Saturday 31 January 2004 at 11:42 pm
got rid of the entirely pointless karma system. personal verbalisation remains more than welcome, but much as I tried I could find no rhyme or reason behind the idea of anonymous clickvotes. of approval or otherwise.
thanks to the new randoms who've commented. always pleasantly surprised by unfamiliar names.
Thursday 15 January 2004 at 9:06 pm
haven't updated for a while because someone stepped on my laptop. not to be too dramatic about it, but the screen now displays a web of lovely glittering multicoloured cracks and fractures running all through the left side, against a global white background with faint lines in it. makes it a bit difficult to type.
happily this proved an incentive and I have acquired, as of two days ago, a sleek silvery new little number, courtesy of my norwegian research council expense budget for 2004: an m30-704 toshiba with a 1.7 GhZ pentium M centrino processor (1 Mb L2 cache!), 1 Gb RAM (!) and 64 Mb graphics card, 3 USB 2 ports and firewire, DVD writer, 15.4" screen, wireless connectivity left right and centre... the whole shebang.
as one might imagine I'm a very happy bunny right now. sadly I have no applications that are intensive enough to do the thing justice at the moment, but I will remedy this ASAP. video editing should do the trick.
still haven't decided on a proper name for it yet [all my laptops need a name to go with their personality], though I am leaning towards Charybdis - for obvious reasons... :-)
Sunday 04 January 2004 at 11:55 pm
monkey emulator blair goes to iraq in the footsteps of his schoolyard idol, to talk to the troops and establish... well, what exactly? the fact that he wants to be george w. bush but he can't because he is too articulate and lacks the butch 'simple caveman of the people' aesthetic of the president select? as michael moore said, the man should know better but he doesn't.
personally I think he has a public schoolboy crush on the macho man monkey. weenie geek fancies the alpha bully at a distance. (i wonder if there are slash sites devoted to the two of them?)
anyway. speaking to the troops: 'there are regimes capable of producing weapons... of mass distraction, and destruction'. brilliant. consider the war on iraq as a massive example of the former. distraction from what? fill in the gaps yourself.
Saturday 03 January 2004 at 12:45 am
ok, I'll break the emergent pattern of my postings here [which as those stalwart few will have noticed, silence for weeks, then a random entry on something of no possible interest to anyone not actually physically living inside my head...].
spent the last couple of weeks - since the 17th - at my parents house in norway, eating reading sleeping and doing most of the things I do here only happier, warmer and with considerably less angst. got back to cambridge on new year's eve at 6pm, from oslo with a three-hour stopover in glasgow for cheapness purposes. had no plans, was in fact considering watching the pope on tv, but non-plans went out the window when housemate invited me to join him, girlfriend and two friends for some serious pheasant and champagne. still, went to bed early having entertained with stories of reindeer I've yet to meet and fed them all some dried reindeer heart I brought back.
last couple of days then desperately trying to break the evil curse of diffuse malingering paralysis I've lived in for the last few months. pulled myself together today and managed to hammer out a new idea of sorts, which is more than I can say I have done since, well, june? it involves actor network theory and forms of authority, but it's pretty vague and of no interest to anyone living outside my head [funny how it comes back to that again...].
anyway. all is as well as can be expected this time of the year. except for the blockbuster film I left in my room before I left. and the fact that it's winter and SAD-time. to stave off the clockworklike seasonal angst that comes from waking up from dreaming of cold noses and sore throats only to realise you are in the Twilight Zone, the angst that looms in the corner of your eye and waits to pounce on you til you wake up and look out the window thinking "hmmm, breakfast would be nice" then realise its dark because the sun is setting, or it would be if you could actually see it through the thick perpetual layer of atmospherically induced gloom outside rather than having to resort to divination or speculative inference ["hm. we would all be dead otherwise. it must still be there. I think"], and you can't feel your toes because they were sticking out from under the duvet while you were sleeping and the frostbite gnomes came in through the cracked front door in the corner of your room during the night and nibbled on your little feet to see how you tasted and how to cook you come the end of the month ["eh, let's just freeze him"...]...
to fend this vile beast off I've secured myself a kilo of biscuits and a stack of obsolete films - tonight, if I can resist the lure of "komodo" and "king cobra" on terrestrial tv, it is the turn of the 1978 remake of invasion of the body-snatchers... the one with jeff goldblum and leonard nimoy. ohoy.
Saturday 03 January 2004 at 12:12 am
had a strange, very vivid dream a couple of days ago, of which i remember only fragments.
a woman was crawling very slowly with her eyes shut along a horizontal metal surface in an immense dark space. there was no sound - not just silence, deafness - and only a small circle around her was visible as she moved. I knew she was very scared and that she was a russian cosmonaut or astrophysicist. the metal surface she crawled on was the hull of a spaceship or a rocket. I knew the darkness she crawled through meant the rocket was in space, but there were no stars and no light, nothing beyond the small circle she moved in, and no sound at all. unnerving, particularly as I knew just how scared the woman was, though not of what [the obvious answer would be explosive decompression, I guess, but then when you're dreaming you don't realise these things until after you wake up do you...]
suddenly something up in front made her raise her head very quickly. as she did she must have opened her eyes, because almost immediately both her eyes were torn out of her head - by the vacuum - and floated off, bleeding, in the dark.
much later in the dream I remember floating through a dark deserted docking bay, full of ancient 60s-style NASA rockets, and falling struggling and afraid away from the exhaust of another rocket. knowing I was about to die horribly but unable to catch hold of anything. all in complete and unnatural silence.
no idea what brought on the space imagery, but I blame the eyeless woman on playing project zero for a couple of days about a month ago [freakishly spooky japanese PS2 game where you wander round a haunted mansion fending off spirits with a camera, unravelling a grisly tale of little girls being strangled with ropes til their heads fell off]. one of the ghosts is a blinded woman with long hair and bleeding eyesockets who wanders the corridors crying "my eyes! my eyes!". when I woke up the cosmonaut reminded me of her.
am going to be in cambridge soon - probably this weekend or next. meet me for a coffee?
flats (URL) - 02 02 04 - 05:12
yo.
hugo - 02 02 04 - 06:42
i'll take that as a yes... ain't got any 'monkeyboy' on my phone, so what's yer number. i'm on 07952 753046.
flats () (URL) - 02 02 04 - 22:22
mobile 906 094 855, landline 01223 722 297. mobile usually easier to catch me on. what you doing in cambridge?
monkeyboy - 02 02 04 - 22:41
a stupid number of my friends go to university there, and they need visiting once in a while (or I need to get out of london).
flats () (URL) - 03 02 04 - 00:26
cool. I'll be in norway from the 10th to the 12th or something, but otherwise all good. gimme a call when you know what your schedule is.
in a time of chimpanzees - 03 02 04 - 01:12
argh. mobile number is missing two digits: correct number is 07906 094 855.
h. - 03 02 04 - 06:04
that much was obvious. i just thought you were being canny so that it couldn't be nicked (as email addresses are) by some evil crrawler-thing, and sold to a double glazing sales company.
flats () (URL) - 03 02 04 - 23:01