Backwards birthdays

Don't you hate it when you wake up in the morning feeling like... wait, wait, stop, I've done the Ke$ha joke before. Start over!

It's been a full 7 years now since I dropped out of school (and, by extension, society), and yet in my half-asleep dazed state this morning I still managed to whimper “but mummy, I don't WANT to go to school, I'm tiiiired!”. I'm just never going to be free of it, am I? I'll be 83, dreaming about that damn school bus. Assuming science doesn't find a cure for dreams by then, that is.

The framework and background time fillers have, as predicted, been slightly lacking this week, so I'm very fortunate that I've been able to be amused by some of the apparently backwards happenings around me, starting with a lovely parcel I got on Tuesday! See, I always thought that you were supposed to RECEIVE presents on your birthday, instead I've been sent a lovely bonus one from Alex before I've even sent hers! My parents seem to have got the whole birthday concept a bit wrong too, considering that they got a nice watch for the wrong brother. He might well need it now he's a big senior at school, but isn't a watch meant to be a 21^st sort of present? Maybe they thought if there were watches all round I'd feel left out, so just decided to prioritise the littlest son. Ha, now he knows how it feels!

You know, I'm not entirely sure I've got the right message out of watching House. I'm sure the writers thought they were getting across a responsible message about the dangers of painkiller abuse, instead I seem to have taken the view that it took him 5 years to have any adverse effects from them, therefore a month or so of scoffing them like smarties isn't going to do any damage. Actually come to think of it, the “being mean to a girl for an extended period of time until she finally admits she wants you” moral of the Cuddy arc has worked out pretty well for me too.

Oh, and for all who laughed under your breath about my hatching Bulbasaur eggs last entry? Calm nature with perfect HP, Defence and Special Attack IVs, making it one of the best in the world on the day that its revealed grass drain moves have received a power boost for the next gen. HA.

Life In A Northern Town

It's the medium brother's birthday on Wednesday, so he's home for some bonus chaos! The bar has been set with his first story about his feuding room-mates – I'm not sure how you're supposed to react when you walk into the kitchen to catch the tail end of an anecdote that ends with “so she bought a paddling pool, but it got filled with beans so she threw a pineapple at her but it missed and broke a window”. Student life in Glasgow, apparently! Next item on the agenda: surviving the grandparents visit for his 'special day'.

So, the pope is about to make his first visit to Britain in almost 30 years, amid a storm of controversy. Meanwhile, Susan Boyle is preparing to perform for him. This is the country that produced Shakespeare and The Beatles, and apparently now the high point of our cultural achievements in 2010 is... some woman that sang on Britain's Got Talent. If only he'd arrived a week early we could have gone the whole hog and stuck him in Ultimate Big Brother. "Day 35, 9:15pm. Chantelle and Brian are in the garden, boasting to Benedict XVI about the footballers they've blown in the toilets at China White."

I had a thought. I have quite a lot of them during the days, but this was a particularly profound one. Imagine there's a girlband. Lets call them.. the Wednesdays. Now, 4 of them are really keen to do a sexy photoshoot in their underwear for FHM, but the 5^th one is shy and doesn't really want to. But the offer was only for the whole band to do it... that's a lot of peer pressure, and something pretty major to end up getting forced into! I'm sure there's some sort of moral to this story, but as usual I'm not entirely sure what it is.

And while we're on the subject! Imagine a pair of identical twins. One is shy, one confident and outgoing. The confident one does a Playboy shoot. Does the shy one get embarrassed that now everyone knows what she looks like naked?

I do realise that this makes me look like some sort of deviant sitting about all day thinking about embarrassed nudey girl scenarios, but its probably still better than what I've actually been doing. Hatching hundreds of Bulbasaur eggs relaxes me, ok?! And I'll be laughing when I see the benefit of my master race of superior genetic plant monsters. In 9 months. When the game I'm doing it in preparation for actually comes out.

Oh and the fact that my horse has failed to materialise on day 16 goes without saying, of course.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.

Beautiful chaos, logical pokémaths

David's Latias deals x amount of damage, using a move with 70 power. When it's finished its training, it will possess a move of 90 power, and have 50% higher base attack. How much more damage will an attack from this creature do?

