Aquarionics

Easter weekend, as I said, I was at a LARP Event. At that event, there was a central plot point of a volcano that could erupt at any moment, causing chaos and confusion.

Since the event, I have been communicating, In character, with various people in the wake of the actual eruption and the chaos and confusion it has caused.

The last week has, therefore, suffered several important boundary issues.

My favourite photo of the volcano.

I am entirely normal.

I mean, apart from the hanging around on the internet, Larp, computer games, geekdom, occasional discussions on world domination, I’m a normal person. Straight white male, aged 18-35. I suffer from mild, annoying, middle class live problems, like not having enough olive oil left, or the terror of running out of asparagus before your party. I suffer from mild dyslexia, I need to wear glasses or else I may trip over things that would escape my unassisted vision. Like lorries, for example.

However, I do actually suffer from one thing that is both cool and terrifying, and because I’ve run out of other things to say, I shall talk to you about it.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to it. It started just after I left home, then went away for years. It hardly ever happens unless I’m the only person in the house, except when it doesn’t. This is what happens: I am asleep, I am partway though a dream, I will have rescued the kitten from the flaming toaster house; swam away from the double-deckered carrot prancing down the River Medway; Crash landed my toffee bathtub; Won the grand prize for the inadvised application of Latin; Shot down the last specification clause with a final piece of badly formed XML; caught the breadmaker; something like that. My dream will have been happening…

And I’m awake. Hi, real world. Interesting. So, yes, this one doesn’t have those purple hydronic houses, does it? Pity, they were cool. And I suppose that means the liason I arranged with thingy from the whatsit film isn’t going to happen, is it? Oh, thingy. Who was it? Er… can see her face, but the name… no, where’d her face go. It was, er.. what colour were the hydronic houses? What’s hydronics? Something? about?

houses? with the filmstar?

And the dream fades into the bleak hole of subconcious and the details spiral into each other and thin out over the universe, tying my concious awareness of my subconcious into an impenetrable package which fades in the sunlight. I’m awake.

And I can’t move.

Sleep Paralysis, I discovered a few years later, is when your brain is out of REM sleep mode, but your body hasn’t recieved the code that means “we’ve stopped dreaming now, you should listen to what we’re saying again”. Usually I can move, open and focus my eyes. Sometimes I can just focus on things. Sometimes my eyes are closed.

I can’t move.

Not a finger on my hand will listen to the commands, no toe will retreat to the warmth of the duvet it was recently denied. Instructions sent to lift my arm, shift my weight, lift my head… none. Non responsive.

Now is the time when you must visualise with complete and total clarity the image of the cover of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Because the thing it is tempting to do now is panic. The first time this happened was, without doubt, the single scariest moment of my life, because there is no way to tell how long this will last. It only ever happens when I’m alone, so the thought begins with “Er. I hope this goes away before I starve” and spirals up from there. How many days until someone realises you’re dead? What if it’s sooner? If you can’t communicate will they realise you’re still there? How? does this go away?

What the fuck just happened?

Are you going to end today in a hospital as the doctors declare you a vegatable and turn off things keeping you alive?

But there’s a worse thing than being trapped inside a panicing mind.

Your body isn’t panicing.

It’s really eerie to have your brain circling itself in abject terror and you not being able to hyperventalate, no cold sweat, breathing steady and regular, even if you think about it as hard as you can.

And you calm down. You force yourself to calm down. This will be over. It will be fine. And you relax, you meditate, you roll onto your back and breathe a calming breath…

…and you moved. it’s gone, and you didn’t even see it go.

And you forget about it, and all the feelings it brings, until it comes back.

