Meme Time

I've given up hope of getting the theoretical weekly quiz up on a Wednesday Thursday Fri... at all for the second week in a row, I was once again left unsure about what to fill the empty slot with. I turned to my blog feed for inspiration, and found that I've been tagged in a meme. Somehow I feel like viral images and videos have taken over the term these days, but the old faithful circular blog meme reminds me of my youth in the big wide scary exciting livejournal internet days and I never fail to smile a little whenever my little blog garners a tag; so I refuse to give up using the word 'meme' to describe them even if the world has moved on without me and the children look at me like I'm crazy.

One could pretend to be dank, or one could post cats.

The Rules

• Thank the person who tagged you for the award.
• Answer the 7 questions set out by your nominator.
• Tell everyone 7 things about yourself — you can spread them between answering the questions!
• (Optional) Write another 7 questions to ask the people you tag.
• (Optional) Tag 7 people to carry forward the Real Neat Versatile Blog Award and answer your questions while revealing 7 facts about themselves. :)

The Thanks

It feels a little cheap now that I've been specifically told that I have to do this, but thanks for Naithin for the tag. Naithin is one of those folks that really gets across a strong sense of his personality in his posts, so much so that it feels like he's one of the folks who've been around the Blaugust tracks for ages, when I've actually only known of him since last Blaugust (unless my memory is playing tricks on me?). His blog is always human, down-to-earth, considered and interesting, and I always click when I see him come up in my reader, something that I can't say about all that many others (sorry guys, I just gotta be in the mood, that's all!). I think it helps that while he's a little older and a little more of an MMO guy than I am (who isn't?), we seem to have a pretty similar gaming background and shared videogame canon, so his posts always feel relevant. Of particular interest to me of late has been his ongoing Humble Choice series each month to help me decide which games to grab, and more importantly which to actually dive into instead of leaving them in the ever-increasing backlog pile, when my monthly bundle comes through. If you're not familiar with his blog, do check it out.

The Answers

If you were to start another blog, or branch off your current blog into a whole new direction, what would it be about?

The Leaflocker is quite the meandering, haphazard, all over the place kind of blog. If I were spin off something new I'd like it to be something with a laser focus on a single topic that I'd decided to explore in depth. Actually, somewhere back in the deep dark past I did start a blog like that for my adventures in heraldry inside the Society for Creative Anachronism. It's called Orle Athwart, it has three whole posts, and though I haven't touched it in almost five years and prior to this moment I don't think that I've ever even mentioned it to anyone, suddenly I have rekindled fond hopes of getting it off the ground and really diving into heraldry again in a big way at some point.

Somewhere about ten years ago now, I can't even remember how or why, I started getting interested in the heraldry aspects of the SCA. The actual dressing up and saying 'forsooth' stuff would take me many years to begin to even think about getting involved in, and was cut off when I moved to England where people view the inherently make-believe aspects of role-players like the SCA with suspicion in favour of more authentic historical reenactment, but I've remained involved in commentary on heraldry matters the whole time. It's a weird thing that's very divorced from every other aspect of my life (except when people from my 'real' life see SCA stuff on facebook and get very confused), but something in the combination of research, pedantry, repetition, artistry and faux-seriousness just strikes a chord, so I keep coming back to it.

What mix of mechanics or genres would form your absolute dream game?

Looking at the games that I've poured the most time into over the years since I had a choice about what to install on my own computer, there are two standouts. One is CounterStrike. I am terrible at  CS mechanically, but the rhythm of the game, the need for teamwork and communication, the flow of the game back and forth, the thinking on the fly, exploiting weaknesses and getting inside people's heads is intoxicating. The other is turn-based strategy games like Into the Breach or Invisible Inc, games with small scope where each and every tiny detail is important, where every moment presents a new puzzle to be solved, a new danger to overcome with a limited number of resources. So, combining the team/real-time aspects of CS with the intimate but deep nature of TBS's? Something like Captain Sonar, enforced by the computer and turned up to eleven, would be great. I feel like you probably have to pick a theme for a dream game too, but honestly, I'd take anything that's not grim-dark-souls-esque, as that aesthetic does nothing for me.

Wait just a second... Is "off to grease my abacus" a euphemism?

My father was constantly bringing home bits and pieces of old computers from his work at the national telecom provider and botching together old machines, so we always had computers in our house, but apart from a couple of exceptions like Myst and Civilization II (I was the only person I knew that actually had a legit version with the manual and everything, and was very confused when my friends looked at me strangely when I quoted the video clips from the advisors) we didn't tend to have games other than freeware versions, demo disks and things that had 'accidentally' ended up there. We didn't have consoles at all (I inherited a NES when I was about 15, I think) and didn't have to buy expensive cartridges and play the life out of them to justify the expense, so as a result largely I was playing bits and pieces of lots of different games but never really dived all that much into any one thing, right up until about high school.

