But it feels a bit like the end of an era today. I feel like I’ve just finished packing and I’m taking my last longing look at the place I’ve called home for so long.

My premier runs out sometime today over at swydm, and I’m not bothering to renew it this time.

It’s strange, I’ve known it was coming for the better part of the last year. I renewed my premier a year ago against my better judgement, and it didn’t take long to realise the way things are going, there’s just no point.

Most of the time it’s like a wasteland over there, and many of the people who are still about (those that haven’t fallen foul of a convenient “technical glitch” that deleted them from the system) are skulking about on myspace.

Not to mention it doesn’t seem worth paying out all that money (I’m poor and sickly and unemployed remember!) for a profile comments box that is lucky if it’s used twice in the same month, and access to peoples galleries… That would be galleries that are either never updated, a volley of porn from around the internet, or galleries that are all locked to the public for some obscure reason. Oh and journal comments, which I don’t use now I have my own webspace and host my own journal…

Nope, just not worth it.

I’ve already cleared out my own gallery, now I just need to spend some time later in the week sorting through all my pictures so i can add a snazzy little flash gallery I picked up the other day to my blog here.

I’m not going to delete the account, as there’s still a few people that I only know on there that I don’t want to lose touch with should they ever reappear.

Trawling through my gallery last night it just hit me how much the old place has changed. My account is heading towards it’s 4th year, and the name I held before that was around 2-3 years old too.

That’s heading towards the 7 year mark, which is the vast majority of my online life too. I only got internet back in 1998, and swydm.com was the first social site I ever signed up to. I looked at most of them, but it was by far the best, a great community, buzzing forums and some incredibly wild and wacky regulars.

I don’t know anywhere else where everyone seemed to own a latex rubber catsuit a whip and know of several creative uses for a turkey baster.

Then there were the bizarre forum chats, the kinky profile comments, not to mention the regular journal pimping competitions that people used to run.

None of that has existed for the last few years, and I still miss it.

That place used to be my home for many hours a day, it used to help make the days sat at the keyboard trying to fill in the long hours until I could go back to bed go by so fast.

These days I’m lucky if I even remember to log in more than twice a week, just to check on peoples journals, and even then there’s not much activity most weeks.

But still I’m looking at my empty gallery pages with pangs of sadness.

I’m not deleting my account, but I still feel like I’ve moved out and I’ll not be going back.

It still feels like a part of me is left there, trapped somewhere on their servers.

And I still feel like I need major psychiatric help for feeling so sad about not paying premium on an internet site

Quite why these two things, and why today *shrugs* Your guess is as good as mine.

1st thought of the day…

If you go on a boat trip they have to have enough life jackets, and certain numbers of life boats (titanic anyone?)

So how come you go on a plane and you’re provided with a cheap looking oxygen mask but no parachute?

2nd thought of the day…

Why is it when you talk to a non-native English speaking person, it never matters how bad their English is, they always know a volley of swear words in English?

We’ve been told for years that we’re now living in a throw-away society, yet at the same time we’re told to cut down on packaging, cut down on purchases, recycle more…

How?

You buy an expensive piece of equipment, it breaks 2 days after the warranty runs out, but you can’t get it replaced because (according to the manufacturer) it isn’t cost effective, it would cost more to repair than it does to buy a new one.

Although you have to love how they don’t give you the option of repair to judge the cost for yourself.

And then we have food and services, doesn’t anyone take pride in their work any more?

When I used to work at the restaurant a few years ago, they were fairly expensive if you went in for a meal, although apparently they’re no more expensive than anywhere else in the city centre.

Yet the difference in the quality of the food was incredible.

Most places buy the cheapest ingredients possible, simply to maximise their profit margins. Yet the place I worked at bought nothing but the best ingredients they could find, and when you ate anything there, you sure could tell!

I don’t really drink anything other than plain water, but I do have a weakness for hot chocolate.

The place I worked at used to make them the old fashioned way…

Thick, frothy…

I’m talking made with full milk, enough chocolate powder to make it so think you could almost stand a spoon up in it. Then topped with thick double cream, and a handful of marshmallows… *drools*

Hardly anywhere seems to do them that way any more.

I was at a cafe last week (yes it’s true, I actually left the house!) that always used to do really nice hot chocolates.

