Never Playing it Cool

  Just over a week ago, Gen and I attended our first ever full blown convention in the form of Yorkshire Cosplay Con at Sheffield Arena. I was looking forward to getting my geek on and spending a carefully planned out budget on merch, t-shirts and any other collectibles and ephemera that may catch my eye. Gen looked forward to meeting a certain J. Michael Tatum and working on getting a restraining order. So if I were to define the quality of the con by how much cash I spent, the YCC 2017 was a roaring success. That carefully planned out budget I mentioned, I may have exceeding it by 60 or 70 %. Now I'm getting automated text messages from the bank about my balance, or lack thereof. The floor of the arena was lined with stalls as you'd expect at a con such as this, all catering for all aspects of geekdom. Several of them tempted me with the prospect of a classic console and I came very close to leaving with an original Nintendo 64, it being the...

I finally got around to getting myself a copy of the Star Wars: A New Hope "Limited Edition" that came with the original theatrical version on disc 2. I've been meaning to pick up the trilogy in these editions for some time but as they are no longer in production and haven't been for some time, I've had to do some searching for the right price. So I watched Star Wars in it's original glory from before it was even called "A New Hope." I was immediately hit with a sudden wave of nostalgia as I saw this:                                 Instead of this: I felt excitement at seeing Star Wars as I hadn't seen it in a long time, without Lucas' tinkering. To see Han shoot first and without CGI that felt so out of place. No re inserted Jabba scene with awful editing to make it look like Han stands on his t...

A while ago now I set out to do a " life reboot ," an idea I completely stole from Wil Wheaton after reading about his own reboot on his blog. Seeing the success he was having in making his life happier and healthier, I thought I could do with doing the same thing. I wrote a blog about it and tentatively promised updates and my progress. There have been no updates, as there has been no real progress. In all honesty it all got off to a false start and ended up being forgotten. Until now. For 2017 I have decided to try and get this back on track and the key to it working is organisation (coincidentally one of my things to improve is to be more organised.) Below is the original list of goals I wanted to achieve and will remain unchanged for the moment whilst I try and get some momentum with it, but goals may be added or removed over time. Read More Write More Commit to regular blogs with both Never Playing it Cool and The Player of Games Work more on my story writi...