Cows that go moo in the night.

So. I've noticed that once again, my posts have gotten all irregular. I think that my inspiration gets worse in the summer.

Here's a little something to tide you over (whoever you may be... I'm not entirely certain the is a definite you, or whether you are just an amorphous blob, made of of a huge amalgamation of the world's population. And wether, which I was going to write earlier is actually a castrated ram. that made me giggle. Sheep using the internet.)

Molly ambled over to the the fence, browsing the grass as she went. She liked it by the fence, the dessert grass tasted more like chocolate and less like sweets over here. Peering over into the next field, where here friend Rachael was having a meal in the main course grass. Lasagna by the looks of it. She took another mouthful of the dark, rich chocolate and stiffened in surprise as her brain processed what she had seen.

'Rachael, but what have you got on your feet?!'

'Hya Molly, do you like em? I got the sheep to order them from e-bay for me. They swear that they'll make my milk better! Mind you, they also said that they would stop stormlight from hurting you. That's silly, stormlight doesn't hit us!'

Molly shook her head slowly, as she thought about it. Rachael always had been an odd one, never quite fitting into the herd, always willing to try new things. It had been Rachael who had made the man-carrier make loud noises and start trundling down the hill, much to the amusement of the herd, because watching the farmer run after it with his arms waving like that... well! Everyone knew that that would spook it more.

'The sheep you say? Hmmm. I wonder if they are trying to pull your udder. You do look silly you know!'

'Naw. Remember when I sat on that fox and stopped Louise's new lamb from being carried off? They said they owed me one.'

'Ah.' Molly chewed the cud, and thought again. 'Well, I guess they aren't to bad, for manhide. I never realised that people butchered farmerkind for their feet. Are they comfy?'

'They're not bad, Moll, Although I don't understand why they have this big hollow bit at the front of their hoof. It is most bizarre. But you're right. It is odd that people butcher farmerkind. I didn't realise they did it. I wonder what happens to the rest of him?'

'Hmm.' Molly thought some more. Confusing things, farmerkind. So confusing that it required fruit flavoured grass. She wondered off deep in thought, flicking her tail at Rachael as she left in absent farewell.

Later that day all thought of Rachael's manhide hoof coverings left Molly's head as their farmer came and herded all the cows into the top field, where, to their surprise, there was a new stormlight attractor. Sniffing the air, Molly noticed that there was rain on the way, and enough to make the chocolate grass field covered when the stream broke it's banks. Hmm.

That night was the heaviest storm that Molly or any of the other herdmembers could remember. the rain came almost horizontal, and the stormlight and the stormnoise came without pause, often hitting the stormlight attractor that stood looming over them.

A particularly bright stormlight filled the air all around them and everything went dark.

When the farmer went to check on his herd the next day after the storm broke, he was shocked to see them all dead under the new electricity pylon he had fought against for so long. All except for one cow who huddled next to the fence closest to him, and for some inexplicable reason, was wearing wellington boots.

Dreams

What do you get when you lose your dreams? Some say reality, others say despair and someone else once told me that to lose your dreams is to face extinction. Either as a race or an individual. Everyone has dreams whether or not they admit it. Where they are now and where they will be in a month, a year, ten years. I know I dream. A lot.

Dreaming is essential to the human race. If we couldn't dream, not only would we not drive forward, but we would also not be able to cope with the real world. It is like the pressure valve that lets us cope with the world when we have to.

Because no-one is truly content. It's true. Even if they think they are there is something, a drive, a dream or a sense of adventure. If they didn't have it they wouldn't bother getting up in the morning, nor looking after themselves.

I believe that without dreams we lose our fight, our drive to improve. To see new things, to talk to new people, to find new ways to look at old things, we'd lose our way forward. We may have dreams but we are inherently lazy. First we forage, then we realised that it is easier to put the plants where we want them, not where they just grow, so we started farming by hand. Then we saw the usefulness in draft animals, and eventually in engines. Ever more efficient, ever easier. Our drive to make things easier for us is what drives us as a race. Our ability to chase dreams is what drives us as individuals.

