The normality of nothing

Well, I WAS trying to think of a really clever word to sum up my current state of mind, but apparently my brain has just totally given up after a week of being heavily overworked. My poor brain. In fact I don’t think I actually have a brain any more. I just have a sort of grey milkshake sloshing around inside my head, and occasionally a few lumps of what remains of my once-clever brain manage to knock together and throw out something smart. Usually though, I find a constant stream of nonsense coming out of my mouth which really might have made a whole lot more sense if I’d thought it through first. But that brings me back to the original problem of only being able to pull something clever out of the pool of confusion in my head when Jupiter is in line with my right eyeball or something like that.

But anyway, my exams are over. Hip hip hooray. I’m finally able to relax without being reminded that I’m not allowed to do or think about anything other than studying, by the pile of books and paper beside me. Really, I think they talk. “No Joe, you can’t go and cook some food, that would take at least half an hour, which is valuable time in which you could be studying Eigenvectors and the Computer Misuse Act!” Consequentially, I don’t think I actually left the house in a week, or 2 weeks, or however long it was since I started panicking about my exams, and that could have been a lifetime or an hour for all I know, because it was both not long enough and far too long at the same time.

That’s not to say I was obedient to the ever wise pile of papers. Half of the time when I should have been studying, I ended up being distracted. Wikipedia is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to students. While it is an excellent resource which is full of information on everything you need to know, it’s also an excellent resource which is full of everything you DON’T need to know, and frequently reminds you of this by constantly linking to other articles in every other word. While it did provide me with a lot of help on things I looked up, I frequently got distracted by random links, which led to more links, in a never ending path of links onto very interesting, but also very unrelated topics to what I needed to know. While I was supposed to be looking up details of British computer law how to do various things with matrices, I ended up reading about black holes, the possibility of time travel, and the potential of apocalypse caused by nanotechnology. It was even able to provide me with a reason why I’m often so socially inept, which is a whole other topic which I’ll probably be going into tomorrow.

But still, I got the studying done in the end, and I did quite obediently refrain from doing anything too unproductive or entertaining in the past week, and instead attempting to study most of the time. I was quite impressed with myself when I logged onto Final Fantasy XI for the first time in a while today, to discover an unread message from over a week ago, proving to myself that I had indeed managed to resist the lure of gaming rather than studying. This all makes me sound very studious, which is in fact far from true. It was more due to panic and a sense of impending doom that I was studying so hard, than a desire to be a perfect student and know everything. I just wanted to know SOMETHING in time for the exams, because it was a bit too late to hope to know everything.

In the end, most of the exams weren’t too bad. I managed to learn most of what I needed to know, or at least enough of it to give some sort of vaguely informed answer to the questions. The maths exam was pretty close to awful though, and while I had at least managed to remember most of the methods for working through the questions, I didn’t quite manage to use them very well. I just hope the person who marks it manages to find some sense within the pages of garbled sums.

While I was studying, I kept thinking of all these things I’d get done after the exams. But now they’re over, I’ve gone straight back to being extremely unproductive, and just sitting around in my room again. Well, I do think I deserve some time off of being productive and thinking after the past week, and I have certainly been indulging in that by sleeping and doing nothing. But unfortunately this lazyness will have to be short lived, as I’m straight back into classes at 9am tomorrow. And along with that, I’m starting a part time job for a few weeks, hopefully getting some work done on the Pirate Radio site, and possibly even going to the gym.

It sounds good in theory, but these things rarely go as planned. Time will tell.

The E is for Evil

I’ll make this quick, because my hand hurts from too much writing.

I hate exams.

See, that was quick. More later.

Is there a (mathematical) doctor in the house?

I really wish I’d gone to more of my lectures last term. Or just more than an average of 1 or 2 per week would have helped. It’s easy to look back now and say “Well, what an idiot I was”, and of course it’s true, but it’s still hard to say with real certainty that I’ve changed my outlook, and this term will be different.

