Blastronaut

There's a mini music festival currently being held at the rugby club behind our house. I was going to pop along since it's only a fiver entry but I'm absolutely cunted after a horrendous night with the lad and trip to that fucking Swedish flatpack furniture labyrinth today. Back on topic for the thread, our summer holidays might be a non-starter this year. Look like we're moving house again (for the third time in three years) instead. So I'm sat in the garden listening to the music from the rugby club trying to decide if my knees are up to the job of laying 50sq meters of laminate again or if I'm just going to phone it in and go with a mix of vinyl and carpet for the downstairs. On one hand I do think this one might actually be a great move for us in the long term and the Mrs and kids all seem genuinely excited for once, but at the same time the thought of doing this all over again in the middle of the summer holidays with four kids in tow really puts the hoor into Hooray.

It's basically just an Enid Blyton book with an Irvine Welsh short story shoe-horned in the middle tbf.

My childhood was basically that film "Stand By Me". A mostly quiet and isolated wee ex-mining village where everyone knew everyone, we all kicked about together and went on daft escapades to the woods, local quarry, or played hide and seek grounds of the chipboard factory. Pissed off all the local farmers by moving all the hay-bails around and building what were probably incredibly unsafe structures from them. We would nick ropes and nets from the factory use them to make hammocks and zip-lines deep in the woods, or "absaile" down the cliffs at the quarry. Half the time there would be some random stray dog along for the adventure with us, we'd know the dogs name and roughly what house it lived at, but nobody knew fuck all about it's owners. Suburban childhood bliss until we stumbled on the body of a body of woman in one of those fields. Turned out she'd had a drunken arguement with her partner, he'd stabbed her 19 times and moved her body to the field in a wheelie bin. We were 10. Wish I could say I was joking. It was probably a year or so after that our neighbour introduced me to SLF and gave me a copy of some dodgy Guns N Roses bootleg. Absolute hero. That was childhood. The teenage years were a different thing entirely.

This is obviously just anecdotal but my own experience backs this up. I wasn't on SSRI's for all that long in the grand scheme of things, but did go through three different types when I was really suffering from pretty severe depression. Fluoxetine (Prozac) really fucked me up, it basically sent me into a manic for about 2 or three months, barely sleeping and waking up feeling like someone had shot speed into my eyeballs. Ironically, my prior experience with actual amphetamines and uppers was almost the opposite. Really worried quite a lot of my family. GP suggested doubling the dose and I went along with it, no prizes for guessing how that panned out. I forget the name of the second one we tried, but it was ultimately sertraline that seemed to work as intended and pull me out of that headspace enough to get back to functioning mostly normally day to day. Sertraline also really helped Mrs B massively with post-natal depression. I know quite a lot of people who are prescribed it or have been prescribed it and almost all of them feel it's been beneficial. Except for one really close friend who was on a really high dose (200 or 300mg) and ended up with pretty severe agoraphobia. It really fucking sucked seeing someone who was always such a socialite suddenly having full-blown panic attacks over the mere thought of leaving his house. Modern medicine is great but I do think that finding the right one is less likely to happen if you cant properly advocate for yourself, or have someone close who can advocate for you, especially with shit that literally intended to affect your brain chemistry.

Is there a way we can crowdfund a reacharound for him as a goodwill gesture? I have relatively short arms, but collectively I think we could manage to reach out and give him a thankful squeeze.

Can't beat a good old chip pan fire. Get the fire brigade out and the whole house and you're neighbours get a few hours on the Oxygen cylinders with a light show and some men in uniform. Street party 101.

That's roughly where I'm at too if you substitute red wine with Guinness and the Bordeaux region with an ex-council house in Central-Scotland.

I'm starting to think these outages might be the result of some sort of supernatural force, deleting my posts to help me save face. Long may it continue.

If it truly is psychic super-powers, don't let them medicate it out of you until you've helped me uncover the identity of Zowie Fenderblast. People have to know! More seriously, look after yourself man! You'll be driving again before you know it. I used to work for a guy (who incidentally married into my extended family) has what sounds like a far more extreme form of epilepsy and still is able to drive on the daily. Make the most of the break from driving responsibilities. There's a lot to be said for Uber, home deliveries and pints at lunchtime. And while Uber and delivery drivers are clearly being exploited, you conscience is clean because it's just a temporary measure and those fuckers can still drive.

Fucking hell that takes me back to my days shilling digitals cameras around the turn of the millennium. I'm pretty sure even then that Leica were always heavily partnered with Japanese companies (Kyocera and Panasonic), and the production of the lenses themselves was mostly (if not entirely) outsourced to the far east. But the name itself was a massive selling point. Not to get into a cock swinging competition, but I use a £150 Motorola for all the same exact things, with the only real caveat being that yours probably badly has a better camera and processor. Last flagship phone I ever bought was the first one Sony released after the split with Ericsson and got burned really fucking bad. I don't think I could go back, it's great knowing that I drop this thing off a bridge or my son launches it into a river I'm not still on the hook for £30 a month for another year and a half. Mrs B has slowing been coming over to the same mindset. Fuck, I even have a teenage daughter who now swears by her iPhone 11 because, in her own words "it still does everything I need it to do, and every time I smash the screen I know you can fix it for £25."

Dont overthink it man. Phones are now practically disposable and the flagship devices are a complete con. Nobody under the age of 35 worth caring about gives a shit about what phone you have, what trainers you're wearing, what car you drive. Slightly older iPhones are orders of magnitude more repairable on the cheap than newer ones or the android equivalents. But by and large they do exactly the same fucking thing as the cheapest android devices.

I hadn't realised it'd gone offline tbf, just had a browse today and thought I might've dreamt my few weeks on here with equal parts relief and mild confusion. Cheers for keeping this place going @Andrew. I'm not one of you but as far as congregations go you're mostly all incredibly sound and reasonable people when your not talking about football. > hopefully the place will stay up through tomorrow. It might not be fully erect, but you can still keep it upright.

I don't dislike them, but they make a big noise about nepotism in the music industry, but don't want anyone to know about the family ties to the likes of Sinead O'Connor and Planxty. All seems a bit disingenuous for a punk band if you ask me.

He's not wrong to be fair. Not to take anything away from you, they looked absolutely toothless and we're more than a bit of a shambles. It was comical hearing even the commentators pondering "well this is a bit fucking weird watching them line up to defend this corner as if there isn't a 6'7 giant just happily wandering about completely unmarked" for the first goal.

Aye. And even if we did, we're more than just fairly reliant on the US to actually sell us the weapons we have been giving to Ukraine.