Games in Development

OK I was just having a look at Wild West Online, which looks promising, although I will not be participating as I am too busy, and realised that I had not extensively described the ones I am actually working on.  There have been significant delays with the game projects, as I had hoped to send some work to the Gambia, but as this was not possible I had to take care of all of it myself

Best Adventure Ever is the one relevant to the David Wolfe project, and will be suitable for PC, Mac, tablet or mobile.  Although the visual novel is not the perfect format for the original story, I felt this was a good idea for maximum coverage since I am a noob to the games market.  I have not decided on whether to attempt to make any actual money on it as all the work on the Wolfe project is intended to gain reach rather than profit.

It is the separate story of Kira and Sam Redwood, who in terms of graphics freakishly resemble Wolfe and I, in a sort of self hating kind of way, and their progress through a series of dating episodes.  Sub-choices are made via consumption – what you choose to eat, drink and do moves the story along.  As you can see, the graphic quality is rather nice.  Without giving too much away, the game is intended to improve the knowledge and confidence of the player no matter how they feel about themselves, and so I think it is a worthy project.  I don’t know why I still care about doing this for nothing, but never mind.

Mood Machine is a steampunk adventure set in London, and tracks the friendships of young people making their way in a mysterious society where  people have, for a variety of reasons, disappeared or died.  This one is more about psychology and how people interact with one another, and contains rather a lot of nice bits of economic history.

 

The two games are intended as entries into the games market with a view to creating the game I really want to make, which is a much bigger job and will also feature Wolfe.  (this family thing is most inconvenient in terms of game character building, Wolfe)  Although this was also intended to increase his reach, I think I will have to offer avatar selection for this game, and so I may include Icke and Robbins as possible selections and widen the games outlook.  Gamers have been awaiting a decent cult builder for a long time, so I think this is a nice back scratching way of serving the market.

In terms of hold ups, I could do with some technical discussion and I need to build up some more skills to get to this third and most important game.  I have the courses available, but have been significantly delayed in getting on with them, and all of this is secondary to clearing the studio, which needs to happen fairly soon.  I think the first priority is to complete the visual novels and see how that goes.  If it goes well, then full steam ahead with Best Guru Ever.

There is also the risk that Wolfe will object once the game is complete, since he chooses to ignore everything I am doing.  I haven’t hidden any portion of what I am doing, so I suggest if he has any objections, he gets on with making them before I put all this work out.

 

FYI – he will not.  I do not know why he considers it a good idea to ignore work that is being done.  The rule in these circumstances is ‘do it until they stop you’  but it is really a waste of everyone’s time.  Extremely frustrating if you are trying to make things happen and very disheartening.

 

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Hanging by a thread

Hanging by a thread

When your life falls apart, as mine did in 1995 you try very hard to find a silver lining. You grasp at straws, you pretend all the bad stuff is temporary, even when it goes on day after week after year. Your mother can be vile to you, your father can be getting sicker and sicker, your family can show how immature and stupid they are. You make the best of things as best you can, even when your idea of the world has fallen apart.

By 1998 I had given up my career in stately home catering and gone to university. This added a few extra unexpected years of youth and I did well despite working throughout my studies at a variety of horrible part-time jobs.

It was not until 2003 that things really started to unravel. When my father was resituated next to the front door I realised I had to stop going out at night, and my mother, not the most caring of people, started to really struggle. Four years of over-working, over-caring and slowly coming to the realisation that my life was effectively over ensued. There was no question of introducing new people to a situation in which I would have to explain that my family were dishonest or having children in this house.

Besides which, the house needed lengthy repairs, which had to be fitted around my jobs and paid for. I quietly got on with it. Now and again the exs would turn up and help for a while, apart from that it was a case of accepting that the education was a waste of time, since I wasn’t able to go anywhere.

My mother had a stroke a month before my father died. My best friend and my uncle followed in the next six months. Two cats died in the same period, which with my isolated life is just as bad as losing a person.

It still took until a few days ago to fully accept that my life was over. I kept looking for things to do to distract myself and pretend that not having a normal adult life was OK because I was helping other people and doing other things. I was quite literally clutching at straws for all that time.

