http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx_GzNlQOxI

There are a few reasons why this isn’t my cup of Lapsang Souchong, but here’s the biggest:

The conceit of having the thing that’s on your mobile phone actually with you is sooooooooooooooooooo fucking old.

Here’s how old: I made an ad with that idea in 2000, and when I was making it we heard that a team from DDB was making a similar ad for a different mobile company.

That was thirteen years ago.

Thirteen.

Thir-fucking-teen.

It was played out before 9/11, before Lord of the Rings, before Jedward.

In all fairness, it has been done brilliantly since:

But it’s also been done really badly, as recently as last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLmZMwPoCg

So as far as I’m concerned, it’s time to put this thing to bed.

Or flush it down the toilet.

Or stab it through the heart with a spike made of frozen excrement.

I was speaking to a copywriter recently and he explained that he had a nickname for the regular demands for a Grrr/Cog/Balls/Gorilla.

He called it Grrrballs.

When I were a lad and all round here were fields it was Tangounexpected (doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so well, but whatevs). Every client wanted a Tango or a Dunlop Unexpected (more a Tango to be fair. It was much more famous than Unexpected) and whether you were being briefed on Sugar Puffs or Pirelli the planners and client wanted to let you know how high they were setting the bar.

Almost always that’s not what they wanted. Most of them just wanted to look as if they were after a big, famous ad, so they pointed to the most topical one. But in those instances it was like the owner of Doncaster Rovers pointing to a great Arsenal game and asking for that kind of performance. None of the necessary factors were in place, so it was never going to happen.

But should we condemn the client who wants an ad way out of his league? I suppose it’s better than the client who goes straight for the crap, and in shooting for the moon you might hit the stars they really want. Then again, creatives are never keen on bashing their heads against a brick wall, and false hope can be pretty tedious.

Then there are the ones who actually mean it. They really do want a Grrrballs.

Few and far between, but most welcome.

Clutch them to your trembling bosom and never let them go.

Orson Welles explains how to gamble (thanks, T).

I don’t know what to say about Winny Puhh (thanks, J):

Why The Walking Dead and Toy Story are basically the same (thanks, G).

Celebrities photoshopped to look like ordinary people (thanks, P).

Beautiful movie moment portraits (thanks, T).

Best burglar of all time (thanks, J):

The greatest films of all time and their 1-star IMDB reviews (thanks, J).

Thug Kitchen (thanks, J).

Great design + great TV = … (thanks, M).

Most ironic things ever (thanks, J).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o4vPyGY0SSc

The basic visuals are the same every time (really good looking food during the cooking process), but each is beautifully different.

Great campaign.

On Twitter today a CD friend of mine said that ‘still in the mix’ actually means ‘no one is taking that idea seriously anymore’.

Nice.

Others:

It is what it is = It is shit

The director’s working on a movie = He’s watching Jeremy Kyle but he doesn’t like your script

Can we see how it works in digital? = We’d like it to die

We haven’t heard back yet = Dead

Interesting (1) = Pretty good

Interesting (2) = shit

Keep going = I hate what you’ve done so far

Can we get more time on this? = Your work smells of poo

Any others?

I think people fear reinvention. We prefer the devil we know even if parts of that preference mean we might be less happy or less able to realise our most prized ambitions. Reinvention requires work, insecurity, all the uncomfortable sensations and thoughts you experience when you have to start all over again.

And yet it’s one of the greatest keys to success. Look at the careers of obvious serial reinventors, such as Bowie, Jagger or Madonna. But then look at the people who were seen in one pigeonhole and then broke out of it to become even more brilliant in another one.

There’s Peter Jackson, whose early films looked like this:

Or The Evil Dead’s Sam Raimi, who went on to direct slightly more mainstream fare such as this:

What about Steve Jobs? From tech whiz to movie mogul. Alan Sugar? Businessman to football chairman to TV star. Justin Timberlake? Boyband twat to credible musician and actor. Robin Williams? Mork to Oscar-winner etc.

It’s entirely understandable that making the decision to reinvent puts the willies up some people, but when you consider how well it can work out and how exciting it can be, the upsides can often outweigh the downs. High-flying women who want to be mums, then businesswomen etc; creatives who go into management; people who leave the rat race to sell organic cheese… You don’t have to put on a conical bra and have sex with Vanilla Ice. You can just go off in a different direction and see if you like it.

A while ago I did a career course with an ex-CD called Patrick Collister. He showed us a graph that explained how the most successful people actually leave their jobs when they are at their peak then go on to find another. I suppose that’s because it puts you in the strongest position for a move (as opposed to waiting till you’ve spent a few years on the down slope), but I think it’s also because you feel in control of your life. If you wait until you’ve failed then you’ll feel as if circumstances have forced you into being someone you don’t want to be. If you make the decision then you empower yourself.

So whatever you’re doing now, there are many other options, including every other way of spending your time in the universe (not including certain athletic pursuits that may have been rendered impossibly by your age or the way you have hitherto treated your body).

Alan Watts explains the best way to live your life (thanks, D):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L_cGjQSR80

The Beach Boys shred ‘I Get Around’ (thanks, T):

The most beautiful bookshop in the world.

