So, here you go: five different versions! I leave it as an exercise to you, the reader, to decide which accent I actually used in the story.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘any excuse to get that big, bulbous microphone out and impress the ladies, Seb…’ And you’re right. I’m such a narcissist.

Does narcissism even cover the loving of your own voice? I guess it does. Perhaps instead of self-portraits of myself around the world, I could take little audio clips instead… hmm…

(If you can’t see these audio players, you’ll have to visit the blog!)

• First! A very straight-forward and normal Seb:
  
• My (famous?) Deep South hill-billy accent:
  
• An accent I’m not really sure about. Common British, with a hint of Australian (?):
  
  (Really, this one just came out, and decided to keep it. It’s kinda cute?)
• Cool/City-dwelling American (Black?) accent:
  
  (Apparently, according to Abi, this one sounds like ‘the old guy with a tooth whistle‘ from Family Guy. I’m not sure how I feel about such comparisons. I was trying to sound young and black, not old and white…)
• Posh/David Attenborough kind of British accent (again, not sure what this one is really…):
  

I suppose, under the slightly-veiled guise of ‘research’, I should ask which accent you think I would have most success with…

[Post link: ‘Get your ass over here bitch!’]

Related posts:

1. Celebrating my noble breeding and photographic sales… in AUDIO!
2. This month, on Seb’s blog…
3. The Daily Nightcap (just like a recap)

So to celebrate my continued photographic excellence and sales, here’s a minute or two of a Brit bumbling his deep, burbling, heart-felt thanks for those that have bought photos… and a little more!

(It’s work safe — in fact, I encourage you to play it while at work. If you can’t see the audio player, you’ll need to visit my blog.)

(Also, if you didn’t yet, check out my first week of  ‘52 Weeks‘ — it turned out well, and next week will be even better!)

[Post link: Celebrating my noble breeding and photographic sales… in AUDIO!]

Related posts:

1. ‘Get your ass over here bitch!’
2. Sunday’s usually slow, but today I lift a trophy up high!
3. The Daily Nightcap (just like a recap)

Once upon a time there were was a seedy, fleet-footed fellow that only moved under the cover of darkness. Only after the sun had descended and the campus took on the dusky, dark-blue hues of night would he emerge in his long coat and broad-rimmed hat. His black leather boots moved with surprising grace, the slight squeak of foot against foot the only noise betraying his location.

He skirts the meeting point, watching his target nervously hop from foot to foot and light a third cigarette, its burning tip faintly outlining his hooded face. Eventually he approaches, sidling up next to the smoker. He grunts a quiet greeting.

‘Got the money?’

‘You got all the stuff I want?’

‘Of course.’

‘Even the ebony-and-ivory one?’

‘Does the Porn King ever fail to deliver?’

…

At university I ruled the roost. I was invited to all the parties and chicks clung to every limb. I was that guy on the white leather sofa, splayed out languidly like a snow angel, girls curled up in the spaces left between my arms and legs. Merely opening my mouth would cause those nearby to quickly hush and watch me; watch my lips, my teeth, the expansion of my ribs as I breathe in, preparing to speak.

‘The Porn King requires a blow job.’ A flurry of activity followed as the girls quickly clambered off the sofa onto the ground and two others standing nearby rushed to help.

I once lived a life of regal opulence. Hedonistic extravagance. Girls and boys available to me at any time for any need and every want: food, sex or even… conversation. I’d be given free tickets to the local cinema and I’d be rushed through the other entrance at nightclubs, the one without a queue. At restaurants I’d always get the best table, the freshest bread and it wasn’t uncommon for the chef to prepare a special dessert, just for me.

I felt just a bit like The Godfather.

Unlike the Godfather though, I hadn’t built an empire based on coercion, fear and racketeering; this was an empire built upon something far healthier: sex and satisfaction. Not the human-trafficking kind either: sex, gooey and juicy, safely condensed into an easily-transportable disc.

The word ‘pornography’, perhaps aptly if you’re a ‘moralist’, comes from ancient Greek literally meaning ‘the writing/recording of prostitutes/prostitution’. That’s not a good start for an argument in favour of pornography, but wait!

