Yeah, it’s been a while.

I thought I’d post purely for selfish reasons, to jog my memory about something later, when I wake up; then I realised since I was typing it out here as a draft (I have lots of ethereal drafts) I might as well hit send and immortalise 2008 On This Blog just to dust things down.

Just fresh of a typically all-encompassing late night Civilization 4 session, bedding down as the sun rose proper, I was completely, magically, awe-struck for a good few minutes. One of those half-in half-out lucid experiences which I seem to blog about a lot (see previous).

As I strained to read a few pages of my book, the paper was lit up with a intermittent golden brown flickering-glow on the pages. I thought it was my reading light fizzling out. My curtains were all but dark, except for every few seconds when the center would glow golden-white and radiate outwards, flickering.

Everyone has seen this effect before, lying on their back in the sun with their eyes closed, as their eyelids glow red and amber as the sun dips in and out amongst the clouds.
‘Oh sure, the rising sun, how quaint.’

I guess I was half-asleep already. In the growing light, Bukowski was making even less sense the more of the pages I could see.

The flickering glowing chakra continued, and then beneath it a distant subsonic roar began to underscore every glint, inexplicably growing louder as the light got brighter and more persistent. My brain mis-fired.

‘This is so unerringly like those apocalypse films where someone’d be reading their Bukowski, and somewhere else a bunch of nukes are being dropped, and nobody’d realise.’

I stared sort of aghast at my glowing-soon-to-be-irradiated curtains, as the rumbling got louder, and the scatter-gun pulses of golden light looked more and more like distant explosions. Half of me was asleep, half of me was still thinking about the bombs in my Civ game, half of me was unable to work out fractions. It was completely utterly terrifying, yet for the life of me even though I knew I was going to be swept up in some mushroomy vortex, I just lay staring at the curtained light show, which was depressingly beautiful.

Which is why everyone tells you not to eat cheese or play Civ before bedtime.

On Thursday evening I had finished playing Bioshock and was chatting to a friend on MSN when I heard a crash upstairs. Since I’m alone at my parents house while they’re on holiday, this was pretty unsettling. Not to mention the fact that the house is centuries old and in the middle of nowhere, because this absolutely didn’t cross my mind for a second.

I went up to investigate in the direction of the sound. The darkness swam in front of me so I flicked on the lights. As soon as I did, a bulb blew on the wall right in front of me, and all the lights in the house went out with it. This frankly scared the shit out of me since it had been happening in BioShock all over the place, and I was probably still half-in-and-out of that environment. I backpeddled downstairs to the fuse box. Quickly.

At least I wasn’t playing Condemned; I might have had a heart attack.

When I went back up I found a bunch of shampoo bottles in the bathroom had been knocked off a shelf. I probably should have put more thought into this, but somehow I actually dismissed it and just went back to my friend with a shrug (his suggestion of ghosts was very calming).

..about thirty minutes later I had a visit from a dormouse of the squirrelly aesthetic, who had ventured downstairs from the attic, and was investigating the bins in the kitchen. I coraled him out. He gave me a scare or two because he liked to pop his head out (cute as it was) from around the corner right as I was leaning in to look.

It took me til 3am to get him out the backdoor.. stupidly timid little guy. Stupidly tiring too.

This was in the recent issue of Maxim magazine, and is currently doing the rounds. Occasionally it’s worth relaxing the stance of ‘withering contempt’ for men’s mags on the off-chance they turn up the odd gem. Yes, it’s silly.

Enjoy.
Doing these things is always a good thing!

