G Man

Toby has come to stay with me and work here at babel for a few weeks. My flat is still mostly bare, we both have to sleep on the floor in discomfort.

wodge of œ50 notes

Yowser! I got paid. Laid down the deposit on my new flat. It’s also russes birthday today, happy B-day mang.

Boss Men

Today I moved out of the flat that I was staying in, and moved into my directors flat. Now I am staying with the two executive directors of Babel! A very plush place indeed. I’m very lucky, its for a weeks while I wait for my paperwork to go through on my new abode.

Maharishi

Went home earlier than usual to have a few drinks with the guy I’m staying in brighton with. I’d been staying clear of the house for the past month to give him and his girlfriend some breathing space… although they would complain either way; you’re here too much or you’re never here you treat this like a hotel its understandable that I can’t win, give me a key to come and go but then complain that I’m coming in a going out.
Well I’m sure they are happy drinking Maharishi tea or whatever. The man has a very short memory as I put him up for about 2 months while we were in London. Still, musnt complain, must be hard having someone stay when you’re in a relationship and the house is invaded.

Thumb Acres

Went to the last ever Thumb Acres, a weekly pub based games night where drinkers can play xbox / dreamcast etc games on a huge projection screen.
Was a very good night out. Shortly after my manager took myself and a few others out to a sleazy nightclub where we all got copiously drunk and made fools out of our selves.

penguin climbers

Made a great analogy; people in the pub describing how the contract process works here at Babel, with people being sacked, put on the bottom of the list and waiting to get hired again (games testers and q&a quality controllers are on flexi contracts here). I compared it to those old battery powered toys you could get where the penguins climb the stairs and slide down the slide only to end up at the bottom of the stairs.

Well, you had to be there. Come to think of it only my manager laughed. I suppose thats key eh?

Went to Thumb Acres this evening, a weekly doo set up in the top room of an expensive pub where people can bring their consoles / games and play on a projector screen while drinking copious amounts of beer! Apparently this night is usually quite boring, numbering in about 4 or 5 attendees every time. However this evening was different! At one point there were twenty people in the room, all playing bishi bashi or some xbox game involving ducking and jumping, very hard and way too many pros in the room. We had full size dance mats to play dance dance revolution, however we played a few driving games like this too! like playing twister and driving a car at the same time, but left foot red makes you crash into a bus…

bit of shit in the sea

watched brighton pier burn

Leo Sayer

everyone in babel got paid except for me as I missed the monthly cut off for wages, which was the sunday before I started.
Went to the pub with the babel staff, got drunk with tom and went to some shitty night club and spent far too much money… walking down the street and saw Leo Sayer!
Ended up very drunk running down the road calling some random guy a toffee nosed twat as he tried to start a fight with me on exit of nightclub.

New Job

I start my new job on monday, working as a games artist for Hove based company Babel.

Its a huge relief for me, as I was totally sick of freelancing!

Also, I need a more stable life, what with getting married this year and all…

Auntie Paula RIP

My Auntie passed away from terminal cancer a few days ago, I didn’t know until today – but somehow sensed this had happened.

RIP Paula Bright – love ya loads and hope to meet again one day!

Brighton bound!

Awoke and had my bath, which is always relaxing in Japan. Firstly you shower down your dirty grimy body (or use a pitcher if your bathroom doesn’t come equipped) then when clean from head to toe, jump in the tub. Japanese baths are rather deep compared to western ones, they are also cramped for western bodies – although this is not a problem when used to the style.

After that I ate my usual breakfast which my girlfriend lovingly prepares each morning; consisting of a bowl of rice, a raw egg, some miso soup and a few satsumas. That may seem like a hearty breakfast but the concept of lunch is largely unheard of in Japan, with a slant towards snacking instead. This breakfast includes fish or ham (cooked). With luck, this breakfast should see you through till tea time!

We were packed up and ready to drive me to sendai for my 6 hour journey to narita airport, shoved all the stuff into the family space wagon plotting our course on the car navigation system. A car ‘navi’ is one of the best devices I’ve ever seen, basically a small flat wide screen on the dash that allows you to watch TV or know where you’re going via satellite – it may sound grand but its entirely commonplace in Japan’s gadget hungry populace. Typing in the destination by place name or telephone directory listing creates a route automatically with ETA checkpoints, busy road warnings, traffic light status and vocal proximity announcements – startrecking!