I had busied myself with creative projects, all of which were labour intensive and not otherwise practical. I am quite good at some things, not so good at others. What has really fallen by the wayside is the sense of perspective and dumping things that just don’t work.

In the spirit of my rather extreme delusion, I decided not to deal with things I cannot change in the real world, in favour of things I might have been able to change in the virtual world. Now that this thread has also, mercifully, been cut I am left in a fairly poor state of health, realising that even the few people I have been engaging with have not really been engaging with me. I seem to have spent a lot of time pandering rather than bothering to observe whether I was being pandered to.

Any close observation of American soap operas will tell you that thin women whinge about their feelings an awful lot. Fatter women simply eat instead, enabling them to shut up and get on with whatever they are doing. It seems to me that the alternative is to take up activities which avoid people, avoid stress and in particular, avoid women altogether. If the last three months has shown me anything, it is that I was right to avoid them for all these years as their communication seems to consist of bullying each other.

So, to that end, I am now up to walking 10 miles per day. I have to sneak out during the hours that we are not under scrutiny, and I am working on felling a few trees when I am here. One of the exs tried to create boy jobs, and I told him that if he did that, I would not be able to manage anymore and to butt out.

My neighbour laughed at this at the time. She is not laughing now that her husband has dementia and is only capable of burning a few weeds. I have been offering to fit a bannister in her house for the last year, and despite visual deficiencies and having fallen down the stairs, she is refusing. These are big Georgian villas, you have to prepare well in advance if you plan to remain in them during your dotage.

Who knows if the combination of fasting, detoxing and walking excessively will produce anything apart from a very tired Ina? Does it really matter anymore? Is there any point in talking, when you know nobody is listening? Do trees make a sound when no-one is listening?

If I persist with the project I am forced to believe that I can deal with a lot of stress that I do not currently think I can deal with, otherwise I have to give up entirely. I could have lived without the last 8 years altogether. Perhaps sometimes life trades happiness for longevity and it isn’t actually worth it at all? Certainly if I factored happiness into my calculations about life, I would have decided not to bother at all, so how important is it really?

All that there is left, as far as I can see, is anger and a modicum of self-worth that I did not previously have. Maybe this is a good thing? Time will tell.

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Status Seeking

Status Seeking

I had a very lucid kind of dream this morning, featuring an ex-boyfriend I would rather forget.

I have had this dream before, if you are into dream interpretation, you may have some fun with this:

I am in a coffee shop in a holiday town. I decide to buy a piece of their super expensive white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake for my mother, as it is apparently the stuff of legend. Notice that I have no intention of actually having any myself, as apparently this is important to the dream. A fight breaks out in the coffee shop as the punters are aware that I have a slice of it.

I then return to my job as a chef in a large and rather industrial kitchen, where I work for a head chef that has considerably less knowledge and experience than I do. Nevertheless I am aware of feeling quite happy as I dodge the Victorian pipes and other workers in the course of doing whatever it is that I am doing there.

After a lot of exploring the staff accomodation, which appears to be a rabbit warren, I come back to work and go through the wrong door into the public area, which is in the form of a bar. My ex, who was Raymond Blanc’s head chef many moons ago, is standing teaching a small crowd of rather daft looking people how to make sandwiches. He is waving his arms around and pretending that this is very complex, and of course with a French accent, it sounds rather more technical than putting cheese and lettuce between slices of pan bread.

He sees me, stops and then tries to belittle me. I am aware that he is jealous that I am allowed in the kitchen and he is not. This relates to reality, as when we were together he was jealous that I was getting better jobs than he was on the grounds that I was a)cheaper b)more flexible c)not famous d)unlikely to stab anyone.

To me, this dream is all about status. I have actively avoided status throughout my life. I like responsibility, but I have no interest in status. I am not sure why this is? I am very keen on seeking knowledge, I am happy to work to gain even small amounts of that, but status is not of interest.

