every little thing she does is cabbage

the hardest i've laughed all week

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:30:22 GMT

listening to the taskmaster podcast, skipping forward 30 seconds through the adverts:

You guys know me: you think Ed Gamble, you think - "why not?!"

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papped by rose matafeo

Mon, 13 May 2024 17:10:14 GMT

been mainline-rewatching tmnz lately. to the extent of having a lovely little dream about it last sunday. which i may have indulged in a bit on monday. then, improbably, on tuesday, was served a FACEBOOK SPONSORED ADVERT telling me that paul williams was doing an album launch gig on saturday?!

1) i need to sort out my mailing list subscriptions (and, indeed, now have)
2) did i... manifest this?! O.O

( Read more... )

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never a truer word

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 16:30:54 GMT

pleasing thing 1: one of the springleaf kickstarter backers gave their "public name" for display on the Wall of Thanks as "TRANSPHOBES CAN SUCK IT FOREVER" XD

pleasing thing 2: the springleaf team specifically said they reserved the right to reject inappropriate "public names" :D

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DELETED! MY! TWITTER! \o/

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 16:35:26 GMT

The very last thing I 'Liked' was a quote tweet by James Acaster's girlfriend (re a claim that mental health effects of pandemic were 'minimal') saying "Suck my dick".

Pretty happy with that.

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happiness writes white

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:59:28 GMT

okay, so... since i last posted about james starting gigging again and my immensely fretful efforts to find out about gigs before they sold out... i have in fact managed to nab tickets for FOUR of his upcoming shows. within as many weeks. starting this thursday. XD

(for the record: two of them i found by twitter namesearching; one of them i DID actually get in on time for by virtue of signing up to comedy venue newsletters and getting alerts forwarded to my featurephone; one of them i'd just completed booking after twitter namesearching by the time i got a newsletter alert about it :P)

i should... maybe stop automatically booking in for every gig i hear about him doing that i'm free for now? at least for a bit? XD he is very definitely Back, Babay <3

(i mean, i regret nothing: who knows if i'll even make it to all of them, there's still a goddamn pandemic on; plus, it's a fun mix of venues! one small theatre with allocated seating (FRONT ROW AGAIN, BABAY) and across-the-board Relaxed Performances; one rooftop bar(!) (at least that one will be a little covid-safer); and one of his old haunt comedy clubs that has its own lovely atmosphere/regulars that we attended several livestreams of throughout lockdown times and are genuinely excited to patronise in 3D...)

we watched back one of said early-pando livestreams last night, one from almost exactly two years ago, and it's one where he's going hard on "lockdown is great! i realised all of my stress comes from doing stand-up, and now i can't do it any more! can't wait to come out of lockdown and never do it again!" - and maybe that was the first time we heard him voice sentiments like that, and maybe we thought it was a joke but he certainly doubled down on it in pretty much every livestream/podcast he turned up in after that - and - now here we are, and here he is :D

(i'm not sure how much of the advertised "hecklers welcome" theme will come through in the actual shows, but i STRONGLY suspect that he's trying to do himself some kind of an exposure therapy or something, trying to pre-empt the part he finds stressful - i.e. audiences being dicks - by inviting it, you know, trying to take control of not feeling in control by explicitly "giving up control"... and i am fascinated to see how it plays out... and i also strongly suspect that now that he's invited it, all the audiences will be too polite to do it XD nevertheless i am 100% happy to contribute to his attempts to get himself free - or rather, paid - therapy :P)

(he's also talked on the "oh captain my captain" podcast about not minding audience interruptions when he's doing work-in-progress shows because they're looser, or they're useful feedback, or whatever - it's when he's crafted a tour show to exactly how he wants it and it gets derailed that burns his biscuits - so possibly the whole thing is a red herring for the time being, to be fair)

i've never been to a work-in-progress show before! thursday will be only his... if i've spotted them all/counted right... fifth full WIP hour since his "comeback" began! i get to see how a WIP evolves - if at all - over the course of weeks! my overzealous overanxious efforts eventually paid off! this is going to be a hell of a summer :D

