Demiurgic

Yesterday was the first official day of my holiday, and I spent quite a lot of it attempting to re-capture my lost youth. It was also the day that I had a real kebab for the first time in months, because in the south they really don’t know how to make one. And I was having such fun that I didn’t even have time to write a blog update. So here is that update now, at 8AM (though probably later, as I have still to write it).

In the morning, before I visited friends, I spent some time exploring some of my old childhood haunts and doing things I haven’t done since I was younger. I visited some places that I used to frequent as a kid, thought that mostly consisted of small groups of trees where I used to climb and/or make dens with some of my friends. Unfortunately it was obvious by the discarded fag packets and cider bottles that these haunts, rather than being used for entertaining children through their summer holidays, are now sites for chav activity. This made me a little sad.

I also wandered around my old first school. It’s in a poor state. Ever since Northumberland switched from the three tier pilot education system, of which I was a part of, to the standard two tier system a lot of schools have been closed. Sadly my old first school was one of them. That has also become a chav hideout. The place was almost buried in litter and covered in graffiti. This also made me a little sad. My last part of trying to re-capture my youth came in the form of my wheeling the bike out of the shed to use as my primary mode of transportation, but it had two flat tyres and I had no bike pump. Whoever said you can’t go back wasn’t entirely correct. You can go back, it’s just better if you don’t.

But I saw chickens, so that made up for it.

The great thing about the friends I still have here is that when I come and see them it’s like we’ve never been apart. We don’t spend hours asking each other what we’ve been up to and what’s new, we just launch straight into geeky conversations about gaping plot holes or how stuff works. Actually both of those were in relation to one particular series. It’s a series that one of my friends likes, one of my friends dislikes and one that I can’t make my mind up about. Though we all agree it could be better.

After we talked geek for a good few hours and they did their Monday stuff while I played Champions Online, we attempted something that was probably unwise. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have put into motion events that will trigger the apocalypse.  I have a copy of Star Trek: Birth of the Federation on my external hard drive, a game we haven’t played for about eight years. We also had access to three computers and decided that we would network them and play a multiplayer game.

However these three PC’s had three different OS’. One was running XP, one Vista and one 7. And we were plugging all three computers into one network and running a game between them. After the ritual chanting and blood sacrifice that is required when trying to get any game to run on a LAN we actually had success. It wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be networking these three versions of Microsoft OS’, and there was no rain of fire outside. The game even ran for a time, but after 30 turns we got a warning message saying there had been a synchronisation error and decided we couldn’t be bothered to reload and play again. But the fact that it worked was quite monumental for us.

Today is probably going to be a day spent “rolling the bones” as it were, as we pick up our continuing Stargate series RPG. I just have to remember not to use the green d20, because it tries to kill me.