The Realisation That Made my Day.

Dear Reader.

I was at the freashers activity fair today hwhich was a bit pointless because it was the same groups as there was last year. But I wash there partly because I was bored and partly because I was looking to see if they had finally established an SCM group because I never want to go back to CU and SCM are generally a bit more liberal, and there was all sorts of groups including the pole-dancing club (people who pole dance not a club where you go see people pole dance you understand) so I was trying to steer clear of that because of the growing crowd of Blokes either staring blankly at the "demonstration" or trying to chat the girls up and I was worried the floor was getting sticky (I know for allot people its not just about sex and all that, but for Blokey freshers just out of Sixth form, it is). And I kept looking and looking for the religious groups becuse they're usually all in the same room and I couldn't find them and I suddenly realised why. Because slap bang in the middle of all the religious groups (and nothing else) from CathSoc to the Islamic Society was placed the Pole Dancing club of Sheffield.

It was such an awkward moment of realisation when you see these women standing in this sea of religious people glaring and almost audibly thinking "are you testing me Satan?". I had to leave because I just got the giggles.

Now I hate to make generalisations about religious people because as I've already said they're often wrong and have people who are strongly the exception to the rule. I don't know what kind of Venn Diagram you could make of students who are strongly religious and students who want to take up pole-dancing but I bet the segment where it crosses over is pretty small compared to, maybe religious people who are politically active and even if there are lots of them I doubt they want to make it a one stop shop and sign up for it in front of all the other religious students. I'd imagine very few people think when they're talking to someone from the CU "oh that reminds me I need to sign up for pole-dancing" so what fresh madness possessed the organisers to do this what link do they have that I just don't get? Especially since in one of the other rooms was almost every other kind of dancing!

They didn't have CSM (*shakes fist*) so I suppose I'm going to have to be a godless heathen for the year and only hang around with Christians on Sundays.

I AM DAVE EXCLAMATION MARK YOGNAUGHT AND I HAVE FINALLY BOUGHT THIS GAME!!!

Dear Reader.

I actually bought and download a copy of the game Minecraft recently. If you've been reading recently I did a post where I talked about my obsession with watching people play Minecraft (the Yogscast mostly) and never actually doing it myself. But now I have it! Which might explain why haven't been bogging as much recently because all I'd have to say about my day would be "I did some farming today, I built a wall, then I finally finished getting the bits together that I needed for that nether portal I've been trying make", which would be rather dull, "a gaming blog" isn't really what I'm going for. but I will talk about it in relation to something my dad asked me the other day. I was playing Mine-Craft and he looked over my shoulder (not exactly used to me being a gamer) and he asked me what I saw in such an old fashioned looking game. I shall have this post as my answer.

1. Despite it's pixelated look and cubic stile its huge. In fact its infinite. The more you walk the more that the world randomly generates (while still remembering where you've been,) so that just drives you to explore more and more both up in the sky and underground and of to other universes and that just plays to human nature.
2. Like real life, you can almost play it however you want. You can spend your time farming wheat and animals or you can spend your time building houses and forts and art or you can spend your time digging down into the earth or you can spend your time hunting and killing monsters. The only rule of Minecraft (for survival mode at least) you have to survive. Beyond that there is a point where you begin to understand what it means to live and use your time efficiently in this Minecraft world (Minecraftia is the most common word I think).
3. It's scary. Surprisingly so. In fact it really plays very hard on childhood fears. The monsters only spawn in darkness meaning that often they jump out from the darkness. This game teaches you to be afraid of the dark. Its also a little bit scary because the whole idea of the thing is in the game you are the only person in the entire world (except the villagers who just seem to stare), and yet there are some structures (aside from the Mob villages) which spawn all by themselves. There's something slightly creepy about mining around and then suddenly coming across another mineshaft complete with roof supports and broken mine cart tracks (who put them there?).

Aside from the dangerous ones like the Creepers who's attack involves blowing itself up, some of the monsters are actually pretty scary in themselves. There's this one called an Enderman (based on the indie game "Slender" which is also fucking terrifying in itself) who will remain docile and passive until you look directly into is eyes it will run at you screaming. If you attack it, it will teleport (usually behind you) and will continue to attack you and hunt you down until either you or it dies. Just because you looked at it. Frankly monsters are partly scary in this game because every time you're killed you loose all the items you're carrying and you invest allot of time on that.
4. Its very Indie this is good because;
A. It encourages universe hacking. By that I mean because its an indie game there are some useful glitches still keep in that make life considerably easier which are in no way realistic however the creators still keep them in.
B. it encourages an insane number of mobs that often attract the owners attention and actually end up in the main game.
5. Herobrine.