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it's show time

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:56:55 GMT

tonight, for the first time in two years, james acaster is taking to the stage again - three years to the day since i acquired my queer homage wristwatch

by way of some kind of synchronicitous foresightful pre-anniversary i enjoy this very much <3

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the situation, like a pokemon, is evolving

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:35:27 GMT

sat 12th feb: tickets for hecklers welcome at machfest go on sale

sun 13th feb: tickets for hecklers welcome at machfest sell out

tue 22nd feb: i find out about hecklers welcome at machfest, and frantically scour all possible avenues i can think of to try to discover whether this might be part of a bigger run of shows, including checking the listings of every comedy club i can remember james having played in the past, checking his dice.fm profile, and googling various combinations of "james acaster" "hecklers welcome" "work in progress"

wed 23rd feb, 10am: tickets for hecklers welcome at angel comedy go on sale (via dice.fm)

wed 23rd feb, 7pm: i google "james acaster" "hecklers welcome" again in order to remind myself of the machfest deets, and am completely thrown for a loop when the angel comedy deets also appear - already marked as sold out

wed 23rd feb: i frantically sign up to every possible comedy club newsletter i can think of, "follow" james' dice.fm profile (whatever that means), and set up various alerts for various channels where there's half a chance of resales turning up

thu 24th feb: i wake up exhausted and take a mental health day

like, to be clear, that's not the only thing that's been A Lot recently - but - haha, that's funny, isn't it - james quit stand-up because it was giving him anxiety - now him coming back to stand-up is giving me anxiety.

the calculus has changed! two swallows make a summer! he is working up a show! i haven't missed my perhaps only opportunity to see him! i've also missed additional opportunities to see him, but there will surely be more! this is HUGE FUCKING NEWS!!! <3 <3 <3

...aaaaaand i cannot rest until i track some tickets the fuck down o.O

...aaaaaand perhaps not even then. -_-

very, very strange to have heard about the two gigs in such a compressed timescale, and with such inauspicious timing. it gave me the impression of FRENETIC ACTIVITY and more news HAPPENING ALL THE TIME and if i could only maintain CONSTANT HYPERVIGILANCE then surely i could get my foot in some door somewhere. in reality, things are happening quite slowly. i'm full of nervous energy and channelling it into likely-fruitless busywork (setting up an app to send dice emails as texts to my featurephone will surely pay off(!)) and shutting doors after horses have bolted (whoops, if only i'd stayed on that patreon i would have heard about that gig, signing back up to it will surely not be a waste of money(!)) and failing to notice tip-offs through sheer panic-induced failures of reading comprehension.

maybe - probably? eventually? law of averages? - i'll score tickets to A Gig. i'm still not sure it'd be enough for me. i want to go to All The Gigs. i want to go to The First Gig. it's about to happen without me and i'll surely be climbing the walls. what will happen?? will it be The Best Gig??? will it somehow abruptly and catastrophically be The Last Gig???? every gig is different, and i'm going to miss so many of them...

i got very into a completionist special-interest groove during the pando. (easy when your person-of-special-interest is only doing an average of 0 gigs per month, and all of them are livestreamed.) that is... very much not going to be sustainable, now.

come on, brain. this is huge news. this is fantastic news. this is news i honestly didn't think i'd ever hear. if i can just manage to wrap my head around it... maybe it'll turn out i'm not anxious, i'm just excited :P

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i never thought this day would come

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:00:53 GMT

hello i found out that jacaster is doing a 60-min 500-seater WIP at machfest (already sold out, natch) and now i cannot do ANYTHING

jacaster, variously: "i hate stand-up, i'm never doing it again, this is my last tour, stand-up makes me anxious, i need to work out why with my therapist, i'm not going back to it until i've figured out how to mitigate that, or maybe i'll figure out it's just intrinsically bad for me and i'll never go back"

jacaster, 2022: "come and see my new work in progress, it's called Hecklers Welcome"

maybe... he will continue to progress the work... into a full show... and i will some day get to see it? :O

every time i saw james do stand-up - wait, that's a lie - two out of the four times i saw james do stand-up - not a bad hit rate, and the other two times were certainly memorable - it was an absolutely incredible experience... i've been getting by on the fumes of those memories ever since, alternately sad that i might never get to have that again and grateful that i got to have it the times i did... and of course timings meant it all got folded in to the weird sense of pandemic stasis... i am not very good at envisaging a future (hashtag neurodiversity problems) but... but maybe now some sense of possibility is unfurling. things are moving? i can let go of the breath i was holding because another one will come in to take its place.

