Untouched... unhinged.

Don't you just hate it when you wake up feeling like P. Diddy? Oh wait... no. Because that's not even a thing!

For the last couple of days I've been using up all my writingness and creativity on real-life, pen and paper stuff instead of this. If I had a few more followers it might be a bad trade off, but seeing as a third of my audience will see the benefit, its probably worth it!

This is such a boring lull just now, with all my last wave of projects taken care of but their replacements to work towards still a couple of weeks away. I had hoped that one of my game deliveries might help fill some of the gaps, but most annoyingly I've had to use some of my writing allocation to send them angry emails for not sending me my free in-game horsey! It may be minor, but I bought from that shop solely on the basis that they'd give me free stuff, so I want it fulfilled damn it!

Did you know?: That Tatu's All About Us was in fact written by The Veronicas, before the record company reassigned it to the Russian pair? Isn't there something a bit off about that that it was originally written by and about sisters, and then co-opted to be about lesbianism?

Talking of the Veronicas (neither of whom is called Veronica, but still), one of them had a nudey picture scandal. Oh heavens! In this puritanical day and age, no less. Someone must inform the elders! However, it was made somewhat worse by one of their fan forums organising a “post your own nude pics in support of Jess” thread, requiring the poptart herself to intervene begging them to call it off. I think that might possibly be the most misguided show of support I've ever seen. But still, full marks for the execution.

The night before the morning after

Apparently I'm 5 years old. I couldn't sleep last night because I was excited about santa my friend coming, so at 3:30am instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling I decided I was going to do something productive. Thus, I wrote my to do list:

TO DO LIST: ₢ 3.30am ^{note: (that's a clock. Its even pointing to the right time! I don't know where I'm going to be able to find something to represent a bee later on though.)}

1. Jet (will solve self)

2. Paypal! Tshirts.

3. NOT THE BEES

4. ARGH MY EYES

5. Seek filter for letter idea. See if crazy.

6. Comes after 5.

7. Solve World Hunger. (potential avenue of investigation: crops that grow horizontally. Plant up side of buildings to save space.)

Then I got hundreds of post it notes and wrote NOT THE BEES, ARGH MY EYES, AAAARGH on them, along with pictures of angry bees, and stuck them all over my flat for my mum to find in the morning. Then I went back to bed.

The Sky at Night

Things are awfully quiet around the house this week. The brother is off camping with dad before he has to go back to school next week, so I guess this is a trial run of how quiet the house will be without him once the holidays are over. But then, considering I sleep through most of the school day, it probably won't bother me too much, just have a lot of barking at someone arriving home around the time I get up and have my 'breakfast'.

I had an OT session today (yesterday actually, its past midnight), and I think it went pretty well. Making it out is always held up as wonderful progress, and I did that fine – we had a very pleasant outing to the local village shop. I counted 5 squished hedgehogs along the road there though, le sigh, and its not exactly a long stretch of road – it couldn't be if I managed to make it out along it, could it? I was determined that since it was my outing, I would be the gentleman and I'd pay for the purchases: a Milky Way for the lady, and some Skittles for myself. Unfortunately things cost a lot more than they used to in the good old days, and somehow that managed to come to more than the 70p I had in change, so I had to borrow a pound coin instead of breaking a £10 note. It just couldn't be one of my adventures if something didn't go wrong, I'm just glad it was that instead of any of the more serious pitfalls my mind is convinced lie out there in the big scary world.

There are a lot of things that I've never had the chance to do in my life – go out drinking, go clubbing, go to a concert, but last night I finally managed to cross one fairly minor one off the list – saw a shooting star. It could have turned into a legendary “seemed liked a good idea at the time” adventure for me to venture off into the night in search of space rocks, but after a long wait and a strained neck looking up at the 10% of the sky that wasn't clouded over, I finally got a jolt when something bright streaked into my field of vision for a millisecond and faded away into the night sky. I wasn't counting on it giving me such a fright, but still, its something I've always wanted to see that, despite my interests in space and the cosmos all my life, I'd never managed to. What shall be crossed off the list next?

Its generally been a good week for me from a social aspect, from multiple angles! I've been chatty enough with my mum's friend while she's been here, and apparently I'm a perfectly charming young man – quiet down with that snickering at the back! Thanks to some gentle prodding (and padding at my ego) I've been brave enough to send some emails to some people who sound lovely and interesting, so hopefully with some gentle persuasion and bribery I'll finally be able to push my (public) followers into double figures, mwaha! Plus you know, all the regular benefits that friendship brings. And stuff.

