WillWybrow.com

You are all a bunch of retards.

The Latin -us suffix pluralises to -i — not -ii.

You only think it ends in -ii because of “radii”. But radii has the i that’s already in “radius” as well as the pluralising i, so of course there are going to be two.

I can’t sing. But I do like to. I don’t often get the chance to belt out my favourite hits because there are always a bunch of people around and I am cripplingly self-conscious about my horrible voice.

Still, the house has been empty for a few days, and some hours ago I got it into my head that now would be a great time to sing along to some of the more epic songs on Guitar Hero: World Tour. It is a great time — the middle of the night and an empty house; what more could anyone need for the comfort of being completely alone?

There are some fucking cracking songs on GHWT; the best of them are downloadable extras, but they are really good tracks. So, if I am going to sing along to them anyway (which I would do if I were listening at my PC), why not get points for it at the same time?

Cautiously sampling “medium” difficulty, like testing the water with a toe, I quickly found that the lower difficulty settings really don’t require you to have the ability to sing well. This was really pleasing, since according to the game, I was doing well, but according to human ears, I was committing aural murder genocide. It just goes to show that we are quite a way from realism in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band game series.

So the water was a good temperature. It was time to wade in and get comfortable before diving under. I cranked up the difficulty to “hard” mode. Bearing in mind that I was singing songs that I know fairly well and love to bits, I can say I was really pleased at being able to succeed so readily in a difficulty setting that I’d fail at if playing an “instrument”. Time to take the plunge…

Success! I discovered to my joy that I could faithfully recreate the vocal tracks of many of my favourite songs on the game in the “expert” difficulty setting. What celebrations there were! As the dawn slowly filtered in through our living room windows, I embraced my ridiculous-sounding voice for achieving a high rating on the highest difficulty in the game. At last there is some part of the game where my gratification is not dependent on the coordination of my left hand’s smallest finger. Success!

Not really been having complete thoughts recently. Not big or important enough to make a full blog post necessarily worthwhile (as somewhat evidenced by my latest attempt). I have been trying to get the most pressing ones into my Twitter feed, but sometimes they are too big or detailed to fit into 140 characters. Yet they are still too small for this place.

You know, I think an uncle once told me his finger was “half dead.” I was really freaked out by it at the time. I was small. Now I wonder if he wasn’t experiencing the same thing I am right now. The loss of sensation in the strip of my finger makes it feel a bit dead. The patch of dry, flaking skin up the side of it also doesn’t help matters. A friend compared its appearance to the onset of zombism, which I thought was amusing. Maybe one day I will be able to tell some children that my finger is half dead. Children will be virtually insane by that point, since we know that every year, they get worse.

I find it very depressing when I read the comment-responses I goaded out of the people who attacked me. It is also a bit scary, but I tend to not let that interfere too much with things. It’s just disheartening to know that there are people out there who don’t even know me, yet are trying so fervently to ruin my life. My solicitor says that if we have to go down, we should go down fighting, but I am not so sure. At least if I were to go in early then I could end things on my terms. I hate the feeling of not knowing what is going to happen. Why are they doing this to me? Well, I know why. It’s funny. Kind of the very best definition of “butthurt” — attack guy, get fought off, sulk a bit, press charges, ???, profit. Everything feels so chaotic.

I finally have finished all the missions in GTA:SA. I like it more than I liked what little I played of GTA IV. I don’t know why it’s such a good game. Maybe it’s because the characters are just so likeable. My favourite is Wu Zi Mu. He was a lovable guy. I will play IV soon.

I went on some rollercoasters! It is the first time I can say that I have been able to properly appreciate them. I would go as far as to say that the levels of fright before, excitement during and satisfaction after were all perfectly balanced. It was an excellent experience.

It’s my birthday soon. What do I want? Oh, one or two things. Nothing that I could ever have, of course.

I guess I have run out of thoughts for now.

Ideally, we’d be able to set privacy settings in terms of the privacy of our profile page visitors. For example, if your profile is public, you can view other public profiles. But if your profile is private then you can’t.

You shouldn’t be allowed to stalk whilst hiding from being stalked. It doesn’t work like that, world.

This is going to be a good one, guys.

For one, Smallville resumes broadcasting. I’ve refrained from mentioning it on my blog so far because I haven’t that much to say about it… it’s a TV show, it’s not to everyone’s taste but I am enjoying it. But Season Eight is the first season where creative control has not been in the hands of the original creators of the show, so I am anxious to see what developments will be made.

Next, Death Blossoms, a new Rise Against single, will be out for Guitar Hero: World Tour. Of course, it will be made available as a torrent online; what isn’t? But for a brief while, it’ll only be out on the game, a game owned by my generous housemate… Perhaps he will let me buy the single (and the other two Rise Against songs released at the same time) and play them all, one after the other, on his console.

