John Walker's Electronic House

My long-held belief that the Third World War will be caused by the Eurovision Song Contest edges ever nearer to reality.

Who am I?

It was the question that held every thinker captive, and was possibly the stupidest, and the simplest question of all. She was. That was it – so obvious, so complete, and so beyond the understanding of the bleary-eyed citizens of the world.

A far more difficult question, and one she realised man would be far better exploring at such lengths was ‘Why am I lonely?’. Such a pathetic notion. It had been a feeling – perhaps an emotion – that had once so dominated her life, wrapped around her like the bandages of a mummy. Great stretches of her time had been spent desperately reaching out to others: she had been an octopus of need, exploring tentacles seeking for connections. If she could find the right link, curl her arm around the right soul, then she would be able to feel safe, to feel loved. Idiotic. All this time spent turning the world upside down in the search for completeness, when the answer had always laid inside.

The seal around the fridge door let go of its sucking grip, opened a crack, and then hissed closed again. Suck, open, hiss, close. Again. Again. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss. The noise pleased her – not for its dull, lifeless sound – but for representing the door’s obedience. It had been the first thing she had moved, and remained her most common target. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss. The sorry little light inside flickered itself on and off with each movement, so weak it was barely noticeable.

In the same way as the glare of the world had dimmed the stars inside her, now the brilliant light in her mind faded the detail outside. There was nothing special about the suck or the hiss, nor the light or the movement. It was the reaction inside her that made the action worthwhile. Each time she used this new region of her brain it lit up hot and red, warm and sweet. When she pulled down gently, she would hear the suck outside, but more, absorb the glow inside. When she pushed back up, there was the hiss, but also the delicious burst of colour. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss, suck, hiss, smack!

The fridge door hit the wall with a ferocity that sent cracks through its frame. Inside, she exploded in awesome reds and oranges.

***

Ago.

The train reaches a station, the doors false start, open, and the leaning couple realise this is their stop, frantically gathering bags. There is an exchange of bodies, old for new, and a silent negotiation over seat distribution. Do women still deserve seats more than men? And it jolts three times into movement. In front of her, he sits down.

***

Tiny. Meaningless. Hiss, suck. She had swung it back around, fast again, but with a hard tug frozen it an inch from closing. Then with careful precision eased it slowly back into place.

And then she was tired of the fridge door.

Colour, the colour outside of her and inside the world, was two dimensional. It existed only to shade the surface of an object, bouncing the pre-selected elements of the spectrum into the open eyes and closed minds of humanity. It was a party decoration, tacky and temporary.

Colour inside her was at least three dimensional, and she was currently working on a hypothesis that it might possess four. The reds that washed through her possessed depth, shape, age. She could reach into them, let them run through her mind’s fingers, feel them swell and subside. They were powerful.

Her eyes recognised an apple on the counter. It lifted. It vibrated. It exploded.

It’s been a long while since Big Robot disappeared from the interwaves, and I thought it might be time to give my extendo-short story a re-airing. Because it’s been… good grief, three years since I wrote it, it’s probably embarrassing or rubbish, but I shall stick it up as once it was in stages over the next few whiles.

In Her Eyes – Part 1

For a while there had still been a small entrance in through the eyes, but that was gone now, shrinking to a pin-prick, and then finally, in a blink, disappearing.

There wasn’t the darkness that might be expected. The world was still there – it was still visible, it could still be interacted with. It could be touched, moved, manipulated, helped or harmed. But it could have no influence upon her. It was now one-way. And this was better.

To hold a human brain in your hands is to know its weight, its size, its texture, but it is not to know any of its truth. To truly enter the mind, to penetrate it so deeply that it entirely enfolds you, and anything outside becomes so far removed that it can no longer pollute this truth, is to be aware. This awareness was powerful, and she held it in her grasp.

At first it had felt like shutting down, perhaps even giving up. For this to happen – to stop accepting the world, disallowing it from being a part of her consciousness – had felt as if she were accepting defeat. The stereotypical breakdown: when everything becomes too much, and the mental faculties give in, and all begins to stop. Coma. The terror she had experienced when gripped by the belief that she was falling into this state had been intense beyond anything she had experienced. It was as if nightmare had somehow clawed its vicious way out of her dreamstate, and wrapped its grip around the whole of her consciousness. It was death, despair, and pure fear. Until she started to see the lights.

You think you’ve seen the stars, until you visit the desert. Despite the thickness of the fear, she began to realised that her mind had been almost entirely invisible against the glare of the world. The world was never truly dark, never truly quiet, and this intrusion had constantly shrouded her mind in an orange misty glow. Now she could see the potential of the lights. It was something beyond; something more important and more significant than the fear, and it became her goal. Hope found in something to fight for.

