Month: August 2015

It’s a bit of a joke around me (I believe …) that I’m … shall we say vulnerable to the charms of Pretty Ladies ?

The Mind Blank when confronted with the charms of a Pretty Lady has happened quite a few times for me. It still happens, regularly. It’s in my genes, my upbringing, whichever part of that bit of brain that determines what we’re attracted to.

That was one for Kim of Yogscast, who has made me go wibbly both from her videos and the two times I’ve actually met her. It was in reply to her posting on Twitter that she was looking out for the red pandas at Bristol Zoo and … couldn’t resist following that with something simple that hopefully made her chuckle. (Except I don’t know if it did, because there was absolutely nothing in return as per usual).

Too good to go unseen. At least that’s what I think. And I know a few amazing Small Pretty Ladies too. Yep. That means you. The Pretty Lady who doesn’t think she is actually Pretty. Every lady has their own special beauty. You are gorgeous. Even if you don’t believe that, I do. Which makes it true.

Although you know the wierd thing ? The ones who should be most beautiful somehow manage to spoil it through a disdainful attitude for those around them. I call it the Curse Of Pretty. It’s like they forget that the beauty that shines most is the beauty of kindness to other people. The smile that will come out for everyone. Even that slack jawed shy boy who is stammering to get sensible words out. But there are some who will :

Look at you as if you’re a stain in the carpet;
Refuse to reply to work based requests;
And generally be unpleasant to those around them.

You’ll know a few of them I’m sure. They’re not really worthy of your attention. Give it to the kind people instead. People like (in no particular order …)

The one who stopped my heart when she came in to the office in her Christmas Party outfit. That’d be how our Snow Queen got that name. She’s an amazing little lady who I hope remembers that soon. (I keep attempting to remind her because she’s special and has helped me out lots in the past)

Our Irish colleague aka Warpath who ran acceptance. People always remarked on us having a flirty attitude with each other. That was true up to a point, she’s actually married now so that flirtiness never went past a certain point (besides I was more interested in Pretty Contractor Lady who worked for Warpath). It made what could have been fraught into something more fun and successful. I got on really well with the acceptance ladies of that time and it meant we got a lot more for both my organisation and their organisation. It was great. We got things done. And it meant I got to talk to Pretty Ladies, albeit because they at one point flat refused to talk to my bosses.

But one lesson there … what people didn’t realise much is that behind the flirty outside, the calculating bit of my mind was going “Ok, she’s trying to charm me into saying yes. That means her argument is super weak.” That’s like the tendency of games sellers to use scantily clad pretty ladies as selling points. Doesn’t work with me as I instantly think their game is being sold on an image that has nothing to do with gameplay that isn’t strong enough to earn my money.

And that Big Everquest Cosplay girl at NEC Comic Con definitely gave me a mind blank, she got the amount of material very close to how the adverts tried to sell Everquest.

And that would be a Mind Blank brain go “help help help” closely followed by me trying to catch sight of amazing little Cupid’s Gift who I was escorting that day to remind me of a Truly Very Pretty Lady. I’ll get the Wow Brain Gone mind blank with CG too when seeing her again for the first time in a while but then she’ll give me a hug and by the time she’s satisfied with Hug Time, the marbles in my brain will be back in the right order and I’ll be able to be part of a sensible conversation.

That’s a really important thing. I’ll have that Mind Blank from a Pretty Lady giving me some attention but what really holds my heart is the conversation. The person behind the Pretty. Actually, that’s more important for me than how people look. A Beautiful Mind ? Never seen that film but that phrase sums up how I get on with all people. I’ll mirror people. Aggression (like on the road) breeds aggression. Politeness brings politeness. Smiles bring wibblyness followed by my grin coming out.

Give smiles. They make everyone feel better.

Smiles over messages are great for that too. LTK (I need to find you another nickname!) is another of those Pretty Ladies keeping me honest over the text messages. She thinks she’s a pain in the … elbow (I have a bone chip there so it aches sometimes) but she’s been great for inspiring lots of these posts coming out. Cos I know she reads pretty much every one of them. I can’t quite believe she does that but that’s my self conscious getting in the way of my self esteem again.