Also, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, you're too tired to remember how to do percentages and you're on IM to your ex girlfriend, who doesn't realise that the maths problem you've just bewildered her with is Pokémon related and may attempt to stab you when she figures this fact out.

(The answer is “almost twice as much”, by the way. I finally figured it out at 3am after lying asleep for a while going over it in my head. I also remembered how to divide by fractions. She was not impressed to be informed of any of these points.)

We've got an extra brother around the house now, so 50% added chaos to be spread! In between the catch up on all the quality TV he missed in his 8 months away (that won't take long) and the Ally McBeal boxset marathon, that is. Apparently when he was at work in Vienna, he expressed a keen interest in the branded toasters that the hotel used, that burned the hotel logo onto the bread while they cooked them. In a wonderfully thoughtful gesture, as a leaving present, his co-workers managed to hook him up with one! Unfortunately, he had already packed his bags, so he had to attempt to take his brand new toaster with him on his hand luggage instead. It's interesting to note that the airport security at Vienna International had never seen a toaster show up on the scanner before, and by all accounts amused both him and them as they attempted to work out if any part of it was capable of being used as a weapon before allowing it onto the plane. And of course, since this was a European electrical appliance, it has a continental-style plug, meaning he had to grab an adaptor specifically for use on this one, sole toaster, that brands the corporate logo of his ex-employer onto his toast. It's nice to know that my capacity for creating beautiful chaos out of everyday life runs in the family!

In other news that will no doubt draw sarcastic comments as to my mentioning her AGAIN, apparently the infinitely wise and talented miss Ke$ha has been on record to say that the reason her songs are so shockingly slutty is because she's making a feminist point. You see, if a man said those things then they'd be seen as perfectly acceptable, so by drawing attention to the double standards imposed on men and women she's really just holding a mirror up to society.

I like this argument, a lot. If I ever say or do anything that annoys or upsets anyone, then I'm doing it to prove a point about how bad it is! Don't blame me, blame society for the unfair values that it attributes to doing that, whatever it might be. Flawless logic.

I'll be there for you

I'm on my own with my thoughts today – the rest of the family are off to a wedding, leaving me with an empty house to throw one of my legendary wild parties in. It might have been interesting to go, but I figured that seeing as it was a family wedding, the bridesmaids would be too much of a minefield. Plus, to make myself look presentable enough to be seen in public I'd have had to do something with my ever expanding beard, and that would have disturbed the family of sparrows currently nesting in it.

Do you ever think that Lily Allen comes home from a really nice date where nothing went wrong and thinks, damn, now I've got nothing to write a complaining song about? That's about how I feel just now. Yesterday I had a lovely friend over, for the first time in 3 years, and it was great. Where's the comedy to be gleaned from that?! We watched a film, wandered around the garden and played some Wii games, and it was great to just have some very nice company. I even cooked the tea for us all (even if it was only pasta and chicken), how domesticated am I? Such a grown-up, sane, normal human being thing to do, even if we did arrange beforehand to have a dedicated moment put aside for trading some Pokémon.

I feel a bit like the writers of the IT Crowd now – I've run out of amusing ideas. Oh snap, I went there! Etc. After my last epic monstrosipost took a lot out of me, I'm not really sure how to go on. Whining about my going out fears was supposed to be the nuclear option, and I wasted it the second I saw a particularly frightening looking gerbil. Metaphorically speaking. Maybe this is a post-apocalyptic blog now, to stretch that analogy well beyond any reasonable sort of breaking point?

The (very) pointless adventures of David and Togepi!

A couple of entries back I mentioned that, for reasons unbeknown to me at the time, I had hatched a near-flawless Pokémon from an egg in one of my old Game Boy games, as opposed to the newer DS ones. Since you can transfer them over to the new generation its not really a problem, but at every single stage of this so far it seems to have thrown up yet another issue to further complicate my already scrambled existence with utter, utter pointlessness. First off, WHAT on earth possessed me to hatch eggs on my Game Boy instead of the DS? Lesson one: nostalgia is painful, ignore it. Lesson two: once you've invested THAT much time and effort into something, however pointless, you have to see it through just on general principle, yes?