Not only has this seriously affected my income, it has been rather sad in that I spend a lot of time thinking that people are not terribly competent. Competence certainly doesn’t relate to success, as far as I can see, at least not as much as wanting status really badly.

The cheesecake issue is about quality of care. My mother has no regard for my well-being, she has actually said as much, however she literally gets the best of everything, even whilst she complains about it. I tend to think this is her idea of having fun, since her life is rather limited. The fight in the coffee shop is people who would rather she did not have this care because they arent getting any. Therefore I think this part is me worrying about aging and how my life is going to end up as a result of caring for her.

The kitchen work element is about resolving this resistance to status, and wondering if knowledge acquisition really matters at this point in my life, since nobody is interested in knowledge anymore.

Rene turning up is likely to be about becoming a greedier and more forceful person, as Rene suffered from a kind of enforced narcissism as a result of his more genuinely narcissistic mother. I actually felt quite sorry for him even as he stamped all over my life for his own gain.

I do wonder if I have been chasing Wolfe for years because of this fear of status and willingness to drown in work for the joy of doing it. If it recovers my health, so much the better but I am a rather disruptive child when I want to know something.

I am thinking that Mrs Wolfe, the fictional character that I am creating, will not be complete by October and that I would be better to complete this project and write about it rather than bother to speak to him. To hell with the original book, nobody cares about the planet or their own welfare anyway, even the people that pretend that they do.

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Hounded by the fictitious Mrs Wolfe

Hounded by the fictitious Mrs Wolfe

She has tired me out today. She insisted on a 3 hour trip to the hairdresser, which I have never done in my life. I look very different, but I notice, because I am actually looking people in the eye, that they are viewing me more positively.

I have never considered just letting my whackiest thoughts guide what I am doing before. This is a queer sort of fun. Progress so far is a weight loss of 36lb, radical new hair and two almost nice items of clothing.

Pending radical decisions include completely changing the way I dress – I tend to wear men’s clothes. Not sure I will let her away with that one as for one thing, it is very expensive, and for another, it is over-egging the pudding to wear women’s clothing when your breasts could easily knock someone out regardless of what you wear.

Now I am to walk sixteen miles a day. I am tired just thinking about this. Two weeks ago I would have said a swift no way to that one as it would have involved intense pain. Today I am just thinking – yeah maybe next week. This week I might do five. If you don’t like it that is too bad, Mrs W.

It is probably time to start work on the next book whilst I slowly work on these games. I also have a very unpleasant meeting about my mother coming up next week. Mrs W can take care of that I think.

In the meantime I shall just have another look at this weird hair she gave me.

She does have moderately good taste, I guess, for a crazy person.

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The Best Romance Ever explained

 

I have been asked for an explanation of Best Romance Ever, as it breaks every rule of the romance genre. Here are the rules of romance, from Elizabeth Grayson, although you will find I have broken every rule of every romance ever.

1) the readers care about the characters.
2) the readers identify with the heroine.
3) the readers fall in love with the hero.
4) the readers believe that the hero and heroine are convincingly united at the end of the book.

  1.  I don’t think either Sam or Kira are particularly appealing characters.  One writer that had a look at Best Scandal Ever found the fact that Kira was fat and had a lot of boyfriends unbelievable due to her own weird hangups.  They are interesting, but not particularly heart wrenching people.  Another early comment was that referring to Sam as a womanizer was an insult.  I replied at the time that it was descriptive.  Sam is not a bad person at all, he just likes women, preferably briefly.
  2. See above.  Kira is a weirdo, who would rather hide in her house than attempt to disengage with her feelings.  She uses them elsewhere as impetus to do other things.
  3. Sam is not the sort of guy that anybody sensible would fall in love with.  His entire life is devoted to avoiding such encumbrances.  The only reason he nearly achieves romance is to improve his status.
  4. Sam and Kira do not end up together at the end of the book. Quite the reverse. It is a comedy of manners, in which their respective nationalities plays a huge role.  Kira is shy and completing a project, regardless of money or status, whilst Sam is very keen to be seen as very successful.  This gives you a further insight into their characters, and is a development on Best Scandal Ever, which posits Sam as a business genius, whilst Kira is a faintly evil academic/artist who doesn’t care about people, money, or anything much apart from Sam, whom she wants nothing to do with.

