Diary of an up and coming sociopath

This morning was surprisingly, er, absent. I woke up when Nikki got home, at 2 in the afternoon. Even on my worst days this term, I’ve managed better than that almost exclusively, so I’m blaming this specific experience on the clocks realigning themselves. I was pleasantly surprised, though, when it turned out to be an actual WARM day. Wow. It only took a few days into BST and suddenly I can go outside in just a T-Shirt. Nikki and I walked to Tescos, went to the newsagent and poked about in Polar Bear for a while, all without it feeling cold at all. While in Polar Bear, I picked up another free magazine thing. They used to have “VICE” but it doesn’t seem to turn up anymore. I may or may not try and get it elsewhere, because I’m learning that these free magazines are often much better than any I have to pay for, and therefore I’d probably pay for Vice. It’d be nice if I could still buy “Too Much Coffee Man” anywhere local, though.

So, it’s now just gone midnight and I’ve been awake 10 hours. I doubt I’m going to be asleep before 4, so I’ll need to get up about 10-11 tomorrow in order to try and hit the reset switch on this horrible BST sleeping pattern. Tom and Ian are both back at their familial homes, which makes the nights here strangely still as well. I guess even now, I’m the only person still awake. Carpe Noctem, I guess. Time to catch up on, er, reading stuff on the internet. Actually, I did attempt to sort out some comics earlier, but it ended with the realisation that I need to by more boxes to have any hope of achieving that end. So that’s probably the plan for tomorrow.

Today I ripped open two mice and played with the insides. I learnt many things, not least of which was that the difference, internally, between an intellimouse 1.1a and 1.3a is astonishingly huge. The problems I had with my mouse appear to have been addressed with nikki’s newer revision. However, I think the toll of UT2004 has finally left its terrible mark on my mouse, since it mow tends to double click things when I only press the button once. It’s not the first mouse I’ve worn out in this way either, actually, the old Packard Bell one that immediately preceded it died in an identical manner. Still, as the wheels on the intellimouse turn, so do the wheels of time and I’ll trade it in for a nice new optical mouse soon enough, I guess. A cursory glance at eBuyer promised a 4-button model that would “take mousing to the next level” for only £25, but I’m not so sure I want to get that far in over my head. Would I really be using such an implement, this Excalibur of mice, to its full potential? Better to go with a budget model, if you ask me.

Despite destroying the mouse in the process, I completed UT2004 today. I’ll buy it once I get the money, it’s earnt that at least. I plan to have a bit more fun with Onslaught mode before giving the game up entirely, and after all, we do have a LAN-fest scheduled for some time in the future, but I may have finally run out of excuses not to be doing my project. We’ll see.

Yesterday Nikki and I went to the library to return some books (I had taken Watchmen out; it was good; I will buy it at some inspecific future point.) and she had a strange conversation with an old guy manning the door who was being slightly superior about the fact her books set off the alarm as she was going in. He seemed to think that “We’ll see.” whether it was accident that her books weren’t properly demagnetised before leaving the library last time we were there. I’m not entirely sure what was supposed to happen, were they going to realise she hadn’t checked some book out and accost her for returning it? I wasn’t really sure. Later on, in the same library, a mentally impaired person checked out her books supervised by a capable human, and I was still unable to find any copies of books relating to scientology.

Which brings me to a rant, of sorts. When I was younger, I’m not sure how I knew the term, but I somehow thought Scientology was based around science rather than religion. The truth is that it’s based much more around Science-Fiction than either of the above. Bad science-fiction. As Ian pointed out to me, “Scientology”, as we all know, means “Study of Scient.” It also involves a whole load of stuff about alien Thetans posessing you, clams, volcanoes, and giving away all your money. Now, all I wanted to do was get some of L. Ron Hubbard’s books and read first hand what a nutcase he is, but it turns out that’s pretty impossible to do at Oxford library for whatever reason. Oh well. Luckily, Ian has a bunch of documentaries on his PC about scientology and this gave us all the laughs we needed. At least, it’d be funny if it wasn’t all happenning…

So, it’s almost midnight. Or, is it almost 1am tomorrow? Is it actually 11pm yesterday? I sure as hell don’t have a fucking clue, and I suspect it’s due in no small part to the fact that yesterday morning I somehow managed to go to bed at 5:30am. What sort of world is it where you can’t trust your own clocks? I keep wondering who’s to blame for this situation. The Government? Scientology? Some kind of Illuminati-based Masonic cult? I think I’m going to take direct aim at the Farmers. See, BST (Bloody Stupid Time) exists, to my knowledge, solely because a bunch of people decided that rather than just setting their alarms an hour earlier to take advantage of the increased daylight hours, they would instead force EVERYONE in the country to realign their clocks. I’m not entirely clear as to why things couldn’t be left on GMT all year ’round, since let’s face it, the benefits don’t seem immediately obvious. Savings on power because it’s light later in the day? Preventing sunrise/sunset from happening at strange hours of the afternoon in the extreme northern parts of the country? They all sound like pretty flimsy reasons to me, though i’m sure there’s someone out there willing to prove me wrong.

