Sdtrk: ‘Favours in the beetroot fields’ by British Sea Power

A happy new year to the very small handful of readers who still haunt ‘Shouting etc etc’! We here honestly appreciate your bloody-mindedness! Linus’ devotion to the arrival of The Great Pumpkin has nothing on you lot!

Doubtless you’ve noticed that there’s been nothing new on this blog since March of last year, apart from the post regarding the passing of Lord Bowie. I mean, there’s creative dry spells, and then there are droughts, right? Well, it wasn’t so much a case of me being unable to write, or whatever it is that I do for this site, but I can honestly place the blame on technical issues. Yay, it’s not me! Well, not 100% me. Heh.

Back round late January of 2015, I’d noticed that no-one was leaving comments. There’s been a dramatic drop in reader contributions for a while, which I attribute to Fecesbook being the pervasive and vacuous filth-hole that requires the least amount of thoughtful interaction that it is, but I found it strange that absolutely no-one was adding anything. I figured my audience’s interest had finally run its course and transformed into long-awaited indifference, until fellow iDollator Mahtek sent me an Email, saying he wasn’t able to submit comments. Well, shit, I thought to myself. Exactly how long has this bollocks been going on? This was corroborated a fortnight or so later by another fellow iDollator, Peter Synthetik, who’d told me that fact over the Twitters. Praise “Bob” for Twitter, eh? This is the part where you nod and agree with me.

Wanting an immediate, free, and relatively painless solution, I assumed that the blame lay in my blog’s theme. After all, it is quite old, although I prefer to call it ‘vintage’. So I set about the arduous task of selecting a new one. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not the sort of bloke who’s keen on arbitrary change. For one, it took me months to tweak the theme into something that I found appealing, and then, when I finally had shaped what would’ve been the new theme into something not entirely appalling, I discovered that it wasn’t the theme that was the issue. Errm.

I contacted my server hosts, and they told me they could have their crack team of IT specialists get onto the problem, at a cost of $65 per hour. Funny thing is, even though I dithered about it for months, I was going to throw in the towel and pay ’em, when I arbitrarily checked on my WordPress dashboard a couple of days ago, only to discover that the problem had somehow sorted itself out. See? It’s like I say: if you sit around for months fostering a mild sense of worry and do absolute bugger-all, everything will work out! Fact.
So yes, comments are now re-enabled! Feel free to leave a charming reply on any post, no matter how old!

Anyway, that’s quite enough explanation. What, you ask, have the residents of Deafening silence Plus been up to since two zero one five?
+ We’d participated via Skype in an interview in November for a podcast out of Toronto called The DarkRoom, and the experience and results ended up being quite good: Episode #2 – Davecat
+ Nick van der Kolk of the podcast Love + Radio took up residence at ours (not really) for a week-end, also in November, and interviewed me at length. On Saturday, apparently I spoke for nearly seven hours straight! And boy, are my arms tired. Nick told us that our episode will debut this September, and if you’re at all familiar with Love + Radio, you know it’ll be worth the wait
+ Still fully employed at Great Job Industries™, and now that I’m a permanent employee, it makes for a better overall experience! The commute still sucks, though. Why can’t they simply move the building a mile away from my home; or better yet, move the facility to Toronto, so I’d have no alternative but to move to Toronto? Must I think of everything??
+ I’ve been playing a metric ton of Destiny. I probably should be ashamed of how much time I’m putting into it, and yet I remain unrepentant.

#warlockmasterrace (pardon the dodgy photo)

Finally, we’re very pleased to announce that there’s a new silicone lass who’s joined our ranks: do give a warm welcome to Lucy Winter! I should advise you right now that she hates her given name as much as I hate my surname, so call her Miss Winter, or just Winter. Made by Doll Sweet, she’s a Snowy head/160plus body, and we’re all completely smitten with her!

Lenka is especially keen on her, as Winter is hers. Remember: Miss Winter is Elena’s Doll, and Elena is Sidore’s Doll. I only have one Doll, Your Honour!
Miss Winter’s been here since 05 February, and you can expect to read a review about her and my experience with Doll Sweet on this here blog here sometime relatively soon. You can find her on Twitter in the meantime, of course…

And you are all caught up! I tried to make getting you lot back up to speed as quickly as possible! Clearly I have failed. But it’s okay, as your standard bearer for Synthetik Living has returned! I am invigorated! Invigorated, I say!! *tries to do 100 pushups, collapses three pushups in*