Had another in my increasingly lengthy line of peculiar dreams last night — the kind that somehow manages to stick in your memory after you wake up. There was nothing lavatorial involved this time around, however.
There was, however, nudity.
I dreamed I was at work. Boring, sure, but I had just returned to work after a few days away, so it’s understandable it was on my mind. My dream work wasn’t quite the same as my actual work, however; for some reason, I was doing my day job as normal, only I was sat at a computer at a work surface on the outside of the “Maths area” from my secondary school — the large, open-plan area that was often turned into one or two improvised extra classrooms depending on the size of that particular year’s cohort.
I was also naked.
For some reason, my nudity didn’t seem to bother any of my colleagues, who were coming and going around me much as they do in my actual office. None of them were naked, but it was almost as if they didn’t see the fact that I was. I, on the other hand, was very much conscious of the fact that I didn’t have any clothes on, and it felt like it wasn’t an entirely deliberate decision to be there in the nip in the first place. It’s not that someone had forcibly taken my clothes off or anything; my clothes had just simply ceased to be at some point during the working day, and I had seemingly figured that the best means of dealing with this was just to sit down and get on with my work as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, despite the fact that almost everything save for the work I was doing and the people around me was out of the ordinary.
Eventually, my colleague Tony came up to me, and I stiffened — not like that, you filthy pervert — in preparation for, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun, a dressing-down due to my lack of clothing. It didn’t happen, however; Tony had come over to me to offer a different kind of feedback, and it had nothing to do with my bare bum or winky.
It turned out all the work I had been doing all morning was in the wrong language. I don’t know how this would have happened, given that all the work I do is in English anyway (with the odd document in Welsh when appropriate — though thankfully for my total ignorance of the Welsh language I don’t have to actually write these) but it had somehow happened today, the day when I was working naked. I’m not even sure which language was the “wrong” language — thinking back on it now at the end of the day, I have German in my mind for some reason, but I often have German on the mind because it’s an inherently entertaining language to me — but Tony was absolutely adamant that all the work I had done was in the wrong language, and needed to be sorted out.
I then woke up before I could sort it out, and it was time to go to work. I made doubly sure I was wearing trousers before I left the house.
Over the weekend, mankind enjoyed a significant step forward in the field of space travel. Unmanned spacecraft Rosetta successfully detached its probe, named Philae, and landed on Comet 67P, aka Chryumov-Grasimenko. It was the culmination of a ten-year mission for Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency, and a historic moment for humanity: we finally had the chance to examine a comet up close, and perhaps make some steps forward in understanding the way the universe works; how the solar system formed; perhaps even how there came to be life on this planet.
As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life’s work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.
Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)
“I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet,” read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, “your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.
We don’t have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.
Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?
Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.
The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that “everyone has a voice”. The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.
This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as “social justice” and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn’t see the world in the same way they do.
The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae’s heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.
Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.
And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor’s trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as “social justice warriors” or “SJWs” — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it’s possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.
This sounds ridiculous, but it’s all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim’s defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say “look how violent they’re being!”, or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor’s case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they’re only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job “well done”.
It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.
Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be “leaving” the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.
Brice tweeted that she was “automatically rating low any games with men in them” during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was “loving all this power”. Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being “harassed” and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? “It was a joke” — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you’ll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a “joke” when we’re talking about a person who made a game called “Destroy All Men” and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.
And lest you think I’m singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she’s simply one of the most recent examples. I’ve thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I’ve witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.
YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:
It’s so goddamn American.
A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn’t take into account much going on outside the country’s borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn’t exist: let’s take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.
The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You’ll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners’ unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.
He’s absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt “Gamergate” as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I’ve ever observed. (As an aside, I haven’t involved myself in Gamergate’s activities — as a former member of the press I don’t agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It’s been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)
It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of “social justice” or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with “so you’re against social justice, are you? You’re against progressiveness?” but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.
All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I’ve alluded to this in the past, and I’ve seen more friends than I’d care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it’s time it stopped.
Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?
Well, frankly, I don’t; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in “social justice” call people), but it’s worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.
This is not a move towards a progressive society. It’s a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it’s not the direction that we as a society should be moving.
The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.
