Author Archives: zinar7

Mar 27 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff, Motorsport

friday_011

F011

I’ve always said: celebrity deaths come in threes. Then again, so do the deaths of my treasured possessions, it seems.

The last week or two have mainly been spent trying to mend, or replace, pieces of electrical equipment that seem to have decided push up the daisies: first, my cellphone; then, bits of my car; and finally, my TV. I’m beginning to think that I have some sort of curse: a sort of Midas Touch that causes electrical equipment to expire by merely being in the same geographical location as me. Perhaps I’m made of magick.

[it’s worth pointing out at this juncture that my digital camera has also developed some sort of fault that I’ve not quite been able to get to the root of; which does mean that the ‘bad things come in threes’ rule has been shattered and that I may have actually broken the universe. If a gaping maw of inter-dimensional cataclysm has opened up near you, then I’m desperately sorry.]

While sorting out a new cellphone and repairs to Big Suze have been no great cause for festivity, this recent state of affairs has forced me to pick up a new TV to replace my old, enormous CRT monolith and finally join the world of High-Definition. I’m not usually one to crow about graphical fidelity or anything, but my, is it purdy. I’ve most recently been playing a lot of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (the PS3 one, although I still sort of maintain that the original one is better, if less pretty) and my goodness does it look good. Obviously, I’m a massive automotive nut and am “well into” motor racing and stuff so am already slightly aroused by the sight of attractive pieces of metal and carbon fibre moving at high speed, but NFS:MW it a delight to look at; with its lovely reflections and lens flare and sunset filtration and gorgeously cinematic, pre-race short films.

Oddly enough for an avid watcher of motor racing and things going fast and things, racing games have never, really, found a particularly special place in my heart: yet, I can’t really explain why. Somehow, the accurate racing simulations (Gran Turismo, Forza, Project Gotham Racing, etc.) have always felt too methodical and not enough like a game to me; requiring expenditure of countless hours in the digital garage, tweaking every last nut and bolt in order to shave hundredths-of-a-second off a lap time. Funnily enough, I adore stat-based /RPG elements in a story-based game with character development and adventurin’, but grow restlessly yawnsome when I’m forced to stare at too many stats and upgrades in other genres (strategy, simulation, etc.). My main motivation, when playing a video game, is still to have fun; whereas simulation games (be them racing, farming or goat simulators), for me, have always placed too many barriers in front of the important business of fun.

Need for Speed has always felt a little different, though; blending some aspects of the engine-tweaking upgradability with the sheer, foot-to-the-floor velocity of OutRun. The movement of Criterion Games developing many of the latter Need for Speeds (Hot Pursuit, Most Wanted and The Rivals) has meant that they’ve absorbed a lot of the features that Criterion previously introduced to Burnout; slow-mo, metal-bending crashes and friendship-ending revenge takedowns. Weirdly, then, NFS:MW feels like a public safety video highlighting the perils of street racing; with time slowing to render every smash, shunt and shimmer in a haunting ballet of wrangled metal. It’s been a genuine delight to take such a perverse amount of pleasure at watching digital cars crashing/breaking in high-definition, perhaps acting as some sort of poetic justice countering everything else that’s doing its best to self-destruct in my life.

In honesty, I’ve played a lot of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I discovered some time ago that racing games were one of those rare instances where I can truly lose myself and forget, utterly about the outside world. Perhaps it’s something about focussing purely on whether the next apex is and how you can tread the very fine line between optimised speed and loss of control that stops the rest of my brain (the bit that constantly worries, questions and fears) from gaining any sort of traction [pun intended]. It’s not necessarily that I have any racing talent or skill (quite the opposite; I’m woefully – almost tediously – average when placed on a track), but more a mindset: I’m not the best at multi-tasking, so if I’m concentrating solely on getting ‘round the track in the most optimal time whilst attempting to keep pace with my competitors, then I can’t possibly be thinking about whether I’m wasting my life. [The delicious irony being that, if I’m spending my time playing video games, then I probably am wasting it to some extent.]

Still, with the long, cold Winter finally behind us and the Spring properly gaining traction, it’s relieving to know that that the motor racing season is once again underway and roaring through some of the world’s greatest arenas of asphalt and dirt. Formula One kicked off delightfully a couple of weekends ago and continues in Malaysia in the next few days; the World Touring Car Championship got started in Argentina a few weeks back, and the British Touring Car Championship kicks off at Brands Hatch next weekend. Formula One will always be my soulmate, but I’m aiming to do better at keeping up with both the WTCC and BTCC this year after losing track [pun sort of intended] of both at some point during the summer of last year. I’ll definitely be going to the BTCC at Thruxton for birthday-related shenanigans, and hopefully also the Formula E race that’ll be happening in London around Battersea Park. I’m still holding out a vague hope of being able to get to an F1 race abroad sometime during 2015, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. Never say never, though.

But anyway, I’ve probably talked enough about shiny metallic things with wheels for the time being.

tl;dr: CARS.

[Zinar7]

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Mar 20 2015
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Activities

friday_010

F010

Of late, I’ve been worryingly addictive Britcom spiral. It’s probably Stewart Lee’s fault; it usually is.

As has been proved empirically, I could watch/listen to Stewart Lee doing stand-up comedy indefinitely until the end of time. Alarmingly, it’s gotten to the stage that just being in the same aura as Stew is enough to send me into the giggles – so in tune, am I, with the essence of the character of Stewart Lee and his many grumbles and gripes, that I can see his ‘take’ on the real world even when he’s not there. It’s observational comedy, but filtered through the kind of bitter, warped mind that engages with my own bitter, warped mind on a primordial level. For me, his material is progressive; it grows with age, like a Pink Floyd record that improves with every listen and reveals more facets of ‘funny’ in a way that – in Chris Morris’ own words in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle series three – “knowingly operates the levers that make people laugh [by using any means possible apart from actually saying anything funny].”`

Such is his grip on the very essence of what tickles my brain’s funny nerve, I think of it as a Good Thing™ that even passing reference to Stew’s material helps to brighten everyday life immeasurably; breaking me into giggles and making me – at least temporarily – forget the darker clouds in the world. To be fair, this very fact is probably why I deploy comedy/movie reference with a machine-gun frequency, since it helps me to make light of the world’s troubles and to briefly shine some sunlight into the gloomier corners. Just thinking about crisps, or toilet books, or visible otters makes normal life minutely more enjoyable, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m incredibly excited about that fact that, in January 2016, I’ll be seeing Stew for the third time; at the South Bank Centre for a special gig where he’ll perform – back to back – all six episodes of the upcoming (or, will be) Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle series four. I still think that his Caffé Nero routine from If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One is one of his best, helped by the genius audience engagement over the forged loyalty card.

