Three: Walk Here

Walk Here was a postal RPG game that terminated unexpectedly around a year ago. I had intended to continue it but my situation as ‘god’ became confusing and I had to stop it.

For the uninitiated, the was idea was this: to choose around 10 friends and create mythical characters from them (players of the game). On the strength of these characters, encourage them to take part in a series of interactive challenges and battles using traditional postal mail and a special Internet portal on my site. Each player would have a certain amount of ‘health’ and possess some sort of special power. This postal RPG formed PART 3 of my super postal quiz, which will remain dead in the water.

Here lies a short summary of unfinished ideas:

• The co-ordinates that each player received in a previous round pertained to a location on the UK mainland. If one was to combine all of the co-ordinates in a dot-to-dot puzzle fashion they could potentially come up with the word, “US” carved into the landscape of the UK. This was the crux of the quiz.
• The base of Simon’s pictorial character in the postal RPG came after searching for ‘Festival Hoover’ from within Google Image Search.
• The RPG was supposed to be a way fall in love with all of my friends. I felt strangely optimistic at that stage in my life. I wanted people to talk. I really love the idea of postal games – I think I can take the idea further.
• The Stick (a.k.a Andrew Boothroyd) was one of the few people not involved in the postal RPG because he was knocked out of the quiz in Round 2. I had discussed with him that I would let him re-enter the game as the evil overlord with whom all the other players would have to face in a final battle.
• It was no coincidence that certain characters were pitted against one another. If only you could remember…

I have no time left today.

Two: The Thought Process

I have twelve minutes left to write this, so I’m writing on thin ice.

Tomorrow I will write down a list of unfinished ideas that remain from the postal fantasy game I callously abandoned last year. I hope it will provide closure.

I am to give a two minute presentation on Monday in front of the entire office. A captive audience. To explain my current plan requires a very short back story. Recently, the internal blogging website and wiki solution within the company were launched via a promotion that involved two ‘hip’ videos titled, “Introducing WikiCentral” and “Introducing **RSS”. They were made up of an American accent, a white background, some willing hands and a series of ‘Web 2.0′ picture cards.

On Monday, “Introducing, The Thought Process.”

One: I Can’t Live Without You, Again.

My life has started. Again. All because I crossed my arms during the interview questions. The unexpected has set me free.

>This< is my action plan. My action plan will not involve targets or deadlines. I imagine the story of the water droplet running from its source in the mountains all the way to the open sea below. My action plan will start and end and start and end. Just like the water droplet.

Do you remember being taught about road safety at school? Road safety was vital to us because without it we would be dead. It’s the same reason I am developing an action plan. You see now. I can’t live. I can’t live without you. I can’t live without you, again.

Sometimes Planes Just Smash Up

I can tell I have a university diary to write before the end of next week because I’m spending all my time a wastin’.

I finally got around to playing through Portal (much to the delight of The Stick) and was predictably blown away. As a bonus, the whole thing worked flawlessly through WINE on my ubutnu box – once I had nabbed Matt’s graphics card. If you haven’t played this digital box of treats yet, you should think about heading over to game.co.uk and picking up a copy of The Orange Box for a mere £14.99. It’s worth the money just for Portal.

“You don’t play computer games” you say? It doesn’t matter. Not playing Portal is akin to never playing Tetris, picking up a Rubix cube or attempting a cryptic crossword in the free newspaper on the train into work. A bizarre, but tale-worthy, series of events led to my Portal purchase. Firstly, I went to a house party that Irja invited me to and during the evening people started playing Rock Band on the XBox. In a hazy state a song came on that struck me dead in my thoughts and I remember a girl singing along to it and exclaiming at the end how much she loved she loved science and cake and crying.

The next week, I got around to trying to searching Google for the track in question and after some misguided attempts (“Cake Song Rock Band” just doesn’t cut it), discovered the song was in fact the closing titles track for the game Portal, as written by Jonothan Coulton (it’s called ‘Still Alive‘, you can go ahead and download it by clicking the last link in the sentence). Once I had brushed away the embarrassment that I didn’t already know the song, despite my self-proclaimed geekiness, I immediately proceeded to the game.co.uk checkout.

So, in a roundabout way, I guess Mr Harding is right when he tells me how great parties are – even if he meant that I should get something other than computer game recommendations from them!

I AM STILL LOOKING FOR A ROOM TO LIVE IN DURING THE MONTH OF AUGUST.

Much to the disgust of Emma, Peter Pedley is now in the safe custody of me – I have missed him for years.