Historically porn has been outlawed for religious reasons — monotheistic of course: the Greeks and Romans loved sex and all the sticky extras it entailed — but more recently the anti-porn brigade has been led by the feminists: ‘Porn is degrading to the female form!’ they decry. At the same time they claim that we’re now grown up enough, as a culture, to grant women the rights they’ve for millennia done without: to vote, to display and do with themselves as they see fit, to sleep with whoever they damn well please — to be a separate race or species: women. For the longest time women have merely been an extension of man, their subordinate helpers, humans without penises. Feminists — and most sane people — argue that it’s time women were allowed to plant their feet on the ground, look around, and strike out in any direction

The argument is, of course, that the actresses in porn aren’t ‘being women’; no, they’re prostituted lumps of meat, their bodies sold for money to the highest bidder for the satisfaction of a paying audience that’s sitting in front of their TV or computer screen, fapping, flapping furiously. But… is there something wrong with that?

It’s the classic problem: how restrictive do you make laws? You can’t re-outlaw porn — it just wouldn’t wash without the stranglehold that religion once held over law-making. You can’t point your finger at the mischievous boys and girls and say: ‘You behave and keep your clothes on now, y’hear?’ The cat — the pussy — is out of the bag.

Perhaps a better question to ask is: why is porn considered to degrade women, but not men? Is it because the woman always ‘receives’? Is it purely because women have been on the receiving end of male leadership and ownership since the dawn of time? What about gay male porn? Are there masculists out there campaigning for the rights of men that always ‘play the bottom’ in porn? Another case in point: I had to look up ‘masculist’ to see if such a word even existed. That’s how foreign the concept of ‘male rights’ are in today’s society.

It’s a shame that women and men must resort to starring in pornography, and no doubt it’s hard and unsatisfying work wrought with risk. In all but a few unfortunate cases however, it was their choice to take part — perhaps they like sex so why not be paid for it? It’s a lot safer to have sex on a porno shoot than with some random guy or girl that you meet at a club — for a start, you have a camera crew and director watching to make sure they don’t stick something in the wrong hole. That’s probably a better problem to address: the current urge for ‘modern women’ to screw anything with a pulse just because they can, but that deserves a separate topic of discussion.

It boils down to this, feminists, priests and conservative law-makers: is it possible to have too many human rights? Do you somehow pretend to understand more about ourselves than us? Ethics — the ability to decide what is right and wrong — is fundamentally personal. You can’t tell someone the right answer for any given situation: to retain the human right of free thought and self-determinism they have to decide for themselves. Instead of trying to govern our actions, educate us fully and hope that we come out the other end wiser and relatively unscathed.

As a race we’re great at getting through things if we know what we’re getting into. When we are blinkered by lies and propoganda, when we walk into a situation without unbiased information, when we are unable to see both sides of an argument due to outside influence — when we lose our ability to make rational and fair decisions, then we’re in trouble.

[Post link: Porn, it’s a human rights thing]

No related posts.

I can’t do a very good Italian accent, so don’t laugh! Fast forward to 3:40 if you want to just hear the ‘exciting’ bit with the shitty Italian accent, and a hint of Dan Brown-esque American storytelling…

Photographers have it easy compared to our painter comrades. We both deal in luminance and colour, tone, texture and saturation, but at the end of the day painters start with a blank canvas and nothing but the camera of their mind’s eye. Some painters will probably tell you that it makes their life easier, being able to create anything their imagination conjures up. Surely though, controlling the minuscule movements of mixing pigment and the brush itself is infinitely more difficult than raising the shutter on a camera. Then there are those that claim photography is harder — you can only work with what you’ve been given. There is some leeway of course: trickery of the eye and your ability to move props and pose models, but at the end of the day, that’s all you have: you can’t magic a dragon out of thin air.