I think the core reason for Mind Blank-ism is that low self esteem. It combines with a disbelief that this amazingly beautiful creature is willing to talk to me, so it takes me a few moments to summon up more than a daft grin.

Have I dug myself enough of a hole yet ?

Haha – I’m about to have more of those Mind Blank moments listening to the album that just started. It’s Lucy Rose’s new one, Work It Out. She has a great voice. Hopefully there will be enough time tonight for the next album, Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp. Tracks like Utopia make me stop and just listen to sheer beauty.

Who else ? The Kim I made the pic above for had that Mind Blank inducing tendency too. She had the cutes combined with a maverick personality which promised unpredictability and lots of fun. But … she just doesn’t interact very much. Even on her signing up for a dating site twice (before I found Cupid’s Gift via there) and sending her a couple of intro messages (counting as non creepy I hope). I mean, why do you go on those sites if you’re not willing to interact with people ? She wasn’t alone in that though. Loads of women on that site will just not reply to the non creepy intro messages.

I think I’m very lucky that Cupid’s Gift replied on that site, because she’s done wonders for that ailing self esteem of mine. When one of those messages come in, I am highly likely to find a pole to distractedly walk into. While CG gives me that impression that someone else might think I’m a pretty good guy, LTK reinforces that fragile confidence by telling me that someone thinks I know what I’m doing. Something at work I’m not going to go into here damages that confidence at pretty much every opportunity (and is why I’m looking to be elsewhere), so having someone I trust saying I’m good at Stuff does wonders for me and enables me to work harder and better.

I feed off confidence. I need it to be motivated and successful.

It’s why my English language grades at school suddenly rocketed from a disinterested low C to a high A at GCSE. Because my teacher changed from a fuzzy old Reverend to … someone who wore summer dresses a lot and who I accidentally called Mom once in front of a few people in the class.

Yep. Almost as embarassing as a mind blank.

And I probably had better leg it now before I get myself into too much trouble !

Stay kind. It’s beauty.

Hmm – three things to talk about today …

Ovens, money printing and blank minds.

I think I’ve missed out tonight, I watched Deadliest Catch, Falling Skies and now there’s cricket on. I could have been watching :

Love it. I’ll watch it at leisure tomorrow when my brain isn’t fried. Ok, I might be destressing somewhat but I’ll be starting a 3 day weekend with lots of cricket on the telly. Mel and Sue, the presenters, are awesome and the Top Gear Lunatic Fringe missed out by scaring off Sue, who was just an innocent bystander in the rubbish around a certain arsehole being fired. Ok. Judging by what I’m hearing about Bake Off, perhaps “innocent” isn’t quite the right word.

Where would we be without a lovely bit of innuendo to make us chuckle, swell with laughter and wish we were nibbling the muffin of our own local Master Baker. (Good job this isn’t a show about fishing).

It has been too long since I’ve had the pleasure of grabbing our Snow Queen’s buns. (Our local Master Baker) I wonder what a soon arriving Master Baker’s cakes will be like. I also fondantly remember the cupcake that the wonderful Pixie made for us a few years ago. You probably get the idea that I like cake. Cake is life.

Money printing ?

A recurring theme here is how much I’ve been loving playing Elite Dangerous. Here’s one reason why :

I’ve let GIMP have a go at enhancing that, which is why it’s a bit stylised. It’s a game where you fly about the place and then see something utterly gorgeous, like the purple star. It’s purple ! A screenshot was totally necessary. The original was very dark and didn’t show the ship at all well. Lighting effects are excellent in this game but that does make it tough to get proper illumination on your ship for screenies.

Outside of the very pretty graphics, it’s actually a bit boring. There is no epic storyline like in a classic like Freelancer. I find it cathartic to play, very relaxing and there’s that sense of seeing new pretty spacey things just the next jump away. Is it strange that I find hot boiling suns to be visually appealing ? Maybe I’ve been watching too much Andromeda with Trance Gemini, wonderful character with a lovely smile.

