The Pattern of Years

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Adam Randall

There are still two blog posts by other authors to come, but for now I’ve decided to write a little something for New Year’s Day. Will 2014 be a good year for me? Well, looking back, my life seems to follow a pattern of having a good year and then having a bad year and then a good year again and onward. This pattern fits the past eight years,

2006: good year
I made some really wonderful friends who I’ll remember forever.

2007: bad year
My Dad died.

2008: good year
I made some more wonderful friends who I’ll remember forever and I got really comfortable at school, very much enjoying all of my classes.

2009: bad year
It was the last year of compulsory education. I stayed for sixth form but I had to say goodbye to a lot of people, including some close friends. I lost contact with most of these people.

2010: good year
I began to really love my sixth form and forged some really strong friendships.

2011: bad year
The end of sixth form. Even more goodbyes.

2012: good year
By now I’d really settled into university and loved it there just as much as I’d loved the sixth form. I developed two very strong friendships and then my friends began to live together and I had a wonderful kind of second home in Bath where I’d often stay overnight.

2013: bad year
My friends all fell out and didn’t live together any more. Then I had a temporary falling out with one of them too.

Therefore, 2014 should be a good year! Of course, I’m not saying my life is on some up and down path, it’s probably much more a case of me changing the facts to fit the theory. There are good things in the ‘bad’ years that I’ve not mentioned and bad things in the ‘good’ years that I’ve not mentioned, this is just an overview and how I remember the years happening. Perhaps this could even reflect the way that my mind works, getting sad about something and then moving on from it by the next year. Who knows? I’d also not like to be so critical of 2013, lots of wonderful things have happened this year too.

One final thing I’d like to say, is that I made an interesting observation when updating my Friend Square the other day, You may wonder what a Friend Square is, so, I’d better explain: when I first started university I got the idea to make a picture of the faces of all of my friends so it could be my wallpaper. I did this easily just by resizing photographs from Facebook, rather than through any artistic skill. It’s hard to explain the criteria I used to decide who qualified for inclusion, but, basically, it was anybody that I liked a lot. Since then, I’ve added anybody who I’m especially fond of to it. I’d post it up here for you all to see, but, some people don’t like to have their photos posted so I’d better not. Anyway, there’s twenty-six people on it now, the three members of my immediate family and twenty-three friends, all of them there in the order that I’ve met them. Two people were added lately and now it’s too big to be a desktop wallpaper, which is nice, I think. I wonder if there’ll be anybody else to add by this time next year? And I wonder what new memories I’ll have to remember.

Happy New Year!

(Don’t miss the New Year’s special Finger Puppet Show!)

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Sir Lawrence the 2nd by Chloe Ward

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Adam Randall
(This week each of the three updates will be written by a different person. Today we have an anedote by my friend and fellow writer, Chloe Ward.)

I was sat on the roof terrace of Graze at the time. I was conversing about random things; university, what I had for tea, pickled onions, ya know the types of conversation you have with your friends. Anyway, we were sat there on our metal chairs with our glasses of ale. The sun was disappearing behind the train station and it was beginning to get cold when a silence came over the group. To fill the silence someone asked, “would you like to hear a funny yet disturbing story?”  We all said yes and so she told us the funny, yet disturbing story about someone she once knew.
    It had been a sleepless night. Fiona had been up and down her corridor all night checking on her dog. Sir Lawrence the 2nd—her massive husky—was not well. She had found him underneath her kitchen table the night before freezing cold. Although he was still eating and drinking, he could not stand and she feared the worst. When she awoke the next morning her first impulse was the ring the vet. She worried that they would put him down, but then again, maybe they could fix him. Her intuition told her to check Sir Lawrence the 2nd first. Sadly, he had passed away during the night.
    After several bursts of tears, Fiona decided to ring the vet. She wanted to get Sir Lawrence the 2nd cremated, only she lived in a built up area in London and the vet was a train away. If she were to take a huge dead dog on the tubes she was sure to receive funny looks. She feared that the workers at the station wouldn’t even let her on the train at all.
    In the end she delicately placed him into her largest suitcase, wrapped him in several towels and set off for the vet. The plan was fool proof. She would take him on the train in the suitcase and since people carried suitcases all the time she had nothing to fear.
    Her plan was going smoothly. She was going down some steps to get to the train. The case was heavy and she was struggling, but she persevered. She was about half way down the steps when a young man approached her. “Would you like a hand with your bag?” He said kindly.
    She analysed the situation. This was her dead dog she was carrying but surely the kind man would never suspect anything?
    “Yes please,” she answered. “That would be fantastic.”
    She passed him the suitcase and she rearranged her hair and such while the man heaved it down the stairs.
    “This is pretty heavy. What do you have in here anyway?” The man was a few steps from the bottom now.
    Panicking she replied with the first thing that sprang to her mind. “Ahh it’s my boyfriend’s DJ equipment.” The man had reached the bottom of the steps now. “Yeah he likes to do that sort of…” She trailed off. The man had picked up the suitcase and ran off with it. Fiona stood there unsure of what had just happened. She didn’t know if to laugh or cry. She was upset yes, but she couldn’t help but imagine the expression on the man’s face when he opened the case expecting to find DJ equipment.
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Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch

Posted on December 27, 2013 by Adam Randall

PictureThis is a novelisation of the Seventh Doctor’s television adventure: Remembrance Of The Daleks. Unlike books that go on to have film adaptations, I would suggest that you read this after having watched the story first. The four part adventure will give you everything as it was originally intended to be enjoyed and then reading it afterward will flesh out the story quite a bit.

The story follows the Doctor and Ace as the head to 1963 England so that the Doctor can tend to some unfinished business. Things aren’t so simple though as two separate squads of Daleks are sneaking around behind the scenes and preparing to take action. I won’t speak too much about the plot though, there are some exciting twists and turns (that I’d hate to spoil) but I’d also like to talk a bit about how it differs from the TV story and why I think it actually compliments it rather well.

But while it is certainly worthy of very high praise, I must admit there is one downside. The start of the story seems very rushed, there’s very little set-up and then all of a sudden the characters are just casually in a very tense situation which was far too fast for me. Thankfully, after a short while, it begins to balance out again.

One definite plus is the fact that virtually every single character is much more developed than they were on the television so you’ll find yourself caring about them much more. There’re are also several scenes which are not directly linked to the plot, but which add quite a lot to it, which are nowhere to be found in the television version: there’s a lovely couple of pages with the First Doctor at the start, a couple of flashbacks to Ancient Gallifrey featuring Rassilon, Omega and introducing a mysterious character referred to only as ‘the other’ who is very interesting and expanded on significantly in other pieces in the expanded universe (specifically, in the “New Adventures” line.)

Definitely worth a read, even if you’ve seen the episode already. Rating: 8.4/10

Buy it here.

(Sorry for not posting anything on Wednesday, I did plan to but I didn’t get around to it since it was Christmas day.)

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show, or the extra strip posted on Christmas Eve.)

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Computer Chat

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Adam Randall
I’d really hate it if this blog were to develop a reputation for having posts which were probably untrue. I promise that all of the stories on here are my exact recollections of things that happened and, with gaps that I can’t remember, I fill it in with what almost certainly did happen. As such, this is a story I’ve held off of writing because it’s just so weird. There was another story I had like that too but that one happened to me a long time ago when I was only a little boy, so I guess that one has an excuse for being weird. This anecdote, on the other hand, comes from 2006 and is still fairly fresh in my memory.
    I was in a Maths lesson (one of my favourite classes) and, as a change, we were all working on laptops and doing something on Microsoft Excel. Everything was going perfectly normally until the laptop starting typing all by itself. I don’t mean that the keys were actually moving and going inward as if somebody were pressing them (that would be silly) what I mean is, that words were appearing on the screen as if somebody was typing. This happened anywhere I clicked which, understandably, made using Excel hard because I’d try to enter a value but then random other words would appear.
    I put up my hand and said to the teacher “I have a problem with my computer.”
    “What is it?” he said when he came over.
    “Well, look at this, it just types by itself.”
    I clicked on a cell in Excel and the following words wrote themself “Look out of the window, you’ll see that they sky is quite grey. It’s been like this all day but don’t worry it’s not going to rain. It’ll be about ten degrees outside all day.” (all of that was correct, by the way.)
    I held down the delete key before it could write anymore.
    “Oh, right. Well, just try to ignore it,” was his slightly unhelpful advice.
    So for the rest of the lesson I continued trying to use Excel and simply deleting any words that the laptop managed to get out. I regret not clicking on Microsoft Word and letting it fill a whole word document with what it had to say, it’d have been interesting to find out, but at the time I wanted to get on with the work (which, funnily enough, I can’t remember).
    Can anybody solve this mystery? Where were these words coming from? I would assume that the keyboard was broken, but if that were the cause I would expect random gibberish, rather than actual words in sentences, to be typed. So, I can’t think of any rational explanation for this (though I’m sure there is one).
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Miiverse Screen Captures

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Adam Randall
Nintendo recently updated the 3DS so that you can access Miiverse on it. Miiverse is an online community where you can talk about and post drawings and screen captures of your favourite games. I have been especially happy with the ability to screen capture things because it was something I simply had no way of doing before. Sadly, you can’t do it with all games, but I’ve been having some fun with it lately and here are all the pictures I’ve taken. Click here to follow me on Miiverse (no 3DS required).