So, although the principle of romance is there, there is no actual romance.  All it establishes is a link between the characters, in the form of his turning up at the music festival when he is upset about the failure to sustain his romance with the famous actress.  In terms of the series, it makes perfect sense, but in terms of the rules of romance, it is entirely rule breaking.

Nevertheless, men have particularly enjoyed the book, as it explains a lot about women.  That nagging old fuck standing in your kitchen loves you very much, in fact, she is just busy maintaining your preferred level of boring old life.  Love is not necessarily about flowers and pretty things.  Sometimes it is about being extremely tough and withholding affection for wider reasons.

Some men, Sam included, misunderstand this as being stuck in a rut, or hen-pecked.  So, for the more intelligent male reader it gives a measure of insight into why you would still be madly in love after thirty years, yet having a relatively grim day to day life.  Best Romance Ever is my attempt to capture why your relationship unit may look shaky, but actually be performing extremely well.

There is a measure of almost autistic denial about Kira.  She has little to no self-confidence, but I have forced her into situations where she copes remarkably well.  She is horrified by her feelings about Sam, and yet flogs her dead horse persistently throughout the books.  This in itself is more romantic than the average romance, since she has no expectations at all and does not forsee anything good or positive coming out of her feelings.

Sam, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware, and even if he was aware, would choose to ignore it, or brand Kira as insane.

Best Adventure Ever, the game in production at the moment, expands on this.  Players selecting Sam as their character will get a very different experience, expressed through food choices and choices of date, than players selecting Kira and her choices of date.  The romantic element between them is still there, however this piece of work is created around them rather than about them.  It is really a piece about the quality of your relationships, how your looks impact/do not impact on your life experience, and how happy you end up as a result.  It is also a comment about men and women generally, since Sam and Kira exemplify the ‘inny/outy’ nature of genitalia itself.

Finally, the pieces of work relating to Sam and Kira are about people who despise convention.  The one thing that Sam and Kira share is that they have no real interest in conformity.  If I ever put them together, I am sure their adventures together would be just as interesting, because of their opposing perception of the world around them.

I would argue that the Best Romance Ever is as the title suggests because there is no concluding ‘happy ever after.’  The Best Romance Ever, is a period of endless negotiation, therefore it is infinite.

 

Still free at this location – The Best Romance Ever

 

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Storytime

Once upon a time, a man was accused of horrific crimes by his family.  His wife left him, after telling over a hundred people of his plight, and went off with someone else.

Then he met someone else, whom he pretended to like in order to avoid being alone.  When he told her of the problems with his family, she realised she had to decide whether he was guilty or not, despite not knowing him for terribly long.  After due consideration, she decided that he was not guilty of the crimes, and despite him being very difficult, remained as his friend and helped him as best she could.

In the course of this ‘relationship’, ostensibly due to stress, he poured two pints of boiling water over her and repeatedly headbutted her shouting ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid’ a lot.  She ended up in hospital.

Oddly, she still kept in touch after this, as he was under intense pressure at the time.  It was not until he did something similar to his sister that she realised that she had been used to rehearse the second attack.

Several years later, when as she knew, he turned out to be innocent he returned to her life.  She was trying to repair her damaged health at the time.  An on-again -off-again friendship ensued, during which he attacked her again.  He was suffering from PTSD by this time, and had poor health due to the earlier trauma.

She, in the meantime had taken care of her parents, and as her family was also abusive, did not go out.  He was the only person that she saw, since there was nobody she could trust at all.  She was so lonely, in fact, that she fell in love with a random stranger that she had met online.  Her other friends, in the meantime, had decided that she was mad to be in love with the stranger, he could not possibly be interested in her and she had always been a bit weird anyway, since she did not share their low self-esteem and yet did not appear to need other people as much as they did.

So, the man decided, he must take revenge on her.  So, he turned up at her home when she was very upset about the random stranger, and announced that he would do as he pleased and bring food that she did not want into the house.