The two things go hand in hand really. The easier life is the easier it is to dream. The easier it is to dream the easier it is to lose the real world. And lose those who can't dream and fall through the cracks of the world.

Like anything I suppose, dreaming is needed in moderation. Too much water can drown you, and too much heat can burn. Too many dream can make you lose your way and forget the dreams you have made a reality.

Moving Day

Moving house is a strange thing. It means the end of one way and the start of another, a new beginning but also another ending. Now this can be a good thing, or a really bad thing.

I have just moved out of halls, and into my first house. Granted it is a student house, but it is a house nonetheless, and I find I am quite bewitched by it. Even more so that the house has three levels and I have lived anywhere with more than two, if you count a flat has having only one. I have a poky little bedroom, which is fine. In fact, the only problem I can see with it is that I cant reach the rail in my wardrobe. And that if I'm not careful then I'll, (and even more so for those unfortunates taller than 5”6') hit my head when going downstairs into my nice spacious kitchen.

Best of all, Archimedes and Screw aren't illegal any more. And they will never, ever have to go over the bumps in Storthes Hall again.

I'll miss Storthes, Not least the fact that when humanity got too much for me I could disappear into the woods for a few hours, or that fact that I could play at being all grown up without actually having to be all grown up. Now I have to pay bills. No, I'll miss the antics of the other students I saw, and the friends I made, and the security guards. When all you have to do is buy food and pay rent, well, it's like the paddling pool of real life. Yes. This year is going to be a corker all round.

Not only am I having to pay bills, am responsible for my own place, and have gone from having six other people to make sure I don't do anything too blond, to one. I'm also going to be working. Like a normal person. From 9 till 5. For a whole entire year. I start Monday, which, by the time this will have been posted, will have passed, because I'm not getting internet till next Thursday. Yes. Next year, I get to pretend that I'm not a student and pay my bills, like a good little proletariat. Only with substantially less money. But then, students are always meant to be broke.

So. Now I have internets, I can finish it.

This past week has been a lot of fun. I've got a new house and a new housemate. I've had to learn how to live with a new person and how to work in a lab, and not work in a lab practical. I've learnt the different between the experiment not working and the product not working, making the experiment look like it wasn't working. And that hurrying to make sarnies in the morning is a bad idea unless you want the contents of the fridge on top of you and that if you are going to wake someone up, do so with a cuppa for them. They'll forgive anything for that. It is definitely still early days when it comes to the job; I'm looking forward to going in come Saturday.

Paperwork

I have decided that our country, glorious or not as the case may be, does not, despite evidence displayed every sunny day, run on warmth and the energy of the sun. Neither can it be run on chocolate, although there are certain females I know that would protest otherwise. So is it fuel? Oil? That's what we joined the war in Iraq for, isn't it? Well, nope, it isn't that either. I have come to the realisation, having followed in the footsteps of many who have gone before me, That our country is run on paperwork.

More precisely on the anger, annoyance and despair generated by those unfortunates trapped inside with a pen and a sheaf of paper in front of them. They say that everything has it's own level of vibration. colour, noise, radiation. So why not emotions?

Of course, different emotions would clearly emote on different wavelengths, so happiness and joy would broadcast on a much lighter wavelength, not packing as much punch, and so it is harder to get so much energy out of them. The darker emotions however, these are much heftier, and the amount of energy that can be garnered from them is somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 times more than those of the happier emotions.

And how do the government receive that energy? Like so much else, circles. Those giant radio microscopes on Jodrell bank (As an aside, my spell checker is insistent that Jodrell is in reality Scoundrelly) are actually emotion receivers, aided and abetted by satellite dishes everywhere.

They are also helped by the florist industry. How? Well, many flowers are the perfect shape to reflect small amounts of negative energy out of the home, and towards the nearest government receiver. Not only that, but when the finally die and have to be chucked, how many people aren't just a little bit upset that such pretty flowers are having to be chucked away, thus aiding the energy gain.

