Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
An inane report on my daily life to keep this blog thing going…
Forgot to buy bread yesterday afternoon and was thus was forced to choose between having none for breakfast or making my own like some kind of peasant.
It didn’t turn out too bad really, especially considering I didn’t follow any kind of recipe or have any yeast.
Roll out the barrel…
You know, it can be very interesting to take a step back now and then and cast an impartial eye over the workings of your own brain.
The phenomena of Stress Goggles for instance. Often, one of the first things that alerts me to the fact that I’m feeling particularly stressed is that the attractiveness of every woman I see jumps up by several notches. The train on the way to work for instance is suddenly full of girls who could pursue quite successful careers in modelling, and every woman on TV appears to have undergone a makeover.
(On this note Claire Hooper on Good News Week has actually changed her hair style recently. I’m unable to tell if this actually makes her look fantastic, or if it’s just the stress talking.)
(Oh did I mention that a mate of mine went to primary school with Claire Hooper? This is my latest pathetic attempt to claim some vague reflection of celebrity.)
Conversely I can usually tell that my stress levels have dropped down to a more reasonable level when random women start looking normal again.
The reason I mention this is because I’m under a lot of pressure at the office at the moment, and the phenomena is in full swing. I suppose it does offer some kind of compensation but given the choice between a world full of beautiful women and a job where I can sleep at night, I think I’d take the sleep.
Recovery is a slow process…
I have recovered enough from my devil-cold (which was almost certainly a case of the flu) to return to work, although I’m still not at 100%. My ears are still blocked and my sinuses are making an entertaining array of whistling, knocking and ticking sounds every time I blow my nose.
As well as going through six boxes of tissues in as many days my enforced break allowed me to devote some time to the FreakWiki. I’m slowly getting all the missing pages up and expanding the biography pages, which are the hardest of all to do (Miki has now been detailed). I also now have in my possession hard copies of all the published material, which helps.
I also finally braced myself to create the much needed page for Internet Jesus/Space Daddy himself. You can see how I chickened out here.
That is all.
I’ll be a good boy, just please make me well…
Have been laid up in bed since Wednesday with the devil-cold from hell. I’ve had tremendous trouble staying awake for more than two hours at a time, and my sinuses appear to have been stuffed with mustard when I wasn’t looking.
Needless to say this has put a crimp in all and any plans I had for my week.
*sigh*
I’m completely socially exhausted now. Leave me alone.
Went to Supanova, took lots of photos, bought some Transmetropolitan, got Summer Glau’s autograph, now watching While You Were Sleeping. Life is exhausting, but good.
(Sandra Bullock c1995 was possibly the cutest thing on Earth).
Can’t sleep – Clowns will eat me!
Honestly, if you’re not watching Psychoville you don’t know what you’re missing.
Revenge of the Roaches
My good friend Ryan is (I hope he won’t mind me saying) an environmentalist much more towards the hippie end of the spectrum than myself. Living as he does on the fringes of the rural enclave of the Swan Valley he is often moved, when visiting my home in the inner suburbs, to comment on the difference in air quality by darkly muttering things like “the very air you breath is a poisonous fume” under his breath.
I, an urban lad born and raised and hence having lungs adapted to a heady mix of carbon monoxide, ozone and soot, barely even notice the difference.
But not this morning. This morning the air in Bayswater tastes like someone’s been burning tyres for fun and profit. It is indeed a poisonous fume worthy of Mordor and my head is already aching from it. Heading in to work will be a relief – if I survive the walk to the train station that is.
I suppose it’s kind of appropriate. I fumigated my apartment yesterday to deal with a persistent cockroach problem. Obviously the roaches had some powerful karma to call on and are getting their revenge by gassing me from beyond the grave. Tricky little bastards.
Going to go look for an oxygen mask now…
It’s been a while hasn’t it?
Well I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy. I took the last week off work to really get to grips with all the cleaning that my apartment needs. Or rather needed as I’ve actually managed to get most of it done. The place is now cleaner that it’s been in probably years, and there’s room to walk around freely without having to skip hop and jump around various piles of useful things. How long it’ll remain like that I don’t know.
I’ve also finished Fallout 3, which was a bit dissapointing as I didn’t realise that the last quest I took on was actually the last quest – I had a whole lot of other stuff I wanted to do! I also discovered that I hadn’t actually installed the add ons, and then had massive problems trying to get them to install over the top. So, in the end I uninstalled the whole thing and then reinstalled it fresh (with the add ons). Sadly this meant the loss of my character, along with my highly customised home (I had my collection of garden gnomes, chinese swords and deathclaw hands arranged just the way I wanted them!).
On the plus side I get to play it all through again, which I’m currently doing 😀
Last Sunday was of course Anzac Day. As is my wont I headed down to the local dawn service, although it wasn’t as good as last year’s. Actually it was all a bit shambolic. One of the cadets guarding the memorial threw up halfway through (I have to say that the rest of the unit perfomed admirably, the CO leading him off and another cadet stepping forward to take his place immediately) and the speaker from the RSL’s lecture on all the wars and peace keeping actions Australia has been involved in since World War One conspicuously ignored Vietnam (I like to think this was an oversight rather than an example of the RSL’s historically rocky relationship with Vietnem veterans). A further surprise was in store however, as he finished off his talk by telling us all to spy on immigrants lest they bring down our democracy or something, which was really quite disconcerting.
