Mat Bowles

Goldeneye was a reason to actually buy an N64 thirteen years ago. I didn't, but a good friend did (my former boss). We spent hours playing that game. A bunch of us would regularly decamp to his house and spend the evening shooting each other in the back. I was crap at it. Really, really, crap at it.

Jennie is pretty much housebound for the next few weeks. My parents have wired me money for Xmas presents early, knowing that we'll have some cash flow issues. I bought a 2nd hand Wii with some of it as our old one is broken. This has proven to be a very good decision. Of the games we have, Worms has proven to be the most popular, we have a houseguest helping us out, so three/four player games are good.

We went into town today (her second time out of the house since the op, her first not in a car for the whole time), and thanks to the staff at the excellent Ninja Games in town (nice store, shame about the website) we got a collection of cheap stuff. We also got a copy of Goldeneye for thirty quid.

I'm crap at it. Really, really, crap it it. It's great. The controls are going to take a lot to get used to, they've put a lot of thought into them and it's a very powerful interface. But, um, I'm not used to it yet. Despite being Goldeneye, it's got Daniel Craig voicing Bond and Dench as M. This Is Good.

The graphics and the game engine have both been updated, but it feels right. It feels like Goldeneye did sat on Lee's couch getting shot by Simon and Doug. In the back. Repeatedly. At least playing it single player I'm getting shot repeatedly by Russians.

We're taking a break from it at the moment, Alien Syndrome looked like a good buy for £3 if the objective is simple multiplayer games. And we got fed up dying as Bond.

But we'll be back to Goldeneye soon. I want to shoot Jennie with a Golden Gun.

So, I awoke this morning to hear Jennie crying in agony on the stairs from the attic room.

She'd been getting ready to go to work and had got some clothes from the attic drying racks. And slipped and fallen a few steps on the way down.

Normally, this sort of fall would merit a loud ow and possibly a minute or two to recover. Unfortunately, she has, for the last few weeks, had a cyst on one of her ovaries, that has been more than a little bit painful (for a definition of pain that us mere men simply cannot fathom, seriously, I don't know how she's been handling it).

The fall had caused the cyst to twist, turning the pain from very painful but livable to unbearable and causing her to scream in agony. An ambulance was called, she went to hospital. That was at about 1130.

They called in specialists, got a consultant to come in, and agreed operating today was both viable and necessary. Through a combination of keyhole surgery and more icky procedures, the cyst, which was walnut sized when diagnosed but had grown to bigger than tennis ball size by today, was cut up and removed.

Rather than waiting until February for the scheduled op, she's in hospital now sleepy quietly, and will be home either tomorrow or Tuesday. While she'll have the pain of a recovered operation, she'll be back on her feet by the end of the week and should be mostly recovered (but probably not well enough to return to work properly) by Christmas.

The pain will be over, and she can try to enjoy life a bit more. This is a Good Thing.

The Doctor did say that, given the rate of growth, they'd likely have had to bring the operation forward anyway, but it's done with now.

For those wondering why I've been mostly silent, with a side order of extreme crankiness in various online comment boxes, I've been more worried than a worried thing being worried (it was possible cancer at one point before formal diagnosis).

Tonight, I've had several glasses of whiskey, and am about to log off to play a bit of Plants Vs Zombies before trying to get some sleep.

Many thanks to all who've offered support &c, too much to take in today, but, y'know, she's going to be OK.

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comments on the original post on Dreamwidth. I'd prefer it if you comment there^[1] if you are able to keep the discussion together. [1] If you are reading this, you very likely have an OpenID.

Why is it, when you've got loads of stuff to do, there's loads of interest in the news and on t'telly, that your body throws a stinking headcold at you that doesn't affect your physical abilities at all but completely messes up your brain's ability to think?

I'm trying to put the finishing touches to a blog redesign for a friend who's actually going to pay me good, solid money. Can I concentrate on it for long enough to actually, y'know, type a line of code?

Can I buggery.

The Prime Minister has finally gone and called the General Election, so it's 4 weeks and 2 days until we all get to go to the polls (or not, according to preference), and after that the really interesting stuff starts. Can I get my head into the right space to write about it? Dinnae be daft.

I'm the election agent for three local council candidates as well as having my own campaign to run in the 4th local seat. Spent the best part of yesterday out delivering, have a new leaflet to write and send to the organiser. Except my brain won't concentrate for long enough. On top of that I have loads of volunteers to help organise (seriously, we've got more local volunteers than the Tories have, how cool is that?), but I can't even type their email addresses properly.

Still, at least I've managed to write a post for t'blog. There's a reasonable chance that this may continue. There's also a good chance I'll keep using Twitter a lot over the next few weeks; I've got a new phone with a decent internet access y'see.

