A Word About Fisticuffs

As many of you are aware, as a writer and artist I feel it is my duty - expanding my creative reference base - to watch human beings and to see how they do things; how they behave.

As a supply teacher I often see children at their best and worst, lighting up a room with sharp insight or witty repartee; or lighting up a cigarette in the room and then trying to weasle out of it by telling me they can't smell smoke when their hand is on fire. (True story. Had it happen. Wish I'd got pictures.)

I can understand people fighting over many many things: religion, race, territory, the hot redhead at the bar, etc etc. These are all pretty primal, human urges.

I'm not much into violence, though as several of the LARPers noted during my experimental stint in LURPS at uni, I swing a pretty mean latex-and-foam-rubber-coated blade. I'm a thinker, a talker. I'm sure I'm supposed to add "a lover" to that, but I can't think where that reference has popped into my head from. Of course, even I have been prone to such primal savagery: after my breakdown I was very much into smacking inanimate objects with my fists in order to make myself feel better.

In Chicago's this evening there was a fight. It was quite a big one actually. I missed what started it, but it was the kind of fight where two people argue, one pushes the other, the other stumbles into someone who turns round and joins in, pushing back, and it just escalates from there.

I didn't get involved, but sadly I was stood very close. Close enough, in fact, to get an elbow in the small of my back as somebody flew my way. Unsurprisingly this hurt like hell. Not just because I'd been elbowed, hard, but of course as Sod's Law would have it, they managed to catch me right at the place where my back is screwed up.

I spent the rest of the evening probably looking very sullen and angry and irritated, which is how I always look when I'm trying to disguise the fact my back hurts like hell. Even now, sitting down 3 hours or so later, its still twinging away and it pisses me off.

What the hell was so important that two people felt the need to fight over in a bar on a saturday night out? A spilt drink? Accidentally treading on someone's foot? What ludicrously petty thing could possibly have sparked such a fracas? Whatever happened to just going out and relaxing and unwinding, listening to some music, having a dance?

I mean sure, I can sit on my high horse and tell people that they should probably drink less and have more fun, especially in light of seeing how drink can be pretty destructive to people you care about, but I need to drink less myself so I'm probably a big hypocrit either way.

Tangental blog much?!

So yes, fighting. I don't like it. I've had a year 7 kid try and beat me up - did I write a blog about that one a while back? Might have done! - and that was laughable. I've seen kids of all ages try and beat each other up for fun! And I've seen grown men of thirty or so hitting each other in the face in a bar for something like knocking someone's drink over.

I mean yeah, having someone spill Stella down your shirt is annoying as hell - especially if, like me, the smell of the stuff makes you wanna stick lit matches up your nostrils - but is that really any reason to give someone a black eye?! Whatever happened to a gentlemanly "Sorry mate, lemme buy you a drink to make up for it?"

Or am I just living in my own little fantasy world?

Errr.... ignore the part of me that's, y'know, a fantasy writer, when thinking about answering that question...

Data Disaster

I had this blog all planned. It was going to be a happy, shining blog, reminiscing about the evolution of television from the mid-90s. This would have perhaps shown my age, and how I’ve dated as badly as a mobile phone in a music video, but I wouldn’t have cared. Mid-90s TV formed the foundation of who I am today!

But alas this is not to be, as other stuff happened before I got to write it. Let me explain.

I’m sure any of you that use computers as much as I do run out of space eventually. Hard disks can only store so much data, and they start to slow down — or “chug” — the closer to capacity they come. Now while TV show release dates ARE changing so that the UK is getting new series closer to their US releases, I still prefer to watch the shows I like straight away. So I download them. I also tend to watch them when they finally do air on British TV. I also tend to buy the box sets (the collector’s 5-series DVD set of Andromeda is sat right behind me, for example. Yes, I plan on watching it in a marathon of poor special FX and Kevin Sorbo-ness.) This is my thinly veiled defence against “zomg he is pirate! Yarrr!” or something.

Some of these TV shows I like to store to watch again and again until the DVDs are released. Things like the Dresden Files pilot episode, which — at approx 2 hours long — was very cool, but not out on DVD and only available in the US on Sci-Fi. I watch it now and again to remind myself what it is about the series (and the books) that I love so much. But it’s over 1gig worth of file. These all add up. So I store all this kind of stuff on an external HD to save myself from a chugging computer fate.

All was going fine with this plan, but now DISASTER has struck.

I have a very simple, 250gig external HD, which I’ve used to back up pretty much everything from the last 7 years or so. In fact, when my sister was moving out, and I was having the big overhaul/tidyup, I actually went through many of my old backup CDs and tried to consolidate the data I have onto the external HD. And now, via an application of Sod’s Law, the external HD has decided to screw up. Connecting it in Windows makes explorer hang. Trying to access anything on it makes explorer hang. Interacting with it in any way (except one, more on this in a moment)...you guessed it... makes explorer hang.

There is 232 gig worth of data on this drive. Granted more than a bit of it is TV programmes that I haven’t deleted yet (I’ve got the DVDs now). Some of it is Anime. Some of it is Doctor Who. I think some of it may have been the Sarah Connor Chronicles actually. Either way, a huge chunk of it is TV and I would in no way miss any of this stuff – well, apart from House S4, but that’s out on DVD this month so that’s fine.

What I will miss, if I can’t retrieve it, is photos, work, silly things that — retrospectively — I should have backed up elsewhere instead. I never even thought about it. That annoying “What if the external HD fucks up?” question. I certainly didn’t expect to have any problems with it only 6 months after I bought it, but considering my run of luck with external storage devices, I should have known better. The sad fact is that, while I have plenty of copies of a lot of the older stuff knocking around on CD — I didn’t throw ALL of them away in the clear out — there’s a lot of stuff that I simply don’t have backed up elsewhere. This IS my backup device, after all. It was a purchase designed to ensure I didn’t have to spend hours backing stuff up onto DVD.

But now it seems I may pay for that error of judgement with the loss of a considerable number of irreplaceable items. This makes me a very sad panda.

This is not to say all hope is lost, however. I currently have a programme scanning every single sector of the drive in the hopes of retrieving as much of my data as possible. I started this scan at 6:05am on 9th August 2008, and at 2:22pm on the 10th August 2008 as I write this very sentence, the scan is 39% done. It’s a slow one, and I live in fear of a powercut, or the cable to fall out, or something that will cause me to have to start the whole process all over again.

I’ve pondered if it’s worth it. How much of the crap on that drive do I ever actually look at?! But that isn’t the point, really, is it. Because I know that as soon as I give up on attempting to retrieve this data, then I’ll need some of it. This, really, is the problem with the digital era. Nothing exists “for real” until you make it real. Photos are a collection of pixels until you print them out.

A big chunk of the backed up stuff — probably 5% or so — is PSD files. My artwork, in the many stages of work-in-progress. I save all of those just in case I want to go back and change things, or steal elements for another painting, or use portions of them for something in web design. There’s several gigs worth of these, as PSD files are pretty damned hefty, that I don’t have backed up elsewhere. I COULD have burned them to DVD, but I didn’t. I relied on one device.

Never again! It seems I will have to add even further to the clutter that is my workspace by adding a second external backup drive to the mix. A smaller, more robust one, for critical backups of stuff. I may also need to add a third HD into my PC itself. All to ensure that, if I have critical data, if I do manage to recover the stuff that is important to me from this buggered HD, then I’ll have multiple copies of it just in case another Data Disaster happens again.

Let this be a lesson to me, and to you too!