Looking the Part!

The last week has been quite epic for me, and today was quite interesting since we mixed things up a bit. The first thing that happened is I had a quick changed of appearance, a new hair style to be precise. The next thing of interest that happened was the compliment I received about my post on Bronies UK. And finally there was today, probably the most interesting day of them all.

So I'm going to start with my new look, because that seems like the best thing to start with, and I also like to go in chronological order. I decided since I'm in a pop-punk band (which will most likely end up as a hardcore punk-metal band) I'd give myself a punk hairstyle, and being the big Misfits fan, I decided to chose the devilock.

Everything went well at first, my hair was of a decent length, not quite long enough for Doyle's or Jerry's variant of the devilock, but it was perfect for Danzig's version, which is the one I'm aiming for. Anyway I combed through my hair to quickly remove my knots and left the fate of the back and sides of my head to my dad, and his barber skills.

That all went well and once the easy bit was over and done with I had a shower and went to bed, it was late and I couldn't be bothered to do anything further at the time. Come morning I started crafting my evil mop into a devilock, firstly by straightening it, and then by coating it in the only hair styling product I had available, Murray's Superior Pomade. It's excellent stuff, but pomade was not designed to hold a devilock in place, and so I ended up just going for that hipster look and combed everything to the left until I had some appropriate product.

Moving swiftly on, on Friday I did my second real post on Bronies UK (I say real because I don't exactly count my first post). Once that was posted I sent it to Zed, because she enjoyed my first real post and wanted to read the second once it was up. As soon as she finished reading it she sent me a message on Facebook reading "I love your writing, it gives my a unique look on life!" I didn't really know what to say to that so I just awkwardly smiled at my screen, thankful that I wasn't in a video chat with her, otherwise it would have been weird.

Today was when the fun really began, Zed decided to come to me instead of have me go to her. Naturally Nath also decided to show up, and then we decided to move to his house since my room is only just big enough to have two of us in here, let alone three of us with guitars.

Well after a ninety minute "guitar lesson" we decided that we should stop and just terrorise the town like the typical teenagers, so we went to the park and literally just played on the swings like little kids. The only thing remotely bad that we were doing was listening to psychobilly songs through the speakers of my crappy phone.

My currant task is actually to start getting my mate Ash running, because he literally just told me he wants to get fit, so I'm gonna support him and help him. After that i can go back to eating pizza and rocking out. I've also got to create my half of our bands setlist, I have twenty-five minutes worth of music to choose.

Rocking Tunes!

As you may know from reading my previous posts I'm in a pop-punk band called Six Stories Up. So far we have written a grand total of two of our own songs, and we are also preparing a crap load of covers to perform. At least two of us are taking this seriously, that's me and Nathan, we're not so sure about the third.

Anyway we have been spending a nice amount of time jamming together, and decided just the other day that we should each choose four songs to cover (making twelve covers), those songs have all been chosen and we're now learning how to play them, unfortunately we don't have access to a drum kit at the moment, which is a bit of a pain, especially since we have an area to put it (Nath's garage, which will soon be converted for our band practice).

As I said we have two songs, one of them just needs a few minor adjustments, and the other one we have forgotten how to play, but we still have the lyrics so at least something is on our side. the first song simply just needs the guitar part for it's quieter bridge rewritten.

On to other ventures, I celebrated my 100th YouTube video last Monday and I had a nice little party with my friends, after I had finished celebrating that I started a secondary YouTube channel called G_Man TV! which is essentially me doing the stupidest things I can think of for the sake of it. So far I only have one video, which is me attempting what I call the Mustard Challenge, and failing miserably.

I also went to Hanley the other day, which made a nice change, I spent the day causing chaos with my friends and wishing I had money to buy myself some nice things. I did however visit the new music shop that has opened in The Potteries Center, it didn't have a very good selection of basses which was a shame but there were some damn nice guitars there, more importantly there was a lot of other nice things there, including, and not limited to, a sexy female employee.

Overall my week hasn't been too interesting but I've been enjoying myself nonetheless, and now I have yet another fun day at the House of Zed, unfortunately I wasted all my money whilst at Hanley so I need to ride my bike there.

I Have an Exciting Week Ahead, and I Have No Plans for It!

Well what do you know it's Sunday again and I don't actually have much to say. I am however excited about a few upcoming things. Before I get onto that though I will talk about a few parts of my week.

Well first thing I set about doing this week was designing a band logo, which I needed to get a bit of help for. I ended up calling upon the aid of my eldest brother Chaz, who decided to give me a few lessons on how to use Adobe Illustrator CS6. I definitely need those lessons, my vector drawing skills aren't great. I was even handed a booklet on how to use Adobe Illustrator CS2, which is pretty much the same as CS6, but I actually have CS2 so it was perfect for me, and I ended up creating a decent logo for a punk band, I don't know how well it'll work for pop-punk though, but my band mates haven't complained yet.