But it’s really dawning on me now that missing so many lectures does cause quite a problem. I’m sitting here now, buried in mountains of number-covered sheets of paper which could rival the height of everest, and my computer clogged up with so many windows of over-my-head computer science and mathematics, that it’s Arithmetic Logic Unit (ooh look, something I learned) is probably about to explode.

Saying that, it’s not actually that complicated, as maths at this level goes. Most of it’s stuff I learned a year ago anyway, and some of the other stuff is even simpler. It’s just that in my gap year of travelling, working, and “self-discovery”, I seem to have forgotten all logical and mathematical concepts. It doesn’t help that they cram so much stuff into such a short space of time at university, at least in comparison to my college A Levels and GCSEs before that. What we covered over 3 weeks of classes in school, is now vacuum-packed into an hour long lecture. And that’s before you even think about comparing the friendly example-filled teachers of school to the rambling number-crunching machines that are university lecturers. They say “Those that can’t do, teach”, well, it obviously works in the opposite direction too – These Professors and Doctors of Science and Mathematics are obviously very smart people, and clearly they can “do”, yet they seem to lack the capacity to teach.

I guess that’s just the nature of university, that you no longer have your hand held through numerous examples and exercises to ensure you understand the point, and instead you have to take some time every week to read up on the material from that week, and work through the textbook yourselves. However, having barely managed to get out of bed for anything before lunchtime (or dinnertime in some cases) to go to a lecture, it’s little wonder that I couldn’t quite find the motivation to do work above and beyond what was required.

So, with a month of school-level learning crammed into a single lecture, it’s no wonder that I’m struggling to catch up on over a month of university-level learning. I’m not sure if it is just the method of teaching, or if I’ve actually got stupider since school and college. Sure, the year out of education certainly helped my social skills if nothing else, but it doesn’t seem to be having the effect of renewing my enthusiasm for learning that I’d hoped for. Maybe I just need a little longer to get into it, I keep telling myself. Alternatively, maybe I need a swift slap to the face for being so lazy and unmotivated in succeeding in something that will prevent me from spending the rest of my life doing work in a supermarket, customer service, or data entry (And having tried all 3 of these, I’d rather bungee jump without a rope than do that again (Don’t hold me to that)).

Going back a paragraph or two, I still find the concept of a Doctor of anything other than medicine amusing, as I have done since I was a kid. I always just thought of a Doctor as the people you go to see when you’re feeling ill, who poke you around a bit and send you on your way with a bit of medicine. Upon discovering that becoming a Doctor was merely an academic qualification, and that you could be a Doctor of maths or history, I just visualised a medical Doctor prescribing some medicine to unhealthy sums or books.

I wish a doctor would treat some of my sums.

Ideas that could have been, and still could be

When it comes to strange ideas, James and I have quite a lot of them.

It’s been that way since the days where we were ever-bored, often-distracted school kids in confusing science classes, where imaginary heroes were more interesting than photosynthesis and osmosis. And even now, not a lot has changed – we still come up with a steady stream of obscure but interesting ideas, and we’re still more interested in crazy cartoon concepts than our education.

There’s another thing about our ideas which hasn’t changed either – they rarely become anything more than just that, ideas. I’m not sure why that is, whether it’s lack of motivation, lack of ability, or something doesn’t want our ideas to succeed, but either way they all just seem to remain as sparking gems of inspiration in our minds, and scribbled in the margins of our old schoolbooks.

Pirate Radio is a collection of some of those ideas, or at least those that have made it into some sort of physical (or I guess, electronic) form, and onto our web site. Basically, we have a lot of random stories that have partially been turned into comics, videos, and animations. But I can’t help but think every time I look at it, that it could be so much more. The web site’s been there for something like 4 years now (wow, time flies) and the ideas have been floating around for even longer.

So many similar things have become popular on the internet in the past 5 years, with webcomics, animations, and memes in a similar vain to some of our ideas. It’s easy to say “well, we don’t know flash” or “it takes too much time/money to produce things like that”, but all of these people started out with basic ideas and worked up from nothing. 5 years if plenty of time to learn flash, and maybe we could have done it ourselves if we’d put our mind to it. Well, I guess it’s not too late now even, but with everyone in university now, it’s hard to really create things in the way we’d originally envisioned

But still, the ideas are still flowing, though on a slightly different theme now. As you’d know from reading our blogs, we like to complain about things. This is true of most things, especially games. We can’t help but think that so many of these games that we play are so flawed, and that there are so many ways in which they could be made better. We have a few ideas of our own, unsurprisingly.

