The impending meh

Not even the lecturers are entirely sure what’s coming in the near future. Rumours speak of exams and assignments, but these only shimmer into tangibility a day or two before their deadline. Legend has it that after the month-long Easter holiday – a break that seems unnervingly long already – we will be bogged down with all of two hours’ lectures a week. Two. Our practical workshop, ending tomorrow, was the most time-consuming part of the work week. With that gone and nothing else in sight to fill the void, what then?

It can’t be true. I feel like I should be standing on a street corner with a sandwich board, hollering about the approaching mass of ‘un-stuff’. The terrible, terrible reason for this is simple: it may well click in your head naturally, like an unknown but polite dinner guest allowing himself into your home with a genial smile. After a few minutes, though, this guest will rip off his entire tuxedo along a single velcro stream, streaking through your once-respectable domicile, rearranging your furniture and mixing up your DVD collection. Only then will you realise the true horror that your casual open-mindedness has wrought upon your once content mind.

A job. I would have to get one of those disgusting things; the kryptonite of students, symbolic of everything a pure-blooded baked-bean connoisseur works (slowly) against. If only to fill the great bottomless pit of shrugs, I soon may need to throw together one of these ‘Calculum Bidet’ things I hear people speak of, and start showing it to prospective employers. What an unpleasant experience that sounds like.

The nerd, the thief, their friend and her lover

As a production team, you’re expected to do a little hard work if you want good results. Some would go so far as to buy small props, or arrange out-of-bounds locations for the three poultry hours in which we are expected to film a respectable short. Overall, though, keeping things simple minimises the margin for unforeseeable catastrophe – as does making as few waves as possible with the staff who have to put up with your presence.

My team and I are going to steal a fridge under cover of night, sneak it into our booked location and cover it in tin foil to make a time machine. Mr palm, meet my friend Mr Face. Despite other teams’ insistence on following the actual rules of assessment, we take each new week as an opportunity to do whatever the hell we want and string together some half-baked connection to the original guideline.

Oh, yeah – and I also eat nothing but french bread and Utterly Butterly now. I’d recommend it.

The best time of my life

It is an unreservedly beautiful day. The sun followed Aberystwyth down an alleyway before kicking its face in, with a boot made of sunshine, then stealing its life savings of morbidness – and finally leaving it bleeding its misery from several stab wounds. Of happiness.

Wow, that was more morbid than anything; my point is that life is amazing. Over the last few days everything has changed about your faithful Insider, dear reader. I finally came to terms with just how great it is being an unemployed, alcoholic hobo when you’re expected to be. I’ve spent too long sitting in my room; I’m taking every opportunity and having no regrets. Maybe the best kind of happiness isn’t simple; it takes hard work, and knowing exactly what you want… Well I know what I want, damn it. I also know that there’s a very good chance I’ll never get it, but who knows? Perhaps, in great British fashion, I will have to be content with failure. Second place. I’m not going to regret anything, though, and I’ll make damn sure I do every stupid thing my brain tells me to. It knows its stuff.

Yes, I am aware that I just wrote an entire paragraph of inspirational bumf – most of which doesn’t make much sense, considering my usual demeanour. Even worse, that’s actually how I feel. But enough about me; what in the hell are you doing inside at a time like this? Grab a book! Meet up with some friends! Go for a walk!

I am tired

Jest if you must, but I’ve done far too much work over the last few days. Since my media production team and I cycle roles (director, writer, etc) each week, the time inevitably came when the rest of that lot would look to me for what to do. Our previous films have all been consistently good; mixing things up with slapstick humour or artsy poignancy… but always of a high standard, heralding character development and plot progression as the most important aspects to engage the viewer.

My turn! Let’s get some guns, teleporting vigilantes and Matrix-style fighting! Hell yeah!

In my defence, I spent the entire pre-filming weekend buying props, choreographing the fight and preparing everything. So what if I gaily kicked subtlety out of the window? The final piece looks pretty damned cool, I must say. It is of student film quality, yes, but plegh. It has guns. And teleporting. My inner child finds this prospect most agreeable, whilst my outer child is too busy rocking out to its ‘Voodoo People’ soundtrack. I know that directing – even under such a strict deadline – probably isn’t a patch on the kind of work that physics, or astrophysics… or maths… or astromaths students, have to do – but the sheer amount of things that can go wrong (balanced neatly with the amount of things that did go wrong) presents a sobering taste of the stressful things to come in the Media industry.

I’m also joining the skiing society tomorrow. It’s been three weeks since I emailed them asking if I could join, and they might be wondering where I am. I’ve put it off for too long; it’s time to get out there and engage in an extracurricular activity that doesn’t involve alcohol!

…Yet.

The Noise From the Street

The moon glides lazily across the sky, looking down upon deserted, orange-tinted streets. As a comforting warmth spills from scattered bedroom windows, distant laughter echoes and fades into the motionless night. The Student Village sleeps in peace, unperturbed by the ocean’s gentle voice whispering over the rooftops.

The driver stirs. Work has begun.

Its engine stirring into life, the vehicle’s rusted wheels creak in stifled agony as it hefts its weight around a corner, into the winding roads of Pentre Jane Morgan. The silence’s corruption is barely noticed. For now.