This happened twice.  She had already asked him not to bring any more food, and he did it again.  In tears, she asked him again.  He laughed at her.

She stood in the kitchen weeping.  She knew this was another assault, but she did not know why.  He was, as usual very tense so she knew she either had to let him play out this scene or she had to physically remove him, which could prove difficult in front of her sick mother.  She also knew that she had nobody at all to talk to, and so she let him get on with it.

Over the months that followed, she often noticed his sneer as he watched her eat and grow fatter and fatter, and wondered what all this was in aid of?  He kept bringing it up, over and over again as if his behaviour was not his responsibility at all.  Because he had picked food as an issue, he imagined he could do this and insist that everything he had done was her fault.

When she finally confronted him and requested the reason why he would do these things, whether he thought her life was easy, he simply said:

I did not consider you at all.

 

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Mindfulness and my male brain

 

Apparently the latest in marketing bullshit involves introducing stressed men to the concept of mindfulness.  Mindfulness, as it turns out, appears to be the new word for meditation, or as my friend would say ‘switching everything off and concentrating on thinking about nothing.’

Personally, when I need to make space for extended periods of military ‘regrouping,’ I make something.  Depending on how complicated the (usually emotional) issue is, it can take from two to six months to figure out.  Switching off involves creating something.

I find the idea of making nothingness a thing a bit ridiculous to be honest, I prefer a good blow-out in the form of tantrum, followed by activity of some kind.  This may seem ridiculous, since I am not really achieving anything these days, but there it is.  I apparently believe relaxation is time-wasting.  This, according to these articles, is my male brain talking, however I have never noticed a particularly negative gender divide when it came to meditation.  It is second only to yoga for people who like getting touchy feely with relative strangers.

Speaking of time-wasting, I have declined the Microsoft contract and am working on the games instead.  It took only three hours before I realised what a huge mistake I was making in terms of potentially giving up twenty hours a week to do a job comparing search engine results instead of building up Ina.  There are a couple of other companies interested, so we will see if they have something less tedious on offer.

I spent years doing terrible jobs, I have nothing to show for it apart from some pretty mediocre memories.  The only thing that has been good about my current predicament is that I have had time to do other things.

So, today I went to university and sorted out my campus passes to renew my research for the Boris book.  I resigned, in true prisoner style, and I drank a lot of supermix.  The supermix appears to have removed the giant emotional lump in my chest, which meant that I was weeping rather a lot last night.  It is as big a mystery to me as anyone why thinking about Wolfe, even briefly, causes such grief.

I imagine it is similar to a former friend, who told me that he could not grieve for his grandparents, but became hysterical over some baby mice that failed to survive two months later.  The difference in this case, is that I am grieving for my sick family, lost potential and lack of power to do anything about it as long as I am the best option for taking care of my mother. I am terrified to leave her side at the moment as we have been under such scrutiny for the last couple of months.

I also purchased some Gynostemma pentaphyllum and some rosehip, with a view to promoting some AMPK.  Since I cannot afford the extracts, we shall see if the combination helps with promoting youthful cell renewal.  Nearly bought some Griffonia seed, but I think it can wait a while as my problem appears to be low dopamine rather than low seratonin. I am quite the fan of Durk and Sandy.

 

 

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About thinking positively

I have to be honest with you, memes like this drive me insane.  Especially with that stupid name tagged at the bottom of it.

Let me tell you a story about positive thinking, and how complicated it gets.

If you particularly want the background to this story, I am sure there are plenty previous posts on it, but to cut the preamble very short:

Seven years ago I was huge, even bigger than I am now.  I was extremely ill and I have an old video somewhere of my sounding rather drunk, although I had stopped drinking several years before.  That is how damaged my liver was.

One of the old boyfriends, that I had been very fond of at 16 or so when he went off with someone else, randomly decided that he wanted to see me.  I panicked, as he had posted a picture of himself at 18 online and I assumed that like me, he looked pretty much the same apart from weight.

