Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I figured I’d break this entry up a bit since my practise of writing long entries perhaps needs a little curbing. I’ve been thinking it’s necessary for a few weeks now and that last long entry just went spiraling out of control. To be honest, I should think more about structuring entries. I know I originally did this but it became less and less an issue as the months wore on. I often wonder if the reason half my friends can’t stick to a blog is because they subconsciously think that the reams and reams of shite I update with is a necessary requirement for all. Maybe that’s just conceit. Maybe not. Either way I’m aware a little more editing andor drafting might go a long way towards making some of this more readable. That 1500 word entry I did about how terrible the lecturers can be? It was an abridged version. There are times when you want things to be deliberately inaccessible, but this isn’t one of them. Maybe I’ll attempt to tighten the act up a bit.

Incidentally, I’m an fan of the crossover entry. That last update was my day, and you can go and read it from Rachel’s perspective and get the bits I didn’t mention. I was hoping to keep the klingon thing under wraps but I guess the lid’s been blown off it now. There’s a bit in French down the bottom which for some reason, I can read. I can only conclude that my French has somehow improved since I stopped learning it, and thusly I assume that in a few years I’ll be a maths genius.

However, I didn’t segregate this entry purely to talk about entry segregation. Take notice, people, of the date. It’s a magical and mystical abberation of physics and maths combining to provide us with a whole extra day. the 29th of February. Pretty weird when you think about it. Orbital eccentricities and stuff. Starting today, the calendar can only get less accurate for the next 4 years.

Leap years remind me of the strange changes we make for British Summer Time. Nothing’s actually changing in any tangible sense but there’s the illusion of it. An extra day of the year to spend wasting time. It’s a Sunday too, this time. A whole extra sunday to spend not doing stuff, because that’s what we do on Sundays (or rather, don’t do.) I have (possibly had, can’t keep up with who’s still around and who isn’t) a great aunt whose birthday was on the 29th. For anyone interested, the ettiquette tends to be to just celebrate it on the 28th of Feb or the 1st of March, though I dunno, I’d take the opportunity to whine about not having a birthday for 3 years out of every 4 and tell people “It’s just not the same” and then start celebrating on completely random dates because if it’s not going to be the actual date it might as well be any, before getting dragged off and detained under the mental health act.

So yesterday, Friday, I did work on my project. Learning Java while building a program seemed like a difficult taks but so far I’ve been doing it very well. I’ve never programmed anything totally OOP before, but this is. It’s easier than I expected.

Today was another of those pointless jaunts up to Temple Cowley. We spent some time in Matalan getting a refund on a cake tin which disintigrated the day after we bought it and while we were there a bunch of security guards falsely accused an old woman of stealing things. She no doubt felt violated. Cavity searches’ll do that to you.

After that we went to Woolworths. In the shop, a small child was erupting forth with the most bloody and hysterical screams because his parents wouldn’t buy him something, and then because his parents wouldn’t buy him something more expensive. We bought some chocolate and as we left the checkout operator asked us if we wanted a cut-price VHS of Home Alone or Pretty Woman. Ian replied “No, I don’t have a video.” and I thought that it was amusing that he bothered qualifying his denial, so when my chance arose I said “No thanks, my video player was recently stolen.” I later realised I should’ve further elaborated and added “by one of Oxford’s finest crack addicts.” He seemed pretty amused anyway.

We also went to Kwik Save. Ian had never been to a Kwik Save, so it was a real treat for him. I had previously told him of some Kwik Save based exploits of mine (in short, the shop and products were so covered in dirt and stickyness that I just gave up and left the basket of shopping on top of a Freezer, departing for greener pastures. Tescos Uber Alles. ) and he had also gained a passing familiarity from the Somerfield newsletter. Nothing prepared him for the reality though. Bare shelves stacked haphazardly with out of date goods, brands you’ve never heard of masquarading as quality merchandise. Prices that weren’t even especially cheap. Somerfield had a mission statement, Ian told us, so we hypothesised that Kwik Save’s must be “Get the customer what they want, at minimal cost or inconvenience to ourselves.”