Some 2 hours later and we pass through Sendai cities toll gate, but the drive shaft on the front wheels pops out of place producing a grating grinding sound – not to worry, the space wagon is 4×4 so we keep on truckin! Later taken to a Nissan garage to get the front drive shaft disabled.

We ate cow tongue while watching the snow outside, saw me off and I’m alone once again – with a mountain of stuff standing outside a bus station. Wonder to my self when I’ll finally get settled! This transient life is never ending and soon I’ll be at Narita airport hoping my plane would tidy up my life by crashing into a mountain! I always wondered why the majority of suicides in the UK are committed by 25 year old males… But no! Life is something to hold on to. I have no diseases, I’m not living on the streets and I have found a new direction in life. Although that direction is against the clock now, Brighton beckons me & Sayuki, lets hope I can get a decent job on arrival!

Time to leave Japan again (the 4th time!) I’ll come back soon when I have my life sorted in the UK. shed a tear and close my book, my work here is done – I had fun!

scary bus

Awoke under Kotatsu with my legs thoroughly roasted. Didn’t wake up the other guys around the table as they were probably too drunk to understand where they were anyhow! But I did turn off the Kotatsu so they didn’t roast to death. We snuck out of the front of the house and out on to ‘a road’… right quite lost now, must find the main road, probably the biggest problem in Japan is the way roads are laid out or rather the way they are sign posted.

Finally made it back to Yuki’s house and got cleaned up, fell asleep under another Kotatsu until late into the afternoon then continued on wards back to Tokyo, as our final destination is a town some 8 hours by bus. My girlfriend locked her keys inside her bag somehow, so we had that to contend with – plus the fact that we were lugging 4 huge bags on wheels!

After wisely going to the huge coin lockers in Shinjuku station we could continue our separate paths. Me to buy a nice digital camera for my friend (with my friends money, which I could have used for numerous activities) while my girlfriend went off to collect the tickets for our bus journey. Theres some fucking fantastic cameras about at the moment but all of them were just out of my reach. I did however manage to pick up a Nikon Coolpix 2500 with a 64mb card within my budget (only just), it runs in English and has a real zoom factor of x3 plus a footprint of 2.0 mega pixels… those specs may seem wonderfull but are just a drop in the ocean over here – most new cameras are tiny little toys but take a footprint of 4.0 mega pixels, and have an operating system to rival most PCs!

The bus we travelled on was rather odd. As long as a National Express but instead of the usual 2 seats on each side that don’t recline very much this bus has rows of 3 seats one on each side and one in the middle and they recline fully (to crush the knees of the person behind).

Lights off, front window curtains down, total darkness.

Karaoke!

Not slept a wink since I left Cornwall on Thursday evening, really starting to show; from the stale sweat clinging to my balls, I am a mess! (I’ll continue to mix past and present tenses thank you very much) Hung around in Narita airport for a bit while my girlfriends flight fell out of the sky.
This really felt odd, like I wasn’t in Japan at all, it was my fourth time to arrive at Narita and somehow the clear vinyl wipe clean surface image I have of Japan is in need of a clean.

To my amazement I was able to speak Japanese ‘fresh from the bag’! Seeing how I didn’t really try to learn ever, not even while I lived in Tokyo for a year and even the six months I’ve spent doing practically nothing, it shocked me when the words flew outta my mouth! So I started talking at any opportunity until the Japanese bird fell from the sky and we started conversing in Englo Lingo. Always ironic, story of life one must belive.

A good six hours laters later and we had jumped the train out past Tokyo to the land of Karaoke & sex pubs, Kanagawa!

Met up with our old friend called Yuki and her brother at their nicely situated house, between SagamiOno and Machida… plenty of Convini (convenience stores), FamiRa (family restaurants) and KaraokeYa (foolish places to sing). By this time I was almost dead! My body had practically given up so when we had to spend another 5 hours waiting for Yuki’s New Zealander boyfriend to finish work (so we could all go to Karaoke together) I just went into a deep trance like sleep in the middle of a FamiRa. Possibly shouting, mumbling, dribbling and getting spontaneous erections within this trance, its always funny to wake up in a packed restaurant feeling highly self conscious.

