Does Wales Have Cheese Mines?

“Far below the lush peat of the Welshlands, Collier’s cheese mines hide the finest cheddar of the United Kingdom. Hardy men come from all corners of the Commonwealth to tap the rich, golden veins of dairy treasure that are the pride of Wales. They dig deep into the earth for this creamy bounty, and we bring the product of their labour to you.

Powerful! Welsh cheddar.

Puissant! Welsh cheddar.

Pungent! Welsh cheddar.

Penetrative! Welsh cheddar.

Welsh cheddar. Straight from the cheese mines to you.

Also, fuck Somersetshire. Don’t believe a damned thing they say.

Welsh cheddar.”

Update on Sunday, September 15, 2013 at 05:02PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Best cheese? Cubed.

I Skipped Thursday

The new season’s first month did not have the most auspicious start for me.

August ended pretty well. I don’t think that I even noticed that it was ending. I just continued on the summer path I’d been treading for months. On the penultimate day, I went out to the beach with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and they later joined my guitarist and me for one final summer session of street music.

Saturday was a late night too. In the vague proximity of the dawn, I decided that I wouldn’t worry about trying to get to sleep until I actually felt tired, summarily acknowledging that I’d probably get near noon before that started to happen.

My memories of the details of the ensuing hours are slightly fuzzy, though it might be fair to mention that some of that is probably due to what my brain went through on that day. I think that I started to consider sleep around 11:00, but I got distracted and postponed it further.

I awoke in pain and confusion at some point in the evening. I’m still not totally sure about what happened. I know that there was a seizure of some sort, and the fact that a bunch of stuff from my desk was on the floor when I woke up could lead one to assume that I was sitting at the desk when the event happened. However, my clothes had been moved from my bed to my chair, and that’s something that only happens when I decide to go to bed. I’m really not sure about any of this.

These sorts of things always mess with my brain. It does something to my mood and my memory. It makes the preceding days feel less real. Between that, the cold weather that greeted me upon my rise, the actual shift in calendrical months, and the sheer contrast between the good times of the weekend’s beginning and its unfortunate end, I could not have asked for a cleaner break between seasons.

But I didn’t ask for a clean break. A clean break is exactly what I don’t want. I prefer to coast along on summer breezes until the sweet Samhain scent of of Halloween makes its presence known. I rarely know exactly what to do with the intervening time. In fairness, I have come to love autumn in recent years, but that doesn’t make this much easier. The fact that yesterday’s spontaneous stop at the dollar store revealed an entire aisle of Halloween stuff might, though.

There is a bit of symmetry in this. My last seizure was at the beginning of the summer, and it affected my left arm in a way that made it fragile enough to suffer several dislocations throughout the following months. This seizure ended the summer by doing something similarly heinous to my right arm.

I felt quite infirm for most of the week, but Thursday definitely marked a turning point of some sort. I woke up late in the evening, and my return to consciousness was greeted by leg spasms. Upon trying to walk, I found that it wasn’t worth the bother, and I decided to return to bed and try again. After a couple of hours, I awoke again to identical sensations, and these led me to call the whole day off in favour of an early start to Friday.

I’m pleased to say that this actually worked brilliantly. I got up around 4:00 in the morning and sought ways to fill my day. I realised that I hadn’t dyed my hair in a while, and though that fact was partially attributable to a pale desire to wait for greater length, I felt that this particular Friday would be my last completely free day for a while. This Monday marks the start of a particularly busy period at the restaurant where I work, and the end of that period signifies the cessation of my duties for the winter. This weekend was basically the calm before a storm that directly precedes a deeper, more profound calm.

Anyway, I stopped in the middle of writing this to go to the salon, and the results are unsurprisingly fantastic. I also tried something new with my eyebrows.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s a more auspicious start?

Update on Sunday, September 8, 2013 at 08:25PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Biggest obstacle between summer and Halloween?

Thanksgiving.

Redundantly Flawless Victory

I was flipping through some old comic books recently when I saw this. They weren’t that old. They definitely weren’t old enough for this to make any sort of sense for me. I didn’t look at the date on the issue, but I remember when this game came out because I bought it almost immediately and let it sit in oblivion for a year before I even opened it. It was the spring of 2011.

Anyway. Before I continue, I’d like to make clear the fact that there are levels to this anomaly. Multiple levels. I don’t think that I’d be talking about it if it only had one level. I wouldn’t even get out of bed for one level. Actually, that last bit’s occasionally a bit of a problem for me, but I’ll leave that for now.

First of all, the print industry’s not exactly in an outrageous state of growth right now. Even mainstream publications need to put effort into moving forward, but niche products really seem to be struggling, and this thing fits quite comfortably into the latter category. One would assume that these guides would have to be doing particularly well to continue at this point.

But I really don’t see how that can possibly be assumed.

The offerings of this project seem to be directed towards the people who played these games in the early Nineties. These were the days before the internet could be used for everything. These were the days when people lined up and payed to play these games in arcades. Secrets couldn’t be learned by a quick trip to the web. They couldn’t even be reliably gleaned through hours of consecutive practice, for one’s time at the machine was limited by the amount of change in one’s pockets and the impatience of the rest of the people in line. Special moves, strategies, and things of that sort could be passed by word of mouth, but such information was hardly infallible.

But these are not those times.

Alright. Fine. Obviously, there are certain minute points that could theoretically lean in the thing’s favour. Perhaps some people don’t want to spend a lot of time on practice. Understandable. That can be replaced fairly effectively by five minutes on the internet.

