Things I Say to my Cat

"Hello Mrs"

"Do you smell of biscuits?"

"Are you a biscuit baby?"

"I love you."

"You smell like biscuits."

"Hello pretty."

"You are cuteiful"

Perhaps my cat's only real shortcoming is her inability to appreciate a good portmanteau. She really is very lovely. Sometimes she does smell a bit biscuity. I don't know if we started getting a new brand of cat biscuits or something, but when she brushes her tiny chin against my nose, it's smells like biscuits. There you go.

Cats are the ideal recipient of small talk. Talking to a cat is like a form of lingual catharsis, in which your words needn't actually be words, excessive intonation is justifiable and nothing you say is of any real benefit to either party. Claire Lovell gets quite annoyed sometimes when I talk to the cat. The cat also gets annoyed sometimes.

Yesterday over dinner, my mum explained to us all that when I was two I came out in a rash on account of having three adult portions of bran flakes in one sitting. Apparently the rash changed places, fading spectrally from one area to another without explanation. When questioned regarding the medical validity of this account, Mum relayed to us that she took me to see the doctor, who is reported to have looked me over and said something along the lines of : "Yeah, that's bran flake rash."

Wow, that was all quite boring. I'm sorry readers, but my desire to maintain the blog does not have any bearing on the inescapable dullness of my present circumstances. I'm becoming quite diligent. It's sort of rewarding, but it's not very interesting.

Not Quite Perfect

Oh hello.

I watched 'Pitch Perfect' yesterday. I think Matt Hobbs recommended it to me. He will answer for this.

Pitch perfect tries to be ironic in places, but it cannot escape from what it is. It's a film about university students, aimed at kids who can't wait to be university students. As such, the protagonist (whose name I forget) has all the smug self-importance of your average fourteen year old, who believes themselves to be ineffably unique to all other human beings, and for whom self expression and / or discovery are seemingly the end goals of all sentient life. Masterfully balancing angst and apathy, Barbara (it was something like that) is so unbelievably boring that I can't really be bothered to dislike her. At one point she goes to a party, and just stands there parading her lack of excitement as though it were genuinely a virtue.

My other big qualm with this movie is that all East Asians are depicted as psychotic / uncaring. Literally all of them. The only lesbian in the film is continually looking for excuses to assault her co-eds. I don't mean to sound like the mushy liberal that university is slowly turning me into, but this whole film is about being free to express your true self, so long as your individuality is merely perceived, but you don't actually deviate from the norm of white, straight, irritating teenager.

Final Score: 2/5 'Mildly entertaining in places, but neither subtle nor shocking. A tedious film. The singing is good obviously.

For all of it's flaws, I will credit PP with reminding me what an absolute banger this tune is:

Let's review something else. Let's review my new board game 'Dead of Winter':

It's a very good board game.

10/10 would review again.

That's the end of the review section of today's blog. Possibly the end of today's blog.

Yes.

B.o.B will play us out with this number one jam on the transient nature of worldly gain, and the importance of an assurance of salvation.

Thanks, Bob.

Don't worry kids, I think the blog will be back again very soon. This was just a warmup maybe. If you need me, I'll be playing Left 4 Dead.

Hands Falafels Weddings

Hello everyone. It's been an exciting week.

I threw a falafel party.

It was possibly the first truly successful social event I have ever hosted. 50% of the playlist was purchased in a charity shop the day before the event, and literally the only thing we did was eat falafel. Economical, simple, delightful. Falafel is the future of parties. It's incredibly easy to make. I have been envisioning a future in which all parties invovle a large amount of falafel, and it is beautiful.

I went to a wedding.

My cousin got married, which was great. I saw my sisters, which was great.

Lost my hat.

Still love weddings. All the Lovells of my generation are married now, excepting myself, my sisters, and a couple of cousins, including this handsome rogue:

The pretty one (on the left)

Get in touch if you're interested, I'll see what I can do.

Even my course has been pretty interesting lately. I've been learning about Biomechatronics. Today I read a paper about the long term ethical concerns of Brain-Computer Interfacing. Will human beings share a hive mind? Will our earthly minds become eternal? Will society be divided into two classes of being? Is it wrong to kill bees? Is there a bee heaven?

My friend Henry is going a kill a queen bee today. He says it's for the 'good of the hive'. He's beginning to sound like a bee.

Would you like to know about a lab I did the other day? 

You definitely do.

It's about the myoelectric signals that control your fingers.