What thing (game, book, movie, anything) have you experienced recently, thinking it should be right up your alley — only to find it very much was not?

With the advent of the whole 'locked in our houses all the time with nothing to do' thing, my old role-playing group back in Australia is getting the band back together digitally. Well, I say my old role-playing group, but we got it all set-up and ready to go and then I left for England and got a day job, so they've been playing without me for the last four years or so. Tabletop roleplaying games (the group is actually playing Pathfinder) seem like they'd be right up my alley; you get to fight stuff, take a break for a cup of tea and to consult a large and esoteric encyclopedia, rules-lawyer to your heart's content and think of creative solutions to problems if the fancy strikes you. Unfortunately, though, when it actually comes down to it and I'm in these situations, I just freeze up and end up going through the same old mechanical motions. I have no idea why and I wish it wasn't the case, but there you go. We're going to give it another try starting some time in the next few weeks (once I actually design my character, that sounds like a blog post right there), and I'm half-excited because I still like the idea of getting into it and just hanging out on the regular with some friends that I don't see enough of, and half-terrified because deep down I know it'll be another unmitigated disaster.

I found it pretty difficult to find something to stick in this category, because these days I'm finding myself to be pretty stuck in my ways. It's not that I haven't been trying new things, reading new books, playing new games and the like, but for the most part I'm straying out of my comfort zone a lot less. Every now and then I worry that I'm becoming a more boring person than the adventurous youth that I once was, but it's more comforting to think of it as knowing myself pretty well and having a pretty good idea what I like. Oh no...am I old now? Do I have to start voting Conservative?

The opposite! Have you been convinced to try anything you thought you wouldn’t enjoy, only to discover you very much loved it after all? What was it?

THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN

On finding an old-school nib pen I recently did a little bit of experimenting in calligraphy, trying out of a sort of casual interest to see if I could find a style that I could execute somewhat proficiently with it. I didn't expect to do any good at this, since I don't have the eye for detail, a sense of perspective needed in all visual art, or good hand-eye co-ordination; and indeed I really didn't do very well at all and some of my attempts at the more complex letter-forms are truly laughable. Despite this, I found the act of trying to replicate consistent letters and the slow progression of forming more and more difficult words as I worked my way through a few tutorials extremely centering, and quickly burned through page after page of my working notebook.  The unsightly blue-black inkstain on my fingers that takes a serious scrubbing to remove is very satisfying too.

I have tried many, many hobbies over the years and I have a pile of theoretically ongoing but actually stalled projects that dates back well over a decade, but I suppose readers of this blog aren't likely to be surprised by that, since there's projects just on this blog that are approaching that kind of age. I tend to throw myself into something for a week or two, devoting all my free time and thought and a significant number of sleepless nights to thinking about it, before moving on to something new, never exactly abandoning or consciously stopping anything, just not keeping it in my short-term memory banks. Actually, the usual time is about twelve days (for confirmation, see my pattern of Blaugust posting over the last few years), which is just a couple of days short of the supposed magical line that you need to reach to solidify new habits. Maybe that is why I'm still stuck in many of the patterns that I developed years ago and the structure of my days has barely changed since I was a teenager. Hrmm, maybe a person only has room in their head for so many habits, and since I've avoided making new ones for so long that's why I'm still stuck with my childhood ones of chewing my fingernails and starting to talk before other people have finished their sentences.

What new thing do you most want to achieve with your blog this year?

I've always wanted the Leaflocker to be an outlet for creativity. Somewhere to share new experiments and skills, to revel in others' projects, to show some progress and to drive me on to bigger and better things. Occasionally I feel like I started out more that way and got distracted by 'blog busywork' of either producing the same old thing week after week (for the week that I produce anything) or consuming more and more media without it sparking any output, along the way. I know that in a lot of ways this is a reflection of the fact that I just don't produce all that much stuff, but if I could find a way to conjure the occasional feeling that I get during a Blaugust that the Leaflocker can act as an engine for creativity not an anchor for it, that'd be one heck of a goal for the ole blaug.

Not sure I have a fact on my mind that really gels with this one, so I guess I'll just share something on my mind at the moment. We live in a small terrace house quite close to our neighbours, which isn't usually a problem (apart from my love/hate relationship with a pair of perpetually yapping dogs), but sadly during this quarantine, (at least) one of our neighbours has been smoking pot twice every afternoon, once around noon and again later on (around the traditional time for such activities). The smell spreads quickly throughout our whole house each and every day, and it never fails to give me an absolutely terrible headache. I'm just glad that I only developed this reaction the the stuff later in life, or I would have been a lot worse off at high school.