Naturally, for every side of the coin there must be a counter-side; for every Stewart Lee, there must be a Richard Herring. For me, Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (or as all the cool kids are calling it, Ruh-Heh-Less-Tuh-Puh) has been a bit of a revelation; tapping into my utter comedy geekdom of hearing many of my Brit comedy heroes interviewed about whether they would prefer an armpit that dispensed suncream or a hand made of ham, and whether they’ve ever seen a bigfoot. Part of the attraction, for me, is hearing comedians just talking; not delivering material on purpose or trying too hard to be funny, just talking.

I’ve been genuinely charmed by the ongoing drama of the “who broke the cupboards in the Edinburgh Fringe 2002 flat?”; the story of how Stew once wanked off Richard with a 100-year old ventriloquist’s dummy; or Rich’s continuing descent into insanity through the medium of playing snooker against himself in his basement and recording it for the internet (Me1 vs. Me2 Snooker). Also, I PAID A POUND:

P1050328

Part of this Lee and Herring adventure was inspired by the discovery of magic of Fist of Fun; Rich and Stew’s first TV show from 1995. The characters of Richard Herring (“…and I am called Richard Herring”) and Stewart Lee (“No, not ‘ahh’ “) work so well, and so many more of my favourite Britcom heroes [Rebecca Front, Kevin Eldon, Al Murray, Peter Baynham, Alistair MacGowan] that it can hardly fail to impress. After having watched the entireity of Series One at a friends’ house over the course of a single evening, I found an almost mechanical response to order myself the box-set of both series before my brain had even registered that anything had happened. I’m yet to even plunder the delights of S2 given that I’ve been 100% absorbed in going back through S1, trying to catch all the background jokes and going through all of the “slow-mo” bits to harvest the comedy gold held within.

[ And while we’re on the topic of classic Britcom shows that I’m only just getting round to catching up with, I also watched recently – for the first time ever – Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. I’m not sure how I’ve really escaped watching it until now, given how much I’m in love with everything AGP has done since I’m Alan Partridge, but it’s reassuring to know that I’ve finally corrected this heinous error. ]

Thinking about it, despite my proclamation in the opening paragraph that everything is Stewart Lee’s fault, upon reflection I think that it’s probably Armando Iannucci that is to blame for most of my Britcom geekdom. With an absolutely flawless record, I adore everything that he’s worked on and everyone he’s worked with: Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, Lee & Herring, Jesse Armstrong, Graham Linehan; I’m Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Time Trumpet, yada yada yada. He’s just an incredibly perceptive, switched-on satirist that seems to just be able to tap into pure comedy and write exceptionally funny situations and characters and surround himself with talented writers, actors and producers with a similar sense for funny. I’m still yet to catch up on his most recent project (Veep; weaving a The Thick of It-kind of comedy across the Atlantic into the Vice-President’s office of The White House), which extrapolates away from very British comedy and into the deep, dark wilds of the US, but I’m led to believe that it’s easily up to his dazzlingly high standards.

So yeah, you can blame Stewart Lee, Richard Herring and Armando Iannucci for my recent habit of breaking out into giggles at the slightest drop of a hat. But if comedy is an addiction, then you can keep your cold turkey; I’m sticking to the hard stuff.

[Zinar7]

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Mar 13 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff, Photos

Boardcrafting +1

Boardcrafting

There’s going to be a bit of a change to the regular Friday Blog cycle, as I feel that I deserve a break from the routine; at least for a week. So, instead of a thousand or so words talking about something opinion-worthy, I’m going to catalogue one of my most recent creative endeavours – my homemade Munchkin Level Playing Field game board – and how one might make one, were one into creative print ‘n’ play board game projects or that sort of thing.

Munchkin has always sort of disturbed me because the essence of the game is to advance your procedurally-generated dungeon-raiding character from Level One to Level Ten (with the winner being the first player to reach Level 10 first), but no materials are supplied with the base game with which to count levels and players must instead use some random tokens, coins, or pen and paper to keep score. Steve Jackson Games does, however, manufacture playing boards and playing pieces that can be bought separately (or as a bundle in the ‘Munchkin Deluxe’ sets), but I thought that – instead of simply ordering them online – it’d be more fun to try and make my own. This post catalogues the process of trying to put them together.

So, what does this thing look like? Well, the finished article looks like this:

P1050304

To put it together, I started with a plain hardback (A5) notebook from PoundLand (The Theatre of Dreams™) , and removed the pages and the metal spine so that I had just the front and back covers; which I (temporarily) taped together with book-binding tape to hold it together. I then sketched out a series of boxes, one to ten, along which the playing pieces would move in order to track levels.

I took the idea of replicating the Munchkin Deluxe board because I liked the idea of the board representing the dungeon that the adventurers are questing through, observed as a top-down view of a winding castle, or something. This way, it’s easier to figure out who’s in the lead and hence whether you want to either hinder them or lend a hand in return for bonus loot.

The next process was to paint up the background areas (green for grass outside the keep), and grey for the castle’s rooms. I used acrylic paints and a regular brush, and I quite wanted it to look ‘rough’ and weathered somewhat so I used quite a lot of dry-brush techniques to “scrape” paint onto the board. When I was done, I outlined the walls with a black Sharpie and then a silver-finish Sharpie for the inner section of the walls.

Munchkin_8

I wanted to add some definition to the inner walls, so I added a stone brick pattern to the outside faces of the walls with a very fine marker, just for funsies. I painted up the starting box (1) and ending box (10) up in more bright colours to reflect “Victory”, and designated each room with the relevant level number.

Because I wanted the notebook to represent a fictional dungeon-quester’s notebook (perhaps akin to a character notebook from Dungeons and Dragons), I wanted to give it a fantasy/role-playing feel so I removed the book-binding tape and replaced it with old, worn yarn that I found in the shed. I cut lots of thin strips of it (about 10-15 cm in length) and then tied them in loops through the holes of the original notebook’s spine. As a final flourish, I decorated the front of the board with the words ‘Munchkin Adventurer’s Notebook’, comme ça:

 

Right, so that’s the board finished, but what do we use to count? Well, instead of buying a Bag O’ Munchkins, I turned instead to shrink plastic to make some ~7 cm pieces to insert into plastic stands to represent each player.

