Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before

So I can't sleep.

I know, you've probably heard someone else on the internet talk about not being able to sleep.  You might even have seen it on here, shock and much gasping.

As such, I'm left wondering what to write about at four in the morning.

My knee still hurts.  Definitely going back to the doctor on Monday, I'll have to brow-beat an MRI out of him.

Cherry blossom season is once more speeding towards us.  The trees are starting to bud which means waiting a couple of weeks, I should imagine.

Terry Pratchett died.  The author of my favourite series, and probably my favourite book.  I've been staving off his most recent works because this way was inevitable, what with his illness, and I wanted to essentially main line the endings to all the threads he started decades ago.  My insignificant homage will be to tie his series up in as short a time as possible, leaving what I can remember of his older books to memory.  Actually that's a lie, I'll definitely re-read everything at some point in my life.

I've been writing a book since December.  It's about one quarter finished, which means at the current rate the first draft will be done in a year, the final copy in about a decade.  Refresh the page hourly for rip-roaring content updates about this.

Also, if you read this you're obliged to buy at least one copy when it's released (self publishing, woo!).  My stated aim is simple:  In my lifetime I want to sell a hundred books.  Whether that's ten books, ten sales each or one book with one hundred copies, I don't mind.  That's a fairly modest number right?  I think it's doable in a lifetime.  Anyway, you've got a year to save up a tenner.  Hop to it.  (Please.)

Don't Even Bother Trying to Sleep

So for the past few days I've been experimenting with not sleeping.  Again.

It's a recurring theme in my life and one that I will fight against until the day I die.

During the many, many hours I've spent awake I've thought about any number of things, but instead of boring you with them I thought I'd share a picture I took with a film camera a couple of weeks ago.

It's not the enormous film camera I showed in the last post, it's just a normal 35mm camera of unknown origins.

A sunset, not a sunrise.  Despite the number of sunrises I've unwillingly been witness to, I've never found the strength of will to overcome the headaches and actually do something productive with a camera.

I like it, which is unsurprising because I'm showing it to the internet and I took it.  It's a very low quality scan (250kb) done by the photo place, and I don't have a print to see just how it would end up looking in the real world - but I really quite like it nonetheless.

I definitely suggest blowing it up to full size and just looking for a few seconds.  It grows on you.

At least it did with me.

The usual disclaimers with my insomniposts, I can't be held accountable for readability or spelling due to the fact my brain is eating itself instead of sleeping like a normal brain.

Oh and I almost forgot, I saw a cool train on Sunday:

So It's Come to This...

So I have to explain some internet terminology first. (In my own style)

Flamewar - When two competing sides of an internet debate (see: argument) get so inerged in the fantastically insignificant details of a petty (or sometimes not so petty) argument; that virtual blood is spilt.  For a brilliant example of this (in the sense of it being archetypal flamewar material - not in the sense of this ludicrous behaviour being brilliant, because, quite frankly, reading any forum for more than five minutes gestates suicidal thoughts within me) see any 'mac vs PC,' 'debate.'  Obviously the PC is better, so I don't know why everyone is so worked up over such a thing.

Secondly, another brilliant example would be the five yearly console war, between Nintendo fans, Sony fans and recently, Microsoft fans.  (What, people actually support Microsoft in one of their endeavours?  Perish the thought.)  People literally cry when a new console is announced.  Most fanboys cry twice.  Once when their company announces an amazing new console; and once again when the enemy announces theirs.  The astute will notice a glaring mistake, three's a company right?

In this case, the three companies in question are usually divided by: Most loved.  (Cue tears.)  Most hated.  (Cue tears of rage.)  And the 'meh,' category.  Time for another definition:

Fanboy - Someone so blinded by their irrational love of _________ , that they cannot see the virtues of competing products, or in some cases, anything else at all.

All this arose from a couple of comments on my previous post about what to do with a broken bone.  I maintain that you don't ice breaks, but let's get the flamewar started!

So my internet geekology lessons aside, what else is happening?

Well I'm glad you asked Sam, because I get paid tomorrow.  For the last four days I've been living on the meagre contents of my fridge.  This meant eggs every day (usually more than one.  How unhealthy is that?  Seriously I need that question answering) with leaves of some description, onion, garlic (contrary to popular belief you can never have too much garlic, and it makes everything taste better) rice, bread, butter, some spreadable cheese and water...

All I can say is, I hope vitamin pills do work.

Joking aside, four days of living a terrible diet isn't too bad.  As far as is humanly estimable, every other person on the planet orders takeaway four or five nights a week, and that's unhealthy.  That's unhealthy in more ways than I can describe in a lifetime.  And as mentioned, vitamin pills are surely good for you.  In the future all our meals will be consumed in pill form, so I'm merely working ahead of everyone else...

So this weekend was a complete scrub.  I did some marking, went to the gym for an hour, (it's amazing how much a crippled finger can destroy plans) and that was it.  The rest of the time I phoned home, slept and was hungry.  It was absolutely, fundamentally the correct decision to bring my ps3 with me, exactly for weekends such as this.  Unfortunately I don't have the right cables for it.

It's 1AM here, and I'm really not sleeping well.  The problem of having nothing to do, is that you think.  Thinking can only take two forms, invariably these are thinking about the past; or thinking about the future.  One is littered with stupidities, oddities and mistakes; the other is scattered with the possibility of mistakes, stupidities and oddities.  Which to choose from?  It's a tough decision; so tough that I wish I had enough money for beer, a well enough finger that I could go to the gym and wear myself out, or a working playstation.  Remember, these things exist for this very reason:  Living life in the now is hard.

Just for this weekend, I really wish I'd had an 'opt-out,' button.

Bad (But Entirely Expected) News!

I didn't sleep last night!


So two nights ago was the rain that kept me awake until really early; completely screwing up my sleeping pattern.  And last night I couldn't sleep because of the interview today presumably.  I'm looking back at the two sentences I've just written and worrying massively, because they don't look like they make sense to me.  My brain is scrambled eggs!  Gah!

Oh well, this job was probably overrated anyway...

On a lighter note, the hallucinagenic effects of not sleeping for so long have given me some really good ideas of things to write about, although with all good inspiration I was reminded of her again :/  Damnit, can't something else be my muse?

(P.S it took four rewrites of this article in order to spell (I think everything) correctly, and to order the sentences so they make sense.  If I have to take a verbal or written communication skills test I'm royally rogered.)