So, I decided to create a database of health options for losing weight and solving the health problem, still undefined, that was causing me to be exhausted, covered in psoriasis, enormous and basically struggling with my workload, which at the time, since it was just after my father, best friend, and uncle’s deaths, was considerable.

I had created an exhibit for Patrick McGoohan online, and his family had been kind enough to acknowledge it, which was basically all I had going for me at the time.

In the course of researching my database, I came across Wolfe, and as I worked on my exhibit, laughed over several of his videos.  The database then transformed into an academic treatise on how obesity became desirable to Western economies, how much you are manipulated emotionally into following standard behavioural pathways, and how to rebel with a view to a more ecologically friendly version of capitalism. Naturally I assumed that Wolfe would be interested in this.

When I went to his facebook page, I was surprised to find him actually on it.  Over the next several weeks I was warily cheered up somewhat (I won’t go into it, but he can be very entertaining in his own way) It got me through an extremely stressful situation when my family was stabbing me repeatedly in the face for looking after my mother.  Apparently if they are selfish, everyone has to be selfish.  Having been told to give up any idea of a family or future to take care of her and my father, I do not know why they then decided they wanted me dead or destroyed for actually doing it.  That is the reason for Ina Disguise.  If I had done anything under my own name it would have been destroyed by now.

Stupidly, I put together a film offering quite an extensive critique of him and Durianriders, using the footage of my transformation thus far, with three months of research into 801010 and the superfood approach thrown in.  Unlike Harley, I am well aware why different people have different nutritional requirements, and unlike Wolfe, I just do it for a laugh.

He blocked me, and the rest is history.  I was broken hearted, although I did not quite understand why at the time, and it was probably three years later before another ex came to visit bearing cake.

I am still of the opinion that if there was a person I should have been with it would have been Wolfe.  I staked my remaining six boyfriends on it, and it is not a source of regret.  Too bad, how sad.

The reason I am writing all this down is because of this notion of ‘positive thinking.’  I was sufficiently positive to take care of myself briefly, because I thought that I deserved better from life.  I did not.  When I determined that I did not, there followed a titanic struggle to decide if I really wanted to be healthy and extremely lonely on a permanent basis.

It isn’t as if anything in my life went the way I wanted it to.  I was obsessed with work, and my parents’ illness, alongside the economy and my inability to appear mouldable enough for your average (very average) employer, rendered that a non-starter after my education.  I wanted children, and I failed to meet anyone because I have not had a social life since 2003.  I wanted to use my education to write a great book, and in the course of my musings on Wolfe, I determined that nobody would be at all interested in reading it unless I had an established name, or offered sufficient entertainment.

So, the struggle became a case of – if I think positively, I am stupidly in love with someone I never really want to meet and I stay healthy on that basis but nothing actually changes.  If I allow myself to be broken by this, I do a lot of sewing, give up writing anything weighty and either way I carry on taking care of my mother.  I was running out of time to have children anyway, and I never see anyone, so it was not as if anything was likely to change.

However, being in love is not useful.  It uses up a lot of capacity which is more helpful for doing other things.  If you allow it to run its normal course, there should be a period of hatred, and I was not at all interested in hatred.  I blow hot and cold as a matter of course, and that course has not altered.

Anyway, as you can see by the website I took option 2 and developed Ina.  Apparently she is fairly stylish.  Nothing that I wanted to happen is going to happen in my life, and this is regardless of meeting anyone or changing my perception of anything.  All that remains is the small things, and perhaps that is just as well.

I am sure that some people would say I have achieved a lot over the last four years in terms of self-development, and I am sure that is the case.  My friends would tell you that I have always had a masterplan of some sort that I am working towards.  I get side tracked a lot (an example being the computers to Gambia project) but I always finish things eventually.  Is it useful?  Probably not.  The book I would have written when I met Wolfe would have been, but considering that it was a labour of love, it would have been a waste of my time as even the one person I wanted to read and use it would not have done so.  Had I been thinking positively, I would have wasted years of my time on maintaining my health in order to have a longer period of extreme poverty in later life, and for what? Trying to impress yet another unimpressable boy?  What on earth is useful about that?