I scoured through a bunch of cards from the base Munchkin deck to find some interesting characters, scanned the cards in and blew them up before printing them to a scale that the character was around 12 cm in size. I used Shrinkies clear shrink plastic, traced the outline with a black Sharpie and then coloured in the relevant area with other Sharpie pens. I needed 6 (because Munchkin plays three to six players), so to be sure of not screwing up, I made nine pieces and cut them out; making sure not to leave too many ‘thin’ bits because I found that these tended to warp very badly when fired in the oven.

I set the oven to “grill” (PUNS.) and lined a baking tray with tin foil. Then, one by one, placed each sheet into the oven for a few minutes (until it goes all curly, shrinks down and flattens out again) before removing it and immediately pressing it under a heavy book in order to flatten out the piece. After touching them up a little bit with the markers where the ink slightly melted and smudged, they were placed in their plastic stands. Because one or two went badly wrong in the oven, and a couple ended up noticeably out of scale with the other playing pieces, I was left with six complete pieces: two male, two female and two monster-ish; which I put in stands, ready to play with 🙂

Munchkin_7

I’m pretty pleased! I think they look rad, even if no-one else agrees with me. Plus, everything still fits in my base Munchkin box, et voila:

P1050211

So yeah, GO GO GADGET CREATIVITY.

[Zinar7]

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Mar 06 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff

friday_009

F009

In my entry from last Friday, I qualified my thoughts on video games and gaming by explaining that I find the process of play to be fascinating.

It’s true, I do find the act of playing to be something that’s always an interesting process – partly due to some of the more obvious excursions that play allows (role-playing as some far-flung hero; making decisions or play-acting in a way that doesn’t affect anything meaningful in real life; etc.), but also because I really enjoy engaging with other people in a ‘play’ scenario. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy socialising with people in a normal setting or just offhand – I mean that I find it very interesting to see what other people do when they’re engaged in something that doesn’t have proper consequences in real life; to see what choices they make and what strategies they employ in winning the game or tackling the problem at hand.

For me, his fascination has, most prominently, been propagated through my expanding passion for board- and tabletop gaming; the social aspect of which still properly brings me a whole fuckton of joy. I miss the good times of the PlayStation/PS2 and Nintendo 64/GameCube console generation(s) where, routinely, four people would come together to hammer out a few rounds of GoldenEye 007, Micro Machines V3 or Mario Kart: Double Dash!!. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule but multiplayer video games now overwhelmingly force players to be separated by a connection barrier rather than just a simply sharing a multitap and a beanbag in front of the TV. Part of this feeling is borne of nostalgia, but it’s mainly a frustration at how good things used to be and how the community of gaming friends crouched around a tiny CRT monitor looking at a tinier quadrant of screen felt far more connected and social than the gargantuan, exhaustive ‘community’ that online play now elevates.

Part of the reason that I’ve grown so attached to tabletop gaming, I think, is that it helps propagate a worthwhile social aspect of play that has (rather disappointingly) all but vanished from digital gaming. Sure, text and voice chat still exists in PC and console gaming and it’s easy to arrange your friends to be connected to you in a virtual space, but it’s not the same as being able to gloat theatrically and extensively in the face of a friend – sitting right next to you – who’s just been blown up by a Blue Shell right before they cross the finish line and pipping them to the post.

In short: Sharing the same, physical, social space with a bunch of close friends while engaging in the process of play is infinitely more entertaining than getting 360noscoped and being called a homosexual by a fourteen year-old you’ve never met on the other side of the world.

The rise of German-style “designer” board games can, partly, be interpreted as a reaction to the ebbing sense of ‘social’ play in modern video games. As consoles have gained online capabilities in the last 10/12 years, (online) gaming has transitioned video gaming away from the “family” environment (with a small group of people in your own living room) to engaging with vast servers of unknown, random nodes across a gargantuan network. While board games have always been a popular activity – before and after the invention of video games –  I have definitely noticed a trend in how designer board games have swelled in number over the last six or seven years and even begun to infiltrate shelf-space in more mainstream shops (i.e. those that aren’t specialist gaming stores) on the High Street. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these trends tally up quite so well.

Naturally, there are likely a whole lot of other reasons why these trends exist and it’s unlikely to be so simple a correlation that one can say, without question, that the shift towards online multiplayer video gaming has stoked the fires of Euro-style board gaming. But I think that there’s definitely a pattern involved, and perhaps it’s one that’s associated with gamers becoming a little disillusioned with the state of modern, AAA video games and aching to rediscover a sense of community play that seems to be growing more absent with each console generation.

In parallel, I’ve noticed a growth in the establishment of more, local tabletop gaming groups, and the population of existing ones swelling in number as more people discover the hobby. From personal experience, the genetic make-up of most of these groups tends to be formed, predominantly, of blokes in their thirties and onwards; at least, among those that aren’t based at, or very near, University campuses and the like. I might be painting with some fairly broad brush-strokes here, but I often feel like quite a proportion serious board game hobbyists are, perhaps, the kind of people that used to play video games but, perhaps, have fallen out of favour with them in the last few years; turning to tabletop gaming as more of an alternative. Of course, I haven’t canvassed the opinions of many of the board gaming community as to whether this is a 100% accurate deduction, but I’d be willing to place some stake behind being at least partially on the money.

The fact of the matter is, I still get a major kick out of engaging with people while we’re playing together; be it in digital world, or in a physical space. That passion is something that is hard-wired into me; like breathing and walking. But, the biggest buzz still comes when I collect together people into the same geographic location to play, and any method of making that happen anywhere and everywhere  is all good in my book.

[Zinar7]

 

If you’re into board gaming and attractive ladies – or, more specifically, attractive ladies playing board games and writing about them in an amusing and intelligent way – then you should check out The Misery Farm: How to Win Games and Alienate Meeple [themiseryfarm.com] because it has all of that and more, and blogs about board game-type stuff way better than I ever could.

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Feb 27 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff

friday_008

F008

This week’s Friday blog (and, likely, next week’s too) is going to be focussed a little bit on games of various sorts, because I find the whole subject of play to be totally fascinating.

It recently dawned on me that, as I approach my 30th birthday, very soon I will be taking my passion for playing video and computer games into my fourth decade on Planet Earth. Age-wise, I’m at the tail-end of the first proper generation of children that had video games as a major Thing in their lives, and I’ve been playing computer games as a serious hobby (and without any breaks) for 23-odd years now. Video games have been a constant presence in my life for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always fanned the flames of that passion by throwing myself into gaming at every possible opportunity and with every major console generation at, and since, the 16-bit era.

