he is a pitiless man, double tough and fear don't enter into his thinkin'

Another year begins - well, it begins two weeks ago, but I'm not one to rush things as anyone who's been following my progress drawing their scripts can attest. Better late than never, I am back to the bloggy grind for the new year, and the first post is of course the obligatory new year resolutions I shall probably fail to live up to:
1 - Put on weight. The exact opposite never seems to work out particularly well.
2 - Drink more - because the alternative is a losing battle thanks to my family tree and genetic heritage of dead, reformed, and 'working on dead' alcoholics. A lot of alcoholics, it must be said, but they all have a valid excuse because being catholic in Northern Ireland - especially in the 70s and 80s - there wasn't a whole pile of self-pity or feelings of persecution so the mass consumption of alcohol until their body started to kill them undoubtedly seemed a great way to redress the balance. Anyway, instead of fearing the beast I shall master it, though to be honest I'm spending more money than I'd like and I'm only consuming an average of two pints a day - to be perfectly honest I'd like an early night already.
3 - Watch the video for Holy Diver more often than is healthy. I have never been a Dio fan even though I have long been a follower of Black Sabbath, but it seems this was my loss as his brand of borderline-parody metal is pure entertainment, and until I come across something in his oeuvre as good, I shall be playing catch-up by watching what looks suspiciously like Freddie Mercury's dad acting out a scene from Hawk the Slayer to a metal song that could not be more 1980s if it had a perm.

4 - Skip meat until July. I used to be a full veggie but got tired of a hostile reaction if it ever came up in conversation, so I went back to eating flesh. Never did understand why telling someone I was veggie engendered hostility, as my reason back then wasn't animal welfare or anything noble or militant, I just didn't like the taste much - apart from bacon sandwiches. Anyone who does not like bacon sandwiches is clearly insane.
5 - Engage with more bear-related media projects. Last year's quota of ursine-instigated murder-based entertainment was disappointingly slim, so this year I have resolved to counter this unfortunate trend as best I can through creating some myself or consuming entertainment of a bear-related nature. Unfortunately this means at some point I shall pay money to see the film Yogi Bear for the sake of seeing through my ambitions to their conclusion.
6 - Be less of a prick. I always fail at this one, but feel making the effort is important.
7 - A page a day. I'm a terrible organiser, but feel it's time I started to act professional about the comicy stuff given that it's actually going somewhere at last, and a reasonable page rate for any working professional is a page a day.
8 - Get a job. It's been too long since I had full-time employment so I figure it's time to fly in the face of all reason and try to find a job in my hometown that does not involve the processing of dead flesh for human consumption. I haven't had good work experiences but I gather this is a universal thing, and while my last 'proper' boss short-changed my final wage packet by several hundred pounds, it's probably worth it as I can say in a legally defensible manner that Kieron Hughes, proprietor of Hughes Glazing (Cookstown) is a liar, a cheat and a welsher.
9 - Get more hits for the blog so the above statement is the first result every time someone Googles "Hughes Glazing Cookstown". This one's self-explanatory, though possibly means I have already failed resolution #6.
10 - Learn an instrument. Because bass guitar does not really count.
11 - Learn a language. I have no idea why I haven't got around to doing this already given how much anime I have watched in my lifetime, but I figure it's a handy bit of CV-padding if nothing else.

And that's it from me for today. Back to posting cryptic panels from my ongoing projects and screen grabs of Vista fucking with my shit as of tomorrow, but I do hope you've had a jolly christmas and a stress-free new year thus far and will stick around for my rambling and latterly libelous blog posts.

BRB!