yes this is way too much importance to attach to a single straight white cis middle-class able-bodied performer, don't be like me kids, but i'm too deep into the parasocial thing to climb out of it now, i'll just ride the waves

plus y'know let's fucking TALK ABOUT his whole difficulty having been with the anxiety and fear of rejection and projected self-criticism and oppositional combativeness of dealing with An Audience and then him being like "hey, let's just face THAT head on, you know i love an asshole filter" XD

(machfest is, of course, by all accounts delightful and unlikely to contain many assholes/heckling comedy noobs, and perhaps his plan is nothing more developed than hanging out with his mates for a crazy weekend and then wandering on stage to chat shit for an hour and then going back to sit around his flat in his pants forever, but. BUT. he could have done that last year, he didn't.[*] he's literally closing the festival in... probably one of its biggest venues?... i think he has more professional pride than that. gonna be watching all relevant mailing lists like a HAWK now.)

[*]eta: wait, maybe he couldn't have, was it cancelled? i wasn't paying attention. he doesn't seem to go every year, at any rate. and you wouldn't specify "work in progress" if it was just one-off nonsense? please let it not be just one-off nonsense.

just to get it out of my system: small moment of silence please for the fact that these tickets went on sale on the 12th and i only just found out about it and i have been - this is how low i have sunk - namesearching james on twitter on a regular basis because it's genuinely the only way to hear about stuff he's doing sometimes, and i'm doing it exhaustively and chronologically but it's such a grind to sift through all the thousands of people independently having the same "hilarious" thought that he looks like a young steve davis etc, and so i'm perpetually a week or two behind - and were i more on top of it i WOULD have heard about the show that way and perhaps i COULD have been in time to buy tickets... but, realistically, it would have been a hell of an undertaking to arrange to go there. fine, i conclude; i will redouble my efforts, catch up that week or two, and make it something i can check in a frequent, painless, timely fashion. if he's coming out of hibernation to any degree, it's worth keeping my ear to the ground.

yes this is not how you should use twitter, don't be like me kids, but you can pry my featurephone from my cold dead hands if you want me to set up push notifications

so. yes. well. fuck? fuck. \o/

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oh, AO3, never change <3

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:25:20 GMT

(except maybe for moving to a proper API with parsable response bodies which is what i came into the devtools tab to try and find)

(it's fine other ppl have hacked together tools to handle them in the meantime)

(why yes i am careening ever closer to becoming the This Guy mentioned in my previous post)

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the true measure of a people's champion

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 10:05:10 GMT

fun taskmaster metagame: for each series, rank the contestants in order of how many fics you think there are in their ao3 character tags, and then check your guesses. play with a friend! hours of fun!

(i got the first two series i attempted BANG ON and every series thereafter was a mild disappointment :P)

no spoilers, but the absolute Taskmaster Monarch of AO3 (for all the series we've checked so far, and frankly i'd be surprised if anyone came higher) is eminently guessable

some series... capture the ficcing imagination WAY less than others o.O

a familiarity with the general vibe of ao3 is an advantage (this is why i am doing better than my partner/enabler :P)

if you wanna get all this guy (and i'm in danger of it), variants include: logged-in vs logged-out; tagged-as-taskmaster-fic-only vs full-character-tag; overall cross-series rankings

posting additional fics purely to adjust the rankings to match your own guesses is a) unsporting but b) impressive commitment (i was surprised to find some of my own fics didn't turn up in certain tags then realised i'd only tagged them as ensemble :P)

make good choices! (i.e. choose to play this game)

