Being Creative

Today is a good day.

The day started by clearing out a good chunk of our garage, which over the past five years has gathered all kinds of wonderful knick-knacks, which are far too lovely to throw away yet not actually nice enough to keep anywhere better than an unheated concrete floored brick box with a leaky roof.  As a reward we went to Pave for lunch (one of my favourite pubs) which was nice, this afternoon my son blew his homework out of the water spending ages on it (again, good to see), the Tesco delivery arrived with beer in it (yay!), and I've just uploaded two new videos to YouTube.  I've also scheduled a load of tweets on Hootsuite - something which I do far too rarely - and I'm obviously writing this blog too.

Being creative is tricky - it's easy to come up with something like "I don't have the inspiration" or "I can't think of anything to blog about right now" (and sometimes I honestly feel like these are true) but what it really comes down to is "I don't feel like it".

To do it right I think you have to treat it as a job - for me, it's about expecting myself to churn out 3+ blog posts and 1+ video a week, of at least a reasonable quality.  Of course, I often fail to meet this, which is purely because I'm not disciplined enough.  That said, it is a hobby (and unless my advertising revenues increase by a factor of a thousand - or more - that isn't going to change any time soon!) so I'm not going to be too hard on myself.

And I have done a video - it's a quick look at new game Prison Architect, where you manage a prison.  Interesting, fun, dark, and surprisingly emotional.

So, as I say, it's a good day today.  I might even push on and try to write an extra post or two so I've got something ready for next week.

One last thing - Adele Archer kindly put up a guest post of mine today, which has a little test for people to see how well they can infer information about someone.  Have a go and drop a line in the comments.

Must go - it's beer time!

Good evening folks

I've not blogged for a few days, not entirely sure why - thinking about it I guess I've been somewhat tired on an evening.  I remember reading somewhere that your creative juices flow best in a morning - and I tend to blog on an evening - so perhaps that's why I've not been that creative.

Anyway, I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty Modern Warfare lately, numbers 2 and 3.  I particularly like the Survival mode in MW3 - for the uninitiated, you face progressively harder waves of enemies, but you also gain money for the kills you make, allowing you to buy aids such as a Delta team task force or an air strike to back you up (or more mundane items like ammunition).  I feel vaguely guilty that I've not been playing Pandaria, but for whatever reason some mindless violence appears to be satiating my gaming needs at the minute.

I finally saw the first episode of Red Dwarf X last night, and it's a return for form for the Red Dwarf crew.  Personally after season 6 I went off Red Dwarf - the episodes seemed to be more about the crew doing missions and actually being quite heroic, when really they're a bunch of misfits that somehow have survived through the extinction of the human race and should really be spending their time mucking about and generally being a bit silly.  I actually laughed out loud at one point so I'm looking forward to getting half an hour to watch the next episode.

The only thing that does distract me from the show is the fact that the guys (with the exception of Kryten obviously) have got wrinkles!  Don't get me wrong, I love the Red Dwarf crew, they are seriously ace, but the actors are now around the age of 50.  The series started 24 years ago!  This sort of thing makes me feel old (and I know I will now receive many comments from people older than me).  I don't know what it is, but I seem to have trouble spotting the passage of time.  Perhaps it's not just me.  I heard today that Girls Aloud are getting back together and releasing a greatest hits album of the last ten years.  Again, I had no idea that it had been ten years since they got together.

I suppose I should take from this that time passes too quickly and we need to make the most of it.

Right - I'm off to bed, I have a day's gardening ahead of me tomorrow!