BenPaddon.co.uk

My Jinxlet adoption kit has arrived. Click to embiggen slightly.

Apparently its name will be Bogglekins. Clearly, Kris and Erica were saving the best name for me.

Firstly, Johari window. Every other bugger’s doing ‘em, so I figured I’d follow the herd.

Right, now onto what I wanted to write about in the first place. Since Jump Leads started, I’ve had a couple of interesting offers here and there from people for all sorts of things. Some of them I can’t talk about yet. Others I won’t talk about because nothing happened and in any case they were offers made by people who just wanted to give JjAR and me the shaft.

Yesterday, though, I got an email from Dino Andrade, who provides the voice of Skull for PvP: The Series and, more importantly, who founded SoulGeek. SoulGeek, for those of you who don’t know, is dating website that caters specifically for geeks. It’s also home to a pretty awesome community of geeks - comic fans, animation aficionados, scifi supporters, gamers, actors, creators, you name it. I’ve made a lot of really cool friends at SoulGeek.

One of the cool features on SoulGeek is the SoulGeek Gurus, a collective of Advisers who offer advice on a variety of things. At the moment there are Gurus for Relationships, Camera Acting, Voice Acting, Art… ing, and Webcomicry. The current listed Webcomic Gurus are the esteemed Misters Kristopher Straub and Scottford Kurtzington, both of whom apparently have increasingly hectic schedules and who sadly don’t have the time to continue contributing to SoulGeek. Dino’s email was asking if I’d be interested in being the next Webcomic Guru.

About half an hour I got off the phone with Dino. I said yes.

Dino recognises that my involvement in Jump Leads doesn’t stretch to doing the art, and I suggested getting JjAR involved to answer arty questions relating to webcomics and I’ll focus on writing for webcomics - we can probably delegate general webcomicry between the two of us. I’ve dropped JjAR an email to see if he’s interested.

Dino and I discussed a lot of really cool things. I mentioned the “Making of Page 13″ videos to him (you can watch them here on DailyMotion, or in reasonably-high-ish definition here on Stage6) and he’s into the idea of getting those up on SoulGeek. I mentioned my plans to record a Video Diary of my trip to England in March and there’s a good chance that’ll be appearing on SoulGeek in some capacity, too.

As Isaac Newton said when he first formulated his theory of universal gravitation, “Shibby.“

I heard on KROQ this morning that the Westboro Baptist Church, who you’ll recall were planning to protest at Heath ledger’s Funeral, have realised that Heath Ledger is, in fact, Australian. Chances are that his funeral will take place in Australia, and it seems the Church isn’t quite committed enough to its goat-sphincter crazy beliefs to fly all the way to the Land Down Under to protest.

I guess the Church believes that “their” God only hates gay Americans.

I haven’t written many ficlets over the past week or two. The weekend before last I was in Houston between Friday and Monday and so I didn’t do a lot of writing at all, and when I got back I felt largely uninspired. It’s taken me another week to get back into the swing of things. I have no idea why. It has, of course, totally thrown my “write a ficlet every day forever” out of whack, but I will be making an effort to do so from now on.

In any case, here’s a new Ficlet Friday.

Twain, Poe and Tesla: Journey to the Center of the Future (sequel to Twain and Poe Have Words with the Inventor by uselessness) - Jan 7th
“Hold tight, everyone!” shouted Poe. “It’s gonna be a bumpy one!”
Hobo Beard Bob wrote a superb ficlet entitled Twain and Poe: Heroes of Space and Time, and from there has spanned this incredibly cheesy scifi yarn with contributions from many people. I’ve only made a couple of contributions - a later entry will appear further down this list - but I fear that I don’t know enough about what is currently going on with the story to successfully continue the yarn. It’s great stuff, though.

b:\lief\ - Jan 7th
Unit 42A crossed his extremities and lowered his Upper Feature Expressors into an angry frown. “I can’t believe you still cling to this absurd notion that we were made by some kind of benevolent creator…”
There’s a sort of marvelous irony about the notion of robots debating their origins and whether or not there is a “Creator” - a sort of robot God. I’d love to flesh this idea out a bit.

Unexpected Visitors - Jan 8th
He hadn’t struggled at all. He wished he’d put up more of a fight, that he’d tried to save himself, but he was hardly the strongest person in the world.
This story actually started out completely differently, although it kept the same core idea. Originally a ficlet about the thoughts racing through a man’s mind as he finds himself tied and gagged in someone’s car boot, I decided to move it into the character’s own home. The idea that his home, his personal space, has been violated in this manner just seemed much more powerful an image to me.

