One thing that has bothered me a great deal, for many years, is the average bloke's tendency to describe the slightest of sniffles as 'flu. I once had a colleague who repeatedly claimed to have "that 'flu-y cold-y thing that's going round", whether or not there was anything 'going round' at the time, and pretending to make light of it while simultaneously making a virtue of the fact that he'd struggled to come into work at all while so terribly unwell. The whole thing was a cynical and, frankly, predatory performance designed to garner sympathy from those female members of staff who could be relied upon to coo and fuss at the slightest hint of distress, and the most offensive thing about it was that it actually worked.
This morning, just as I sat down on my train into work, I received a text message from a colleague, telling me he wasn't going to come in because he'd woken up feeling "fluey", when he'd appeared perfectly healthy the day before. Also not helping the 'flu side of the story ring true was the fact that it was a well-composed and comparatively long text message.
Whenever I hear guys talking about have 'flu, I start getting a little snappy. In my four decades of life, I have had 'flu maybe four times (I've probably written about it here), and each time I was in no fit state to handle any kind of technology more advanced than a duvet. The first couple of times I was under my parents' roof, and I've had it twice since moving into my own home. I consider myself quite unlucky to have had it that often considering how rare it actually is, if one can see past the NHS scaremongering that is the 'flu jab which gets publicised around this time almost every year. 'Flu is no joke, but it can cause some pretty funny hallucinations while it's busy debilitating you utterly. It also has the (admittedly rare) potential to be fatal if it gets bad enough that you can't take care of yourself - I seem to remember hearing some years ago about one of my former teachers, living alone, and found near death with 'flu-related issues (dehydration amongst them) after being out of contact with friends for an unusual length of time. She pulled through because a concerned friend went to visit her, and happened to have keys to her home.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the proponents of "Manflu", even if they claim to be playing it up 'for a laugh'. I have no idea why so many guys claim to have 'flu when their ability to move around and string coherent sentences together proves otherwise. Is it somehow offensive to their macho pride that they have a cold? Do they believe themselves so healthy that it must surely be 'flu that their immune system is so valiantly fighting off that they're muddling along with a blocked nose?
Seriously, if you're unwell, that's fine... But call it what it is. Taking time off work is probably a very good idea, not least because you won't end up making your co-workers ill later on. A blocked and/or runny nose, sticky/sore throat and a headache are symptoms of that most virulent of plagues known as 'the common cold'. It's annoying, but it's not really debilitating, is it? See a doctor if you must but, unless it turns into an ear infection (which happened to me just about every time a few years ago) or a chest infection, it's very likely you'll be told simply to take some paracetamol, drink lots of water, and get plenty of rest.
Thursday, 26 November 2015
Saturday, 14 November 2015
Well, That Escalated Quickly
One thing I do try to do, as often as possible, with this blog is document my weird dreams and I've had a couple this week which would be outright disturbing on their own. Together, there's a sense of escalation, despite the fact that the first cast me as the 'victim', while I was the 'villain' in the second.
Since I've left it a few days before getting round to writing about the first, I don't remember much beyond the impression the dream left with me. Essentially, it boiled down to being kidnapped by a trio of eastern Europeans in a what seemed to be a small car. I was with a former colleague - someone I intensely disliked, so I've no idea why they'd have kidnapped the both of us - and, at one point, we seemed to come to a silent agreement to attempt an escape. The driver - someone else I believe I recognised, but don't remember who it was - turned round long enough to impress upon us what a painful mistake it would be as the two sitting in the back of the car with us (may have been a taxi... or some kind of many-seater people mover that simply felt claustrophobic under the circumstances) were rather more alert and dangerous than they might have appeared... and that they would reach their guns before we did.
We resigned ourselves to whatever fate awaited us, and I started thinking that there was lots of stuff in my cellphone that would be of great use to anyone attempting identity theft, and wondered if I'd be able to get it out of my pocket to delete the offending notes before they noticed. It did dimly occur to me that, if I could do that, I might be able to phone or text for help... but I woke up around that point.
Thursday night's dream is somewhat fresher in my memory, though the details are no less confused, to be honest. It seemed to begin with me playing a first-person shooter game, looking about the same quality as GoldenEye on the N64 (which is to say, a bit rubbish by today's standards) and spending quite some time laughing at the game's expense. At some point, though, this low-res, low-poly game blended into reality... or I stopped playing and moved elsewhere in the building I was in - the problem was I couldn't really be sure in the dream, partly because of the extreme nature of what I did next...