It’s only now, though, that I’ve sensed that I’m not really in touch with gaming anymore. I’m at a point, now, where I feel no great urge to make the leap into the current console generation of PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U; nothing that draws me in to new hardware, nor encourages me to invest in the short-sighted output of AAA-studios and cash-hungry publishers. At least for the time being, I’m perfectly happy with my PS3 and my PC (and my Wii, my PS2, my GameCube, my DS, yada yada) and don’t feel like a few more pixels or some extra ultraFLOPs of processing power are going to lead to me having any more fun than the fun that I currently have with the machinery I already own, or owned in the past.

It used to be different, though: I remember the days of playing blocky, LucasArts point ‘n’ click adventure games where it was 100% about story and gameplay and not a jot about photorealistic textures, and hashy polygon-based stunt racing games where the absence of car physics and multi-reflective surfaces were no hindrance to the process of having a blast. I funnelled umpteen hours into Lemmings, The Simpsons: Bart Simpson vs. the Space Mutants, Sleepwalker, Soccer Kid and Lotus Turbo Challenge II, even though they looked like crap, didn’t necessarily play that well, and routinely broke or glitched out because of bugs or because the floppy disk was knackered. That was my era of gaming; one where I recall – with a misty-eyed expression – the simultaneous joy and frustration at having to constantly insert and eject Money Island 2’s ELEVEN floppy disks in order to load new scenes or dialogue to the game. Of course, while Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge has lost none of its charm and brilliance in the intervening fourteen years, the likes of Race Drivin’ on the Amiga 500+ have long since been eclipsed by genuine progress in design and mechanics, and all but forgotten except by Nostalgia-nerds like me.

Looking at the broad spectrum, games are better now than they were when I first engaged with the hobby: they’re more shiny, better written, work better and are far, far more accepted by the mainstream than I ever dreamt that they would be. The leaps that were made throughout the 32/64-bit era (PlayStation and Nintendo 64) and then onto the 128-bit one (PlayStation 2, GameCube, Dreamcast and Xbox) were genuinely mind-blowing; where the improvement in graphical fidelity was also joined by progress in game engines (and hence gameplay), along with improved cinematic awareness and well-written dialogue and storylines. There’s a reason why many of the most highly-regarded video games (Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Half-Life) came from those eras: it felt like mainstream/’AAA’-games were just improving in every way; but never at the expense of fun, and never forgetting that they were there for play.

In the last four-five years, though, I’ve sort of felt like I’m not the target of mainstream games anymore – The need for even better graphics (beyond what we have now; which I could call ‘perfectly adequate’ for representing an immersive virtual world) doesn’t really grab me, and the prevalence for newly-released games to have Day One bug patches or pay-unlockable DLC sort of makes me be a little sick in my mouth. Furthermore, I’m not into sports games like Fee-Fuh; nor ones where fourteen year-olds go around shooting each other with realistic military equipment whilst calling every other player a homosexual. The term “Gamer”, these days, conjures up visions of spotty teenagers playing FIFA 15, Call of Duty and Candy Crush Saga. I’m a person that plays games, but I’m not a gamer.

I’m also not loads into disrespecting women or doxxing anyone that doesn’t 100% believe in the same views as me, which seems to be a big part of calling yourself a “gamer” these days.

Nothing about the PlayStation 4/Xbox One output from their first 18 months or so has shown me that we’re any closer to the asymptote of Gaming Perfection than we were, say, eight to ten years ago, and there’s no sinew in me that feels the urge to make the leap to the next gen. I’m not here saying that “old games were better” or anything like that; my gaming collection still spans over 25 years’ worth of digital fun, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. All I am saying is that – Oculus Rift and VR aside – I don’t truthfully foresee anything truly revolutionary happening to my gaming palate as I turn the clock over from twenties to thirties. It’s been a long time since a new AAA video game truly took my breath away (BioShock Infinite was probably the last one that did that), so it seems like – for now –  it’s still up to the indie gaming scene and my existing collection to continue to produce the most interesting and relevant contributions to my gaming buffet.

So yeah, excuse me while I crack on with some Borderlands, Chrono Trigger and Citizens of Earth. Boom.

[Zinar7]

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Feb 20 2015
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Activities

friday_007

F007

So, this week…has definitely been a week. It’s most definitely been seven full rotations of the Earth around its spin axis, and definitely been approximately 1.92% of the Earth’s transit around one orbit of the Sun. No-one could possibly argue otherwise unless, by some happy chance, the Universe is sucked into a time vortex that takes the whole of Humanity back seven days before anyone gets to read this. We can only hope.

As weeks go, though, it’s been a bit of a funny one: not one of the easiest to get through, but one that had to happen. I sort of came to terms with some things that I’ve probably needed to come to terms with for a long while. I’m not sure I’ve completely made my peace with them yet, but I guess the key thing is that my head is now attempting to look forward at what’s to come, rather than pointing at the floor and trying to wish that everything would just work out. Sometimes, in order to see the bright and the beautiful, you have to wade through the murky and the miserable.

Naturally, when you feel like misfortune is clogging up every channel of positivity and nothing seems to work out, you start to question the concept of ‘luck’: despite all my best efforts, I don’t feel particularly graced with good fortune at the moment. I mean, of course, I’m a semi-affluent, white male in the developed world that doesn’t need to forage for food or shelter or safety from life-threatening danger each day, so obviously I’ve been graced with a certain, sizable amount of ‘luck’ in my life already. But removing the long-term vision and focussing just on the short-term, things haven’t really been going my way in terms of major life progress: I’m still in between jobs; I’m single, not exactly in Olympic-level fitness and hardly swimming in money a la Scrooge McDuck. It’s not like I’m expecting to win the lottery or anything, but it’s amazing how effective a moderate stream of minor successes and compliments/congratulations can be; and how confidence-eroding it can be when there’s an absence of a breadcrumb trail of good news trickling into your daily life.

But could I have changed any of this? Am I responsible for my own good ‘luck’?

A lot of people put a lot of stock in the power of positive thinking, and how it seems to attract good things towards your face with frequency and velocity. I appreciate that, sometimes, I’m not the world’s most positive person – I realise that I get bogged down by my own flaws and faults, and stuck worrying about how I’m not any of the people I look up to – but I work hard to try to make things and write things and design things as a way of constantly improving something. In that respect, I take great stock in making small, daily improvements to things; analogous to minor stat upgrades in a Role-Playing Game where you’re ever edging your character closer and closer to the required level at which to take on the big boss. Much of the frustration I feel at the moment is that _because_ I’m in between jobs and relationships and whatever else, it’s hard to feel like you’re making such incremental progress to your own operating system (Simon 3.0) because you (arguably) don’t know what you’re working towards.

