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The Pokémon Village Fête 2009 was broken when I went to Liverpool. The tent in the shopping centre had been put up wrong and wouldn’t support the hundreds of people that’d be walking in and out and through it. So I didn’t get to partake in any of the cool stuff they had available, only the Regigigas download.

Then I found the money to take a day trip up to the Westfield Shopping Centre in Derby, and everything changed. It had already been running in Derby for a few days, so there was no chance that it was going to go wrong or not be on. I arrived and used one of the magical Westfield interactive signs to find the shop I was meant to be heading for and lo — there it was. The set up for the most fun day in the history of days out.

In the front-left corner was the Pokémon Training Academy, where kids gathered to be shown the basics of the new games. Along the left-hand side was the Village Green, where you could get your face or hand painted, and get given balloon models of Pokémon. In the far-left corner was the Photo Station with the huge Pikachu. Along the back wall was the Pokémon Cinema where Giratina and the Sky Warrior was being shown. In the far-right corner was the Trading Card Game table where the lovely PokéGirls were playing a whole load of cards in short, three-prize games. I forgot to bring my decks so I didn’t sit down and play, though I did watch. Along the right was the Regigigas distribution and supposedly a Pokémon Ranger and Mystery Dungeon showcase, though the systems actually all had copies of Platinum in them. And finally, in the near-right corner was Pokémon Battle Revolution on the Wii and a raffle ticket system for assigning groups of four players to mini tournaments. There were a lot of event Regigigas being played on the day, and an equal amount of Action Replay Arceus. Some people have no morals.

I met some really cool people and saw a few of the staff I’d met before. I played against good teams, bad teams, teams full of legendaries and teams of well-trained non-legendary Pokémon. I acquired a shiny Golem and a shiny Uxie, and gave some people things they wanted in return.

I got my promotional freebies and had a decent laugh with one of the staff members who insisted on quizzing me on the games and making up the answers when I didn’t know them. Everyone was great and I had an incredible time.

Token lunch at Subway, of course, and I took a quick look around the huge shopping centre in the morning. To round off the day, I met Keziah for a quick drink in the ever-popular Caffé Nero before walking back to the station (I found my way pretty easily; been doing really well finding my way around places lately) to round off an excellent day’s fun with a pleasant train journey home.

Brilliant.

Last week, I had the delightful and inimitable experience of some time in Holland, on holiday. It was all very exciting, but I am not going to give a full account of everything on here. I do, though, have a few thoughts that merit sharing that have arisen as a result of the trip, and one of these thoughts is how much I loved my first experience with air travel.

When I was in Holland, Olivia reported that one of her fundamentalist co-workers once remarked that flight on a plane was something wondrous and terrifying enough to warrant or prompt a belief in a deity. What?

I felt the exact opposite. Within a few minutes of taking off, I was already high enough up that I didn’t care about anyone on the ground. As the cars on motorways that go so fast when you are in them began to resemble crawling ants, it was tough to even conceive the size of the people — real people — inside the cars, let alone how tough it was to empathise with them. It would be like trying to hold conversations with atoms. If there were a god, this is how he would feel looking down on us, too.

And then we burst through the clouds and outside looked like every depiction of heaven there has ever been, and I realised that I was higher than god. Aerotravel defecates in the eyes of god.

Flying was amazing. My suspicions that people who don’t like it are a bunch of wusses were proved to be accurate. I don’t think there was enough sensation, if I’m honest. The flight should have been more intense. Maybe next time I will ask the pilot to do a few more banking turns or a barrell roll. There also should have been more acceleration in take-off. I wanted to be thrown back against my seat, that would have been cool.

I was on a pretty medium-sized plane. I saw a B747 out the window when I was taking off and I definitely want to try one of those someday.

Eventually I’ll be wealthy enough to jet off all over the world. Well, maybe once or twice. But there will be no upper limit on the amount of excitement I’ll experience! And then it won’t just be Europe I’ll tear it up in, but the whole world.

More to come soon!

If I could drive, then I could bitch about driving!

As a foot-bound pedestrian, I feel like I am missing out on a huge and common source of rage that everyone else is getting to dip their fingers into. While there are times when I am in a car and feel the frustration of the driver, I can’t really lay claim to any of that fury, even though I’ll be on the same journey, because I’m not in control of the car. I can’t really justfy rolling down the window and yelling profanities at drivers.

It’s not just driving that I’d feel cheeky complaining about. I talked a few years ago about those crappy little signs that you get in the back windows of cars — “baby on board” and such, all their variations (“mother-to-be on board,” “young person on board,” “daddy’s little princess on board,” etc.) too, were all unnecessary and useless and just annoying. Do drivers think they are somehow less likely to get into an accident by informing the person behind them that there is a child passenger in the car? Are people going to take more care on the road because they don’t want to get into a crash that might hurt someone else’s child (as opposed to a crash that might only endanger their own life)? I don’t think so. If anything, drivers will be more likely to rear-end you because they were distracted trying to read the little yellow square you’ve got dangling in your back window and not noticing when you brake. Slam. Game over.