...For some reason, my girlfriend's family (including the dog, but it wasn't their actual dog as far as I can remember) had gathered together in a large-ish, glassed-off area in one room. It looked almost like a large shower cabinet as the glass didn't reach the floor or ceiling, so perhaps they were just checking out various parts of a large hotel apartment, and decided to see if they could all fit into the shower..? On a whim, I decided to chuck a grenade in with them.
I have no idea where the grenade game from, other than the game...
The next bit I remember was walking down a road heading back towards the scene of the crime, imagining what state the police and forensics teams would have found the room in - glass and human giblets littering the floor, part of a wall blown out, people in clean suits milling around taking samples of DNA, that kind of thing. I distinctly remember thinking I could get away unpunished... and that either my girlfriend wouldn't mind that I'd killed her family (and dog), or that I could at least get her to keep quiet about it. Weirdly, that's when reality started to trickle into the dream, and I realised there was no way I'd ever get away with it, one way or another, and that my girlfriend would never approve... So I decided to turn myself in to the police just before I woke up.
I wonder if that last part was a reaction to my utter disdain for that plot device most frequently used it detective TV shows, where the killer says "I had no choice but to kill that person" (sometimes almost being presented as a sympathetic character, for example, killing someone to protect a friend/lover)... Because, let's face it, whatever the situation, ending someone's life - whether one's own or someone else's - is not the only choice. Perhaps it's the intention to portray all killers as so divorced from reality that they can't see an alternative but, far too often, these characters are portrayed as everyday people up until they're revealed as the killer.
But what's worse than that, in those same TV shows where the killer committed murder (occasionally several) to 'protect' another person they supposedly care about, that person invariable shows disgust - as opposed to dismay - that this person they've supposedly known for ages would behave that way... and I don't believe for a moment that such a dramatic act could be utterly unprecedented.
Now I'm on this televisual digression, I'll mention that I've just started watching Mr. Robot... and have been very impressed so far, both with the story (even if it is a little derivative) and its presentation. The odd camera angles, the use of focus to represent the main character's state of mind and attention make it very interesting to watch without even paying attention to the story. The protagonist's warped morality and the internal dialogue - directed, amusingly, at an imaginary person who is the viewer - are compelling. I like the way his best friend and his shrink can both tell when his attention has drifted (presented briefly as a flashback or a more honest version of the conversation he's having) and snap him back to reality. The best friend also impressed me by striving to avoid being a damsel in distress, insisting that the protagonist let her succeed or fail on her own abilities, rather than step in to support her in the workplace.
Since I've left it a few days before getting round to writing about the first, I don't remember much beyond the impression the dream left with me. Essentially, it boiled down to being kidnapped by a trio of eastern Europeans in a what seemed to be a small car. I was with a former colleague - someone I intensely disliked, so I've no idea why they'd have kidnapped the both of us - and, at one point, we seemed to come to a silent agreement to attempt an escape. The driver - someone else I believe I recognised, but don't remember who it was - turned round long enough to impress upon us what a painful mistake it would be as the two sitting in the back of the car with us (may have been a taxi... or some kind of many-seater people mover that simply felt claustrophobic under the circumstances) were rather more alert and dangerous than they might have appeared... and that they would reach their guns before we did.
We resigned ourselves to whatever fate awaited us, and I started thinking that there was lots of stuff in my cellphone that would be of great use to anyone attempting identity theft, and wondered if I'd be able to get it out of my pocket to delete the offending notes before they noticed. It did dimly occur to me that, if I could do that, I might be able to phone or text for help... but I woke up around that point.
Thursday night's dream is somewhat fresher in my memory, though the details are no less confused, to be honest. It seemed to begin with me playing a first-person shooter game, looking about the same quality as GoldenEye on the N64 (which is to say, a bit rubbish by today's standards) and spending quite some time laughing at the game's expense. At some point, though, this low-res, low-poly game blended into reality... or I stopped playing and moved elsewhere in the building I was in - the problem was I couldn't really be sure in the dream, partly because of the extreme nature of what I did next...