Finally, it’s the Warwick Atheists’ formal-dress social. Starting out at a nice(ish) place to eat in Leamington, the guys in their suits and the girls in their dresses will undoubtedly move on to the pub and wind down the evening in the dying noise of Wetherspoon’s. A classy end to a shitty term.

It’s about the only thing I am looking forward to in the near future.

Oh man, this one was so much more action-packed than the last one.

First of all, Anti-Flag pulled out. Justin Sane broke his collar bone and fucked off home, said someone, so there was a new support act in. Enter King Blues, a London punk-reggae band with the bare minimum of talent. Between them and the almost-equally under-par Flobots, the bar was set very low for the main act.

During the course of the evening, one of my friends was punched in the face, and another had his glasses smacked off and subsequently crushed underneath the angry crowd. I think that Anti-Flag’s calming influence and shouts of “when someone falls, we pick them right back up,” were sorely missed, as well as their encouragement for getting the energetic crowd members worn out early on so they don’t brawl during the better half of the show.

Aiming as low as they could, Rise Against managed to pull off an almost identical set. Their two accoustic songs were, I think, switched over in this one. But other than that, it was the same, down to the wording of the between-song banter.

Anyway, after taking a look at my friend’s bare, un-spectacled face, and having just been crushed by a bunch of people throwing themselves to the ground (ground that I used to be standing upright in), I fucking cheesed it out of the centre in a hurry. Ruining two pairs of glasses in two months is not something I am prepared to do, and by this point we were at the second song and I knew the set wasn’t going to be any different.

So, I bothered to write down the list in order this time. For your information, here is the setlist for Rise Against on March the 6th at the Roundhouse, London:

But the songs and the order and the banter aren’t the only things that make a performance! There are other things too… like a member of the support act joining in with one of Rise Against’s songs. That wasn’t in this performance, right? WRONG. Flobots’ violinst added her bit to Hero of War.

Wait, there’s more. In both instances, there has been a hilarious instance of a song played that I can somehow relate back to the Altercation. In Birmingham, Anti-Flag burst out a herioc performance of “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)” — brutally reminding me of my recent trip to the Leamington Police Station and the impending ass-whooping I will receive if the jury doesn’t think I was acting in self-defence. In London, Flobots drove home their inflammatory “Fight with Tools” — euphemism for stabbing, anyone? Bah.

Anyway, they announced that they’ll be at Reading and Leeds this summer. If I get the chance to go, I would love to see them, for reasons mentioned in my last post about these guys.

Suddenly I feel so reassured about court proceedings. When you look at the average coherence of the comments by his friends, you get gems like the seemingly out-of-nowhere “sad” call (which, by the way, I love as an insult because it doesn’t make any sense) because of my hilarious post on shoelaces.

You also get comments so delightfully riddled with poor grammar, spelling, ideas and arguments that all you can do is hope these kids get called as witnesses — all they’ll do is strengthen my case.

But seriously… fair enough telling me I am wrong when I say Lee Evans is a worthless hack, but coming here and calling me a liar? I should be making a much bigger deal of her crappy spelling.

I’ll let it go this once.

When you were a child and your parents took you to buy shoes, do you remember the care and effort put into measuring your feet? There’d be a number for a measurement, given to one binary place’s* accuracy, and a letter for the breadth of your foot. Maybe this is because the growth of children’s feet is important to keep uninhibited (since we must all be familiar with the barbaric ancient Chinese practices of foot-binding). Maybe having half-sizes in children’s shoes is just a way to sell more shoes. Either way, the practice seems to drop off in later years.

I know that when I have bought shoes, I rattle off a number and am given a pair of shoes that fit. That’s it. Even a size too big will fit fine, really. You’d have to go a few sizes too big (but maybe just one too small) to notice or have any inconvenience.

I want you to think back over some shoes you have purchased — ones that fasten with laces. After your shoes were initially laced up across the six or so pairs of eyelets on top, how many times have you re-laced them?

If you have at all, it’s more than I have, and more than I suspect most people have. Do we not just throw them on? If you’ve ever been bowling, you won’t see anyone undoing all the laces on the borrowed bowling shoes just to do them back up a bit more loosely or tightly.

Given all this, what, then, is the point at all in having laces that reach all the way up to the opening in the shoe?

Two or three eyelets, tops, is what I’d say is really necessary to get the right degree of customisability. The other half? Useless. If there’s going to be anything, it could be unremovable but elasticated bindings across the top, but I would expect there to be no difference at all if the shoe were made a little more solidly.

