All Kinds of Fun

I like to think that the level of familiarity between myself and my ragtag band of readers is great enough that I shouldn't have to bother with the trivial nicety that is apologising for the long time delay between this post and the last.  If anything I probably flatter myself by imaging that the majority of people reading this give any significant percentage of a crap about how frequent these posts are.  However, I would like to extend my appreciation to those few, odd people who sometimes say lovely things like 'David, when are you going to update your blog?'.  I never know quite how to respond to this, for one because I don't usually have a clue when I'm going to update my blog, and for another because I am quietly a little pleased that anybody cares.  I did half heartedly attempt to throw in a second dream log, because I had a second dream.  It has velociraptors and possibly cannibalism in it.  Also blue people.  It is here.

Just currently I am writing this because [pauses, plays free cell with real cards for about an hour] I am on exam leave, which means that all activities outside of the educational sphere have a magical allure to them.  I have been playing quite a bit of free cell recently.  It is more fun with real cards, and I feel  more of a talented recluse (Poe's Dupin and Chandler's Marlowe come to mind) than a bored office worker.  Exam leave is not great.  Sometimes I realise how much work I have to do, and reflect on how proud of myself I will be if I try hard, whereas other times my primary objective is to do nothing productive.  At one point I clicked on a banner ad featuring a scantily clad cartoon vampire lady as a joke with Claire Lovell, and then proceeded to play 'Thirst of Night' (a game that likes you to click on things and pretend you're a vampire) all the while saying funny things to the other people who were playing it.  It was very funny because it is a stupid game and I was pretending to take it very seriously.  It involved a lot of threatening everyone with my ridiculously weak forces, and making proud boasts of my unimpressive feats, as if I believed that I really was a awesome as the game wanted me to believe I was.  Claire and I thought it was funny.

It became less funny when I began to succumb to the familiar psychological tactics of such games, and for the next three days played it a bit because it passed the time and was not work.  I wasn't having withdrawal symptoms or anything, I just stopped because it was a really boring game.  I felt foolish for having ever played it beyond that first comedic half an hour.  It's one of those games that operates in three steps:

1. Get resources

2. Use resources to click on things

3. Wait 

(And then back to step one)

This breaks my two rules of gaming:

1. Do not play games that involve exhilarating real-time waiting as a game play mechanic.

2. Play games you want to play, not games that want you to play them.

Also, 3. Never play any amount of World of Warcraft even once.

They're not very rigid rules, in fact I made them up just now, but they maximise fun and minimise needy game  weirdness.

Ruth Lovell came home and then went back to university again.  She has a year in industry lined up with a quite top secret organisation who blow up pigs and kill people by accident.  (Srsly.)

A taxi driver stopped me the other day and asked me where I got my hat (the pith helmet), got me to write down the website and was very interested in the delivery time.  There seemed to be a great deal of urgency to his interest, and I wondered why he was in such a rush to by an interesting hat.  He'd probably just had an epiphany about how life without hats is not really life at all.  I was left feeling very good about the fact that I had been able to help and the fact that the man had taken the first step in his journey of hat ownership.  I'm not sure if I've already mentioned this, but my hats have now doubled!  My loving mother went on a Caribbean Prayer Cruise (deeply spiritual, I'm sure) and brought me back a tasteful blacky greyish trilby that seems to be made of recycled papery plasticy stuff.  It's nothing ritzy, but I like it.  I wore it to my cousin-in-law's jubilee/birthday celebration, because we had to look like we were from the fifties.  I looked like this:

The hat is in the grass behind me.  The tie is my father's and the waistcoat was given to me during the party by friend of family (and of mine).  It is currently hanging up in my wardrobe, waiting for an excuse to be worn again.

About two days before this was taken I was at a street party in my street.  It was alright, I entered the hat competition and didn't win anything because I'd just stuck a two inch union jack onto the top of my pith helmet and evidently other people had gone to a little more length than to fiddle with some paper, cocktail sticks, string and hot glue in the half hour before the judging.  In the evening my whole family went in except for me and my big sister, and we stayed out to party hard in the evening street disco.  It was a bit lame because the DJ was any next average homeboy (I love that rap).  Also my street is full of people that aren't that exciting, so the atmosphere was a little dead.

