taking fire

Sunday in New York began with bright city sunlight. I made plans for a Central Park expedition, but the afternoon was overtaken by sudden storm winds and snow cold blowing. On 7th Avenue, square signs on thin poles rock back and forth like mentals. Yellow traffic lights nod and swing from their cables like those on Sparkwood and 21.

I took some photos with the latest Exilim incarnation until my fingers got cold. Then flipped up my collar and trudged home for for tea and medals coffee and brownies.

Gaming for zero bucks

I’m doing a pretty good job of eliminating free time, and when it does occur I easily fripper it away feeding my fascination with new and independent games. With that in mind, your reader can do worse than glowering purposefully at tigsource and fun-motion.

Couple of recommendations then. First I was surprised at the crunching medieval RPG physicality of Mount & Blade. Hacking people down from horseback has never been so much fun, despite lacking the delicate attention to horsey detail you remember from Shadow of the Colossus.

The other discovery is the utterly absorbing ASCII bombshell Dwarf Fortress, but that’s another post entirely.

And lastly although Call of Duty isn’t free, the Zero Punctuation review is, and will occupy much less of your life. I owe it to myself to shell out for this one but I don’t need another excuse to be chained to the laptop.

Memes

Since the early days of ALL YOUR BASE I’ve been a total sucker for interweb memes. The more obscure and geeky the better. Witness the chuckles I still derive from image macros. Besides the obvious lolcatting, I present the simple joy of FAIL. Or (NSFW, sorry) DO NOT WANT.

Youtube is a mithril-mine of random and inexplicably funny memes for those with a robust palate. If you find Lynchian repetitition, epileptic visuals and ear-splitting noise an appealing combination you might enjoy the culture of video-mash such as this one. Or you can keep it anime with IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAND.

As the author says, these are “completely without purpose other than to cause emotion in the viewer, commonly that of confusion or amusement. It is also pure internet culture, with its everchanging series of memes and fads.” I find it fascinating.

PS. cheers to P for writing to me and supplying the Romero-kitty.

Rotund plebian Peter Kay once observed that on some days, you see loads of people on crutches. This is true, in the sense that it tells you something about the threshold for novelty in your brain, and how everything below that threshold becomes background noise.

The same thing happened to me today, except today I noticed loads of people with birthmarks on their heads. Some of the marks were quite intense, almost black. In fact some of them were shaped like – oh, I see. Walking down Fifth Avenue towards St Patrick’s cathedral, 1 in every 10 pedestrians has the black spot in the middle of their dish – a startling number, given the shopping horde. A fair cross-section of gender and ethnicities.

This visual impression of Ash Wednesday – the mass tattooing, the negativity of guilt and penance – is one of crudeness, of religious cross-pollination and paganism.

At the cathedral itself, lines of bowed citizens wait for the local paedophile to daub the icon of torture on their eagerly pious heids.

Then the rain started to come down. Not as though to wash our sins away; but rather as if the clouds were anxious to wash away the evidence of our failure to move on, to better and less easily corrupted ideas.

Had a film marathon day on Saturday, courtesy of Netflix streaming movies.

1. Welcome to the Dollhouse – a very poor way to cheer yourself up with a hangover
2. Little Dieter Needs to Fly – just astonishing, you couldn’t make it up
3. Air Gear – meh. Good anime recommendations needed
4. My Best Fiend – Stu wrote this up a while back. Fascinating
5. Reno 911 – amusing

Unfortunately I had undesired company in my apartment.

Somewhere during film #2 I notice movement in my peripherals and there to my left is a fat cockroach, dragging its carapace casually across the kitchen floor. This has never happened before. With a faint growling noise I get up and grab some kitchen roll to get the fucker without having to touch it. When I get within a couple of inches though the beastie hits the Turbo Boost and rockets under a door into the cupboard.

I open the door, find the big Kafka bastard on its back and go for the scoop. Unfortunately in a bid for freedom the beast decides my arm is a viable escape route and goes for it. An appalling sensation of too-many bristly legs clinging and working up the side of my hand.

I’m not particularly squeamish but at this unexpected turn of events my arm starts flailing and I hear myself make a noise of pure mammal horror, the reactions coming from somewhere in my brain completely outwith my control. Cockroach left the flat pretty soon after that.

I read in Unweaving the Rainbow about how your brain has a visual circuit dedicated to picking out small, dark, moving objects. For the next three hours this function was turned up to 11 – I was seeing little beasties in every dark shape in my lower field of vision.

So just as this reaction begins to fade and I’m trying to concentrate on Kinski’s insane goggle-dish, I sense movement and lo! a mouse’s filthy puss peeks out from under the fridge. Fucking hell, not again. I shout at it – “Oi, you wee bastard” – and it scampers into the same cupboard. Cue 25 minutes of carefully removing items from cupboard and chasing it around.

Just when I’d got the apartment looking pretty cool. Verrrry hard to relax barefooted around the flat after two invasions in one day…

Deceased, long-coffined genius Douglas Adams pointed out the three broad stages of civilisation:

1. Survival
2. Inquiry
3. Sophistication

Or in his canonical example:

1. How can we eat..?
2. Why do we eat?
3. Where shall we have lunch?

Let that message sink in for a moment. It’s the last leap – sophistication – that comes to my mind most often in NYC.

We have collectively scrabbled from the tar pit of base survival. We have lit the world evenly with neat beacons of science. And now, having avoided the grey lands of functional homogeny, we wander in an odd, disjointed land of inconsistent capitalist freedoms. Like Iain Banks’s Culture, with random patches of repression.

Two examples of sophistication that happened to me today. One is good, one is bad. Neither may be entertaining.

