Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It occurs to me that out of all the times I’ve bothered to answer the Friday Five, I’ve never actually liked to it. I’ll stick it on the links bar in a moment, anyhow.

1. What do you most want to be remembered for?
Mostly, I want to be remembered for being the best example of a human being ever to have existed and for inspiring a religious cult based around the idea of my eventual resurrection and ascent into godhood. Unfortunately, that kind of thing seems unlike as at now 20 years old, I have yet to perform a single miracle or generate any disciples. With that in mind, I don’t really care if I’m remembered or not. I’d like to have a book published, because presumably that’s a pretty close way to get achieve practical immortality, especially given the fact that digital copies will exist, but then it’s a matter of actually being a good writer, so who knows? Scratch all that. I want, above all else, to be remembered for being the only human not to die.

2. What quotation best fits your outlook on life?
I could apply so many. “Come on, the guy looks like a date rapist!” being the most obvious. Hehe, no, I just kid. Erm. Of all the quotations I can think of, the most applicable is probably from Calvin & Hobbes, and goes:

“I should be doing my homework now. But the way I see it, playing in the snow is a lot more important. Out here I’m learning skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life - procrastinating and rationalizing.”

There’s the ever-popular alternative, of course: “Life sucks and then you die.” I don’t know who said that but it’s quite astute at times. I’m not sure I can apply any one quotation to my outlook. Generally, I think that everyone knows what the right thing to do is in any given situation (though sometimes you can trick yourself into thinking you don’t) and that if you don’t do it you have to accept the repurcussions. I often tell people I have no regrets, or at least very few, because I’m confident that every choice I’ve made has been the right one, which makes me sound arrogant at times, but it’s true.

3. What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?
Okay, I don’t really achieve a lot in the specific sense. I haven’t conquered a fear of insects or painted works or art, nor have I contributed to society in any more than a general way, if that. My biggest achievements this year are probably just getting into some kind of proper existance away from home and Uni halls, and (hopefully) making Nikki happy, which is pretty much what I spend my time doing. If she’s happy, I am, and that’s enough of an achievement for me.

4. What about the past ten years?
The same as above probably applies. Other notable moves include passing my driving test, getting in to Uni and, er, well I haven’t done a lot else. I am only 20, the past decade pretty much included very little of note, besides the usual being a teenager stuff. Without trying to get too Disney about it, my biggest achievement is the have become who I am and to know what I know.

Honourable mentions, of course, go to completing my Placebo collection, collecting my comics, and owning complete TV series’ on CD\DVD. I’m a completist sucker for the procurement of intellectual property. I am not defined by my possessions, but I am inexplicably linked with them.

5. If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?
I would say “Little kid, you shouldn’t be speaking to strangers.”

Okay, I have a real one now. I would say: “Understand yourself, your reasons and your motivations, listen to your educators, but know when to ignore them. Don’t think you have all the answers, but make certain you knw what the questions are. Expect the best, prepare for the worst, and don’t be afraid to ignore what’s cool if you think it’s stupid.” Okay, that’s several pieces of advice, and a kid probably wouldn’t understand them, but it’s those general concepts that have made me who I am today. That is, a lazy, underachieving geek.

Maybe I’ll rethink that advice.

Today, while sitting in the park, I discovered something that I’ve been looking for since I was a young boy, knee high to a grasshopper (That’s an unusual turn of phrase actually. I guess the point is that grasshopper’s knees are actually pretty high up given the average ratio for the animal kingdom tends to make you assume that your knees are lower than your head. Oops. Tangent.) Erm. Yes. I sat down in the park and was, as ever, idly ripping up grass and staring at the ground for my next piece of flora to destroy, when I saw this:

Now, I don’t know if it’s apparant or not from this picture, but this is an actual four leaf clover. Not a shamrock, not a 3 leaf clover with one leaf ripped in half, or even a five leaf clover with one leaf missing. It is an actual example of a clover with 4 leaves. I was quite chuffed to discover this, especially in such an unassuming way. I picked it, brought it back home and put it in this bag, and now I’m pressing it in the hope that it will bring fortitude and joy to my life (okay, okay, it’s just a dead weed. I know. It’ll maybe make a good anecdote one day.)

