Book of Imaginary Things

Made it back to Australia yesterday and have since slept for fifteen hours. I didn't know I could sleep for fifteen hours.

The first leg of the journey was in a big A380, which has decent screens and on-demand TV. I watched Dragonball Evolution, after which I felt vaguely cheated because they didn't reach ludicrous, world-shattering power levels, and Monsters vs Aliens which was very funny and which I strongly recommend.

The second leg of the journey was in a smaller plane, but Singapore Airlines seem to have upgraded their fleet because they also had the better screens and on-demand movies. I watched a bit of the library episodes of Doctor Who until the sound inexplicably cut off. I like Doctor Who, but not enough to watch it muted. The plane also didn't have any seats designated B, though there was no obvious reason why.

My Oyster card finally gave up the ghost on my way home yesterday.

An Oyster card is, for those of you haven't had the pleasure of living in London, the swipe card for the Underground, London bus network and some of the other overland rail networks. Peculiar amongst English inventions, the Oyster card system works really, really well.

Last week, my card abruptly stopped working on one side. The little plastic sleeve in which I keep the card is bent in one corner from five years of travelling in my pocket, so I inevitably end up using only one side of the card. I made use of my problem-solving skills to determine the most immediately solution to my dilemma was to remove the card from the sleeve, turn it over and slide it back in.

But last night Side B started flaking out too. The massive convenience of the Oyster card never hits home harder than when it suddenly stops working. As it happened, I was heading down into Shepherd's Bush station at the time having met up with tallarn for dinner and he explained to me it was as simple as going up to the station office and asking for a replacement. They'd even transfer your balance over.

I asked the gate attendant at Ealing Broadway station if this was the case, after the man used his Transport for London skills and experience to make my card work at the exit gate - not on Side A, not on Side B, but on the edge. He panicked and told me that no, I couldn't get a new card at the office.

But I slept on the problem and one thing I've learned about England is that in any organisation, the left hand has no idea about what the right hand does. So I asked at the office at Northfields station this morning.

The man in the office tested my card, gave me a form to fill out, and after I'd done so issued me with a replacement. Instead of the black plastic TFL sleeve I've had for the last five years, this card came with a bright yellow IKEA one.

No assembly was required.

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results


My favourites:


And this one had me in fits of giggles:

Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity


I can look at my bookshelf, or think back to some of the movies I've enjoyed, and apply this to just about any form of media I consume. For example, I'm currently reading a Starcraft novel and I have quite a few Warhammer 40K books.

I have my limits. There are some licenced product writers who I simply won't read, but if I find one I consider tolerable and I like the subject matter, I'll dive in.

My new laptop -  in fact, my first laptop - arrived this morning. It's a large, shiney, black and grey shark of a machine which, upon start-up, did not work.

A Dell technician guided me through formatting my hard drive, reinstalling Windows Vista and getting back online wirelessly. He then asked for permission to remotely connect to my laptop and install the rest of the drivers for me.

So now I'm sitting at my desk at my old PC and turning my head now and then to watch as my laptop, at least as appearances go, fully enables itself.

I wonder what it will do then?

The Best Way To Break Into Science Fiction Writing Is Online Publishing


There's some stuff in there about writing in small chunks making it easier to read a quick chapter or two on the train, and some stuff about structure, but it's missing what I assume is one of the most important points, which is promotion.

Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book


The above is the kind of reason why I'm not an early technology uptaker.

Today at work my boss told me about Project Gutenberg and if I reach the point where I don't have to read off a desktop PC, it may become viable for me to start using it.

Desperate-to-leave LinkedIn users rename accounts "delete delete delete"


Maybe I should try this with Bebo.

Elderly retired boxing champ beats six kinds of crap out of drunken burglar neighbour

This just fits so well into my image of England now.

During a raid last night in Naxxramas, a young Norwegian guy in my guild mixed up his words slightly when he said over voice comms, "If you guys don't stop, I'm going to come around to your house and smack me in the face."

An hour later I had to switch off Ventrilo, the voice comms software we use, because my flatmates were all going to bed. The joke had not died.

How an Indie Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter

Amanda Palmer:


Kind of the 1000 True Fans thing, plus a few things about Twitter I didn't know, since I've yet to pick that new toy up and muck around with it.