One of the best things about the Japanese games I tend to play in preference to anything else is simultaneously one of the most frustrating things.
I’m referring to the question of game length.
In an age where the public are seemingly ever more likely to rate interactive entertainment in terms of a “money per hours” ratio — look at the drubbing Gone Home got from certain quarters who felt that $20 was too expensive for the 2-3 hours of gameplay it offered — it should be abundantly clear to anyone who plays them that Japanese games, for the most part, consistently offer the absolute best value in terms of bang for your buck on the market.
Take Senran Kagura Burst, for example, which I finally pummelled into submission and 100% completion over the weekend during downtime between activities. This is a game that is essentially a spiritual successor to the arcade brawlers of yore — games like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Asterix: The Arcade Game and The Simpsons Arcade Game, to name but a few favourites from my own youth.
Unlike those brawlers, however, which typically tended to be no more than four or five levels long — they needed to theoretically be completable on a single coin credit and in a single sitting, after all — it took me in excess of 50 hours to complete all the levels in Senran Kagura Burst, and there’s plenty more I could do after completing all the levels once: try for an A-rank on all of them; try and level up all the characters to 50; try and unlock all the characters’ “balance” modes through using them in different ways; try to complete all the levels in the challenging “Frantic” mode; try to beat all the bosses with special moves; and try to see all the bosses’ special moves without dying. Were I to tackle some of those additional challenges — and I’m not ruling out the possibility, as I enjoyed Senran Kagura Burst one hell of a lot — I’m sure that could easily put a significant number of extra hours on the clock.
Notably, though, a lot of this “extra” stuff is optional. You can romp through the main storyline of Senran Kagura Burst, ignoring all side missions and some of the clever things you can do with the characters, in probably about 10 hours or so, if that. (Most of that time will be reading the game’s lengthy visual novel sections, which are skippable after you’ve completed that mission at least once.) And in doing so, you’ll have had a satisfyingly complete experience from start to finish — particularly as the game’s structure effectively feels like you’re getting two (rather similar) games for the price of one thanks to the story unfolding from two different, parallel perspectives that meet up at various points.
The same is true for many other Japanese games, with RPGs being the clearest example. Your average Japanese RPG these days will take anywhere between 20 and 100 hours to clear first time through, assuming you don’t just plough straight through to the ending, and that you take on a bit of side content and spend a bit of time fine-tuning your characters. After that, though, you have a choice: set it aside, satisfied that you’ve seen the conclusion to the story, or continue playing in the hope of enjoying everything else the game has to offer — often referred to as “post-game”. Many modern RPGs also offer a “New Game Plus” mode, in which you can carry across certain things from your previous playthrough into a new run — the exact things you can carry across vary according to the game, but often include things like character levels, unlocked skills, equipment, secret areas uncovered and all manner of other goodies. This tends to turn you into a satisfyingly unstoppable powerhouse at the outset of your second playthrough as your buffed-up character cuts through enemies like butter, but is often necessary to take on some of the biggest challenges the game has to offer. Some games even withhold their toughest bosses and dungeons until post-game or New Game Plus, providing you with an incentive to continue playing even after the credits have rolled.
Even seemingly “short” Japanese games have a massive amount of longevity, too; take your average “bullet hell” shooter, for example, which typically follows the arcade machine structure of theoretically allowing someone to clear it on a single credit and in a single sitting. The true challenge of these games, however, comes from perfecting your game — achieving that single-credit clear (often known as a 1CC — 1 Credit Clear), beating your last high score, topping the worldwide leaderboards. The latter aspect in particular can become enormously competitive, and in the case of many shmups, requires you to fathom out an initially Byzantine-seeming scoring system in order to take maximum advantage of it.
And this isn’t even getting into the truly, directly competitive titles such as fighting games, which have potentially limitless replayability if you’re actually any good at them. (I am not, so I tend to play through the story mode, if there is one, and then be done, perhaps with an occasional two-player local match with friends if they’re up for it.) Or driving games with ongoing online competition. Or all manner of other joyful experiences.
I’m not saying Western games don’t offer any of this longevity — anyone who’s super-into Call of Duty’s multiplayer mode is doubtless raising their hand and going “Um…” right now — but for my money, and particularly in the single-player space, Japanese games can’t be beaten for value in terms of how much entertainment you’ll get for your £40.
