Accidentally found ourselves locked out of our house today, which wasn't quite the way I had hoped to add excitement to my day. Fortunately, Stratford is the sort of area where nobody bats an eyelid at somebody breaking in to a house through the front door. Unfortunately, Stratford is the sort of area where nobody bats an eyelid at somebody breaking in to a house through the front door.

This morning's film offering is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Try to plug in USB device, the plug is the wrong side up.
Turn the thing over, the plug is the wrong side up.
Turn the plug back over again, it now fits.

Can't sleep, so watched Drive Angry with Martin and Christina instead of doing what any normal person would do. Even while in the grips of sleep deprived wobbliness, Drive Angry is not a great film. The good thing, however, is that it's got Nicolas Cage in it so, while it might be a great film, you're always likely to have a bit of a giggle because... well, it's Nicolas Cage. You've got to laugh.

The trouble is that it's a Nicolas Cage film, but what gets you through it isn't the promise of Mr Cage, but instead the hope that William Fichtner's character will make another appearance. This is a truly shocking state of affairs for a film which basically sells itself as "watch Nicolas Cage drive cars, shoot people and demand to know the whereabouts of a family member get through a day in his life".

Yesterday afternoon, in a fit of fuck-my-hair-it's-annoying, I shaved it off. I've had my head shaved before, but this is the first time I've actually done it myself, in front of a bathroom mirror. There's something a bit odd about doing it; after you've started, you think "maybe I could stop", ending up with some sort of an undercut, or maybe a mohican, or so on.

Then you hit a point of no return. You realise that you can't go back and that you probably can't even cobble together some kind of wig out of the hair that's discarded on the floor around you. If you're like me, you'll also probably begin to get a bit concerned about the amount of hair that's on the floor while you still seem to have so much hair left on your head.

But now it's all gone. At the same time, because, hey, I had my shaving gubbins out, I also trimmed off my facial hair. My facial hair usually takes a notoriously long time to grow, so I figure I'll race it against the thick mop of hair that'll inevitably burst out from my scalp over the next week. Which will win? Which will grow to half an inch first? Will "Team Moustache and Beard" beat out "Team Top-of-Head"?

In other (gaming) news; Skullgirls is hard, I'm still waiting for Guild Wars 2 to come out and Skullgirls is hard.

While I'm going through a bout of the "terminally shy, oh god", Martin and I decided to indulge in some basement gaming, as the gaming table we'd lovingly cobbled together out of MDF, foam and an old folding table I had going spare hasn't seen much use recently. If you can ignore the low ceiling (which is high enough that I can sort of stand up), it's quite nice, especially during the summer where it offers cool respite from sticky London summers.

The heavy rains we've had, however, seems to have stretched the abilities of the pump that prevents the place from flooding. Fortunately, it's not a huge amount of flooding, just a thin layer of water across a large patch, but it's still not great news for the contents of the basement. Over the next couple of days, I'll go down there and see what things of mine have become waterlogged, so I might need to be disposing of some things, which is a bit of a shame. On the other hand, there's stuff in boxes down there that has remained in those boxes for over a year now, which is probably a good indicator that it's stuff I don't really need.

As for the basement gaming? I won both games. Go me. Both of us were actually trying to get some practice in for an upcoming league at the FLGS, so I feel quietly confident that I'll do well in the first month at least, but I know that Martin's list will cause me problems later on.

Well, the beta doesn't start until seven o'clock on Friday evening (I'd say it's like my birthday has come early this year, but the two dates coincide perfectly), but I've already got a criticism of the new Guild Wars 2 downloader they're using - it looks like you have to leave it running to completion, and it's a very large download. I've no doubt I'll get it all downloaded eventually, it's just a bit problematic to have to do it all in one go. First world problems, eh?

( In the late summer of 250, Holdwaxed struck down the human Ebpel Splattereddye with a giant cave spider silk sock in Muncheddates. )

Edit: New note to self - DO NOT RAISE GOBLIN WERE-ELKS FROM THE DEAD.

I swear this cold is out to get me. I'd say that a over a week is far too long for gunk to be coming out of your nose, but once you've got the past the initial giggle-worthiness of "euw, my nose is some sort of gunk factory", any amount of time is far too long. Still, it's better than it was and, while I spectacularly failed to make it out to the London Changeling game, I did make it to the shop. Chalk one up for the good consumers guys.

Following the usual cycle, I am once again thoroughly addicted to World of Tanks, which is a free multiplayer game where you drive tanks around and shoot, often ineffectually, at other tanks. Like most online games, there is a lot of "grinding", as you need experience points and credits in order to buy bigger tanks but, fortunately, the actual gameplay is fun enough that it doesn't really feel like much of a grind. Since they've introduced a little achievement which ranks you based on the average experience points you've earned in your tanks, I've become a tiny bit competitive - I recently hit the top 1% of T-34-85 players (again, calculated by average experience per battle in that tank) and, after the initial jubilation wore off, I began to worry. How easy would it be to slip back in to the top 5% bracket? Using that tank has gone from "whee, this is a joy" to "oh-god-please-don't-let-me-die-before-I-get-any-kills-myself-don't-you-dare-shoot-me-ohgodmytankisonfirenononoNO!".

Despite all my efforts, my statistics aren't that great. My roughly equal number of victories and losses suggest I'm not exactly an asset to my team, while my 17% rate of surviving a game until the end clearly indicates my superb ability to catch incoming shells that might otherwise hurt the better players. I guess that makes me a team player.