Photography is all about working with what you’ve got. There is a small amount of knowledge that you need to know before you can operate a camera but we’re talking 3 or 4 simple equations — and the ability to push down a button. Point, and shoot. You can affect how much light enters the camera and that’s it. It’s because of this simplicity and the switch-over to digital cameras that we’re now swamped with thousands of photographers; you, your mother and her mother can be a photographer. It’s no surprise then that selling photos has also become a lot harder: there are more photos in circulation and thus it’s harder to be seen. You can still get lucky, but more than likely your only chance to make money today is as a stock or paparazzi photographer. Like almost every art form it’s one big labour of love: you pray that one day you’ll become the next Monet or Ansel Adams but chances are you won’t.  There are so few rich artists, it’s depressing.Whether it’s due to a lack of talent or saturation of the market I don’t know. What I do know is the one thought that courses through the mind of every person that’s made art their life-long dream: will I only be famous after I die?

To separate themselves from the pack, to stand out, artists try to be different. ‘Yet another photo of some daffodils’ isn’t quite as appealing as ‘Exploding daffodils in the bedroom of the woman that broke my heart’. Almost every photographer you’ve heard of or seen today will have been unique — that’s what it takes to not sink into the mire of boring, formulaic photographers, your voice forever unheard, your view of the world unseen.

It’s all about chasing the perfect photo. Like storm-chasers, train-spotters or groupies chasing the perfect tornado, rare train or celebrity photographers must try so, so hard to get the perfect photo.  Place yourself one centimeter to the left and you might ruin the entire photo. You might have to wait for a cloud to cover the sun to get the perfect light conditions, or even wait for the sun to be in the perfect position before you take the photo. A landscape could be completely average and nondescript at midday, but the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen at 5pm as the sun begins to set.

Photographing people is another beast entirely: the merest flick at the corner of a girl’s lips might make or break a photo. A glint of sun refracting off her eye could change the meaning and the impact. Is she breathing in or out; are her muscles tensed or relaxed? Even the greatest photographers of all time might take thousands of photos of the same  setup — as the years go by, the ratio of good-to-bad photos will improve but you’re still searching for perfection, and sometimes that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Fortunately I’m a landscape photographer. I’m quite good at portrait work, I just don’t have the experience — and being a good photographer takes a lot of experience. Landscapes don’t go anywhere: the sun continues to rise, the clouds roll on by — you can keep practicing and practicing, with landscapes. With people… it’s a little trickier. One day I’ll put in the hours and chain down one of my photogenic female friends, get the lights out and go to town! One day.

So there I was in Venice, up a clock tower. It was 3pm and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Being the geek that I am, I phoned my dad and asked him what time the sun would set — 6pm, 3 hours away. Fine, I can wait 3 hours. I’ve got a book and a bottle of water. There are all sorts of pretty tourist girls swanning around that I can chat to, and take photos of (with their own cameras, of course!) Two hours pass, it starts to get dark, my pulse quickens. I dart around the tower, surveying how different Venice looks in the fading light, looking for the perfect angle for the perfect photo.

‘The tower will be closing in 10 minutes, please take the elevator back down.’

Shit. I smile and nod at the Italian, my mind quickly working through the available solutions: I wasn’t about to head back down the tower after waiting for two hours! It wasn’t a big tower, and there weren’t any obvious dark corners. I looked up and wondered if I could wedge myself inside the bell itself. Maybe in films… but not here in real life. I was out of time and only one option remained: climb out one of the windows and cling to the wall. They do it in films… they inch themselves along a thin ledge…

The Italian usher was slowly walking around the tower, shooing people into the elevator. I only had 30 seconds to decide — wuss out and waste two hours of my life, or… chase the photo. I jumped onto the windowsill and looked down — Shit — I turned around and inched backwards until my toes were on the ledge — Crap — I reach to the left and grab the edge of the next portal — Phew — I’m safe for now, but the pounding of my heart against the ancient brick wall would suggest I’m still in in a wee spot of bother. Finally, the sound of the descending elevator! I slide myself along the ledge, my feet now splayed like a ballet dancer’s and pull myself back inside.