It’s our second (and final) full day here at Center Parcs. We both woke up extremely stiff all over after what was a pretty busy day yesterday, so we had a relaxing morning. We headed over to a cafe in the main plaza area to have some breakfast — a pretty magnificent Eggs Royale (Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon instead of ham) accompanied by spinach and some really nice if slightly salty crispy potato bits.
After that, we had a little wander around the shops in the plaza, which we hadn’t really explored a great deal. We paid particular attention to the sweet shop, which offered the typically overpriced pick and mix, a selection of American sweets (including Nerds, Runts and Gobstoppers, the latter two of which I haven’t seen for years), some nice looking ice-cream and a selection of fudge that would put Cornwall’s finest to shame. We came away with a box full of fudge of various flavours and have been enjoying that over the course of the day. Pro-tip: chocolate fudge with Oreos in it is proper delicious.
Our main activity for the day was “An Outing with Owls”, which we signed up for largely on the promise of being able to see some owls, since owls are pretty cool. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the session, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, with everyone getting the opportunity to get their falconry on and let owls of various sizes land on their (leather glove-protected) hands while they nommed on bits of chicken. These well-trained birds swooping from person to person is an impressive thing to witness, and not a little disconcerting when one comes flying straight for you before perching politely on your hand until it’s had something to eat.
We got to see a selection of owls, ranging from a barn owl to a Great Grey, which, true to its name, was both grey and massive. (And dubbed “Clock Owl” by Andie and I, due to the fact that when it was sat on its perch prior to the session, it had the size, shape and appearance of a rather feathery mantelpiece clock.) There was also a South American burrowing owl, which was kind of adorable, too; rather than swooping around as the larger owls did, this tiny little thing preferred to scurry around on the floor, then occasionally leap and fly up onto anywhere that took its fancy — knees, hands, shoulders and even, on one particularly memorable occasion, the top of a gentleman’s hat.
We came back to the apartment for a well-earned rest after that, and we’re shortly to have one final night-time session in the Subtropical Swimming Paradise before grabbing some dinner.
It’s been a very pleasant — if quite expensive! — couple of days away, and I predict it will be quite tough to go back to reality on Tuesday! Such is the way with holidays, though; good times have to end at some point and we all have to make our way back to the humdrum nature of our daily existences.
Still, for now, there’s still more to enjoy, so we’re going to make the most of it.
A rather pleasant day all round, really, though my aching body will attest to the fact that we’ve done a whole lot more than we’d usually do on a Saturday. That’s probably not a terrible thing, mind you.
We kicked off the day with a substantial breakfast courtesy of the awesome “breakfast packs” sold at the on-site supermarket, the Parc Market. This contained four sausages — decent sausages, too, not cheap crap — along with six slices of bacon (six!) and two lumps of black pudding. We also supplemented it with some eggs — because what sort of breakfast doesn’t have eggs? — and some hash browns. It was tasty, if rather filling.
After letting that lead weight settle in our stomachs a bit, we headed over for our first foray into the Subtropical Swimming Paradise. The Center Parcs I’d previously been to several times was the Elveden Forest one rather than this one here in Longleat, but I was expecting the pool to be almost if not completely identical. Sure enough, the layout was a little bit different, but all the same things were there — the lazy river, the two flumes, the terrifying fast slide (which appears to have been remodeled into two separate, smaller, single-person slides rather than the wide, multi-person slide it once was and, of course, the Wild Water Rapids. There’s also a wonderful warm pool outdoors that leads into the aforementioned Rapids, and an even warmer jacuzzi just off that. The contrast between hot and cold when you get into these pools and feel the cool air on your skin while the warm water heats up your body is rather wonderful.
After a bit of exploring everything the pool had to offer, we headed to the first of two “extra” activities we’d booked for the weekend: a spot of target archery tuition. This was a fairly substantial walk away from the main plaza building and involved a little bit of getting lost amid the many identical-looking streets of villas along the way, but we eventually got there on time to shoot a bunch of arrows.
