My Blogvent Calendar

Newsflash time everyone, a little public service announcement for you all. In case you were not aware, Christmas is just around the corner! This year (as ever), we will be celebrating the birth of Jesus by entering into a festival of gluttony and giving on the 25^th, so I thought it would be kinda fun to look at the 25 days of December in a lil bit more detail.

Merry Christmas ya filthy animals (Image Credit: LifeHacker)

1. You leap out of bed to stuff the first piece of advent chocolate in your mouth without even stopping to look at what character adorned it. You listen to exclusively Christmas music on your iPod all day and whine at your parents/significant other to get the decorations down so you can get in the proper spirit.
2. You leap out of bed again, although it’s possibly not quite as enthusiastic as yesterday, and maybe remember to check the choc pic. You complain about the continued lack of decorations and go back to your Mariah Carey and Slade.
3. You get up fairly normally and if you don’t have a look at the cocoa character by now then you’re running out of excuses. Someone asks you what you want for Christmas and you have a minor panic that you haven’t even bought those socks for Grandad yet!
4. What’s that? There’s only three weeks until the big day? Good one friend of yours, it’s not like everyone knows that and has been counting down the days since July hahaha oh wait…
5. Hello first Crimbo song on the radio, now it’s officially noel! Thanks for the reminder Greg James, you’re the best!
6. Hmmm, getting bored of “Last Christmas” now, give it a rest Greg.
7. The decorations have finally gone up and life’s pretty great in your indoor Winter Wonderland.
8. Oh shit! You forgot your advent calendar yesterday! Well, I guess you’d better catch up with double chocolate today, it’s what Jesus would have wanted!
9. Maybe you should watch a Christmas film tonight? Home Alone’s always worth a watch, Elf’s a classic, which to choose?
10. Who’s highlighted all the Christmas TV they want to watch in this year’s Radio Times? That’s right, it’s you!!
11. OH EM GEE IT’S ONLY TWO WEEKS TO GO!!!!!!!!
12. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzz December is dragging, there’s still two weeks to go!
13. It’s officially Christmas now, the Coca-Cola advert’s come on!
14. You go Christmas shopping and only buy things for yourself, but hey – it’s Christmas for you too right?
15. For reals though, can they stop playing so many Christmas songs? You can’t escape them anymore, they’re in every shop, on every radio station – you just want to listen to Justin Bieber’s comeback album in peace.
16. **WELL I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS, EVERYDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYY**
17. Wait, it’s December? You completely forgot for a second! Does not feel like Christmas right now.
18. OH MY WORD THERE’S ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT AND YOU STILL HAVEN’T GOT ALL YOUR GIFTS OH NO OH NO OH NO!!!!!
19. Now it feels like Christmas, you’ve just had your work Christmas dinner and you’re feeling like you won’t be able to eat again for a while. Sandra from Accounts had one too many brandies and did a dance on the table.
20. You’d better hope Santa doesn’t count eating chocolate before breakfast as naughty because you’ve just scoffed down five days’ worth at once!
21. That’s it, no more school for two weeks. This probably involved some kind of assembly and/or carol singalong but at least you didn’t have to wear your uniform and the headteacher’s wearing Rudolph antlers for some reason (just wait until you go to University, the academics are even more keen for Christmas than you are so you basically break up in November).
22. What a relief, Christmas shopping is done and you only had to fight three people for that last  handbag for your mum.
23. It’s Christmas Eve Eve, which can only mean one thing: wrapping presents all day in front of an endlessly repeating Love Actually.
24. As if there’s only one day to go! Your day possibly involves some kind of travelling,  maybe a carol service and probably some hefty drinking, which is what Christmas is all about really ain’t it? You settle down in front of the TV and have that age-old debate of whether to open all the presents at 1 minute past midnight or not, but as always you will wait until morning and you wonder why you even mention the midnight plan these days because it’ll never happen.
25. This is it, the big day! No matter how old you are, you wake up at an ungodly hour like an overexcited child and tear into your presents. It gets to 10am though and you’re thinking “now what?” because you got so hyped for Christmas that it’s not really living up to expectations again (especially because it didn’t even SNOW).  But then out comes the bubbly, Grandma gets a bit tipsy and you eat Pigs in Blankets until you need to be carried to the sofa for a lie down in front of the TV (Queenie’s on the box so you don’t even feel bad about it).  After a fair few hours of moaning about how full you are, you’re able to get up and you go for a Christmas walk with the whole family; it’s obligatory to wear all your new clothes regardless of whether or not they work together. You get back and it’s probably time for a Christmas special of something, and if not then hey – it’s board game time. When you get peckish there’s plenty of leftovers and chocolate for you to snack on, but when it’s time for bed you’ll be feeling pretty damn content.
26. Only 364 days to go…