There I am, all alone and king of the hill! I camped out for another hour, constantly assessing the landscape, sizing up the prey, waiting to strike. An hour later, I struck gold — a full moon! A total fluke, but completely deserved. I pulled out the camera, struck a pose not unlike a war-time sniper and… wait! A big ship too! Click. Bang!

That’s how I chased my perfect photo of Venice. It’s not a stereotypical view of Venice but I challenge you to find another like it.

It was getting cold and I had no food; I was out of water and thirsty. I packed up quickly and pushed the call button on the elevator. Nothing. I pushed it again. Still nothing. I looked out through a window and grinned in the darkness, wondering if it was possible.

To be continued…

[Post link: Venice: The perfect photograph (now in stereo!)]

Related posts:

1. This month, on Seb’s blog…

If you hadn’t gathered already, I’m big and imposing, like two conjoined Pavarotti Siamese twins. I’m a fairly prolific person; I don’t do things on a small scale. When I take photos, I take a lot of photos (and I’m getting quite good — proof below!) When I play games, I play them for hours and hours (immersion is key!) When I write, I write thousands of words; carefully thought-out, heart-felt and well-researched words. The great thing is, no matter what I turn my attention to, I love doing it! There’s a reason excellence is one goal we all strive for: it feels damn good when we finally get there. No one ever feels good after finishing half-assed job, right? But when you put down your paint brush or pencil or microphone and you’ve done good, it feels great!

The problem with typing on this kind of scale is that it causes repetitive strain injury (RSI) in my fingers. You just can’t sit at a desk and type for 12-16 hours a day without repercussions. Fortunately it’s not permanent — yet. Normally I catch it, slowly creeping up: I take a break, go for a walk; stretch my fingers and my lungs (don’t get me started on my cardiac fitness…) Historically, I’ve interspersed my computational orgies with travel, but this year all of my trips have been scuppered! Three of them! Wales, Ireland and Scotland; February, March and April. I hope to make it to Ireland later in the year, but until then, I’m stuck here in front of my computer, sucking on my sore fingers (which is surprisingly soothing, even when you do it yourself).

Can you believe the trip to Wales was cancelled because the incredibly cute girl pulled out at the last minute? Usually that’s my job. After I’d booked some hotels! Man, she had the Welsh accent and all… (Obvious when you think about it, considering she’s from Wales, but still, a wistful sigh is required at this point.)

So today, instead of solid, insightful prose, you get a few pretty photos and some audio tomfoolery. My travel stories are almost up to date (with the huge exception of America), so it’s actually time to write about my most recent trip: Italy! I’ve been wanting to write about it for ages — strike while the iron is hot! — but I’ve been a very good, patient boy and kept to the chronology. I should do America — I owe it to all of you lovely Americans — but after all of the ‘how I blew it with yet another girl’ stories from the last few weeks, I want to write about something else.

You get 3 photos. Two beautiful landscapes and one idiot. If you can correctly identify the odd one out, I’ll give you a cookie.

Florence:

Venice:

Venice again:

Also this month:

• More guest blogs! One of which I am promised will involve indecent exposure; another will be far too intelligent for any of us to understand (damn doctorate students)!
  
• Why Americans rock! A long-overdue piece that will probably come towards the end of the month.
• Things I don’t like. So far I’ve been fairly fluffy and easy-going; philosophically benevolent, even. Now I’m going to write some slightly more angry entries (in the absence of sex, hitting a keyboard angrily and with gusto is about as good as it gets. Help.)
• And much, much more! How about another ‘Pirate Special‘, but this time… ‘The Animal Special’! Watch this space as Seb gets down right bestial.

[Post link: This month, on Seb’s blog…]

Related posts:

1. Venice: The perfect photograph (now in stereo!)
2. Celebrating my noble breeding and photographic sales… in AUDIO!

Yesterday I was linked to by WoWInsider — the ‘definitive’ World of Warcraft news source. It’s basically a huge collection of journalists that write about every aspect of WoW. One of them, Jennie Lees, wrote a lovely little article about gamer psychology, and linked to my own articles on the topic. She went a lot deeper than I, looking at the Myers-Briggs scale, and even Helen Fisher’s work on brain chemistry.

