Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Well, I have to be honest. I consider hallowe’en a bit boring these days. Last year we did the novel thing of carving a pumpkin but it was kind of retro and cool because it was our first hallowe’en away from home. This year we just didn’t answer the door to unsolicited trick and/or treaters. Humbug!

This morning I had my first lie in for what seems like weeks, but is actually only 5 days. Nikki went off into town so I finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth and still had ample time to do the housework (in a manly, manly fashion.) and tidy up before a brief comic-shop excursion. I got the new issue of “Stupid Comics” by Jim Mahfood because I can’t get enough of ‘em, and I got issue 7 of “Dork” just because it looked pretty good. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet though.

I look forward tomorrow to starting a new book. I’m undecided as to what to go with, I suspect I might break into some of the Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe before I start on 20,000 Leagues. If 20′000 leagues is as good as Journey though, I’ll look at getting more Verne. Of all the books I’ve read since beginning my speculative fiction spree, Journey was one of the more enjoyable. An excellent read on many levels, even if it does seem to cop out a bit at the ending. I’m thinking, having read The Divine Comedy, that I should have a read of some more classical literature. Something Greek, perhaps? I’ll get to that later though, I’m enjoying the comparatively light style of all the books I’ve got at the moment and I’d rather not go to something as taxingjust yet.

Sometime between getting my comics and eating dinner, Nikki, Tom, Ian and I went to the large Tescos, mainly because I needed more petroleum. We had a pretty uneventful shopping-based experience until the final aisle, when we discovered that all the “Dairy Milk Mint” bars had been split open and broken, by the undereducated denizens of the surrounding Oxford locality, I’m sure. Either that or a sign from god. Ordinarily I’d be appalled but the Dairy Milk Mint isn’t half as good as to near-identical “Mint Crisp” and I’m willing to fight it out with anyone who claims otherwise, so yeah, I wasn’t too upset that they had been made unsellable.

With Hallowe’en gone, however, the stage is now set for all kinds of Christmas-based fun. It’s not like it’s tomorrow or anything, but the various supermarkets around here have been bestowing us with Season’s Greetings for a good two weeks now. Tom and I believe it’s some kind of plot to phase out Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes’ Night entirely and replace it with a single 3-month long Christmas period (or ‘Winterval’).

Speaking of the festive period, the other day I decided it was time to get a replacement monitor. Of course, being a stingebag student with little money anyway, I decided to get it for Christmas. I can wait 8 weeks or so. This monitor is getting on a bit and seems to have a broken green channel or something. It’s getting steadily darker such that I have to employ all kinds of colour correction and gamma modification software to keep things viewable. It also makes playing games a difficult affair, since the applications don’t always work, especially with DOS. Hence all the online games I’ve been playing, really. The most recent of these games is “Shade” - a really stunning example of a text adventure that shows what can be done with the medium. It starts off straightforward enough but it quickly becomes an intensely interesting and well-written piece of gaming. Makes me long for the days of text-adventures all over again.

Haha! Today I did my Maths coursework and it was indeed, very easy. Not too sure about some of the stuff but I’m expecting a B+ at least for this piece, if not an A. I hope time doesn’t prove me wrong. Tomorrow I have to hand in the coursework. Let’s see if I can’t make the fucking bus stop this time.

Today Nikki bought a stack of albums. I can’t say I’m too bothered about the Magnet or British Sea Power ones, but MC Honky = teh good. Some of you who are Relly might notice where she’s taking her musical influences from these days ;-) Speaking of music, I’m still torn as to whether to see The Mars Volta. I was resigned to not going because they were sold out, and I was just accepting that when I saw that the Sunday still has tickets, so now I don’t know what to think. Josh says he might come, Tom would probably be on board. There’s at least two people I could drag along given that Nikki isn’t really into them. So soon after Dave Gorman it is, but I realised today I don’t have any gigs lined up and that’s a good excuse for one. I shall ponder the matter.

Yesterday I started reading Verne’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. It’s actually a lot funnier than I recall, the main guys are totally comedic, I laugh every other page. It has to be intentional though, and I’m enjoying it a lot. I was actually a bit intimidated at the prospect of reading a full-length novel having read loads of shortish stories recently, since Dorian Grey, because my attention span can wander during longer books, but Verne is so engaging I’m flying through it. If 20,000 Leagues is as good as this, I may seek out more Verne.