We went to some place called the “Oxford Pram Centre” which actually sold toys, because I was wondering what Transformers they had. Unfortunately, when I got there an old woman in a wheelchair had been parked in front of the shelf and we couldn’t wait for her to be moved. It’s incredibly bleak, that situation, abandoned in a children’s toy shop with the last of your dignity failing. Sums up Cowley pretty well.

To round off the excursion to Oxford’s seedier suburbs, we went to the large Tescos. As we approached the underpass of the ring road, a sign attached to the traffic lights read “Judgement Day is Coming,” to which I can only say: Finally!

We bought ourselves some food for tonight. The place was pretty crowded, but it wasn’t until we got to the checkouts when things became worrying. As we sat in the queue waiting for our turn, Nikki pointed out that if you listened to the crowd noise underneath it all there was the constant wailing of children, punctuated by one or two breakout screams. It was like being in baby hell. Suddenly the stress of shopping all clicked for me and it seemed almost claustraphobic. I’m not going to go shoppng on Saturdays from now on, if I can help it.

When we got to the checkout Nikki told me to pack fruit and veg in one bag, dr stuff in another. I was doing well until I got to apple juice, which is clearly fruit, and not dry. Apparantly, though, it counts as dry. After that, I got given canned tomatoes and tomato purée, both of which were clearly fruit. Or so I thought. Wrong again, James. At this point the checkout operator was laughing ta my exasperation. Eventually I recategorised the three bags into “Fresh”, “Frozen” and “Processed” and that seemed to cover the right bases. Another strike for me. (extended metaphor, kids)

Later on, Rachel came over and we had dinner then watched “Being John Malkovich” which Nikki bought on DVD ages ago but we only just watched. It’s a pretty good film, it’s a bit philosophy-lite though. It kind of starts raising big social and philosophical questions but stops short of cutting into the meat of them and shifts the focus to how people ar affected by this weird concept. It’s well-made, due to the direction and acting, it just needed to be a little more challenging to push things over the edge, I would say. Some good jokes though, it’s let down by a pretty predictable ending, I think. Spoilers follow for the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t seen it: I mean, I guessed that the guy would leave John and end up “absorbed” in the new vessel watching his former wife unable to influence actions because they had to have some pretty heavy handed exposition to set it up. I was a little let down by the ending, to be honest, it was the only real bad point of the film.

After that Ian and I dropped Rachel back at her college and had a brief discussion about time travel. It’s not important.

On Wednesday evening I drove back to Oxford. The weather was fine. I decided to take the chance of eating the leftover turkey nan had given me, which I had then neglected and left in the hallway all night. I was mildly worried that it would be infested with bacteria and give me all kinds of food poisoning but a healthy disdain for caution and some extra-heating later, I ate the meat and it was good, and thus far I’ve not suffered any gastric malady. Russian Roulette with cooked meats, does life get any more exciting?

However. Due to a kind of sleep irregularity that occured on Wednesday morning (and, er, afternoon) I managed to get only 4 hours sleep last night before waking up to do a lecture. It was a frustrating time, laying in bed trying to convince my brain to stop working all the while knowing that it would take very little persuasion for me to just read or go back on the PC until I was tired. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation - if I stay in bed, it’s likely I’ll not get to sleep, but if I get up I definitely won’t. So I kind of rolled out of bed at 7:30 and did my best to look like I was awake. The illusion persisted all the way to Wheatley.

Actually, let me whinge about the Wheatley bus ride. I don’t know why, but today on the Wheatley bus there were loads of schoolkids. Year 8 maybe? I would like to persuade anyone reading this that I learnt from them that spraying deoderant liberally on each other is NOT A PLAN FOR THE TOP FLOOR OF A BUS WHEN NO WINDOWS ARE OPEN. Ian and I both arrived independantly at the conclusion that the only way these girls could coax themselves into an acceptable level of slag-ness was to ensure they were surrounded with a fine mist that utterly incapacitated any male within 10 metres. We almost choked on the damn stuff. Then they were doing this weird kind of social hierarchy thing where the chief slagette was whining to no-one in particular “Go and wipe that window for me, I can’t see out of it” whilst roaming freely about the bus. I mean, just DIE already. Wipe your own damn window. Unfortunately, it was way too early for a killing spree.

