Jason - Aged 27

Sometimes you tweet something and you could never guess the consequences of your idle warblings. I’ve already blogged about the Giraffe thing but I felt the whole adventure was also note worthy. I’m no stranger to the power of getting people enthusiastic about an idea. The whole #ratm4xmas thing was the perfect example of that and I blogged about it at the time. As per usual, this all occurred on twitter, where fun stuff always happens.

Twitter tends to work like the ocean. The sea ebbs and flows with the tide, occasional blips will stir up a storm or two. Whatever starts will eventually fade away into forgotten memory. We people sit on the beach and react differently to these developments. Some get on their surfboards and ride those waves while they can. Some have a paddle in the shallows dipping in every now and then. Some will be in a meteorological office plotting maps of the occurrences, comparing them to old occurrences. And some sit on the beach laughing at everyone else. I’m kinda a mess of all of the above. I can be quite reactionary/band wagony which I’m trying to address. More often than not some wise older than me thing will point out the wider issue and I’ll be left looking like a puppy covered in mud. I want to be wise old labrador. Maybe one day…

Recently a storm started which didn’t stop for so long that I’ve forgotten when it started, it’s only just falling away now. I refer of course to the UK general election. Twitter was ablaze with election based jabber for weeks. Links, jokes, hash tag games the whole shebang. This whole thing has been quite good for me because it finally helped me breach the world of politics and gain a better understanding of the whole process. It showed me why it was important to vote and all that.

The problem for me was the doom laden inevitably of it. If I was of the tory way of thinking it might have been better but due to my silly beliefs in compassion and such like it wasn’t to be. Thing about twitter is you tend to gravitate towards people who think similarly to you, unless you like looking for an argument, but I don’t. Consequently, most of the people I follow were lefty types and were all getting very down about the numbing inevitability of an impending tory government.

This really reached critical mass on election day and it was all getting a bit much. I could see that people needed a little distraction, just a little reminder that even on days like this of enormous consequence, we can still have a giggle. It could have been anything, just something to take your mind of the thing that had dominated your thoughts for so long. So I had a quick think and then it just popped into my head.

Draw a Giraffe

It was obvious to me immediately how it would work. No competitions, no talent requirement, nothing that would make it stressful or competitive, that was the last thing everyone needed. People just needed a little release, a little sunshine. So I tweeted a request for people to draw Giraffes and off we went. I drew mine first and people got onto it straight away. The seed had been planted. All you need is about 5 other people to have a go and the inspiration spreads like a forest fire. As time rolled merrily forward over the course of the day the entries were rolling in. Each one a thing of beauty. You could see in each picture how much fun they’d had drawing it.

Just as quickly as it had started it had finished. I wasn’t going to press the issue as there didn’t seem to be any point. It was always intended as a little distraction and on those terms it was very much mission accomplished. By the end of the day the collection stood at 125 giraffes! I was so proud of everyone. I made a little gallery for them and thought that was that. But there was one last thing…

People ask me about twitter a lot but I’m never able to truly explain why it’s brilliant. I guess it’s brilliance is the sum total of the people you follow and interact with. I follow the best bunch of guys in the world so everyday is a joy for me. The one thing I will say to people is this

You get out what you put in

I tweet a lot, I make very few apologies for this as it has given me so much. This Giraffe thing was no different.

A guy I’d met a little while ago, Mike (@mikewinship, follow him), was at a festival called ATP. The special curator (or something) of the event in question was none other than Matt Groening. Anyone who knows me, knows that the Simpsons is truly one of my favourite things in the world. No matter what it does now, nothing can spoil the memory of the golden age. You can imagine my excitement when Mike tweets me this:

@mixmasterfestus Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to get Matt Groening to draw a giraffe. This is a good plan, yes?

Now, Mike was delirious with Giraffe fever and had declared he was going to attempt to get a Groening giraffe. I didn’t want to get my hopes up so I wished him all the good luck in the world and watched with eager anticipation. It was like chinese water torture for me so I can’t imagine what it was like for him. Here’s how it went down:

@mixmasterfestus @mapsadaisical I’ve been in the signing queue twice now & he’s stopped before I got to the front. Won’t fail again… (1:32 AM May 9th)

Waiting in line to try and get Matt Groening to #drawagiraffe – he’s not here yet tho… #ATP (3:43 PM May 9th)

@mixmasterfestus @mandrewb have been told he’s not signing til 6. Queue disbanded. I now have no purpose for an hour or so. (4:29 PM May 9th)

