The beginning.

So I've started a blog. Thanks for the advice Mathew.

Right now I have a problem. This problem is one that most geeks and indeed most people will experience at one time or another. Money. Not every geek is Bill Gates and most of us have to make do with meagre scrapings from minimum wage jobs to keep us in comics, cult movies and videogames until we find that amazing golden goose of an ideal job. So I'm poor, largely to do with the large credit card bills and minimum-wage-job hopping.

Currently, to alleviate the situation I chose to settle into a job as a chef in a new restaurant in the West End of Glasgow. Its a very trendy bar/restaurant affair with a menu comprising of brunch, the ubiquitous sandwich and soup combinations, some tapas, a crazy vegetarian, uber-healthy salad, and the usual selection of steaks, burgers and a fish curry thrown in for good measure. The slightly over-ambitious nature of the menu is complemented by the ludicrously tiny kitchen which make service anything but easy unless one's setup is perfect. Here we discover that I am, at least in part, one of those very annoying types of geek, a food geek.

Allow me to explain, food geeks, I mean proper food geeks, are a special breed of geeks. They comprise, mainly of chefs of an above average skill level, who believe that their culinary talents elevate them to a god-like status as far as food matters are concerned. In other words, we are a bunch of snobby know-it-alls who like nothing better than eating good food and criticising it in the minutest detail. The only sort of person who is worse than a food geek is a restaurant critic. Food geeks can be found in the kitchens of pretentious bars and restaurants in the parts of towns where rich, trendy and quaint all meet to form and environment so wanky and pretentious if it were a person it would form some sort of perverse ouroboros loop with its head firmly and decidedly lodged up its arse. Everywhere you see a menu item accompanied by a herb jus of a soup named after some exotic region of the world then there is bound to be a food geek in the kitchen. Anyway, enough of that nonsense.

I should have used my powers for good but I became a chef by pure accident. Here I was looking for a summer job while I was at university and thought, "I could be a dishwasher".Next thing I know I'm throwing together sandwiches and piling salads high enough to rival the Empire State Building. A pasta here, thai curry there and next thing you know I'm working full-time at an award winning restaurant whilst trying to finish my final year at university. It could only end in tears. And it almost did. One year and almost £20,000 worth of debt have pinned me to a life of sevitude until I can pay penance for my sins and rejoin normal life. One day perhaps I will look back on this moment fondly and say, "Ah, those were the days". Probably though, I'll be thanking whatever lucky stars that have shone upon me that I'm not in a bloody kitchen any more.

Anyway, back to the point. The point of my blog is to discuss my various geeky interests with anyone who is unfortunate enough to read this blog. I'll probably end up talking rubbish about the latest storyline in Punisher or complaining about the price of the latest high-end graphics card. But hopefully I might just say something interesting every once-in-a-while.

Welcome to my world. I'll pass out the Koolaid at the end. You first.