1 - Sniffing your own armpit
2 - Discreetly tickling your own nuts with a pen in your pocket during a meeting
3 - Buying a better dinner than everyone else you are having dinner with
4 - Being sick and knowing that after this one’s done you won’t need to be sick anymore
5 - Throwing something into a bin from a distance
6 - Piercing the foil cover on a jar of coffee
7 - Getting up early on a Saturday and still doing fuck all, all day
8 - Setting fire to the bottom right-hand corner of something
9 - Kissing the back of a girl’s neck
10 - Scratching an itch that’s actually up your arsehole, without skidding your own kecks
11 - Listening to “Ace of Spades” on headphones while doing other cool stuff
12 - Slapping someone on the slappy bit of their slaphead
13 - Plunging the knife in, over and over again, even after the bastard’s clearly already dead
14 - Adding brown sauce
15 - Swatting a wasp to death
16 - Draping clean underwear over your face and laughing manically from underneath them
17 - Grating cheese
18 - Imagining someone somewhere is telling someone else that you’re a great dancer and that you have a massive cock
19 - Throwing a soft thing at someone’s head
20 - Inhaling strongly as a very sexy lady walks past you on the street
21 - Throwing a hard thing at someone’s groin
22 - Pretending to fuck stuff
23 - Drinking some chocolate milkshake, doing a really beaming grin at someone, then forcing the milkshake out through the gaps between your teeth until it dribbles down your chin
24 - Popping into a laundrette and having a quick smell
25 - Holding your breath for ages until you start to hallucinate, then breathing again
26 - Diving spectacularly to catch a ball
27 - Singing popular songs and replacing the odd lyric with profanities
28 - Shifting your testicles into the other pant-leg, so the pant-leg they usually live in gets a chance for the thigh-sweat to dry out
29 - Twanging a plastic ruler against your desk
30 - Operating an air-horn
31 - Washing your genitals
32 - Putting crisps in your sandwich
33 - Watching a film that has John Candy in it
34 - Letting a bogey go crispy before you pick it, so it pulls a few nosehairs with it
35 - Getting in a shower with a woman (not your mum)
36 - Doing tequila slammers
37 - Jumping, at full stretch, from one elevated bit of concrete to another elevated bit of concrete
38 - Shitting outdoors
39 - Cleaning out your bellybutton when it hasn’t been cleaned out for a while
40 - Revving a car engine as loud as it will go
41 - Pausing mid sentence to picture yourself having an orgasm
42 - Scratching your arm, finding a small scab, then picking it off
43 - Holding his head underwater until you can finally feel his resistance subside, then holding it under longer for good measure
44 - Getting young children to say “shitfuck”
45 - Having a piss when you’re waist-deep in water
46 - Pretending to throw a stick for a dog, but not throwing it, so you can watch him run off all excited, then look around all confused, then come back to you all sad, unable to understand why you would betray him like that
47 - Stretching your scrotum up over your cock so that it looks like a pink hairy beanbag
48 - Blowing as hard you can down any sort of wind instrument
49 - Turning the quilt over in the middle of the night, so that it’s freezing for a minute or two, then warms up again
50 - Coughing just as your opponent is taking a shot
51 - Leaving the pub early to go home, knowing you have porn in your bag
52 - Kicking a football really hard into an empty net from two yards away
53 - Dropping something that has a very, very, very long way to fall before it hits the ground
54 - Ordering pudding
55 - Putting your hand inside the thoracic cavity and feeling you way around all of the victim’s major organs while the body is still warm

I’ve long since wanted to update this site, but I’ve been swept up with life. Re-designing websites has also become something of a bugbear for me since I’ve fallen behind the web-design curve. It’s hard to express the frustration felt when I have dramatic visual ideas and yet no ability to code them anymore. I do miss the halcyon days of plain old HTML, even if nobody else does.

In the meantime I have scared off my readership by not posting anything.

Well, ‘if you build it..’, and all that.
In related news: Here is a link. Here is a visited link.

THE LAST TIME I SAW THIS TITLE SCREEN about ten years ago it heralded twenty minutes of cursing and one broken gameboy. Ah, the innocence of youth.It’s pink, because that will stop me getting mad at it.

That decided, Macro Zone here I come…

I just had a pleasant/strange happenstance.

A friend made a drink for me. I just said “whatever you’ve got going.” It was cheap hyper-concentrated orange squash, sugary neon orange liquid that you can feel dissolving your teeth with every mouthful.

This wouldn’t have been particularly amazing if a few moments later I hadn’t bitten into a biscuit (’Coconut Rings’ - pseudo coconut flavoured shortbreads), which sent me reeling back to my childhood where one of the earliest of earliest memories I have (perhaps indeed the earliest) is of enjoying this exact combination at my toddlers playgroup, aged two/three-something.