First off, instead of happily plugging the game into my DS and transferring it to the new games nice and simply, I decided it might be fun to properly train it 'old-school', before letting it loose competitively on the new, wi-fi, touch-screen modern hotness. Who says there's no room for romance in, erm... Pokémon? All I had to do was spend a day or so working out what in-game berries to feed it.

Problem 1 quickly reared its head: I didn't have any of those berries. So over the course of a couple of nights I got hold of one, grew it, replanted it, until I had enough to go around nicely. Of course, a slight miscalculation in my permanently sleepy state (planting 2 = twice as many) somehow meant that one morning when I woke up to find that I had over 60 of this virtual berry, far more than I could ever find a use for. Maybe I should take up virtual jam-making, although knowing my luck with this whole project so far I'd probably end up living in a shipping crate with only a retro Game Boy and a magic bean to my name.

Next I had to figure out how to make tasty treats for my precious Pokémon. Maybe this was the stage that I should have taken a step back and properly surveyed the utter, utter pointlessness of what I was doing, but for some strange reason it made perfect sense to do so at the time. I worked out that if I made purposely average treats with one of my 60 berries, it would raise its stats in 3 areas at once at half the speed – a net gain! However, with the condition stat stored as an 8-bit integer, it would max at 255, and my treats were regularly coming out at level 23 – if I could just play the treat-making minigame flawlessly twice to boost it to level 24, then it would perfectly add up to a nice, round 255 in 11 treats, saving time and... well, actually if I have to replay the minigame hundreds of times to get it to come out perfectly its not really saving any time is it? But still, it makes perfect sense in my head and I've worked it all out on my own, using my superior intellect and maths reasoning to streamline the training of my virtual creature. I'm being productive!

The next step was actually applying it. Of course, it failed to work. For some reason, instead of reaching 255, it stopped somewhere in the middle. It told me that Togepi didn't like my treats. I failed to account for this in my pokémaths. Thus rendering most of the adventure to date and previous days work pointless. Still, I've got a stack of treats saved from when I last played in 2007, so I just used them instead. It has literally only just hit me that I should have used them in the first place.

Change of plan needed then, and I dusted off one of my other old games and discovered that a very useful move tutor could be traded over from that one, that would really help move things along. The only minor flaw being that I'd need to find another old Game Boy from somewhere to trade with, but my brother used to play too so his will still be about. Amazingly, considering that this could have added another layer of complexity to the proceedings, it didn't and he found it in record time! There was only one minor flaw... the wireless adaptor. A small, grey piece of plastic designed to plug into an obsolete console, that had become separated from said console at some unknown point in the last 5 or so years. I've invested too much into this now to stop though, so on with the search!

While examining the unopened boxes from our house move (4 years ago), I came across the following items:

• a box of wooden railway toys “for passing onto my future kids”

• a box full of 7 year old love letters (as in, from 7 years ago, not from when I was 7)

• a VHS tape of a 2006 wrestling pay-per-view

• a strip poker set, unopened

• a watch

• another box full of cuddly toys

• two full ring binders of GCSE physics and chemistry notes

• approximately 400 obsolete hard drives

• a broken remote control helicopter

• a pair of thumb-handcuffs

• and a partridge in a pear tree.

When I was just about ready to start burning things, I called in my brother for help... and he promptly found it in his own room. In the same box as he found his Game Boy. Maybe I should have started by looking there.

So that's the adventure to date, still nowhere near finished but I think you'll agree, after investing THIS much in it I surely need to see the project through now. All I need to do is trade that item over, and then the minor issue of beating a section of the game 32 times in order to unlock another special move to teach it. But I'm sure that will just fly by.

In other news, my t shirt and socks are co-ordinated today!

Now that it's raining more than ever... I'll hit you with an umbrella.

Seven days, seven entries, seven followers. There's a nice symmetry to that. But on the other hand... that's not very good. Don't you know who I am, internet?! I am a beautiful and unique snowflake, pay attention to me! Maybe this whole blog thing would have gone a bit better if I actually had friends to bribe – or at least minions. I'm down to a single minion and she's pretty overworked as it is.