But now they’ve gone the way of everyone else…

Everyone wants to maximise their profits, which is fair enough, it’s a business after all, but they don’t seem to have any interest in the quality of their stuff. No interest in whether their product is good enough to have people coming back for repeat business, just so long as it’s cheap…

And by cheap I mean cheap to make, not cheap to buy.

I had a hot chocolate at this cafe on Friday, it was made with water instead of milk, so was very thin and far too hot, had hardly any chocolate powder so was pretty tasteless, and was topped with squirty cream.

I should mention here that I would like to find the person who invented squirty cream, tie them down and squirt cream down their throats until they implode… Ok so I guess technically it would be explode…

I loath that stuff with a passion, I’m convinced that the nearest it’s come to a cow is if it happened to pass one on the road on the way to the store.

It tastes nothing like cream, or any other dairy product, is full of sugar and turns to water the second it comes into contact with anything warm.

I bought this hot chocolate, which was described as “Luxury thick, creamy hot chocolate” and even went for the slightly more expensive version that was served “with cream”.

Hell they can’t even get the descriptions right, because the description given was the furthest thing from the runny, tasteless slop they served me with!

But then we have cakes too, you buy a cake of any kind and they’re so artificial they all taste pretty much the same…

And don’t even get me started on the use of those “cake topping” rubbish…

I find it quite frightening this trend to go for cheaper and cheaper materials and ingredients in all products, especially since it doesn’t mean they reduce their prices any!

I find it equally frightening in this day and age that there is a whole generation brought up on this artificial junk who don’t know what real food actually tastes like. They don’t even know what a real cake or desert tastes like, just this bland pre-packaged rubbish you buy in the shops.

Blah… I need to go stab someone now…

I was tootling about the internet, as you do, when I came across a blog. It was quite interesting, but after every entry was a couple of paragraphs about seeing the author on some cam site.

Now call me naive, but I was thinking it was going to be a facebook or myspace but with webcams.

Silly fraggle!

Needless to say it wasn’t.

It was one of those webcam for pay sites. You get to talk to the “models” in chat rooms, and then take them into a private session where they will do your every bidding, which appears to require total nudity and sex toys…

Nice to see humanity is progressing isn’t it?

But I digress.

First thing that hits me about the place was the number of people trolling (and I do mean trolling!) about the place. Never in my life have I had the misfortune to see such a bunch of degenerate misfits!

How nobody has ever snapped, gone off-line and hunted them down is beyond me. I’d have thought it was a pretty simple idea, you flirt with the model of your choosing, then you have to cough up the cash to go any further… It’s not exactly rocket science, now is it?

And I checked out both the guys and girls on this site, and both got the same calibre of clientèle, the girls got:

• Show me your boobs
• Take of your bra
• Touch yourself
• take of your knickers

And every variation of the above, but in more colourful and graphic terms, while the guys got:

• Show me your penis
• Make yourself hard
• Pop your pecs (not entirely sure but I think they meant bounce em up and down)
• Pop your nipples (I don’t even want to know what that one’s supposed to mean)

And both sexes got the “are you shaved”, “gay, straight, bi” and “Do you want to have sex with me” questions.

It’s no wonder most of them look so bored having to listen to that for hours at a time, not to mention how none of the idiots are able to take a hint, they ask, they ask in CAPS LOCK, after about 10 seconds they’re furiously barking out orders like some kind of Drill Sergeant and then they throw a hissy fit because the model isn’t obeying, so obviously doesn’t appreciate the viewer so it’s no wonder they’re not getting any private sessions…

Either that or they sprout something along the lines of “I love you, you’re so hot, you’re so kind, I want to have sex with you here and now…

Now can I see your…”

Umm, they’re trying to earn money, they’re not a performing monkey!

And I have to laugh at the number of people who try it on with the “If you show me your penis/breast, and start touching yourself I’ll take you into private for 30 minutes…” Umm, yeah, right… Like they haven’t heard that one at least 12 times in the 5 minutes I’ve been sat there.

I’m a bit bemused by the whole thing actually (no shock there then). There were one or two good looking guys and girls on the site, but so many of them looked like they fell out of the ugly tree, and didn’t so much hit every branch on the way down as were clubbed repeatedly with said branches at every opportunity!

Don’t get me wrong, looks aren’t everything, but in that kind of industry, it’s all about looks I’d have thought.

Maybe it’s me but the boys mostly looked like they were about 12, and the girls… Well they fell into two categories, there were the ones that looked like slightly past their best cross dressers, and the others who looked like 40 year old cheap hookers, and they’ve all had some pretty hard paper rounds, as they say.