Ah well. Luckily, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is when all you’re doing is playing Unreal Tournament 2004. What a game. It’s so good, I just might buy it. I did buy comics yesterday, and I’ve been throwing money about to add to my collection of the obscurest Placebo releases (Nancy Boy 1-Track, Protege-Moi 1-track Promo. Can you feel the excitement?) so maybe I’ll wait a bit. In fact, that sounds like good motivation to e-mail Aqua and get my pay for the recent testing. Though really, that’s contributing to my rent. I preferred it when financial issues existed only as some kind of abstract future concern. Still, I won’t let that defeat me, since it seems ever since I’ve had this blog I’ve been whining about a lack of money. It’s bound to change once I get a full-time job, right? Semi-Rhetorical, that.

Tonight we got Fish and Chips from, and I can still bearly bring myself to say the name of the place, “Posh Fish”. I can’t lie. Despite the horrendous name it’s a great chip shop. The portions are unbelievably huge. A large portion of chips weighs 1.4 kilograms (we checked) and costs £2, not to mention easily feeds four. Nikki, Ian and I ate for the same amount it’d cost to go to Nandos EACH, and by god, it was nice. Ian looked at us strangely, during the preparation procedure, and accused us of being “weird northerners” for having bread and butter with chips. I admit I never considered this was a specifically northern custom or anything, but then I’ve never had reason to consider it one. Maybe it’s a holdover idea, the same way linguists will claim the words “brook” (stream), “bap” (bread roll) and “alley” (er, alley) are totally regional, but then in reality they can be understood by anyone. Deep Fried Mars Bars definitely not for people below the divide, though.

When in town yesterday, I bought an issue of a magazine called “Retro Gamer.” Turns out, it was practically published with me in mind. A whole bunch of stuff about old games and systems, including an article about Dizzy (!!) featuring the original design for a game and interviews with the creators, as well as a big list of all the Dizzy games. It was beyond cool. However, in addition to that, there’s also a giant feature about Commodore through the ages, showcasing their various systems. It might be £8 an issue, but given that it’s bi-monthly and I’ve stopped buying FHM (Nikki’s read it more than I have for years) I’ve currently got about that to rebudget per month. Looks like I’m sold on it. Until the inevitable cancellation such a specialty magazine faces, I suppose.

Still, this retro line of thought has inspired me to put down Unreal Tournament 2004 and consider finding the PC version of “Fantastic Dizzy” to play. Ah, memories.

Yesterday, Ian and I went to town - me to deposit cheques, he to buy new headphones. We had almost made it back without incident when, as if by divine intervention, a Nun interrupted our conversation on the bus. I wonder how many people find themselves in that situation. She was asking for help finding “George Street.” Some umming and ahhing occurred, because neither of us really had a clue. Something about the streetname was familiar. George Street. It seemed like a place we’d talk about and mention casually in conversation. Was there a George Street Tavern, Ian asked? We couldn’t say. This aged and frail Nun was relying on our help. It connected to the Iffley road, she told us; it was before Tescos. We told her to get off the same stop as us, and that would be the closest. Like some trusting fool, she followed our directions, and Ian helped her with her bags before we set off (much faster than she, since we are posessed of the proportionate speed and strength of twentysomethings) in search of the road ourselves, eager to allay our suspicions that we’d got it horribly, horribly wrong. Which, in fairness, we kind of had. George Street was nowhere near where we suspected. Indeed, it seemed that it didn’t exist. And yet, it must… We considered the options. Was George Street just so far down the road we couldn’t get to it on foot and had informed this Nun to get off many stops too early? Did George Street only exist in some kind of alternate Oxford? Were we in fact just reinforcing each other’s delusions and failing to understand that George Street didn’t even exist? Well, the answer is a combination of these and a little more.