Poppin' Candy

This blog post is a little story about an email I had the other day, and to understand why I was so excited to read this email, you need to understand two things.

The first is that I am a mahoossive nerd at heart. Sure, I act cool with my indie music taste and the rad festivals I go to and the edginess of (some of) the clothes that I wear, but deep down I just want to stick a disc into my Playstation 3 and get lost in a gloriously nerdy haze of skill points and power ups for hours on end. I watch nerdy TV shows and I drag Chloe to see nerdy films at the cinema (which she protests endlessly about but occasionally actually enjoys). I love superhero films, and have a particular obsession with anything that comes out of Marvel Studios; from the dizzy heights of the Avengers to the much lower stakes of Ant-Man via the critically acclaimed Iron Man and the universally panned Incredible Hulk, I will watch them all with an ear splitting grin etched onto my face for the full 2 and a bit hour run times.

The second thing that you need to understand is that last year I worked as a Christmas temp at HMV in Brighton, which involved the usual sorts of things you would expect from a retail job like shelf stacking and a handy discount card, but importantly to this story it included a helluvalot of time spent on the checkouts. Now, as in any HMV shop worth its salt, the queuing area in the Brighton store was lined with lots of products that didn’t really fit the mould of CDs/DVDs/Games, but instead would probably be categorised as merchandise for the CDs/DVDs/Games that we sold. This covered everything from the One Direction Colouring Book to the Frozen Castle to the foamy Minecraft Swords to the Breaking Bad Mugs; the idea being that customers would spend plenty of time looking at these items whilst queuing and be spurred into making impulse purchases that they wouldn’t have otherwise made. Well let me tell you, it definitely worked on me! Directly opposite my checkout at HMV was the “HMV loves Marvel” display. Now, remember what I said about how nerdy I am? I was spending eight hours a day, six days a week staring at some pretty cool looking merchandise for all of my favourite films, which included plenty of things that looked like this:

Mmmmmmm, so much Marvel

Pretty cool, right? So, there I am at HMV, deciding which Superhero to buy, but by the time I got paid they’d been taken off the shelves and me being me, I had absolutely no idea how I could find them again as I couldn’t see what they were called from where I was. Anyway, some time went by and I stumbled across someone’s blog post about the Pop In A Box subscription service, and hey whaddayaknow, that’s those cool Marvel figures that I was talking about!

So what is Pop In A Box? Well, it’s a pretty cool online subscription service specifically for expanding your collection of Pop! Vinyls, which are a series of kinda bobblehead-y figures of characters from all over popular culture. Normally, Pop! Vinyls are quite expensive and, depending on the figure, can be priced anywhere from £7 to £30+. Pop In A Box offer a variety of plans where they send you a number of Pops per month for a maximum of £8.49 per pop per month (plus P&P), and you can choose the subscription size to suit your budget. What I really like about Pop In A Box though is the collection tracker tool, which allows you to add the Pops you own, and (more importantly) select the ones you want or don’t want. Pop In A Box will then send you figures from your “Want” list (without sending you one that you already have) and will ignore the ones that you don’t want; plus if for some reason they don’t have any that you want in stock, they won’t charge you for that month.

A couple of pretty cool TV shows represented by pretty cool Pop! Vinyl figures (Images from thinkGeek)

I love Pop In A Box, and am getting very excited to start my subscription! Funko, who are the company that actually makes the figures, are constantly pumping out new lines like the Toy Story line and the Harry Potter line, which are duly added to the Pop In A Box inventory for you to yay or nay. If you think that this subscription service sounds as awesome as I think it is, then click here to sign up now!

