Home
A new year, just like last night at about this time, and still I haven't written anything of it down to supplement my unreliable memory. Well. My unreliable *personal* memory: facts and figures are easy, but what I did yesterday, who I met, what I said... fade, with time, and not much of it.
Anyway...
Seasonal break with the family was nice, even if my brother was only able to stay a couple of days due to Work in his hometown needing him on the 27th. It was nice to catch up with people in Worthing (aunts, uncles, cousins, old school-friends and so on), and the week or so I was there wasn't really enough. I must try to sneak back there a little more (not least so the home improvement work at my mother's house doesn't back up again... ;) ).
After the seasonal break, well, I had a whole day to organise myself for a New Years' party in Fishersgate. The theme? An 80s night (since all the attendees were born in or remember the 80s). The invitation? Had a still from the movie "Beetlejuice" on it. Since I still have all the parts for my Brighton Below costume in the cupboard, Instant Costume! Well, plus a green furry wig/hat from a stall in Kensington Gardens.
Navigating the streets and stations of Brighton in such a costume is an interesting experience, and reminds me (again) why LARPers tend to travel incognito and finish rigging their costumes at the event itself. Reactions from passers-by, and there were many, were mostly positive (even if I was misidentified as the Joker by a 6-year old). "Holy shit, it's a bear!" sticks in the mind, and the ear, somewhat, but the speak^Wshouter was emerging from an off-license, so alcohol may have been a factor. Still, rigging at the party would have lost the impact of the entrance (although it was tempered slightly by finding everyone else in more standard 80s wear. Oh well.)
The party itself was good, what with period food (good), period games (NES and 80s Trivial Pursuit, better) and period music (best!). Around 2340 (and just as my team was about to win Trivial Pursuit, damnit!), the 1980s party was invaded by an allied party taking place in the 1880s. The Time Agency and the well-known Tempus Fugitives appear to have been responsible, but no-one was harmed, and the temporally-displaced people adapted quickly to the change in scenery, and more quickly yet to the buffet. As for the temporally-displaced... well, it turned out that about 60% of the cast and players from Brighton Below were there. And there's me in a tweaked version of my bbelow costume, thinking I was relatively safe in throwing it on quickly for the party. Had I known they were coming... well, I'd have worn something else. So it goes, I guess.
...it still freaks me out slightly that of the 1880s group, there were I think two people I didn't know (or, at least, couldn't identify on sight). Granted, some of them took longer than others ('chelle, in particular, taking almost thirty minutes). These days, I know more people than I can recall in one sitting. Even two years ago, I don't think that was true.
Anyway, the new year thing happened, plus the extra second to account for the Earth's inconvenient rotational period, and there are photos of me dancing inanely on Facebook somewhere. I blame the punch, which I know had the best part of half a bottle of rum in it (and I should know, I put it there). A while after midnight, our party invaded the 1880s for a bit (a five minute walk to the relevant house), then we wound things up and I found myself walking home at 0530 in 2009. About six miles in the cold, in a suit, with a rucksack, and at the end of a very long day. I've no-one to blame but myself, really: I could probably have found a corner of floor that wasn't being slept on, even if some Tetris was involved, and if I hadn't forgotten my sleep-apnea medication (stops me snoring loudly enough to wake the room every half-hour or so) and didn't want to get out of the full-face makeup. And, and, and... I finally staggered up the hill as dawn was breaking, and fell asleep at about 0650. Today I woke at 1400. *sigh*
New Years' Resolutions? I've more or less resolved not to make any, on the grounds that TODOs written down on one day are no more special than any other, and no more likely to be achieved. I'll write a list of something like Resolutions at some point in the very near future, incorporating things like "eat better and lose weight" and "try to focus on whatever I'm doing better", but I refuse to tag it to the beginning of the year, for no obvious reason.
I hope anyone reading this had a good holiday, and is looking forward to the challenges and triumphs that accompany this and every new year.
...now I just wish I felt as positive as I sound.
Well, it's been a busy few days, what with Katsu and Mike in town and the last of the run-up to Christmas. Not that I'm complaining, of course.
Friday, I managed to get everything I wanted done, done, and shut down the machines in the lab. Now I can't work over the holiday, even if I wanted to (apart from maybe reading a few papers).
Saturday, we all wandered into town for a spot of last-minute Christmas shopping, then returned to Fishersgate for a one-shot Serenity RP. A certain stoner mechanic turned out to be surprisingly good at beating information out of low-lives, while the captain tried to prevent the crew from killing each other. I don't know why I normally run stoner characters in Katsu's games, but this one came by it honestly (he has the complication "Hooked", which I selected for him a long time before I decided his actual personality). Pacing of the game wasn't perfect (it got a bit rushed toward the end, not least because the last train was approaching and we took so long to set up characters), but I think everyone enjoyed themselves so, success. I quite enjoy Serenity, and I may have to run a game at some point: the system (the dice mechanic on which the game's rules are based) is pleasingly simple, and I know the background fairly well by now...