Anyway, it means that, today at least, I can enjoy a brief moment of Internet celebrity. I recorded an audio blog to commemorate this moment, which hopefully isn’t the high point of my career — but who knows!

(If you can’t see the player, you’ll have to visit my blog)

Tomorrow, however, life will no doubt slip back into normality. I’ll have to wash my body myself and make my own meals. I should enjoy this moment while I can!

Where did I put that bag of cocaine and those escort call cards…

[Post link: Sunday’s usually slow, but today I lift a trophy up high!]

Related posts:

1. The Daily Nightcap (just like a recap)

Tonight I tell the tale of, in the form of an audio blog, ‘healthy alternative transport’ gone wrong. The tale of how I almost log my legs trying to traverse the pretty (but seemingly deadly) city of Amsterdam.

It was the last day of my stay in Amsterdam. Rogier, my gracious host, had booked an internet cafe for us to play World of Warcraft from (I try to play WoW from every country that I visit as it’s a lot of fun playing next to someone that you’ve talked to over the Internet for 3 years). The problem was… the cafe was on the other side of town. ‘Ah, Amsterdam is a small city, it’ll be a breeze!’

‘There’s a problem, Seb: I only have one bike’ says Rogier.

‘Sure, sure… no problem at all, de nada, I’ll ride on the back!’ I quickly shoot back, eager to try what millions of Dutch do every day — cycle around Amsterdam.

Little did I know… I would soon be riding into… the gaping maw of HELL.

(I hope this gets turned into a movie one day!)

Anyway, in an attempt to be somewhat educational and informative: for those of you that don’t know, Amsterdam is like… the cycling capital of the world. It’s so dense, and the waterways make driving so cumbersome that everyone prefers to cycle everywhere. There are so many bicycles that there are even multistorey bicycle parks!

The other massive advantage of riding bicycles everywhere is that half of these cyclists are… female. Girls with some of the finest asses you’ve ever seen. Toned, and peachy and… often wearing short skirts too…

Sitting at those canal-side cafes, just watching the world go by; watching those legs go by. If only I had my own pair of legs, and hadn’t lost them riding a bike across Amsterdam.

[Post link: Cycling can cause serious injuries, the need for amputation and possibly even… death]

No related posts.

Sometimes, when I wake up, my legs are so cold that I swing out of bed and fall to the floor because my legs have decided not to do their primary function: stand. Living in a old house really does suck sometimes.

I just had a few things to say, which didn’t really warrant an entire blogging, so I thought I’d whack them in here before I go to bed. First, a lovely little story, written by my younger sister. We’re all so very proud of her; she’s come such a long way since the accident:

You know, that picture actually reminds me of another Father Ted sketch! For various reasons, Father Ted ends up writing an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest (only click it if you’re REALLY interested, but be careful… it’s a dark and slippery slope back out), only at the last moment he has to re-write the song because he’s actually stolen another song. This results in… well, check it out:

Sorry, anything to make you watch something from Father Ted.

Other than that, I just wanted to do a little ‘wrap up’ for The Penis Monologues, which you can listen to if you missed them the first time around (it’s also quite fun to hear my accent change between each!):

• #1, The Cowboy:
• #2, The Scottish:
• #3, The Irish Priest:
• #4, The Russian:
• #5, The Australian: 

(If you can’t see the audio players, you’ll have to visit my blog)

It’s been a lot of fun trying my hand at accents that I’ve never really used in conversation before — it’s amazing just how hard it is trying to make a single word sound authentic. The vowel and consonant sounds change SO MUCH between each language, it’s quite amazing. It’s been quite a thrill trying to make them appear almost real and try to give a little bit of a backdrop for each stereotype at the same time: they are almost entirely truthful, with only a  few bits stretched to make them more interesting.

I noticed that no one from any of the 4 countries (or a real life cowboy!) have commented on my accents, so I might never know if I completely butchered them. I’ll just assume I did a fairly good job of them — a man can hope, right? If you want to hear something I can do rather well — speaking proper English — go and check out some of the other podcasts.

