Fizzy Brains

Pigeon Holes (or lack thereof)

I've heard barristers describing the brain working like a set of pigeon holes. Really clever people have more than others - each holding vast amounts of information and FACTS (remember them?) to be accessed on a need-to basis. 

As soon as they take on another case the pigeon holes they used for the previous case are emptied and filled with the new information so they become an expert in the new case. 

That's a well-oiled brain.

On a good day, I have probably 2 pigeon holes. Which is why when a task is undertaken and someone asks me something, I can be immediately derailed and the thing I was going to do is long forgotten, or the object I was holding lost, discarded.

I have to replay my previous steps and actions in order to find my iPad, book, keys or whatever it was I was holding, when , for instance, someone asked me a question that wasn't related to what I was doing.

A highly inefficient way to be, constantly looking for your stuff.

This is what my life was like in the last few years of work. It was just hopeless. Having to concentrate on the job in hand and remind myself what I was supposed to be doing. I needed to do everything with blinkers on - tunnel-vision - staring Linford Christie-like at the finish line. 

Any distractions and the vision and job in hand are lost. 

Start again.

People still ask me if I'm going to return to stonemasonry. It's difficult to explain to them how exhausting it can be just to get a job done as it requires so much more conscious awareness - concentration - to complete relatively simple tasks - and with that comes the mental tiredness.

I'm drooling more and more from the right hand side of my gob. This is a dementia symptom believe it or not.

So no, I'm really not in a position to return to work. 

Ever.

Goblins Reunited

Yesterday I went to Dragonmeet, which is the annual RPG and boardgaming expo in Hammersmith. I took the coach up from Wells, which terminates in Hammersmith bus station, and then walked the 5 minutes to the Novatel Hotel which hosts it.

The definition of convenience!

 Jono and I moved away from SW London roughly the same time. We were mainstays at Kingston Gaming Club. I was known for being bossy, but you have to be - if people don't make the commitment to coming on time every week, the group loses out, and it just dies a death. You have to be honest.

These days people think nothing of not turning up or texting they can't make it on the morning of the event. Bear in mind some people travel for at least an hour to get there, and would like to organise their social lives too.

I'm one of those people who was brought up to believe lateness was rude. And there really is no excuse for not communicating if there's a problem in this day and age.

Rant over.

So, Jono, Adrian, Larry and myself went around the place. One of the standout observations was the lack of official Dungeons and Dragons accessories on sale. WoTC (the owners) have never even had a stand there.

Mainly it's the smaller independent companies. These are people who write, produce and sell their own products. 

Truly labours of love. 

Mongoose, who produce Traveller, were there. All 4 of them. This is a global science-fiction RPG and it's a tiny, tiny company with a hugely loyal fanbase too. I saw the book they produce for physicists who play a maths based version, where they work out the velocity of a craft travelling at X which then slingshots round a gas-giant 3 times the size of Jupiter but with only 75% of the gravity...

Something for everyone!

I bought a D&D compatible adventure called 'Against the Faerie Queen' which is a role-play-heavy (rather than combat) epic fantasy adventure based in post-Romano Britain. It won't suit everybody, as it's more about lore, diplomacy, politics and role-playing.

It won't be for everybody, and people struggle when it comes to correctly pronouncing Welsh words. 

But I love the fact Celtic in this sense refers to Welsh Celtic rather than Irish Celtic, as it so often does.

I also had a kickstarter arrive the other day which is like D&D set in a gonzo future and televised...so much to read!

Tsundoku or what??

At Dragonmeet I met Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop, who with Steve Jackson invented the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook which brought so much joy to my teenage life. I shook him by the hand and thanked him, then he struggled with the PDQ machine (I thought he'd have a minion for that) and signed my book.

I bought presents for my Thursday lot. I hope they like them!

Had a really good chat with Larry about socks, and why they are important. 

Met Tyrone, Peter and John Bryant too.

It was such a proper geek and nerd-fest. The sights, sounds and smells were just brilliant. Great to see younger people there too - not just us sad old beardies.

The overheard conversations were a joy to behold - '...of course I was just using the beta part of my brain in that scenario..."

-----------------------------

It's come to my attention recently that I am not playing nearly enough role-playing games.

Seriously. 

I have gone slightly doolally or at least higher up the doolally scale without it.

It gives me something to aim and work for in the week. It’s intensely taxing on my grey matter. It’s the most intense of social interactions with high emotions, adrenalin, arithmetic, acting and other things beginning with A.

It also keeps me out of the boozer.

If I don’t get my fix I get rather…grumpy, lazy, listless, depressed all of which is a virtuous circle. 

Good news is that Jono/Adrian/Larry will be running a Traveller campaign online on Wednesdays from that London/Plymouth.

Hoorah!

Official Dungeon of Dementia T-shirts!

I've been working on these for minutes.

Available in XXXM. 

Payment options: postal order only

103 Guineas per item. 

3 for the price of 4.

Disclaimer: Dungeon of Dementia accepts no responsibility for fights, hospital bills, loss of limb or any other negative outcomes incurred when wearing its apparel.