Anyway, the point is that unless I’m a driver, you can all disregard everything I have to say about experiences in the car because I am not part of your exclusive club. Whatever. Enjoy your global warming, faggots.

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.

Oh man, Bob Catley is a fucking rockstar. He’s basically a superhero. I met him, and shook his hand, and was all “yo AHS, check out Bob Catley,” and they were all “woah, his music is awesome!!”

We went to Tamworth for Jenna‘s generic-winter-festival party and saw her dad and sister and town. We had a great party.

Then I went back to Leeds (again) to share Liz‘s birthday party with Chris and Norman at their four-fifths atheist domicile…

Then I came home. I got back to Leamington and almost kissed the ground with happiness. But not because I’d been away, but because of what happened while I was away. Basically, I was glad to be home without regretting being gone. Let’s leave it at that.

That’s the summary of all the decent things that happened this weekend. Not at much detail as last time, I guess I’m just not in the mood.

Oxford

So began the first of my holiday outings last Wednesday, when I went to visit the wonderful Jenna at her Oxford University college: Linacre.

We decided to try and cram as many awesome things into the day as possible, which is why we set off to Modern Art Oxford and the Natural History Museum (which were great) and also swung past the “castle,” or the mound-where-a-castle-once-used-to-be (which was not so great – not only was it a lame attraction, but Jenna confessed that she hated me so much that she was skipping the country to avoid spending new year’s eve at my house).

Modern Art Oxford was a very pleasant experience. They had a few exhibitions on (including one which was disappointingly closed), ranging from boring to plain weird. It was all loosely connected by sharing common binaural techniques to create the sense of sounds coming from positions they weren’t, which was interesting and entertaining. We stopped by the gift shop and I was bought a 25mm badge.

The Museum of Natural History, where I had previously had the pleasurable experience of watching Richard Dawkins face off the imposing John Lennox in debate, was another fascinating experience, made even more so in the light of the remnants of the memories of my last visit; atheism and evolution tend to go hand-in-hand these days.

I got to spend some time in Linacre college, which my friend Tom Etheridge tells me is “not a real college, [because it's] full of grads.” But what if I’m visiting a “grad”, Tom? The college was nice and modern (but still with that Oxford University class pretension about it). The student rooms were cosy and nice and the dining area was homely.

The most important thing that I can say about Linacre, however, was that when I got a shot at using one of their computer rooms, I got a nice surprise. Some of the new motherfuckingly huge iMacs were there, but what did their screens have plastered all over them? It wasn’t Leopard… it was XP! That was quite an unexpected highlight that appealed to my technological nature.

In the evening, we stayed in the college’s common room, and I met some people. We had fun playing darts and Pictionary and watching some Channel 4.

Leeds

The first thing to note about Leeds is how fucking far away it is! Regardless, hitching the train up there was alright; I do like getting trains. While I was there to see and hang out with all of Leeds’ remaining A-Soc, strictly speaking I was Liz‘s guest.

When I arrived at the station, I moved into the shopping centres, passing through all sorts of different bits, including “Victoria Quarter,” which had an interior made of gold and had shops whose very names were too expensive to pronounce. Liz and her housemate Michelle intercepted me (despite the terrible description I gave them of my location) and we wandered around the city centre for a little while. I spotted four Caffé Nero coffee shops, and visited two of them (Stuart, have pride). After some guilty confessions from Liz that she didn’t actually know her way around Leeds’ centre, we decided to try and find the restaurant that we were meeting A-Soc at later. We did find it, and spent the waiting time in Wetherspoon’s (where else?).

The restaurant served fairly standard food but I’d say it was overpriced as well. Nice atmosphere, though, and the glass panel in the middle of the landing of the first floor was just terrifying. Afterwards, we didn’t return to Spoons, as was my initial inclination, but headed off to somewhere a little quieter, which was a better idea now that I think about it. I heard about the London antics of Leeds Atheist Society and met and spoke to some cool people.

i think a-soc is a pretty cool guy. eh debates god and doesn’t afraid of anything

After things wound down (meaning: they closed at 11pm and didn’t give me the required time to finish my bottle of wine), Chris gave me a lift back to his house, stopping at Tesco to pick up the classic Southern Comfort and Pepsi Max party drink. Back at “Atheist House” (which is not as good as the name “Fort Atheist”), we stayed up most of the night watching various animated shows (American Dad prominent amongst them).

In the morning, I got up and sped off to Leeds station to catch a ride back home, but not before having my half-can of Relentless thrown off the First travel bus. They got their comeuppance, however, because I scrawled “FGW Are[sic] cunts” on the First Great Western train that was my final connection to Basingstoke (and last public transportation vessel for the day). That will teach them not to allow cans of drink on their Leeds buses.