After the logo was done I started working on creating a pop-punk version of Eurobeat Brony's song Discord. I did this in the hopes that I could convince the rest of the band to join me in covering it, and thankfully I was able to succeed in such a thing. So now we have one song that we are definitely doing at some point.

Continuing on with the band activity, our lead singer Ash wrote a song for us, which describes all of our relationships without using his horribly inaccurate wrestling theory (don't ask). My initial thoughts on his song was simply "oh no" the least pop-punk person in the band wrote a pop punk song, and surprisingly it's actually not bad, I would say it's better than the one I wrote the other week, but it talks about me, Ash and also Nath instead of just Ash, or just me, or just Nath. Mine at least talks about just me, which focuses the song. Admittedly I screwed up the instrumental side of the song by letting my love of prog take over.

Other than various band related activities my week has been fairly uneventful, which has meant I've had a few bad days in regards to my depression, but overall I am still a mostly happy person. Weirdly I've been suppressing my depression with darker music, and by that I don't mean I've been listening to Cradle of Filth or someone similar, I mean instead of listening to Rush I've been listening to Tool. I suppose this is actually quite normal for a sad person to suppress their sadness with sad music, I just don't understand how it works.

Anyway this next week has at least two events that I'm looking forward to. First off tomorrow I'm going up to the House of Zed and the plan is that the entire Library Crew all turn up. The Library Crew consists of the three friends I've mentioned a lot on this blog recently (Ash, Nath and Zaina) and also another friend of mine, Keely, who is hard to reach now that we don't all go to school anymore. I'd also like to point out, in order to avoid confusion, that Keely is a boy, not a girl, he got the name Keely when Ash misheard what I called him during an intense game of Uno.

So the five of us are all going to have a meet up at the House of Zed, which is Zaina's house in case you didn't know. If all goes to plan Monday should be quite enjoyable, however, I was told by Zaina that she wanted to have a word with me, the way she said it implies that it's not going to be good news. I still can't wait to hear what she has to say, because she wouldn't have said it if it wasn't important and it might help relieve some of the tension within my mind.

The other thing that I'm looking forward to this week is celebrating my 100th video on YouTube, which I believe is on Wednesday or Thursday. I have a few plans for my video, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm actually going to do with it. The only thing I know for definite is that I'm going to need to borrow my dads smartphone, it's the best camcorder in the house.

Yet Another Exciting Week for The G!

I have had an absolutely incredible week! First off I spent a day at college to get to know the students I'll spend next year with, and I even made a friend. After that I had an absolutely incredible Saturday which may have started rough, but it became one of my happiest days. Today has also been pretty darn good too!

I'm going to start with my day at college which was Wednesday. I didn't really expect much out of it in the first place, I went because I wanted to see who I'd be spending the next year with so I had time to mentally prepare myself for it. Most of the lads seemed alright, but they definitely aren't the kind of dudes I'd usually attach myself too, one of the girls wasn't either. The other girl however I did find some connection with, I ended up spending the majority of the day making friends with her, she seemed to be the most like me.

Surprisingly the people I met that day seemed to like me, I usually have people hating me straight from the get-go, but not this time. I'm also not sure how long this will last, but most of the year will be spent team-building so I imagine we all might come to be friends, maybe not good friends but friends nonetheless.

As I said Saturday has been the best day in recent memory for me. Unfortunately though I started it off by talking to my ex-girlfriend (and not the good ex-girlfriend either) so I started the day feeling pretty damn horrible. I'm not going to go into details, it's not very interesting, (for me at least).

That feeling lasted about an hour, it stopped when a little knock at the door signaled the arrival of a package for me. Inside the package was a new headset for me to record my YouTube videos with, and more importantly, a set of bass strings (D'Addario Chromes XL if you must know) so I distracted myself for the next few minutes by listening to Tool and restringing (and polishing) my bass.

Once she was restrung I felt like I could marry my bass guitar, flat wound strings are amazing, they feel so smooth and they flatten out and smooth the tone to really emphasise the fact it's a bass instrument. I don't think I'm ever buying round wound strings for my basses again.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to play her for very long, it was time for my day to start. To jump back a little, Wednesday was Zaina's birthday, but she was unavailable that day due to plans with her family, Saturday was the day where me and Ash were able to celebrate with her. and come one O'clock on Saturday afternoon I set off for Ash's house where I got a lift to Zaina's house (after a brief clothes shopping trip).