...For some reason, my girlfriend's family (including the dog, but it wasn't their actual dog as far as I can remember) had gathered together in a large-ish, glassed-off area in one room. It looked almost like a large shower cabinet as the glass didn't reach the floor or ceiling, so perhaps they were just checking out various parts of a large hotel apartment, and decided to see if they could all fit into the shower..? On a whim, I decided to chuck a grenade in with them.
I have no idea where the grenade game from, other than the game...
The next bit I remember was walking down a road heading back towards the scene of the crime, imagining what state the police and forensics teams would have found the room in - glass and human giblets littering the floor, part of a wall blown out, people in clean suits milling around taking samples of DNA, that kind of thing. I distinctly remember thinking I could get away unpunished... and that either my girlfriend wouldn't mind that I'd killed her family (and dog), or that I could at least get her to keep quiet about it. Weirdly, that's when reality started to trickle into the dream, and I realised there was no way I'd ever get away with it, one way or another, and that my girlfriend would never approve... So I decided to turn myself in to the police just before I woke up.
I wonder if that last part was a reaction to my utter disdain for that plot device most frequently used it detective TV shows, where the killer says "I had no choice but to kill that person" (sometimes almost being presented as a sympathetic character, for example, killing someone to protect a friend/lover)... Because, let's face it, whatever the situation, ending someone's life - whether one's own or someone else's - is not the only choice. Perhaps it's the intention to portray all killers as so divorced from reality that they can't see an alternative but, far too often, these characters are portrayed as everyday people up until they're revealed as the killer.
But what's worse than that, in those same TV shows where the killer committed murder (occasionally several) to 'protect' another person they supposedly care about, that person invariable shows disgust - as opposed to dismay - that this person they've supposedly known for ages would behave that way... and I don't believe for a moment that such a dramatic act could be utterly unprecedented.
Now I'm on this televisual digression, I'll mention that I've just started watching Mr. Robot... and have been very impressed so far, both with the story (even if it is a little derivative) and its presentation. The odd camera angles, the use of focus to represent the main character's state of mind and attention make it very interesting to watch without even paying attention to the story. The protagonist's warped morality and the internal dialogue - directed, amusingly, at an imaginary person who is the viewer - are compelling. I like the way his best friend and his shrink can both tell when his attention has drifted (presented briefly as a flashback or a more honest version of the conversation he's having) and snap him back to reality. The best friend also impressed me by striving to avoid being a damsel in distress, insisting that the protagonist let her succeed or fail on her own abilities, rather than step in to support her in the workplace.
Sunday, 1 November 2015
The Fiction Dichotomy
It's been quite a while since I wrote anything significant about the books I was reading... that was probably the Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which took up far too many posts due to an excess of enthusiasm for a genre I'd never really tried reading before.
With Science Fiction, I'm on more familiar ground... Or so I thought, until I encountered Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. It starts out all nice and properly Sci-Fi, with a maverick space trader discovering an important artifact of a long-dead alien race, and with some families arriving on a reasonably human-compatible world having been shipped there to turn it into a halfway decent colony, only for things to go tits-up when a weird satanist convict happens upon some weird energy-virus-thing that gives him terrible powers. The writing throughout is compelling, and actually became quite unnerving as the antagonist tortured people to open them up for possession, and the internal electronic systems of various soldiers started to malfunction under this malign influence...
...but all that forced a disconnect from the story, when I found myself wondering "why is there Supernatural Horror in this Sci-Fi story?"
Because this isn't possession by some weird alien energy virus, as it's first thought... it's possession by the eternal souls of long-dead humans, given inexplicable powers. And it gets weirder than that.
I'm currently about three quarters through the second book in what's called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, and one of the primary antagonists by this point is Al Capone, the Prohibition era American gangster, assisted by the futuristic equivalent of Lady Gaga. It's very confusing to have this level of batshit insanity in a Science Fiction story, even one which seems to be trying to explore some measure of theology by focusing on the nature of the afterlife. Bad enough when the souls of real people from real history are described as returning from some kind of purgatory from which they have been enviously observing life for millennia... but now the first major antagonist has discovered the existence of ghosts as well.
Yet, while all this weirdness is making me question why I'm continuing to read such a bizarre mixture of genres, the quality of writing and characterisation is keeping me utterly hooked. I want to know what happens next, even though I genuinely dislike the story.
