Simon is blogging again!

Those of you who are still hanging around here, like Tom Cruise hanging on to his last thread of sanity, may be interested to know that I'm blogging again.

You can find my new blog, maybe a bit more grown up than this one, maybe just a little bit more sensible, but probably just as full of rubbish as this one is, at SpiritualAtheist.co.uk.

Come and take a look and let me know if I've matured at all over the years

Reincarnated as the Freelance Guru

This blog has been usurped by the Freelance Guru.

The Freelance Guru
One Man - One Pole - One Mission

'I was once like you, until a chance encounter with a snake inspired me to quit my job and seek wisdom. Taking only the bare essentials, such as my laptop and mobile phone, I now live on top of a pole overlooking Bristol.'

Most Read Posts Here

• Anglo sexton
• How to keep an idiot busy
• Reasons to visit Britain
• Taking Note
• 3 sides of James Blunt
  

Keeping it Civil

Let’s be honest. There’s only so long I can make the wedding planning cynical enough to be on this blog and avoid overwhelming you in a barrage of love, sweat and tears.

So I’ve created a blog specifically with the purpose of telling the story of our Civil Partnership. However, I’m not the best designer in the world, so I’m hiring you guys as my design critics, my reviewers and amateur complainers.

Click along to www.KeepingItCivil.blogspot.com. I’d love your feedback.

And besides I need some traffic.

Get away...

Click to Enlarge

Previous Funny Pictures

• Readers Caption Comp
• Pillar of Society
• Stick Humour

Blessons

Blogging Lesson number 23.

• Writing what you consider to be a light hearted rant, without first explaining it to be a joke may cause people unused to that style of your writing to worry about your emotional and mental health.

This has been added to the growing list of blogging advice I have been compiling for new and wannabe bloggers.

Among the most important are:

• Don’t update daily! People come to expect it, and send out search parties if the blog is idle for more than 25 hours.
• Don’t ever try to blend your online persona with your real one. The mind of the average reader can not handle two contrasting personas on the same blog and doesn’t wish to know about your everyday life anyway unless you have something in common, normally childbirth, in which case your onto a hit.
  
• Everybody likes a controversial subject to get their teeth in too.
• Do not do a meme, not even one. Don’t even think about it! The second you do, you won’t be able to stop doing them, they will flow in through the door like straight men to a cross-dressing party. (What is with that anyway? Why do butch, handsome, adorably stupid guys feel the need to dress up in woman’s clothing at the drop of a hat? Answers on a postcard.)
• Never include any poignant observations into your blog otherwise people will believe you can think and expect it of you on a regular basis.
• And finally, keep posts short. Cut out every single, little, insignificant, pointless, dull and meaningless, boring, drab, repetitive and unnecessary, discardable filler word in your post. Keep it, your post I mean, the blog post though, not your mail because that would just be daft wouldn’t it, haha, just imagine... anyway, where was I, oh yeah... keep your post(see above) as short, tiny, minuscule, petite, diminutive, squat and ant-sized as possible. Otherwise the only reason people will read all the way to the end is for the hope of some kind of joke, laugh, funny or last line punch line. And they’ll be really, really, really, really, really annoyed, frustrated, fed-up, disturbed and angry when they discover there isn’t one. So don't do it.
  

Oh and by the way, this is a joke! See --> :) <--- Just checking...

Goodbye

I’m leaving this behind.

This blog is a greedy mistress, demanding more of my time than I am prepared to give. She pulls me away from my family, from my friends and from the rest of my life, with addicting claws that dig into me like spurs into my flesh. There is a reason after all, that I don’t date women.

The page views fluctuate wildly, the comments vary massively and the only stable factor is the wasted time and effort it takes to update this page. It has come to the point where I begrudge having to update it, where I loathe trying to be funny at half-past six every morning, and where I detest the lack of interest, and reward, my effort receives

And so, after much consideration, I have decided to regain my life.

I am taking a break from The Freelance Cynic.


I’ll be back on Monday, hope you’ll can cope without me…

(Almost had you worried then, didn’t I?)

Previous Scare Tactics

• Wheels on Fire
• Grinds my Gears
• Warner Busers

This is your Last Chance to win 250 Free Blog Hits! Click here to find out how. Results will be revealed on Monday.

Thank God I'm a trained counsellor

In small doses, the memes are fun. They give me something to post about, challenge my humour and slowly warp me into the everyman personal Blogger I am petrified to become.

The Interview was ok. I asked for it and dealt with the consequences. The Music Meme was bearable although I would have preferred a subject I had some knowledge on, like Particle Physics. But this is too much.

Shelly of This Eclectic Life has given me A Thinking Blogger Award.