Peering around, the driver waits for the opportune moment. All must go according to plan. A single red light glares, unblinking, from the dashboard in silent anticipation. For the faintest moment, the driver’s teeth are bared to it in twisted agreement. Protruding slowly from the ink-black darkness, a finger connects with the glowing plastic… and pushes.

Out, from the top of the PJM ice-cream van, roars a cacophony of parps, toots and farts – an orchestra of mentally deficit instruments screaming with terrifying glee. Seriously, who in the hell can bend an ice-cream van through the student village roads on a nightly basis whilst somehow eluding the men in white coats? Joking aside, I hear it’s a profitable business – but can you, right now, think of a single other profession that would so unquestionably require either ‘paedophile’ or ‘murderer’ on the driver’s CV? There’s something inherently off-putting about ice-cream van songs at night that makes your DNA shiver. If it didn’t also unleash a surprisingly powerful desire for a mint Feast I’d have hidden under my friend’s bed until it went away.

Come to daddy

Xbox Live

You can’t get it in Trefloyne.

There you go. This point may, in some small way, help to influence next-year students’ choice in accommodation, should it be particularly important. Although private accommodation is free to receive Xbox Live in all its glory, there’s a whole mess of MS-DOS Matrix-hacking to figure it out on campus… and even then your connection could be like mine. I occasionally get a basic connection for a few minutes, but I flat-out cannot play games online. I can’t download updates, I can’t download demos or any official content… as far as I know, all I can do is upload stats to the web and download custom Guitar Hero tracks. These few abilities shut off for no reason after anything from one to two minutes.

If you’re still interested, you’ll need to open the ports yourself by visiting your personal firewall settings and requesting the following ports opened:

  • UDP 88
  • UDP 3074
  • TCP 3074
  • TCP 53
  • UDP 53

…For the description, be honest. I quite simply put ‘Xbox Live’ and they allowed it the next day. You still need to configure your computer to share your connection with your console, and for that I recommend a simple router. All of this, though, gets you very little if anything. I’d wait until private accommodation, when I could be certain of getting everything, if I was you.

Do not go to Carnage

Eventually, drinking loses its appeal. Heavy drinking, that is – going out for a quick few is all well and good, but last night I looked at my Carnage shirt and couldn’t bring myself to step out of the door with the sole intention of getting covered in felt tip and vomiting in a shop door. There’s a reason why many places have tried to ban it, and why for the first time ever riot police were seen outside the Union; the same Union where one man too drunk to get in was the (immature) entertainment of the night from one of the windows.

If you need any more incentive, I went to CK this evening, for the most glorious shopping spree of my student life. Knowing that my Carnage budget was still withdrawn on my debit card I walked from aisle to aisle grabbing absolutely every colourful and unhealthy thing I could see. I didn’t reach half of the amount that I had happily put aside for a single night of liver-melting fun.

Alright, I know I’m no saint. I challenge you to find a single man on this cold island who stays within the ‘expert-backed’ recommended alcohol intake… and then slap him. But, even though my flatmates insist that I should have gone, I’m still glad I opted out of this particular event.

Procrastination

When a work week gets too busy, you find yourself putting off laundry until the absolute last moment. Every guy probably has at least one disgusting, moth-eaten pair of boxers at the bottom of the pile that they leave until they have no other choice. To put how desperate my situation had become into perspective: I donned that very pair today.

Once you’ve thrown your pickled carcass into bed after a night out, you’ll often find yourself justifying complete lies about tomorrow’s morning lecture. Let’s get the following things clear here, brain:

  • You will not wake up in time for breakfast
  • You will not wake up in time for a shower
  • Deodorant is not a shower
  • Lots of deodorant isn’t a shower either, stop it already
  • Putting socks on the radiator doesn’t make them good for another day

They say that you’re far more conscious of yourself than others. That may well be true, but you should never rely on that fact – especially as you calmly stride to your seat in yesterday’s beer-stained shirt, being haunted by a mist of deodorant.

Skid marks

What do you do if you need muddy clothes for a film? You go outside with some clothes and muddy them up, of course. Not wanting to walk too far, I just stepped outside of my block and went behind some bushes… and, obviously, everyone I have ever met had to walk past – glancing briefly into the shrubbery to see me hunched over, frantically rubbing a pair of trousers against the ground like a thundering lunatic.

I have also decided to finally get off my backside and into some societies; the Walking Club, the Debating Society and the Assassin’s Guild. The latter is almost impossible to find out about – I had to ask around the Union’s back corridors for a contact email – but then, they wouldn’t be very good assassins if they showed up on Facebook. It would sort of defeat the purpose, really.

A Valentine’s poem

This Valentine’s to you, my friend
For all the evenings you would spend
To cheer me up through thick and thin
And get me smiling once again.
You never shout or criticise
Or mess around with other guys
I know you’re always at my side
From smoothest sail to troubled tide.
The fondest memories that I keep
Are watching as you fall asleep
To the best lover in all the land,
My one, my only – my left hand.

Happy Valentine’s Day!