This has nothing to do with Robin Williams - Jan 8th
“The thing I don’t like about Bicentennial Man…”
It’s funny, really - I started writing this ficlet to express my displeasure about the end of that film by having two characters debate it. By the time I had finished writing I had completely changed my own mind.

Twain and Tesla: Funeral for a Friend (a sequel to Twain and Tesla’s Excellent Adventure by uselessness) - Jan 9th
On the barren landscape of the planet I’ll Give It A Proper Name Later…
…and I’d better not include anything more there to avoid giving away the story for those of you who haven’t read it properly.

Origin of Species: A Prologue (a prequel to b:\lief\) - Jan 9th
It happened so long ago now that it’s not even history anymore.
After I wrote b:\lief\ I found myself wondering: Who are these robots? Where did they come from? I decided to write a brief ficlet to cover this. I have since written a much longer version of this ficlet which tells the same basic story but adds much more detail, depth and (hopefully) humour. I may share it here at some point.

World 1-3 - Jan 16th
“Y’know, if you hold down the B button you’ll run faster.”
This stems from a piece of advice I appear to have to give my sister every time we play a Super Mario game of some sort.

The End - Jan 22nd
He slouched back into his chair. Several minutes passed before he said, “Well?”
A semi-autobiographical account of the last few minutes of my relationship with Amy. A lot of the things I say in this ficlet are things that ultimately I didn’t say at the time, but they’re certainly how I felt.

A Friend for Dinner - Jan 22nd
No preview for this one - I don’t want to ruin the tone of the ficlet. It’s funny, though. Honest!

An Unexpected Visitor - Jan 22nd
The green light shone through his car window as he tried vainly to restart the car.
Aliens descend to the Earth to spread their message.

Dollar Value - Jan 22nd
looked down at the document in my hand. Stocks and shares, worth… well, a lot of money.
I really wish I hadn’t written this one now. It’s far too “bloggy” for a ficlet. I’m not saying it;s 100% accurate, though - I earn more than $18 an hour.

Mundane Moments Made Magnificent - A Challenge - Jan 23rd
Well bugger me. I just noticed I’ve written more than 52 ficlets. This calls for a celebration of sorts – a challenge, perhaps?

Don’t Panic - Jan 24th
I walked in to find him reading a leather-bound book with gold leafed pages.
This is actually a variation of an idea I had very nearly a month ago, and I’d decided that if David and Michelle ever asked me to write an episode of ./shutdown I’d probably use it there.

Update: And another one…

Special Delivery - Jan 24th
He had walked across barren deserts, across endless plains of flat, lifeless land.
The idea popped into my head on my way back from lunch today, and I had to write it down.

BBC News are reporting that a “government agency’s annual awards” have refused to give nods to a modern-day retooling of the old-as-stone children’s story The Three Little Pigs. Why? Well, it could be racist and potentially offend the Muslim community because it features pigs as principle characters.

It really does seem to be that we, as human beings, are very slowly creeping towards a society where no one does anything because there’s a risk it might possibly offend someone at some point somewhere between performing the act and the Apocalypse.

I really am starting to lose all faith in humanity.

You may have heard that Westboro Baptist Church are planning to protest at Heath Ledger’s funeral because he played a gay Cowboy (and now “Coybow” as I had originally typed) in the film Brokeback Mountain. The Church is of the opinion that, and I quote, “God hates fags! & Fag-Enablers!”, and have previously picketed the funerals of people who have died of AIDS. Clearly, the members of this Church have taken the Christian value of “love thy neighbour” to heart.

What a bunch of intolerant, ignorant, idiotic, morose, dimwitted jackanapes. I don’t honestly care which God people choose to believe in - that’s their decision, ultimately - but it’s not their place to decide what “their” God hates. Additionally, as a co-worker has accurately pointed out, God also apparently hates Haters, do shouldn’t the Westboro Baptist Church also picket their own picketing? And then picket that picketing too? Then picket that?

Idiots.

CNN are reporting it as breaking news. Holy shit.

It appears I jumped the gun with regards to my contention with Game Partisan.