(Don’t miss this week’s Finger Puppet Show)
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Christmas Fantasy Vs Reality

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Adam Randall

In the news lately I’ve seen a story about a vicar who received a lot of negative comments after he told some school children in an assembly that Father Christmas didn’t exist. There’s been a lot of talk about how he ruined Christmas for them and things like that. For today’s blog entry I want to question whether or not Christmas is any better if you believe that Father Christmas exists.
    Obviously, we all know Father Christmas. He’s the lovely old man who makes us all presents at the North Pole and then magically travels across the whole world on Christmas Eve and delivers all of the gifts. He’s a great fictional character and probably one of the best known of all of them. I certainly don’t dislike the character, or the idea, and seeing images of him always makes me feel Christmassy and excited for the holiday season.
    But why is Christmas nicer if you believe he’s real? There was no point in my life when I believed Father Christmas was real, or if there was, it was beyond the reaches of my memory. But if you do believe in him, you believe that one person is kind enough to buy perfect gifts for all of the people on Earth, which is a wonderful thought, isn’t it? But I think this is one case where reality is much better than fantasy. Rather than one person being kind enough to give everyone gifts, everyone is very nice and take the time to express their love and care for their friends and family. Sure, there’s no real magic, but on this one day we express such extreme kindness towards everyone and it’s a kind of magic rooted in real life; it’s the magic of human love. Father Christmas is nice, but I’d much rather look at my gifts as an extension of other people’s love for me.

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Puzzle Swap

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Adam Randall

PicturePuzzle Swap is one of three free games that are installed on every Nintendo 3DS. This one happens to be my personal favourite of these games.

The 3DS has a pedometer built into it (I absolutely adore that) and, until you’ve taken one thousand steps in a day you are given one play coin for every hundred steps you take. One way to spend these play coins is to use them in Puzzle Swap in order to get new puzzle pieces for various pictures.

The pictures are all scenes from various Nintendo games such as Skyward Sword and Donkey Kong Country Returns. That might sound a little boring, but once you have all the pieces of one of the pictures it then becomes a moving 3D diorama or in some cases even a short looping 3D movie to watch and these are lovely. The 3DS’s 3D effect works very well on them all and only one or two of the many pictures are disappointing.

But you can’t get all of these puzzle pieces just by spending play coins. To further encourage you to carry your 3DS around with you, there are rare pink pieces (the rest being blue) which are harder to get. Normally, you spend two play coins and a little bird will swoop down to your Mii and give him or her a puzzle piece (a random one, you might already have it) but this bird will never bring you pink pieces. Every time a new picture is released (and it is updated fairly regularly at the moment) you are given one piece of it at random. This could be a pink one. Then, every time you pass somebody on the streets, your 3DS detects this and you can then meet the owner’s Mii in Puzzle Swap. When you meet another Mii you can choose to have your own copy of any puzzle piece they have, but only one per visit. It’s through the passing of others that you get the pink pieces and if you never take your 3DS out with you, you’ll never get to complete any of the pictures.

While this is a lovely free game, I have to say it’s not really something you can just sit down and play. You can only make a certain amount of progress each day and so you’re only likely to use this for about five minutes a day while you get your daily pieces. But as a free game, I certainly enjoy this a lot and find it quite addictive. It also has an excellent ‘walking along’ type theme tune.

Rating: 7/10

Buy a 3DS (which will have this game built in) now.

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Christmas Cards

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Adam Randall

There was a person in my ‘Researching and Writing a Novel’ class who I was concerned might have the impression that I didn’t think too fondly of him. As such, I thought it would be a good idea to give him a Christmas card to show that I did indeed like him and my friend Chloe Ward was also keen to sign it. The plan was to bring it in and sign it just before the final class and then give it to him in the class.

Sadly, things wouldn’t work out quite so easily. It turns out that there was actually one less lesson than we thought there was and so, when we thought we’d have a final class, we actually had tutorials where we got back the grades on a piece of work. She and I were two of the very first to have our tutorials and so we came up with a new plan: we’d give the card to the teacher and then he could hand it over to our fellow student when it was time for his tutorial. It all went perfectly; we were outside the classroom, the card was signed and enveloped and there were only about ten minutes left until the tutorials.

Then I realised something dreadful: this plan wasn’t ethically sound! I imagined it playing out.

“I have this card here…” I’d say, with the plan of ending the sentence with “…which I’d like you to hand over to somebody.”

But before I could finish he’d probably cut in with “A card? Oh, thank you so much! You’ve made my day. I’m so happy right now.”

And then I’d have to break his heart with the truth.

Therefore we realised we had to give the teacher a card too. We rushed down to the student shop and bought two boxes of cards (they were buy one get one free) and then, while Chloe had her tutorial, I hastily wrote a card for the teacher. As I was doing the writing, I heard somebody come in behind me.