There are hundreds of theroies around this character (or mob or monster or myth). Some think that he was a miner in the game before the game was released who now roams the land either as ghost or demon searching for his usurper to get his revenge. Some think Herobrine was the name of the game creator's brother who died tragically and now lives on as a ghost in his brother's game. Some think the entire game is actually all a dream created by prisoner who is being tortured and Herobrine is actually the character's subconscious and when arrives he will call on the player to "wake up".

But here's the thing Herobrine is entirely a myth! Entirely made up by fans of the game even down to the way he looks. there has never ever been a confirmed sighting of Herobrine and the creators of the game deny ever putting him in any of the game patches. Here's a kind of creepy quote from the creator Notch.

The Herobrine stuff is awesome and kind of scary at the same time. It really shows how little control a content producer has over the content.

I've publicly told people there's never been any such thing as Herobrine, and that I don't have any dead brothers, and that letting too many animals die in lava is a fool proof way to summon him but that you don't need to be afraid of him. He only means well, he's looking out for you, trying to warn you of the dangers you can't see. There certainly are NO physical manifestations of Herobrine that will sneak out of your computer if you leave Minecraft running at night, looming over you as you sleep with his pale eyes inches away from your face, as he tries to shout at you to wake up. Sometimes you wake up with a jolt, and he's gone, and all that lingers is the memory and faint echo of his wordless screaming. Of course it was just a dream. There's no way a morally dubious ghost with a god complex could at any point decide to haunt the children who play my game "for their own good", as there is NO SUCH THING. etc etc

Now you may be wondering why I put this last one in because isn't part of the game but a game has to be really big and scary and challenging and real if, out of the control of the creators, an entire ghost story myth can be created by its players.

Dear Mitt Romney. It's not funny any more.

*Sigh*

Dear Mitt Romney.

This is not funny any more! You have just made so many stupid slip ups that, I am really starting to worry about your mental health.

What were you thinking? What were your advisers thinking? What thought could have possibly possessed your brain that made you think that saying you don't care about 47 percent of the american public was a good idea?

I think I might have about the same chance as becoming president as you do. I, a British, labour supporting, borderline socialist, liberal, Darwin believing, Christian, at the age of nineteen believe that I might have the same chance of becoming president as you do. Or, at the very least, I could give better advice on public speaking than your people did.

1. when on a diplomatic (ass kissing) trip to Britain for the Olympics don't say that you think its going to be a failure (that's our job!)

True the British public weren't feeling too good about the Olympics either, but if you start saying it too they will rain down on you with fury and anger!

2. Even if you say "who cares? fuck the planet" in a nice way there are still going to be people who notice what you're doing.

3. You are only a Mormon try to not sound like you're an alien that has replaced the "real" Mitt Romney on behalf of the body snatchers.




Actually I think I might know what you were thinking. The 47 percent video was taken at a fundraiser. That means that the Democrat party wants money for their election campaign so they invite a lode of rich people and businessmen to these things so they can listen to you and give money if you're doing what they want you to do and generally saying "fuck the poor" (Corrupt? No! Not at all! Everyone does it!). At this point in you're life you believe there is no possibility at all that the "unwashed masses" are actually watching. Which may show that you and your advisers know nothing of the modern world. We are always watching so you  always have to be on, every man with a camera phone can be a spy for the media and we are everywhere!

Excess and Suitcases.

Dear Reader.

My parents were cleaning out the loft and they found this suitcase

and I really like it. I'm kind of into old stuff at the moment partly because generally I like things that might have a story because, frankly, I like stories and partly because I hope to some day have a house that's like Sherlock Holmes' study but this is beside my point. When I saw this suit case the first thing that came to mind was how tiny it looked to my modernised eyes. I kept asking my parents how could people actually go on holiday with these things they simply said that people would probably just wear the same clothes (or suits) over and and over. Which, with the rise of cars, lifts, suitcases with trundle wheels and generally never having to actually carry our own bloody suit cases, is an ability or habit, humanity as a whole has neglected.

I mean look this is it next to the bag that I took to greenbelt. This is shameful. Keeping in mind that I was sleeping in a tent for only four days and had to drag bloody thing through a muddy camp-site and I this wasn't my only my only bag, it really made me think about how much excess crap I take on my holidays. I actually tried packing this old suitcase and I found just by wearing my trousers twice I could survive for at least six days (at least!) and it didn't weigh that much.

