Hi! It’s… been a while!

As many of you know, gaming is a huge part of my life. It’s my safe place, keeping me sane when other parts of my life feel like they’re spinning out of control. It’s what I do to relax, and to have fun, and accounts for a reasonable quantity of the past 18 months or so since I last posted anything here.

After a rough few weeks, culminating in my failure to get a job I *really* wanted, Terry went onto that Internet they have nowadays and bought me a little present. Cos that’s the kind of husband he is!

I am now the proud owner of an officially licensed Legend of Zelda Link cosplay hoodie! It features an embossed Hyrulian Shield on the back, a long tapered hood and detailing on the front to represent a satchel & belt. It is AWESOME!

On a related note to the disappointing past few weeks, we decided to treat ourselves to a night away. Which is how we came to Warwick Castle on an unseasonably chilly April Saturday ready to explore, learn, and basically tear around the place like a couple of loons!

It should be noted that thanks to an encounter with the hotel Nespresso machine I was bombed out of my head on coffee and sugar. I was so hyper I clocked a few middle age parents with a gaggle of unruly tweens giving Terry a pitying look. I didn’t care. I was Link! Hero of Time! Defender of Hyrule!

But I’m not much of a hero without a sword. So first stop is the gift shop where I get the ‘blue’ sword, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Master Sword itself! The texture of the foam makes it look really cool in the photos, almost like it’s been added in using old fashioned cell animation! Sidebar: Lots of Merlin Entertainment’s signage refers to Knights and Princesses – bleugh! But the toy sets in the shop have been labelled as ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ which is progress of a kind I guess. #lettoysbetoys

Sword in hand, I pose for a couple of photos in the courtyard

Taking @summerbeth cosplaying in @WarwickCastle pic.twitter.com/i6scd9TFu8

— Terence Eden ⏻ (@edent) April 16, 2016

And under the portcullis

And get a cool shot next to a display of shields.

.@summerbeth isn't the hero Hyrule needs, but she is the hero they deserve.#yah! pic.twitter.com/yFYzECWNec

— Terence Eden ⏻ (@edent) April 16, 2016

We walk around the state rooms and found the dining hall – almost a dead ringer for the one at the Knight’s Academy in Skyloft!

Looks like @summerbeth has found the Skyloft dining hall.
⚔ pic.twitter.com/Vejj591BO8

— Terence Eden ⏻ (@edent) April 16, 2016

Me having slain an army of Darknuts!

We join in a free tour which covers some of the history. For our slightly exorbitant entrance fee we want to learn something!

We paid extra for the Dungeon tour. They won’t let us take our own photos in there, so sadly no opportunities for me to pose slaying a ReDead. I’m totally in character by now, but I get the feeling the actors in the exhibit think I’m scene stealing a bit. C’mon guys – haven’t you ever heard that improv is all about saying Yes!

They have a display of the birds of prey on. We watch the show, which is included in the entry price and frankly way better than the dungeon, and includes an owl just like the one which hangs out near Lake Hylia!

Over at the bird enclosure, Terry took this awesome photo which looks like the Eagle is perched on my arm.

Lots of walking through gaps in hedges!

Then we’re off climbing the ramparts!

From the top of Guy’s Tower I survey my kingdom!

We’re pretty exhausted by now. Last stop is the maze where we got two of the best photos of the day!

Shout out to Windwaker!

And finally no Zelda level is complete without a jumping puzzle!

Took my wife Cosplaying at Warwick Castle

Thanks to Warwick Castle for a great day out, and Merchoid for fantastic customer service! And to my truly wonderful husband for buying the hoodie, taking countless photos and generally being the best Squire a Knight could ask for!

Hi. Liz isn’t here right now. Please leave a message after the beep!

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Earlier today, Terry blogged about footling around with the API on our Fronius inverter which is hooked up to our solar panels. For him, the ability to live tweet how our solar panels are doing was a massive plus when deciding which inverter to install.