I was going to say its just a pity that animals can't sign up as followers, in a flawless segue into talking about my other new friend, but I just remembered that there are actually quite a few on Twitter, most of whom have more followers than me. Quite sobering actually, when you think about it. Anyway, I've been spending more time with the adorable little neighbours kitten that everyone's telling me to stop encouraging, but he's far too adorable to stop! I went outside and sat on the stone bench at the bottom of the garden, and an adorable little bundle of black and white fluff bolted from out the trees and came to sit beside me, curl up and give me lots of cuddles and purring. I can't turn that down!

One Week

It's been a week now since I had the company of another human being – the first week of another 3 year wait? Hopefully not, but I'm still reliant on people coming to me instead of trying to get out there into the world to lasso up some friends for myself. I suppose then it's a good job that I'm so magnetic and charismatic that I can attract anyone here at all! Just need to focus on either making sure they come back, or never leave. And since that XL cage I ordered for last time never showed up, I guess I'll just need to work on being a fun and exciting host. I'm leaving negative feedback on that cage though.

I've already done a post here looking back over the years and reflecting on how far I've come, but its just hugely frustrating that the final roadblock, the last thing for me to get over and get back to some sort of normalcy is proving so difficult to get around. I've actually been out 3 times in the past week; not going anywhere in particular, but just trying to make some sort of symbolic stand against an imaginary construct of my limitations. Suffice to say, it's not gone so well.

I've been battling with M.E. for a full decade now, and I would say I've got a reasonable handle on my symptoms and how to manage them, so its all the more astounding really that I managed to misjudge this one so badly. Going out takes energy. Just because you insist that you're “trying harder” or putting up some sort of fight about it does not in any way negate the amount of energy that going out expends, leading to a rather major flaw in the plan of “I'll just do it lots and lots until it gets easier”.

My other brother returns from his travels in continental Europe tonight. He's my younger brother by age, but he passed by me socially many years ago. It doesn't help with the mid-life crisis when you're still pining over things and experiences that someone you're meant to be more advanced than has burned through them all and got sick of them! Next he'll be finished Uni and off into the world of employment, while my nights are filled with dreams of the school bus and sleepovers.

Still, I've got the chance to dazzle him with my culinary prowess that I've been working on while he's been away. Buttered pasta with grated cheese, and yes – I did grate that cheese myself.

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!

Reminiscing in the rain, pondering as it pours

I thought it was meant to be summer? While London bakes in 30°C, I don't think its stopped pouring with rain here for about the last week. In some ways that's not so bad – I've delegated my garden watering duties to god, and he seems to be doing a pretty good job of it. A saved 3 minutes per day to sit on my arse and play Pokémon is worth sacrificing our summer for!

I actually went out in the deluge yesterday. I'm not entirely sure why yet again, this seems to be happening a lot to me lately. Maybe I have some sort of brain slug that's slowly trying to take control of me? Step 1 get a blog, step 2 get soaked... step 3 world domination? If anyone notices any changes in my personality (like being nice all of a sudden), alert the Pentagon, there's no telling what Zyglexz is going to do next!

Yes I named my imaginary brain slug. Sue me.

Anyway, back to reality, and although I hardly went far, I ended up out for 45 minutes. Things just... got awfully loud inside the house. At times, when I was under some trees, with the rain coming down steadily on the soft forest floor, it tapped into some sort of memory, as if I was almost there at something, if I just focused a bit harder then I'd uncover some sort of long lost link back to something I didn't even know I'd lost. Unfortunately when I tried to focus a bit harder and move on, instead of spurring on my impromptu quest to recapture my soul I somehow managed to get a Ke$ha song implanted in my head instead, where it remained for the entire rest of the walk. I saw a deer, which was nice, but when I got back all I'd really achieved was a thorough soaking necessitating a complete change of clothes, some more leg pain, and the lingering feeling that I'd been teased with something just out of my reach that I know fine well I'm never going to be able to comprehend.

Oh, and a psychotic desire to strangle anyone who claims to either brush their teeth with a bottle of Jack, or that “they know we got swagger”. THAT DOESN'T EVEN MEAN ANYTHING.

40% of my posts to date are now tagged with being about Ke$ha. This is a worrying start.