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late entry to the acaster/williams venn diagram

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:48:21 GMT

- has been leafblowered in the face on a tv show

the person behind the celebrity is full-on 100% humiliation kink and james did not hesitate to accept the gig: change my mind

(demeaning rules! obedience! disobedience! punishment! talking about someone as though they're not there! putting shameful tweets in their mouth! lingering shots of their awkward discomfort! DID SOMEONE FIND MY AO3 OR)

gotta say, if this is something that some people find humorous and i find titillating, i'm sure not worried that i'm the unreasonable one XD

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big fat quiz of the year 2021

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 17:06:09 GMT

Music round question: "What terrible incident befell Shakira earlier this year?"

Me: "Her hips lied."

Jacaster: "Her hips lied."

Studio audience: [laughter and applause]

I've got previous, too. Surely the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that I'm a comedy genius B)

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james acaster/paul williams venn diagram (middle section)

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 16:13:51 GMT

Taskmaster star

Taskmaster crush

Taskmaster superfan

has released an album that I own

makes a big thing of their small-ass hometown

Extreme Straight Boy Energy

funny teeth

striking eyes

Rose Matafeo

iconic persona outfit

has never worn glasses

is the Alex to someone else's Greg

can't keep their parting straight

their songs get stuck in my head

girlfriend has contributed to their creative work

has "William" in their name

has made art about being broken up with

gormless mouthbreather

skinny twink

delightful smile

uncool person ironically doing cool things

a bit ginger

accent ripe for impressions

special interest podcaster

likes being bullied

sits on the end and is weird

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my type: mouthbreathing twinks

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 15:06:21 GMT

it took me half an episode of taskmaster nz to start crushing on paul williams

i.e., until he got leafblowered in the face with a glassful of cream

do i just crush on anyone who takes slapstick humiliation well? spoilers: yes. although: sad indictment of alex horne, then o.O

my gosh, imagine the time i could have been having over 11 series of slapstick humiliation with an assistant i actually found attractive O.O

i'm so sorry, alex

he's very good and i like him very much! i just... can't get into that aspect of it with him

dammit i'm not ready for another celebrity crush... jacaster's still taking up enough time and energy as it is

plus this would be the first time i ever proper crushed on a celebrity YOUNGER than me o.O which feels like some kind of milestone

one of the episodes had a line about him being "handsome", which then i was like... wait, shit, is that a joke line or is he actually conventionally attractive?? i can never tell?? shit i think he might be conventionally attractive... that's embarrassing... he hides it well enough for it to work for me though :ok-hand:

(must be such a trial, wanting to play low-status when you're conventionally attractive ;) )

welp we've still got a series and a bit left to mainline so i guess i'll enjoy the ride and see what develops...

(and uh yeah this is what the previous entry was about >.<)

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i'm [easy/difficult] to please (delete as applicable)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:01:05 GMT

( vaguely nsfw/tmi )

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signs point to yes

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 10:10:24 GMT

can you be "inspired" to do something by someone who's never actually done that thing themselves? like, trivially, yes you can. is it weird to then tell/thank that person? what would happen if telling/thanking them inspired them to also do it? inspirationception?

as previously discussed, i was partly inspired to learn sign language by how expressive jacaster is in his movements and gestures. would it please him to know that? i suspect probably? after all, one of the themes of psw is delight in the unexpected and frequently unsuspected "connections" that can be created by people releasing art into the world. or would it just weird him out? he has enough issues with fans taking things he didn't intend from his work(/existence) as it is. i think i would probably find it somewhat jarring to be told "hey, you being who you are inspired me to become something you're not".

does it matter to me whether it would please/unsettle him to know that? only really in the context that i remain obsessed with the idea of him having some bsl, and of seeing him sign. and that it would be extremely random to just... ask whether he knows sign language, and marginally less random with the framing of "you look like you might, so much so that you made me want to, and now i do and it's great".

occasionally i attend stuff that has q&as with him and i never know what to ask; wishing i had thought of this before that one that came up a few weeks ago. then again, it probably would have been a terrible question, given that it was a recording for an audio-only podcast.