Generally it got me thinking about excess crap there's all sorts of stuff people say things like you should throw away a piece of clothing if you've gone an entire year without wearing it, there was this, frankly cruel program where they take all the stuff out of the person's house and they're only allowed to keep the stuff they can remember it (psychopathic really now that I think about it. There was probably a prize).
There's this quote that I heard from William Morris apparently (thank you wiki quote) that says 

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

which is pretty good advice if you're sorting out your stuff for uni but it just shows a need for people to just go round their house and say "is this useful or beautiful" and "if its not why the hell am I keeping it?" because that's the only point to an object.

But just out side of the whole bush craft stuff where you drop yourself in the Gobi  with nothing but a toothpick, two hats and a ukulele is the fact that we don't need to carry that much around with us any more. With I pads and I phones with pretty much everything you could ever want on them from your favourite novels to your laptop files we're kind of moving away from the time when you have lots and lots of gadgets and you just have one multi-tool piece of technology. There's this idea that "cavemen" were actually much more advanced than we think because every thing they needed to exist could be carried on their person, there's even some evidence that they could carry burning embers in special pouches so they could easily light their fires again and with all these new advances in technology we're kind of returning to just that. We do not need to carry so much stuff.

this is what the case looked like when it was filled.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Dear Reader.

you know when you come across an idea or a phrase  that just describes something so perfectly that you realise you've already had the idea in your head but you've just been waiting for a way to describe it.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a recurring stock character in (mostly indie) films and novels who has all or most of the following characteristics

1. Brightness (this can just mean that they are smarter or more strong willed than anyone else or like something that is bright they just seem to stand out from everything else in the universe)
2. Loveable weirdness (be that an unusual obsession, philosophy or simply a hipster taste in the arts)
3. An ability change the way the moody male protagonist sees the world.
4. They are very pretty, not necessarily in a kind of sexy (maybe even predictable) way, but always seeming like they are way out of the protagonist's league even though she inexplicably is still attracted to him.
5. Like a pixie, being free and wild, they inevitably leave the protagonist returning him to his perhaps even more depressed and moody state.

Famous examples I know of are the character Summer Finn in the film (500) Days of Summer played by Zooey Deschanel (who almost defines the general look and feel of this stock character) and the character Clarisse McClellan in the wonderful book Fahrenheit 451 who is famous (in my life at least) for being the first fictional character from a novel I may have actually fallen in love with.

and the whole thing raises a couple of questions the first is one I can't even start to understand which is "why is it always a girl?" Don't moody girls want to meet weird wonderful imaginative boys who brighten up their lives and change and challenge how they think? Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong or maybe its because in stories where the male characters are weird or unusual they are also the main character and a bit of an underdog which the female character eventually realises they should have been in love with all along (which is kind of the opposite of the male version).

The second cluster of questions I suppose is probably the questions asked by most of the men who go to see these films or read the books is do these women really exist or are they entirely idealised wish fulfilment fantasies? If they exist, where the hell are they? Because, like pixies, these Girls are almost mythological. Do people not see them simply because other men find them so attractive and appealing that none of them are single any more they just disappear as soon as they're created? (after a year of working in a creative writing course I can tell you this might indeed be true because there are a lot more writer arty types in a relationship than than not) but finally if women are constantly trying to emulate people they see in the media like super models and almost comically dressed celebrity idiots why aren't they emulating the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

And before you ask I am in no way saying women look like these characters or whatever. Its just women have always had this idealised version of the perfect man who listens and is funny and bakes cakes or whatever, which has all come from the media and similarly I think what a lot of men have been trained to want by the media is someone who's just unbelievably cool.

Coolness by the way is a standard that has fallen out of favour in recent years and its a real shame. Probably because it should never have been used to described the "cool kids" at school because they weren't. My friends are, and much like the pixie I fear for the day when they realise I'm not really one of them.

Richard Feynman is "Kinda' Nutty"

Dear Reader.

This is Richard Feynman who I believe should be in the top ten coolest scientists and I can give you at least three reasons why he should.

1. He played bongos. Alot. 

This video is of him playing bongos with some guy who lived near his house (not a physicist) and people who followed him and admired him would ask this guy "well what does he talk about?" and he'd say "well we talk about stuff, sometimes we talk about bongos."

2. He cracked safes in his free time. In fact, while working for the American government he managed to guess the 9 digit code for the safe containing all the research for the Manhattan Project, in two goes. He tried what he thought were the two most obvious numbers 1. the first nine numbers Pi (3.14159265) 2. the speed of light (299 792 458 m / s).
Not done with that he turned up to work the next morning placed the Manhattan Project file on his boss's desk and said "you need to change you're password". That is pretty bad ass. I imagine him just swaggering out of there, with maybe, just, this playing in the background.

3. He has a brilliant way with words. He always seems to explain things so well but more importantly he never used a metaphore that's a "good lie" (one that sort of works).

A good metaphor

Why a you should never use a bad metaphor