Now all I need is my copy of the Breakfast Club soundtrack on vinyl to keep it inside. (That’s a Futurama reference, for anyone looking horribly confused)

Oh yeah, I forgot to say. Yesterday, while we were watching Big Brother, one of the guys (the oldish indian style gent) was going on about hos his high powered executive friends had told not to use his fruity business language in the house. He was saying, in response to that, “I know how to communicate! I can talk to someone who earns not very much, and I can talk to someone who earns six figure sums I know how to communicate.”

Emphasis mine, of course. I just found it hilarious that his implication is that someone who didn’t earn as much as him would be automatically stupider. On the other hand, he’s a complete fucking geek, going on and on about Star Wars. I recall him saying something like “Han Solo is an important figure in the galaxy…” So with that in mind, it’s hard to persecute him too much.

So, what’s up in the ever-exciting life of James Hunt?

Yesterday Nikki had to go to a Uni Council meeting. I was interested to see what actually goes on in them, so I tagged along. Here is my report back:

First we sat and stared blankly while some woman read out a long list of stuff, until we got to the funding requests. At this point, people would present their case as to how much money they wanted to the Chair (that is, woman at the front, though an actual chair would’ve had as much impact on the proceedings as her) and then a vote would be made as to whether the funding application passed at this stage.

The average request goes along the lines of:
“We want £400 so that we can organise a culturally significant gathering whereby we will celebrate our country’s history in the traditional manner, to allow our countrymen to feel at home, so far away from their native land. Then we’ll take everyone down the pub. We need the money for a few rounds of drinks.”

Yesterday the European Business Society wanted to organise the staging of a tradition that originates in North Germany, whereby everyone goes on a walk, stopping every 5 minutes or so to play a game and have some Schnapps. They then proceeded to explain that the walk would end at the pub so that they could have some food and, you guessed it, buy everyone a round of drinks.

So people ask for their funding and then everyone votes “yes” for it and that’s that. Occasionally, people will ask for stupid funding or to create a dumb society, but people want everyone else to vote for their thing so they won’t not vote for another’s for fear of repurcussions. This is how we end up with the “Rugby Appreciation Society” and the “Rugby Social Society”, whereby the first is so people can get money to get drunk and watch Rugby, and the second is so people who watch Rugby can get money to get drunk.

Tom and I recently worked out that with a proper front you could launder significant monies and fund a substantial drug habit, at the Uni’s expense. It’s almost worth trying.

On Monday, it was a Bank Holiday, so yet another of my already sparse lectures didn’t occur. Nikki and I went round the “Cultural Arts Fair” that had set up in South Park, which was made up of a group of Chinese people in traditional garb, A guy dressed as a Cowboy, and the local Scout Troupe running a tombola, all the while with songs from Oliver! played over megaphones and some horrific commentating being done by the local Hospital Radio station. That’s the “Cultural Arts” bit. After that we wondered around the actual fair, which was filled with many bootleg toys (Disney might be interested to know that you can put a red jacket on any yellow bear and pretend it’s “Winnie the Pooh”, according to the Carnies) and almost as bizarrely, a hoopla game where you could win such prizes as a packet of cigarettes or a 4-pack of beer.

After that we sat in the park and did some people watching and dodged frisbees. Most amusingly, two guys spent the best part of 2 hours trying to get their stunt kite in the air and, in front of everyone, failed miserably and eventually went home. There was also an african guy who had brought his Bongos, and what appeared to be the OBU Hackey-Sack society, which I had assumed up until now was merely a front for dope smokers and didn’t actually exist.

And that’s been my week so far.

Just got in from the Radiohead gig. Admittedly, I didn’t mention that I was going recently, but I’ve had a fucking terrible cold and as such I haven’t felt like blogging about things. I’m just about up to the task now though, so hopefully things will remain as coherant and entertaining as they ever are.

Paul and his sister eventually found the place (having had the usual Oxford-based traffic problems) and we sat around a bit, then went off to catch the Oxford Tube. Normally the journey is pretty uneventful, but we had, a seat or two away from us, a group of individuals who were pontificating and philosophising about Maths and the Physical Universe. (”The problem is, we don’t have to words to describe this point in space-time.” “A hypersphere would connect to itself in infinite directions” and the like). Clearly, it was an attempt by one of the males to lure the (unfortunately, totally impressed) female into an unsuspecting “Physical” liason of their own. When we left the Bus, some random italian\spaniard\generic european asked us if a) We knew where the venue was, and b) How much could he expect to pay for a ticket. Clearly he was prepared.