People are expected to actually want to pay to watch people looking like that perform obscene acts alone in a room with a webcam and waterproof keyboard?

Then there’s the price… $6 per minute! Who can even afford it, even if they are that sad, desperate or perverted? I worked it out, that means for my entire weeks money, I’d be able to afford 29 minutes of viewing… That’s just silly!

The “models” (don’t you just love how they call them that, not that I’m quite sure what you actually should call them to be fair) also get bonuses depending how long people spend in payed shows. They get $10for each person who spends 3 hours in a paid session.

Now by my maths, that means the person has spent $1078.20, and the model receives an extra $10. Not the best of bonus plans, not to mention how often is anyone going to spend that on a webcam show? Heck, that’s $359 an hour, they could hire a high class escort for that, and there’d be a lot more “interaction”…

There’s also the models to consider… Several of them appear to be students, who are presumably trying to earn money to put themselves through college or university. Yet you do have to wonder what impact this particular carer move is going to have on their long term goals. I saw a couple of people studying to become journalists or work in media. Am I alone in thinking a background in the sex industry immortalised on the internet for all to find is going to be quite the problem if they want to be taken seriously?

Mind you, after gawping at the site off and on for the past 3 days, I’m not feeling any strange urges, but I am feeling more than a little evil

I have a sudden desire to be wealthy, just so I could torment one of their models! Some of them take it all so seriously.

Would it be so wrong?

It would probably have to be one of the guys, the girls seem to take it all with a pinch of salt, but the guys appear to get very worked up over it all, making them so much more fun to torment.

Now I’m sure most of you know what I’m like when I’m feeling evil (surely you remember the tampon conversation with the poor girl at the checkout a couple of years ago )

So I’d imagine it would go something along the lines of waiting until they were getting more than a little frustrated and then taking them into private. Then, naturally I’d have to do everything in my power to put them off completely…

Naturally there would be lots of random questions to put them off the task at hand.

All those strange things people to to get their babies to eat could probably be nicely adapted, should be nice and disturbing…

Aeroplane noises and the train in the tunnel… Yep I’d imagine that would throw off their game just a bit

And just to finish off, as they’re about to… well, you know…

“So, how’s you’re mother/grandmother doing these days…?”

Or if I were going to be truly vicious… A question about a parent/grandparent in their negligée/underwear… that should nicely ruin it for them

Clearly a little more thought would be required, but I’m sure I could ruin their day, and probably their whole week without too much more required

Ok so I never could remember the lyrics to that tune. *shrugs* So sue me…

Anyway, not the entry I was planning for today, but I was reading Cia‘s blog this morning and got inspired. And after all, inspiration isn’t something to be ignored! (Not to mention for a change it’s not about the local wildlife!)

So… Love and marriage…

The thing I’ve always found so odd about the whole thing, people say that children grow up so fast these days.

Well, really, you have to ask yourself what can you expect?

I’ve heard people ask children as young as 8 if they have a boyfriend, or girlfriend.

I’m sorry, but they’re eight! They’re not even supposed to know what the heck to do with the opposite sex, let alone already be dating one!

I remember when I was younger, it started at about 14, every time I’d go to anything with family members, or family friends, I’d be asked if I had a girlfriend.

Naturally me being me, they didn’t ask on more than two occasions, I think the slightly bemused withering look they got by way of reply and the question “What am I supposed to do with one of them, I’m 14!” Well, let’s just say they stopped asking very quickly

But that’s kind of the point, at least to me… How can you complain at children growing up so quickly when everyone is asking them that kind of thing. The media and society now makes you feel like there must be something horribly wrong with you if you’re not dating (and probably parent of four at the rate we’re going) by the time you hit puberty.

What’s wrong with the good old days, where you at least got to finish school and get a job before you were expected to be dating and married?

And more importantly, what’s wrong with being happily single? Why is it so important that you be connected to a significant other to be “normal” and “happy”?

It does make you question (or me, at least) what the connection is between the growing trend of pairing everyone up as soon as they are in their teens, and the drastic increase in failed relationships in recent years.

Personally I think there is a very solid connection between the two.

People go into relationships far too fast, and they are far to busy doing it for other people, rather than for themselves.