One of the things I dislike about our country’s governmental system is the way that electing a competent MP is detrimental to the local representation. I would like to think that the people we elect into power are able to represent our best interests, even if some of them don’t, and have thought for a while that anyone who is a minister for something-or-other is going to find themselves hard pressed to represent anything local at all. I was still somewhat surprised to read this, however:

(An interview of Meg Hillier with Blood & Property)
Blood and Property: How does your job as a minister fit in with your job as a constituency MP?
Meg Hiller: The difference is that I can’t speak about issues in the chamber of the House of Commons that aren’t related to my ministerial portfolio or department.
So I can’t ask questions in the House on certain issues but that’s not necessarily a problem because there are other ways I can raise them. For example, on the Crown Estate proposals, which is a big issue in the constituency, threatening to sell off its property in Victoria Park, I’m working very closely with the other MPs involved who are not ministers. We’re working together but they’re speaking and I’m supporting.

MPs who are ministers “can’t speak” on local issues. We elect them into a position of local responsibility, and they get promoted into silence. This is really, really stupid.

On the other side of my local ward is Denny de la Haye, an Independent candidate who is standing on a platform more like Athenian democracy. He intends, should he be elected into parliament, to vote on any issues put in front of him based on what local people decide, via his website. There are a number of issues he feels strongly enough about to exclude from this system. This appears to be much like the swedish “Demoex” political party, but – beyond reading their wikipedia page – I don’t know very much about them.

The downside of such a system is that part of the social contract of the elected officials is to make unpopular decisions that are for the good of the future, rather than suffer “tyranny of the majority” type problems, but the political climate is so horribly poisonous right now, with the average person’s trust in MPs trashed by allegation upon allegation upon scandal upon duck-house, that the idea of a more direct line into government could reinforce the idea that they do indeed work for us.

The ward I live in is fairly safe for Labour, so it’s possibly a doomed attempt on his part, and I need to research his opponents more, but it’s an interesting experiment.

The first company I ever coded for had a CVS server on a redhat box under my desk. I learnt roughly how CVS worked, and mostly how good it was for tracking changes, and how horrible I found the merge process.

At my next company, I couldn’t see a way that CVS would be very useful (I was wrong) but when we ported my pet project from one language to another we added a CVS repository, and that worked well. I found out about SVN, but didn’t have time to implement it, though I used it at home.

Trutap used Subversion extensively, branching trunk for every milestone, the milestone for every ticket. Merging was a pain in the arse, and one person ended up on dedicated “merge” duty. I learnt how useful properly done SCM could be.

Current company I started at with a free reign, and decided the way forward was Git. I’ve used SVN for a while, but the only way I’ve seen it work really well – the trutap method – works even better – and a hell of a lot more naturally – as a Git repository. I have drunk from the Git kool-aid, and it is both delicious and refreshing. A few days later I found that dotwaffle – who worked there before I did – had the same idea and had already set up a central git repository somewhere else.

It follows, then, that I have pretty much abandoned my self-maintained and dodgy subversion server, and shifted all my various code projects over to “Github”:http://github.com/aquarion where they can languish in an unfinished state on someone else’s repository. This now includes all the code behind the “Lifestream” box to the right of this post, in the unlikely event you’re viewing it on my site.

I am back from Maelstrom.

The weather was horrid. The fact that the longest event of the year – four days, Friday to Monday, rather than the Friday to Sunday of most events – ends up being both the first event and the one most likely to have the worst of all possible weather for camping in is somewhat unfortunate. During the day was blustery this time, but not terribly cold. The nights, however, were freezing, even with my awesome fluffy sleeping bag, roll mat and two blankets (Yes, I had some stuff under me as well as over me. The main problem appears to be that the sleeping back is great at keeping heat in, but I wasn’t generating enough).

On top of the weather, people have been planning this event for six months, and old grudges have solidified. Plus, people want to keep moving to keep warm, and thus the first event has, in recent years, generally been the one with the highest death count. This event was no difficult, set on a volcanic island, almost all of the population of the game ended up running off site as fast as they could collect their loved things and ones, slightly ahead of a predicted volcanic eruption.

So, generally, I didn’t have a wonderful event, but my character had an *awesome* time, where long-term planned stuff started working, he had people to be angry at and people to negotiate with. I just wish the bastard had made more time for minor things like feeding his physical representation…

Ah well, 59 days, 20 hours, 29 minutes until the next one.