Games Holiday 2024

But what is the meaning of the word ‘Spam’?

I’ve made it, baby!

 I’m so popular now that i got my first piece of Spam in the comments. It’s marked a turning point in my career.

Um, Actually, it hasn’t. It hasn’t done anything of the kind. 

I thought I would be deluged, but no. 

Disappointment.

Spam ain’t what it was.

Adrian still eats this.

At least there’s still lots of young women with no clothes on who like my Instagram photos.

Life in a Cotswolds Farmhouse

It’s Wednesday evening. With the exception of being driven to Tescos, I haven’t actually left the farmhouse since arriving here on Friday. I don’t really do anything like the strategic wargaming or bored-games that everyone else seems to like. I ran a Mutant Crawl Classics game for 4 1/2 hours the other day. That was bonkers and hard-work. I was absolutely drained at the end.

In the game, the characters are living a stone-age existence in a world similar to Earth, the climate is tropical, the sun large and red, the sky a teal/turquoise and the moon is replaced by a large crescent over the horizon. The object of the game is a rites-of-passage where you must go to ancient fantastic places and retrieve artifacts, which can be as mundane as thermos flasks or as fantastical as plasma rifles. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The trouble with RPGs - you have to rehearse and revise and be on top of the entire story you’re running for that session or it can be crap.

Luckily no one wanted to play it again. 

Sometimes you can wing it and it will be great, but I have less confidence I’ll be able to pull that one off. I have less capacity to absorb information these days (it was never great)  and to recall said information on cue.

Went for a pub lunch on Thursday. I couldn’t work out the taste of the burger - it was either excessively salty or excessively burnt. 

I did some role-playing for an hour as Hubert H Humphrey as the precursor to a wargame that I wasn’t a part of. I enjoyed the role-playing though. 

In another D&D game I play an incredibly camp Bard who I’m trying to keep different from Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s fun. 

Traveller has a science-fiction setting in which I play an Australian doctor and wellness consultant obsessed with people’s nutrition, forcing Brussel sprout and mung bean smoothies on them at inappropriate moments. 

Spending a lot more time on my own. That’s just my nature nowadays though. 

Read the Saturday Times. That was a pleasure. Giles Coren, Janice Turner, James Marriott, and also the awful Gerard Butler, just because I can’t believe how truly awful he is.

Even The Times seems to be embarrassed about him, omitting the link to his column in the paper’s Comments section.

The literary critic hails The Shipping News by Annie Proux, a truly great novel bursting with flavour on every page. Nice to have my good taste confirmed.

We stay up late to recall past players and friends, some of whom are no longer with us in life, and others who were too obnoxious to be invited back. 

We try and decipher someone’s curmudgeonliness, then laugh at our own. 

Good times. 

We are a 14 yard skipful of neuroses.

I’m loving staying in bed. It’s much better than walking around looking for things to do. Just staying here so comfortable and warm with my thoughts. 

Oh well, I suppose I’d better be social…

Brix and Me

So I’ve been looking at videos of The Fall who I didn’t like very much. I first came across them at Maidstone College of Art sharing a house with some fine artists.

I saw an interview with Mark E Smith and at that moment the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (I was 19) and that was Brix, his wife.

80s beauty

When she was in the band they were at their best.

Oh, the life we could have had.

So that was in a way, quite depressing.

Really pretty small blonde women with beautiful big smiles. Most of whom turned out were Jewish.

Do I have a type? I certainly did back then. 

It’s weird to think ‘that’s it‘ on the relationship front.

I don’t think I could have one anymore as it’s not fair on the other to burden them with the illness and also what do they get out of it?

And I just want to be left alone for hours at a time.

But I don’t think that last bit is anything to do with the illness. 😜

Mark E Smith and me

So I then watched lots of Fall songs and clips of interviews. I watched him eviscerate the ever fawning Lauren Laverne. I enjoyed that. 

Rediscovering through streaming sites or Youtube all that music we turned our noses up at or didn’t understand back in the day.

But he was needlessly rude and cruel to so many people, with fights on stage and a revolving door of band members.

What a diet of booze, fags and speed does to you.

He was a fascinating character. He didn’t sing but he could, he wasn’t a poet, but more of a performance artist. He was loyal to Salford, bitter about Northern industrial decline but also wallowing in the grime and depression of it, a tyrant to his band, a narcissist who cared nothing for people’s approval, a refreshingly original thinker who called things out not to toe the trend but because it was true as he saw it.

Self-destructive, charismatic, a one-off.

Charisma beats looks - which is what attracted Brix to him.

The world needs people like Mark E Smith.

Glad I never met him.

Smalltown Attitude

Maybe I should rename this blog. Sounds like a punk fanzine from the 80s.

Maybe it was.

Gossipy little places where people talk a thousand miles an hour about people you don’t know and don’t care about. 

People’s lives often begin at home and end at the town or village’s boundaries.

And everyone’s mad at my age. Half given-up, half fed-up. Shaking your head in either despair or laughter.

God…

That’s what dreams are for, I guess. Me and Brix living the life…

…in Shepton.