Eventually the time came when we could depart, bound for Karaoke and the possibility of meeting some new faces. We drank, sang, drank, sang, drank and used about 3000 yen a piece – thats about 15 GBP – for the 4 hours or so of utter joy! Karaoke could never work in a western country, well not in the way it does over here. (click here for information on Karaoke).
We descended on a convini at about 6am buying up stocks of beer and food to be consumed at a Malaysian mans house, he is the boss of this New Zealander… we all fall asleep in front of the telly with our legs under Kotatsu (under heated table).

Japan bound

After the insanely boring bus journey from Cornwall to London Heathrow, arriving at 5am, I sat and tried to stay awake the long 8 hours before my flight departed. As it was the day after Boxing Day there wasn’t the usual travel options to hand. The bus journey was in some ways better than travelling by train, as I would have. The major downside to all travel is that I can’t sleep a wink!

When flight check in time eventually came I wondered over to Terminal2 and right into the most shite system I’ve ever had the misfortune to be controlled by! Virgin had taken all the destinations and flight numbers out of the millions of check in points held to the virgin empire and instead manned four or five said points with the objective of checking in any passenger for any flight within the day!

Needless to say, the queue grew to gargantuan proportions spilling into other and out of their own slices of ground to sky domination.

Thirty minutes before my flight and two hours into resting a book upon my vaguely moving trolley, I was checked in. ‘oh you better hurry’ was the information uttered by my check in attendant seemingly oblivious to the fact that their incompetence was causing that days entire flight schedule to be grounded… the check in point next to me left a customer waiting while he casually wondered off returning some ten minutes later, two coffees in hand.

On my tickets it says ‘doors are locked 30 minutes before take off’.

My flight left in approximately twenty minutes, I still hadn’t been through the fake gold watch detector, my luggage still un scanned for sex toys, dead animals and explosive lighters.

Sod it! I bought time by running the 300 meters to the gate, as I just wasted another 10 minutes buying tacky London souvenirs to pay off my girlfriends family in Japan. As I got to the gate, and produced my boarding pass, the flight attendant asked me if I could speak any Japanese. ‘Can you announce a final boarding message for us? In Japanese?’ – I didn’t have much of a clue how to go about it so I declined, although on contemplation I could have done it.

Found my tiny seat on this new Virgin skybus sitting next to probably the most hated breed on earth (for myself); a female Japanese artist studying in London… so at least I didn’t have to talk very much! The entire contents of the seat sack… what can I call that place pushing into my legs laden with stuff? Anyhow, the entire contents of that place was covered in molten chewing gum. Given the opportunity to move I declined as sitting in the center of the place just ain’t my thing man. One vastly redeeming factor was the v.port system that was embedded within the back of each seat! Everyone could watch movies on demand… very cool. (the whole system ran on linux and crashed countless times, a right botch up. Half of the screens were in linux dos for the entire journey.)

As the speedy flight was drawing to a close, I treated myself to a trip to the toilet. Fantastic spaces, these new Virgin toilets on both their planes and trains… certainly enough room for mile-high club antics! It was rather dark inside but I could make out some graffiti scrawled into the plastic walls; ‘Virgin staff stole from me’ it said. Make up your own mind as to what that might mean!

burnt finger

Wednesday and the last day of christmas shopping, at Truro.
Although I didn’t go to Truro for that reason, I was there on bussiness! After spending all night and morning finishing off the final samples for flyin times new site.

When I got to Truro after much wrangling in a town called Liskeard (some 40 miles away) unfortunatly the people who were meant to see the site in flyin time’s main outlet shop were… not home. No problem, many more things to do. Met up with a cool programmer guy who gave team dadako some work for a disability standards compliant site.

Got very drunk. Noticed how many of my friends drive when they are drunk (slightly worrying)

As I was talking to some friends of mine in a bar, my eyes suddenly rolled in the back of my head and lapsed into a much needed deep sleep. They huffed and they puffed but could not reawaken me! Eventually Damon (you’re rumbled!) took his lighter and proceeded to try and cook my finger in an attempt to rouse me!

Dazed and confused, I rose. There after I continued in my misshaps, falling asleap while waiting for my train, again on the train… like that till I arrived at my door.

oh fuck! christmas is coming! look out

beer! kababs! Gin!

On friday myself and my sister went to see our grandmother for her 32nd birthday! She’s still alive and kicking, and was very pleased to see us.
The journey back homer took us through St.Austell, where I stayed to see my good friend gary. A few other people were at his house, I was even introduced to someone by name… but I didn’t have a clue who he was until told his old quake handle! We all went down to the pub for some beers. Pubs in St.austell are fairly dire.

