every little thing she does is cabbage

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/

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/

Gang! GANG! Do I have a good one for you today!

I spent my entire teens home-taping pop songs off the radio; I have maybe 60 of those 90-minute cassettes, ten or fifteen songs crammed onto each side, dating between 1999 and ?2006, a mix of current hits and (more and more as I got older and more into Radio 2) whatever classics happened to get played. I moved to more of a digital-walkman-based system around 2010, and although I always kept my cassette walkman and a small selection of tapes with me, I haven't touched it in, god, at least five years.

Recently I was prompted to retrieve my entire set of home-taped cassettes from the family home (in their lovely purpose-built case with the slidey drawers and the little cassette-sized slots). I thought, well, I don't want to chuck these away, but if I've got to have them cluttering up the house, I should probably actually make use of them, at some point?

And yesterday I got a song in my head, one I really love (Lovestruck, by Madness) and realised I only possess in analogue format. I don't hold with streaming services, you see; maybe I could rip the digital audio from somewhere on YouTube, but by the time I'd done that, well, I could just as quickly have resurrected my old audio cassette setup...

- Which cassette was it on, then? Check my little notebook with its handwritten alphabetical system of listings (also, fortunately, safely retrieved from the family home). Seconds later, we have the answer: cassette number 7, from 1999 itself...
- Find the cassette in the case, first of all ripping off the parcel tape I'd stuck over the drawers for transit.
- Does my cassette player that I haven't touched for aeons still work? Yes, it looks like it does! Need some more charge in those batteries, though...
- Do my rechargeable AAs that I bought in 2012 and have barely used in years still charge? Yes, they do! And enough to power a cassette player at appropriate speed and volume, no less!
- The final hurdle: how the fuck do I carry this thing so that I can listen to it while cycling? Turns out, it fits perfectly in my shirt breast pocket (much as, I imagine, a stylophone would...) (actually, my housemate has a stylophone... maybe I'll try that when I get home :P)

Deliberately I didn't check the tracklisting (neatly written out, with numbering, on the sleeve that comes in the cassette case). What I enjoy about shuffle is not knowing what's coming next; also, in this situation, I'm going to have to listen to everything in the order it comes without skipping (I could fast-forward, but that would be very awkward while cycling), and I don't want to know there's a run of utter garbage on the way and lose the will to power through it. This is only cassette number 7, after all, back when I was still newly bewitched by the Top 40 and its Stockholm-syndrome-like power of repetition and familiarity; it's probably full of throwaway pop shit that "oh, I love it so much, I can't bear to not record it, what if I never hear it again!". Isn't it?

Five songs in and... oh dear... I might be making one of these posts twice a day for the next 180 days XD

1) Should I Stay Or Should I Go - The Clash
Well! That's a pleasingly solid start! 11-or-12-year-old-me had taste :D

2) ?The Whole Of My Universe - ?
THIS is a real mystery. Sounds pretty indie, sort of Beck-ish; I do remember it, and remember liking it, and writing it down with satisfaction in the tracklisting when I managed to capture it; I couldn't remember the artist (though I think they might have been relative unknowns), and I left the sleeve at home, but I assumed I'd be able to search-engine it from the lyrics fairly quickly, because we live in the future now. But... nope! Not a thing! Very odd... I shall investigate further and update you once I'm able to check the tracklisting...

3) Dance The Night Away - The Mavericks
I... had absolutely forgotten that my gran quite liked The Mavericks, and our tastes intersected at this particular song which had got a lot of airplay, and I think I, unusually, recorded this song onto this cassette from an album of theirs that she owned! (This theory would be borne out by it actually having the full outro, rather than being abruptly cut off where a DJ started talking over it...) Her cassette player, marvel of marvels, had two decks, so you could do reel-to-reel recording with it; I coveted it greatly, and occasionally took advantage of visits to do little projects like this. Oh, bless her. I'd forgotten all about that.

4) Feel Good - Phats and Small
I know that this is what it is and who it's by, because Zoë Ball triumphantly announces it just at the end of the recording. I must have decided to keep it in because she timed it so neatly. This was the only thing about this song that was worthy of noting.