It had taken a week to truly escape. A full week, no sleep, before the final pin-prick of fear blinked away. And then she understood, really understood. It was the outside world that had provided the terror, and once she was entirely separated from it, it could have no hold on her. It surprised her when, from within this new confidence, the new purity, she was not afraid to look outside again. It was as strangely simple as opening her eyes. Now she could see the world, but the world could not see her, and only then could she see how weak the world truly was.

Colours, which had formerly held her entranced when painted across a sunset, or vibrant and alive in bouquet of flowers, were dreary and washed out. Sounds that had once brought her to tears, or filled her with an uncontrollable urge to dance around her room, were now the hollow clanking of a stick against a barrel. The outside world was muted, faded, but most of all, weak. And now finally she could see the stars, see each individual light, pristine and clear. A new clarity. This was not shutting down, this was opening up. This was far from defeat.

She considered her fingertips. It was a new game she played. She would recite the instructions in her mind to an imaginary someone who still didn’t understand: Imagine your fingertips. Don’t look at them, but instead call an awareness of them to your mind. You already know what they look like, so forget the mental image you’ve conjured up – it’s pollution, it’s glare. And now forget what you can feel with them. That’s the tactile feedback produced by the nerve endings sending electrical impulses to your brain – the invasion of outside influences. You need to generate an awareness. The knowledge of your fingertips. They exist, they are a part of your body, and they are controlled by your brain, but you don’t know them! Again, she had won.

The rules that time plays by appeared to be the same. She was aware of how many days it had taken for the fear to be defeated and the knowledge to come; and how many days she had spent bathing in the wonder that was now hers. Hours, minutes and seconds passed by as she had always known, but instead of counting away her remaining lifetime, here she found they only measured the length of her joy. The passing of time had lost its power. The clock no longer counted down, but up.

It was on the third day, or ‘Day Three’ as it appeared labelled in her mind, that she realised she could change things.

So for some reason, about 400 people are reading this site a day. I haven’t looked at such things for a long while. Weird.

I want to put you all to good use.

You occasionally get a chance to make a difference. I want for one of those times to be now.

My very good friend Kim’s mOm had breast cancer a few years back. Ever since, she and Kim have gone on the Avon Foundation Walk For Breast Cancer (I think they mean in support of those with it, rather than marching for the rights of cancers in breasts. At least, I really hope so).

It’s not some crappy jaunt of flappy women. It’s a two day, 39 mile walk. They mean it.

Kim and her mom have walked ever since. Except this year her mom can’t go, as more cancer was found in her spine. The current results look really good, and she’s been through treatment, and horrible things like the neck brace are now off. There’s still a few more months before everything is A-OK, so this year Kim’s walking alone.

In response to this, Kim’s decided to increase the amount she’s aiming to raise from $1,800 to $10,000.

I think that’s a remarkable and noble step. Most would have given it a miss this year. Kim’s marching forward.

It deserves respect, and more than anything, the charity deserves money.

So give something.

Do it. Click on either of the images, or this sentence, and give a teeny weeny bit of money. Or loads if you’re rich. If everyone reading gave a tiny bit, say $10 (£5.71), Kim would be halfway to her total.

Don’t not do it for once.

The first thing that must be overcome when playing Nanostray is shouting the word “NA-NO-STRAY!” in a faux-Native American voice, over and over again until you have no friends left, and everyone on the train moves to another carriage.

Laters! – Kieron

Review goes weird.

A friend has taken a rant of mine seriously, and pointed out that it’s a good idea.

If enough people got together and pledged to pay a small monthly fee, just a couple of pounds each, then we could pay Richard Curtis to never write another single word in the remains of his festering idiotic cesspool of a life.

Imagine the world without the useless skinbag vomiting his loathsome films and TV programmes over us every six months! Imagine how we could walk the streets safe in the knowledge of not seeing a poster of Hugh Bloody Grant flapping his charisma-free wet dishcloth of a face. It would be a new dawn.

Someone set up a website and a Paypal button.

Occasionally I am A Man.

Brian was late today due to a combination of being up all night working, and being up all day working too, and a broken stylus for my magical drawing tablet. It’s been a bit dodgy for a while now, and while too busy/lazy to investigate what was wrong, I had at least discovered that if I didn’t screw the top to the bottom completely tightly, it was functional. Today, even that didn’t seem to help. So it was time for a proper investigation.