And yes, I genuinely did sell someone a One Direction Colouring Book

P.S. Because I completely forgot about how I started this post, the email I received was basically giving me a link for 5% off your first Pop In A Box, which is the link I embedded two sentences ago. This disjointed ending to the post is what I deserve for trying to write this whilst making fish fingers but hey ho, I'm a hungry boy so what can ya do

What I’m listening to

Firstly it’s been way way way too long since I last blogged, and I’m fairly certain that I said that at the start of my last post as well? Whoops! Anyways, I thought as a casual way of dipping my toes back into the blogosphere, I thought I’d do the classic “What I’m Watching on Netflix”… only, I haven’t really been watching much stuff! Instead, I thought I’d talk about what I’ve been listening to because since Glastonbury (I went to Glastonbury btw), I’ve been on a bit of a CD-buying binge. So, what’s on my record player CD player iPhone?

Foals – What Went Down

Right, firstly, I love Foals. A lot. I keep a sort of mental list of my “big 3” bands (aka my 3 favourite bands at the moment, then all the other music I listen to kinda mixes in somewhere else in the order and I don’t put a lot of thought into it) and for a helluva long time, the big 3 consisted of MUSE, Bloc Party and the Arctic Monkeys. However, MUSE just aren’t as good now as they once were, what with their forays into Space Operas and Dubstep, so they were knocked off their perch by Yannis Phillipakis and his boys after they gave me the greatest hangover-cure of a set when they headlined Latitude 2013 (I may have been in a little bit of a state earlier in the morning day). So with that in mind, obviously the fourth effort by the lads from Oxford was obviously going to make it to the top of the virtual pile.

(Image Credit: mouv)

One of the things I love about Foals is that their sound is constantly evolving; that is to say, each record sounds new and fresh, whilst keeping elements of what makes them Foals so that the fans don’t revolt (I’m looking at you MUSE). This album was billed as their “heaviest” yet, and whilst the opening title track is pretty monstrous, they never lose sight of the “twiddly-indie-pop” (as a friend of mine likes to call it) that is evident on their earlier work. “Snake Oil” is a personal favourite, with a funky groove that really does snake its way into your head, whilst “London Thunder” harkens back to the gentle melodies of live favourite “Spanish Sahara”.

Is this album better than their previous 3? Well, that’s up to the individual, but I can say that listening to it repeatedly has only made me more and more upset that I couldn’t get tickets to see them at Bristol’s tiny Anson Rooms venue in November.

Slaves – Are You Satisfied

This is a band I’d heard quite a lot about for a while, but never really gave them much time. They were the support band when Chloe and I saw Jamie T back in November, but we only glimpsed a snippet of their set as we ran through to the toilets. However, one of my friends is a bit of a superfan of theirs (he has a signed copy of their album) and he dragged us to two out of their three sets at Glastonbury (I went to Glastonbury btw) and tried to drag us to the third, but we got caught in the crowds and missed it. And you know what? They were sick! Slaves have a lot to say, and they say it with an aggressive guitar riff while the singer jumps around and seemingly attempts to smash his drums into the centre of the Earth. Their live energy translates onto record very well, despite the slower pace of songs like “Cheer Up London” compared to the way they play it in person. The lyrics that are spat out by Isaac Holman have a remarkable sense of wit, as does the band’s entire existence in fact; ranging from their on-stage banter to their frankly hilarious social media presence. The subject matter that Slaves take on ranges from Climate Change to the rather bizarre and surreal refrain of “Feed the mantaray, feed the mantaray”, yet I find that their songs are very catchy and sing-along-able.

(Image Credit: Digital Spy)

Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

I first came across Courtney Barnett in a new noise issue of NME when I was looking for hip new bands to play on my student radio and I just think she’s great. She’s kind of like a rockier, Australian, Laura Marling, although there’s not a lot of folk influences evident here. Her deadpan singing style makes you feel like she’s personally telling you the story of her life, especially when combined with the fact that she actually does just kind of ramble on about stuff that’s happened to her. That probably hasn’t sold her very well to be honest, but she’s also quite funny and definitely knows how to write a good riff. My favourite song of hers is “Pedestrian At Best”, but the whole album is full of tunes and because of this I’ve casually booked tickets to see her when she comes to the UK in December. Good times all round!

(Image Credit: Beat And Sound)

So there, that’s a little snapshot of the albums I’ve been listening to recently. Have you listened to any of these? What did you think?