We noticed the lack of really “epic” games around. By that, I mean games where hundreds or thousands of characters are involved. When you see the massive battle scenes in movies like Lord of the Rings or 300, they’re pretty amazing. But no games have really managed to capture something like that. Sure, Dynasty Warriors, right? That’s not exactly realistic though is it. You run around the battlefield with your one guy with a sword/spear/axe, racking up 100s of kills, killing each generic peon in a single blow, and barely being touched by all but the most skilled of generals. Ok, sure, so the characters are supposed to be skilled fighters, but no person can run into a crowd of 100 armed fighters and hope to survive.

The example of 300 illustrates this pretty well in fact – they know they can’t do something stupid like that against a massive army, even though they are the strongest fighters in the land. If they run in there, they’ll get surrounded and shot by 1000 arrows. That’s what these games are lacking – tactics. Of course, you have the other end of the scale which is Strategy games, where you command your 100s of forces and tell them all what to do, but those games don’t really involve you as much as those with individual characters and stories.

The ideal is somewhere between those – a sort of adventure/RPG game with engaging story and characters, and epic battles that require some real strategy to win. Ideally, it would have various scenarios and outcomes, and your decisions could greatly affect the outcome of the battle, while still involving hundreds of characters in the battles. This could be done in various ways, with AI enemies/allies, some sort of command system where you could order people around, or even online play involving many people – although the technology to have 100s of people participating in a battle is far away at the moment.

We’ve had a lot of other ideas, down to some pretty interesting details (at least we think), so we’re going to keep thinking of them. Here’s hoping that we can actually do something with this though. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had some great gaming ideas which have never quite been completed, after 2 incarnations of Final Dawn (a game I worked on for a while with some other friends) left eternally incomplete.

Procrastination makes the world (and my thoughts) go round

I have have of one blog post written, and another in my mind, but I’m not going to post them. Why? Because I’m stuck in that wonderful loop of procrastination. Not familiar with this concept? Allow me to demonstrate via the wonder of a JPEG image!

This is the problem I’m facing right now. Currently, I should be studying for my exams, which are next week. However, whenever I do sit down to do some work, I get distracted by anything and everything around me. For example, I’ll go and check some of my favorite funny web sites, watch TV, play on my Playstation, or even tidy my room. Now you might think that fairly normal, but the only times I’ve ever tidied my room were back when I lived with my parents, and I faced consequences such as having my internet removed, or worse still, no ice cream. With as much internet and ice cream as my sleep schedule and bank balance will allow on tap at university, it’s no wonder that it takes a miracle for my desk to see the sunlight through the dust, let alone the mounting piles of paper, CDs, and crisp packets.

Yes yes, typical untidy guy, whatever. People seem to do their best to avoid me when I’m outside of my room, so it’s hardly likely that they’re going to come looking for me inside the room. On the rare occasion that someone DOES knock my door though, 90% of the time they’re looking for someone else who lives in my flat. The other 10% of the time they’re drunk, and seem to have forgotten that they don’t particularly like me for whatever reason.

Well, what started out as a post declaring “I’m too lazy to write anything” has turned into a suitably cynical outlook on life, as seems to be the general trend of my thoughts lately. Perhaps it’s the teenager in me not willing to accept defeat, as my 20th birthday comes ever closer, now only 2 months away. “No! You don’t want a happy fun life! Come back into the dark pits of depression, we had fun together there, didn’t we!?” No, sorry, I really didn’t. There’s little less appealing than going back to the school days where I couldn’t quite get anything right, and struggled to find anyone who I could really call my friend.

Damn teenage angst, stop infecting my thoughts. If I wanted to break down and cry in pain, I’d go chop some onions. I have some in the kitchen too. I hate onions. As it is, I’ve been avoiding any meals that contain them in case my eyeballs explode in some sort of scene out of a bad horror film. I hate eyeballs. And bad horror films too.