Even I find it unfortunate when I have to start a day with such metaphorical bile, but the fact that the fucking mist of scented gases was forcing me to gag the literal bile right up, so it seemed appropriate.

But anyway. Our lecture was on “Accessibility”. I’m pretty familiar with the topic, having (*ahem*) made my website in utterly valid XHTML and CSS. It’s totally readable by the relevant applications. Unfortunately, the saga of incompetance continued. We had a big talk on something called “Voice XML” which the lecturer had worked on, and then we got told that it had never actually bee implemented by anyone, and was eventually replaced by something called “Salt” which we were told nothing about save for the fact that Microsoft endorsed it. A prime example of lecturer’s peddling their own brand of crap instead of what’s actually good for us to know.

She also told us about her pet project web browser which she was paid a lot to produce but failed to. Now, I find the idea that (as she said) she hired a bunch of programmers to write something she conceptualised just, deeply offends me somehow. That she doesn’t know how to program but has the idea for something, so she pays people to do it for her… It feels a tad irrational, but I can’t help comparing it to the idea of someone saying “Well, I want to write a song about summer and love, but I don’t know how to write music or lyrics, so I’ll pay people to do it for me and then it’ll be my song at the end of it.” Programming is an art, dammit. I mean, there’s the other side of the coin, like how an architect gets the credit for designing a building when it’s the engineers and builders that actually create the thing, she would be the architect and the programmers the builders, but I dunno… bricklaying is a craft rather than an art. I admit my arguments there aren’t totally well thought out, I suspect they’re influenced by my resentment that this woman is making a career out of telling us stuff that’s blindingly obvious and she’s not even doing it right.

Well, this entry has become a little bitter. It’s not all that bad. However, I may not win many friends with the next bit. Maybe you should skip past this next paragraph if you’re particularly sensitive about the blind or disabled, because .

Now. The web is, for better or worse, inherently multimedia, though it relied primarily on the visual medium. The big problem with accessibility is that it’s unbelievably hard to create a program that can translate the visual into the audible. Soon, it might be illegal for a company to create a website that is not accessible to someone who is blind. Now, I’m not some extreme right wing nutcase, but in this instance I think the organisations for the blind should probably just accept there are some things you can’t do without sight. Until the web is available in braille, I think the emphasis should be on improving screenreaders rather than constraining individual sites to make them available to the disabled. I’m not blaming the blind people themselves, just the organisations pushing for some twisted version of equality that totally fails to account for what, let’s face it, is a disability. Improve screenreaders. Put the research there. Don’t start taking legal action against the government because you can’t figure out how the information in a table is listed on the New Deal site. I’m not saying that the blind are in any way second class citizens, nor that they don’t deserve the same opportunities. Emphatically not. They are humans just like everyone else who have the same rights. I will not be misinterpreted here. It’s more that the organisations representing the disabled are trying to change the wrong thing. It’s like trying to cross a river by diverting the course instead of building a bridge.

Okay, that out the way, let me take the final shot at the accessiblity tool we were shown in the lecture, which has taken the idiotic name of “Bobby.” This helpful site checks through your page and spews out utterly irrelevant messages based on the content of your page. every image and use of colour gets an error message. Let’s be fair here. If the w3C standards are followed, you’ll get an accessible site, and their checking program is actually helpful, in that it’ll point you to an error and often suggest a fix, whereas “Bobby” just about manages to perform the most basic analysis and give you problems so general and superfluous you’d be unable to find the relevant problems on a complex page. Go stick a few URLs in to see how crap it can be, if you’re at all interested. Put something like amazon or hmv in and watch it choke on the barrage of useless errors (every question mark represents an “error.”)

Wow. I haven’t been so passionate about Uni work in years. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong kind of passion.

But still, it hasn’t been all bad. I’ve actually had a pretty good day. We’ve been making homemade muffins recently, which has provided us all with some excellent snackfoods, though this is because Tescos are routinely out of stock of the decent kind. Today, in fact, I went in to find out that the batter mix was out of stock! Damn pancake day bandwagon-jumpers! They just don’t consider who gets caught in the crossfire.