Via warrenellis.com

Taken

Liam Neeson's action hero is cool, professional, hardly ever more brutal than he needs to be, doesn't swear, speaks English as a first language, is completely human and isn't ashamed of some dark past. He is, in other words, just about the opposite of every action movie hero of my teens and early twenties.

The movie was not otherwise particularly notable, but I enjoyed it.


Max Payne

I had an idea of what this movie was about from the game. The trailers changed that completely. And then the movie turned out to be different again.

Again, a not overly memorable action movie with Mark Wahlberg scowling and muttering at everyone. Except, I was thoroughly amused by the state Max was in when he went into the final action sequence. I liked that a lot.


Underworld - Rise of the Lycans

One day someone will create a good movie with this general concept and I'll be lost to it. In the mean time, I remain a sucker for this franchise.


Push

On the subject of subjects I am a sucker for: a movie about different kinds of telepaths. There was a difficult plot element they did their best to explain but I didn't really get until I saw it in action, but I still enjoyed the movie a lot. The movie also made use of the idea that everything has its opposite - for all the sniffers and watchers, there were shadows to counter them.

Dakota Fanning was good as a thirteen year old watcher roaming the world on her own, drawing visions in coloured crayons in a black notebook and Chris Evans, after being one of the few entertaining things in the Fantastic Four movies, still amuses me.

When the telekinetics, the movers, use their powers, there's a burst of spectral lens flare. I get what Peter Jackson was about when he said he dislikes flashy magic, but I preferred this visual display. Human beings like to show off.

On a purely intellectual level, Labyrinthitis can be fascinating.

A pathway of square concrete pavers becomes a genuine challenge to traverse when it tilts slightly to one side. The nihilistic urges than come with this whole situation are also interesting. My body isn't living up to its side of the bargain here, so fuck it, I don't care about taking care of it, where the hell is that bottle of scotch and I wonder how you go about getting a dealer on speed-dial? And looking backwards on a day in which I actually have to develop strategies to compensate for literally being dumber has a certain "so that's why that guy couldn't figure out how to fold that letter item when we asked him that time" quality to it.

Yesterday I established that I was not caught between the wheels and levers of two bureaucratic engines. But I did spend three hours waiting for a phone call uncertain as to whether or not this was the case, and raging internally if lethargically at a system that's meant to be there to help you out when you need medical support and the God-damned thing makes you jump through hoops at the time you're least able to do so.

Also, in any kind of British bureaucracy or corporate structure, the left hand has no idea what the right hand does. That's why I was shocked a few years ago when, while in Australia, I rang up to change my flight and it was easy. Fuck you, receptionists who looked at me in blank terror when I asked for my NHS password after being told on the phone I had to come into the GP surgery to get it.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that I hardly have the mental capacity for my job at the moment, and I don't like blogging about being ill, so I haven't had much to say here lately. For many reasons, I hope this situation does not continue for long.

Only three weeks until my holiday in Australia. I really am looking forward to it.

I think it would be funny to watch The Seeker: The Dark is Rising with tallarn .

It would be funny to watch him scream and throw things at the TV.

My minotaur is back. Off to the doctor again tomorrow. Had enough of this crap.

I impulse-purchased a CD.

A CD. A physical disk. I bought one. In HMV.

I was killing time in Shepherd's Bush before meeting tallarn  and randomling  to go and see Star Trek*. We were meeting at McDonald's for a quick burger before the movie. I was sick and miserable all day with what I assumed was a now-rare spike of Labyrinthitis and not a low-grade heart-attack God-damn it** and I had initially planned to find something other that a grease burger. Shepherd Bush's culinary options proved less diverse than I'd hoped. I went with the grease-burger.

Before that I wandered around the new Westfield shopping centre, a curiously frumpy and gloomy impression of the Australian shopping centres of my retail-employed youth. I checked out the half-hearted bookstore and then strolled into HMV, thinking to look at their movie DVDs. Even if I don't buy one, I know what new releases are likely to be at Blockbusters.

They were playing, as they usually do, a CD.

And I liked it. And I thought about walking up to one of the staff and asking them what it was, and maybe looking for their stuff online and checking out the rest of the album. But I decided to let it go and left the store to meet up with the others.