But seriously, I like to think that I’m a better person these days, and I generally have a much brighter view of life than the school days. But it’s funny how even now, over 5 years later, I can see the first year of University sort of echoing the start of Secondary school. I move on to a new place with new people who I don’t know, and I’m struggling to make friends. Granted, it’s not like back then when I was about as confident as a mouse with a fear of loud noises, but the premise is still the same.

Ok, so I guess it is very different. In school I was generally bullied about my weight and such, which resulted in me being less confident still as I thought everyone hated me. But again, I still can’t help but see a similarity there to how things are here and now. I’m not being bullied, those sort of issues are long past, and I’m a lot more confident and outgoing now. I’d like to think that I’m a different person now to how I was before I met many of my friends.

But I still seem to be going around in a circle here (Don’t worry, I won’t draw a diagram of this one). The point is, regardless of what I’m like or who I am, I’m having trouble making any friends here, much like I did when I moved to secondary school. I just can’t really seem to find anyone who I really get along well with, or anyone that finds me more interesting than daytime TV (Seriously, the people in my flat would rather watch another chat show about whether a 16 year old girl who has 3 mothers is actually George Bush’s grandfather, than make conversation with me most of the time) I can’t really figure out why though, and it’s been the subject of my thoughts on many a sleepless night.

My instinct is just to think that it’s just them. That they’re not really very nice people, and that they’re best avoided anyway. But with the confidence problems of yesteryear gone now, and immature insults a thing of the past, it leads me to think that actually it’s me that’s the problem. I’m a friendly guy, I don’t think I’ve done anything to make people dislike me, and I didn’t steal anyone’s toast. But there must be something. There’s obviously some reason why I just don’t come across as a likable guy to most people. Because out of all the 35 people in this building, I’ve made 1.5 friends.

On the other hand, maybe I have just been stuck with bad luck, and it just so happens that I’m in a building full of people that just aren’t all that great. It does always seem like I have to make so much effort to actually be friendly with these people, and that none of them are really the sort of people I’d want to be good friends with. And there’s no reason why I should change myself to fit in with another group of people, right? I just can’t really work out if it is them, or me that’s the problem.

I am pretty self-critical at times. And I don’t mean in an “I hate myself” kind of way. I mean, I think the majority of people wouldn’t even think along these lines. A lot of people would just think that there’s nothing wrong with them, and no reason to change the way they are. I sort of wish I was like that sometimes, and maybe it would be better if I just thought like that and didn’t try to analyse what was wrong with me. I really would just like to know what I’m doing wrong though, if anything.

But still, if this is just following the pattern of school, everything will work out find and I’ll get to know some more people soon enough. Here’s hoping.

I think I left my motivation at home

I’m finally updating again after a week or so since the last post (and even that one wasn’t me). It seems like I’ve been hit by writer’s block, or perhaps, since I’m not really a “writer”, it’d be blogger’s block, but that just sounds odd.

It’s not really that though. I’ve been hit by a general lack of motivation to do anything at all since I’ve arrived back at University. I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised that, as always, I ended up putting off starting my programming assignment (which I had the entire christmas break to work on) until the day it was due in, and finished it at 6am after a rather long night. That’s relatively normal – in fact, if I’d been able to stay up all night working on things when I was living with my parents, I’d have probably been a lot more productive. As it was, I didn’t start panicking about work until the day it was due in, but by that point I’d only have 2 hours left to work on it before I was forced to go to sleep.

There was a webcomic I read once. I don’t remember WHAT webcomic it was, but it went something along these lines -

Person 1: “Shouldn’t you be doing your homework?”
Person 2: “I can’t. I can only do work when I have the right feeling”
Person 1: “Oh? What feeling’s that?”
Person 2: “Impending doom”

It just sticks in my mind because it’s so appropriate to me. I’m not really sure why I always leave things to the last minute, and it’s a really bad habit that I wish I could get out of. I had hoped that after my gap year, and having a break from education for a year, I’d be freshly motivated to go into University and work hard. Not so, unfortunately. If anything, I’m even worse than before, with a combination of having to learn again, and the university life in general being quite daunting to me at first. I missed classes and deadlines and generally just didn’t fit into things at all in my first term here. I’m hoping to turn that around this term, but time will tell how well that actually works out. So far things seem to be going better than last term at least.