So why money printing – I had my doubts about Elite Dangerous when it was in its pre-release kickstarter phase. I didn’t believe they’d come out with an interesting product with good gameplay. It’s surprised me that they have. They didn’t fail by trying too much, they got just enough in and they’ve expanded the game from there. But now … we have a release for an expansion, after the game has been out for only 8 months. That’s pretty soon … Eve has released a few but you don’t pay anything for those outside of the subscription. WoW makes you pay for them but …

Original game cost – £40
Expansion cost – £40
Discount if you have it already – £10.
So I could get this expansion for £30, or I could pay £130 now for of the expansions later.

I thought £40 for the original was steep and I’m balking at paying that again for the expansion. It would let me land on planets but to be honest, in Frontier Elite 2, you could do that and the novelty wore off quick. I’m just not convinced that represents value in any way. It should have been baked into the game when it was still in the oven.

What’s more disturbing is that the overwhelming impression on the otherwise excellent Facebook community is :

Opposing views are being ridiculed. I’m keeping my head down and avoiding the subject because … my views are heretical. A usually helpful community has turned bullying with quotes like “If you don’t like it, play something else”. Not helpful. I will go elsewhere.

After paying £40 for the game after release and another £40 on a flightstick (which will be used for … it’s coming) and getting so many hours out of the game, I have my moneys worth. But I’m not convinced that they deserve any more of my money for features that they promised as part of the base game. Hell, they promised an offline mode, which was a promise broken which upset me (but was willing to go along with). The implication is that they withdraw access to the game because you don’t keep up with expansions. Or only people with the expansion get the good stuff.

Not happy with Frontier and this announcement. Certainly not shelling out £130 for one single game. That’s very obnoxious. I’d recommend waiting for :

No Man’s Sky. It’s promising all the stuff that should have been in Elite in the first place and I’m well and truly getting caught up in the hype. Perhaps this is the new Elite we were waiting for.

Enough about games – mind blanks ?

Actually – with that teaser, maybe I’ll leave that one until later and just remember those things that make my mind happily go blank.

Pretty Ladies smiling at me;
Pretty Ladies laughing at my really bad jokes;
Trying to find words that fit instead of the ones in my head (words are hard);
Messages coming in from … you guessed it … Pretty Ladies;

This one is appropriate and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it for a while :

Except it’s me smiling, walking into pole and wondering how I can answer the message that just came in.

Stay smiling. I’m going to give Elite a miss tonight because … tireds. But I’ll remember those bubbly chuckles, the helpful prods, the haha’s from my jokes, the “yey this tweet was about me” and one lady who smiled today because I asked her how she was. That one is really struggling at the moment, trying to help her as much as I can and at the same time, I’m getting help in staying positive from a few other people I know.

It’s a better world if we help each other out.

PS I’d kinda like to get a response from some of the internet micro-celebs who I send tweets to. It’s intended to make them chuckle but they rarely get a twitch of a response. Disappointing.
PPS As I hate to end on a downer, it’s disappointing that I don’t get a response but I made myself chuckle while writing/making the tweets and they tend to get :-)’s from other followers. Which makes me happy.

Tired tonight.

A combination of not getting much sleep (my brain has forgotten that Go To Sleep program) and going hyper due to being highly miffed this morning (desk booking incident) has burned me out somewhat today. I may have … an early night.

Desk booking ? We have to book our desks and there’s a 70% occupancy rate. We have 70% of the desks available that we’d need if everyone was in. You can imagine the mayhem when all the desks are needed. Especially when you have contractors who cannot recognise the difference between an N and a O and therefore sit in the wrong desk and don’t have the courtesy to move when you point out their mistake to them. I have to admit, I am extremely blunt when it comes to the desk booking. We’re having to be more aggressive than we should in defending our area due to poor briefing given to new joiners.

But enough about work. Ok. Had a couple of meetings that restored my faith in professionalism after that incident with the incompetent contractor. I mean ! Not being able to recognise basic shapes. God forbid he gets anything important to do.

Yep. I have a low opinion of the support contractors we see, mostly due to the reason we have them in. Low pay and worsening conditions are making people jump ship over to other organisations. Who then come back doing similar jobs, poaching staff and costing us more money.