I’ve done archery a couple of times in the past, and I’ve always enjoyed it despite not being all that good at it — my score in the competition at the end of the session was the second lowest. It’s inherently satisfying to feel that release of the bowstring and to watch your arrow arc gracefully through the air on the way to its destination, be that the bull’s eye of a target or the protective fabric at the back of the range. And that “thunk” of an arrow actually hitting the target? Wonderful stuff.
Andie did pretty well at the archery, beating my score by a considerable margin — although my pride dictates that I should mention at this point that I was shooting at the “grown-up” targets that were a fair distance away while she was shooting at the medium-range targets for beginners and/or short people. She still did great, though; evidently all that Bard training in Final Fantasy XIV is good for something.
After that, we caught the “land train” (actually a road-based train stopping at various destinations around the park) to the Village Square area, which we hadn’t explored previously. This small area, separate from the main plaza, features a few nice little restaurants and a pottery workshop. We were interested in the former aspect, specifically an intriguing little establishment called The Pancake House. It did not disappoint, providing huge and delicious Dutch-style pancakes (with the option of American-style pancake stacks instead if you prefer) topped with a variety of both sweet and savoury options. Andie went for a rather delicious apple affair that had lovely soft cooked apples along with plenty of caramel, cinnamon sugar and all manner of other goodness. I had an equally caramelly pancake, but mine featured lumps of honeycomb rather than the apples. It was damn good, but it was the second lead weight of the day to hit our stomach, which made the walk back to our accommodation rather hard work!
After a break back at the apartment, we headed out to the Subtropical Swimming Paradise for an evening swim as I’d previously enthused that it was very nice at night time. Sure enough, it didn’t disappoint; the outdoor pools in particular were lovely in the dark of the evening, with the underwater lighting highlighting the steam rising from these warm pools, providing a lovely relaxing, chilled-out environment that was blissfully largely child-free at that time in the evening.
After that, we headed back, ate steak, chilled out, played My Little Pony cards, went to bed. Then I got up and wrote this. Now I’m going back to bed.
It’s Andie’s 30th birthday soon, so I wanted to do something nice. Rather than taking the “present” route, however, I decided to book us some time away at a place I’ve been wanting to come back to for many years now: Center Parcs.
For the unfamiliar, Center Parcs is a chain of holiday villages scattered throughout the UK and across Europe. They have that holiday village “thing” of being largely identical to one another, regardless of which one you go to, so the fact that Andie and I have come to the much closer Longleat Forest incarnation of the chain rather than the Elveden Forest one I went to several times as a young ‘un is still filling me with a certain degree of nostalgia — plus, I won’t lie, a pleasing amount of feeling that I’m a “proper” adult for booking something like this and my parents not being involved in any way whatsoever.
Anyway. I have very fond memories of my various previous visits to Center Parcs. They’re situated in idyllic forest locations, and provide plenty of opportunities to walk and cycle around without having to worry about cars — cars are only permitted on site on Fridays and Mondays, which are also the only days you can check in or out. The accommodation is good-quality, too, taking the form of either small apartments (which we’ve gone for) or, if you’re in a larger group, villas and log cabins of various sizes. All of these are furnished very nicely, kept in good condition and set up in such a way that you can self-cater your holiday if you so desire; those feeling lazy and/or flush with cash, meanwhile, can take advantage of the various restaurants available in the main plaza building — which, this time around, we’re conveniently about a minute’s walk from, which is nice.
There’s a wide variety of different activities on offer at each Center Parcs, although on previous visits I didn’t partake in that many of them. This time around, we’re going to try some archery tomorrow and spend some time with some owls on Sunday. I predict we’ll probably be spending a fair amount of the rest of our time at the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise” — the huge pool complex that forms the centrepiece of each Center Parcs plaza, and a place that I fondly remember as one of the best water-based experiences ever.
The Subtropical Swimming Paradise is pretty great, for numerous reasons. Firstly, it’s huge, providing a large swimming pool-cum-wave machine pool for actually swimming properly in, a slow river to get caught in, several excellent water slides (a long, slow flume, a short fast flume and a large white straight-down slide) and a white water rapids to fling yourself down with enthusiasm. Secondly, it’s warm — that “subtropical” bit isn’t an exaggeration, since the whole place is deliberately made warm and humid to feel like you’re really on holiday while you’re in there; it also allows various tropical plants scattered around the area to thrive, giving the whole place a really nice look, particularly when compared to your usual municipal pool. Thirdly, it’s kind of beautiful at night-time — there are several outdoor pools lit by coloured underwater lighting, and the warmth of the water combined with the cool night air makes for a very pleasant experience. Going down the Rapids, which is largely outdoors, is also a lot of fun at night-time.
