Malaise

One of my work colleagues has been extremely ill this week. He’s come into the office for a few hours this morning and informed us that on Monday night he was so delirious that he hallucinated the characters from Animal Crossing trying to sell him sleep.

In terms of my own health I spent a couple of hours in hospital that same night with the same old anxiety attack masquerading as a heart attack symptoms that I know and love so well. I was pretty sure it was just an anxiety attack but the problem is that no matter what I may think intellectually, the anxiety (and symptoms) won’t actually go away until I have some kind of medical confirmation that there’s nothing wrong and I’m not actually going to keel over dead.

Now I’d be happy with a simple ECG, but they have this annoying “duty of care” concept in the health system and wouldn’t let me leave until a couple of blood tests came in, so I was stuck in an observation ward for a couple of hours when I’d much rather have been at home looking for horses in Minecraft. But hey, whatever.

Two interesting observations. To calm me down (although frankly after my ECG came back as normal I was perfectly calm) they gave me a diazepam. This is apparently quite popular as a recreational drug – I can’t imagine why as all it did for me was make me feel unpleasantly disorientated, give me a headache and get NoFx’s Creeping Out Sarah stuck in my brain. Since alcohol makes me feel the same way (with the exception of the bit about aging Los Angeles punk musicians) I rather suspect that my autistic brain just isn’t wired up in such a way to enjoy getting high. Eh. No great loss.

The other observation is related to evolution. Goosebumps are often mentioned in science texts as an evolutionary relic of the time when humans had fur. When we get cold, we get goosebumps because our bodies are trying to fluff up our fur to trap a layer of warm air. This obviously no longer works, except – as I have maintained for years – in my case it does work, because I am hairy enough for some air trapping to take place.

She asks me why, I’m just a hairy guy…

It’s not anything that will stand up to even a slight breeze, but if the air is still I can warm myself up a degree or so by switching on my goosebumps (I have some slight conscious control over them).

As X-Powers go it’s not going to get me hanging out with Wolverine any time soon, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being one of those normal people.

The reason I mention this is because in order to attach the various sensors for the ECG they had to shave some patches of my chest hair. And stomach hair. And side hair (I’m hairy high and low, don’t ask me why, don’t know…). Ever since, I’ve been acutely conscious of exactly where they did this, as walking down the street I can feel those areas as cold patches, even under a shirt and coat.

Weird huh? Who would have thought a nice, modern gentleman such as myself could rely so heavily on left over parts from the apes and monkeys.

Buckley’s or None

Stumbled over this YouTube channel the other day…

I like this guy. Not only do his musical prejudices match mine but he sounds like a Canadian version of Randal from Clerks. Additionally there’s some real intelligence and thoughtful analysis behind all the snark.

Not safe for work, both on the basis of Buckley’s language and the truly awful music he highlights.

Also, is it just me, or does Beez in the Trap by Nicky Minaj sound exactly like Slap My Elbow by S’Mouse?

For the Emperor! Supanova 2013

Headed over to the Supanova Con on Saturday with Ryan, Paula, Bek and Bek’s daughter who’s name I can never actually remember. It was a pretty good day overall. I didn’t get any autographs or photos – I’m always starstruck to the point of imbecility when meeting celebrities, so there’s really not much point, but I did enjoy the panels with Karl Urban, Alan Tudyk and (of all people) David Hasselhoff.

Yes, I went to see the Hoff. Mainly just so I could say that I saw the Hoff. I actually enjoyed his panel, mostly I suspect because I expected him to be a complete train wreck, and he wasn’t. He could in no way be said to be a humble man, but he had some interesting stories, and I was surprised to discover that he can actually sing pretty well – perhaps those Germans aren’t quite as crazy as we all thought.

Karl Urban was fun. He started off his talk by awarding Judge Dredd badges to audience members who could identify movie quotes. This didn’t go terribly well at first, until he clarified that they weren’t specifically quotes from his movies. After that he answered audience questions in a highly entertaining fashion, did a Batman voice, and threw in some good natured trash talk about the Wallabies ๐Ÿ™‚

The final panel we went to was Alan Tudyk, who was a complete riot. The hall was completely packed out – standing room only – happily Paula and Bek had got a place in line while I was seeing the Hoff, so we got seats halfway up. Notable incidents included someone asking him to say his “leaf on the wind” quote – which he delivered as “I’m a leaf on the wind, watch me GHURK!” – a self admitted fangirl asking him if he were her and he were still him what he as her would ask him as him – which completely threw him in a most entertaining manner – and a story which he reckoned he’d never told before about how he found himself identifying with a Billy Joel song while working in a racist bar before he got in Juilliard (he knew it was a racist bar because he threw a customer out for saying abominably racist things, then got told off by management).

He also did some Karaoke at Deville’s earlier in the week. Awesome! ๐Ÿ™‚

Apart from the guests we had a good look around the stalls. I had finally given in to the inevitable and dipped my toe into the waters of cosplay by wearing my Commissar hat (a few people even requested photographs!) and found an amazing replica chainsword for sale. Unfortunately it was priced at $215 which seemed a bit excessive for a piece of painted foam, so I had to leave it. Bek got a friend’s block mounted Star Wars poster signed by Carrie Fisher, and just about died of excitement at meeting her. We also did a lot of sitting around watching cosplayers.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Supanova, but I was quite surprised by the quantity of Adventure Time cosplayers. You couldn’t have throw a rock without hitting four or five Finns. A bit of aiming would have easily brained several Fionas and Princess Bubblegums. There were at least two Ice Kings doing the rounds, one Flame Princess and a Marceline and Marshall Lee with actual guitars. On the 40k front there were some generic guardsman and at least two other Commissars, but they had much better uniforms than me, so I stayed out of their way lest I be accused of Heresy ;D

All in all, an excellent day out!

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