1. Sock pairing

This is just flat-out the best thing in the fucking world. Forget your anal bleaching (now available in my neighbourhood). This is the gasping stratosphere of human achievement, and it’s in your local laundry.

Forget the grim-faced, impatient hunt; the fabric match, the is-it-black-or-dark-blue, the scratchy wool on dry fingers, the turning-inside-out; all these dark seconds of hell are whisked away, to be deftly performed in secret by a stout professional for the sum of a few dollars. I would give these sweet cloth-loving people my children.

2. Stamps

Stamps. Your actual, post-a-letter, postage stamps, and the incomprehensible torrent of choice available to you. A baffling bible of design after design, where every christ-fisting token functions identically.

The US Post Office on Lexington Avenue is a granite bunker. Inside, bright billboards proclaim release dates of upcoming stamp designs. Banks of stamp machines whirr, sensuous in gluey anticipation. Mittened mothers ogle and dither, glassy-eyed over glass-top rows of coy, scalloped paper. See them furrowing brows, chewing fingers and earnestly weighing up the options with the intensity of someone hitting ‘Reroll’ on an AD&D character for 45 straight minutes, waiting for the lucky 18s.

Game of the day

Bloody Zombies. Tagline: Solve puzzles with your opponents’ blood! Heavily based on the Braindead end sequence.

TF meta

We have switched to facebook links in the bar on the left (for those who are FB members). Myspace can *flicks thumbnail under front teeth*

Right, Wednesday. A shotgun spray of things from NYC.

the city that never sleeps

That’s pretty much true. Every bar stays open until 4am every night. Your local diner is 24-hour; jaded, badly paid waiters dealing with utterly pished punters. The theme of want-it-your-way and convenience, applied to getting wasted and munching massive portions of ordinary food. And tipping 20%.

No Country For Old Men

Superlatively tense. Totally bleak. I actually had a nightmare about the savagely coiffured bad guy in this film after watching it. Did I mention the ending is bleak?

Big Fucking Buildings

The Empire State watches over my neighbourhood from a distance. It is a strangely comforting sight, especially returning home at night. A welcoming, paternal glow. In winter dusklight, it appears brick red. The top spire stretches up, unfinished and raw. A scaffold, framework, exposed vertebra. The naked metal beams of a spacecraft or station; all rods and antennae. Totally at odds with the gothic thrust of the main building.

Compare with the Chrysler, my favourite building. I walk up towards it every morning on Lexington Avenue (of Velvet Underground fame). It’s shiny, art deco, a fan of light spunked heavenward. In direct sunlight it looks computer generated; you blink involuntarily.

The Fountainhead

Finished it today. As a novel tangentially about architecture I now see the Big Fucking Buildings with a different gape, and say things like “gothic thrust”.

The problem with spending more time on posts is that you get fewer of them.

Gone are the days of 2003 when you could twist off 10 posts a day because you’d found some amazing links off b3ta. Hence here are some random and unconnected things instead of a beautifully nuanced journey through paragraph-land.

I’ve taken to carrying the moleskine about with me again. The immediacy this brings is essential in keeping track of your changing feelings toward things – a process that you utterly fail to appreciate without a physical record. It also comes in handy when you’re out on your own again and you can look clever by jotting stuff down and staring thoughtfully into the middle distance, rather than simply weeping bitter lonely tears into your Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
In a related point, after a night out it’s amusing to trace the gradual degeneration of your physical coordination to Michael J Fox levels by rereading the frenzied scribbles.

Actually go read that whole thread – guaranteed hours of laughs, if not 100% SFW.

I found some amazing comics from hockeyzombie, like the singing shark. And the nightmarish dough boy.

Only five days left in the big city before flying back to the homeland…

To celebrate the start of a glorious new week – and feel like I’ve achieved something – I finished up something new for the joy of damage.

In other news I got my de facto national identification number today. Pain in the arse doing anything without it (like getting a decent phone).

Security is weird here. You can commit credit card fraud all day and no one will notice. On the other hand, people are constantly on guard against identity theft. Address labels must be stripped from rubbish garbage. Delivery notes from the Royal Mail US Postal Service (USPS) don’t mention your name.

Talking of garbage, NYC is a super-progressive recycling city – It’s The Law. After the marathon Ikea session I spent a solid forty-five minutes jumping on cardboard boxes and tying them into anally tight bundles with twine.

I’m not sure that sounds right.

At least I now have a kettle, so could recover in quintessentially British fashion by consuming pints of tea.

I am from Arbroath, Angus. Tomorrow I move to New York.

In case you were wondering, let me tell you – the whole Moving To An Exciting New Place isn’t all fucking lovely biscuits, as one might suppose.

It’s been sixteen months since the turning point of being excited about moving somewhere else. That principle, that bright optimistic potential of displacement and cultural immersion remains; but circumstances conspire to jizz in the chips.

First and constantly foremost is that my grandparents are amazingly unwell. This is upsetting for everyone involved. I have to be able to return home at short notice. Bonds within the family are stretched, and there is friction. Relationships to be managed.
Outside of the family, actual adult relationship relationships demonstrate their enduring capacity for generating hurt.
For mundane stresses, I am moving house. More than that, I am moving country and continent. And currency. And systems of taxation and healthcare. I am working just as hard as ever. With vacation time saved to see family at Christmas. With a pay cut due to different salary conventions in NYC, and a new flat-full of furniture to buy. Just in time for the January tax return lottery that I got stung with last year.

Boo fucking hoo, I know. Nevertheless, the net effect is that the last few weeks have been numb and introverted; a blank-faced execution of complex To Do’s and a shocking demotivation at work. No anticipation at all. Most days I just want to go to sleep and forget about everything.

For now I am working hard just to keep my shit together. I’m sure some kind of fun stuff will follow eventually. I will let you know.