[In more simple terms: there are no current users of Simon 3.0, so how do I know what features I should be upgrading?]

Of course, the answer to that question is that it should be the other way around – you don’t try to tailor your own operating system to any users (or potential users), you design your OS to work correct for you and it’s up to the users to discover its smooth features and approachable interface. There are a lot of other operating systems out there in the world, but there’s only one you; and if users choose not to subscribe to your network, or applications decide not to port to your system, then the fault lies not with the OS, but with the external device.

Kris Roe of The Ataris possibly summed up this sentiment most succinctly in ‘The Hero Dies in This One’:

“The hardest part isn’t finding what we need to be; it’s being content with who we are. STAY WHO YOU ARE.”

(Kris Roe, 2003)

For too much of the early part of this week, I was stuck in a digital wasteland; shooting imaginary bandits in the head with an array of powerful semi-automatic weapons (that is to say, I was playing Borderlands) rather than facing the world and embracing the wonderful selection of friends that I have around me. Even if I’m in-between pretty much everything at the moment and feeling like I’m not moving forward at all, I’m determined to pick up the courage to let myself wander out in the wild world again. Wandering out into the real, social wasteland may have the potential for actual bad things and bandits, but it’s the only way to truly improve yourself; and it’s better to throw yourself out to the lions than to say that you’ve never been on a safari.

It sounds silly, but the key to not being invisible is to be visible. Throw yourself into endeavours, show the world your face, rather than hiding it. Sitting alone, weeping, in a corner is not the way that I’m going to make my mark on the world or anyone in it; Simon 3.0 has got so much love to give, and it’s resilient as hell. Let’s go on fucking safari.

[Zinar7]

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Feb 13 2015
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Activities, Movies 'n' Stuff

friday_006

F006

I watched a film this week. In this film, a Nazi spider-robot from the future anally raped an American soldier who had been sent back in time to 50,000 BC to kill a dinosaur-lion thing and investigate an alien flying saucer that had crash-landed there.

Yeah, my brain hurts, too.

This piece of sheer majestic greatness was The 25th Reich; an Australian comedy(?), sci-fi, action, horror…thing from deepest, darkest 2012. I’d discovered this film by accident, having been pounding the streets of Southampton looking for new contenders for my semi-regular B-movie horror gatherings. Yet lo and behold! What should shine out from amongst the standard Hollywood schlock and grime but a sparkling DVD case proclaiming the words: “5 men, 25 dimensions, 1 reality”; adorned with a picture of some US soldiers stood in front of some Nazi spaceships and a sticker saying “£0.75”. Before my brain could even compute what was happening, I found myself at the cashier’s register with the movie in my hand and my wallet 75 pence lighter than it was; suddenly questioning whether what I had just done was a good idea.

Well, what I had just done was cheaper than a cup of coffee and would only eat up 81 minutes of my precious life, so what was the worst that could happen? [Oh yeah, a Nazi spider-robot from the future anally raping an American solider, yada yada yada].

Alas, I’m not going to tell you. Y’see, such is the sheer, intense rage and amusement that The 25th Reich managed to instil in me, I’m going to take some time to really delve into the film; dissect it, poke fun at it and, if absolutely necessary, watch the bloody thing again. I tried my best to formulate my thoughts on it with enough turnaround as to post it here in time for today, but I can only deal with so much madness in one go; so, instead, I’ll post it in a fully-formed, uh, form hopefully sometime soon. I think it’d actually be rather interesting to go through the process for other, similarly-terrible B-movies as well; perhaps as a sort of series, I don’t know. Either way, I’m sure it’ll be fun to revisit the madness again one more time. Maybe.

Okay then, so what good things have I watched recently?

Well, I’ve recently tried to semi-resurrect my commitment to #Project500, my personal goal to try and watch all the of the 500 films ranked as ‘The Greatest Movies of All-Time’ as part of a poll in Empire magazine in 2008. As of today, I’ve managed to check off about 370 of them (to be fair, when I started, I had already seen almost half of the list); in the process, discovering a number of films that would now rank as some of my favourites. The last couple of years have seen a bit of a drop in the tick-off rate, so with the passing of the New Year I decided to sharpen my film-slaying sword and head off back into the #Project500 battle:

From Here to Eternity was a fairly pleasant, romantic drama focussing on a company in the US army stationed at Pearl Harbour just before the infamous attack; The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was a tedious horror/psycho-thriller from Dario Argento that, despite the original film being in English, I somehow managed to watch dubbed into Italian with English subtitles; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was monotonous drudge with some appalling plotlines, rueful acting and some terrible songs; Topsy-Turvy was an entertaining, light-hearted biopic of Gilbert & Sullivan’s struggles to put on The Mikado; and A Man Escaped was a sort of slow-but-tense, black-and-white film by Robert Bresson, cataloguing one man’s efforts to escape prison after being arrested by the Nazis for being a part of the French Resistance. So yeah, films.

In between the #Project500 adventuring, I’ve also returned to my journey through The X-Files: after a bit of a break, I’ve recommenced at the beginning of season two, where the noticeable step up in quality (of both writing and visual effects) is already apparent. I love that the series perfectly combines my three, separate passions for paranormal conspiracy theories, B-movie special effects and detective drama. Also, if I was gay, I would totally try to it on David Duchovny. I’m not, but it’s good to have a Plan B just in case the whole ‘heterosexual’ thing doesn’t work out.

I’m not a person that really goes in for long-running TV series, and I totally shy away from the modern obsession with ‘box set’ TV unless it’s Game of Thrones. It’s like a constantly-repeating mantra that I feel like I have to repeat to everyone: no, I haven’t watched Breaking Bad. I don’t care how ‘good’ people might say it is; I’m just yet to be convinced by the ‘format’ of long-running drama series – I prefer “cinema” as a concept, where drama and storytelling are communicated concisely and character development is progressed more in a way that I enjoy. I’d rather spend 2-3 hours with a brilliantly concise, well-shot piece of celluloid drama than feel like I have to persevere with a bulldozer of a box set in order to eventually receive the payoff about a hundred hours later. In short: Breaking Bad may well be brilliant for its hundred-odd hours, but 2001: A Space Odyssey manages the catalogue the whole of human existence (from prehistory to a science-fiction future) in just two hours.