DeViney has told me that when he wrote “suggested”, he was in fact trying to be Political and “very, very dry”. It appears he was a bit too dry - I interpreted it literally (as have others, incidentally), which is the entire reason I exploded in the manner I did. He’s assured me he’ll write a follow-up to the follow-up, and has also said lots of other nice things to me, and he even bought me flowers and took me to a Talkie, so I’m all appeased now.

GP’s stuck with me as Editor in Chief, then. I’m not budging. I told DeViney that at the moment, through no fault of his own, the site is a mess. That hurt him, as I expected it probably would - if he had a baby and I told him that offspring had a fat nose and also smelt like camel dung, he’d probably feel much the same - but I’ve also said to him that I believe I can fix that. I have ideas, and I want to implement them. Looks like I’ll be sticking around to set them in motion.

I have apologised to DeViney for making assumptions and accusations, and now I shall apologise to you lot, the twenty-or-so people who regularly read my blog. Sorry, kids, didn’t mean to get you all rattled up over nothing.

I was wondering when DeViney was going to see my recent blog post about his article. He’s been trying to call me all day, he’s sent a couple of text messages, and I’m not particularly in the mood for a conversation today - partially because I’ve spent a lot of this weekend being ill, but also because… well, why should I talk to the guy?  He wants me to be Editor in Chief of GamePartisan. That’s nice. Do I want to be the Editor in Chief of GamePartisan? Ooh, I’m not so sure I do.

I guess it’s just one of those things we’ll have to wait out, isn’t it?

I’ve just added a link to my RockBand.com profile to the right there. The picture on the profile is, of course, not me. It’s also not any of my Rock Band characters. I should take some up-to-date photos at some point…

I’m going to start off this entry by addressing something that pissed me off when I discovered it. Every time I’ve gone to write about it it’s left me red in the face and just… angry. Here’s an excerpt from DeViney’s follow-up to my Microsoft article on GP (bold emphasis mine):

Then the whip came down: it became clear that in order for me to proceed in my efforts to finally capitalize on being one of Microsoft’s biggest supporters in the video game industry for over five years, Ben Paddon was going to have to hit the road. I was advised by a friend at Microsoft to “remove any potential sources of contention” and that would allow me to resume my efforts to bring about a Microsoft sponsorship of GamePartisan.

That sentence left me feeling really, really pissed off. I had been told by DeViney, and by another GP writer, that Microsoft had pretty much demanded it or else no dice. Instead it appears DeViney was “advised by a friend,” which is something entirely different. I’m not happy. I feel like I’ve been manipulated by DeViney, used by him to further his agenda with GP.

He called me on Tuesday to let me know he was stepping down as Editor in Chief for 90 days and offered me the position. At the time I accepted because when he called I was on my way home from work having been sick, but the more I think about it the more utterly repugnant an idea it sounds.

It’s a two-sided coin. On one hand, it gives me the opportunity to do something really good with GP. I feel that GP’s weaknesses are its lack of internal structure (meetings are called that never happen) and the fact that a lot of the news posts are just directly copied and pasted from Press Releases. That’s just lazy, in my opinion. These days I find myself more and more turning to Kotaku for my gaming news, and I really like the editorial manner they relay gaming news. I’d be inclined to lean towards reporting news in that manner, but with perhaps a bit more of an Amiga Power style humour slant to it. At the same time though, the idea of deepening my involvement in the site leaves me feeling cold. Following this revelation, I really don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about the continued existence of GP, or my involvement in it.

The issue that started the entire Microsoft problem - my immigration - is being handled by Larry Hryb, better known to the gaming public as Major Nelson. We’ve been emailing each other back and forth this week and he’s assured me that he will at least try to resolve the problem within the next few days. Fingers crossed it gets sorted.

With that out of the way, how do I feel about life in general? Well, no sodding clue. Mostly, right now, I feel il. But you don’t want to hear about that. I’ve been paid today, so I have a very strong urge to buy something nice for myself. A family friend, Patrick, once suggested that I might have a shopping addiction and I’m starting to think he might be right. I’ve been going up and down my Amazon Wishlists thinking to myself, “Yeah, I’d quite like to buy that.” I’ve been looking through Steam to see if there are any games I particularly want. I’ve been looking at inexpensive laptops for writing on. I’ve been… well, I’ve been window shopping so far.