Why does it matter? Well, it doesn’t really. But shoes come unlaced, and the laces need to be applied to places where they don’t make a difference. We’ve gone through more trouble as a society to achieve lesser improvements in convenience, so why not this? What am I really driving at here? Alright, you’ve twisted my arm. When I was admitted to the holding cells in the Leamington Spa Police Station just prior to my police interviews, they told me I had to remove my shoes. But my feet would get cold. I hate having cold feet, so I just asked if removing the laces was ok (since they’d confiscated the drawstring on my WordPress hoodie by this point). Time grudgingly passed, and when the time came for me to leave, I had to re-lace my whole fucking stupid shoes again. AND that was with the somewhat limiting use of one good hand and some extra fingers. God damn shoelaces.

*Here, of course, I mean the accuracy you can represent with a binary number using a single digit after the radix point. This would give a degree of accuracy allowing you to express whole numbers and whole-and-a-half numbers, but nothing more accurate than that (like quarters or thirds). I wanted to use a word that ended in -al instead of “binary” here, such as decimal or octal, where denary is to binary as decimal is to… something. But I couldn’t find the word or it doesn’t exist. If you can shed any light, please do. It maybe the case that I am too lazy to find it out.

Hey guys… I think I might have ruined my finger.

When I got it re-dressed last Monday, the nurse phoned the specialist to see if she ought to re-apply a plaster strip between my fingertip and wrist in order to restrict my finger’s movement and ensure that no strain was put on the healing nerve. This presumably would give it the best chance of healing. Well, the specialist, or someone on the specialist’s behalf, said that it would be fine to omit such a construct, and that I could have some use of my finger — it would be “fine as long as it’s not bent back.”

I mention this because at some point recently, I noticed that there was no more pain when I stretched my hand out a bit. Earlier in the week, I’d feel a stinging tug in my finger when I was getting close to stretching it out too far. It felt like a kind of warning that I was close to undoing all the plastic surgeon’s hard work in the operating theatre when he repaired the nerve.

Now that I notice that the pain has gone, I also notice that it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better anymore. Where before, I would put gentle pressure on the outside of my right index finger (along the edge adjacent to the thumb in the endmost segment) and sort of feel it; there’s now nothing. It doesn’t feel completely numb — if I apply pressure then I can feel it, but if I touch it lightly, there is nothing.

I have been acting quite irresponsibly, I’ll be honest. Getting crushed up against jumping bodies at the Carling Academy last Thursday probably didn’t help any. Neither did hoisting the idiot crowdsurfers (I fucking hate crowdsurfing) up off my face when they were inches from kicking my teeth in as a matter of course of their blatant disregard for anyone else’s enjoyment (we all know for a fact that if you crowdsurf, a band will think you are the coolest of all their fans and pay you lots of special attention…). Also causing more harm than help would be my recklessness in trying to get my finger back in use. Reaching for things with my right hand because it was slightly more convenient hurt, but at the time such things seem trivial.

I don’t mind a bit of pain. I like to think I am ok at dealing with pain if it’s something I know about. That’s to say: not unexpected things like receiving an injury, but the prolonged pain afterwards that’s associated with it healing. I’m good at recovering. But while I’m ok with pain, I hate the idea of damage. I sprained my wrist once. Not really aware of what the results were in terms of pain and mobility of breaking a bone there (since it would have been six or seven years since the most recent break at the time, and that was a collar bone and not really involved in movement), I noticed that it was a lot easier to deal with knowing that the pain was only a sprain and not a fracture or a break. This sprain was simply stretching a ligament a bit too far, so the psychological effect of knowing that there was no serious damage was that I could take it in stride more easily. Sprains are commonplace and they heal fine on their own.

When I was told at the hospital that there was potential tendon damage to my finger, it was a much worse feeling than the actual pain I was in (and that’s not just due to the numbing effects of the alcohol that night; trust me). The idea that I could have ruined my finger made the injury seem more real. If there had been no damage at all, I could deal with any amount of pain from the cut skin.

So, as it stands, I think I might have broken whatever fragile repair work has been undertaken on my digital nerve. I’m going to voice my concerns at the hospital when they remove my stitches. I’ll probably also tell Dr Srivastava, my plastic surgeon, when I see him in three weeks’ time. The day after my birthday!

If that’s the case, I will definitely ask him to have another crack at it. The NHS’s substance abusers’ overdose responses demonstrate its willingness to help people fix themselves even in the event that the stupidity of the people in question is the cause of the problem. If they can pump the stomachs of passed-out alcohol-soaked kids on Friday nights, they can certainly take another shot at trying to give me the top-left corner of my finger back.