I’d even accept the fact that there are some people for whom the internet isn’t the most natural of things. They might not know the resources the web has on offer or the ease with which they can be accessed. However, I would doubt that many of these people fit in the demographics towards which these games are marketed. They’re surely not plentiful enough to finance the continued success of these guides.

But this madness goes even deeper than that.

All of the secrets this advertisement promises? All of the special moves and finishing rituals? All of that is clearly and readily available within the game. Every single thing. The entire list of special attacks for the character you’re currently playing can be accessed directly from the pause menu. That was the first thing my friend and I did in our first match when I finally opened the game in the summer of 2012. It took 40 seconds.

Update on Monday, September 2, 2013 at 02:32AM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

And it comes in hardcover? How can it possibly come in hardcover?

I really just don't know

Hale Snails and Vapour Trails

I’ve heard people say that current trends in recent animated films like “Turbo” and “Planes” hold morals that glorify and exacerbate the worst qualities of this generation. For some reason, I’ve been seeing fewer movies recently, but I don’t think that I would have wanted to see these ones anyway. I’m thus unable to speak to the details of these narratives, but I’m familiar enough with their structures and the arguments against them.

Essentially, the protagonist is an inexperienced misfit with vast potential who finds himself in competition against professionals of the discipline in which his talents lie. Despite his naivety and lack of training, he’s able to succeed against the professionals through sheer willpower and natural talent. A pessimistic interpretation would take this to signify an endorsement of the impatience and narcissism that supposedly typifies my generation. Incidentally, I happen to think that generational stereotypes are nonsense. I’m obviously not the best person to say this, for I am flagrantly impatient and narcissistic, but those are personal faults that cannot be ascribed to everyone who was born within two decades of me.

Anyway, I’d disagree with that interpretation for two reasons. First, it’s a narrative trope that goes back for millennia. Protagonists are generally supposed to be interesting, and the easiest way to make a protagonist interesting is to make him special in some way. Do you remember King Arthur? Do you remember when he was a scrawny kid with few prospects and fewer muscles who attained kingship by pulling a sword from a stone in which it had stubbornly stayed against the force of dozens of strong men? Do I even need to mention that many of those men were probably knights with years of leadership experience that might have been more practical in the ruling of a kingdom than divine appointment or prestigious lineage? Admittedly, the tutelage of a wizard tends to balance things out, but the point stands.

I’d also like to say that such tales don’t lead people to expect victory without effort. Anyone who carries that expectation will lose it immediately after discovering that it doesn’t hold up in practice. Maybe he’ll realise that he needs to work for what he wants, or perhaps he’ll give up after that first failure. The world has always been filled with people of both types, and it always will be. That’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is an emotional one, and it’s designed to get people to give themselves a chance. After sheer laziness, one of the biggest reasons for which people don’t try things they’d’ otherwise enjoy is intimidation. Any skill that one might try to pick up has already been perfected by multitudes of other people who’ve been practicing it since childhood. Although that’s an understandable reason to avoid something, it’s also a terrible one. I recently discovered that the guitarist for my band, who is a truly glorious musician by all accounts, only started playing in the middle of his adolescence. He knew people who were already proficient in the instrument, but he didn’t let early inferiority stop him, for he was passionate, and he knew that mastery is not always something that’s apparent at the start. It’s an obvious truth, but it’s one of which some people still need to be reminded.That’s why we have stories.

Sometimes those stories just happen to be bad.

Update on Monday, August 26, 2013 at 02:45AM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Sword of the stone versus Excalibur. Which wins? 

The sword in the stone was really more of a ceremonial blade, while Excalibur was clearly made for battle. Excalibur wins.

Fly in the Water

I recently ran my first half marathon for no reason. It was late, I was bored, and I couldn’t see a reason to stop after I’d finished the usual four kilometres. It was a fairly good time, though there was a point at which my leg sleeve started to slip, and I feared that it would fall and force me to stop. Fortunately, it stayed up for the entire night because it loves me. I think that there’s a beautiful kind of purity to the love I share with that fluffy thing.

I also got lost around Kipling because of that maddening loop thing and the transition from Bloor to Dundas. I thought that I was continuing along Bloor, but I’d actually failed to make the switch to that street’s new path. When I realised my mistake, I ran up a tiny road by the name of Aukland and turned east on Bloor until I reached that loop again. I actually tried to consult my phone’s map at that point, but that failed miserably because traffic loops are even more incomprehensible without any representation of depth. I ran around the loop and returned to Bloor, but my divided attention must have caused me to inadvertently invert my map. I dropped my phone around that time too. Maybe that did it. In any case, I didn’t realise that I was heading west again for a fairly long time. I passed Aukland again, but there was some part of me that believed that Aukland was doing that whole Dundas thing of twisting around on itself, and that part convinced the rest of me that Aukland was indeed long and circuitous enough to intersect with Bloor twice in the space of a mile.

When I found myself among suburban lanes, I finally admitted that this was a part of Bloor I had not previously encountered. Checking my map again, I discovered its inversion and turned around there. My third encounter with the overpass wasn’t completely free from confusion, but I was able to deal with it and continue east. Things were alright after that. I stopped around Keele, drank nine cups of water, and proceeded to walk home.

Anyway, I arrived in my room to find  a fly on the inside of the cup of water that I’d left there earlier. I was thinking that it might still be alright if I could just get the fly to leave the cup, but when I tried to blow the arthropod away, it fell into the water. That destroyed any willingness I might have had to drink from that mug, and I let the water sit for a while instead. When I finally got up in the morning and poured the water out, however, the fly revealed that it was still alive and flew away.

Update on Sunday, August 18, 2013 at 02:34AM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Worst thing about amphibious flies?

They could teach the spiders . . .