Next up is probably some kind of… review. Either of a video game, or maybe some cameras. It’ll be in proper British-English, which is a relief to most, I think. Ah, and I’m working on some kind of ‘weekly feature’ for the blog, which probably won’t interest a lot of you, but I think it’s about time that I wrote about something with an element of authority — I’m simply sitting on a wealth of knowledge which I feel I should share!

[Post link: The Daily Nightcap (just like a recap)]

Related posts:

1. The Irish Monologue
2. ‘Get your ass over here bitch!’
3. Forgive me, for I have waffled

It hasn’t been above 2 degrees in 3 days now — the snow is still there. I thought snow was meant to act as an insulator, but it’s frickin’ freezing in my room. I’m wearing a wooly jumper, 2 pairs of socks, slippers and gloves.

So, to get away from the cold, it’s now time for something completely different. Sunny, balmy, land-of-the-eternal-barbecue… Australia!

(If you can’t see the player, you’ll have to visit my blog)

Join Bruce the Australian Surfer & Rodeo Rider on this, the fifth and final (for now!) penis monologue.

Right now I’m in the middle of raiding, waiting for some person with a broken computer to come back online. The joy of massively-multiplayer online gaming. The constant logistical nightmare of organising a guild of 150 people. Trying to keep 20 different nationalities playing together nicely and assuage the tensions caused by different religions, national holidays and ways of life.

Oh, he’s back online. Back to the grind!

[Post link: Throw another shrimp on the barbie]

Related posts:

1. Forgive me, for I have waffled
2. The Daily Nightcap (just like a recap)

The Russian Monologue:
(If you can’t see the player, you’ll have to visit my blog)

All of this bleak, cold and snowy thing got me thinking of my friends over in Serbia, Czech Republic and the other Eastern Bloc states. When I was in Serbia a couple of years ago, there was an unseasonable warmth, 20C in October! Then in the last 6 hours of my stay, it dropped to -5C, and the entirity of Belgrade was covered in about 6 inches of snow. My friends told me that the -5C was a far more normal temperature for them… and it often goes lower, to -10 or -15. It’s that continental cold though — no humidity, so you just wrap up warm, drink a little vodka, and everything’s OK.

So, the point I was trying to get across was that while it’s kinda snowy here, in most of the northern hemisphere it’s a lot colder. These guys have also been through an awful amount of strife in the past 100 years. Sure, we’ve had 2 world wars; but so have they. They’ve also had the rise and fall of communism, and the Cold War. Then, in recent years the NATO bombing and the disintegration of Yugoslavia into seperate states that followed was also very harrowing.

Seb: ‘Did you want to be split up?
Serbian Friend: ‘No… we still consider each country our brothers. It was very odd to have NATO come in and tell us we are now different countries.’

Slobodan Milosevic is also a bit of a national hero in Serbia — another thing that was oddly reported by the media. But the discrepancy might come from the fact that the Serbians backed his genocide… while most of us think he was a bit of a monster. If anything, it’s just proof that the reported truth should always be analysed before taken as fact.

Oh, another fun thing — in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, the bombed governmental buildings are still there, as bombed-out wrecks. ‘Why didn’t you pull them down?’ I ask. ‘We leave them for the tourists to see,’ my guide quickly responds, with a big grin. I’m amazed they welcomed me with such open arms…

Anyway! I was inspired to do a semi-serious penis monologue in an attempt to describe the current state of the former USSR: the Commonwealth of Independent States. Life is hard, miserable and misogyny is rife. At least in Serbia, women seemed to get a little more respect — but really, it’s a bad thing when a nation has so many women that they are exported as ‘mailorder brides’, or trafficked to other countries for prostitution.

I don’t want to rant on about it for too long, so I’m just going to give you a fantastic link: A High-Heels Running Contest in St. Petersburg. The following picture says it all:

(And for any men out there, check these cheerleaders)

I haven’t got that site favourited… honest.

[Post link: This goes out to all my communist comrades]

Related posts:

1. That’s a Goose Egg, Seb
2. Throw another shrimp on the barbie