I suppose I should give Quad a quick mention before I finish this entry, too. It’s like Tetris without gravity, and it’s bloody addictive, especially since there’s a scoreboard. I haven’t broken the top 100 yet, but give me time…

Well, I didn’t think mondays could get much worse, but god dammit if I didn’t top last week’s debacle. This week, the monday started when I set my alarm but neglected to set the clock properly. Resultantly, I was woken up in the morning by a horrendous piercing bleep approximately an hour before I had intended. Still, that’s a little better than late I suppose. After this, I slept until my normal time, got up, and as the four of us ambled over south park, I cursed the coldness of the day.

Then something happenned that I had long anticipated. Across in the distance, where road and park meet, we saw the Bus. Quick mental calculations ensued. “WE’LL NEVER MAKE IT!” doomsaid Ian. But it was too late, for the rest of us had taken flight across the solidified ground of South Park. Ice-ripped lungs and tear-strained eyes did little to prevent our advance, over the park, out of the gate, and across the road before collapsing in the bus doors mere seconds before it would have left. I can only imagine the spectacle of the four of us amused many a bus-rider. It’s a personal best, actually, to run at that time of the morning, on an empty stomach, in the cold. Inspired by necessity. Hmm. A good life philosophy if ever there was one.

As the nausea of such unplanned exercise slowly descended upon me I spent the rest of the journey propped against the offensively small seats of Wheatley Bus, my back cricked and my chest burning hotter than any non-smoking person’s lungs probably should. And what was all this for? A very crap lecture on networking. God help me.

The remainder of Monday was much more pleasantly sedate. I continued to convert Ian to the cause of Roast Dinners Uber Alles and from Tescos, I took a chance on a frozen pack of Part-Boned Chicken Fillets, because the price of Meat is expensive these days. They were excellent though, £5.50 for 7 works out much cheaper than fresh chicken, I’ll say that much. Around 8:30-ish, Nikki dispatched me to collect Rachel from her college because it’s getting to cold for her to cycle, which is fair enough, and if I can stop one more person from exercising my work is done. We all sat around watching Mastermind and complaining about how stupid the categories were getting (The Monty Python person beat the Civil War person. Wonder why..) and then watched University Challenge. There are two basic misconceptions about University Challenge we discovered were almost universally (no pun intended) held by us all as a child - The First is that we nearly all thought the teams actually were stacked above each other, rather than, as it would seem, on either side of, due to the composite shot they use, and the Second is that we all kind of thought that one day we would get to University and be as smart as the people on University Challenge. Wrong. Tom suggested they hold a “real” University Challenge where all contestants are taken from the lower percentile of grades and the actual Challenge is to make people turn up to the Quiz, let alone win it.

This morning George, Ian and I all made the terrible mistake of going to Wheatley to try and find Dr. Bob CHAMPION! but he didn’t seem to be around so we left without signatures, god dammit. I guess I have to wake up early on Thursday now too, or something equally annoying.

Well, it’s getting pretty cold. I mean in a kind of “my fingers are siezing up” way too, so given that I don’t have much more material I’m going to abandon this and find something slightly warmer to do. And there’s always Coursework. In fact, Maths needs to be in this Thursday, so maybe I’ll attack it now, which is what I keep saying but never doing…

As I write this, I am about to embark upon a time-travel mission the likes of which have not been attempted for almost a whole year now. Who knows if, when I hurtle back through time, I shall arrive on the other end. If I do though, you can be sure I’ll do a blog update letting everyone know about my safe return to the timeline. I’ll try not to cause an apoalyptic paradox by preventing my own birth but I can’t promise anything.

Wow. Amazing stuff, this time-travel. I suddenly have a second chance to live this hour over. To alter the future that the people of today might have the benefit of knowledge of the people a bit later than today. To put right that which once went wrong.

Well..

This time, I’m going to spend the hour asleep.

Since I’ve spent most of the last 2 days fiddling with computers, I’ve had little time to update. While I have a gap though, I thought I’d make a quick record of what I’ve actually been doing so that I don’t come to forget it, which might sound stupid, but believe me it will happen.