So, anyone want to come to Yorkshire and help me get my brain working?

Apparently, if I stop posting here, people will start ringing me to check I'm ok, or wondering what I'm up to, or other similar things. This is especially true if I just, y'know, stop writing stuff and stop commenting elsewhere.

Well, I did. It started as a weekend break from t'internet in which I didn't even look at my email, then it turned into a few months where I simply scanned my email for important stuff, occasionally checked into Twitter, but otherwise didn't read any of my reading, friends or feed pages and simply turned off. Honestly? It's been good.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing. What I have been doing is enjoying life in many respects.

Learnt how to bake and cook

I've learnt, not just how to bake (which is quite easy), but also how to actually, y'know, properly cook. I am no longer scared by a recipe that requires I chop an onion. I know what a vichyssoise is (but not how to spell it), and have even made one. My carrot, cream and orange soup, adapted from Mary Berry's recipe, is quite simply gorgeous, and I successfully made baguettes yesterday.

I've been helping miss_s_b in the garden, in which we have potatoes, beetroot, oregano and even scented geraniums growing well. The newly planted garlic is already sprouting, so that'll be nice for next year.

Biggest bestest cake in the world

I've been spending time with amazing_holly, reading, playing games, cooking and having fun. I managed to get her to teach herself the basics of multiplication and division while baking a cake. I even, as a reward for her for sticking with learning to be good enough at Speed Racer to actually beat Mummy in a championship cooked, with her, the biggest bestest cake that Mister Mat has ever made! which has, somehow, now become the biggest bestest cake in the world. Well, she is 6. It was fun making it though, even if it was so big it had gone dry before we finished it.

But also? I've been playing games. A lot of games. For this you can mostly blame liadnan. Y'see, awhileback I had a catastrophic OS failure involving a critical Fx vulnerability and a dodgy porn site, and we gave up on fixing Windows and switched to Ubuntu for the main desktop. I had some problems getting a few things to work, and he pointed me at the wonder that is the world of Linux repositories. So I installed some, to see what I could find.

Open source, extendable games

Mostly, I found games. Open Source, extendable, games. Based on some wonderful classics like Elite, Civilisation, Sin City and similar. I will, I hope, write up the ones I enjoyed, just so I can have a record of them. I may even write up the ones I hated, to remind me not to install them again. In the meantime, I'm back. I've been reading, and even commenting on, most of my reading pages, and plan to completely reorganise them to keep my sanity in place.

In the meantime, enough about me, what've you guys been up to, have I missed much?

OK, miss_s_b cooked us a lovely veggie cottage pie this evening, with cheap garlic bread using a baguette from Tesco's bargain bin.

So I need to cook pudding after Shrub's gone to bed. I've done loads of steam puddings recently, as well as cookies, muffins, biscuits and bread variants (recipes might get posted on request, I still have the bread recipe in drafts somewhere). So...

Any suggestions?

Preferably not involving nuts (because I'm allergic) or chocolate (as Jennie's allergic). Stuff involving syrup or jam is an added bonus but not essential.

I knew, when I moved in with miss_s_b, that I was moving in with a massive SF geek. What I didn't realise at the time was the extent that I was moving in with two SF geeks, one of whom was 4 and will be 6 next month.

Today, we took her to see her first film in the cinema. Given she's watched every single episode of TOS and has the Animated Series in her pile of favourite DVDs, the choice was obvious and we figured there was a good chance she'd enjoy it.

We were slightly worried, as it's certificate 12A, which means kids only with an adult, but I did look it up on the rating site and the reasons given made it look like it was fine for her. It was—she had to hold Mummy's hands a few times and give her a hug when Mummy got upset and emotional, but, y'know, what are 5-year-olds for if not to look after their big soppy mother?

I'll spare you the acclamatory review. The casting was excellent, the characters were played perfectly, the whole establishment of the parallel universe thing was cool, the science was suitable crap and full of PSB, they made up at least two impossible plot devices, and I didn't want to kill Simon Pegg. Nimoy was cool, the girl playing Uhura was gorgeous (#29), and there were lots of big bangs and cool explosions.

They didn't destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, but came close—perhaps an actual Trekkie can explain to me why they built the HQ of Star Fleet, the most important institution in the galaxy, on the wrong side of a major fault line?

Anyway—go see, and if the kids like SF, take 'em, just be prepared to hold their hands a few times.

Her review? As the credits rolled:

Is it over? I don't want it to be over.

On the way to the car:

Me: What was the best bit Miss Holly?
amazing_holly: All of it.

She was genuinely upset that there wasn't more to see. Wrath of Khan with her soon then (we've got two copies of the DVD after all).

ETA: Jennie's write up is here.