Fact of life in our place.

Music ?

I currently have Hannah Peel’s The Broken Wave playing in the background. It’s a wonderful album with an amazing singer and her magical music box. Songs like Song For The Sea just make me stop everything and listen.

(I wanna get this post out before midnight, so I will probably come back and fill in the links later …)

What other albums do I have like that ? Albums that grab you with their quality and hold your attention all the way through. Albums with a story. Albums that carry their theme. Albums with a certain magic. Albums to truly enjoy.

Well, on the theme, it has to be Madonna’s total disco celebration of Confessions On A Dance Floor. If you’re looking for energy, this has it. In spades. Awesome album, got me back listening to Madonna. She’s always been an outstanding artist, who has evolved over the years. She still has it.

I listened to Arctic Monkeys’ Favourite Worst Nightmare last night. The Arctics first two albums kept you listening with their quirky new style all the way through and when A Certain Romance comes on to finish Whatever Happens … you know you’ve been listening to something that’ll be a classic. It’s just a perfect ending to a quality album.

Cardigans … you just knew something was coming from these :-). All of their albums are triumphs for me, they’re jammed full of amazing songs done in their own unique style which has also evolved over the years. It’s kept evolving into Nina Persson’s solo projects too. You have the outstanding cover of Iron Man, the beautiful lullaby of 03.45am No Sleep, the shut your cares away and dance of In The Round, the poignant Song For The Leftovers, the violence of I Need Some Fine Wine, the happy wanderlust of Daddy’s Car. The anthemic For What It’s Worth and rocking My Favourite Game. I’ll be a fan until I die. Or go deaf.

And listening to Hannah Peel’s Cailin Deas Cruite Na Mbo, I’m reminded of the delicate flower that is Natasha Khan of Bat For Lashes. Her first album, Fur And Gold was utterly enchanting with songs like the Rabbit Song, What’s A Girl To Do and she’s got better from there with songs like Laura.

And with the name Laura (who was a lovely lady who worked on the same project as me for a while), my mind goes to albums related to two very special ladies who I have the pleasure of knowing :

First up is Morcheeba with lead singer Skye, their Big Calm has that theme running through, that piercing voice and variation of songs that comes together as an album. And it’s rounded back with the sublime Fear And Love.

And the other is the Carpenter’s Gold album, which is just littered with song after song that I’ll sit back to listen to and attempt to croak along to. Songs like We’ve Only Just Begun. That wonderful voice of Karen C was taken from us far too early.

Who have I missed ? I grew up with All About Eve and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books. One of the characters that caught my imagination was Menolly, a singer songwriter who was a victim of prejudice, making up addictive ditties that the traditionalists hated. But I loved those stories and Julianne Regan of All About Eve became the voice of Menolly for me. And she liked a Facebook comment when I said “Happy Birthday our Wild Hearted Woman” (that being one of my favourite tracks), which made me very happy.

Oh and there’s also the inimitable Kate Bush with those soaring vocals. I had a few of her albums on repeat. They worked really well as albums that interwove the songs together and I still listen to them. She kinda ran out of steam with The Sensual World, I didn’t like the albums after quite so much. But when there’s The Kick Inside and Oh England My Lionheart and … Hounds Of Love (best ever album by our Kate) …

I think I may well know what I’ll be queueing up next for a long trip in the car.

No blokey albums ? Let’s have a look. I think that’s reflecting my tendency to fall in love with that female voice. (post ed – I forgot about the Arctic Monkeys up there)

What to finish on, it could be no other than the band I adopted for a nickname. That’d be Alisha’s Attic with their middle album, Illumina. This album is amazing, full of emotion and it won my heart with songs like The Incidentals which gets me humming along and maybe even breaking into singing if no one is around to hear me.

I get embarassed with the bad karaoke.

I’ll leave it there but not before seeing some A Camp tracks pop up, which reminded me of Algebra. Hope the neighbours can’t hear me with that bad karaoke.