Today we’ve had a fairly relaxed day getting here, doing a bit of shopping for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast (though we forgot eggs and oil — back to the shop tomorrow morning!) and booking our activities for the next couple of days. Tomorrow, as previously noted, we’re going to shoot arrows at things and probably spend a fair amount of time in the pool, then the day after we’re going to hang out with some owls. Exactly what we’re going to do with the owls remains to be seen, but Andie likes owls so it seemed like a fun thing to do.
Anyway. Being away from home means being away from my Mac, Comic Life and Paintbrush so no comics for a few days, I’m afraid. I’m sure you’ll survive, though. You’ll just have to read my thrilling prose instead, huh?
If you buy in to the popular perception that various forms of media — particularly movies, TV and video games — desensitise people to horrific and violent things, then you are an idiot.
Okay, that might be a bit strong, even if it’s what I believe. But the experience I went through this morning certainly drove home the fact that reality is reality, and fantasy is fantasy.
It was something I’d seen many times in the virtual world. Something I’d deliberately caused to happen many times in the virtual world. And yet seeing it in reality — even for just the fleeting moment that I did — was horrifying and disturbing.
I was driving to work as I normally do, along the M27, which regular readers will know is a road I despise for numerous reasons, not least of which is the fact that it gets very busy and seems to have more than its fair share of “incidents” and “accidents”, according to the overhead electronic signs. (I’m not actually sure what the difference between the two is, but I know that they both cause enormous delays on a nearly daily basis.)
It was early in the morning. The sun was just starting to rise, bathing the Eastern sky, which I was driving towards, in a pretty peachy-orange glow peeking out from behind the clouds. The day was dawning, and it was just about becoming possible to see things without the assistance of artificial lighting, though the streetlamps were still illuminated and most drivers still had their headlamps on.
The traffic wasn’t heavy — as I’ve noted recently, I’ve started leaving for work a lot earlier in the morning than I had done, as this allows me to miss the rush hour jams on the way to work, though I usually get caught in the beginnings of them on the way back when I leave. There was a steady flow of cars in both directions, though; people were on their way to work, though not yet in the numbers that would swarm onto the devil road just an hour or so later.
In other words, it was a perfectly normal morning. I was driving along, minding my own business, listening to some Emerson, Lake and Palmer and trying to make up my mind whether I was enjoying it or not, when suddenly it happened.
Over on the other side of the motorway, a small white van spun out of control then flipped over in what I can only describe as a movie-style crash. I was passing it by in the other direction as it happened, so I didn’t see the aftermath, but what I did see was enough to etch itself onto my memory for the rest of the day.
It didn’t look as if the van had actually hit anything; it looked like a loss of control. I wouldn’t have expected a simple loss of control to result in the vehicle leaping in the air and corkscrewing, however, but that’s what it did; it was a crash of the ilk you’d see in a video game like Burnout, only it was really happening. There was someone inside that van; there were people in the streams of cars that were speeding towards it, unaware that disaster had just struck a few hundred yards ahead of them. As I say, I didn’t see any of the aftermath, but I would be very surprised if there weren’t at least a couple of other cars involved after the fact — and I’d be even more surprised if anyone managed to get out of that without at least a few injuries.
It was a strange thing to witness; I felt surreal and disconnected, but at the same time painfully aware that it had really happened just a few metres away from me. It occupied my thoughts for the remainder of my journey to work, particularly as I saw the traffic starting to build up in the opposite direction and, with admirable response time, the emergency services start to make their way down the road to deal with the situation.
I don’t know how it happened or indeed what happened next; I hope that anyone involved in what looked like a horrific accident is as all right as it’s possible to be when something like that happens.
And if you’re heading out onto the roads in these wet and windy winter months, particularly first thing in the morning? Do please be careful.
Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will know that for the last few Novembers, I’ve done my own private NaNoWriMo–style project: to write a novel (or, at least, something of roughly novel-length) in the space of a month. You can read previous attempts starting here, here and here.
Previous installments have varied somewhat in quality. This is at least partly due to the fact that I tend not to plan out pieces of creative writing in advance, and in all these cases made a deliberate attempt to “improvise” the plot as I went along. The philosophy of “just write” in other words; pretty much the guiding principle of this blog in general, only with rather more of a focus than usual. And that’s pretty much the guiding principle of NaNoWriMo, too; to get some creativity flowing, and to do the initial hard work of getting something out of your brain and onto the page in a structurally complete form. You’re a lucky person indeed to come out of something like that with something you’re 100% happy with, but it provides a good starting point to then go on and edit, polish and refine if you want to — or simply move on secure in the knowledge that if nothing else you’ve practiced and refined your craft a little.
Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will have likely noticed that we’re well into November and no new work of fiction is forthcoming. I’d like to apologise for that. It wasn’t entirely intentional; in fact, I was actually quite looking forward to firing up the fiction-writing engine in my brain — it’s been a while; about a year, in fact — and seeing what on Earth I could possibly come up with this time around. I’d even had a few concepts I’d been kicking around inside my head, but hadn’t decided on which one I really wanted to pursue.
So what happened? Well, largely a lack of awareness on my own part, to be honest; the first of November came during that period when Andie and I were doing a whole bunch of things — firstly, we went up to Scotland for Cat’s wedding, then came back again; then Andie had a delightful day in hospital (nothing life-threatening, I might add); then we went to London for the Final Fantasy concert Distant Worlds. At some point during that week, I completely lost track of what day it was — November 1 was the night of Distant Worlds, and much of our day was spent travelling, so starting a brand-new creative project was unfortunately top of my list of priorities.
But never fear! (At least, not about this! Sometimes fear is justified, like when you lift your toilet seat and find a man-eating spider.) I’m still going to do “this year’s” writing; it’ll just be a bit late. Quite a bit late, in fact; so late, in fact, that referring to it as “this year’s” might be a bit of a stretch: I’m intending to start it on January 1, 2015.
Why? Well, largely because I have “one of those things” in my brain — somewhat exacerbated by Andie, who is much the same — where I like dealing with nice round numbers (we both turn the volume up and down in increments of 5, and God help you if you set the temperature in your car to something ridiculous like 23.5°C) and starting things at natural starting points. Consequently, starting a month-long project on November 12 is absolutely unthinkable to me, and thus I can’t possibly start until the beginning of a new month.
So why January and not December? Well, December is that irritating month with Christmas in it, and such festivities have a habit of proving somewhat distracting to the creative process in my experience, so I figured probably safest to leave it for now and kick off the new year in style with a month-long creative writing project. New year, new beginning and all that; what better month than January to start something like this, really, when you think about it?
Anyway. That’s the situation, if you were wondering. If you weren’t wondering, well, now you know, and if you’re particularly curious about what I’ve done in the past, you may well now have three novel-length pieces of unedited prose queued up and ready to read from previous years’ projects. I hope you enjoy them as much as it is possible to enjoy something so rough around the edges.
Are you planning some sort of event that will bring together a number of disparate groups from your life? (Say, friendship groups from different eras of your existence, departmental colleagues from different parts of your business or family members from various far-flung corners of your family tree.)
Are you planning said event to involve a certain degree of social interaction?
Then do me a favour: stop subscribing to the popular wisdom that “mixing people up” is “a good way for people to get to know each other”. Because it’s not.
The theory is sound: make people step out of their comfort zone and meet new people and there’s the chance of developing new relationships, be they personal, professional or even intimate.
But here’s the thing: jumbling people up randomly (or even semi-randomly) is not a good way to go about this, for a number of reasons.
First is that in many cases, people will just bugger your plans and seek out their original groups anyway after a while, making the exercise largely pointless in most cases.
Secondly, and more seriously, by doing this you put anyone who has even the slightest degree of social anxiety in an extremely awkward position, where they’re caught between the terrifying prospect of having to engage unfamiliar strangers in conversation without the support of their peers, and them coming across as that sullen loner who doesn’t talk to anyone.