Today was Sunday, and we went to Nandos for lunch. Food was good, restaurant crowded, staff distracted... no big surprise at this time of year. A brief side-trip to a guerrilla art market, a stop by the new doughnut shop and then back to Fishersgate again for the lighting of the first candle on the Hanukiah and a few games (including Munchkin Cthulhu, Ia, Ia...).
Now, I'm back home, fiddling with the code for this website and getting ready to go to bed. Tomorrow I go home for Christmas, and Katsu and Mike move on on their whistle-stop tour of friends and family in the UK. They'll fly home before I'm back in Brighton, and be 3000 miles away again. I suspect I can make do with the friends I have around here, but I'll be sad to see them go nonetheless :)
So, the weekend is drawing to a close. Technically, in this timezone, it drew to a close an hour ago. It has been a good couple of days, but not really a restful one.
Friday afternoon I skipped out on the work Christmas Do to drive up to London. Since the work Christmas Do was probably just an afternoon of playing video-games instead of working (no real complaint there, I suppose) followed by an evening at a mid-to-low-quality Greek restaurant and a mini-pub/nightclub-crawl in the company of a series of questionable characters, I feel less than guilty there. Instead, Spook and I hopped into the Spookmobile and travelled to the Pembury Tavern, Hackney, via the wonders of Tower Bridge and the centre of London (notably excluding the Congestion Charge Zone, which we skirted by as little as ten feet on several occasions due to our GPS being Smart). The Pembury is an excellent pub: good food, good drink and good atmosphere. The journey up, not so much, since we did it at rush hour and a one-and-a-half-hour journey ended up taking closer to three...
Still, once we made it to the address, we discovered that the Pembury's postcode is rather large. A little research took us about 500m down the road, and to the pub itself (thanks Aquarion), where we met up with Aquarion, Tamara, Cookie and a few more excellent people. Over the next few hours, boardgames were played, laptops were used, and Cookie showed off the weird and wonderful side of Ruby (the programming language) to those interested. Shevek's excellent scarf (pink/purple six-inch chainlinks in wool) was much remarked upon, all of us caught up with people we hadn't seen in a while and met new people, and I managed to avoid being totally inappropriate. All in all, a good meet.
Spook and I slept over at Aquarion's house, as planned (it being a long journey back to Brighton, and the hour being past midnight), then went our separate ways in the morning: spook to his parents' and me to my brother's new place in Surbiton. Once there (Walthamstow Central to Surbiton is a fairly long run when you don't know the terrain too well), we made chilli, played with the PS3 and the Wii, and set up a wireless point so said consoles can be online at the same time as my brother's laptop and any other machines in the house. Network is, apparently, "good". Eventually, it came time to leave, and he gave me a lift home, because he's Good People. Or well trained, or something :)
It occurred to me yesterday that I've now travelled the length of the Victoria Line. A couple of years ago, my brother and I went to see Velvet Revolver at the Brixton Academy (Victoria->Brixton), and now I've travelled back from Aquarion's (Walthamstow Central) to Victoria.
Sunday I just tried to recover, but that doesn't seem to have happened. What with doing the washing, doing the shopping, cooking some of the shopping into a curry and fiddling with the code for the new version of my website (nearly release ready, finally), the day has flown by. I put a portable hard disk together with the intention of reinstalling my laptop this afternoon, but now it's tomorrow, and there is no time... Ah well. Tomorrow night, maybe.
A friend from my usual IRC channel is coming back into the country and having a birthday do in London tonight, so I'm off that way to see her and a few others I've not seen in a while. Then, the following day, I'm going to be the Tech Fairy at my brother's new house. Hopefully I'll have some free time on Sunday... :)
This entry posted mainly so people have some clue why I'm not at home / answering the telephone at random points over the next few days.
Both of the above are true. I forget exactly how many stories there are supposed to be, but it's a scarily small number, something like seven or ten. There's "farmhand saves princess", there's "plucky nobody defeats evil empire", "boy finds girl, loses girl, wins girl back", and so on. Technically, if you reduce all stories down to their barest components, they fit into one of these categories. Note that Star Wars encompasses all of the above examples. A little more discussion can be found here, for the interested.
Equally, there are no new faces. I went to a NaNo write-in today, which turned out to be just me and one of the Municipal Liasons, at the Sanctuary Cafe in Hove, and the woman who served me at the counter was the absolute spitting image of Amy Hayes, someone I knew from Texas. Different hair-style, different dress sense, but physically almost identical. It's a peculiar experience, and as my social circle continues to expand with time, I'm having it more and more of late. This one, though, was particularly striking because I encountered this woman (whose name is Alice, apropos of nothing in particular) in a cafe very very similar in structure to Austin's Spider House cafe, to which Amy took me and a friend several times while we were out there. Setting and resemblance are enough to touch off old memories. I wonder how Amy is these days? Must get back in touch.
NaNo progresses, of course, and my body-count hasn't risen any higher, which is probably for the best. I have a couple of antagonists and a protagonist, which is a good start, but the plot is about to get interesting ahead of schedule due to my running out of words and having to introduce a turning-point event a good deal earlier than I intended. Or, I could jump tracks and tell someone else's story for a bit, and come back to that little cliffhanger. Decisions, decisions...