When the energy is received, it is sorted through a series of transducers, much like solar energy is and sent into the main grid. But that's the negative emotions. Surely if they are good for paperwork, the positive emotions have a place too?

They have. Ever felt so happy you could fly? Well time was you could. Witches on broomsticks and all that palaver. (Ask me someday and I may tell you the true reason witches used broomsticks. All I can say is ouch. Splinters.) Then the government realised that the happier emotions could be farmed as well as the darker ones. The Victorians truly were innovative. What did they use them for? Well they coupled them with the electricity gained from the unhappier emotions and then used them for lifts. The cables were just for show. Because if people realised, they would be incensed. There would be riot.

It has turned out, over the years, to be a secret tax. And as technology has progressed, it has been used not just for elevators, but escalators, planes, Anything that requires power to elevate a position. In Grecian times, Archimedes figured it out, hence the Archimedes screw. He wanted a hot bath without carrying it upstairs. It made him very happy, but he never managed to re-create it after the screw. A little boy called Peter figured it out too. And he flew away to a better place, but you all know that story.

This energy is still being collected today, and in it's own way channeled into the grid. But like the NHS, it was last structured in the forties and is trying to cope with over twice the number of people who were around then. So the system needs a restructuring before it can work to the full benefit of all concerned. At the minute, there are loads of little signs that it is giving under the strain. Lifts braking down, escalators stopping for no reason...

There is a whole secret world of emotions out there, and the energy they produce. Let them out, and maybe you won't be stuck in a lift next Tuesday, or find yourself in a power cut on Thursday evening. I know I'd find that preferable. But maybe you like the darkness between the floors?

Infinite Questions, Finite Answers

How can we truly understand infinity? What can you say you know that goes on for ever and ever and never ends? The world? It was once formed from a cloud of interstellar dust, and it wasn't a world then. And while it has lived - is living - it will have to die eventually and return to the pile of dust it once was.

Time? Time is a human concept. We decided how long a second should last, a minute, an hour, a year. And even then these minutes, these seconds have only been passing since we decided they existed and we are the ones who have imposed time back to the start of the universe.

Start. If infinity truly existed, there would be no place in our vocabulary for the word start, nor for the word end.

I have heard some people say that emotions are infinite, and they give rise to human creativity. That there is a never ending circle of life and death, children being born and people dying. None of these things are infinite. Not really. There was a first life, a single celled organism. When and where I don't know. There was a first human life too. Or rather a first germ-line mutation that led to Homo sapiens sapiens. And the answer to when that was haunts a lot of people. And eventually, who knows when, who knows where, there will be a final human life. Either through extinction or evolution, but it will happen. And when we die, so will our creativity. Our love, our hatred, our laughter and our tears. No. None of these are infinite. The life span of the human race is fleeting. The length of a life of an individual even more so. And this is a good thing, because our minds and our hearts are only equipped to deal with the finite.

Not even the universe is infinite, it has to end and it has to start somewhere and somewhen. And even if you believe in the big-bang-big-squish theory, when was the first bang? When will be the final squish?

Everything comes down to circles in the end. Nature likes circles and they fascinate us as well. And a circle shows, at least to my mind, the closest thing to infinity. Ever seen a Möbius strip? Follow it which ever way you will, it has only one side. Your finger tracing a side is inside, and then outside and then inside again. But even this is finite. For the infinity, the foreverness is trapped within this single piece of paper which itself is trapped within the world that we see and know. And how can something that ends hold something that doesn't?

As a human being, I look at the world from within the laws of finity. And to be honest, that sits a whole lot better than the concept of existing without end ever will. It scares me a little. Because to never end, it has to never grow or develop, and that leads to stagnation. I have never found something that I want to keep exactly as it is. Things need to grow and change, or else they wither and die. Even love. I love my parents dearly. I always have done and I always will do. But the love I feel for them now is different to that I felt when I was three, or ten, or will feel when I am thirty. Because it has grown with me. It has changed, and ended and started again in a different shape. It may have done it so gradually so as to fool you into thinking it was one continuous never ending thing, but it has changed, and it is different.