Then nothing, until 2 hours later…

7th from the front for signing… #drawagiraffe happening real soon! (6:39 PM May 9th)

Then it happened…

Matt Groening: “Giraffes are hard!” #drawagiraffe http://twitpic.com/1mh5g0 (6:55 PM May 9th)

:O:O:O

Mission accomplished!!! #drawagiraffe http://twitpic.com/1mh5v4 (6:56 PM May 9th)

Mike Winship, a king among men

I was so proud. To think a single tweet could reach so far only goes further to prove how much fun can be had on this earth. It was the best end to this saga I could have possibly hoped for. It was perfect. We should all thank Mike for his dogged persistence and for just capturing the spirit of this whole thing so brilliantly.

Now all that remains is the question of what to do with these Giraffes. People have suggested donating them to the marvellous Onemilliongiraffes.com project. Thing is I can’t donate them as they aren’t really mine. This whole thing wasn’t about drawing them for me, they were about drawing them for yourself. The One Million Giraffes thing seems like a nice idea, but it’s not my place to just giveaway other people’s lovely pictures, that’s their decision.

People have suggested making a book of the pictures or something. At first I thought I might be stepping on the Onemilliongiraffes chap’s toes but he’s doing this for a bet whereas I’ve been doing it for no real reason whatsoever. I’ve come to think thats there plenty of room for Giraffe based hijinx so it would be fine for me to do something with the election collection, as long as it’s a force for good it doesn’t matter. If they find their way into the million too, all the better. I’ll pitch it to the guys who drew them and see if they can think of anything cool. Something might come of it, who knows?

So there you have it. This whole thing has gone to prove that it’s really not that hard to enjoy yourself. People can be great fun when you give em a chance.

You can find the gallery here: http://www.thinktanktoybox.com/2010/05/drawagiraffe/

You can find the One Million Giraffes project here: http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/

• The colour must be red
• It must have 4 doors
• It must cost less than £30,000

The keyword here is MUST. I learned the true value of the word must in university doing requirements engineering. You have to strictly define what the software must and must not do.

I realise this has been quite boring up until now but we need context people!

I was having a chat with TheFagCasanova about the possible middle name of the Ski Jumper, Andreas Wank. We decided Alan would be best and then we moved onto good cat names and reminded me that I have strict rules for potential cat names.

Before I lay out my rules, I decided to quiz the Twitterati about their cat’s name to see if any subscribed to my strict naming policy. They didn’t disappoint in their diversity

• Big Dave Jeffries
• Fattie
• Thinnie
• Bumble
• Velvet Moon
• Hector
• Bill
• Fluff
• Bob
• Other One
• Lola
• Hamble
• Chloe
• Flower
• Twinkle
• Milo
• Ghandi
• Darren
• Saucepan
• Lao
• Raspberry Watkins
• Bootsie
• Oscar
• Tiger
• Flying Tiger Fury
• Smudge

Aren’t they marvellous? But! as marvellous as they are, only one fits the bill as defined by me

Darren

The splendiferous magicnose nailed it with the only one that truly subscribes to my rules.

So what are my rules? I hear you shout as your spit your fish supper all over the screen (you should really clean that up). Well I’ll tell you, the rules are as follows

MUSTS

• It must not be traditional cats name (Fluffy, Marbles etc)
• It must not be a name that could be attributed to a comedy horse (Colin, Charlie etc)
• It must not be a name that could be attributed to an WW2 army general (Archibald, Wilberforce etc)
• It must not be a name that could be attributed to troubled Anime character (Azrael, Jiro etc)

DESIRABLES

• It should be a name that can be attributed to a man who works in a garden centre
• It should be a full forename (Don’t care for Bob, for example)

EXAMPLES

• Darren
• Liam
• Alan
• John (possibly Johnathan)
• Simon
• Richard
• Robert (not Bob)
• Ian
• Paul
• Matthew (not Matt)

As an example, I went on holiday to Spain with my dad and sister a couple of years ago and I explained these rules to Sophie. We spent a fair chunk of time, a good hour, walking across the big rock of Gibraltar in complete silence save for

Sophie: “Stephen?”

Jason: “With a ph?”

Sophie: “Yeah”

Jason: “Perfect”

We built up quite a list, great fun.

