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Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

Blog : Posts from May 2002

And the clocks were striking thirteen

Some Embra graffiti

I was walking up The Vennel today, in heavy drizzle, when I saw a piece of paper pinned to a wall. On it, it said “What would make Edinburgh better? Have your say!” The top entry was “SUNSHINE” in big letters, and with a smiley-faced sun. I couldn’t help but agree.

Mind you, lower down it said “more sweaty moshing”, which isn’t really the sort of thing I’d encourage, at least not right next to me.

Geek news, not Greek news

Or, the Eurovision

I seem to have got the stupid thing working sort-of reliably now, by unplugging the old Windows hard disk completely. Well, I hardly ever used it. It’s not crashed at all since I did that.

Saturday night: I wasn’t impressed by the Eurovision result, but I wasn’t impressed by the songs generally. Ah, well. It’s always a big disappointment, I think: the song you want to win never does. Slovenia were working on the right lines by going for a complete camp-overload—isn’t that the whole point of the thing? Jessica Garlick would have done better if she’d worn shoes that matched her outfit, I think. And why did Malta do so well, anyway, when it sounded just like the music from Wish You Were Here? I kept having visions of Judith Chalmers.

Dimitra said she wants to forget all about this year’s song content so she can forget the Greek entry ever existed. It was definitely going into “so bad it’s good” territory—I couldn’t keep a straight face through it.

Fingers crossed...

Trying to bring things back to life

Well, it’s still broken. Sort of. I managed to get it running again most of the time—I’m not sure really how—but every so often the disk drive starts making nasty clonking noises and the whole thing just freezes. Actually, it did The Noises just then, but for some reason kept on working.

Because I’ve not been writing things down, I don’t seem to have anything interesting to write down. I quickly got bored of going back and forth to an internet café every two or three days to read all my email (I know, too many mailing lists). I was planning to take up lots of exciting new activities—and especially, get some more things ready to type and put up elsewhere on this site. But, um, I haven’t. I wrote a letter to a friend in the US, two poems to post to one of the many, many mailing lists, and that was about it. Oh, and I managed to get two friends’ computers online. No self-interest there, of course. One of them paid me in cake, which has to be a good thing.

If you go to Not You, The Other One, you can read all about what students at my university were like. Not me though, of course. Everyone else seemed to be Dead Posh. When I worked in the library, behind the counter, we could see what the students’ names were when their matric cards got scanned. There was a frightening number of people with names like “The Honourable James Twistleton Ponsonby-Smythe”. I had friends whose flatmates thought a nice weekend in the middle of term was a quick flight to Switzerland, for the skiing.

Oh, of course, I have to remind you that it’s the Eurovision on Saturday. My friend W (the actor) would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t point it out.

Update, 27th April 2022: Not You, The Other One no longer seems to be online these days, although its writer is still around and about on social media.

Aaargh

Or, technical failure

So, the computer has broken. The bastard. I won’t be writing much until I manage to get it fixed, which will probably take a couple of weeks at least. I managed this by persuading a friend to let me use his machine.

Mulling things over

Is it a dream, or a nightmare?

Last night’s dream: I was supposed to be travelling to Mull, which had managed to move itself to the other side of the country and was now somewhere in the Tay. Then, I was sat around in my old school, fixing clocks. Or something like that. Later on, I was attending a conference (which seemed to be something to do with town planning) in a labyrinthine hotel, adn it all got very scary. I discovered that we were some kind of guinea-pigs for the real conference-goers, we tried to escape but couldn’t and all that sort of thing. The best bit was when I found that if I took my phone and flipped over the SIM, I could then use it to reprogram reality—although this gave us a better chance of escaping, it meant we could be tracked down a lot quicker, too.

I really should have less cheese with my evening meals, I think.