Little things annoy me. You might have noticed.
Big things annoy me too – like pointless wars and the way there’s not a colony on the Moon built especially for me so I can run around with a mirror, pretending to be Sam Rockwell – but the little things far outweigh the big things by hundreds to one. I hate the way the stapler that sits on my desk doesn’t always work properly and I can’t fathom a reason why. The fact that I have a job where I’m required to sit at a desk and use a stapler also annoys me, but I feel that complaining about it is silly as it pays me enough to sustain a fairly comfortable life. I don’t like that I’m not a successful writer, but as I’ve not quite finished my first book (or pimped it out to any publishers – at all), and my only real body of work consists of these boring tirades, I’m not surprised I don’t have a working relationship with Charlie Brooker and/or Stephen King. Still, I tend not to allow any of those perfectly acceptable, logical reasons to hinder my ire, and I end up filling the internets with words. Though not as often as I feel I probably should. Which is also a gripe of mine.
That last paragraph served to big myself down to a point where you’re expecting me to start shouting about anything, no matter how trivial it might be in the grand scheme of things. I wanted to drop the readers expectations to a level where I could start complaining about the way microbe-sized dust mites are often unfairly short with each other in conversation, and generate only tiny amounts of surprise. Lots of disdain, maybe, but you’d carry on reading anyway if you made it this far.
When aiming my tiny little anger-crossbow, I had planned to puncture holes in the marketing types who seem to believe numbers are a perfectly suitable replacement for letters in words. For example, the upcoming game F3AR (or, FEAR 3 as I’ll call it) is stupid beyond even their usual standards, and not just because it looks ridiculous. The name ‘FEAR’ itself comes from the first letters of ‘First Encounter Assault Recon’, which in itself is a cheap and tacky excuse to give your scary-game-with-guns-in a name that seemed appropriate. For some unknown reason, just calling it Fear couldn’t be justified – so they retarded it up a bit. Now, it’s been ‘stylised’ to read First 3ncounter Assault Recon. I understand that the number 3, when typed, looks a little like a drunken, spazzy version of the letter E backwards, but did you really think it through? How do you even say that? I know, I’ll pronounce it as ‘Fear’ thereby making all of their efforts (and therefore my argument) moot and pointless.
I was going to talk about that, and mention the new Alton Towers ride ‘Th13teen’, which is ridiculous. Though I’m not condoning the bastardizing of the English language, there was a time when numbers only replaced letters when they still stayed phonetically acceptable – late became l8…for mutated annoying into 4…by that rule, ‘Th13teen’ should be vocalised as Ththirteenteen. Which makes the speaker come off as brain damaged; the monorail copped-out and just called it ‘Thirteen’, further enhancing my theory that inanimate objects are more sensible than marketing executives.
But I won’t write about that. It’s a ‘thing’ that’s been going on for years, and it will probably be a fad that sadly outlives me. Why anyone feels the need to ‘mix’ things up a bit’ with a language that’s existed perfectly well for centuries, goig through natural progressions and changes, forming the way we speak and communicate today – is beyond me. It feels forced, led by people who have slogans and brand names tattooed clumsily onto their shrivelled little souls.
So what’s the point. I’ll switch my brain off again now and get back to w0rk.
(P.S. – I’ll forgive this fad and embrace it with open arms if anyone can convince Danny Dyer to legally change his name to D4nny Dy3r. That would be very funny indeed).
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