So, I have to say, I am not a fan of endless positivity.  Had I taken the positive route I may well have been beautiful by now, but there would have been nobody here to look at it, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.  I would also have been stark raving bonkers to remain in love with somebody that repeatedly blocked me even for asking a question about his charity.  As it was I pursued that line of thought for far too long, although Wolfe has had some small benefit out of that.

I am unusually clued up about why people respond to him the way they do. I took a variety of lines of investigation into the emotional triggers they are experiencing.  Apart from the fact he has made a niche subject extremely entertaining and courted as much controversy as possible to attract more attention to it, which personally I regard as a stroke of genius, some of his speaking techniques have led to considerable leakage in his commercial catchment, besides the errors that everyone makes on a similar trajectory.

So, although nobody is interested in this knowledge apart from me, I have got to the end of that line of enquiry.  I am left wondering why I would spend 8 or 9 years bothering to sort this mystery out.  I am still rather entranced by the methodology, but I didn’t have the time for this really. It gave me something to think about apart from the horror of finding out my family were quite so vicious, and it got me through a difficult time because of the sheer distraction of weeping about something else.

In terms of myself, I still don’t rate myself highly enough, and thinking positively is not something that is likely to help.  Positivity involves hope, and hope is not useful when it has already gone.

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Introduction to Ina

Introduction to Ina

This week, I decided to launch myself a bit more seriously, in preparation for the finished Boris pieces, which I think are the start of a more revealing art period.  Several of the sites would like me to write a regular blog, and so here is your handy introduction to Ina Disguise.

My father, also an artist, always advised me to do anything but art, since producing artwork for money is not the happiest of experiences if you like to express anything.  Therefore, his reasoning was avoid art in order to produce better art.  This led to my becoming a habitual over worker, as I took him at his word and worked every hour I could to avoid doing any artwork for many years.

Ina Disguise came about as a result of my inability to have a conversation with David Wolfe, a natural health promoter that I wanted to talk to about some academic work I was doing on eco-economics, marketing and behavioural economics.  I managed to connect with him briefly on a few websites, but he only seemed to want to talk trash and pretend to himself that he is very clever.  I am not sure why he does this, because apart from his lousy writing and a murky past, he actually is very clever.

As my family were trying to use abusing me as an excuse to rob their own mother, this came as the last straw and I became very unhappy, despite having just lost about 160lb and looking unusually hot that year.  Therefore, after spending several months fighting off the urge to eat myself into oblivion, I started sewing, which is a habit I had previously formed whilst avoiding horrible and hurtful people and recovering from failed love affairs.  If you cannot have the relationship, you might as well have a nice carpet out of your misdirected emotions.

Since he had blocked me from actually speaking to him, after it transpired that I was unusual in seeing through his many disguises online, I then wrote Best Scandal Ever in an effort to appease and inform him why I was buttering him up in the first place.  Best Romance Ever followed, and, since I am of the opinion that keeping one’s brain balanced is rather important, I spent the time that I was not writing doing a lot more stitching.

I had previously amassed art materials with every spare penny from every job I had had since being told that I had to give up everything for my parents as nobody else in the family would ever be willing to do it.  Currently two of them are sitting idle with pensions whilst I am unable to earn my own.

Anyway, within a year of putting my work out in public, GQ had got in touch, which has been an enormous encouragement, and my work has now been in Tatler several times, and last month I realised an early ambition and managed to get a spot in World of Interiors.  I cannot tell you how much the girls from these magazines have helped me at what has been a very rough and ego bashing time.

So now I work in batches, usually five or six pieces at a time, and I have released several batches over the last four years, with varying results.  Some of the pieces are more popular with other people than me, but my experiments have taught me a lot.  Scale is a great tutor, as is ensuring that you are spoilt for stock volume in raw materials.  As with writing, the ideas you would like to have only come when you have indulged the ideas you initially think are merely basic.

Wolfe taught me a lot about marketing, allowing yourself to express even the most rudimentary ideas, on the basis that most people cannot manage that and will show some interest anyway.  There is simply no point in waiting until you are good enough, because if you don’t practise and attempt things, you don’t develop the stamina, skill and confidence to get to the good stuff.  One of my pieces, Raw Sex Object, took seven years to complete, and I am not even interested in selling it because it is really a giant sampler.