Speaking of music (I guess), I've added this sick song to my mental 'for the wife' playlist (I also danced to it with my cat just now).  Richie is dangerously smooth, and this tune is lyrically and musically wholesome.  (As in 'inspiring a sense of wholeness', as opposed to 'censored and culturally irrelevant).  I mean, that's awkward shuffle first wedding dance material.  I've been thinking lately 'I flipping love marriage'.  It's a bit sentimental and girlish, I know, but there's something brilliant about seeing people I know who are married and thinking 'those people have been in love for a long time and they still are.'  It's a wonderful thing.  Also I am a big girl.  Less sentimental hits in the 'for the wife' playlist are:

- Always by Erasure (A funny song featured in this funny game)

- Future by Know da Verbs (Big love for that tune)

- Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel

- Be Your Man by Josh Turner (A bit raunchy)

- Ignition by R Kelly (I will probably play this a lot.  My wife might get annoyed)

Just found this, which you might appreciate if you're a bit nerdy.  But probably nobody will care.

Well, this is falling into a meaningless list of links now.  But while we're here, another fun thing I did recently was go to Westfields with my youth and do a hipster safari.  It involved putting on an Australian accent, wearing a pith helmet and saying fun things about any hipsters you saw.  It is the cheapest of the three sole ways to enjoy Westfields.  (The other two are eating and bowling.)  Next time I'm there I might go into Hollister and see if I can apply for a job on tills.

Also I have a stick shaped like a gun which I was showing Claire how best to use to beat up bad guys when I smashed the exterior bulb of my light, revealing the ugly, energy efficient tubing inside.  So now my light is a smashed bulb with a bulb inside it.  My love for my cat is growing deeper and more sincere of late.  Will keep you posted.

Dream Log II

I've spent pretty much the last four days in the company of top lad Alex Dugal in commemoration of his 18th birthday, which means that I've known him now for approximately 16 years.  He's a top lad.

On the Thursday, he came round here for cake celebration with my family (epic Minecraft / Alex and his kittens cake courtesy of Ruth Lovell), on the Friday we had a Nandos celebration with our mutual friends from XL and he slept at my house, on the Saturday I went to his house and slept there, and today we all went to the Easter Morning service at the Bridge.  Between those last two days, as I lay sleeping on the floor under the rickety bunk bed of my longest standing companion, I had a dream worthy of a second dream log.  (The first one's here.)

The Dream


The dream starts in a grimy underpass of some kind.  There's a normal 'through-pass' kind of thing going on, but also a small cube of space to my left.  The two are separated by a chain-link fence that has a doorway/gap in it.  Somebody is a few steps behind me, a friend.  Possibly Joel Williams.  In front of me there are two velociraptors.  They might be eating a dead person.  A small T-Rex appears, and begins to eat them.  It stands a little in front of them, opening and shutting its jaws repeatedly near them so that half of its teeth are sort of scraping / chewing at them.  The velociraptors make a similarly half-hearted attempt to defend themselves, and the overall impression is reminiscent of those mono-dimensional combat animations between sparring avatars in dated strategy games that serve as a simplified representation of the attritious combat of two warring factions.  After a while it becomes apparent that the velociraptors have won, as all at once most of the Tyrannosaurus' skin has dissapeared and he is dead.  Now it is just me and two velociraptors, and that is where things normally get awesome or terrifying.  Neither of those adjectives really seem apt for describing what happens next.  Perhaps more fitting would be 'surreal' or 'eerie'.  Having said that, 'surreal' is kind of a given in most dreams.

The dream skips ahead a couple of minutes (as dreams do) and I find myself in the aforementioned chain-link partition with the velociraptors.  They are not eating me, but I am eating with them.  They occasionally hand me a small, rather delicios nibble of cooked mince meat type stuff.  I'm not sure if it's an animal or a dead guy, but I feel worryingly like it may be the latter.  Also I'm writing this a long time after the dream now, so I can't remember so much. 

Now I'm running with a bomb, and I know I'm being chased by velociraptors a few blocks behind.  I think I also have waypoints and a GTA style mini-map.  People are panicking because they know the velociraptors are on their way, so I keep running.  Eventually, a velociraptor catches up with me, takes the bomb and runs on with it.  Turns out he was just trying to help.  Misunderstood velociraptors seem to be a thing in this dream.

All I can remember now is that I'm doing an exam or something in a part of my school I've never seen before.  It's all curvy and colourful.  Then I get lost and wander into a dilapidated, corrugated iron, slum like corridoor.  At first I'm confused, but when I get out I mention to David Glover that I 'stumbled into the old Geography corridoor, which I had completely forgotten about.  I met Andy Lovell and explained to him that the school was very changed, and he said he was going to speak to Miss Davis.  I got to English and Miss Davis told Andy to go away.  There were foreign people in my class.  Their skin was half blue, half not blue.  They were a brother and sister and sat on opposite sides of the classroom.  I sat down next to the blue girl.  She made good conversation and wore an impressive blue hat, as did her brother.  It was like a super cool berret, but I can't remember very well now.  Then I woke up.