It seemed, with her creeping senility, that the nun had misremembered the name of the correct location, which was “James Street”. We probably should’ve noticed that, since there is a Nunnery on, er, James Street, off the Iffley Road and before Tescos. Kind of makes sense when you think about it. However, it wasn’t just that simple because, you see, George Street also exists. We knew there was one around, but where? Many miles away, it turned out, for our regular Cinematorium is based on George Street in central Oxford. That’s why we remembered George Street. That’s why our directions were half-arsed and confused. That’s why there’s a Nun that still wanders the streets of Cowley haunting strangers for directions, night after night trying to get to a street that doesn’t exist.

Today looked like it was going to be one of those “sit around and mope while feeling unmotivated in any general direction” days that frequently permeate lectureless weeks. All this was changed, however, the instant we discovered the data projectors my good woman had borrowed from Uni might stand some playing with before she took them back tomorrow. Data projectors are pretty expensive kit and it was probably a huge abuse of our position to use them, so it took some serious moral quandrying. Most of which we did after watching Kill Bill Vol 1. in our new Home Cinema setup! Haha!

Okay, that’s not the best picture to use as an example, but to be honest the flash ruined most of the pictures I took, so I chose one where it was obvious there was a lot of colour going on. We set the projector up facing the front wall of the room, having moved Nikki’s Busted calendar for a clearer space. Ian and I rearranged the speakers from my PC on either side, and we had our own private showing. In order to show you just how cool it is, I also projected Transformers: The Movie up there.

Great stuff. Have I mentioned how necessary acquiring one of these now seems? We think that if we club together, buy one, and then charge people a quid per movie, we can make back our money in no time. Of course, earlier in the day I’d been putting it to real use. See, the way these things work is that they project your computer’s output, so we were watching the films on the PC and putting the image of that onto the wall. This also meant something excellent - I could play Unreal Tournament 2004 on the wall! To be honest, after a while it seemed just as normal as playing on a monitor, but it was fun. And UT2004’s not all it can play:

Though that’s not really as glamourous.

I don’t seem to be needed by Aqua tomorrow, which is both good and bad. Good, because I’ll have time to concentrate on my project tomorrow, and bad, because at this point any money is a Very Good Thing. I do have well over hundred quid to invoice them for. Of course, as if to combine the PC and money-related threads of today’s post, my DVD-ROM drive seems to have given up the ghost. I forget how old it is exactly, but it’s surely not too long ago I bought it. I try to remember when I bought my first DVDs. Admittedly, it was before Uni, but did I just watch them on the downstairs unit? I believe so. Still, the DVD drive seems to have stopped reading DVDs altogether, which is annoying from a cost perspective, but then, I’m not too rushed in getting a new one since I still have my glorious DVR drive. Vanilla DVD-ROMs can’t be too much these days anyway.

people say  that sounds like an excellent job  when I tell them how I supplement my loan income and i usually smile and say something like  well it s not as easy as you think but yeah I play games for 8 hours and get paid for it so i can t complain too much really  and then i think about what it s like and sometimes i wonder if people really understand that it s not just playing games any more than being a banker is spending money just because there s only one bad point which is the repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and eventually after four hours of driving up golf courses and around race tracks while being on constant alert for the slightest broken triangle or attempting to reproduce the most vague problem you think you saw once out of the corner of your eye it begins to seem a lot more like work than some people would like to believe   but i play games for money

Seems like months since the questions were any good. Henceforth:

1. If you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
I would serve many things, so lang as they were chicken-based. Well, to be fair, it’d probably be a traditional style carvery. It’d sell Turkey, Beef, and other roasted meats that are common to the carvery genre, and I’d have alternate dishes on hand, which would be plain. Not with mayonnaise. Not with a rich garlicky sauce. Not flame-grilled and glazed with honey. Plain, with ketchup to taste.

2. If you owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
I believe I covered this not too long ago. Ideally, second hand and rare CDs/comics/dvds. It’d be clean and welcoming, not a horribly dusty pit of despair and geekery. In fact, it’s always have some music playing or something too, since it occurs to me nothing makes me more uncomfortable about shopping than the feeling the shop owner/clerk has nothing else to do but stare at me as I meander around.

3. If you wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Depends. I have loads of Sci-Fi ideas I’d like to one day do, but then again, writing genre fiction is practically a good way to kill a potential career. I’d prefer to start off with something a little more mainstream, really. Something like Douglas Coupland or Chuck Palahniuk. I’m not really sure what that genre would be classified as, but they’d be high-concept/existential human stories, probably with the emphasis on style over plot.