I haven’t found a good way of dealing with this yet, and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Invite someone to, say, a wedding as the only representative of a a particular group (as happened with my friend Cat’s wedding a while back, where I was the sole representative of her Southampton years, albeit not quite alone as I had Andie with me) and I can forgive the situation as there is literally no alternative.
But if you deliberately and wilfully split up friendship groups — groups that have often formed on the basis of mutual trust — then I’m less understanding and, more to the point, less understanding. And considerably more prone to bouts of crippling anxiety.
I may well be in the minority on feeling this way. Social anxiety is a disorder, after all; a deviance from the norms of society. But I don’t think it really hurts to at least provide the option for people who feel this way to remain with the people they know, like and trust.
Or, you know, just stop doing this altogether. I get the intention and it’s somewhat admirable in theory. But it just doesn’t really work, and in the meantime, there’s a reasonable chance it will be putting at least a few people in the room in a situation of considerable discomfort. So just stop it, please.
I’m beginning to think that there’s not really any part of the year that is what I’d call “ideal” conditions in this country. The summer months are far too hot, and the winter months we’re moving into now are far too cold, wet, windy and just generally irritating.
There’s a special kind of unpleasantness about winter, though. As I sit here typing this, the weather outside can probably be best described as sounding “hostile”. The wind is blowing, picking up and howling through the streets and alleyways; the rain is falling, drenching everything and turning anything that isn’t concreted over into a swampy mire of brown gunge; there’s a draught coming in from somewhere around the window that I haven’t managed to identify as yet.
Not only that, but we’re at that time of year where, assuming you go out to work, you’re probably leaving your house when it’s dark and not getting back until it’s dark either. All in all, it’s a fairly bleak time of the year, and it’s unsurprising that it puts some people in dark moods.
I’m not sure what changed my outlook. When I was young, I used to quite like winter. I used to enjoy the early darkness and the necessity to carry a torch around — I must confess I still do have an odd liking for wielding a torch, even if it’s only an improvised one using my phone’s flash — and I used to like wrapping up in layers to be immune to the waves of cold in the air. I used to enjoy the run-up to the Christmas period, complete with village carol singing and the inevitability of being invited in for brandy and mince pies at least once or twice during our nightly tours of the mean streets of Great Gransden. I never used to really notice the bleakness.
So what changed? I wonder. Perhaps it’s just the fact that my life is very different to how it was when I was younger; the fact that now, rather than living the carefree life of a child, I have my own responsibilities and anxieties to worry about, including the necessity of getting up and going out — often in horrible weather — to get to work on time, then getting home in often equally horrible weather only to slump down, pretty tired out and not really desirous of doing anything other than something that doesn’t require a huge amount of mental activity.
Perhaps I’m just not quite in the rhythm of the full-time job set just yet. I’ve been doing pretty well, though; I’ve managed to maintain my routine of getting up earlier than I was, leaving earlier than I was and usually missing the bulk of the traffic of a morning and sometimes in the evening too. This puts me in a somewhat more positive frame of mind, even if the weather is as hostile as it sounds like it is as I type this. There’s still that ever-present feeling of tiredness, of slogging on towards some as-yet unknown destination. But that’s just how life works for the vast majority of the population; I should probably get used to it.
I have an away-day for work tomorrow. Not really relishing the prospect of having to stay overnight, but at least the accommodation is paid for (albeit in boardings described by one reviewer on TripAdvisor as “like a prison camp, only dirtier”) and we’re getting fed. And then at the end of this week Andie and I are taking a short break at Center Parcs over in Longleat for her birthday treat. I’m looking forward to that, so I guess there’s the objective for this week, if nothing else.
On that note, then, it’s time to wrap up warm, snuggle down under the duvet and get some sleep for a horrendously even-earlier-than-the-new-usual start tomorrow morning. Expect a grumpy post from my phone tomorrow evening, and the comics will be back the day after assuming I don’t just collapse from exhaustion the moment I get back in.
Had another in my increasingly lengthy line of peculiar dreams last night — the kind that somehow manages to stick in your memory after you wake up. There was nothing lavatorial involved this time around, however.