On Monday evening. miss_s_b did, with a fair bit of help from Shrub and me, bake cupcakes. A sign that I'm getting naturalised is I'm now in the habit of calling them buns (mostly, admittedly, because Shrub gets confused otherwise). SB was in charge on Monday, because I'd not baked cakes for years (and years and years), and simply lack confidence in the kitchen.

It's not that I can't cook (granddad was a chef, I grew up around farms), more that, generally, I couldn't be arsed. But, y'know, I do enjoy cooking, so I'm trying to build my confidence up.

I learnt how not to do it

Anyway. I learnt lots on Monday. Specifically, I learnt how not to do it, and that, if in doubt, use less mix in the bun case, not more, which was SBs preference.

So, with us having eaten them all by this evening, I decided to cook some more up. Theoretically SB was going to be in the room with me making sure I didn't mess up, but that would've meant getting out of bed and that just wasn't going to happen.

I quartered the recipe

Given that we'd a) made far too many and b) they'd all overflowed the cases on Monday, we decided to quarter the recipe to make just 12 (ie one tins worth). So, from memory, I quartered the recipe.

Except that I mixed up the cake recipe and the bread recipe. So when I quartered a 800g of flour and weighed out 200g, I was actually measuring out the exact same amount of flour as we used on Monday.

Ah well. We now have a nice sponge cake as well as 126 cupcakes. I did cook 12, but, y'know, they were fresh and looked tempting. Shrub likes them too.

The sponge cake is still cooling, SB's made some buttercream icing to use as a filler, some of which is already on the buns.

Eat the mistakes

This cooking larks a lot easier than some people make it out to be y'know. As long as, y'know, you're prepared to eat the mistakes.

Nom nom nom.

I don't play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. I try to avoid buying too many computer games, especially new ones, as I know what I'm like. Up until now though, I had no idea that Jennie was, in actualy fact, worse than me in this regard as well. She's hidden it well.

Those of you that read miss_s_b or theyorkshergob might be wondering if her silence today is due to hangover or similar from her birthday yesterday. You might suspect she's recovering. Well, she is, sort of.

She's sat on the sofa. Playing Speed Racer on the Wii. She's been there pretty much non-stop except for food breaks. Since 4pm today. 9^1/2hrs and counting.

It's a fun game, with lots of little tricks to learn. But she's way way past the "I want to be able to teach shrublette how to play this" stage.

Doesn't bother me of course, I've been distracted for more than a few hours by Oolite since I started playing it in November. But I don't recall an 8 hour straight game. Meh, I've turned the TV volume down and crawled into bed, I have books to read and candles to read them by--if she doesn't come upstairs until the morning that's her call.

Visitors tomorrow, innerbrat and ms_ntropy are braving the Megabus from The Smoke. So she'll teach them how to play it tomorrow evening I've no doubt.

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I think the The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy answered this best back in 1992:

Although it's not exactly new. And possibly it's being replaced by t'internet. Which, y'know, given the events of this week, is probably a good thing. On that subject...

URL of the week:

http://change.gov/ (via)

I have a brief comment on the Obama election. It's a story about a man who captured the hopes of the nation, made an appeal for change, won an election by mobilising a massive coalition of disparate influence groups, uniting them for a common purpose who went on to win seats all over the country, including in places that were previously thought unwinnable for his party. A lawyer, he and his young family were a refreshing alternative to the tired right wing Govt that they voted out.

Mr President Elect Obama sir? If you turn into another fucking Tony Blair, the entire world will be very disappointed in you. I voted for that git, I supported that git. He broke his promises and let me down. Don't be a git sir, we're depending on you.

Domestic bliss?

This morning, miss_s_b did take young shrublette to school, then went into town and did some shopping in Tesco. She bought a loaf of bread, more classic Doctor Who poseable action figure (we're very close to getting the whole Robot now, yay!) and a big bag of five custard doughnuts. I then took her to work. At lunch today, I did eat one of the doughnuts and felt a bit guilty about it. This evening, I picked her up from work, we went to former Cllr Yates's house to get his name at the top of our petition, then I dropped her home so I could go back to her work to pick up her Dad and give him a lift home.

When I got home, I offered to make tea. Quoth she:

I'm not hungry actually. I've eaten all the doughnuts

She has as well, the greedy pig.

Next time she complains about putting on weight? Suggest she might like to stop eating all the doughnuts...

Love you darlin'

Um, somehow:

Which is a bit weird as I don't really do that much politics on here (well, actually everything I write about is political but that's because everything is political, especially if it involves more than one person). Also, um:

By more than one person, some of whom the feelings definitely mutual. Weird.

Nominations close tonight at midnight, mine are here, but I'm repeating them below so I can add links in for SB tomorrow, gotta go now, just got out of the bath and we're off to Leeds for susannah_banana DJing at the Wendy House and I'm late...

( My nominations are... )