To my mind you need to know, love and understand yourself, before you can ever hope to love and understand anyone else. And since most people don’t really grow into the people they are until their very late teens (or in many cases their mid twenties) how can anyone expect the relationships to stand up to the test?

I also think that people need to stop pushing at it. If it’s right it will happen, that’s how I’ve always looked at it (although I suppose I should probably point out here that having been single since birth, I may not be the foremost authority on the subject!).

If people are always looking to try and find love, sooner or later they’re going to convince themselves that they’ve found it. Whereas is they just learnt to be happy in themselves, they might actually be better suited to notice when they make that connection with someone. They may also be better suited to distinguish between love, lust and desperation, and that in turn will make them far more suited to see whether it’s a connection that is likely to last, and whether or not it is a person they would happily spend the rest of their lives, grow old and die with.

Apparently the actor Chris Evans (who plays Johnny Storm) has decided he no longer wants to do any shirtless scenes in movies so people will take him seriously as an actor.

Oh the poor dear, how my little heart bleeds for him, to look like that, have a body people would kill for, and not to be taken seriously.

I hate to break it to him, but if he’s not being taken as a serious actor it’s more likely to be down to his movie choices than the amount of flesh he does (or doesn’t) show.

Lets face it, if you’re in a special-effects laden blockbuster movie, you’re very unlikely to be winning any awards for your acting prowess.

Heck, they even dish out the parts based on looks more than acting skill, otherwise they wouldn’t have had some of the truly terrible films they’ve had lately where the only thing keeping people going to see them is the amount of eye candy available! I sometimes think the main criteria for casting some of these films is how well they fill out a lycra bodysuit, and not much else.

It’s a safe bet if you’re going to sign on for a comic book/cartoon strip film you’re going to be upstaged by the incredibly over-the-top Arch Villain, the special effects and the lycra (or latex rubber as they’re using these days) and probably in that very order.

So it’s pretty obvious, (to me at least) if he, or indeed anyone else for that matter, wants to be taken seriously in the field of acting, it comes down to the same thing the public wants to see in a movie, a good strong plot and well thought out characters with at least some depth.

I always find this so odd, everyone wants to be taken seriously at what they do, not just actors, but being taken as a “serious actor” always seems to mean one of two things, either they’re body of work to date is fairly standard, so they suddenly decide they have to take a part that involves mindless and gratuitous (not to mention totally pointless) swearing, violence and full-frontal nudity… (Does anybody really think they’re going to be taken seriously after doing something like that?)

The other option appears to be, as with Chris Evans, their body of work to date has (at least mostly) revolved around their looks and how they look wearing next to nothing. That group of people suddenly decide that the are more than just a piece of meat, and they’re never removing any clothing ever again.

Again, it’s probably just me, but I’d have said both options were daft. The only thing that’s going to change peoples opinion of you is to get the right part, something that will stretch and show off your acting abilities. If you have the skills the amount of clothing is irrelevant.

After all, look at people like Bob Hoskins, or Kevin Bacon, both are taken seriously because of their skill and talent (and good film choices) not the amount of clothes they do or don’t wear.

Is it just me, or are people just plain weird?

I did. I reduced my carbon footprint by turning it off!

The problem is, these concerts are great to raise money for charities, but they aren’t really much cop for awareness of global issues. People go, they have a great time, and then they go back about their lives like it never happened.

And having a concert for global warming and carbon emissions? Umm… Am I the only one to notice the number of lights, the number of trucks required to move all the equipment and the number of air flights that will have been used to transport all the acts to tech various locations. It’s a safe bet that lot probably tripled the carbon emissions for the month, if not more.

Seems a bit counter productive to me…

The thing is, it’s just never going to work.

They’d have done more for the environment not having all those concerts than any benefit to come from them.

Call me pessimistic, but I just don’t have that much faith in mankind.

People will do what they want to do, if it goes along with being green, then great, and if it doesn’t then tough.

People have known for a few years now how much pollution and carbon is churned out by all those flights for holidays abroad.

Have they stopped flying?

Hell no!

They join a scheme to plant a tree to offset their carbon emissions… Like a single tree is going to do anything. The rain forest is the lungs of the planet. We’ve known that for over a decade, yet it’s still being cut down at a happy little place so they can introduce the Amazon to the essential food that is McDonald’s.

And that’s the real crux of the issue. Until people change their priorities and change how they think, all the awareness in the world really doesn’t do jack.