I’ve also been getting stuff across to my new computer, which is now pretty much set up and ready to be used on a daily basis (apart from just as a platform for Fallout 3, which to be fair it has been used for on a daily basis). I managed this trick by buying a terrabyte external hard drive, which has made transfering stuff so much easier. Hooray for affordable USB storage!
Anyway I’d better go. I’ve uploaded a bunch of new photos to Flickr and they need descriptions and tags.
Was a fail, now fixed!
Lifehacker is a pretty cool site – one of the ones I check on a daily basis during my lunch break. That said, it would be nice if when they decide to illustrate an article with one of my photos they actually attributed it to me. Particularly since the Creative Commons licence I use on my photos requires it.
I’ve added a comment to the article – we’ll see what happens.
Also on the subject of my Flickr stream, the operator of Save the Cliffe has been nice enough to upload my photos (with full permission and CC attribution) to his site. I can only hope it helps.
Later: Aha! Lifehacker have fixed the attribution. Thanks guys!
And Dan Abnett
Well, yesterday I paid a one third deposit on a new computer to replace the weather-beaten old box I’ve been working on for the last eight years or so. On the one hand this is great – I won’t have to wait five minutes for it to boot up in the morning or load a program, and I’ll be able to get back into gaming a bit – maybe check out some of those MMOs the young people are all talking about (*grin*). On the other hand I have a certain sentimental attachment to my old box, it almost feels like a betrayal to discard it for a shiny new model (this is of course completely nuts :).
I don’t have the full specs with me, but the processor is an Intel i7-860 and I’m getting 8 Gigs of 1600 Mhz memory, so it should probably do me for another eight years or so. I should be able to pick it up on Thursday, then I can spend a few weeks trying to get all my data across.
Computer excitement aside my life for the last few weeks has pretty much been limited to work and organising an Amazing Race style cryptic treasure hunt through the CBD. I’ve wanted to do something like this ever since my brother lent me a book – possibly by Poppy Z. Bright? – years and years ago that involved a similar race through London (In the book the game was being run by a bunch of evil, rich, land-owning bastards and the penalty for failure was death. I’m being a bit nicer about things :).
With luck I’ll be running the game in mid-April. Results will probably be blogged here at some point.
In the last few days I’ve also been reading one of Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts novels after discovering it on my way to work on Friday morning, buried in a pile of books dumped by the letter boxes. I always take time out to have a quick look through any piles of discarded books – I almost never find anything worth keeping, this was thus a pleasant surprise. I’m quite enjoying it – not a book I would have gone out of my way to buy, but certainly a bargain at the price (my 40k-reading-heart of course forever belongs to CIAPHUS CAIN – HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!! 🙂
Finally I’ve been promising my friends I’d blog about this for ages. On Skype a few weeks back we (somehow) got onto the subject of who we’d cast in a Team Fortress Two movie. We eventually settled on the following folk…
For the Demo-Man, Fabes insisted we cast Don Cheadle. I have no idea who Don Cheadle is, but Fabes says he looks the part and could do a kick-ass Scottish accent, which is good enough for me.
As the Heavy, our top choice is Paul Wight, better known as wrestling’s “The Big Show”. If he wasn’t available Vin Diesel could probably do a decent job, or failing him Yahoots Magoondi.
Given his brilliant performance as the Shoveler in Mystery Men (and just about anything else he’s ever been in) we agreed that William H. Macy would make a great Engineer. If he wasn’t available we’d see if Nathan Fillion could do a Texan accent.
Opinions on The Medic were split. Ryan and I favoured Neil Patrick Harris, based on his performance in the title role of Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. Fabes wasn’t so sure, and suggested this guy. Sure, he doesn’t look much like the Medic and we don’t actually have any idea who he is, but he seems to be an actor, and we think he’s probably German.
We were kind of stuck on the Sniper until Fabes made the brilliant intuitive leap to offer the part to Hugh Laurie. He bears an eerie physical resemblance to the character, and if he can do such a perfect American accent in House he should have no problem producing the strangulated cockney that seems to pass for Australian over at Valve.
The Spy was another problematic role. We eventually settled on Bruce Spence – the guy who portrayed the Mouth of Sauron in The Return of the King – on the basis that he has a big mouth.
The Scout had us baffled for a while, until someone suggested we grab a time machine and hire a young Jim Carey. Perfect!
Fabes was very keen on going right back to the source and casting R. Lee Emery from Full Metal Jacket as the Soldier. Personally I thought Vincent D’onofrio (who, surprisingly, was in the same movie) might be a good choice. If neither was available we agreed that a younger Jack Nicolson would be a great choice.
Finally the Pyro. I suggested Andy Sirkus on the basis that he’s used to communicating via just body language. Working by the same logic Fabes insisted on Johan Kraus from Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Not the guy who played Johan Kraus, the actual “real” Johan Kraus.
(We’re all a bit worried about Fabes… 😉
So there we go. We’re not sure what a TF2 movie would actually be about (apart from involving Toast) but when the script is done we’ve got the cast all ready!