Now it was only a matter of time before this meme was thrown my way. As each nominee has to nominate 5 others, the whole blogosphere will have been nominated three times over after just 12 recursions. However, I didn't expect to receive it just yet. I imagined more last ditch desperation, with a remark like “Freelance Cynic, ‘cos it’s the only thing left in my blogroll.”

Instead, this Iceberg I call my blog got a lovely write up and an early nomination. There are only 2 conclusions to reach from this. Either Freelance Cynic is a deep blog full of profound ideas and secrcet truths, or Shelly is a nut-job.

I’ll leave you to decide which one is true.

Here then are the poor blogs that make me think.

The Japing Ape
I never believed a gorilla could be so eloquent and deep until I find this blog. He has a profound understand of much of human life, and I have learnt a lot from him

Words, Words, Words
Fellow Atheist and like minder thinker, I always leave this blog thinking, sometimes about intelligent things.

Coroner Stories
Seldom updated but morbidly intriguing stories from a person whose day job really is death.

This Eclectic Life
Even though she nominated me I’ll nominate her back, partly because every post of hers conjures up new thoughts in my head, and partly because I’m running out of thinking blogs. Don't worry though you don't have to do the meme again.

Coaster Punchman
Normally this guy hammers out the funnies, but occasionally he really makes me think, like this post about homophobic homosexuality.

Here are the rules:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Related posts

• The Interview
• The Music Meme

Related Blogs

• This Ecelectic Life
• Japing Ape
• Words, Words, Words
• Coroner Stories
• Coaster Punchman

Have you claimed your stake at 250 free blog hits yet? Link to the Freelance Cynic or add it to your Technorati favourites now to take part. Click here to find out more.

British Wit, or lack off

This is a wonderful blog which simply points how brilliantly stupid the British are, and will help you to pass the time while I work up the energy for another post. That's not as easy as it sounds, because I, like all Brits, am also stupid!
Overheard in the UK

The Family Carnival

And now for something Completely different, my rant about my boyfriend has been included in the latest family carnival over at An Island Life

Click over and check it out!

Misinterpretation - Tabloid style

In the same way a mob of Sun readers stormed a Paediatrician's house, confusing him with the other thing beginning with a 'p', an innocent comment I left on Esoterically.net has sparked a tangled conversation, complete with accusations of child molestation...

Click over to Esoterically.net to read all about it.

---

In the meantime, I am working on some funny posts to go alongside my journaled quest for self-actualization. That way those with short attention spans seeking an easy laugh whilst avoiding my personal life challenges (my boyfriend included) will continue reading the blog. I like friends, even if they exist only in the comments section of my online persona and like me largely because I am deranged.

I have often wondered why people back off when I start being myself, and having actual feelings like in the becoming me series, and have decided that it must be something to do with having 2 persona. Inspired by this site on Google image searching I sought an answer from the worlds most over-rated search engine and asked Google what I would look like as a schizophrenic.

The answer, in case you're wondering, was this...

...which to me, at least, explains everything...

Blog Wreck

I was up to ridiculously late on Wednesday night working on my blog design.

I can't explain why, but it feels good to look at a mass of CSS and XHTML and slowly begin to work out what it's doing. It feels even better to know that none of my knowledge of CSS, XHTML or any useful computer skills came from my Computer Science Degree but rather from Google, W3 and library books.

And thanks to my self taught knowledge I can take a simple, but elegant and highly functional template design and turn it into the train wreck you see in front of you.



I know now how my parents felt raising me.

Last night I stayed up late again talking to my Boyfriend.

It is going to be a very long, very tiring day today...

Just Eat the Cat!

A while ago, about 17 days, four hours and 13 minutes to be precise, I realised that I'd stopped being young. Or at least being student young.

With out realising, I had grown into an old man over night, happy to go home to my apartment (yes an apartment, not a flat, appearance is everything) and sit in front of the PC or the TV with a glass of water instead of a bottle of beer!

This Blogger, with a ranting, slightly psychotic style I was tempted to steal, seems to sympathise with me. - Just Eat the Cat!

Blogged in space

It's Amazing!

About a week ago I thought a Web Blog was primarily a device for wannabe pop stars on MySpace or right wing political pundits trying to break into the Daily Mail.

Imagine my surprise then when I discover that the site I've spent the last three years developing, maintaining and ignoring was basically a blog. And even worse, that I could have designed the whole thing in about 3 minutes if I'd just known about this site back then.

That's three years of my life wasted, bringing the grand total of years wasted up to 20 and a half. The first two and a half years I can't remember but I do seem to recall Milk and Cookies which, to be honest, is about as good as my life gets.