Category: Life and Associated Annoyances

Poisonous Fumes

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…

May Day

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.

Lifehacker FTW

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!

New Computers, Treasure Hunts and Toast! Oh My!

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!

Good News!

Something positive for a change…

Hollis Hawthorne is back on deck!

Maybe now she can pay back that money I sent her… (joke! joke! I swear!!) 😀

On the work front I sent the boss a long email yesterday explaining why I can’t continue to do the job I find myself doing. I’m not quitting the company – I’m just divesting myself (or trying to divest myself) of some of the responsibilities I’ve been wrestling with for the last year or so.

I realised over the weekend that the reason I’ve been feeling so wrung out for months is because I’m simply not up to the task allocated to me, and the stress of trying to carry it out has been eating away at me 24/7. This is why my apartment looks like a tip, why I’m not sleeping properly and why I’ve been increasingly anti-social of late. So I’m kicking it to the curb and going back to being a simple programmer again. I hope.

I’m still waiting for a reply. Wish me luck…

Bleeeech

Hufflepuffs are excellent finders!

Ack. I have all kinds of things I want to blog about (a run down of the improv game I ran on the weekend, why the core premise of Bryron Hall’s rebuttal to the famous rpg.net F.A.T.A.L review is invalid, just what is a true Hufflepuff anyway) but work is stressing me out so much that at the end of the day I just don’t have the energy to be creative. The best I can do is fill in a few more simple articles on the FreakWiki and collapse into bed.

But I don’t like to end on a down note, so here are some songs…

Come to Australia – It’s all true!
I’m on a Boat! – Metal Style!
Sweet Caroline – Tripod!

Calling all Crabs

Ramblings and complaints

Well, we’re battening down the hatches for a major heatwave – just in time for my birthday. Oh joy! Temperatures are expected to range between 37° and 42° C until Sunday, after which they’ll drop down to a merely hellish 36° for a few days. I love this city but I hate this weather.

My work email account keeps getting spammed by the “Ruby Royale” online casino. Some strange part of my brain continually misinterprets this as “Ruby Rose”, so every morning when I come in and start sorting through the spam I get a sudden jolt of irrational excitement before sanity kicks back in. Damn spammers.

Finally I know it’s neither new or clever to make fun of Emos, but sometimes they make it so damn easy!

Social Energy Crash!

An excuse for appalling behaviour

One of the things about being both an Aspie and a severe introvert is that you have only a limited amount of social energy.

Social energy may be a bit of an odd concept for the majority of people out there (most of the population being extroverts) but basically it’s a measure of your ability to be around and interact with other people. Extroverts replenish their social energy reserves by being around other people – making them sort of social perpetual motion machines – but we introverts need time alone to recharge before we can go out and do stuff – even with people we like.

This was brought home to me particularly this weekend. By Friday my energy reserves were approaching critical and I intended to spend a quiet weekend in doing chores, chilling out and recharging. Then Fabes called me up and suggested we all (that is to say me, him, Ryan and Paula) get together on Saturday. Against my better judgement I accepted – not to say that it didn’t sound like fun, it’s just that I really needed time off from people.

So I headed over. We had a great time playing Munchkin and running through an really old Dragon Warriors RPG scenario (I controlled a surprisingly intelligent Scottish barbarian named Grignr and an apparently mute Sorcerer named Zzardoz, while Ryan ran a very English Knight named Sir Spiffington and a Mystic by the name of the Comte Merde de Gallo). We then hung around for ages watching late night TV (including the end of The Core which we mocked mercilessly and a promo piece on the Commonwealth Games in Delhi which we also mocked mercilessly then felt guilty about).

Now the plan was to spend the night and head home in the morning but by 1:00am my levels of social energy had completely crashed. As a result I was overcome with an intense need to get the hell out and retreat to my own territory, so I called a cab and bailed.

I spent most of Sunday asleep, getting up only to walk down to the village for some laundry detergent and to watch a couple of episodes of the Boosh (Trapped in a box by a cockney nutjob! ‘ave a cup a tea!). As a consequence my energy levels are now sufficient to see me through the working week, but I’m going to have to spend this weekend being totally anti-social to get back up to an acceptable level.

So, I guess my reasons for recounting this tale are to apologise to the gang for my sudden and rude departure, and to make a plea for understanding and tolerance for all my introverted kin out there. It’s not that we don’t like you – we just need time to recharge!

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