Clearly the contact between the magical pixiewires inside and the battery was incomplete, but only when fully joined together. This seemed counter-intuitive, until like the scientific genius I truly am, I realised that the thread onto which the top half screws was being pulled up from its base upon closure. FASCINATING! My first attempt at a repair did not succeed – surprising in light of its simple cunning. I decided I would hold it in place with Sellotape. But I couldn’t find any. The only appropriately gluey material about was a box of sticky white labels I never remember I have when I Sellotape white paper over old addresses on packages I’m sending to people when I’m too cheap to buy a new padded envelope (all the time). Which would suggest I do have tape somewhere. Sadly torn strips of white sticker are shockingly not adequate affixative for holding a metal thread to a metal pen. I know. More drastic and scientific methods were required.

How about pushing the battery from the other end? The other contact was unreachably buried in the top of the hollow pen, but what if a small amount of metal were to exist between the contact and the battery? Could this be the Macgyver moment I was waiting for? All I needed was some metal that would fit in. After pondering the conductivity of tin foil, but deciding that if it should be obvious that it wouldn’t work, I really shouldn’t try it so I would never have to admit to having done so, I then noticed the metallic band on a nearby thin paintbrush. Sorry Mr Paintbrush – your life is given for the greater good.

To the kitchen, then, where all wood and metalwork is destined to take place. Using an old, un-used kitchen knife (read: one of Jonty’s), I sawed a small chunk of the metal-encased wooden cylindar from its moorings. Ka-ping! Success. Dropped it into the inside of the pen, screwed it up as much as I could, and ta-da! Brian! I overwhelm myself sometimes.

It reminded me of my favourite moment of manly improvisation, when I lived in Stoke on Trent, during a half-hearted and half-finished attempt at university there. We lived in an area that had frequent break-ins. In fact, our garage was broken into so regularly that we stopped attempting to lock it, and instead used it to store items we wanted rid of, but were too lazy to take to the tip. The next morning they be magically gone.

However, this meant we were somewhat concerned about the sanctity of our sacred grounds, and the fact that the chubb lock on our back door appeared to be glued on. In the 1970s. We called the landlord over, the ironically named Dave Goodfellow, to have this sorted. He snorted at our assertion that glue was not the ideal means of having it hold the baddies out, took a screwdriver, and removed the rust-worn screws that were propping the thing up. More sliding out than unscrewing, he took his catch and held it up to us. “Look at that!” he commanded. “Never been removed, that, ever.” The peculiarity of such a claim appeared lost on him, as he pushed them back into their holes and left the house.

So it was left to us. Us three men. Men of the world. Men with literally no tools other than a hammer. Most things we fixed in our collapsing home with a hammer, but on this occasion we could see now way for it to help. We purchased a new Yale lock, removed the previous one by, and I swear this is true, pulling it off the door. And then, in a series of improvisations that still fill me with pride to this very day, we affixed the Yale lock, cutting the metallic block to size and all, using only a bread knife and a pair of scissors.

We were beautiful.

Cauldron, let’s go. Come on. Let’s take it outside. I challenge you, the developers of Gene Troopers, to a fight. Name the time and place, I’ll be there. That’s the only way we’re going to settle this.

The majority of my time playing this game was spent face down on the sofa, having crawled there from my beanbag in aimless rage, thumping the carpet and furniture along my way. At one point, I bit my arm. I BIT MY ARM.

A lovely way to start the week, with one of the most consistently absymal games I’ve ever witnessed.

There’s a special kind of madness that’s caused by developing for the DS. 2004’s Project Rub (or as it was far better titled around the world, Feel The Magic: Project XX/XY, and in Japan, I Would Die For You) took the Sonic Team away from their increasingly tiresome hedgehog, and instead focused on the very involved business or winning a girl’s heart. And rabbits. And robot bulls. And vomiting goldfish.

And now we have Rub Rabbits (or as it’s far better titled in Japan, Where Do Babies Come From?), which also appears to be about winning a girl’s heart. And rabbits. And robot crabs. And riding cows.

Pleasingly mad.

A favourite moment in DC, that perfectly demonstrates the division of language between the US and the UK (no one say that hoary old cliche).

Wanting to fill some time before my journey home, I decided to visit the stores on the other side of the road from the hotel. I asked the lady at the desk,

“Is there a safe way to cross the road?”

She replied,

“No, but there’s a giant next door.”

Which was something to think about.

I rounded the corner, and then laughed out loud. I realised her side of the conversation:

“Is there a Safeway across the road?”

“No, but there’s a Giant next door.”