Alasdair Watson

Surrender Control. Interesting, if slightly mad idea. It’s reminded me of a conversation with Hugh about a LARP that made use of SMS/e-mail – designate one, maybe two nights of the week as game nights, when people might get SMS’s, phone calls etc. related to the game (and e-mails/web-basde contact at any time, I guess). Actually, it’s one of the few role-playing related ideas to really grab me in the last while – I’d love to run a nasty, paranoid LARP using properly modern tools. Hugh was talking about the possibility of being able to run something genuinely country-wide with this sort of thing, but I’m not sure I’d want to go that far. If I could get twenty players and two more refs in the London area for it, then I’d probably do it. You could do so much to engender paranoia with this – players that hardly ever see one another, meeting in bars in response to text messages from an unknown source. Is someone else watching them? Does anyone know what’s really going on? Just who is that guy who always seems to be leaving the bar as they arrive? How did someone else know that they would be out that night, in order to leave that message on their answerphone?

God, yes.

Which Buffy character are you? Apparently, I’m Spike. I was expecting Xander, but while I’ve no idea which suits me better, I do like Spike more as a character, so hurrah! But god, the bit at the end that describes the character is just awful. Exactly how can one be “a rebel with a capital yeow”?

I fear I am coming down with yet another fucking cold. I’m absolutely exhausted, and I feel headachey and generally rotten. I’ve had far too many colds lately. They really piss me off, as I always, always get at least one night of entertaining fever dreams with a cold. It’s just the way my system works. Additionally, it really fucks up my gym-going, because not only do I miss a while with a cold, but it always get my asthma going as well, and I can’t do my workout without coughing up great chunks of lung.

I have nothing useful or interesting to say. I have had a pleasant, if rather dull day, doing not very much, followed by a quiet night out with Antony, Marcia and Andrew, which was nice, since we haven’t really just had a chance to go out for a quiet drink in ages – it always seems to be big sessions with a large crowd.

Like I say, pleasant, but hardly anything worth talking about. So tell you what, why don’t you go and read about Anna’s day, which sounds like it was more interesting than mine.

Go on, sod off.

Despite the fact that I have been listening to Enya all morning, I’ve got Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” playing on repeat in my brain. I don’t know why.

I can’t decide if my relatively hangover-free status right now means that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, or if I’ve just got lucky and managed to avoid the level of hangover that I deserve. I hadn’t planned to get that drunk last night, but I seem to have managed to do a pretty good job of it regardless. I’m now racking my brains to check what astonishingly stupid things I said at various points throughout the night…

My Monster Match is The Mummy, apparently. But when the description opens with: “Has anyone ever told you that you look sharp in linen, and white is definitely your color? From head to toe, you are the best dressed of the zombie clan.” You know something’s flawed in their testing procedure.

Found in the comments of some code I wrote last year : “We are sexier and more clever than their simple scripts.”

I don’t recall writing that comment, but everyone else at work is frightened of that particular piece of code, so I’m the only one that touches it. I must have been in a odd mood that day.

Another one of those “get to know your friends” questionnaires arrived in my mail today. Frankly, most of the quesions were dull ones, that I’d seen on other surveys but I thought these ones were sufficently different to post up here and give you lot something to think about.

“Pick one :love, beauty or creativity.”

“If you were another person, would you be friends with you?”

“Who are your second family?”

Things I have just remembered: I have a large bar of Green and Blacks organic dark chocolate in the fridge at home.

Hurrah!