Here is the signal:

 Here is the signal reflected in the x-axis, filtered to eliminate its high frequency component, and normalised (amplified by a constant so that the maximum amplitude is 1):

 Here is an overlay of the corresponding muscular force data, and the computed predicion of muscular force based on a mathematical model that relates the normalised, full wave rectified, low-pass filtered electromygraphic signal to muscular force.

They're pretty similar. That's good news because it means that we can use surface electrode data from somebody's arm to control a prosthetic hand. It's not actually quite that simple, and it gets wibbled around when you do it in real time, but it's getting better all the time.

That's enough of that.

That's enough of this.

I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple of times until you told me not to anymore

If you read last blog, you learnt all about France, a country famed for it's abundance of sharp downhill bends and gravel. I'm so good at the words that I forgot to tell you all about the pictures. Sit back, relax, buckle up and enjoy the fun that is having other people show you their holiday photos.

In France there are cars, tractors and even beautifully framed silos. If you're very good then your nice Dad might let you use his camera while he's driving around.

Claire (little sister) has gone to Cambridge. Everybody thinks she's very clever. 

It's the end of an era for the Lovell family, Mummy and Daddy are by themselves at home with only Ruth Lovell for company. We've all sort of flown the nest. If we all become teachers then we can be at home together at holiday time forever and ever. Maybe my parents can retire to Sheffield and I can also retire and spend the whole time climbing with Father. I guess Mum can keep working so that we can still eat food.

I'm going to a Halloween party (don't tell my mum) a la maison de mon meilleur ami Paul Wallace. I want to dress up as Ned Ryerson, but I don't know how I'll do the jacket.

I get quite excited thinking about pretending to be Ned Ryerson for an entire evening.

"Who are you supposed to be?"

"Now don't tell me you don't remember me, because I sure as heck fire remember you!" 

Actually now that I've written that down I've started to think it might become pretty boring pretty fast. Maybe I should make little business cards. The fluffy collar is the hardest bit.

My course is pretty interesting now. I'm learning about robot arms and teaching robots to play football (eventually). Let's look at that wizard cat again.

Next time I might just do wizard cat, no words. Need more gifs.

J'ai mal a la tete.

Let me tell you a story. If you’ve seen me in the past month then you’ve probably heard it already because I think it’s much more exciting than it really is.

About a month ago I was having a dream; I can’t remember what about. I woke in a state of unusual bliss. I was outside. It was sunny and I was nestled within the fold of an unusually comfortable ditch. It was a nice place to wake up, but I couldn’t remember falling asleep there. I hoisted my head a little to take in my surroundings. It felt heavy. Somebody had left a bike at my feet. Ignorant bliss began to give way to disquieting curiosity.

“Dad?” I asked. It felt as though my father should have been there, but my childish plea yielded no response. I decided to get up, and managed on the third try. A dog was barking, then a man was saying "Bonjour?".

“Uhh – Bonjour.” I said to the man. He was on the other side of a short fence. Why was the man talking French? 

"Um..." I said. I felt funny. I put my hand to my head and looked around.

wow

I spent about five seconds basically by myself in the middle of the French countryside with absolutely no idea how I came to be there. It was immensely surreal and a little bit scary. By the time ten seconds had elapsed, I was beginning to piece together a 'banged my head' theory, and I think I even managed to say "Parle vou anglais?" to my new only friend in the world. After that my Dad arrived and rescued me. There was a short car ride, of which I have no recollection, followed by lots of molly coddling and about two days of lying down all the time and showering with the door unlocked.

What else happened over summer?

I turned 21 and became a proper adult

I stroked a French kitten

I went to some very fun birthday parties

I'm really good at kubb

Also I went into the peak district for a couple of days with my course mates and now we're all best friends forever. We climbed a mountain and everything.

I'm now the proud owner of a Tilley hat (big thanks birthday benefactors). Stuff really can make you happy.

I've basically forgotten about everything else that happened because I was so excited about falling off my bike.

Hopefully blog will be more regular / substantial / conventionally formatted in future.

goodbye

Collected Works

Well it's midnight. I'm not very sleepy because earlier today I spent about four hours sleeping on the floor of my front room. I'm not sure why that happened.

My summer is about to kick off. I'm not doing anything right now because I set aside a couple of weeks to prepare for my seemingly inevitable resits, but then passed all my exams. This was an embarrassingly surprising turn of events. The third years on my course all say that second year is the hardest year, so if I learn how to try at anything then it might not be too late to make something of myself.