The gig itself was great. It was nice to see Radiohead again. The new album has grown on me like a fungal infection recently so I was quite pleased to see the songs played live, together with some oldies. Of course, we can guage how much of a Radiohead fan I was by the fact that my favourite two of the songs played were “Like Spinning Plates” and Thom’s solo acoustic “True Love Waits”. And, if seeing them fuck up “Airbag” in South Park wasn’t good enough, Thom forgot the first line to TLW and had to ask the audience, and then managed to forget another line a few into the song, leading to much collected mirth. It’s moments like that which make me realise how tight and professional Radiohead are.

I think I’ll ask for my money back…

Anyway. Besides gigging and being ill, we (Nikki, Tom and I) also watched the Eurovision. While it was nice to see that all the war-mongering of late has reduced the UK’s position in Europe to “dead last” (and naturally, having a shit entry didn’t help) it was disappointing to see that everyone’s favourite Russian Lesbians, Tatu, were relegated to a third place standing overall.

Another symptom of my lack of bloggage recently, is the horribly addictive Crimsonland. I beat Tetris, I reached my peak on Super Collapse, I gave up on Scrabble (my brain can’t compare to a computer able to match permutations of hundreds of thousands of words from its database. Not all the time.) and now I’m hammering away at Crimsonland. I haven’t determined at what point I’ll decide I’ve beaten it into the ground, but rest assured it’s not going away anytime soon. Download it at your own risk.

And that’s about it. As interesting as ever, I’m sure. Perhaps I’ll get around to that Buffy essay I keep threatening to do at some point soon.

“Machete”

Which Dawn of The Dead Zombie Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Well, that wasn’t bad. I admit being a little underwhelmed, as many people have feared the special effects the Matrix pioneered have failed to look as impressive the second time around. Whenever things started going slowly, I wanted them to speed up. And the huge car chase everyone was gushing over actually turned out to be a bit rubbish. I’m not a big car chase fan though, so I suspect that’s my bias. Overally, the action scenes didn’t impress.

I was a lot happier with the storyline though, some very good things were added to the Matrix mythology. I’m not fully convinced by this film that the sequel was actually necessary, but I reserve full judgement for after Film number 3, which could either redeem the trilogy, or send it straight into the crapper. At this point, things could go either way. Which is ironic, for a film that was essentially about the illusion of choice. Fittingly, the choice has already been made ;-)

As I was doing the Matrix quix, I couldn’t help but notice this popup. It is, for anyone not willing to click on it, a highly unconvincing console window.

Clearly it echoes the spirit of those highly unconvincing dialog boxes which actually seem to fool a depressingly large amount of people (”Your computer is currently broadcasting an internet IP address!”) Presumably, the belief is that the average computer user will become numb with fear at the sight of a DOS box and become compelled to read it as they wonder what the hell’s going on. Even I double-taked wondering where the hell it had come from.

Of course, it makes a number of fatal flaws. As Paul noted, the command prompt wouldn’t actually include the trailing slash, and, oh yes, IT HAS A DIRTY GREAT “OK” BUTTON PASTED HAPHAZARDLY ONTO IT! Jesus christ. I’m almost of the mind that anyone fooled by that deserves their fate.

In preparation to go and see The Matrix 2 later today, I’m going to watched “The Matrix” in a bit. In the meantime, I celebrate this day of cinematic moment by doing a “Which Matrix Character are you?” quiz. I can’t say I’m upset with the results:

You are Neo, from “The Matrix.” You display
a perfect fusion of heroism and compassion.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Woah.

One of the main problems with tests, of course, is that they fuck up my l33t XHTML skillz if I just cut and paste the code. You wouldn’t belive the kind of surgery that’s sometimes necessary to make this shit valid…

Today Nikki and I trekked around Oxford to find some stuff to make her T-Shirt in preparation for the Radiohead gig on Sunday, and she used the stuff she bought to take this photo, and e-mailed me it to cheer me up:

Sorry to go all mushy on you, the reading public, but things like this make me feel lucky to love her.

I promise, no future updates will be as sickeningly saccharine as this ;-)