Now I must stress these are my rules, this is my system. I would never begrudge a Cat name you choose, I just personally wouldn’t choose it. I’m not going for a world domination here, no thanks, too much hassle. I just have my own system for naming cats, you can call yours what you like, live and let live. But if you ask me what you should call your cat, then its game on.

This mainly extends to Male cats. Because the ladies have two X chromosomes they are twice as varied and thus harder to define. Us males only have one X and the Y is redundant meaning we’re a lot easier to pigeon hole, it’s a pleasure.

Naming female cats is like plotting a ladies drinking timeline, the typical male drinking timeline is a lot easier to nail down. There are obviously some deviations from the mean but this is a good indicator of where a man is in his life

Cheap Cider/Alcopop >> Cheap Lager >> Stronger Lager >> Proper Cider >> Stout >> Real Ale >> Real Ale with a Handle >> Whiskey Straight >> Whiskey with Water >> Death

Women? I’ll be buggered if I know. Female cat names? Same story.

So there you have it, my hard and fast rules for an acceptable name for a Male Cat. Hell why not? female cats too. To be honest it would be quite funny to own a girl cat called Andrew (not Andy).

We all know the story by now so I can’t be bothered to rehash it too much. The talent show X Factor has had the Xmas Chart all sewn up for 4 years now. It’s quite a boring state of affairs but I can have no great objection to it as as I said I haven’t taken any great interest in the music charts in general for some time now. There are people who do take an interest and were fed up with the status quo of X Factors uniform domination and started a campaign to get a different song to number 1 this year. The song was Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine (a personal fave, I’ve done the Macarena to it) and by gum they did it!

People have reacted to this in different ways as the obviously would. Some have loved it, some have hated it, some have placed unrealistic meaning upon it and others have pointed this out in typically lofty fashion. I’ve tried to take a broad view of it as I find myself easily lead by bandwagons.

The first point for me is this whole thing has been gloriously daft. If you subtract any weight of meaning, far reaching consequence and social commentary. Killing in the Name as Xmas #1 is a funny concept to me. The best quote I’ve seen on the subject was on twitter (obviously) where @mattleys (a guy who is certainly worth a follow) said:

” It’s a wonderful piece of Great British Mischief.”

The Xmas #1 has meant nothing for years and even when it meant something it still meant nothing. So to have a song that is so far from removed from Xmas as Xmas #1 is a funny concept. Simple, but funny.

That said, after the initial laugh about the farcical nature of this situation you have to address the song choice. I’ve thought about it quite a lot and the KITN is the one of the few songs that could work, it inspires so much in so many.  There were people like me who wanted it to happen for the laughs and others who attributed all kinds of grand ideas of fucking Simon Cowell which were clearly naive and misguided. The original nature of the song was intended to inspire such rebellion in people and said people have been seemingly conscripted into a campaign they have imbued with meaning that isn’t there. The aim of this campaign was always to have fun and shake it up a bit and by christ it worked.

It’s a shame because in an ideal world a song with a bit more Xmas cheer or even just heartwarming intent would be the vehicle for this marvel. However, Jon & Tracy could never have known this would happen. Tracy said to Sky News that they had to fight fire with fire and if you think about it, it wouldn’t have worked without something like KITN.

If I had my way and a time machine I would have suggested this

It was announced as an Xmas single about a week after #ratm4xmas took off and it would have been perfect. Happy, joyous and different. But them’s the breaks.

This leads me to the grandest point of all. Something that hit me recently and has highlighted that love or hate it, this whole glorious barn dance has been an unbridled success. People have said that no one cared before so why should they care now? That’s kinda the point, this whole thing has made people interested in something they weren’t interested in before. People have got involved and done stuff, it’s a good thing! In a nut shell:

It has shown what can be done if you inspire people

Jon & Tracy god bless em have raised over £60,000 for Shelter because of this. People have said that Shelter would be there without this etc, blah blah blah. This doesn’t matter, none of it does. Not the charts, not the X Factor, not RATM, nothing. Nothing in the face of the bold truth that when you do something that encourages people to act then things can happen.

None of what has happened is of any great consequence. But it has made people excited, interested, furious, snooty about something that before now they had completely taken for granted. What happens next year? Everyone will be trying to compete with the X Factor single and that’s the way it should be. But not just the Xmas #1. Not even music. None of it matters beyond the fact if you give people something to get interested in, something they feel they have a stake in that they wanna see either happen or not happen, they’ll turn up. Can you imagine if we all took a general election this seriously?