Two minutes later I raced back, found a guy, and asked him what we were listening to.

"I think it's this," he said, curled one arm towards a nearby shelf and put a Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix CD in my hand. He thought the lead singer used to be in a band with someone out of Daft Punk. He wandered off to continue stocking shelves.

I looked at the CD in my hand.

And the song playing in the store, which I would later learn is named "Love Like a Sunset Part 1", I didn't just like it, I could feel it building up inside my head, louder, more intense, thrumming.

It was in my bag when I met the others for the movie.


* Bloody hell that movie is fun. I reckon I'll see it again while it's still showing.

** There's the part of you that's smart and the part of you that's dumb. Both parts get equal air-time, really.


EDIT:  Amadeus Wolfgang turns out to be the name of the album. The band's name is Phoenix. Suggestively, their website is named http://www.wearephoenix.com/

The toilet seat in my last house was the sturdiest, most solid toilet seat I have ever encountered. The landlord installed it after we broke the previous one and it remains the only time in the two and a half years I lived in that house that he fixed something in such a way that it was unlikely to break again.

And it never did. It supported the backsides of my flatmates and I for the rest of my time there. It is the only thing he fixed - the only thing - that never broke twice.

The catch - because there always is one in London generally and in London housing in particular - is that the toilet seat didn't stay up by itself.

I only had to have it fall down once at the worst possible time before I concluded it was a lost cause and going one-handed is just too perilous. So I gave up on it. I sat down every time.

My new house's quirks appears to be locks and doors. The front door is a battle to get through and the door to the upstairs bathroom, which I share with an English girl, can't be locked. There is a well-established rule about not opening the door when it's shut, which would be fine, except the first time I hopped out of the shower it decided to swing open of its own accord.

The toilet on the other hand is hardly holding together. The toilet seat will stay up though, so there is at least an up-side.

Habit is a hard thing to change though. I keep sitting down on it.

For my own personal future reference, the construction of the database tables, admin screens and changes to the agent interface to allow the different templates to display depending on certain other options the agents select takes two hours of solid work.

5:30pm to 7:30pm, for example.

I really thought it would take about an hour, maybe a little more. But this does play accurately into my vague awareness that I always underquote jobs. "Pick a number and double it," one of my managers said to me once.

I never remember it when it matters.

I don't remember if I mentioned it here, but I was told a while back that I can't eat at my desk any more. It annoyed me enormously at the time, but it's turned out to be quite a good thing. Now I sit in an unused foyer at work during my breaks and read. It is a cold, tiled, echoing room with some nice chairs and people going through it all the time. Others are often sitting in other parts of the room with me and I hear some curious conversations. Some of them should happen in meeting rooms. Some of them should happen in pubs.


Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

It struck me as time to actually check out a master of fiction, interspersing my usual drek with some finer stuff. Ray Bradbury's prose is very flamboyant, almost distractingly so, but it struck me as very fine indeed. And he didn't resort to using clowns as villains. That would have been just too easy, really.


Magician's Guild, Trudi Canavon

Whenever anyone is greeting or speaking to someone they're friends with, they smile. And since there are hardly any villains, there's a lot of smiling. By the time I was fifty pages in it was driving me nuts.

I flicked to the back, read the author profile, saw she's Australian and then it made sense. A comment most Australians usually make after they've been to Europe for the first time is that no one smiles here.

Towards the end I was wondering why the book wasn't grabbing me, aside from the lack of villains, but it struck me while we were getting an almost room-by-room tour of the Healer's Wing of the Guild: everyone was pleasant and welcoming and really rather the same. Where were the weirdos?

I may give her another go if I see the next book in the library, but if it's wall-to-wall smiles again, I'm out.


Odalisque, Fiona McIntosh

As the title promises, the book revolves around a harem. It spends precious little time inside the harem, considering, but it spends so little time outside the palace I was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic.

But the author really has done her homework. I didn't know there were three types of castration and I squirmed when I realised it was going to happen on-camera, so to speak. Fortunately I'd finished eating.

Not sure whether I'll continue reading these books. If I see the next one in the library, I'll probably pick it up.