5) Love's Got A Hold On My Heart - Steps
You know what? This is actually bloody good. I was never particularly a Steps fan, but neither did I particularly deride them, and as a sort of low-rent ABBA, they really do the job. Heartfelt soaring vocals! Tasty chord progressions! A beat perfect for striding from the cycle park to the office! This is what cheese is all about - it's overblown, and it's manufactured, but we humans are simple creatures and we respond to the by-the-numbers tugs on our emotions nonetheless. Embrace it, and it feels triumphant. XD

Currently undertaking the sudden huge and stressful task of clearing out my childhood home, inhabited by hoarders for 32 years! (Nobody died or anything, just... stuff happened.) I have a filthy cold, the boiler has finally given up the ghost, the thermometer is showing 13 degrees... all great stuff.

Among the tat, however, was a bag of 'souvenirs' from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2007. I performed there in the first of several very enjoyable student shows, and my parents, bless them, were very proud and travelled all the way up to see me (and have their own first ever general Fringe jag). And they were such devoted fans incompetents at managing paperwork that they kept every single magazine, review paper, ticket, flyer, brochure etc they picked up there in a safe place box under the stairs!

Annoyingly, of course, Jacaster didn't do a Fringe until 2008, and didn't do a proper show with actual listings and flyers and things until 2009 - if only my parents' Fringe mania had still been as strong the next two years I went up (they did go, I just don't think they'll have kept All The Things). Even so, I spent a pleasant Britcom timewarp hour looking at photos of Tiny Not-Very-Famous David Docherty et al, AND, making it all worthwhile, I found:



THAT'S RIGHT! Now, whose Britcom day can I make by sending them a genuine, original, mint condition flyer for the grammatically-irritating 2007 Durham Revue show 'Adventure Fantastique', POSSIBLY handed to my own mother or father by Actual Ed Gamble or Actual Nish Kumar themselves?!

Better quality photos of this exist elsewhere, but I was amused by the very small, very faint print at the bottom reading 'Smirnoff is the sponsor of the Underbelly and not of any of the shows performing there'.

My camera is terrible and the back of the flyer is pretty boring but have it anyway.



I will genuinely post this to anyone who wants it hard enough. I'm not enough of a Gamble or Kumar stan to be fussed about keeping it for myself, but I would love for some joy to come out of my parents' ridiculous lifestyle choices.

Either way, I very much enjoyed coming full circle like that, finding a Relic of Great Cultural Importance to current-me improbably retained from a time when past-me had no idea any of this was even happening. :)

(Oh, and it really brought home how much these guys are Of My Generation. At the same time I was up at the Fringe with a sketch show from my first year at A Prestigious University, Gamble and Kumar were also up at the Fringe with a sketch show from their... third? second? year at A Different Prestigious University. SO WEIRD, MAN.)

pro tip: if you are crying in a bathroom and you need to stop crying and leave the bathroom, sing kettering town fc under your breath until you have, in fact, stopped crying

(it's something external to focus on and it's just about the right length ime)

(this is both a darkly-comic joke post and a genuine recommendation)

dropped a fanwork, now i have fanwork-drop.

('drop' being a term i know from kink circles, e.g. 'top drop' or 'sub drop', for the sort of emotional 'hangover' you get after an intense scene)

i made a fanvid! i posted it to twitter! i didn't have a twitter before, therefore i am Nobody, and inevitably the vid has gone Nowhere! (except for being interacted with by britcomcom friends and i am obviously very happy about that <3)

so yes it is all a bit anticlimactic, and although i am 100% satisfied with what i have created, and glad that it now exists in the world, i... well, am kind of sad it isn't existing a bit harder.

(aaaand beating myself up for not Doing Twitter Right, as if that would have helped when i am only one profile pic up from being an egg, but, like, 'if only i'd used more hashtags!' 'if only i'd realised video previews don't display on mobile!' <- that one's the killer, really.)

gonna also post it to places where people will actually find it and care in due course, so this is kind of like a weird pointless limbo-y Limited Release, but that means i'm getting all of the 'huh what do i do with my life now that's done' and not very much of the buoying validation.

all right fine my reasoning being IT IS NOT UNHEARD OF FOR JACASTER TO RETWEET FANSTUFF PEOPLE @ AT HIM, okay, it is overoptimistic but not totally pie-in-the-sky to think he might, and once internet shit takes on a life of its own it is very hard to control, and the last thing i would want would be for it to end up leading him on a trail back to the ao3 tag. lasterer even than sitting here feeling like a twat for getting my hopes up.

ah well. it's a damn good fanwork, and i stand by that.

I'M GOING TO SEE JAMES ACASTER FILM SOMETHING TOMORROW

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

GONNA SEE MAH BOI

never been so excited to take a train to hackney

(anyone else going?? i'll be the one scarfing a burrito in the queue :P)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA that is all