It’s an exciting prospect and something that should be taken advantage of for the greater good. It’s all well and good being cynical about it, but this whole thing raised money for homeless people this Xmas. Maybe it’s a small gesture but for fucks sake it’s better than nothing. You can captivate peoples imaginations and steer it towards good causes, it’s a simple idea but a great one in my opinion and that’s why this whole thing has impressed me so much.

I refuse to be cynical about this as I feel it’s these things, with genuine passionate interest, that can make changes for the better. We should all applaud Jon & Tracy as they’ve made something brilliantly stupid happen and some poor homeless bastards will have somewhere warm to stay on Xmas day because of it. If you can’t see the benefit of that then that’s a damn shame.

Fuck you, I did what they told me. Sony got paid and I don’t care. I had a bloody good laugh, I saw what people are capable of no matter how naive or misguided, their hearts were in the right place. Now if we can use this for grander efforts, then we’re cooking on gas.

If you wanna give to Shelter this Xmas, you can do at here -> http://www.justgiving.com/ratm4xmas

I’ve broken it down into 6 separate sections, here we go!

Shaun’s House

This is my tour of Shaun’s house in Japan.

1st Day

My 1st proper day in Japan we went to Kamakura which is like old school Japan, Temples and all that caper

Bright Lights, Big City

This is a montage of all the obvious touristy sites of Japan, gorgeous place

Mad Japan!

A breakdown of some of the oddball things I did and saw

Ramen Queueing

A video diary of my Ramen Museum queueing experience

The Last Supper

And finally, a short video of our last meal in a restaurant somewhere in Tokyo, I forget where.

And that’s it! safe to say I had an absolute riot and recommend everyone go.

Here’s my flickr gallery of Japan pictures

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8512511@N05/sets/72157617778158407/

Volunteering mainly consisted of walking around in a circle making sure the consoles were running and no one nicked any controllers. On my watch one PS3 controller went missing so I think I did ok. Some kinds tried to nick an 360 at one stage so it could have been worse. Good fun really.

When we finished this endurance challenge we were thanked (obviously), given £30 and given whatever crap was left. I managed to blag two, COUNT THEM! two Left 4 Dead 2 t shirts. Good ere innit. Here’s what it looks like

Obviously I only need one to add to my collection so I vowed to give the other one away via the medium of a twitter competition. It’s taken me roughly a month but I’ve finally figured out what to do. As per usual it was a twitter revelation:

“http://twitpic.com/r00nz – please pray silence for the crappest drawing of a monkey ever”

to which I added

“You’ll notice it has a nana.”

which lead to

“Also I just thought of a competition for this L4D2 tshirt.”

that finally gave birth to

“I want you to draw a zombie like a 5 year old would. Most authentic gets the tshirt.”

And there you have it folks. #zombiescribbles was born!

I want you to draw a zombie like a 5 year old would. Now this was a point of contention for a while as some of you people out there with 5 year olds. This puts you at a point of advantage. Worry not, I have taken this into consideration. The interesting twist in this quiz?

It will be judged by a 5 year old

Sam, my lovely friend at work (@percivalh, please follow) has a cracking wee son called Milo who will judge the competition and also provide a control picture for you all to reference from.

Edit: And here it is!

There is one final detail to this competition. As method of payment to young Milo, I shall be giving him my favourite transformer toy, Scorponok.

Isn’t he grand? The extra detail is – for every entry I get, I’ll give Milo one of my Transformers.

Also if you want one, I’ll chuck in a Transformers toy for 3rd, 2nd and 1st place too (in respective order of epicness). I’ll be administering the competition via twitter. Please hashtag your entry with #zombiescribbles and the closing date is…Friday the 11th of December! (2009)

So get drawing!

http://bit.ly/12mReN

Just…what?

http://www.midweekherald.co.uk/midweekherald/news/story.aspx?brand=MDWOnline&category=news&tBrand=devon24&tCategory=newsmdw&itemid=DEED31%20Jul%202009%2013:49:14:713

I think you’ll agree it is stunning news. A Leopard?!?! (or leopard style animal) dead on the main road?!?! STOP EVERYTHING!!!

After rigorous investigation, they discovered the true nature of the dead Leopard.

http://www.midweekherald.co.uk/midweekherald/news/story.aspx?brand=MDWOnline&category=news&tBrand=devon24&tCategory=newsmdw&itemid=DEED31%20Jul%202009%2014:16:36:240

I could go on about just how daft this is. But I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll leave you to enjoy.