I've been making most of my time at home, investing in my relationship with my cat. She hurt her leg and was limping everywhere. Apparently it was very sad at first, but I only saw the funny cute part where she was hopping around. She's all better now.

My friend has a blog where he writes all about books he's been reading. Very good. Here is a review I wrote about the game 'BioShock: Infinite', a game I found time to play from start to finish despite all the important things I am doing:

"Yes, very fun. You can shoot the baddies with guns, but also you can make them die from crows. This central crow/gun mechanic doesn't really get old. Your girlfriend is from outer space and she gives you money all the time.

All of the islands are flying, and your heart rate too will be elevated when the puzzling narrative quantum leaps from here to the next. At the end of the game you will think "Oh maybe I get it" and "It sure would be good to play that again and gain a more insightful understanding into the statements it makes regarding human nature and our destructively selfish pursuit of personal redemption"

11/10 would set fire to hands again."

Here's an idea I had when I was watching The Hobbit II:
"If Smaug stopped protecting that treasure and everyone could just grab it, would the value of treasure plummet massively? Is he inadvertently safeguarding the global economy of Middle Earth?"

Look at these Russian kids lol they are my fave.

Soon I will have done so many activities that there won't be room to fit them on this exciting blog. For now we must content ourselves with this.

This is mostly about the film Groundhog Day

I've been driven to updating my blog through a combination of exam time procrastination and blog-neglect based guilt. I'm concerned that having these factors as my main motivation will result in a relatively unentertaining post. I have an exam in Hillsborough that starts in two and a half hours. I've created a Facebook event inviting people to come and play Risk at my house, and I'm sad that nobody has said they are coming yet. I rewrote the lyrics of BBK's 'Too Many Man' especially for it as a promotional item:

Shorty I rep Risk okay,

Monday to Sunday like Risk all day

You're fearful and tearful, I'm cheerful and giving you an earful; you've never been rekt this way 

Man get shook when they see me play

Pass the red dice then see me slay

Seem happy when we start the game but they're always bare vexed when they go away

YOU NEED TO PUT A HORSE ON THERE 

YOU NEED TO PUT A HORSE ON THERE

THERE'S TOO MANY MAN, TOO MANY MANY MAN, 

TOO MANY MAN, TOO MANY MANY MAN

I'm pretty sure that's fantastic. It's only been up for like half an hour, so the call from Reach Records probably won't come until tomorrow. 

Risk is a fantastic game. I'm not sure why. It's like the game itself isn't fun, but the half hour before it starts is inexplicably thrilling. It's like the rush you get before you dive into ice cold water, or during the setup time of a paintball game. Your mind and body ready themselves for an intense physical, mental and emotional challenge. If you lose, the game is always disappointing, but if you win, it's like all the grief and frustration of the last six hours is paid back three times over in the glory of your victory. It's basically a form of gambling that uses personal trauma as currency.

Why do we like what we like? I think we kind of choose what we want like a lot of the time. Like why love cats, or hats, or Risk or Groundhog Day? These are all fantastic things, but there are loads of fantastic things. How do you pick which ones you want to really treasure? It seems to me that professing love for many of these things actively increases the love I have for them. I was reading about Groundhog Day today when I should have been revising. Because it's got a relatively moralistic narrative about the human condition, loads of people of various religions understand it as kind of allegory for their own belief. Especially Buddhists, but also like everyone else. Director Harold Ramis writes:

'It always seemed ironic to me that it didn’t lead people to recognize the commonality of all their points of view, but rather, "This must be about us and only us.'

Interesting. My bud Dave Stewart thinks it's a poisonous celebration of basic moralistic self sufficiency, but I see it as an exploration of the dissatisfaction of worldly pleasure and the (seemingly) inescapable burden of our selfishness. It's after Phil tells Rita that he's "come to the end of [himself]" that he is enabled to love other people, and is thus set free from his perpetual unhappiness. For me, the most important message of Groundhog Day is the diagnosis of selfishness as the disease that has dissatisfaction as its symptom. Obviously from there I would springboard into our need for an omnibenevolent deity to liberate us from our own nature, but that's not really what the film is really about. It's a funny coincidence that most things we see convince us of the truth of what we already believe. But believe this: Groundhog Day is a fantastic film. One reviewer writes:

"Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something."

When's the last time you watched Groundhog Day? What did you think about it? What does that say about you? If you've never seen it, hit me up around February second next year. Maybe after we've  watched it we can have like an essay writing competition or something.

Cool, groovy. Enjoy your summers, kids.