I ended up having a small nap in the evening, which I used to do a lot more but now I have Nikki to, er, protect me from such slothness. Ian managed to sleep for a few hours though, which did him no good, so maybe it’s for the best. I also watched the new Angel, which was an incredibly moving and heartfelt piece of TV that contained the bitter aftertaste of cancellation only because it was so damn good. I can’t believe they killed the program when this is the level of quality it’s showing.

Also today, I posted off a comic to someone on eBay and, finally, received word that the camera had arrived safely with its intended buyer. By god, we’ve had the runaround with this camera, but it’s there now. I also learnt my Angel DVDs are being sent tomorrow. Should be here by Monday, I guess. Excellent news.

And, as if to end the entry on a high note, this morning I woke up to a cheque for £123 from Aqua Pacific. I may not have been able to do the work for them this week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get paid for what I did last month. Fucking excellent. Tomorrow I bank it, and ride the wave of money into next week.

So it turns out that the reason I occasionally end up going on to the M40 at Longbridge, instead of the A46, is because the road markings are incorrect, or at least, unclear. Go in the lane marked, A46, follow it straight down the exit and you end up on the M40 heading towards Birmingham with a confused look on your face and a vague plan of co-ordinating some map-reading in an attempt to find your way back where you were supposed to be. In my limited experience.

On the drive back from Oxford this morning, it rained, pretty badly. I’m starting to suspect there’s some kind of bad-weather deity who lies in wait for me to head out on a long car journey before unleashing the fury. Well, I’m going back to Oxford later today. Do your fucking worst!

I was quite glad to get my comics today, a whole chunk of issues finally caught up with. Also, I grabbed the new Placebo singles, which I have yet to listen to. Went for dinner at Nan’s and sat around there for a bit, then picked Nikki, Jo and Emma up to embark on the previously described failure of orientation. The story ends well, we made it to the gig with loads of time to spare. Because the venue was about an hour late opening the doors. We stood in the cold for a good 45 minutes wondering when someone would take mercy on us. Apparantly, it’s the Upper Room who are to blame for both this, and Paul’s lack of a soundcheck. Yes, as if making music of dubious quality wasn’t enough, their tardiness doing a soundcheck left me in the cold and meant that the first time I saw Paul’s band had to be at a time where the sound was crap. I’m starting to actively resent support bands.

We were opn the guestlist for this gig, courtesy of Glenn. Not the first time it’s happenned, but I’m always glad when it does. I was asked to show ID, so in order to prove I was who I said, I showed him the side of a card which contained a photo of me and a barcode, but no name or birthdate. Not really sure what was going on there, but he seemed unable to disagree with the card. Emma and Jo had to buy their tickets like a pair of regular humans.

So, as previously discussed, Paul’s band, or rather the band Paul is in, “Unreal Coriander” sounded a bit dodgy. The songs themselves were pretty good, certainly lyrically superior to the Upper Room anyway. They started with a cover of Feeling Good, which I would say is a bad choice. I’d say that because I hate the song and their version does it no favours (nor does Muse’s, so they’re in good company) so naturally it’s what I’m going to say. Besides that, they were alright.

We listened to the Upper Room again. I guess I’ll never like them. They were better than the previous time we saw them, but then again it’d be hard to be worse. Much in the style of “Saint Rose”, they’re a support band I’ll only be glad to know are playing a gig I’m going to because it means there can’t be anyone worse in their place.

Easyworld themselves were as good as ever. The crowd wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as at Oxford, and given the sedate nature of the gigs recently that’s saying something. The sound was slightly improved and the venue much cleaner than the Zodiac, and the band were much more “on form” in that they seemed a bit more organised than back last week. The strangest part about this gig was the wafting aroma of fish and chips from the Uni’s recently installed chipshop, “Battered.” I’ve smelt a lot of weird things at gigs before, many of them I’d prefer to forget, but Fish and Chips wasn’t on the list until today. Dav shared some anti-Coventry banter with the crowd as well as making the point Dave Gorman seemed fond of (and thus, I presume all entertainers do when visiting) that Warwick Uni is actually in Coventry, not Warwick.

