It was my birthday. I was given books. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Unsurprisingly, the author ruined what would have been a fantastic story by a failure of an ending. The story was intricate, the characters interesting. Dr Iannis died pointlessly, his tale left untold. Why the author chose to neglect that and write about the rather boring moaning of Pelagia for a third of the book is beyond me. Killing him like that was also…saddening. Iannis was much, much more interesting than his daughter protagonist, who spends most of the book lamenting the fact that every male on the island seems to want her. She is a blank, the book revolving around her, so maintaining the blank and killing off everyone else is illogical.

I also received a sketchbook. Not an off-the-shelf one—Bella actually stitched each page together by hand. It’s beautiful. There are few things I have been more proud to own, that make me happy to see and use. I must admit, my drawing skills are limited, but I still savour it. Presents are rarely as thoughtful as that.

Ndubz wrote a book. I had no idea he was literate…

I’m now using Last.fm to track my music habits. It’s beautiful, I must admit. I have been doing desktop wallpapers based on my favourite artists due to the amount of pictures they make available. Apparently I listen to Paramore a lot more than I thought. And I don’t know why Cobra Starship are on there. Cobra Starship are awful.

Joanna and I are still together, though why she settles is unknown to me. I find myself watching the Matrix (the third one, whatever it’s called). I’d forgotten how progressively bad the series got. This one is the merde du merde.

I’m rambling again. I’m too tired to care. Too. Much. Work.

Oh well, at least I’ve come across a musician who can a) actually play and b) is quite nice to listen to as she does it, too. I used to post music up, but apparently I’m not allowed to do that anymore. YouTube to the rescue! It’s such a pity they removed music videos in the UK, though. What a way to lose market share. Bastards. Anyway, the lovely Lisa Mitchell is the one whom I speak about, and here is she with Neopolitan Dreams.

It’s still stuck in my head.

I have discovered RentACoder. I can well and truly say that I hate it. How could anyone undervalue their profession like that? $5 for a piece of coding? Come on, that’s awful! After their extortionate fee, that’s £3. THREE POUNDS. I could find that much money on the street! It makes you think, doesn’t it, about what the point is to learning this type of skill to a professional level if it’s going to be undervalued by a cheap, foreign “programmer” who outputs more invalid code than a monkey who’s handed a copy of Microsoft Word and a keyboard. Eugh. No wonder we’re in a crisis.

I’ve been thinking about words a lot. I happened across a book of Macbeth (with its title set in Helvetica, of course) and started thinking about how the English language seems to be out to get us. It doesn’t care who gets taken down in the process, either.

One of the strangest words I’ve seen is prophesy. It means to give a prophecy? Yep. Looks like prophecy, right? Of course. So it should be pronounced the same? Wrong!

Prophesy is a hard word to justify, since its very meaning has been usurped by the highly ambitious prophesize, but the mentality behind it isn’t that stupid. Well, for the bedraggled collection of words which we call English, in any case.

To put it simply, words which, as a noun, use a C, usually turn this into an S in the verb form. The most prominent example of this is advice, which changes to to advise in the verb. There is another, albeit little-known, example: practice goes to to practise.

Another example of the constant vindication is the divide between affect and effect. The noun of both is effect. Why? The world hates you. Yes, the two verbs have subtly different meanings, but for what reason? Could you just not use a different word, for goodness’ sake?

Spelling hates you and me, apparently. How rude.

I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been procrastinating—damn, I shouldn’t tell you that—and it has apparently been for no reason. Do you know how long it took to actually revise the site? One day! Putting off one day of work for less which pays off quite a lot and takes a load off my shoulders in the long run is…stupid. Yeah.

The database has been cleared, bar one post, the design has been updated to get rid of the accursed orange (hey, I liked it!), which means, technically speaking, I have no past.

That suits me just fine.

I should probably introduce myself, then. I’m a guy who goes by the name of the Cyan-Light. Don’t ask, ’cause I don’t know why either. I’m a bit of a web designer/developer/master/whatever the term is for us nowadays. My likes are relatively small and my dislikes disproportionately large: I’m a naturally born critic and proud of it. I do happen to have a girlfriend. I don’t know why. It just happened.

I’ve always been a strict grammar…ist. Unfortunately, my spelling skills, as a result, fell, so please excuse me.

I will be writing about everything from books to games, HTML to Windows.

And I will do so with style. Keep tuned, ladies and gentlemen.