My plans to waste 2011

As often happens this time of year, a new year has begun and with it another opportunity to disappoint yourself and fail at your own resolutions, at least the ones you remember. I however failed at this time honoured tradition and accidentally fulfilled last year's resolution to write a blog post each week, so this year I have come up with three resolutions as the chances are I will fail at least one of them.
The first resolution is basically a sequel to my post a week one, which kind of made the quality of my posts go down as I tended to write them in five minutes at 11:55 each Sunday. To be honest the fact that I've met  my deadline each week is kind of miraculous as I often published with less than five seconds left of the week. But to remedy this I resolve to at least try to put more work into each blog post. This isn't to say the posts will get better, but at the very least they will become a more considered type of rubbish.
My second resolution is to be slightly less of a dick. It might come as a bit of a shock to you, but I, despite near perfection in all fields, have sometimes been considered an annoying arrogant jerk. I can understand your surprise at learning this, but it's the truth. I'll give you a moment to overcome the shock. Okay?
Anyway, I don't plan on becoming nice or to stop mocking people for fun, but I plan to at least feel a little bad about it. It's basically practical self improvement, without the annoying part where you're supposed to improve yourself.
My final resolution is to experience a wider range of alcoholic beverages. To be honest this resolution is basically an excuse to drink, which seemed like a very good resolution before New Years Eve but less so now.
Anyway, I may or may not accomplish any of these resolutions, but the important thing is that I tried. Well, I assume I will have tried. The important thing now is that I at least try to try.
Anyway, Happy New Year. It doesn't feel exactly the same as 2010 at all does it?

2010

So another year has come to an end, the globe has returned to the same position it was at the start (relative to the sun at least), the seasons have looped around and a large number of people have bought 12 pictures of Cliff Richard with 365 boxes and numbers. So what has 2010 brought to me? Let's have a look, in categorised list form. To be honest I haven't really thought about how dull this will be to read, but that doesn't matter. Because I'm not the one reading it.

1. Music
   In the last year I have become much more open to a large number of genres, including jazz, techno, dance, trance, classical, folk, indie and a whole bunch of other stuff. I've also been to several gigs, the two which stand out to me being Gogol Bordello and the Rage Against The Machine free concert in June, which was the night before a maths exam, which brings me to my next point:
   
2. Academics
   I completed most of my GCSE's and started a couple of A Levels this year, as well as leaving compulsory education. During the year I also spent most the year being an all round smart guy. As well as pretentious.
   
3. Appearance
   This year has also seen a general move in the ridiculousness of my appearance away from my clothes (stopped the whole four jackets at once with a tie thing) into a concentrated look of idiocy growing from my face in the form of a slightly ginger beard and moustache which practically screams "I'm 16 but I think my facial hair makes me look like I'm 25, but it actually just makes me look like I'm practising to be a crazy homeless guy". I've also got glasses and to quote one of my critics "Most people look smarter in glasses, but you look less intelligent in them." In one of my slightly stranger days I dressed fully as a woman and went to prom. I totally looked fabulous.
   
4. Social Life
   Urm, no.
   
5. Useful Contributions to the World
   Nothing to see here, move along.
   
6. World Sporting Championships Won
   Oh come on, this one's just not fair. Why the hell would I have won any world sporting championships?
   
7. Evil Villains Defeated
   Ah, screw it. Yeah, sure, I defeated loads of evil villains this year.
   
8. Trees Swallowed
   What? This one doesn't even make sense.
   
9. Pointless Pursuits
   Finally, something I excel at. This year has claim to be my most pointless yet, especially since I discovered Reddit and losing several whole days to it. I went 61 hours without sleep followed by 27 hours in bed, I spent about an hour trying to tear a small phone book in two (I succeeded, because I'm just that manly. Well, I'm that manly if you wait for an hour. I guess that's not manly at all), I spent a large amount of time considering the philosophy of pac-man (must write a sequel at some point), spent days playing a repetitive game until I got on the leader board (play here and try to beat me, currently at 18) and generally wasting time. On the subject of pointless pursuits let's look at the final category.
   
10. Blogging
    Yes, my blog is in the top 10 things I did this year, which is kind of depressing. More importantly though is the fact that, at the end of this sentence, I will have completed my New Year's resolution of a blog post a week, though this has kind of decreased the average quality of my blog which I will address next week, but anyway, see you in 2011, bye.

New year, new me (yeah, right)

Now seems an appropriate time to write about the new year. It being the new year and all.

I'll start with the obvious question of New Year's resolutions. This year I've gone with writing at least one blog post per week, except when I don't have access to a computer, but then I might just write a post and post date it so it automatically posts while I'm away. However, before getting excited about the prospect of 52 posts, consider the percentage of new year resolutions that are actually successful. Although I plan to do a post a week, I try to remain realistic. At the very least I plan to do more posts than last year, which I just counted and found out yo be 10.

Moving on, I just looked through all my facebook updates of the last year and realised it was in fact a rather dull year in respect to how much I did, or at least how much I facebooked. I'm sure I did something of merit during the year, I just can't think of it right now.

So, onto my plans for this year, to make it more exciting than the last. Urm. Damn. I forgot to make plans for this year. At this point you might notice that by forcing myself to do a post a week I will have to sacrifice the quality of the posts. But when it comes to blogging, it's quantity before quality, right?

Actually I might have a plan for the year which could interest you, my loyal reader, which is to start work on a book about me inspired by this blog. Which all seems a tad self absorbed. At the moment I'm still struggling with the direction it would take. The obvious idea for a book about myself would be an autobiography, but seeing as I haven't lived through enough of my life to actually fill a book that seems like a bad idea, as well as the fact that I haven't accomplished all that much, certainly not enough to interest the average reader. Maybe once I've conquered the free world (though surely it wouldn't be free once I'd conquered it?), won a few Oscars and revolutionised music I'll think over the idea again.

The second option would be a non-linear book of my thoughts, much like this blog. I'd have to lay on the autism angle pretty thick though to give it any commercial prospects. Again though there's the question of why the hell would anyone want to read it? Which raises the question of unique selling point, or USP, which is what distinguishes my book from the millions of others, and why the customer, or, more importantly for me as the author, publisher would choose my book. The only words that spring to mind here are autistic punk.

Which brings us to my third and final idea, which is very similar to my second idea, except that it would almost all be about autism and would be more around the idea of neurodiversity and autistic rights. The trouble with the last two ideas is that non-linear writing tends to end up very messy, so a structure would almost certainly be needed.

At this point there are quite a few variables to whether or not I'll even try to write a book, but the main one is the response and suggestions I get from you, the reader. Because without readers a book is just paper with squiggles on it. So please comment or contact me with feedback/suggestions/death threats. Or maybe not death threats.