Infinity is one of those questions that will always be at the back of my mind, along with a few others, like, why do we use the word blue to describe the colour blue? When was it decided that that particular syllable(s) - blue, bleu, azule - was the right word to show what it was? I suspect that these questions will always muse in the back of my mind, never to be answered. But that's aright. Because by putting the concept never on it gives it a finite value, a 0 instead of a maybe that would otherwise be the case.

Still. The question remains. How can we truly understand infinity?

Froth Froth Froth

A fair bit of prior warning to people. This post is entirely to satisfy my LARP froth. LARP = Live Action RolePlay. Live Action RolePlay = win. Epic, epic win.

I mentioned in an earlier post something called LARP. I may have mentioned it in more than one earlier post, but since they are coming up to 'bout a year old now, there isn't much chance I'll remember, given my track record.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I went to my first truly big LARP event. I've not talked about it sooner because, well, you know how it is. Revision yadda yadda, exams yadda yadda... You know, just the entire reason I'm visiting the great northern wilderness for.

Anyway, I went to Wigan for one of the big CP events, one that is held there every year. I am now going to sum it up in 10 words. No particular order I hasten to add. just, the words that say it the most to me, as a complete newcomer.

1. Mud. Soo, soo much mud. I lost my boot in the mud whilst cooking bacon. EVERY morning.

2. Rain. I have been assured that it usually pelts it down at Wigan and this year was no exception. Although there was enough sun to get sunburned. Go figure.

3. Bacon. I have come to the conclusion that LARPers Aren't actually entirely human. They can apparantly live off bacon alone. They seem to be some sort of half carnivore, half machine construct.

4. Kit. Ranging from the ooohhh my word Iwoot to good grief, is that for real? mostly Iwoot though. Shiny shiny kit. Weapons and shields and bottles and bags and uuuummmmm LARP shinies.

5. Tents. Some beautiful IC ones and some funky (and huge, and tiny, and colourful...) OC ones. Having to take off boots before I could crawl into the tent was fun too. I had to hang my socks out to dry.

6. Roleplay. Done live style. No dice for these hard core members of the gaming community. I saw things that genuinely moved me that weekend.

7. Battles. Epic, EPIC battles. Both observed and participated in. Watching you could see patterns and where these pattens broke up and where people when down. Participating in them? Chaos. Amazing chaos. You are focused on the person in front of you, the one who is trying to hit you. If you're lucky, then they go away and there is another person in front of you. If not then you go away and there is another person in front of them.

8. Death. Most notably to me, my own death. And funeral. and standing down ceremony. I cried. Blubbed like a baby. You forget the outside world to that level. It's pretty immense. And intense.

9. Monstering. An uber uber uber part of the weekend. A chance to let your character rest a little and play something else. An angry cripple, a vengeful goblin, an upset ogre. Doesn't matter if you die. Coz, you know, monsters can respawn. Monstering is so so much fun. A chance to just let yourself go.

10. Refs. White tabbards, hi-vis vests, paggering :p They kinda make it work. they stand there, looking a bit out of place if they have the high-viz vests on, they make up the monsters and get them to where they're going and telling them what they need to do. I liked the refs I met. They were geekier than I was.

Well, the explanations there make it slightly more than ten words, but take the first word of every point and then the rest as a sub-vocal blurb. THEN it works.

The entire weekend remains as a series of snapshots. The frying pan, the standpipe with it's lack of a drain, Gate guard, the alchemists meeting, Water carrying for the monsters and then dying because of the monsters. Dying, and the funeral, that bit is fairly clear. Strong emotions attached I guess. And the OC tent. Thinking I had broken the zip, fixing it. breaking the zip on mine and then another sleeping bag. Lord knows what I would have done had the event been any longer. And then packing up. That bit was rather busy and then the journey home? I didn't even get out of Wigan before I was asleep.