After easyworld finished, Jo and Emma went home and we hung around talking to Ceri and Ben for a while, and later Glenn and Dav. We learnt, entirely by accident, the real reason why “Dav” isn’t “Dave” which had somehow eluded us until now, and I’m forced to admit it does really make sense. At one point I described how the Stereophonics made me very, very angry and Dav said that while he thought the course laid out by the first album could’ve made them the best band in Britain, by the 4th album it made him want to kill people. So I’m not alone in that. Dunno about “Best Band in Britain” though. Has he not heard 3 Colours Red?!

I dropped Ceri and Ben back to their respective houses, with Nikki and I imparting the (unfortunately tiny) sum of knowledge gained about Uni upon them as we went. I took Nikki home too, and then myself came back to write about the day’s events. Having had this nice short break, tomorrow I go back to Oxford, do some project/coursework and, most importantly, try not to think about the money I’m not making.

Just now, in a fit of IRC-induced luncay (It’s always the way…) Tom, Ian and I made some pancakes. Which, Nikki, if you’re wondering, is why there’s a lone pancake in the kitchen. I have gained three things from the experience:

1. “Monster Crackin’” chocolate sauce does not go well with pancakes.
2. It’s a luxury of studenthood that we can make pancakes at such an hour.
3. There’s a good reason I only eat pancakes about once every 5 years - they’re horrible.

With that wisdom passed on, I’m off to bed. Lent is soon to start, and while I may or may not wax on about the subject in the near future, let it be known that the only thing I ever give up for Lent, is Lent.

This morning, I had to come to a difficult decision. In light of all the work I have, could I afford the money and time necessary to dedicate 3 days to gamestesting and general bumming around home? Unfortunately, the answer was a resounding “no”.

After getting up at some godforsakenly early time, I was relieved to discover that my practical partner wasn’t going to be around for an hour later than usual. A comic then arrived from eBay - Grant Morrisson’s 1995 one-shot “Kill Your Boyfriend”, which I once tried to buy from Amazon maybe 3 years ago to no success.

I eventually got up to Uni for 10, and met up with Ben (Practical partner) and we got our networking project part-way back up to speed. We got kicked out of the room pretty quickly though, because some Ph.d students needed it, and this means I’ve not got to fit a good day’s work in somewhere this week. This, combined with my final year prject which needs work is the reason I’m not going to be able to do osme work this week, which is annoying, partly because I’d already agreed to it, and partly because I really, really need/wanted the money. But fate has conspired against me.

Anyway, I came home and made the phonecall to release me from that commitment. I admit it’s unusual, the day I feel bad about rejecting work, but it’s the only choice I had. Ian and I went to Tescos, and then we made some Chocolate Muffins. They were delicious in every way. We followed the box’s instructions exactly, endorsed as they were by Jane Asher, up until the point where it said “leave Muffins to cool for 30 minutes.” We managed about 10 before eating some slightly gooey warmed muffins, which were pretty good, but to be honest they came into their own once cooled. Not a bad first try in any estimation.

Around now some time, I got around to reading the comic that had been purchased. It turned out to be pretty good, despite the old pre-computer colouring era art. Pretty fast paced and unusual to see an American comic so firmly based in Britain, but it was good stuff. It’s one of those comics that a lot of people would like if they weren’t so quick to reject the medium.

In the evening Tom, Nikki and I watched the Tenacious D DVD through. The memories came flooding back. Soon I’ll have another DVD of a gig I went to (3 Colours Red) which is really going to do much better than any amount of blog entries at reminding me what it was like. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and these are 25 pictures a second. I can’t compete.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading off for easyworld, by way of having a short break before throwing myself headlong into the pile of work I’ve got. I guess I should go post the comic I sold on eBay, too, before that gets too late. And the I’ll maybe get some comics and the new Placebo singles. I guess I’ll find time to update after the gig, but I can’t promise anything.

The weekend has been about as busy as ever. I went to the comic shop again on Saturday, hoping to find a few things worth buying, but it turned out there was just the one, thought to be fair it was one I’ve been waiting for a long time - the first issue of “The Pulse” It’s replacing “Alias” which didn’t so much get cancelled as reach its conclusion. I’m planning on buying it anyway.