“Hasn’t the class started yet?” they asked. It was the student we wanted to give the card to. The whole plan was now no longer needed. For a second, I thought it might be best just to give the teacher the card to hand over anyway; we’d done all this preparation after all. Then I realised that was ridiculous and gave him the card and explained that there were tutorials instead of a regular class.

This anecdote has quite a happy ending really: the other student got his card and seemed pretty happy about it, the teacher got his card and seemed even happier (“You should have given it to me sooner, I’d have given you a higher grade!”, he joked), Chloe and I both got good grades and then we had a lovely lunch with Oscar Taylor-Kent who also got a good grade. How fitting for a Christmas story.

(Don’t miss this week’s Finger Puppet Show.)

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The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Adam Randall

PictureThis is the first novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. All of these stories take place in a strange fantasy world on a giant disc on the back of four giant elephants which are on the back of a giant space turtle named Great A’Tuin.

The story follows two people, one named Rincewind and the other Twoflower, as they travel across the Discworld. Rincewind is a drop-out from the Unseen University who has one ancient and extremely powerful spell trapped in his head, but, due to this, cannot do any other magic. Twoflower is an optimistic (and potentially naive) tourist who travels with a savage living trunk called The Luggage which has a mind of its own, though is loyal to its master. There’s not too much story to it other than the pair of them going from one hilarious and dangerous situation to the next. What makes it enjoyable is the comedy and the characters (I find Twoflower and his Luggage especially loveable.)

During the course of the novel, many works of fantasy are lampooned; there’s quite a funny scene with the gods playing dice which is quite a good send up of Dungeons and Dragons. Though my favourite parody in the book has to be the time the pair of them face Bel-Shamharoth in an ancient temple in what is a clear poke at the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Having said that, don’t feel you won’t be able to enjoy this novel if you don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of fantasy, if you barely know any fantasy it’ll just be lots of funny things that happen, if you know a lot of fantasy you’ll smile at all the references you get.

On the whole, while this book is a good read, there isn’t all that much to it. The biggest downside is its lack of much overall plot. As I said, the characters are lovely and you’ll often find parts very funny indeed, but if you’re looking for a deep, engrossing storyline, this isn’t the place to go.

Rating: 8/10

Buy it here.

(I do not own the copyright of the cover image.)

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Apology

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Adam Randall

Back in 2009, when I was in Year 11 (the final year of compulsory education), work was being done to create a year book. A contest was held to include a poem on the front cover and I decided to enter it. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I know it was a limerick which started “This book is about the Corsham School” and ended “To buy this you’d be a fool”. Of course, that wasn’t serious; I was very enthusiastic for the year book and I still have it safely in my room now, I was just doing some self-loathing humour and, as I was pretty close to the teacher organising it all, I thought she’d laugh and appreciate the joke.

The next day I was in my drama class, which was taught by the teacher behind the year book. She gave the class their task and then afterward said “Adam, could you come into my office? I need to have a word with you.”

“So, why did you want to see me?” I asked once inside. I’d almost fogotten about the poem at that point.

“I think you know why you’re here,” she said.

“Do I?” I replied, a little confused.

“Yes. You’re poem for the yearbook.”

“Oh yes! Did you like it?”

“No, Adam,” she said, sounding very sad, “it was very hurtful. I put a lot of effort into that year book and so have a lot of other people. I’m really upset that you would ridicule it like that.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry to have upset you,” I said. “But you must know I don’t feel like that, you’ve seen that I’ve been so enthusiastic about it before. I hoped it’d be clear that it was just a joke. I certainly didn’t intend it to be an attack on the yearbook.”

“Well, that’s how I took it,” she said. “And if that weren’t bad enough, you didn’t have to send it to every person in the year.”

“But I didn’t do that,” I said. This was very confusing, I had only sent it to her, as far as I knew.

“Yes, you did, Adam. I think we’d better arrange for you to apologise to the whole year in an assembly soon…”

Later in the day, I went onto a computer to see if there was any reason that my email might have been sent to everyone in the year. It seems that when I’d sent it to her, I’d done so by clicking ‘reply’ to her email about the poem contest… Only I hadn’t clicked ‘reply’, I’d accidentally clicked ‘reply to all’ and my inbox was full of emails from people who had received it.

“lol”

“That was good adam but why did you call me Miss?”

“Um. I think you clicked the wrong button.”

“This is hilarious.”

“Adam, how did you mix me up with our teacher?”

“Classic Adam.”

I replied to all of them and either thanked them for their compliments or explained to them what had happened.

The next day was the week’s assembly day and that was when I was going to have to give the apology. Thankfully, for whatever reason, the assembly was cancelled and then when the next assembly came along my teacher was feeling better about it (and was convinced I hadn’t tried to be mean) and said I no longer needed to give the apology. So, since then, I’m always sure I definitely don’t click “reply to all”…

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