2 nights ago, Nikki and I went to see LoEG. It wasn’t half as bad as people could claim, though obviously it was nowhere near the standard of the comic. In fact, as we left the cinema two guys who were dissecting the film said something like “Ah, you can’t blame [the filmmakers] for the plot though, they took it from the comic.” and I felt like turning round and correcting them. The plot of the movie and comic bear no less than a passing resemblance. To blame the comic for the incomprehensibilities is the worst thing that anyone could possibly do. Of course, I don’t actually care enough to engage in conversation with someone I’ve never even met, so they’ll just have to carry that misconception to their graves. Still, not at all the worst film I’ve seen this year. I’d put it better than Underworld, that’s for certain, at least this was funny.

Going to the cinema, we noticed that suddenly the weather has turned bitterly cold. It improved a bit since a few weeks ago but it’s now worse than ever. Amusingly, this means that all the wasps which I have spectacularly failed to mention are infesting the house are all seriously dying. For weeks we’ve had lethargic and dying wasps kind of crawl around the kitchen floor, mostly devoid of the power of flight. They’ve provided some amusement, of course, we torture them before sending them to their dooms, be it by mid-air tea-towel interception, drowning in chicken fat or just chucking them outside to freeze. Wasps aside, I’ve decided there will be no complaining about cold weather. I prefer it to the heat. I DO.

The next day, after a protracted sleep-session, I started the Invisible Man. It’s only short, so I thought I’d give myself a break before launching immediately into a huge Verne novel. I finished it today, in fact, and it was ultimately quite good. HG Wells seems to write exceedingly small chapters though, they frequently were less than 3 pages. His chapter breaks were pretty strange too, one continuous scene often spanned several chapters. The most interesting part of the book, for me, was just that it actually made you believe that invisibility would be a curse rather than a blessing. The pseudo-science was fun too, though it probably wouldn’t be used today. Something that certainly would be used today is the turn of phrase “I worked like a nigger.” I’m glad the attitudes have changed, but there’s something really funny about such racism being so brash and, considering that similar attitudes popped up in Doyle’s books, so accepted an attitude. They’d have probably got on well in the police.

The rest of yesterday was spent formatting and installing my Hard Drive. This is my first update from a completely clean windows installation. I’ve already started filling it with shit, of course, but for now it’s unsullied. I’m currently formatting Nikki’s hard drive and getting all that ready for her new windows installation. Shouldn’t be long now.

Yesterday evening, Rachel came over and had dinner with Nikki and Tom, and then all of us, with Ian, took advantage of an only slightly blurred picture to watch HIGNFY and Jonothan Ross, with an episode of Red Dwarf DVD in betwixt. I have very few plans left for the day, mostly just bringing the PC back up to speed. I should probably do some maths coursework this week too, given that it has to be in on Thursday..

Well, the new hard drives go here on the projected date. Later today or tomorrow I shall be installing said drives and beginning the brain-numbing task of an all-new, all-different windows installation.

Today I skipped Discrete Maths because it was entirely about “Eularian Trails” and “Hamiltonian Cycles”, both of which I’ve been well aware of for many years now. Instead, I went up to Uni and got my project form signed. I was looking for the room “DM37″ and spent a good 15 minutes walking up and down the Darcy building trying to figure out the numbering system. Eventually, I found the room I was after, through a side door, down a corridor, right, left, through some doors which initially appeared to be maintainance doors, up some stairs and then into a small cupboard which turned out to be a huge office. I swear sometimes, this Uni exists in part in a completely different dimension, externally the building doesn’t even seem to have 2 floors. I keep expecting to open a door and find a snowy wonderland inside, or perhaps Dr. Who relaxing with his robotic dog.

Just after I got back, David and I kind of dealt with some kind of electricity-board based imposter. I’m not entirely sure what he was after but between his accent and gibberish talk of “upgrading the meter to a new tariff” and whatnot I have a slight belief that he is in fact trying to forcibly convert us to another company. The bastard.

Following this, I decided to put the day to use and finished off “The Land of Mist”. I can’t say I was that impressed by it, to be honest. It became boring whenever Challenger wasn’t involved in the action, and could have probably benefitted from being made shorter. Also, it was a little too obviously influenced by Doyle’s apparant infatuation with “spiritualism” during the time of writing it. Anyway, that’s all the Challenger stuff out the way, I asmit I lost a bit of steam towards the end of it, but now I’m back on track and I believe I’ll read some Jules Verne next. Fittingly, tonight Nicola and I are going to see LoEG, which should be cool.