Speaking of time-consuming television, I’m once again romping through the whole of The Thick of It with gay abandon and unstoppable laughter. TToI is one of the (albeit, very few) television programmes that I could watch over and over and over again, and I’m once again revelling in the monolithic brilliance that is Malcom F. Tucker. [the other programmes that I could watch endlessly being Peep Show, Green Wing, Blackadder, I’m Alan Partridge, Black Books, Father Ted and The IT Crowd]. There’s just something endlessly cathartic about Tucker’s constant swearing and way with words; as if his expletive-filled rants somehow have a emotional connection to the soul and directly expel everything ‘bad’ from the world. He’s possibly the greatest comedy character ever created, and one which I will never tire of listening to.

Three words: Tim. In. Ruislip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GT18lYRRDQ

[Zinar7]

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Feb 06 2015
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Activities, Music 'n' Stuff

friday_005

F005

I’ve struggled a bit, recently, with identity.

This has always been a bit of a weakness for me, partly because I’ve never really felt like I’ve fit in anywhere, and because I’ve sometimes felt like I never will. But given my seven-month break from full-time employment and recent changes to my relationship status, I’ve relaxed into a pattern of feeling merely ordinary.

I know that we can’t all be special gothic snowflakes and, as humans, we have no right to feel ‘special’ through every second of every minute of every day but lately, I’ve felt merely like one of the crowd; yet, a crowd in which I don’t truly ‘fit in’ with. Yes, I am aware of the glaring oxymoron: how can you feel just part of a crowd if you feel like you stand out as ‘different’ within it? I don’t know; maybe I feel camouflaged by the other, regular, shambling humans of the world and obscured by the lights that burn brighter in society. I’m not saying that I deserve to stand out or be praised for my achievements/’me’-ness, I just mean that I’m too keenly aware of my role as merely a bipedal mammal in a overpopulated society of bipedal mammals and so have become disillusioned as to how I can make a meaningful impact on the bipedal mammals in my close proximity or the bipedal mammal population as a whole.

Maybe if I believed in religion – or a higher purpose for each and every one of us – then I could have the faith to recognise that we’re all part of highly connected and social society, and that the network of friendships and familyships (and the love that is transmitted along the conduits between them) is what arguably leads to social (and individual) progress. It’s my background as a scientist and engineer, though, that makes me see human society as simply one of thousands of other species; and that the individual populants have no God- or chance-given right to feel anything but part of the hive. I’m not trying to put an outright downer on anything; I’m just expressing my grounded view that – as humans – we’re nothing special. At least, not in the context of the Universe as a whole.

But: you know what? Even in that functional view of the world, we all still have our place and our unique roles. We’re all cogs in the machine; cogs of all different shapes and sizes and functions. I am different. At the very least, I am unique from all the other bipedal mammals in the world, and I have my own – unique – thoughts, talents and abilities that cause me to mean something to the bipedal mammals around me and, who knows, maybe one day mean something special to someone.

So, in the spirit of self-improvement and recognising all of the elements that make up ‘me’ and ‘me’ alone, I thought I’d set myself some homework: use the alphabet (A-Z) to list all of the things I enjoy and that work together to construct the unique bipedal mammal that is ‘me’; what you’d find if you cut me open and performed some mass spectrometry on my chemical formula (FYI: I’d rather you didn’t cut me open, but it’s really up to you).

[A] AFI, Assassin’s Creed

[B] Board Games, B-Movies

[C] Clerks, Chiptune

[D] Daft Punk, Dieselpunk

[E] Earl Grey, Edgeworth (Miles)

[F] Final Fantasy, Formula One

[G] Game of Thrones, Gory Horror Films

[H] Half-Life, Houmous

[I] Inception, In-Line Skating

[J] Japanese Cinema/Animation, Jam on Toast

[K] Kickstarter, Ke$ha

[L] Less Than Jake, Lovecraft (H. P.)

[M] Monkey Island (the Secret of), Monty Python

[N] Nine Inch Nails, Night-Time City Lights

[O] Okami, Orbital Mechanics

[P] Point-and-Click Adventure Games, Peep Show

[Q] Quizzes, QI

[R] Rush [the band], Rez

[S] Star Wars, Scott Pilgrim

[T] Turisas, Terry Pratchett

[U] Ümlaüts, Unending Sarcasm

[V] Velociraptors, Victorian London

[W] Wes Anderson, WASD + mouse

[X] Xenoblade Chronicles, X-Files (the)

[Y] YouTube Parties, Your Mum

[Z] Zelda (The Legend of), Zombie Nazis

 

Furthermore to this activity, I also recently started a self-imposed task to enrich my life with more positive, affirming music that encourages me feel good and awesome and other positive words. I called this task #Rule32, from Zombieland’s wise words to “Enjoy the little things”. So, I now have a Spotify playlist with which, each day, or at least every day I remember to, I add a new song that makes me feel like an awesome person. You can find it here:

Today’s song (013 // Foo Fighters – Something from Nothing) has particular meaning for me on this journey, so I’m going to write a few words about it: Foo Fighters were the first band that I properly got into on my journey to rock/metal addiction, around the time of There is Nothing Left to Lose. All of Dave Grohl’s work has properly captivated me (from Nirvana to Probot to Them Crooked Vultures to his drumming with QOTSA, Ghost, Tenacious D, yada yada yada), but Foo Fighters have always hit me direct in the heart.

‘Something from Nothing’ hits doubly hard, because it rings true with me: in truth, I’ve made something from nothing; I’ve made a something of myself, all on my own. Everything I’ve done and achieved in my life, I’ve done on my own. I’ve had very little in the way of leg-ups in life, and I’ve worked fucking hard to make everything I’ve made for myself. I’ve been lucky as well, but everything that I’ve gathered around me and left in my wake is the result of an incredible amount of perspiration, dedication and persistence.

I came from a tiny, rural town in the middle of nowhere, escaped the trappings of being overweight, lonely, picked-on, confused, afraid and whatever-the-hell-else to push myself hard enough to get through ten+ years of hard work to become a Master of Aerospace Engineering (with Astronautics) and, latterly, a full-on Doctor of Philosophy in space-y type stuff. I’m soon going to be starting a new job that continues this career path, and pushes me even higher and harder. Even if my brain sometimes try to convince me otherwise, I’ve achieved an incredible amount and have turned into a person that I’m proud to be.

