Strike Three

In solidarity with those taking strike action today, I didn't go to work. Technically, I have every Wednesday off, but this time I was holding a placard.

Not a literal placard, but a placard in my heart. It has severely reduced my blood flow. For the people.

The heart may not seem like the ideal place to express industrial disquiet, but keep in mind that it has better circulation than most newspapers.

Circulation! A pun! And a satire of the dying print medium! I don't know why I don't have a job writing for Private Eye. It might be because I'm Ian Hislop's illegitimate son, and he doesn't like me bothering him at work.

I don't work in the public sector, but still felt guilty this morning, sitting in Starbucks, drinking coffee. Starbucks seems to be the modern emblem of unfettered capitalism: stores everywhere, friendly production-line individuality, everything a candidate for more merchandising and more sugar.

But I don't really know anything about their business practises. My politics leads me to have a non-specific suspicion of big corporations, even though I find a lot of them very useful. Can I justify shopping in Tesco, with their aggressive expansion? Do I have to shop in an independent retailer instead, even if it's more expensive and doesn't sell anything I like?

I don't know. The important thing is to just make sure I feel guilty all the time. Cover the bases. Assume that you're constantly sinning, and just hope that your self-awareness makes you better than everyone else. The nobility of the neurotic is a fantastic flag to wave, even if you're worried about whether the flag pole is Fairtrade, and it's planted directly into your left ventricle.

***

Mood

Cosy. Is cosy a mood? Cosy might be a state of mind, but that doesn't account for slippers.

I'm not wearing slippers, but am cosy nonetheless. Socks'll do me fine. Socks are nature's slippers, after all.

Listening to

I'm making my weekly playlist, based on a specific theme. We do this every week. It's what I live for.

You can get a sneak preview of mine here. The theme is 'abstract concepts'. I was struggling a bit, but luckily was able to steal some ideas from my friend Sarah and googled "list of abstract nouns".

That may not be in the spirit of the playlist, but never mind.

One of the songs on my list if from an album called The Miners' Hymns by Jóhann Jóhannsson. I bought it a while ago (and may have mentioned it here before). It's the soundtrack to a film about a Northern mining town, and is all sombre atmospheric brass. Listening to this again shows my support for the strikers. Just playing to this song is better than helping out in a physical, literal way.

(I don't know why I'm talking so much about this strike, when it doesn't have much to do with me. It's useful to have a running theme going through a blog post, though. Otherwise it would just seem like INCOHERENT RAMBLING.)

Reading

I've read nothing since my last post. Not a book, not a comic, not a pamphlet, not a full-sized pamph: nothing.

I read some best-before dates on products in the supermarket. They were pretty good. The endings were quite unexpected.

Watching

Disney's The Princess and The Frog

We saw this last night, and it was very enjoyable. It was refreshingly Disney-like in tone (which is slightly different to Pixar, I think). It's also done in traditional animation.

The story was perhaps a little thin, but there were lots of great bits, spectacular set pieces (which looked great on Blu-Ray), an original dynamic, and a couple of things that made me laugh for far too long.

Playing

Whilst I haven't been playing anything, I was reminded of a 'playing'-related thing yesterday. So I'll write about it here.

I've got an old FIFA game on the Wii, which I still play. It's pretty good, and is a good way to keep my hands and eyes busy. I need to do several things at once, or I get restless. So it's either FIFA or depithifying clementines, which I definitely don't do all the time.

Anyway, the game is only from last year I think, but the players and squads are out of date. I've changed these manually, but there are still problems.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is a young footballer who used to play for Southampton (my team), but was sold to Arsenal. He had a good game against Man City yesterday. My version of FIFA still had him playing for Southampton, so I manually changed him to be an Arsenal player. So far, so good.

But because he played for us (at the time a League One team), the makers of the game didn't bother making him very good. They probably assumed any Saints player must be awful. Or maybe they just rank all lower-league players the same.

What this means is that Chamberlain, now in the Arsenal team, is awful. He's slow, has no shooting ability, is unable to perform skills, and is driving a rubbish car (this isn't mentioned in the game, but I've made this assumption).

He doesn't fit in with the world class players at Arsenal. Well, maybe not world class. Hemisphere class, perhaps.

I could just not play him, but it's the principle of the thing. He's an ex-Saint after all. So I purposely include him in the side and try to make sure he plays well. I put him in the centre-forward position so he has more chances; I pass to him, even if the player in possession is in a much better situation; I try really hard when he has the ball.

I want to convince the game that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain deserves his place in the side.

The question is this:

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

The game is not capable of learning from its understandable errors. No-one else knows what I'm doing. I'm just making the game more difficult for myself, for NO REWARD WHATSOEVER.

If a tree falls in the woods with no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Maybe.

But if a man - a grown man, mind you - tries to prove to an inanimate piece of software that a player is better than his in-game ranking would suggest, and there's no-one there to see it, does he make a sound?

Yes. The sound is a roar of pathetic futility.

Then again, it has provided some blog content. So I'm all smiles.

Eating

I just had a duck wrap. It was tasty, but I feel guilty. I like ducks. I don't like ducks to be killed, no matter how delicious they are. Poor duck. Poor, poor duck.

I don't feel guilty about the hoisin. Unless they make it from squirrels or something.

Drinking

Nothing. I'm thirsty.

***

Today's blog post has come to a close. All it needs is a callback to something I said earlier.

I'd better go now, because my dad (Ian Hislop) needs me to help him out of his own arse.

Ahahaha.

I love being me all day long with no break.

Go in peace.