It is hot tonight. I am sitting outside to combat the continental temperatures. My bedroom sits on the top floor right next to the boiler/hot water tank and it is nested in the ^ of the roof making the entire space a metaphorical Berkshire hot-pot. Talking of temperatures, I have just been ‘cruising’ the internet and this has to be one of my favourite photos of the year thus far:

I have been wanting to make a video about making cake for the last few months – I have all the footage but have been slow to slice it together ever since my Hopesick video was deleted from YouTube for copyright infringement. I tried to re-upload it to Vimeo but they also immediately rejected the upload due to copyright issues (presumably, they scan the YouTube database somehow?). Can anyone recommend a reputable flash video site that understands the difference between fan-fiction and organised copyright crime? If so, maybe I’ll get round to finishing some videos.

Next month, I am going take up an opportunity to visit Russia. My invitation is in the offing and I have been busy reading about the tenuous Visa application process this evening. This will be cool, for all the right reasons.

Tonight, I miss:

- – Milk in the 24 hour CO-OP.
- – Lists
- – Immature conversations about physics in the early hours
- – Being Alone. Being Together.

The Trouble with Summer in Suburbia

The problem with living in a mundane, family driven suburb is the rippling effect it has on everyone who lives in it. I will spend far too many evenings idling myself away in the garden with a bottle of Rioja, some good music and a willing wireless laptop. Just like tonight. I should have saved this existence for a time in my future when I own an Apple Mac and watch Formula One races at the weekend.*

Now that I’m staying on at Mars until September, I’m looking for some place to stay for the month of August. I registered myself on a site that goes by the name of spareroom.co.uk, flatshare.com and various other façades. It’s a bit like a Facebook for people who are in need of a house or vice versa. I have a personal profile on which I have to advertise myself as a person that might be the person somebody would like to live with. Eat with. Share with. Breathe with.

I’m thinking that when all of this is over and I have somewhere to stay, I should take up rental viewings as a form of social networking. This is so much better than other social internet sites – you meet people face to face, get invited to their house and have time to look through their rooms before they even begin to make judgements about being friends with you.

The problem with Berkshire is the aggressive flight scheduling that acts out above your head, well past midnight. It’s set me off thinking about Air France Flight 447. There was a story on Slashdot today about whether or not Airbus planes rely too much on computer aided guidance. It came as a surprise to me that it was quite difficult for the pilot of an Airbus to over-ride the computer in an emergency situation. I hadn’t previously realised that (even in 2009) we have reached a point where we entrust computer processors over ourselves in life-death situations. Does anybody else have philosophical problems with this? Maybe I’m already getting too old to accept progress?

I look up and I see the sky as a misty black. I wish I could reach out and pull it over me like a duvet and it would be the comfiest duvet in the world because this duvet is the atmosphere, the clouds and everything in between.

* Any references, however coincidental, are not descriptions of real life people, especially not people with the first name James.

In my mind I’m having a pretty good time with you

I post. I don’t post. I post. I don’t post.

Hello ghosts, please find attached the minutes since our previous meeting:

• We completed a trip to Italy but forgot to blog it or talk of it. Travelling is too much like ammunition for egocentric show-offs. Well done you went to Africa to help malnutritioned children. Well done you found your inner heart-chakra in outer Mongolia. Well done. I found a five pence piece dated 1994 in High Wycombe.
• We remembered that language isn’t a barrier to our mutual, multinational love of Johnny Cash and country music.
• We made ’sweet tweets’ (cookies shaped like speech bubbles) for a team meeting. They went down a treat, unlike the presentation I was forced to give about the DANGERS of Linux web servers for the organisation.
• We evaluated all the boys that you fancied on that dating website and I don’t know where to go now you’ve actually met someone.
• We talked about my career, and I didn’t have a chance to tell you I didn’t want a career.
• We stood shaking outside a locked train station for three hours and it was perfect.
• We know that whenever I’m excited about computers, all you can think about is how much cooler and democratic your studies of art/physics/politics/mathematics are.
• We dressed up as bunnies in wet suits and gave carrots out to members of the public in the rain.
• We didn’t talk on the phone because you never make the calls.
• We texted Nick Bolton during a Bishop Allen concert because we needed to learn something about ourselves.
• You texted me tonight (invitation).

We live in this house and it isn’t always clean because we are living in it. And if you don’t want us to live in it, then you should clean it for yourself. Because we are tired of walking around all the dust in this house, just to find out that you are doing nothing about it. Do something.

We’re all basically alone

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Collect Words

Buy yourself a packs of spiral ring notebooks from a stationery shop. With the first notebook in the pack, you can play a game.

Write the word STOP in large letters on the first page. Take the pad and a marker pen onto the streets with you. Plan a way to walk – it’s important that you go to a populated place, preferably a city centre, as you will need input from members of the public. Each time you come across somebody, stop them and ask if they will write a word onto the next available sheet in the notebook. Try and anticipate what type of word each person will write. If you practice, it becomes surprisingly easy to guess a word that correlates with the word the person actually writes. Do this until it becomes lonely, you have to be somewhere else or you meet somebody. There are numerous variations to be made out of this idea. Create some.