Today nothing exciting happened.

EXCEPT!

I cracked an egg when cooking, and it had TWO yolks. My food tasted better than ever before. These mystical two-yolk eggs are surely the food of kings. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime chance for glory. I am reminded of the time I got a solid chocolate Malteaser. There’s nothing like an unexpected change in routine.

Perhaps coming tomorrow: Triple-Yolked Eggs? Solid chocolate Twixes? All the old rules no longer apply..

I would’ve updated yesterday, but I’ll be honest. I didn’t have a great morning and it seemed a bit too close to reflect on. Yesterday I got up in the early hours as is customary for a Monday, had a nice morning chat with Nikki and inadvertantly set myself about 5 minutes late getting ready. I rushed about in a kind of sub-conscious haze such as those I have documented in previous weeks, I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say as I began my icy trek towards the bus stop, my fate was long sealed.

As we sat on the Wheatley bus, I noticed my bag was open. This meant I had not closed it. Neurons fired and a chain of electrochemical reactions cascaded through my brain. I had not closed my bag. Therefore I had not touched it since last night, other than to pick it up. This meant I had not put anything in, and specifically, not my Networking homework. And this is how I found myself sitting on the top floor of the Wheatley bus, resting a borrowed pad of paper on my knee, doing my homework from memory. For the first time since we got them, the new buses actually benefitted me, because the old ones were so juddery that any coherant writing would’ve been impossible, but with the new ones, it was easily within my abilities.

After that, I had 3 hours of the most mind-numbing networking crap ever. I was going to whinge about how horrible it was but I can’t even begin to talk about the pointlessness of the whole exercise. Instead I’m going to skip ahead to Monday night and the excellent watching of Kill Bill. Nikki and I went to see it with Si, Matt, Rach, Ian, George, Tom and various other connected people, and the universal view was that yes, it fucking rules. There’s so much to say but so little is criticism or analysis, it was simply just very cool. Pretty much my one problem with the film? It was too short. I could’ve watched more, but they cut it up and won’t release the rest until bloody February. Ah well.

Today I did many productive things, including getting up before Midday and getting council tax certificates. This morning we went to Wheatley and got our Computing Projects on track. Bob Champion (Both by name and nature, I feel) pointed us in the right direction, so when I came home I write out an e-mail to, and just received one back from Hazel Peperell. All signs point to “good” because she concurs that my precitive/adaptive text messaging idea is sound and that I should come discuss it, so I’ll e-mail her tomorrow and say “Yes, I shall come in on Thursday for some form-signing fun.” or words to that effect.

This evening, Rachel came over and the five of us watched that BBC police documentary thing. It was quite horrific. Obviously there’s a clear bias being portrayed but the fact remains, even if this is not a completely representative sample, it’s hard not to think that the police are much better than the criminals themselves. I never had much faith in the police, specifically, but I’d say it’s currently at an all-time low. There aws also a general feeling between ourselves that the policemen who got caught be racist are all idiots, since the guy seemed to entrap them all by just dropping into conversation something like “So, what would you do if a black person was in a car?” or “Hey, how is your new assignment? I hear you guys are all pretty prejudiced against asians there. Any comments?” I can’t wait to see the fallout from this, I’m even considering going to buy the Mail and see what their spin on it is. I’m predicting that they’ll probably have a big page dedicated to either ignoring it entirely, or about the evil crimes committed by minorities. There was also one ethnic officer referred to in the program who I’m guessing they’ll perhaps target and dig up dirt on about how much of a victim he is not..

An entertaining weekend, to be sure. Saturday was strangely sunday-esque. I had little to do until the evening, and besides a short excursion by Nicola and myself to the comic shop, I got nothing done really, until the evening, which was, of course, the Rock of Travolta gig.

I’ll do things chronologically, but I’ll forewarn anyone who doesn’t already know that the real climax to this collection of anecdotes occurs somewhere around the middle. Despite the attendant somehow managing to completely miss branding me with UV ink, there was little problem entering. We almost got all 4 of us on 3 tickets, but us kind of realising what was going on too late to stop from saying it meant that they caught us out and the 4th ticket was paid for.