One of the main distractions last term was gaming though, and specifically the MMO Final Fantasy XI. I’ve been playing it for years, and as all MMOs are, it is (for some reason) quite addictive. Having got back from a 3 month vacation without playing it, and with the freedom to play it as much as I want, I was awake pretty late playing it quite often last term. Fortunately though, since I’ve come back from the christmas break, I’ve lost most motivation to play that as well. And I’ve had little desire to play any of the console/handheld games that I’ve had waiting to be finished for months either.

I don’t even feel like going out. I need to go into town for a few things, but I still haven’t, and I need to go and do some laundry pretty urgently. But I just haven’t felt like going out for some reason.

So with little motivation to go out, play games, or do work, I’m not sure what I DO have motivation to do. On the plus side it does mean that I’m spending more time with my flat mates while I’m sitting around doing nothing, so I guess that is a good thing. Although I guess they already made their first impressions impressions of me last term, which weren’t so great since I barely socialised. Well, better late than never, I guess.

With exams 2 weeks away though, I really do need to kick some motivation into myself if I want to get a decent grade in them. I’d say that I should do some revision, but revision implies that you’re going over something that you learned already. In this case, after missing a lot of classes, there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge, so I have a lot of things to learn before the exams. I have one small exam on monday, and although that is in the subject I understand the best (programming), there’s still a lot of definitions of things that I need to memorize.

So, I guess I better get to work.

Edit: After reading over this, I seem to have lost my humor as well. But, due to lack of motivation, I’m not going to try and make it funny now.

Joe’s Soggy Bloggy Woggie

Hello, my name is Joe.

Okay, I lied, or did I?

Bah, this is going to be harder than I thought!

So, as you may have guessed (if only by the writing style) the person who is writing this is not currantly Joe, or apricotly, or figly, or any type of dried fruit…ly… And that, my friends, is how you get away with a really bad typo.

No, my name is James Crawford and I’m here to save your life. Gah, I am suffering from a stupid lack of focus at the moment, mostly because the Joe you expected to be hearing from is sat about a meter away from me playing sonic CD.

Yes, we’re blogging buddies and we’re doing something crazy and writing in each others blogs. I should apologize for this because it was in fact my idea the whole time, so if you are annoyed that you are missing out on the regular Joe action then please visit my website and read what is currently (no fruit involved) the main article. If it is not, and you are backreading? Well, do a search for ‘ballsack’ and it probably will come up.

Hmm, I wonder if I’ll be able to write as much fluff as Joe usually does? Ooh, I know, I’ll pretend that I actually am Joe, that might help.

Mmm.

Ok. That didn’t work nearly as well as I hoped. Still…

“Today I am staying round my friend James’ house, who I have mentioned before. James is a bit of an ass sometimes, but has many redeeming factors that make him one of my better friends. Like that lush beard of his, that’s one of the biggest reasons I even talk to him. I just wish I could stroke it sometimes…

Yesterday was saved, it seems, by James and his perfect facial hair. I was looking at another night of doing absolutely nothing round Julian’s aside from watch him lag the World of Warcraft servers. It was only when James came round after noon that things looked up, because he brought his Wii with him, and a truckload of gamecube games too! Unfortunatley, Julian has a TV from the stone ages and James didn’t think to bring the right adapter so we ended up playing less on it then originally planned. Still, we did practically nothing, which is still a step up.

As James was leaving, to go to visit some girl he knows, we found the right adapter! James said he’d leave the Wii with us so that I had something to do, which is a very nice beard he has… Um, I meant to say it was a very nice thing to do with his beard. I think I’m losing track of this, anyway, I ended up playing Sonic CD quite a lot.

