn’t quite finished but because it was taking its sweet time getting up the straw I decided to dump it in the bin and go for something colder and wetter, and that would presumably put up less resistance to the prospect of passing through my system. I put the Gatorade in the fridge - that can be tackled another time - and pulled out a nice cold Pepsi.

Pepsi is not inherently nice, it must be pointed out. Colas generally aren’t, but I drink ‘em anyway. Who can say why? It might be the caffeine. I wouldn’t call myself a caffeine junkie, because I don’t need caffeine to wake me up in the morning and I can usually get through an entire day without needing a caffeine-based drink. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to rule it out as a good reason.

Since I got back in through the door, I’ve felt a lot more focused, both mentally and physically. I know where everything is. Thoughts and words are coming to me a lot quicker than they have done over the past week or so. It’s invigorating, and it’s a great sensation. I may see if I can do that walk or a similar walk on a daily basis, or at least as often as I can. Now, though, I’m going to relax for a couple of hours, and then tackle a game of Wii Sports Tennis.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days trying to reduce a 41 page Jump Leads script down to a more sensible, manageable 20. I wrote with a view to sending it to the BBC, so it’s a bit long for a comic adaptation. In its unabridged state, it would take nearly a year at one page a week to tell that story. That’s an obvious no-no. The first issue itself it probably going to take another two or three of months to run its course. That’s a quarter, nearly a third, of a year on one story. That’s probably ideal, given the format.

It’s not been easy. I have trimmed, shortened, removed, modified, nipped, tucked, adjusted, reshuffled and neutered every single scene, every single line of dialogue, every single aspect of this script. I’ve sanded it down and polished it and done what I feel is all that I can possible do without having to rewrite the entire thing. All that time, all that effort, and I’m still only down to 27 pages.

27 Pages! I honestly don’t see how I could possibly excise any more from the script without seriously compromising the humour or the story. But Euan’s said he’ll have a look at some point, as he has experience trimming stories down. He usually plans the stories for Rooms out with a daily strip in mind, and then trims it down for his three-a-week schedule. Sometimes I envy him, with his four-panel comic, then I remember just how big Jump Leads is, and I recall that attempts to adapt it to a four-panel format did not work so well. Maybe I’ll show you those strips some day. Maybe the Universe will collapse inwardly. Who can say which will happen first?

As my Xfire profile will no doubt show, I’ve spent a lot of time playing The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary. This game is something of an oddity - it’s a remake of The Settlers II, an MS-DOS game released way back in ‘96. Originally intended for a Germany-only release, UbiSoft quietly released it across Europe in September of last year. They also planned to release a DS port of the original MS-DOS version, but that got pushed back to this year, having been renamed to The Settlers and made a GAME exclusive in the process. Meanwhile, The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary gets planned for a US release, which is pushed back further and further until it eventually coincides roughly with the release of The Settlers for the DS and the sixth game in the series, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire.

Are you still with me? Good.

Bizarrely, UbiSoft went out of their way to promote and market the game in Germany, where The Settlers is enormously popular, but decided not to market or promote anywhere else in the world. They just sort of dropped the game, waved and went on their merry way. Which is a shame, because The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary is without a doubt the finest game in the series since, well, The Settlers II. The sequels always lacked something and when UbiSoft bought the game’s developers, Blue Byte, they seemed intent on running the franchise into the ground by making it look and play just like every other bloody RTS game on the planet. Which, y’know, is stupid.

I should probably review the game properly for RealVG. I imagine I will. For now, just make do with: It’s awesome, it’s very cheap, buy it now, you won’t regret it.

I can’t think of a more appropriate word to describe just how hideously inept that company are. I just tried to pre-order The Settlers DS, which comes out over here at the end of the month but is apparently already available in the UK via Game. GameStop utterly refuse to let me make purchases on their website, regardless of which card of mine I try to use - my UK Visa or my US Visa. It’s rather reminiscent of why I don’t like their Brick ‘n’ Mortar stores.

Sigh. I’ve half a mind to import my copy from the UK.

I’ve never done the whole Double Feature thing - two films in one day. The concept seems alien to me, like going into a restaurant for lunch and then returning there a couple of hours later, while your stomach is still digesting the previous meal. That was the apprehension I felt when the idea of a Double Feature was brought up yesterday but having done it today, I can say that it’s definitely not a bad thing. Really it’s no different to watching two movies on DVD in a row.

So today we went to see two films, as you may well have gleamed from the above. We saw Stardust, which is a simply incredible film that everyone in the Universe has to see. Really. It’s that good. We also saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which wasn’t bad but I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more had I seen the preceding movies. I’ll probably write more about the two when I can be bothered, but right now my brain is starting to deactivate.