The first band was called “The Evenings”. The music itself wasn’t bad, kind of space-art rock. Lyricless, of course. The real problems with the band lay in 2 main areas. The first of these areas was the ludicrous inclusion of a “conductor” who, to keep the reference point on the same intellectual level, was essentially Bez in tails. He danced around like an idiot and informed the crowd that their drummer was new and to forgive him. Way to draw attention to an otherwise competent drummer. The wrong kind of attention. The second area was far more horrific. I cringed at it, I’m sure everyone did, and despite Tom’s vocal objection we later described it as “too obviously trying to be post-modern”. What happened was that a guy joined the band on stage and ripped up a newspaper. At various junctures people in the 8-strong (or something) band who weren’t necessary to play would read bit of it and the ripping guy would occasionally chuck them over people onstage. At the climax of their set, they chucked said paper into the audience. Can you feel that? That’s ART, kiddies.

Luckily, their unfortunately obvious expression was diluted when they had to come and clean all the shredded newspaper up.

And now, the second band. They’re called “Smilex”, presumably after the gas from “Batman: The Movie” that made you laugh until you died. Would that the members of this band had followed the effects of their namesake…

The frontman of Smilex was, make no mistake, a cunt. Unfortunately my opinion was reduced slightly when he requested that we all call him a cunt, so I upgraded him to “sophomoric and inadequate nothing” which is a new insult I had to invent entirely for the occasion. The music of Smilex was certainly not much to write home about. I accept it is probably technically competent, but it seemed a bit crap to me, and the lyrics/singing of the frontman made little sense anyway, so I wasn’t really enjoying it. Neither was I alone, since practically no positive response was received from the crowd, who remained totally still besides the members of the previous support band, who did some goodwill jumping and stuff.

At one point, and this is where things get good, the guy was running around the empty area in front of the stage and he stuck his microphone between Tom’s knees and pretended to be fellating him. Tom told us later that he was too shocked and drunk at the time to have much of a response beyond the “Jesus Christ.” I saw him utter. After the fact, I leant over and suggested over the music that he should’ve kneed him in the face, so imagine my bemusement when a minute or two later, he tried the same thing on me. I’m relatively certain we were singled out for ridicule because, as a rule, Tom and I can look particularly sour faced even when we’re having fun, let alone when we’re watching shit. So anyway, try, if you will, to empathise with my delight when I did in fact manage, after 20 god damn minutes of this band’s shit music, to knee the guy in the face. Not as hard as I will next time, that’s for certain, but it was enough to make him stand up and shout something unintelligible at me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no homophobe and the act of implied homosexuality did little to upset me in itself, but if there’s anything I dislike it’s forced participation and personal ridicule, and this was clearly an example of both. The moral of this story is, well, I forget if there’s any specific moral. Don’t let me knee you in the face, I guess. Or don’t go see Smilex if you haven’t got a hammer on your person. You’re free to choose either.

Anyway, despite this chicanery and foolishness, The ‘Rock were excellent. They played most of their new album and a couple from the old, I was most please to see Giant Robo performed live, and obviously, “Everything’s Opened Up” was another high point. There’s nothing much else I can say really, it was a great experience. Hardly moshing music, to be fair, so I just stood and listened, which in the absence of any obvious moshing effort, is how I like to enjoy things. I’ll save my rant on how this seems to confuse other people for another time because I don’t want to taint the excellent live memory of the Rock of Travolta.

After the gig, we came back here and Ian joined us for late-night socialising, which culminated with the five of us sitting on the one bed having agreed to watch Nikki’s new copy of Requiem for a Dream. It’s a pretty depressing film, really. Much like The Evenings, it tries too hard to be art to actually be excellent, but it’s on the right side of good. No happy endings though, just amputation and electroshock therapy, and while I tried my best to argue that having sex for heroin wasn’t actually a bad position to be in, I suspect it wasn’t the prevailing opinion. After the film, Nikki and I drove Rachel back to her college and went to bed. Actually, we drove ourselves back first, then went to bed. Much like I am about to do now, because tomorrow brings the promise of a good 7 hours at Uni. It’s not that I can’t handle it on about 4 hours sleep, but to be fair, I really really don’t want to. So I’m off.