If these groups really want to help the planet, then maybe they should be getting the recording artists to cut back on the carbon burning world tours, maybe they should be forcing manufacturers to go back to the old ways where things were built to last, and designed to be repaired, and leave the new idea of make things as cheap and fragile as possible so they don’t last, and have to be replaced because you either can’t get spare parts, somebody to fix them, or more frequently the parts and the labour to repair it is more than it costs to replace it.

They need to hit people where they’ll think the most, their pockets.

If it costs less to buy a replacement than a repair, people will sling their goods out faster than they can run to the nearest trash point.

If they can get them repaired cheaper, they’ll get them fixed, reducing waste and reducing manufacturing carbon and pollution emissions.

You want people to stop buying the gas guzzling cars, then put a cap on gas purchase. If they can’t buy enough gas, they’ll soon get a more economical car.

Better yet, get the car companies to put more effort into alternative power methods in cars, reduced consumption, and increasing mileage. Get them to make cars that don’t rust. I remember reading years ago that they could make non-rusting cars way back in the 90′s if not earlier, but naturally they don’t because they want people to buy cars more often to keep them in vast amounts of money.

You want people to stop using their cars and start using public transport.

That’s fine, but when public transport runs once an hour or less, when it’s cheaper to run a car than it is to buy a bus ticket, then you might as well save your breath. People think with their wallets, and even those who do care have to go with what they can afford and what is practical.

Short of being a fanatic, you’re not going to spend 2 hours on public transport and anything up to an hour in the wind and rain waiting for your connection on your commute to and from work when you can get a car and drive yourself there in a quarter of the time for about the same cost and without getting cold and wet. It’s just not going to happen.

You want people to use public transport, then put some money into it, stop dishing these services out to the private sector who are only interested in profit margins, take them back under governmental control, put some money into them and give the world a transport system that’s cheap, efficient, economical and practical… Then and only then will people start using it and start leaving their car at home.

When these people start putting their money where their mouths are, start looking at the practicalities and giving people options (or ultimatums) then I’ll give them some time, and a whole hearted support.

Until then they can shove their “awareness concerts” they can shove their droning musical acts, stuff their bland and inane celebrity introducees (who lets face it aren’t so much there to show their support as to get their face seen), I’ve seen it, I’ve thought about it and it changes nothing. It’s all been done before, it meant as little to people and policies then as it did yesterday. When something doesn’t work, how about you stop flogging the dead equine and come up with something that’s actually going to make some kind of difference?

I had to buy some new underwear yesterday… And… Well… I do wish they’d make them for the… How do I put it… Wider buttocked amongst us.

There’s something not altogether pleasant about getting dressed in the morning, putting on a perfectly respectable, fresh pair of underwear, only to find they’ve mutated into the worlds most uncomfortable thong by lunch time.

Then you’re forced to spend the rest of the day performing several rectal excavations trying to retrieve them again.

Have you noticed, whenever people get asked who they’d like to get stranded on a desert island with, they invariably pick some hot and sexy specimen of man/womanhood, presumably with the intention of wasting away the days performing various obscene acts of wild and rampant monkey sex on, under and over every coconut tree on the island.

Am I the only one who doesn’t really get the appeal of that scenario?

Personally if I’m going to be stranded on a desert island, I want one of three people, and in the following order…

• Somebody with a working satellite phone to call for assistance.

• Somebody with at least a moderate knowledge of survival skills in hostile environments

• Somebody that you can trust not to kill you in your sleep by day three so they can eat your dead corpse until help arrives.

I don’t know… is it just me?

The reason this should be interesting, is that with current technology the only way for a household to reduce carbon emissions by that much is to go back to the dark ages.

Well pretty much anyway.

To reduce household carbon by 60%, according to the news report, you’d have to do all of the following:

• Get rid of your car
• Change all your light bulbs for low energy ones (and stupidly low light too I notice)
• Remove all electrical equipment from the home
• Remove all radiators and heaters
• Permanently turn off any central heating
• Don’t take any holidays

Doing all of the above will bring all British homes into line with the new Bill.

Of course we’ll all die of starvation and hypothermia, but then that’ll help with the overcrowding issues too, so I guess they don’t see that as a down side.

Personally I’d have thought they should be putting more effort into finding alternate energy methods and making things that use less power/fuel, rather than trying to get everyone to use less.

Lets face it, in this age of technology and poor health, everyone want’s as many time saving gadgets as they can get their little mitts on.