I seem to be off the hook buying a whole load of comics recently, it feels like I’ve cut way, way down. That said, let’s see… 1602, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Rising Stars, Secret War, The Pulse, Transformers G1, Transformers: The War Within Vol. 2, Ultimate Spider-Man, New X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and X-Treme X-Men. Interesting. Three of those are limited series, and four of them are close to ending, though XXM will be replaced by Astonishing X-Men, which is going to be written by Joss Whedon so there’s no way I can get out of buying it. Hmm. It also occurs to me I’m waiting for both Daredevil: Target and the Black Cat miniseries to put out new issues. Must be about a year since I saw anything from either, but that’s what you get when you hire Kevin Smith to write comics…

After that, we can pretty much fast forward to this evening. Sure, you miss out a lot of UT2004 games and a marathon game of Solitaire Showdown Si and I had, but it’s pretty much possible to skip all that without feeling like you’ve missed too much. This evening Rachel and Matt came over for a brief dinner and chat before heading off on their respective ways. We did some general ranting at the types of geeks that it’s possible for us to look down on (D&D players; Furries) and Nikki and Rachel looked at Jewellery, the most useless of all accessories. Also turns out Rachel knows someone who actually does LARPing. We had a good laugh at their expense, though it wasn’t quite as malicious as it sounds. It was a laugh of pity.

Now I’m going to bed. Somehow it’s fallen that we have almost an entire project to complete tomorrow for the networking, due to some windows installation/uninstallation fun with our server last week. I got up early especially so I could get a good night’s sleep now, though that’s kind of necessitated me walking around on the verge of a headache for most of the day. It’s the only way I could possibly get up at 7:30am tomorrow, which is the unfortunate truth of the matter. Ah well. If nothing else, maybe I’ll be finished with the networking stuff by quite early tomorrow…

This morning I was woken by good news: Nikki had lost £20. I know it might not sound like good news, but last night I found £20 on the floor and I was thereby freed form the temptation-heavy moral ground of knowing I had someone else’s £20 and no-one else knew squat about it. I’m such a model citizen.

However, the good karma came my way. No sooner had I returned Nikki’s £20 than I was phoned up with the offer of more work from Aqua-Pacific, next week. That’s another £120 I can chalk up to keeping me above the breadline and swimming in new DVDs. Still waiting for those Angel discs though…

After getting up and slowly coming to terms with having agreed to do work next week, I discovered that Tom and Ian were both already awake which kind of threw off the schedule. I was planning on finishing my coursework writeup before they got up, but in the end it turned out for the best because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to write about sodding adaptive menus, so Ian hanging around meant that I could pick his brain, his rich, tasty brain, for information. We drove up to Wheatley (on the way seeing a terribly hideous Honda with a spoiler that appeared to be constructed from strip lights and tinfoil) parked in a Wheatley side road and walked up to the campus. They’ve finally painted yellow lines along the grass verge outside the campus everyone used to park on, meaning that people now use, er, other grass verges instead.

We spent a while wrestling with Delphi 4 to get our programs worked. Apparantly, the latest versions of anything are well beyond the reach of the university, let alone a programming language. I’d estimate we were using 1997’s software on 1998’s OS. We handed the stuff in, despite the network’s frequent tendancy to slow to a snail’s pace every 5 minutes, possibly due to one of those e-mail viruses the university has managed to get infested with recently.

The twist in this tale comes on the way back though - we went not to Tescos, but to the Headington Co-Op. I can tell you’re all blown away. Headington Co-Op used to be a total pit not worth entering for anyone who could buy things without foodstamps. It was pretty much totally torn down and rebuilt, and now it’s almost too good for itself. It has an intranet site to browse products and, near the terminals, some hand washing basins so people about to use the intranet can do so hygenically. And those nice self-service scanning machines destined to replace checkout operators by the year 2025. We got followed around by a nice imposing security guard who we suspect saw Ian’s rucksack and instantly took that to mean we were international drug traffickers on the FBI’s 10-most wanted list. He wasn’t even subtle, keeping roughly half a metre of distance at most. Looking back on it, he was probably a frustrated homosexual aching for male contact. Urgh.