Anyway, Wolfe has never understood that I am not trying to kill his career, and I cannot be bothered explaining it to him, so I have now embarked on the Boris adventure, as I perceive Boris to be a far more settled and confident person who might actually appreciate my amusing coded communication skills.  I shall lavish attention on poor Boris until I presumably focus on a very serious person, such as the Pope.  In the meantime, enjoy the artwork.

Ina

 

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All about Boris

The Mayor Boris Johnson in Croydon, South London, Tuesday November 22, 2011. Photo by Andrew Parsons/ Parsons Media

 

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Interviewed him for a TV current affairs research job in the 1980s.

My notes say he was a shallow, egocentric upper class twit who I would not trust to go to the loo on his own.

Johnson is typical of the upper class boot boys of his era. Unprincipled, self serving and arrogant beyond belief. Bullington boys with enough money to buy their way out of the trouble they caused, wrecking restaurants, indecently assaulting women passers by and using threatening and abusive behaviour that would get us plebs locked up.

Don’t laugh at Boris,give him he hatred he and his list boy friends warrant.

 

OK – I have a problem with this comment on a number of levels – the first one being that neither Stanley nor Boris are genuinely upper class.  Boris is more aware of this than his sister, which is why he has perfected his presentation skills to the point that he remains likeable and relatively honest for a Tory.

Having experienced Rachel, who works hard at not understanding how the other half live, Boris is a deceptively responsible person when compared with Stanley, whose luck in life is matched only by a psychotic libido.  Yes, he has polished a public act called Boris, but no, I cannot agree that he is a standard Bullingdon boot boy, especially as he avoided actually doing anything with the club as he did not like forking out cash for destroying people’s businesses and getting pissed.

In fact, Boris is a scholarship boy, spurred on by sibling rivalry, and Stanley is the son of a farmer.  A farmer who lost his farm because Stanley’s dreams and opportunities lay elsewhere.  To suggest that they are merely upper class twits would be a gross underestimation of their social skills.  Actually, they are fairly ordinary Somerset farmers who are now doing something else.

I rather like this mischief.  The idea of having a trademark manner and hairstyle which renders you memorable, combined with the arch observation skills necessary to pull such social mobility off with aplomb, appeals to me enormously.

Currently, Boris sees his role as distraction.  As long as you are watching Boris, you aren’t watching boring old Phillip Hammond or Theresa May.  Who remembers a single thing Hammond did as foreign secretary?  Exactly.  He is no great shakes as a chancellor either, but they are all very rich.

Boris is guilty of flippancy and he is guilty of not taking politics terribly seriously, but this is why he presents a good antidote to the massively grim notion of Conservative rule.  He is also providing himself with sufficiently great publicity never to have to worry about selling a book.  If he decided not to bother going to work tomorrow, I have no doubt that he would not want for money.

This is not to say that Boris is always nice.  Plainly this is not so, but again who really wants to look much further than the entertaining front?  Stanley is very good at this wall of distraction too, which makes it easy for them to deceive when necessary.

To conclude, insulting someone on the basis of class is snobbery, whether you are looking up or down.  One chooses one’s persona to a great degree, exemplified by my being considerably posher than my siblings.  This sounds like I am acting, especially as I went to a horrid school and my siblings all went private.  I can tell you that it is not an act at all, I, like Boris spent two years from ten to twelve avariciously reading Wodehouse.  It is an imprint which does not leave you. (I can tell you that it is no advantage at all when you live in Glasgow and have an infamous leader from Red Clydeside as an ancestor)

Boris’s carpet is in the final stages, but I would like to present it with the first of the furniture collection, Bordello Rhetoric, as they represent both Boris and Al.  As ever, these are made as gifts, but should Boris not wish to pick up his presents, they will be put out for sale in due course.  Once I have the shoes and the furniture complete, I will commence work on Lucifer Ogilvie.

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