All in all, it was one of the most amazing weekends I've had in a long while, to the point I'm still frothing about it on a near daily, if not daily basis. Leek is next. I want! I want NOW.

I'm sorry the formatting is so dense folks. apparently, it doesn't want to do what I'm telling the computer to do. I'll see if I can fiddle with it when I'm back on my machine, and back in FireFox. Also, sleepies and lack of spacing means that there ARE mistakes in there. I just hope I caught most of them.

Late Nights and Labyrinths.

I'm sat on a bed in my friend's room, whilst both friends are asleep on the bed, with the Labyrinth on in the background- Bowie for the win. Just for the hair- and for the first time in months I'm not aching all over. Codeine really is a blessing in disguise. N.B. apparently, they're not asleep, muttered comments about well, yes, about 42 must be kept to myself in the future.


Where does inspiration come from? From the heavens? From beyond that, beyond the universe? Is it a tangible thing, or is it like a shadow on a cloudy day? Or is it the pattern of light hiding in the water and throwing sparkles up on your wall?

It's different for everyone. They say Newton got his inspiration from an apple, a physical thing, and Archimedes found his in the bath. I do a lot of my good work at night, in the small hours of the morning, like now in fact. Things drift to me on the night, 'soft as velvet, dark as sin'. I must admit, when there is light around, I am usually more concerned with wanting to be elsewhere, namely out in the light, enjoying it. I don't do that enough regrettably. Not enjoying it for it's own sake.

Moods play a big part, well of course they do really. If you have lost someone, you want to write something to remember them by, if you have just had the best day of your life then things will naturally be a lot more exuberant than it would be in another case. (the birds are singing now. Its times like this when I could almost forget that I am in a small room in a huge student estate, surrounded by people.)

I find that most ideas come to me in the small of the night because by that point I have had a fairly full day, and my body is accustomed to earlyish nights. So by three or four in the morning I am at that point where I am half asleep, half meditating, and because I'm not chasing ideas down they can form naturally. Do you find that? The more you try to force an idea, the less it works or works well?

But once that idea is there, and has been left to brew for a while, then it works and that is the point you can push it along and cause it to have a more structured shape, to make it work for you, If you're really lucky, it turns out to be a fantastic idea, not simply a good one and the writing seems to write itself. (If you had seen that last paragraph unedited, you would be able to tell when it is being written: It had lost all attempts at sentence structure and grammar. Which is a pity, me being a fair bit of a grammar nazi.)

Looking at some of the wonderful pieces of art, be it a painting, a sculpture, a book, or even an inspired piece of research it's hard to believe that it is all due to a chaotic connection of nerves in someones brain. And that leads to the thought of is there outside help? is there something giving us ideas and thoughts, and if so, are they tangible to them?

I can imagine it wouldn't be a glamorous job, not at all, I can envision an open office plan building, with a typical office warren made of noticeboards for walls and pictured of the wife or the dog on the desk, with those awful inspirational calenders that seem to find their way into every office environment of this type, with thousands upon thousands of workers, all at their desks, filling out forms on old clunky computers that don't work very well any more.

'Oh hell, I've got another P189. Lord but there are a lot of them going around at the minute, production must be trying to fill a quota, although why they want yet another bad lesbian porn manga, I'll never understand.' And: ' Arrrrrrrggh that stupid computer has crashed AGAIN, all this last week's work was on that. I'll never get that production bonus if this carries on, tech support promised me this wouldn't happen again, PROMISED!'

If it is like that, then I think that I would rather prefer that it was random mis-firings of neurones. Because lets face it, the normal neurons would be concerned with keeping the body alive. Self preservation is a wonderful thing, and sometimes I think genius must run counter to that. 'The good die young.' Sure they do. Because they forget to do the normal things like eat and pay the bills so they have clean water and heating in the dead of winter and such.

I think that because it is now full light and I started this in full dark, and because the ramblings in my head, let alone on paper are starting to get increasingly disjointed, I will end this here, because I could go on for a long time and this is already of rather epic length. Good day.