After meeting tons of people I used to know (and hang out with some years back) we all decided that it might be a laugh to go and visit the local nightclub. It was empty, not a suprise. Had a good time dancing anyhow, to music that sounded like it was being played in the house next door. Ate a kabab, felt highly sick.

Went back with friends to a friends house where we drank Gin all night, chatted a fair amount and played playstation. Felt like I had never left Cornwall, for a few seconds.

Well I haven’t been that drunk for a long time, and it felt very good!

friday the 13th!

spooky!

I shall be travelling to Falmouth today, I’ve not been there for years and years. In fact the last time I went, I saw some breakdancers down at the Pirate, maybe a visit to there is on the cards again.

exersise

I’ve been doing kendo exersises for a few years now, not that I do kendo however.
And I do it so that I can sit at the computer longer without getting cramps, it can also give you that get up and go on cold days. My sisters flatmate was looking to give up smoking by fasting as a detox. Then it hit me, I’ve been self fasting for years by total accident.
I sit usually go untill the last possible second until eating. That combinded with the exersises puts me in a perfect position to give up smoking again! (I gave up for two years, but started again three years ago in japan)

Smoking IS bad for ones health, but as a good friend said, its not bad for your soul. We are just walking lumps of meat after all, some of us infect that meat, others less so.

Should I give up smoking? Would it really change anything?

Nah fuck it. I enjoy to smoke. I can be the smoking ninja computer man… thin as a rake. But, healthy. Is it possible to be healthy and smoke?

Well I’m a living experiment.

Cornwall

did a few days work at Victoria Real last week after a nice little interview the other friday… they are nice guys. I hope they’ll be getting me in to do some more projects soon.

I’ve been spending an ugly amount of my time on the computer, fixing websites, making a game with headstate, looking for more work (oh the joys of freelancing!) and basically living in a house with my who family for the first time in 10 years!

Things will get slightly worse before they get better is my bet. Need a house asap. Somewhere to be alone, somewhere to do my work. Brighton was the destination, but I may try to pick up a few nice teleworking contracts and rent a place down here in Cornwall, to chill and save money. Also to get my fiancee over from japan, which is important, without a house… ‘am DOOMED!

Bungled attempt!

I decided to take a lift with my mother in her rented car to Bristol, on her way upto Yorkshire to do the things she has to do. (shes a landlady, but usually lives in south Africa!)
After trying to find my friend Adam we gave up for being totally lost. We were given directions from junction 16 on the m5 but told to come off at junction 19 mistakenly… so I told my mother to continue on her journey and I would find my way on foot. Adam has done quite well for himself working as a chef, recruited by an old school friend of ours.

Adam and myself drank the night away, then decided to take the last train back to the station closest to his house. This is where we broke our first bottle of san miguel beer, as Adam put his bag on the ground too swiftly. We later bought another two bottles off beer to take with us but it would end up that these beers were in danger too.

When we left the train it was quite late, being wise to the ways of Bristol we delayed our exit from the station just incase someone tried to try something on. As it happens we were very cautious but still got caught out… we let the two previous brothers walk to the end of the path, although I wouldn’t call them brothers, they spoke of a different regional accent, and then descended the stairs as the coast was clear, but two guys who obviously were brothers (by brothers Bristol people mean to say black people who will mug you) walked just a little too close, on the this dark station path, and grabbed me by the arms. I wriggled free while they kept on trying to trip me up by kicking me in the leg (?), I did fall over in the end and cut my arm, then Adam was picked on as I ran to a relative distance of safety, the two guys chased him about a metre as Adam ran into a shopping trolley! His two bottles of beer became ammunition at this point and he lugged them smashing on the floor in front of the two bungled muggers. We were both able to escape without much damage.

On the journey home through the maze of streets that is Bristol, we, too drunk to do anything but run off, tried to reason why we were picked on and how they bungled what must have been their first ever attempt at mugging. They didn’t have any weapon to speak of, no motive, and Adam is quite stocky, whereas I’m 192cm tall. We see it as waste of time on their part and ours. The problem was mostly that Bristol is shite and I’d never think of living there, hell London was enough, I’m totally passive when drunk, and would rather live in more passive surroundings – like Brighton.