The day with Zaina was spent pretty much in the same way as all other days with Zaina. We just sat back and chilled whilst having a great laugh. The highlight of out time there was that she made us a really nice curry, and even supplied us with a nice amount of naan bread and poppadoms, as well as prawn crackers, mango chutney and some weird tasty chicken things. That meal really did kick ass.

That time soon came to an end and it was time for me to face what I was expecting to be the hardest part of the day. To jump back once again, that morning I noticed a post on the Bronies UK Facebook page saying that the blog was going to be opened up to a few new authors and he was looking for applications. Being an aspiring author, and a big fan of the My Little Pony television series, I added him on Skype, thinking I'd have a higher chance if I applied that way instead of by filling in the form. I was told at the time that he couldn't speak to me because he had to go to work, and that he would be able to speak after nine PM.

When I got back home from Zaina's house at about half past nine, the first thing I did was send him a message. No reply, so I waited. While I waited I decided to plug in my new headset and test it out. I thought progressive rock sounded incredible without surround sound, with it it sounds like pure magic being pumped into my brain. It's Heaven.

Half an hour later I received a message and we started talking. He asked me if I'd ever wrote for a blog before and I told him that I have my own blog (this one) and then sent him a link to last weeks post. He was so impressed with it he just accepted me onto the team there and then. I couldn't believe it. Then he started asking me the interview questions just for the sake of it.

I don't think I've been that giddy since just before May Day when I started seeing Lydia. I wanted to celebrate and dance around my house, but unfortunately my brother was asleep and he needed to wake up at stupid O'clock in the morning, (his words), so I couldn't make much noise.

Today was a bit more toned down, I spent the morning trying something new with my YouTube channel, and I spent the best part of two hours editing my video, at least it felt like that long. It was all worth it, I quite like how my video turned out.

After all that was done I went to my friend Nathan's house where we discussed our band and recorded a silly video for his YouTube channel. The majority of that visit was about how our band needed a name change, because the name we had was more horror-punk than pop-punk. We now have a new name, and this next week will be spent on a logo, and also creating a set list that gives us about fifty minutes of play time. Hopefully we can soon get our hands on a drummer and then get around to doing some proper rehearsals.

I'm pleased to be able to end this post by saying that i am most definitely pulling myself out of my depression, I now have a band, I've made a new friend, I also have a new hobby and even a bit of a job. As long as I keep on going like this, I reckon I'll be back to my old self by September at the latest.

Yay! I'm Keeping Myself Occupied!

This week has been another week that has thrown me off my usual routine, I have been spending time with friends at awkward hours, I have finally formed a band, and I'm learning Spanish.

First off My friends have dragged me into a strange concept for a YouTube channel called TheMentalLibrary which is basically the insane group of idiots that used to hang around the school library. It isn't actually the complete set of idiots unfortunately, one idiot doesn't leave the house or socialise. The other idiot is camera shy so we haven't fully included her, although she is mentioned as being part of the group in the introductory video (which I will start editing shortly after writing this).

That YouTube channel is basically going to consist of Ash telling me to humiliate myself, and Ash telling Nathan (A.K.A Stunt-Man) to hurt himself. Ash will simply be involved in the skits that are semi-scripted. It's definitely a good job I have no dignity when a camera is rolling.

Last night I also formed a band, and within thirty seconds we were jamming along to Weird Al's parody of American Idiot. So far it seems like this band will be a pop-punk band (sigh) but I can live with that and soon I'll convert it to something that suits my preferences a little more. Although I don't mind pop-punk I'm more of a Horror-Punk kind of guy, I also like progressive rock/metal and psychobilly. My ideal form of band would be a progressive psychobilly band, with a musical style reminiscent of black metal, but I highly doubt that will happen.

The other point I made in my opening sentence was that I'm learning Spanish. I used to learn Spanish in school when I still lived in Birmingham, but since I moved to Stoke-on-Trent I stopped learning Spanish and started German instead (sigh). Recently my dad told me about a website that teaches you one of five languages for free, and I couldn't remember what it was called until a post on 9gag lead me straight to it. That website was called Duolingo!

I have so far done six lessons on it, I'm doing two lessons a day, and I will do that everyday (well that's the plan anyway). I've encountered a lot of words I already knew, but I've also been learning some new words. I'd also like to say that it is teaching me Spanish better than my old teacher did.

My last post was full of talk about stories. I have been working on the My Little Pony Fan Fiction piece, and I wrote three chapters in one morning. Which if it had followed my original idea would mean that the story would be complete, however, while I was lost in the story I changed it slightly taking the mid section of it down a completely different road. I had no plans to do such a thing, but I did, and it's coming along nicely.