And then I remembered all the mushy soggy biscuits getting baby-booty-stomped into the carpet, falling off the climbing frame, bashing my teeth on my drinking beaker (repeatedly), and getting my first kisses from a girl called Bethany (who, after a few years later, I wouldn’t ever know again).

And as I come-to in modern day Europe, Sweet Trip’s Velocity : Design : Comfort is playing in the background and all of a sudden it’s the most poignant moment in the world.

That’s it, it’s DONE. I’m officially Old. Strange ring to it i guess.
This is the point where I remind yourself that it’s just a number and I don’t really care about these sort of things anyway.. Still, “2…0″,,huh? Damnit I am too dunkbusy for this lala cya later!

KENT UNI HAS A FIREWALL THAT WOULD MAKE THE CHINESE BLUSH. I am at Uni, though, and apparently Blogger works.

This isn’t an LJ, so I’ll spare you the biographical, save to say it’s been ace; I’ve never laughed as hard as I have tonight, playing Cheat, possibly the worst (or greatest) game to play when you’re not sober. Tomorrow is free from lectures, thank god.

Normal littleeye reportage may or may not resume coverage shortly. Actually, you may not see too many posts on here in the future, since I’ll be spending most of my time feigning education.

Well, then. Over a year has gone by since I blogged about exam results, jubilation and forthcoming relaxation, which must mean that I’ll be going off to University soon. Tomorrow (today) in fact.

It’s been a strange old year. It’s strange when you actually sit down and attempt to craft a large portion of time where you cut the strings to anything society-wise and just drift along wherever life takes you. To begin with it is extremely difficult when you don’t have any routines or responsibilities; you feel disconnected from reality. Then after a while, for me anyway, I felt a weight lift and I rather than being isolated or disconnected I just felt free. I’m not sure I can credibly explain it without sounding like a bit of a hippy, so I’ll leave my thoughts for now. Ask me about it in the future.

If it happens that I can’t post at University (god bless firewalls), then this will be my last post for a while, so be happy and stay safe in the meantime!

This is going to be one of those posts where I just hit the keyboard running and see where it goes. It’s a Blues riff in B, so watch me for the changes, and try to keep up…

Rob says:
I have a K and an 8

Rob says:
and everyone is calling me.

Rob says:
I hit a K on the flop

Rob says:
but there’s an Ace in there too.

Rob says:
Damnit, I need a king on the river..

GAMBLING, KIDS - JUST SAY NO. Up til last week that had always been my own fully ingrained motto thanks to an upbringing under shrewd just-say-no type parents. Sure, I’d played poker and the like for fun. When you’re playing for penny sweets or bragging rights, it is fun. When money gets involved in gambling (as it tends to do) it’s not quite the same.

Ollie says:
ok dude, so i signed up to pokerroom

Ollie says:
$20 minimum deposit, and these guys SUCK, i’ve just made $20 in 10 mins.

Ollie says:
Well I lost a bit then but it was funny as hell..

Ollie says:
This guy didnt even know what his hand was called!

Ollie says:
I had a jack high, and he was betting all over the place, and all he had was a 7 and a 2!

I got suckered in, as you do. My friend had recently picked up his online poker play and was up A LOT. He explained his tactics and experiences over the course of a conversation and even under some interrogation it seemed like a decent enough course of action. I would sign up, deposit some cash, and hit some poor fools for a couple of dollars before switching tables. All I had to do was play it safe, bet on surefire hands, or bluff when the going got good. Normal score. The clincher was the 20% bonus on my first cash dump. Signed, drawn and quartered..

At first, things were peachy. Ollie and I entered a room together to play a few hands so I could get the feel of the online opponents. They weren’t all that special. Within half an hour we were up around $10 dollars more each. Time passed, and players came and went. Our first mistake was not quitting when we were ahead; when big-money players entered our table with a wad of cash, they gained the control fairly swiftly: even if they were fairly obviously bluffing, with less money it’s impossible to play the percentages and call them on it every time. Inevitably you lose out to them more often than not, and they take your greenbacks. We started to lose..

Rob says:
This is so much BS.

Ollie says:
hold on, we’ll win it back. don’t worry.