The real incidents never occur inside supermarkets though. At least, not today. When I parked my car, I was forced to squeeze through an incredibly tiny gap due to the utterly incompetant ability of some guy who had parked diagonally across his spot and ruined the modular structure of the parking spaces. It was on a downhill slant, though, and when I got out of the car it seemed to me that either the ground was moving in some unforseen direction, or the car was. I jumped back in and hit the brakes, and reversed it a bit, and put the handbrake back on. The incline was apparantly too steep for my normal level of handbrake-age. I was slightly wary of leaving the car at this point, because, well, no-one especially wants to go into a supermarket when it’s possible their car could quite possibly be crashing through the wall of a nearby business establishment, but after careful observance it seemed to be fine. Besides, there was a bicycle nearby beeping in a suspicious manner and if TV has taught me nothing, it’s that beeping things usually explode…

The high point of today was going to Tescos.

Starting to see a pattern here, anyone?

I exaggerate, really. The high point was possibly finding out tomorrow’s lecture has been cancelled, which opens up my day to possibilities that were otherwise beyond reach. Sleeping until midday, for instance. Or, indeed, sleeping until 1 in the afternoon. The world truly is my oyster. I hesitate to call the lecturers disorganised, but I’ve had about 6 amendments to the coursework that got set, and received notice of the lecture cancellation twice. They clearly need more help operating their computer machines.

This morning I was woken at the unholy hour of 11am by Nikki, who was waving my new Red Dwarf DVDs at me. There’s no better way to wake up than to new DVDs. I’m going to be watcing those in place of Futurama for the next week or so, but after that I’m pretty much stumped. I did just buy half of Angel S3 (Ian bought the other half, but I’ll pay him back later) because I can’t resist it when the DVD sets crop up for under £50. It’s too bargainous. No matter the financial situation, it makes sense to buy them there and then. Though, maybe some of tomorrow’s spare time can be spent putting some of the more superfluous items I own onto eBay…

Speaking of DVDs, there’s a whole bunch of releases coming out in the near future. This year alone, there’s Buffy Series 7, Quantum Leap Series 1, all 3 Invader Zim sets (plus the special edition packaging/bonus disc) and Red Dwarf Series 5. That’s a lot of stuff. No sooner have I completed the Futurama sets than many more DVDs rush to fill their places. Damn my rampant completism!

However, that’s not to say things aren’t going to calm down. The Buffy DVD collection is almost finished, the Angel Collection is more than halfway done, Invader Zim will be finished by the end of this year and Red Dwarf is half done. I’m not even touching the Simpsons for a few years, and hopefully by the time they’re ripe for purchase I’ll be rich and money won’t be an issue. Right.

I think maybe the problem I’m having is that if it’s a bargain now, I reason I’m saving money in the long term, except, in the long term all I’m doing is piling bargain upon bargain. Luckily my plan to pay off the credit card is going much better than it did before Christmas, not least because the futility of paying off £14 and then receiving £7 interest finally got through to me.

On the other hand, I successfully saved £6 by downloading “Lost in Translation” instead of going to the cinema. Had intended to, but just couldn’t find the time. There’s always the possibility that I’ll end up buying the DVD based on this though, which means a potential net loss to me of about £12. See how DVD addiction can get you in the hole? Luckily, I’ve avoided signing up to confirmed scam merchants “Britannia” who, as both Ian and Rob found out, will try and send you ever DVD that gets released and would then attempt to make you pay through your very arteries, if they thought they could get away with it.

I can’t pretend it’s all DVDs though. There’s been an abundance of gigs in the recent months, a phenomenon that appears likely to fizzle out around April sometime. I used to think that because i didn’t drink I actually saved a lot of money that students would otherwise spend, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe if I did drink I wouldn’t have to spend so much money on Comics, DVDs and gigs to entertain myself… Anyway, with that logical conundrum, I’ll leave to seek out further forms of entertainment on the internet. They’re around here somewhere, I’m sure of it.

Today’s Easyworld gig falls on the 3rd Anniversary (+ 1 day) of our first ever easyworld gig, which took place on the 16th of February, 2001, at the Coventry Coliseum. And they’re STILL PLAYING JUNKIES. Jesus christ. Have mercy, people.