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today has not been great, HOWEVER:

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 16:20:07 GMT

Stu Mather (producer of Hypothetical) retweeted one of my Hypothetical Twitter shitposts with a positive endorsement! <3

The retweet got absolutely no engagement XD but this is the closest thing I have ever had to a senpai actually noticing me and I can therefore retire from shitposting happy.

(He retweeted it nearly two weeks ago, but I had been stress-avoiding my Twitter notifications ever since attempting to shamefully self-promo it by replying to a Dave post - which is probably how he came to spot it - because I fully expected to get absolutely no engagement and didn't want to face the humiliation. I had genuinely forgotten WHY I'd been stress-avoiding said notifications so when I randomly clicked on them it was a delightful surprise!)

I do not understand Twitter, it scares me, it upsets me, I'm definitely doing it wrong, and I should probably just delete it, BUT. FINALLY. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. someone involved in the making of a thing that I shitposted about ACTUALLY ENJOYED THE SHITPOST. \o/

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on a scale of one to ten...

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 08:25:43 GMT

Finally got around to buying Surf Music (of course) and started listening to it properly. For the full effect, I should really be blasting it through a PA system while loudly having a conversation and huffing liquid nitrogen, but my earbuds will have to do. Which means I can actually make out the lyrics. And Track 3's got me a little bit heartbroken.

She said she wants braces
But you don't need them, girl

Your imperfections are perfect
So don't ever change
If we all had no flaws then we'd all look the same
F them braces
You don't need them, girl

You'll always be pretty
As long as there's love in your heart
And some crooked-arse teeth in your mouth

2019: Jacaster heard that song several hundred times while sat waiting to go on stage.
Also 2019: Jacaster started wearing Invisalign.

Genuinely can't deal with... with... I can't even describe what this is, but whatever it is, boy's sure got a goddamn knack for it.

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hypothetical s3 ep 6

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 18:47:48 GMT

predicted the "i've started so i'll finish" joke; feeling incredibly pleased with myself B)

also, and not for the first time, very much in the market for some phillips/acaster ¬‿¬

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my party piece is the whose line theme, that's another improv show, guess that makes it relevant

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 21:17:10 GMT

This Hypothetical series 3 interview is quite a fun one!

"Harry Hill gave me this Stouffer," [Widdicombe] grins

Well, that's fantastic.

"I don't do sign-offs at the end of each segment anymore," notes Acaster [...] ["]it would always confuse the studio audience."

TCHAH, it confused YOU, more like! The only thing confusing about it for us was when you'd come in late when we'd already started clapping :P RIP sign-offs, I'm genuinely extremely sad they're gone :'(

"(The audience) was 60 people spaced out["]

Hmm, maybe it was. I had in my head Olver had said it was 80. One of us is wrong :P

"Actually, just relaxing and being with people that you want to be with and enjoying yourself isn't actually a bad way of spending your time. Life isn't about getting things done."

Aww, said with the fervour of someone who's only just started to figure that out and has to keep repeating it to convince themself it's true <3

But the main reason I'm bothering to make a post:

"I think the worst way to approach lockdown was this feeling that at the start that you had to be achieving [...] 'I need to learn how to play the saxophone in this or it's a waste of my life'."

Feeling extremely called out by this, because for highly coincidental reasons, I actually DID learn to play the saxophone during lockdown XD

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ships in the night

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 09:59:04 GMT

Yesterday on the phone my mum reminisced about meeting Josh Widdicombe. She came to see me perform at the Edinburgh Fringe several times at the turn of the noughties/teenies, and took in all manner of random acts while she was at it. She reported sitting in a pub in central Edinburgh and Josh coming up to her and flyering her. She told him she had actually just seen him ("as part of some weird stand-up thing - there weren't many people there") and had thought he was very good.