I played between my house in Maidenhead and Hobgoblin in Reading. I stopped a kissing couple at Maidenhead train station to play my word game. I expected their responses to be positive and bouncy, maybe a little agitated because I had interrupted. They wrote down the words TEAM and JOY. It was a sweet moment. It interests me that there seems to be two type of people. The first type will write down whichever word comes into their head when you ask them. They second type will think of a word and then think a little longer for another word that has been styled to reflect how they want to be portrayed.

Here’s a sample, hastily recorded via hand video:

The last word in my game was Toulon, which is a coastal city in the south of France. As homage to this blog, I pledge to visit that town and play the game there.

Why microblogging is spiritless

I am bored [of you]. We are bored [of you]. You are bored [of you].

“say something else”

Are you actually saying that we are not as cool as we think?

I play this game with a (best friend at work) where we try to send one another an instant message at exactly 11:11:11am. It always seemed that we miss the event by a single second. So for example, I posted at 11:11:10 yesterday or 11:11:12 another day. This drew us into conversations about how much can happen in a single second and ended up in a translated lyric, “the rain is weaved from tiny little moments, when water goes down plain, it takes to wait no matter how long, for moment of your life to come to stage.” Lovely, no? Anyway, today, I finally managed to post at 11:11:11. A screenshot to prove it ~

I feel apologetic (to myself) tonight because yesterday I was really tired and ill, having had a few drinks in Maidenhead. When I got back I made the mistake of logging into Facebook and became strangely flustered about my profile picture and the comments underneath it and the fact that I was using facebook in the first place. I very uncooly proceeded to delete the photo and send an odd, slightly offhand comment to James. It was very strange. Sorry James! To redress the balance, here is the photo and a comment from James

Aww look at Irja peeking out of your crotch like that! DRINK! FECK!

The rest of your life could be a replication of what you felt as a teenager. Here is an exercise. Phone up a close friend that you really like but have never had a romantic relationship with and tell them that you are starting to feel in love with them. Shortly after saying this hang up the call. Now wait. Maybe the seconds turn into minutes into days into anything.

In the time between hanging up the call and them returning the call, you will feel something – I hope this will be the exact same feeling you got when you were 17 and texted a girl in some semi-drunken state with the words ‘I love you’. Or the time you found out a girl you really liked was actually texting some other boy under the table every time you saw her. It’s nice to replicate feelings, otherwise you forget.

I like the idea of Idle coding:

Better Twitter

I’m arranging some photographs onto a wooden board as I listen to I Love The Unknown by Clem Snide. Many of the photographs were given to me 9 months ago when I was still talking. I remember that clouds have become my favourite topic for conversation, which is almost cool but mostly sad. I want somebody to send me an SMS text message that contains a hyperlink to a compressed zip file they have prepared especially for me… +44 (0) 7850 487 816 [Thank you, you!]

I think I should arrange a charity gig in light of this comment. I can imagine organising some kind of event in Friezland Church Hall with John Calvert headlining and Steele of the Whores providing support. Anybody interested?

You Are What You Work

The moment James told me Ryan Adams had quit the Cardinals, taken up writing and hitched up with Mandy Moore, my world fell through the floor and I slept. It’s a shame because I’ve been trying to keep myself awake for as long as I can recently – when I’m tired I feel more receptive to everything that is really important. My emotions become sharper and more pronounced and I start to forget about work/processes/students and instead feel love, jealously and everything else that matters (like eating smoked cheese).

It’s easy to become lost in the clutter of a full time job. To try and dispel the clutter, I took a trip to Scotland at the weekend. There was a bus to the west coast and a Bed & Breakfast on top of a hill in Oban. It feels more like a memory now – a scene from an old movie.

Career People:

1. Keep opinions to themselves and play lap dog to their superiors.
2. Fail to realise that emotions are the most effective tool for EVERYTHING.
3. Are emotionless. ROBOTS.
4. Pretend that work colleagues are just work collegues.
5. Only listen to music to ‘unwind’.
6. Lie about anything, just for fun.

I’m in work very early this morning and thought I’d listen to Sun Sun Sun by The Elected. It’s been a long while since it made the pit of my stomach churn. I’ve also been listening to a lot of M Ward. His new album has a song on it called Epistemology which for some reason I am all-out obsessed with.

‘Cause I just rolled and I tumbled, down a long road, I stumbled
While shooting in the dark as to what’s best
And finally I found you, without ever learning how to
I put the right foot in front of the left…

I still don’t know why it’s so beautiful – the lyrics bring about a feeling of aimlessness – simple, uncoroordinated emotion. Expressing hope in ignorance.