Monday, March 23, 2009, 6:35
Seem to have let the weight drift up just a little bit. Nothing drastic you understand. The significant loss over the last two years remains very much in place. It’s just edged into a bracket that doesn’t feel good symbolically. I’m very much a person who needs symbolic acts and events to provide structure. A sustained flow of literal thoughts is something I just can’t do. So, time for a short period of austerity methinks. Clean the system out, ready for the Easter Break. Mini-Lent. I hereby set myself the ridiculous target of losing a stone by April 3rd. You just see if I can’t. 12 stone 4 by April 3rd. By the way I’m a twit now as well. Username mark_boardman. What are you doing? Updates in the sidebar: look left.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 6:46
Construction of self is a funny thing. It’s quite clear that many people don’t do it: they appear to proceed daily without any apparent need to assess how they interface with the world. I still find myself doing quite tortuous empathic calculations about how someone might feel in response to what I’m about to do or say, and then still very often getting it wrong. Which I suppose uses up quite a lot of mental energy. That’s it really. If that sense of how to interact comes naturally then I suppose you have significant spare energy for other stuff. I still look back on things I’ve said and wonder who it was that was saying them. I wonder if I’d even like to meet that person, let alone have anything more sustained to do with them. It applies to things I’ve written as well as things I’ve said, but not as much. With writing, you at least have that time to think offline, recompose… before it goes live.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 11:01
It strikes me that no explanation is needed for using and embracing technology. The people who need to justify themselves are those who have decided not to use it. Technology exists to share thoughts with the world. It’s socially acceptable to do so. Why would you not do it?
Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 6:39
On Sunday all my sites went belly up for a period of about sixteen hours. (Does anyone write numbers as words anymore?) Kind of felt like I’d made the wrong decision about which pill to take and woken up in a bath of goo with wires attached to my spine.
No-one was really to blame. A fileserver somewhere in California adopted the foetal position and stopped responding to requests. My online world was in suspension and I started to imagine myself touring the streets of a deserted New York in a fast car with only a dog and some plastic dummies for company.
All hail the techies at Dreamhost who restored the illusion within a time frame that allowed me not to see too many real-world horrors.
Sunday, February 15, 2009, 23:56
There’s nothing like space in your head and the knowledge that you don’t have to fill it with anything within a specified time frame.
Plenty of things need to be done, but inhabiting that space for a couple of days and nullifying all real responsibility has quite a cleansing effect. Neurones that are beaten down by the daily routine dust themselves off and fire up again. Somehow your brain rehydrates and the future is so much more plausible.
Watched Ptang Yang Kipperbang early evening, after a tea of stuffed red peppers and baked potatoes. Every bit the reminder that I hoped it would be – the central epiphany of the squashed spider and the appearance/reality motif have stood the test of time an then some.
Then Close Encounters bought this afternoon in Asda for a fiver. Very pleasantly surprised to learn that it has a DTS track. Pulsed the sub at the appropriate UFO moments, and was overall very politely balanced. They’re good finds – old movies with DTS sound. Somehow it seems they make more effort when remastering an old movie. The ultimate is Duel.