I thought it was meant to be summer? It's rained non stop for the last couple of days, really not sure that trading watering for sunshine was a great deal now. However, in those extra three minutes for Pokémonning, I did manage to hatch an uber-skilled Togepi, so maybe it will have balanced out if he wins me a couple of battles. The dogs still need walked in it though, so I'd better hope we get a break from the deluge before the day's out or I'm going to get soaked, again. I'm running out of clothes after that last escapade, I already had to spend the day freezing cold in my shorts so if THEY go... well, I'm just glad I had my OT appointment this morning instead of tomorrow. That one could have been awkward otherwise.

Last time I took the dogs out, I carried a big stick. If anyone asked, I was going to claim that I was pretending to be the legendary Sumerian warrior, Enkidu. But no-one asked.

As an aside, I'm amused that my spell check has suggested changing the words “pokémonning” to “poisoning”, and to change “uber-skilled” to “semi-skilled”. It wasn't keen on Enkidu or Togepi either, but that's not as funny so I'll just ignore that. Digitized utility stumbles slightly over proper nouns, it's not the richest vein to mine comedy from.

At least we've had some mild chaos keeping me amused. For what feels like about the 8^th time, a family member rescued another dog! Maybe we have some sort of magnetic anomaly under the house that attracts runaways? Or maybe we all just smell of chum. This time it was a sheepdog that had somehow managed to get itself lost, and had made its way across several fields and a moor to come and sit at my dad's feet. Last time it was me that did the heroic rescuing I got a tin of biscuits, so I was cursing my luck at being too slow with the lasso. When it inevitably happens again we'll have a fight on our hands to go and play the hero. I'll probably get bitten.

The Way I Am

I'm still not entirely sure on what the point of this blog was, or who I'm writing it for. So far I've tried to write as though I'm explaining things to an 'outsider', to someone living a perfectly normal life and drawing attention to the ways that make me and what I'm going through different. Really though, the type of people likely to be reading this are those who are in the same or similar positions. All my friends and contacts now that I've built up over the years are people in the same situation, linked together by a shared empathy and understanding that we've all had limitations placed on us and trying to find ways to express ourselves that let us break free of our shackles.

There are a million blogs like that out there, so what do I really think I'm doing differently? I'm an identical drop of water in the endless ocean, convinced that I can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. Maybe there was no real point to this at all, just an empty void to throw my thoughts out there into, tossing them into the abyss under the delusion that my echo will answer me back and we'll strike up a meaningful conversation.

Something I've noticed though with all the other blogs like this out there is just how defined by the illness they all seem to be. I was watching an episode of House the other day where one of the characters wondered, how would you introduce me? As a doctor, as black, as a car thief? I suppose I'm in the same boat – no matter what I might strive for or try to be or achieve, its almost always going to have to include this as a caveat. If someone asks, what does your brother/son/friend do, the fact that my illness is the reason for it is always going to have to come up within the first two lines. I don't have a job, I'm not at college, because... .The fact is that its not normal and that it needs an explanation for why my 'scenic' path as I've described it is the one that I'm travelling down, always pointing out that its not by choice and that really of course I'd rather be on a different one.

So I've pointed it all out, but what for, what have I really achieved by laying it out like that? I've not come to any conclusions, just made myself look smarter by drawing attention to the fact that I've noticed it instead of working on fixing it. Its a good technique, especially for debating or arguing – set out all your points in the form of a question, that way if you're proved wrong then you were only being wise and spurring on a thoughtful debate!

In the end though, who we are boils down to the sum of our experiences, and for anyone else out there like me who's travelling down a path that they can insist they didn't choose, it still doesn't change the fact that they're sauntering their way slowly along it anyway. This path I'm on has influenced everything about me, even down to my looks - I have long hair mainly because there was a period of time where I wasn't able to get out to the barbers, so had to just let it grow. I happen to quite like the person that I've become now (and my extremely cool hair) – I'm fully aware that its not 'the same as other people', but for the moment I've convinced myself I'm that snowflake floating down from the sky, waiting to change the world when I finally land. Everyone in the world will have changed and grown as a person over the last decade of their life, if I tried to rebel against an imaginary construct of 'the illness' and discard everything that its influenced me into becoming, then I'd just end up with the mind of the 13 year old that I was, playing Pokémon and wanting to push girls into the mud.

Oh, wait a minute...