You Know Nothing, Thrones Fans

Warning: this post is full of spoilers for all five seasons of Game of Thrones and all five A Song of Ice and Fire books.

So, after five years of threatening it, Game of Thrones has finally caught up with the ponderous pace of George RR Martin’s writing. At long last, the entire GoT-watching community can sit down to watch an episode with precisely zero knowledge of what’s to come, which I believe is absolutely the best environment in which Thrones can exist. Let me explain.

I was late to the Westeros party and only leapt onto the bandwagon after the entirety of Season 3 had been broadcast (due to the repeated insistence of multiple friends that I just had to watch this great new show). I was instantly sucked into this world where anything could happen to anyone, and the great thrill of watching it was the total sense of dread when a favourite character was in peril, or the jaw-dropping curveballs the writers would throw at us. Of course, I hadn’t been oblivious to spoilers throughout the time I’d let Thrones pass me by – I knew, for instance that Ned Stark died in Season 1, and that bad things happened to good people at a wedding in Season 3 – but a lot of surprises remained to keep me gripped (“uh oh Brienne’s going to be raped! Sweet, Jaime Lannister saved her, what a great guy! Oh what the fuck, why did they cut his hand off?”).

Daaaaaaaamn (Image Credit: Movie Pilot/Game of Thrones)

Upon finishing Season 3 and finding myself with roughly seven months until I could enjoy watching even more of my favourite characters dying, I did what any sane person with money left on their Amazon gift voucher would do and bought the complete set of books. At first I was amazed by how closely the two mediums matched up and was vividly able to imagine (remember?) the scenes in my head. That is, until I started reaching points in the books that the show had cut out, characters that they had combined, plotlines that had diverged. With the ever-expanding book cast that didn’t have a face for me to reference, I quickly found myself losing track of who was who and thus slowly losing interest. I started to go online to find summaries and synopses of the parts I’d read, and then more and more the parts I hadn’t. This meant that when Season 4 started, I was behind in the books yet knew what was going to happen.

And it sucked. I’d robbed myself of the element of surprise for the big moments – for example, when Prince Oberyn was on his victory parade in episode 8, I knew what was coming next – yet I didn’t have a keen eye for small details like Lady Olenna getting her hands on the poison from Sansa’s necklace. So I decided to make sure I finished A Dance with Dragons before the next season kicked off, which I managed despite the plodding pace of book four, A Feast for Crows.

This is kinda how it felt to watch Season 4 (Image Credit: Norville Rogers/Game of Thrones)

Having finished the entire series, and even starting again from the beginning, I approached Season 5 with an expectation of how it should play out; an expectation that was dashed almost straight away with the rather limp-feeling death of Ser Barristan Selmy, aka the greatest living knight in the Thrones universe. Changes from the books were suddenly more numerous, more glaring and much more annoying than they had been previously. All of a sudden I started asking why Sam and Gilly left for the Citadel in episode 10 instead of roughly episode 2 or 3, why did the Sons of the Harpy mount a coup at Daznak’s Pit rather than poisoning the honeyed locusts, where were Jon Connington, Arianne Martell and Aeron Damphair? I was becoming irked by the smallest differences, which made me realise I was now, primarily, a fan of the books, not the show.

I digress. Now that both book readers and show watchers are all up to speed, there are no spoilers milling around the web for the future of either medium, which means I can’t go off and spoil it for myself. In addition, due to the high probability that Season 6 will come out before Book 6, I won’t be able to point out the macro or micro changes that have been made for the screen adaptation because I won’t know that they’re changes; thus I won’t be able to get disproportionately irritated by Messrs Benioff and Weiss. But do you want to know the real beauty of this scenario? The show is so off-book already, and has been getting further and further off-book with each successive season, that it seems probable that the majority of on-screen moments won’t spoil the majority of the remaining books – partly because there are so many non-existent plotlines on Thrones, and partly because of the significant changes to what they have left. So yes, this is an extremely exciting time for fans of Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire and those of us who are in love with both – and not least because of the vast number of cliff-hangers that are up in the air.

Spoiler alert though: Jon Snow (or Jon Targaryen!) will not stay dead. HE JUST WON’T OK????

She got our back (Image Credit: chechar/Game of Thrones)