So today I have been at James’ and we’ve been playing on his Xbox, watching “I R Legend ” and getting annoyed because I forgot to bring the Wii remote. Fortunately, James is a spoilt bastard and he needed to visit his other Nan, who lives opposite Julian’s house, to pick up an expensive camera (christmas present). So now I’m playing on Sonic CD again, while James writes the blog that you’re reading that I’m writing that… Oh dear, I think I’ve broken the fourth wall… Well, not the fourth wall exactly, but definately a wall… somewhere…”

So, best go fix that.
This has been James, thank you and goodnight.

Happy New Year, Let’s Party Like It’s 2002

It’s that time of year again where you look at a digital clock, and you think it’s reset itself because the date is 01/01. Or at least I did that today anyway. I guess I’m the only one. So, Happy New Year.

I spent last night with a collection of almost all of the people who have been my close friends over the years. It was quite suprising that we’d managed to get everyone together without even trying, when you realise the number of times we really had tried (and failed) to do this in the past year. It had just sort of fallen together. There were some in the group that had become the more more popular ones, the ones that always seemed to be trying to convince themselves that they’re cool, and getting through new girlfriends at a rate faster than China’s national birth rate. Then there were us misfits, who had become somewhat less inclined to hang around with these old friends over the years, partially because they seemed to consider themselves too cool for us these days, and partially because we just aren’t into the same sort of social drinking scene as them.

Still, as much as some of us had become distant and seperated into somewhat different groups these days, we had all been quite good friends at some point. And it’s kind of sad when someone who once proclaimed that you were one of their best friends, now makes little more conversation with you than snide comments about your choice of drink. I’m not really sure where it went wrong with some of those friendships. Who’s fault was it, and in the end, is it really a bad thing?

Back in school we were all one big happy family of friends. There were some that were closer friends with eachother than others, and some that argued with eachother a bit, but we all got on with eachother pretty well. This was back when we were around 14. It all went well for a few years, we wasted our lunchtimes having fun, and shared our insights into growing up with eachother. I guess eventually as we moved on to college, people started to make other (perhaps better suited) friends, and we all began to diversify and find different interests. Out of what had been our group of “unpopular” friends back in the lower years of school sort of split in two, with half no longer content with this, and sort of surrounding themselves with people that did make them feel popular. The rest of us just remained kinda content with being a bit different, found more likeminded friends and enjoyed ourselves.

I guess it was due to the magic of “social networking” that we had all found ourselves together again in the same group today as we had 5 years ago (Plus and minus a few people). Those outcasts of yesterday that were at the top of their own social ladder these days had put out an open invitation to come along to a popular local pub for a New Year party. I guess that’s how things work with the advent of things like Facebook and MySpace, people remain on eachothers list of qualified “friends”, which basically ranged from their best friends and family to some guy that sat in the corner of one of their classes 5 years ago, and these messages and invitations just go out to everyone they’ve ever met.

Eager to catch up with my old friends, especially after discovering that all of my best friends were going along (or at least ended up going along by the time the word had got around) I happily snapped up the invitation and made arrangements to go along and found somewhere to stay for the night. Some of them did look a bit taken aback to see some of us that they’d probably forgotten about by now, or perhaps tried to anyway.

Still, I DID have a good night. A great night in fact. I do still get along fine with everyone, it’s just not the same as it used to be. Regardless of anything else, all of my closest friends were there, which was a rare treat, and we got some nice pictures out of the night too. It was great to catch up with some old friends, even if a lot of the people seemed about as interested in what I was doing with my life, as they were in the ancestry of the fly that had just fallen in their drink. We all had a chat with eachother, a few drinks, and even a bit of a song and dance as we counted in 2008. And we were all really enjoying it.

As it turned out, by the end of the night it had reduced down just to the people that I am still actively friends with now, and if anything, the walk home was at least as entertaining as the rest of the night. For a little while it felt like we were back at school again, running around and making mischief, laughing and joking with eachother. Sure, a lot of it was the inevitable alcohol consumption of a New Year’s Eve, but I’d like to think that a part of it was us remembering the old days, and taking a rare opportunity to relive a bit of what we’ve lost as we’ve started to grow up.