4. If you ran a school, what would you teach?
Freedom from ignorance.

5. If you recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wondered what I’d sound like recording free jazz. I’m sure it’s crossed all your minds before. To be honest, I prefer music to complement lyrics rather than to be the sole focus, so if I had the instrument AND vocal ability drive, I’d be aiming for something a bit in the Damian Rice/Aqualung area.

I’m still in Leamington, having been given work at the start of next week. I’m therefore giving myself a combination end-of-term/mother’s day/long weekend holiday in between the employances. In order to celebrate this, yesterday Nikki and I went to Stratford and I bought a bunch of comics, which is always a good way of spending the money I earn.

Today I’ve been mostly sleeping and lazing around, because I stayed up late watching my Red Dwarf S4 DVD which I put off viewing specifically so I could see it specifically when I was stuck here without my PC. Tonight we’re having a kind of ad-hoc gathering of friends, after it emerged that not only I, not only Nikki, but Josh, Paul and Si were also in Leamington. Given the nature of time, we decided to meet up and head out to the cinema. Only a few days ago, I was lamenting the fact that I’d probably be unabel to go and see the Dawn remake with undisputed Zombie Fan, Josh, who I saw the original with one Friday evening so many years ago. However, when I realised we were all back this weekend, my memory sprang into life, and I recalled the radio advert I heard so recently proclaiming “Dawn of the Dead…Previewing across the country, March 19th and 20th.” Today’s the 20th! Henceforth, we’re going to see it, then grab some food. My only regret is that there was no time to arrange a carvery.

Still, there’s nothing more to say. I just felt like keeping track of what amounts of nothing I’m doing in between gamestesting. Tomorrow I get to go to Dad’s pub in Kenilworth for a meal, which should be good, since as a poor student I don’t get to buy expensive food often (Though I really wasted unaffordable amounts of my money in London the last two times I went, so that’s a half-truth)

Well, I tried to update yesterday but there was a large minor technical fault preventing access to my internet. Luckily, I am posting on a new internet.

That’s a little geek satire to ease you people into the shame and horror.

The exam of Wednesday morning - I say morning when it was actually afternoon because as far as I’m concerned, 2pm is morning enough for anyone - was not a successful one as far as they go. We did some last minute revision, no more or less than any usual exam. However, fate had in store for us an hilarious twist. When we got into the exam, it became readily apparant that the questions we had been taught by Mary Zajicek, lecturess extraordinaire, were not actually on the exam. Indeed, it seemed we had spent 4 weeks learning about her pet topics, and very little about anything, say, USEFUL FOR THE EXAM. Pete Marshall’s section was also a terrible loss, since the subject he taught is one of those over specialised over-jargoned fields of computing, which talks a lot about models (I revised NINE. SEPERATE. UTTERLY. MEANINGLESS. MODELS.) and contains no useful information. For example, one could tell someone how to drive a car, or, one could create an academic deconstruction of driving and create 15 different models describing the various approaches people take to the job, and their psycho-socio internal perceptions of it, that invents a lot of new terms to descibe things but still leaves you no less clear about how to actually do it.

Clearly, I am not a bitter man.

After that hideous exam was out of the way, Nikki and I came back to Leamington, because I had gamestesting to do and she wanted an afterexam/mother’s day excursion back home. That meant this morning I woke up at some ungodly hour and as per usual made my way through misty Leamington centre to the offices of AP, which smell strangely of what I (erroneously?) assume to be Pastramai due to the Subway below. Todya there was more testing for FCars to be done. Over the day, it became more and more obvious that despite vast, vast improvements, said game wasn’t going to be bug-free enough to be submitted tomorrow, so in a Half-Life 2 style fashion, it was pushed back. This means my potential work for tomorrow is now rescheduled to some time next week.

At some point towards the end of the day, when the various goodwill text messages had ceased and I was beginning to wonder what would entertain me for the final 2 hours or so, Paul (owner) borught down a DVD he had been bequeathed with on the “Cannonball Run”, an illegal cross-continent street race that occurs each year and everyone stopped working and spent half an hour being entertained by the antics of a bunch of nutcases outrunning the French police, so my quest for amusement was ended, my lust for bugtesting replenished, and I made it out the other end of the day.

In the latter part of the day, I visited Dad for an hour and then broke my KFC embargo, in a kind of half-hearted attempt at getting a meal, but tomorrow I have secured for myself a home cooked roast chicken, in addition to a trip to Stratford for some comics.

ALso, I’d like to deny the rumours that I am a moderately successful author, former NME journalist or London call-girl pretending to be a faceless student slacker. Pre-emptively.