PS Forgot a couple. I’ve been following Garbage from the early days and they keep coming out with great albums. Fix Me Now, yes please. And then there’s one of the albums which was the genesis for this post, The Staves debut with Dead and Born and Grown.
PPS I missed Goldfrapp too ! Their first wonderfully wierd album, Felt Mountain, with the sublime Utopia is coming up soon in my listening. Road To Somewhere is their best for me by a long way. Close your eyes and relax.

Been struggling for Good ideas for posts lately and by Good I mean happy theme posts instead of BEWARE THIS DANGER type posts.

And then I saw …

Perfect !

But before I dive in to that, yeah – been struggling for post ideas. You don’t (at least this is what I think!) want to hear about my adventures in virtual worlds. I watch a lot of Youtube gaming videos which gives me an idea of what’s interesting and … Elite doesn’t make for interesting watching. It makes for interesting playing (for me!) but you have to filter heavily what you talk about with it. That’s like … new ships, trading routes (yawn), helping with community goals, getting promotions.

Oh and the Cookie Clipper finally has a suitable name since coming out of mothballs … She’s been rebadged “These Aren’t The Cookies You’re Looking For”. I bet R2 approves from his galaxy far, far away. I wonder if I should call the Space Truck “Centennial Sloth” because of all the special modifications.

Good things ?

Music. Definitely music. I’ve been listening to 4 new albums lately as I do that thing of listening to individual tracks first before the album to check them out.

Taylor Swift – Red. Great album. Has some excellent tracks. She just keeps giving us great music, long may it continue.
Lucy Rose – Work It Out. Another top album, it’s even better than her first.
Steve Gregan’s soundtrack for Guild Of Dungeoneering. Has the great mini song tracks that give the game a lot of its charm. Mostly background music though.
Scott Bradley’s Post Modern Jukebox. Nah. Won’t get any more from these. They have a certain style. Some of their covers are as good, if different, some of their covers (Living on a Prayer) butcher the original. But I don’t regret buying it as you have to form your own opinions on these.

And then there’s also an excellently boppy Working Girl from Little Boots and more excellence from Taylor Swift with 1969. There’s a tonne of great music out there to listen to. Especially if England foil your plans of listening to the cricket on the way home by finishing the game early. Great stuff our boys :-).

Cute pets !

There he is again, our Ben with tail a-wag as per usual. I think that tail wags in his sleep.

Pizza. Oh pizza how I love you and hate you at the same time. I have to pick my moments with pizza, it adds inches to my waist and the acid I make from the cheese makes it tough to sleep but … it’s pizza and I shall love it always. It’s just that good.

Computers can be tough to love but they do give us much more contact with the outside world than we would have had before. Hey, maybe we would have been propping up bars to meet people instead of seeing who we see over the bytes and bits.

And then there’s the games (some awesome, some poor, some incredibly frustrating due to interminable bugs) and the variation and portability the computer gives me with my music. I listen to far more variety now than before due to those soft rules I have for picking the next album that I’ll queue up. Next is Moby’s Play, which I’d have mostly ignored without those soft rules but … it’s still a great occasional listen.

Coffee. Coffee is life. And I haven’t had any since Thursday. Roughly 4.30 pm I believe. Yep. If you can remember hours without coffee, that’s probably a sign of a teensy, weensy touch of addiction.

That kettle is going on right after I hit that Publish button.

Last and most important is that You.

Yes. You. You reading this right now. You’re awesome.

It gives me a massive lift seeing the hits coming in here from … everyone ! But that’d be the regulars in particular. It reminds me that there are great people out there looking after me, looking out for me, being interested in what I write, what I’m doing, where I’m going.

And then there’s also the people who make closer interaction than that. Those who hit the Facebook Poke button, those who bounce the messages over to me, people who assure me through regular contact that I’m a part of their lives, people who I help or help me during work. Perhaps that jester on the shoulder part of their life but if I make one person smile or chuckle or laugh in a day, that’s a good day.

We can’t live this life on our own, it gets supremely better when there are other people around to make you happy, or for you to make happy by making jokes for them or just even being around to be part of their lives too.

See if you can make someone else happy today ?