~~(This would explain why there were, to my recollection, no Widdicombe flyers in her hoard - why take the flyer if you'd already seen the show?)~~ (Oh, now that I check, her hoard was 2007-specific and Josh didn't start Fringing until 2008, actually.)

So it sounds fairly likely that she went and saw James' fabled 2009 debut Edinburgh show "Acaster, Helm and Widdicombe"! Because of course she would have. And when pressed, she said, oh, maybe it was that, but she didn't have any memory of James in it - she just remembered Josh was very good. Because of course she would/n't XD

I choose to assume that while this pub conversation was going on, James was also there, standing awkwardly behind Josh, being completely ignored while my mum obliviously showered his co-performer with compliments XD

To be boringly realistic, after some brief research into Josh's Fringe history, it was most likely actually "Comedy Gala 2010" that she saw, because that's a much more likely show title for her to rock up to on spec than "Acaster, Helm and Widdicombe", but nevertheless, the thought entertains me. It could alternatively have been 2010's "Amusements", which I hadn't heard of before, and which was also a collab with James! - that was just the two of them, though, so perhaps less worthy of the descriptor "some weird stand-up thing"...

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Hypothetical s3: This Time it's a Global Pandemic

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 19:00:36 GMT

People I have not been in the same room as since March 2020: my mother, any of my other relatives, all but one of my work colleagues, all but four of my friends.

People I have been in the same room as: James Acaster.

( Read more... )

Crazy times, eh?

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clutching at straw[berry blond]s

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 16:02:37 GMT

apparently there is a "what celebrity do you get told you look like" meme going around

i furrowed my brow at this concept and then remembered one time in school creative writing club when a... clubmate? co-clubber? wrote a haiku about me (i assume this was a mandatory group activity rather than an instance of stalky weirdness) of which the last line was "a female jarvis cocker"... i think this was on the strength of nothing more than my heavy-rimmed glasses? and maybe my bit-ginger-ness? although i don't think of jarvis cocker as ginger? maybe he was once?... it was meant as a compliment though, or at least i took it as one, even if in retrospect it turned out not even the non-jarvis-cocker part was accurate

ANYWAY

i have thought about that haiku a lot since the early 2000s (in my egg days i would always latch eagerly on to any external """confirmation""" of my """mannishness""" e.g. favourable comparisons with actual mans - the day i first came in with my new heavy-rimmed glasses and got compared to vic reeves, of all the gangly eccentrics, was a highlight of the decade). but never before have i thought about it in the context of "wait, who's someone else who keeps getting told they look like jarvis cocker?"

admittedly in that case it's on the strength of more than just their bit-ginger-ness, but... it's nice to be able to claim i have an Air of acaster about me, by transitive property ;)

more pertinently, of course, the last line of a haiku shouldn't have seven syllables.

in fact, as i dredge around in my memory, i become increasingly convinced the full haiku was:

Short ginger hair /
Thick black-rimmed glasses /
A female Jarvis Cocker

...none of which fits the syllable scheme at all. that creative writing club was a joke :P

the aside about vic reeves has actually reminded me that i was so proud of the comparison, having been vaguely aware of and appreciative of him in earlier childhood, that it sort of kickstarted me going "oh yeah, he's a person!" and digging out off-airs of his stuff from our VHS collection to rewatch out of curiosity/egocentricity, which... developed into a full-blown fannish obsession/crush lasting over a year XD it's a bloody wonder i didn't become a hard-core pulp fan after that haiku

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on evolving identities

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 17:13:27 GMT

"female to male" was nowhere near as dramatic a shift as "arnold rimmer to james acaster"

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speaking of lockdown hair

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 17:44:39 GMT

> exclusively revealed at hypothetical s2 recordings: josh widdicombe puts off getting his hair cut until he's filming a tv show, when he asks the makeup person to do it as a favour

> planned first recording date of hypothetical s3: april 9th

> announcement of indefinite postponement of hypothetical s3 recordings: march 20th

> uk goes into lockdown: march 23rd

lads there is a REASON why josh hasn't contributed to matafeo's lockdown hair twitter thread XD he is so fucked :P

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