American colour photos from the 30s and 40s look not unlike today (thanks, R).

Amazing photorealistic oil paintings.

And pictures made by injecting paint into bubble wrap (thanks, L).

Michael Owen is such a massive cock (watch till the end):

Drawing johnsons in video games (thanks, J).

Weirdly angry Mail Online commenters (thanks, T).

My anus is relaxed (thanks, T):

Movie Mainframe Madness (thanks, J):

Rap quotes:

Winning a karate match the Russian way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7nU4bG5uT4&feature=player_embedded

Actresses without teeth (thanks, J).

Strangely addictive eelslap.com (thanks, J).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PvgM6z12bQU

It’s the new Spotify ad from Droga 5.

For my part, I think it’s fine.

It doesn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I can’t help thinking that if all you have to do is sell music as a positive thing then you could probably come up with something better than this.

But y’know, it’s fine.

A recent commenter wanted some advice on how to write a book. Now, I’m no Jeffrey Archer, but I have indeed managed to marshal 100,000 words into a story that was published in a series of pieces of paper, which means I’m qualified to explain how I did it.

Let’s make the explanation more palatable by configuring it as a list:

1. Have a strong idea. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s fair to say that plenty of people start off with nothing more than a rough concept or situation that they might be able to squeeze a plot out of. If that’s what you’ve got I think you’re going to be in trouble. Create a plot that can be reduced to a couple of sentences and it will concentrate your thinking and make it much easier to answer the essential question, ‘What’s it about?’. You will be asked that a lot, so come up with a good answer at the start and you won’t go wrong.

2. Writing a novel is an enormous amount of hard work (if you enjoy doing it you might not consider it to be ‘work’, but it will still require many hours of writing and revising), so if you’re under the impression that writing 100,000 words is going to be difficult, think again: you’re going to be writing closer to 500,000, or even a million if your book’s going to be any good. You will write a first draft then a second, then a third, then if you’re me, another 40 or so. And by ‘writing a draft’ I mean reading your novel (yet again. That’s another thing – you’re going to read your novel many, many times if you want it to be good, so write something you’re going to enjoy or you’ll never finish it), making changes, perhaps making more substantial changes and reading it again to make sure the changes work in the context of the whole thing. If they don’t you’ll be reading/writing/reading again. There’s an old saying: writing is rewriting. It’s very true.

3. You have to make sure all 100,000 words work perfectly. You may have read my novel, and you may or may not like it, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that it doesn’t work. By that I mean that the characters are consistent, the plot makes sense within its own world/rules, it has a beginning, a middle and an end and, most importantly of all, it makes you want to turn the page (at least a bit). That last point is the most important of all: the only responsibility of the author is to make the reader want to turn the page. Everything else is immaterial. Without the turn of the page the great ideas, the crackling sentences and the intricately symmetrical plot might as well be used loo roll.

4. I think there are two kinds of novelist: the ones that write 300 perfect words a day, and the ones who write 3000 shit ones. Most of us are the latter. The first ones think and revise as they go, which slows momentum and can lead to paralysis of insecurity, but I suppose if you’re good enough then why not do that? The rest of us just get any old shite down (at least for the first draft) to maintain the flow of the plot. Then we repair all the clichéd metaphors and tortuous sentences during the revision process.

5. You might want to think of it like this: you have the central idea (the skeleton) and as you write you keep adding flesh. A scene-by-scene synopsis might be the muscles, a more detailed version of that could be the sinews etc. until you have every necessary sentence written and a proper working body (or corpse, depending on how successful you have been). If you think your hero is going to arrive at the police station and cross the road to the bank you’re going to have to know what car he drives, how he drives it, what time of day he pulls up, whether or not there are any other cars around, when he speaks, what he says, who he says it to, what the reply might be etc. This is why it takes a while.

6. Try to write every day. If you don’t the trail goes increasingly cold until you have to re-read everything you’ve written and then you get caught up in a spaghetti junction of changing things before you move on. Before you know it you’ve spent three days writing nothing. Also, you won’t get to 100,000 words by doing it every now and again. There have been times when I’ve managed 10,000 words in three days, and others where I’ve done nothing for a couple of weeks. While the iron is hot, strike.

7. You will make it up as you go along. You might have the broad outline, or even a tight outline, but as in the car example above, you have no idea what every single single scene will look like. If you’re anything like me you might start with no exact idea of the ending and let the story have a life of its own (I could never work out the second half of Instinct until I gave it a go. Actually, that’s a whole point of its own. 7.5: the way to cure writer’s block is by writing. Go on, write any old shit. It’s much easier to repair something than it is to create a perfect series of bons mots with which to fill a page). Even if you do know your ending you might well find you arrive there via an unexpected route, or arrive somewhere else entirely. Go with the flow.

8. Ignore all the above if you like. There are no hard and fast rules. That’s just the way I’ve done it. If that helps you then great. If not, find your own way.

9. I think that’s it. Any questions?

UPDATE: a tip from Chuck Palahniuk.