It also helps that some elements - such as the human augmentations, the 'affinity' links between people and bio-mechanical machines, not least the Voidhawks and Blackhawks - are very interesting and well-implemented, and the 'living spacecraft' idea has intrigued me since Farscape, if not the likes of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who... novels. It's also unusual for a Science Fiction novel to acknowledge how ridiculously difficult it would be for fleets of spacecraft to effect a planetary invasion from another solar system except where the planet is wholly undefended, and that a space battle would tend to last a number of minutes if planned and executed in any sensible way, rather than the way movies tend to do it. There are also several stories going on at once, as one would expect from a novel that spans several galaxies, with the Possessed progressing their grand agenda, as well as a few fighting against it or, at least, progressing their own personal agendas instead, as the living come to terms with the terrible concept of the afterlife as described by the Possessed and struggle to find a way to contain them and, eventually, fight back against them... With one of the alien races hinting that fighting may not be the answer at all.
The thing about reading for oneself, rather than watching a TV show or a movie, is that the experience becomes less vicarious because it's playing out directly in your head rather than in front of your eyes... This series, so far, has been hitting all the right notes, even with the more outlandish characters. Their behaviour is believable, given their circumstances (which is rarely true of television these days, let alone movies!), and the galaxy-spanning implications of all areas and types of conflict involved are quite palpable.
So I guess it's bravo, Mr Hamilton...
With Science Fiction, I'm on more familiar ground... Or so I thought, until I encountered Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. It starts out all nice and properly Sci-Fi, with a maverick space trader discovering an important artifact of a long-dead alien race, and with some families arriving on a reasonably human-compatible world having been shipped there to turn it into a halfway decent colony, only for things to go tits-up when a weird satanist convict happens upon some weird energy-virus-thing that gives him terrible powers. The writing throughout is compelling, and actually became quite unnerving as the antagonist tortured people to open them up for possession, and the internal electronic systems of various soldiers started to malfunction under this malign influence...
...but all that forced a disconnect from the story, when I found myself wondering "why is there Supernatural Horror in this Sci-Fi story?"
Because this isn't possession by some weird alien energy virus, as it's first thought... it's possession by the eternal souls of long-dead humans, given inexplicable powers. And it gets weirder than that.
I'm currently about three quarters through the second book in what's called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, and one of the primary antagonists by this point is Al Capone, the Prohibition era American gangster, assisted by the futuristic equivalent of Lady Gaga. It's very confusing to have this level of batshit insanity in a Science Fiction story, even one which seems to be trying to explore some measure of theology by focusing on the nature of the afterlife. Bad enough when the souls of real people from real history are described as returning from some kind of purgatory from which they have been enviously observing life for millennia... but now the first major antagonist has discovered the existence of ghosts as well.
Yet, while all this weirdness is making me question why I'm continuing to read such a bizarre mixture of genres, the quality of writing and characterisation is keeping me utterly hooked. I want to know what happens next, even though I genuinely dislike the story.
It also helps that some elements - such as the human augmentations, the 'affinity' links between people and bio-mechanical machines, not least the Voidhawks and Blackhawks - are very interesting and well-implemented, and the 'living spacecraft' idea has intrigued me since Farscape, if not the likes of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who... novels. It's also unusual for a Science Fiction novel to acknowledge how ridiculously difficult it would be for fleets of spacecraft to effect a planetary invasion from another solar system except where the planet is wholly undefended, and that a space battle would tend to last a number of minutes if planned and executed in any sensible way, rather than the way movies tend to do it. There are also several stories going on at once, as one would expect from a novel that spans several galaxies, with the Possessed progressing their grand agenda, as well as a few fighting against it or, at least, progressing their own personal agendas instead, as the living come to terms with the terrible concept of the afterlife as described by the Possessed and struggle to find a way to contain them and, eventually, fight back against them... With one of the alien races hinting that fighting may not be the answer at all.
The thing about reading for oneself, rather than watching a TV show or a movie, is that the experience becomes less vicarious because it's playing out directly in your head rather than in front of your eyes... This series, so far, has been hitting all the right notes, even with the more outlandish characters. Their behaviour is believable, given their circumstances (which is rarely true of television these days, let alone movies!), and the galaxy-spanning implications of all areas and types of conflict involved are quite palpable.
So I guess it's bravo, Mr Hamilton...
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