For this gig, Ian expressed an interest in coming, mainly due to the fact that he’s been hearing Nikki rave about Easyworld for around 2 years or so. He seemed to enjoy it as much as anyone can enjoy the piano-heavy sets, but it allowed us to explain the whole gig-going culture and etiquette to him, so that was fun.

For some very strange reason, there was a huge queue. It was incredibly long, for an Easyworld gig. We were just facing a terrible wait when Nikky, who had come to Oxford for the occasion, appeared and allowed us to cut into the queue with her. She introduced us to her friend, and showed us some photos of Josh which had been double exposed with a party in the park, leading to some excellent pictures of Josh the Benevolent Deity of Rock casting a watchful eye over the crowd, and one particularly amusing photo of a 150 ft high disembodied Josh Head gazing translucently out from the stage. The queue was moving incredibly slowly (thanks to the ticketless venue system which, frankly, requires more work) and we got rained on a bit, but eventually made it inside.

The first band were called “Dive Dive”. They were pretty good, as far as support bands go. We spent a lot of time making sure Ian understood that “support bands are normally pretty crap, so don’t exect to like them” but it was a nice surprise in that they were about as good as support bands come. I’d have bought a single if there’d been any there, which is about the best praise I can give.

Lickily, our damnment of all things support band was justified by the second act. “The Upper Room” they called themselves, with a blatant disregard for venues containing a upper room. I can imagine many a comedy situation where someone tries to explain that the BAND called The Upper Room is playing the upper room. This isn’t where the comedic potential for the band ends though, my god no. You know when a band is so bad it’s funny? That was them. I’d say that you get two types of crap support acts, the ones that just make an offensive din, and the ones that are hilariously incompetent. The guy couldn’t sing, the music wasn’t terrible (but nothing great) and the lyrics were tremendously prosaic, which is what made me laugh. The songs all seemed to go along the lines of “I phoned you/and you wouldn’t speak to me/then I went to the shops/and bought a cup of tea” and that’s not even a huge exaggeration (especially, unfortunately, the rhyming…) I guess they’ll be supporting at Warwick and ULU too. I know my assessment of them might sound harsh, so, to present a few alternative opinions: When I turned around to see what Tom thought, he was laughing at them, as was Ian, and I’m not sure of his past gig-going (if any) but they weren’t exactly up against much of a frame of reference and he still thought they were hilariously bad. When they finished their 3rd song, Nikki ran over from the place she was standing to tell us she thought they were terrible. To show I’m not biased, Fishy said they were “Okay” and the guy standing in front of us who smelt strange was dancing along to their medicore crap, so not everyone’s as brutal as me.

After that, Easyworld came onstage. I say “after”, there was quite a long wait in between, but we shan’t concern ourselves with talk of it. To be honest, I didn’t think they were entirely on form. They sounded as good as they ever are, but it seemed slightly more shambolic than usual, which I attribute to being the first date of a new tour. The set was about the same as the last tour, with Junkies and Demons thrown in for good measure, in place of Don’t Expect You to Notice and Stain. I think I preferred the last tour’s set, since it didn’t contain two of my most hated Easyworld songs. I admit they fit better with the new stuff though. I swear people were singing along with Til the Day, which was just…weird. I’ve heard it live quite a few times, but suddenly the whole crowd knows it. It’s the only way I can connect the chart positions with the live performances. There was an encore, apparantly unplanned, of You & Me. Dav sang a portion of Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body” which was the first time I’ve seen them play that as the cover in the middle of it. It sounded really good done on guitars, and Dav sang it really well. They should clearly be sticking it on as a B-Side. They would be if I had anything to say about it. The crowd was really jumping for You & Me too, which along with the Til the Day singalong implies a mix of old and new fans. This bodes well for Future Opxford gigs too, in contrast with the last time they came to the Zodiac, the place was packed and the fans enthusiastic.

So that was it. First gig on a new tour. Warwick is next, one week hence, where Paul will be supporting. The the ULU gig about a month after. Much gentle head-nodding fun yet to be had.