I think I’m going to try and chill out this evening, maybe throw a DVD on and go to bed a little earlier. I really feel out of sorts…

A long time ago on the Team17 Forum, someone by the name of HaK registered and began posting some very strange posts. He usually spent his time being fairly Stupid, which is fine because the quality of posts on the Team17 Forum isn’t great these days anyway, but then he made the mistake of trying to talk about Amiga Emulation as if he knew exactly what it was when he clearly didn’t. It started off simply enough - he referred to Amiga floppy disk images as ISOs, and went into great detail about how one goes about using them. The information he provided was almost entirely wrong, and so I posted a message trying to correct him.

His response here was to PM me and start telling me that he was right. My response was to PM him back and tell him he was Wrong™ and advised him to do some proper research. He didn’t. Instead he decided I was calling him an outright liar (which I eventually did, because if nothing else he tried to tell everyone else on the forum that he was a famous hacker from the 90s despite the fact that he spoke like a 12 year-old boy) and decided to personally attack me, which is nice because that, when coupled with some of his more moronic forum posts, is what resulted in the Mods at the forum banning him forever.

I promptly forgot about this, as I tend to only remember things of consequence and a small argument on the Internet hardly falls into that category, unless of course that argument is with Microsoft. HaK, however, did not. This can be summed up quite nicely with a quote from the abominable Street Fighter: The Movie:

For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.

Fast forward to late last year, when a couple of people from the Team17 Forum got fed up of the fact that there’s no board there for general, open discussion, and decided to set up their own Invision Free Board. HaK, of course, registered. The link for this board was passed around on the Team17 forum, and the Veterans like myself chatted amongst ourselves on MSN about just how utterly silly the board was, mostly because HaK was doing silly things like proclaiming himself the author of the Hacker’s Cookbook, or whatever, and giving his bank details to a 12 year-old. Eventually news of my plight with Microsoft reached the forum, as Yauhui (the board’s creator) had been cross-posting Dream17 news stories and I’d mentioned my problem there.

HaK decided, with the aid of a friend, to leave a completely uninformed comment telling me to “JUST BUY A NEW XBOX” (which, considering I’d immigrated, is something I’d already done), and decided to call me cocky and arrogant for trying to get this problem solved. I banned him from posting on the Dream17 news page, and decided to register on that Invision Board to set a few thigns straight and try to calm the poor guy down.

Unfortunately I learnt that you can’t actually calm down fevered, gibbering madness.

He decided to attack me personally, which is nice. I told him over and over I wasn’t prepared to have an argument and if he wanted to be an adult he was welcome to drop me an email. Instead he continued to post publicly on that little forum. Which is, y’know, nice. Eventually he posted something akin to a threat:

Quite honestly S2k… its time for you little boy to back off… im [sic] reaching my limit. and i [sic] swear to god… i [sic] will find you… you dont [sic] want me to find you… so i [sic] warned you once… now BACK OFF…

As you can see, he’s quite [sic] in the head. So I decided to stoop down to his level of stupidity and let him beat me with experience by writing a point-by-point response to his last fevered outburst. I’d had enough trying to be mature, now I was going to have fun with him. He clearly thought I had a personal vendetta against him as he does with me, so I thought it might be fun to play with that.

he postedo n that forum saying he would leave, and then sent me this email (the picture has been added for comic effect and wasn’t included in the email, but oh Gods I wish it had been):

Hey look i found plenty photos of Ben Paddon, i even have your details Ben Paddon, I even have your home address Ben Paddon, You give way too many details about yourself online, Ben Paddon… So guess what, I found you Ben Paddon… Internet genius…

I suppose everywhere i go from now on, My name will be Ben Paddon, i live in La, I worked for disney, i write a dumbass jump leads comic, I love soccer, Im also totally into guys… yeah thats me …. Thats why im a writer for playgirl, cause im BEN PADDON!

He very clearly doesn’t have my home address - that I live in LA is something I have rather publicly spoken about on this blog, on Dream17, on RealVG and GamePartisan… pretty much everywhere I’m online, really. He also seems to think that calling me “gay” is some kind of insult, which pretty much cements my hypothesis - now a theory - that he’s a twelve year-old boy.

This could, however, constitute a form of Identity Fraud. He sent me the email using the Dream17 Email form which, for security purposes, logs things like the IP address of the sender and so forth, so if he decides to push it too far it wouldn’t be difficult to, say, pass his details onto the FBI or something. I doubt I’d need to, though, because he’s a harmless child.