Rob says:
Right..not against this prick.

Rob says:
I’m down $12.

Ollie says:
watch me for a hand or two

Ollie says:
i’m gonna bleed him dry, watch me

Rob says:
You can’t, because he ALWAYS bets. And if you sit out and then come in, he folds. So you have to only bet on amazing hands, right? Well then he’s like “waitaminute”. You’ll have a hand one time, but he’ll still bluff you out because he entered the table with money over our heads, and he has all the power. That’s not even poker; poker is giving some guy a look and knowing that his heart is beating a hole in his chest. This is just fucking lame.

Ollie says:
It’s my time..I’ll draw him in.
[…]
Ollie says:
fuck

Ollie says:
Let’s move.

At 4am we were both down at least half our $20 initial deposits. Ollie was worse off than me - on previous days he’d been up as much as $50 before events had taken a dramatic and distinctly red twist. We decided that we couldn’t both win our money back playing at the same table, so my friend went elsewhere.

Gambling is… gambling. Am I indicting it? Not at all. It does what it says on the tin, and it’s your fault for not reading the tin properly. I’m indicting myself. It’s the rocket-fuel highs and the catatonic lows. Your world can fall out from under you in a string of bad hands; your winning streak dries up and you’re left fighting a losing battle against the flow of the game. A sensible person would call it a day and bail. Sensible people don’t gamble.

THE HIGHS. Come 4:30am I was back in the game, and so was my friend. Actually, I was up - A LOT. Not only had I won back the $8 that I’d given away to some high-roller, but I’d managed to entice in people with less money than me who delighted in throwing their cards in the middle on nothing-hands.

Ollie says:
So..?

Rob says:
I’m on $15.70. Seems i hit my luck..

Rob says:
I’ve made up 15 in 15 minutes, i’m nearly back to $20. Well okay now I’m down. But..
[…]
Rob says:
PERFECT

Rob says:
I let this guy in for three rounds, just feeding him up.

Rob says:
Then I play raise me-raise me for flop to river.

Rob says:
He thinks I’m bluffing like I had been, calls me on it again and again..

Rob says:
I win $10 straight out.

Rob says:
$20.05. I am finished. I am happy, fuck, euphoric. I came back from 25 cents!

Ollie says:
Awesome!

I could have quit. That’s the line that gets you later when you check back through your chatlog, when you think back through your mind to all of 30 minutes, hours, a day previous and YOU had played the game, taken the gamble and come out on top. The halcyon skies of euphoria. You’re a sucker, and it hurts.

I think this is about where we came in.

Rob says:
Damnit. A second chance for a king on the river..

Ollie says:
Pfst, flashback humour. In a blog post

Rob says:
..someone will have an ace, I know it.

Rob says:
I know it.

Rob says:
Oh, god.

Rob says:
Nobody had an ace, but someone hit a 10 on the river and just happened to have two more in the pocket. On the river.

Rob says:
That’s me done. All gone. No deposit. No bonus. Dead.

This is gambling. To a certain extent I could accept that. Gambling online though is something that I’d always steered clear of and I will never try again - without the ability to stare into your opponents soul and figure him out, you’re a sinking ship when you come up against career bluffers with some money under their belt. Oh, and remember that 20% bonus? Sure, it was only $4, but this is how it works out:

“You need 7 player points for each dollar you want to redeem.”
Player points are earned by playing hands, simple as that. How many hands to get a point? I played over a hundred hands in 6 hours and only got 1 point, so to redeem my 20% bonus of $4 I’d have to play for roughly (7×4)x6 hours. 168 hours. At the rate I was going it would have been a month before I see my $4 bonus that I signed up for - long enough for most people to have either made it or lost it at the round table..

Rob says:
£11. It’s nothing. It’s the way you lose it. The cold, hard fact that you were once even, in the black, and on a different day or hand you might’ve made hundreds. But that’s gambling for you. It ISN’T FAIR. It just seems fair when you’re up. It’s easy enough to win, and it’s enough fun to convince you to throw sense out the window for as long as it takes to throw away your money too.

That’s the gift and the curse of human nature for you.

Sure, it’s £11. But ouch.