What’s on your wishlist that you most want to buy, but for whatever reason you haven’t pulled the trigger on purchasing yet?

First visitor we've had in months

Since we've moved to Southampton we've been strongly considering getting a car, as we're within excellent day and weekend trip distance of lots of interesting bits and pieces, and we'd also like the ability to travel back to visit folks in Oxford and the occasional mahjong tournament without being at the mercy of the vagaries of the UK's rail network and it's frankly mystical pricing system. We went from being a two car family back in Australia to being strictly public transport or cycling people in Oxford, but even though here in Southampton we can easily do all our day to day stuff the same way,  as we hope to have more free time now that the thesis is over it feels like it might be time to think about investing in a vehicle again. There are lots of reasons not to, of course. We don't have a garage and would need to park it on an already-crowded street, we would have to go through the process of securing driver's licenses here, we probably wouldn't use it often enough to keep it in good condition (there are a lot of cars failing to start around here, after not having been used for a few weeks, and seeing people standing over an open bonnet looking perplexed is a regular feature of my exercise walks), the environmental concerns (we're already climate baddies due just to emissions from our  biennial flight to Australia), and of course, the main one is the cost of keeping and maintaining a car, even a little one. That said, we are Australians, I suspect the siren call of the road is something that comes from growing up breathing the air of a wide brown country and that it will ultimately prove irresistible.

All this being stuck in a house with only me and YouTube for company has finally pushed Mrs. Owl over the edge on the purchase that she has been putting off for the last four years or so, and I opened the door late last week to find a guitar on our doorstep. We're enjoying being a musical household again, even if neither of us can hold a tune and the amount of time that she can strum at the moment is very limited given the strain that it puts on her out-of-practice arthritic fingers. I cannot stress enough how much joy just having access to a musical instrument in the house has brought us both over the last few days, and don't know how we went so long without one. If I had my way, no household would be without a musical instrument. If I'm subjected to our neighbour's questionable musical taste for too many more weeks I might change my mind on that point, but for now I'm sticking to it. At least until someone on the street gets a set of bagpipes.

When this whole lockdown thing is over; and the shops/services currently closed reopen, what is the first thing you’ll visit/do?

Well done, ye generally rubbish but surprisingly faithful servants

For months, even pre-quarantine, the answer has been the same. I most desperately need some new shoes. My old ones, which were never all that good in the first place, are now held together with prayer and duct tape and it's only a matter of time until I'm better off going out barefoot than wearing them. Thankfully I don't really have to wear shoes a whole bunch at the moment (my slippers are getting some good use), but as soon as the restriction on non-essential shopping is lifted I'll have to pull the trigger.

I'm bad at shoe shopping. I've always been bad at shoe shopping. To be fair, I'm bad at almost all shopping that's not a regular food shop that I go into with a clear categorised list; I tend to wander up and down the aisles, looking at everything and putting nothing into my trolley, desperately hoping that the attendants don't try to talk to me. Clothes shopping of any kind is just a strange mixture of intimate and public that makes me uncomfortable. Shoes are the worst, though, because while I can and do wear clothes for decades and people can buy them for you if they think you're getting unbearably daggy, you have to buy shoes for yourself, and to do so just regularly enough to be annoying but not often enough that you can get used to it. I also have weirdly shaped bulgy feet, so I tend to have to try on a lot of different pairs to find something that works (which is also why I can't just do it online, the chances of getting lucky with a pair I haven't been able to actually physically try are slim). To top it all off, I inevitably wear through the heel and sole of new shoes in next to no time, make the whole exercise feel generally pointless. So yeah, shoe shopping. Yuk.

The Questions

I am ever-reluctant to tag others in these sort of things, which seems strange given how much I enjoy them, but what can I say? I guess I contain contradictions. Nevertheless, if you've stumbled across this little corner of the internet and find the questions below vaguely interesting or just want an excuse to talk about yourself (I've found this whole experience a lot more enjoyable and involved that I expected to when I set out), please make my day by taking a shot at answering them and filling in some additional facts of your own. No worries if you don't have a blog yourself, either, you can email me or stick your response in the comments, I'm always keen to hear what people have to say.

Tell us about:

That one thing that you're good at that people looking at you, or even that some people that know you, wouldn't guess.

That project that's been sitting on the back-burner for ages that you somehow just never manage to get down to.

The piece of art/music/poetry/game design that most recently made you want to stop in your tracks and just soak it in.

A memory that you remember one way but other people have a completely different take on.

That place, physical or mental, out on the internet or in the real world, where you most feel at peace.

Something that people just don't seem to get about the way that you think, act or react that you wish that you could get them to understand.

A fun website, video or gif that you've recently stumbled across. 

Here's one I stumbled across today that I enjoyed more than I should have. Behold the chicken, bird of prey.