I am something from nothing. I, more than anyone, need to remember that.

[Zinar7]

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Feb 04 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff

Café Carnage: Dev Update #1

CC_1

Ahoy there! I sort of semi-mentioned Café Carnage in my last Friday blog, but since I’ve now had some time to think more about possible ways the game could be improved (as well as getting a few tabletop gaming friends to play it and see what they think), I’d like to document the results of playtesting of Café Carnage v2.0 and offer some thoughts about what changes could be made. These game dev blogs are primarily a vessel for me to screw around with ideas and develop concepts, but hopefully that’s interesting to you guys, too.

So, in that spirit: onwards!

Divider

So, essentially, Café Carnage is a party game. A light, card-based game with minor elements of strategy and push-your-luck but, at its base, it is a party game (albeit – at the moment – only a party that only four people are attending). The version of Café Carnage [v1.0] that Marco, Dickson and I developed as part of the Global Game Jam 2015 (#SotonGameJam) was a very simple, party-game for four players; stripped of some of the more fancy ideas that we came up with, in order to get a workable, fun game completed in the 48 hour time limit. To download the Print ‘n’ Play version of Café Carnage [v1.0], take a look at the link below:

Print and play files: Café Carnage – Global Game Jam 2015 game by Marco Caldarelli, Simon George and Dickson Chui // Ages: 8 and above, playtime: 15-30 minutes.

In its primitive state, it’s a short, no-brain, luck-pushing game that essentially boils down to picking the right time to run from your bill-paying responsibilities: basically, picking the right day (of five) to play your “Run!” card and hoping that none of the other players play theirs at the same time – it’s a slightly amplified version of the famous Unscrupulous Diner’s Dilemma. There’s some slight more complexity and decision-making as to when to pick the best time to run, but, in essence, there’s a fairly clear way to victory that sort of becomes obvious once you’ve played it more than once.

But that’s fine: Café Carnage is intended as a party game; one in which you quickly bash out a playthrough in 15-20 minutes, call your friends “bastards” and perhaps have a chuckle or two along the way (results may vary).

CafeCarnage_3

The difficult problem now lies in how to develop Café Carnage [v2.0] and take it one step further into a more robust, more interesting game. After last week’s jamming, I’d sort of identified three key areas that I wanted to develop further in Version 2.0:

  • More players (5+)
  • More player interaction
  • More variation in the points/cost balance (and penalty for going over budget)

During #SotonGameJam, we only really tested and balanced Version One with 4 players. The idea of the game was, initially, to be a party game that could be played with a group of up to (say) 8 people who then debate over the bill; much like a large group meal IRL. The main logistical complication in adding more players lies in supplying sufficient number of cards such that, over the five rounds of the game, you’re not endlessly shuffling the discard piles and that there’s enough variety in the various dishes that diners can eat. Adding more players does, however, screw with the rules governing how diners can “Run!” from a meal and how only the ‘slowest’ diner (i.e. the player that consumed the most food that day and hence is the most out-of-shape) gets caught and all others escape without paying their bill – in a four-player game played over five rounds, the chances of 3+ players choosing to “Run!” at the same time is unlikely (in testing, rarely did more than two diners choose to “Run!” at the same time), but in a game with 6 or more players, you’re going to get multiple runners every round. How to ‘fix’ this such that one single diner doesn’t end up having to pay for 3-4 other meals (from successful escapees) is still an open question.

Regardless of any increase in players, a way of stimulating more interactions between the players is an important task. At present, players simply choose their three dishes (starter, main course, dessert) secretly from other players, and then the card showing what they choose to do when the bill arrives, before there is any engagement between the players in revealing what dishes they ate and revealing their chosen SHARE BILL/PAY SEPARATELY/RUN card. That there’s so much time spent simply doing your own thing means that there’s not only the potential for Analysis Paralysis (AP) to creep in, but also that the players are silent through this phase; which is not so fun. In Version One, what players choose to eat and choose to do when the bill arrives is in no way based on what anyone else is doing – you essentially do your own thing regardless of what other players might do, so you may as well be playing a solitaire game or playing against a droid. For Version Two, I’d love there to be more ways in which you can actually play against the other humans; be it by forcing engagement between players and revealing something about what everyone had to eat that day (perhaps, while everyone is eating their dessert, diners can choose to ‘grill’ [pun intended] a particular player about how much their starter or main course cost?), or more directly through bonus action cards or special powers that allow players to sabotage other diners’ meals.

CafeCarnage_1

One other thing that became apparent during the #SotonGameJam testing was that, even though Café Carnage Version One was incredibly well-balanced for four players (due, largely, to luck more than any tactical game design decisions), games would often end quite close in terms of the final scores of players. While this is not necessarily a massive issue, it does mean that games can be lost or won based on a single, minute decision (for example, choosing a one-star Starter dish rather than a three-star one); or worse, sheer luck. Furthermore, this also penalises heavily any player that is involved in an unsuccessful “Run!” attempt, because the requirement for them to pay for their own meal in addition to the meals of all other players who successfully escaped means that they’re near-guaranteed to end up way over their budget and heavily out of the running.

Aside from Version Two addressing the problem of multiple (3+) runners during a meal, it is fairly clear that a better cost/star ratio needs to be manufactured: in Version One, a one-star meal costs one ‘money’ (there’s no set currency for Café Carnage yet); a two-star meal costs two ‘money’; a three-star meal costs ‘three’ money, and so on. Because of this (and because any remaining budget at the end of the week contributes to Victory Points), points at the end of the game tend to vary between 35 (for winners) and 25 (for losers) – considering that players start with 30 ‘money’, this is not a huge variation (although not an unreasonable one).

There are some options for making this more interesting, and for elevating the tension as to whether the gluttonous diners successfully share the bill (thereby forcing other diners to share the burden of your expense): one is to modify the “exchange rate” between stars and ‘money’ – e.g. a one-star dish costs one ‘money’, but a two-star dish costs two ‘money’ and a three-star dish costs five ‘money’; but at the end of the game only stars count as Victory Points (not your remaining budget), but you lose Victory Points if you end up in debt at the end of the week. Alternatively, there’s the ‘Tastes’ variant that adds additional ways to earn stars/Victory Points as bonus value-for-money – each player is dealt a ‘character’ that appreciates certain types of food (e.g. Pepper Grylls likes her food to be vegetarian and/or healthy; Josh Rogan enjoys spicy foods, etc.), and bonus stars can be collected by choosing dishes that meet your diner’s requirements.

I don’t know what the solution is to this problem yet, but it’s good to have ideas.

CafeCarnage_4

Anyway, last Sunday, I gathered a bunch of my gaming friends ‘round my place to give Café Carnage a few rounds (with differing variants) to bash out some new ideas and brainstorm. I’m still thinking about the findings and feedback of that endeavour so I’ll leave those thinkings to the next post; but suffice to say that, after playtesting, I would like to add the following goals to the initial three that I laid out earlier in this post:

  • Less downtime/AP/potential for decision-making (and less shuffling time)
  • Action cards and during-dinner hijinks (e. stuff happening between courses)
  • Physical money (instead of a money-track)

So yeah, there you have the basis for Café Carnage Version Two. I’m still working hard on thoughts for Penny Black and my binary game, Bit Pattern, but I’m fairly pleased with the progress with “café game” as well 😀 Until next time, then. Godspeed!

[Zinar7]

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Jan 30 2015
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Activities, Games 'n' Stuff

friday_004

f004

Last weekend, in less than 48 hours, I helped design a novel café-based card game from scratch.

I can scarcely believe that it’s been a whole seven days since the beginning of the whirlwind Global Game Jam 2015 / #SotonGameJam tsunami that wiped out 48 hours of my life last weekend but, evidently, it has. I’ve got a bigger game dev-based post in the works in which I want to write about my various board game projects (Penny Black, Babbage and, now, Café Carnage), so I won’t take up too much time here with them, but yes, in 48 hours Marco, Dickson and I came up with a brand new card game called Café Carnage as part of #GGJ15, and you can download the print ‘n’ play files here ~

Print and play files: Café Carnage – Global Game Jam 2015 game by Marco Caldarelli, Simon George and Dickson Chui // Ages: 8 and above, playtime: 15-30 minutes.

Café Carnage is a party, bluffing-type game where yourself and three friends decide to visit five restaurants with an initial budget of £30, and attempt to eat the most food whilst trying screw your friends over by getting them to share the bill when you’ve eaten heartily, or running away when it’s time to pay the bill. In the end, we actually managed to pretty much come up with the whole of Café Carnage in less than 20 hours after a false start where we focussed on a different concept, which sort of makes it even more surprising that we actually have a game to show at the end of it. And it works! It’s not the world’s best tabletop game nor is it free from minor problems and limitations, but it’s a playable game and (at least from the playtesting we managed to get done during #SotonGameJam) people seemed to be enjoying it 😀

There’s more work that can be done on it towards refining it, but it’s totally playable as it is for four players looking to have a quick, light-hearted bit of fun ordering food and trying to bluff your way out of the bill. So yes: overall, in between the panic-designing and epic exhaustion that were sort of hallmarks of the jam, I had a good time at #SotonGameJam. It certainly proved a dramatic, rollercoaster way of spending a weekend; even if it did – at times – help to fuel the raging inferno of insecurity in my own abilities and ideas.

Recently, a lot of my insecurities have (sort of) come to the forefront of my mind and hammered away at my sanity more often than I’d like. Over the years, I’ve become quite good at burying the insecurity and covering it up with distractions or occupations or (more genuine) stresses and strains; but, with my current situation of being between-jobs and on my own at home for most of the time, there’s considerable time for the insecurity to chisel its tiny way into your sanity and start tinkering away into your confidence and self-belief. I’ve never been particularly affluent in self-confidence and self-esteem but, recently, things have sort of accidentally conspired to erode what faith I did have in myself; causing me to doubt the confidence in my outward persona and the things that I say, make and create. The general result, essentially, is that I’ve had too much time to overthink a lot of things, and to reflect on where I am in life/love/legacy and whether I measure up to the imaginary standards I’ve concocted that I think the world is expecting me to live up to.

Whenever I’m faced with a question of “whether I’m good enough”, I naturally end up comparing myself to unrealistic benchmarks (famous people, fictional characters, people that I perceive to be “winning at life”) and conveniently forgetting about the millions of other people around me that have normal lives and normal expectations set of them; as well as the flaws & imperfections that my beloved ‘benchmarks’ inevitably possess in addition to their positive qualities. My brain knows that, rationally, there is no point in comparing my physical appearance with that of Tom Hiddleston but, for some reason, it seems to interpret the fact that Tom Hiddleston exists – and is uncomfortably pretty and charming – as some sort of sleight on myself and my own looks. I can sort of understand where it’s coming from, though: when Hiddlesexy is wandering about on the same celestial body as I am, who the hell would be physically attracted to me?

The thing is, such thoughts are far from helpful. I might be wholly unconvinced by my physical looks and (most of the time) think that I’m some sort of hideous troll, but that’s not to say that everyone else thinks the same, too. Naturally, I see my flaws and my imperfections because I’m looking for them, and I see them every day in the mirror or in my brain or in my hands and am continually reminded that they’re there. They’re there, right in front of me, all of the time and, because of the way my brain works, they blot out all of the good bits that aren’t flawed or opaque and cause me to forget all that’s good about me and the confidence I have in myself & my abilities. Deep down, I have trust that I’m not a terrible person nor possess the world’s most repulsive appearance, and that I have qualities that People™ value and want to have around them, but the brain sometimes has rather unhelpful ways of trying to be ‘helpful’.

It’s been a bit of a choppy sea that I’ve been sailing in these last six months out of long-term relationship, and I’m still finding my sea legs. I’m still properly figuring out where I stand in the world, now that I’m standing in it on my own; and, in trying to establish my comfort zone, I’m sort of still feeling around for signs that I’m doing things right and that everything is okay. I’m the sort of person that wears their heart not only on their sleeve but on their every facet, and so it’s sometimes easy for my exposed heart to find itself injured in the process of everyday life – in the absence of corrective feedback or affirmations of “yes, you’re doing things right”, my brain tends to interpret the neutrality as indications of my visible failures or inadequacies. Again: not helpful, brain.

I need to let go of who I think I’m supposed to be, and embrace everything that makes me, me; imperfections and all. Just because I am not some famous, swooning celebrity who’s solved cold fusion and won a Best Actor Oscar and climbed Everest does not mean that I am not still a kind, generous, intelligent, thoughtful, funny person that’s – in his own way – unique and talented and beautiful.

I can do a lot of things that a lot of other people couldn’t even consider doing: I mean, last weekend, in less than 48 hours, I helped design a novel café-based card game from scratch. I bet Tom Hiddleston couldn’t do that, even if he would look infuriatingly pretty whilst trying.

[Zinar7]

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