I confess this was one of those occasions I admitted that his technical expertise & enthusiasm had vastly outstripped my own and so I just let him get on with it. So I had no idea that, as an extra marketing strategy, Fronius has a line of merchandise given away as a thank you to their customers. A couple of days after the install, the lovely Paul from Sims Solar popped round with the certificate for the Feed In Tariff, the instruction manual & some swag!

But this was no ordinary swag! This was actually useful. I got a mug, an in car phone charger & a metal disk the size of a pound coin which magnetically fits into a holder which fits on a key chain: the kind used for accessing supermarket trolleys so you don’t need to worry whether you have a pound coin in your purse or not.

The daft thing is that these things actually aren’t that useful to me. I don’t drink a lot of hot drinks, I don’t drive & I only rarely go to the supermarket as I now do virtually all my grocery shopping online for home delivery. But I can totally see how someone else might find this stuff useful.

I appreciate that a modicum of thought has gone into considering what Fronius’s customers might find useful. That rather than splashing their logo over any random object they have attempted to find items which will get frequent use & might, in some small way, make their customers’ lives a little easier. Fronius, I applaud you!

Sometimes when I get tipsy I @ the celebrities I follow on Twitter. I’m currently sat in a pub round the corner from the Oxford Playhouse (blogging from my phone using the WordPress app! Truly we are living in the future!) I will be shortly going to see one Marcus Brigstock. And so under the influence of a couple of beers I decided to reply to his tweet from a few hours ago:

@marcusbrig Glad to hear it! I'm missing a sceptics in the pub to come see you tonight!

— Liz Eden (@summerbeth) November 5, 2014

I’m not really one to get star struck, but, for instance, should Joss Whedon ever respond to anything I said, well that would just make my day! But I have a notion that the more famous of the twitterati probably have some kind of filter on their replies. Or maybe a PA to read them on their behalf.

But a few months ago Terry tweeted Shappi Khorsandi just before her show & she incorporated it into her set. So maybe the same thing will happen to me!

A few months ago I was delighted by a rather extravagant surprise present from Terry: a 2nd hand (but perfectly functioning) Wii U console. I had planned on getting one eventually, in readiness for the new Zelda game which is due out at some as yet unknown point next year. But one came up for sale on the AV forums and Terry snapped it up. Not only did we get the hardware; it came with an embarrassment of riches, content wise. I think we got well over a dozen games in disc format, and several more which had been installed into vacant slots on the hard drive.

I spent a thoroughly enjoyable week test driving most of the new stuff to get a feel for whether or not it would be my cup of tea. In the end I think we only took a few games down to our local Game store to trade in for store credit, and the rest were stacked neatly in the (newly built) AV centre awaiting their turn. I learned a lot about my gaming turn-offs and turn-ons  from that exercise, which I will blog about in due course, but if there’s one thing I have learned from doing NaBloPoMo it’s to spread what little creativity you can muster around as thinly as possible if you want to last the whole month.

That was several weeks ago, and with 1 and a half exceptions I have barely touched the new stuff. Because, amongst the games which were pre-loaded onto the machine, was the HD version of Wind Waker. So I have spent most of my gaming time for the past month replaying it, for the 3rd time. The land of Hyrule, or in Wind Waker’s case the tops of the mountains which centuries later would form the tiny islands scattered across a vast open plan world, is my happy place. Despite its propensity to get taken over by the Forces of Evil, Hyrule is where I feel safe.

First and foremost, I game to relax and have fun. Sometimes that means trying new things, but sometimes it means immersing myself in a familiar world. Like re-watching a favourite film or re-reading a favourite book. The fact that I know the outcome isn’t important. The fact that I know the solutions to the puzzles isn’t important, although it’s an interesting reflective exercise to notice the difference between when I am remembering how to do something, and when I am actually re-solving the puzzle because I have forgotten the solution. I also found myself turning to my trusty walkthrough (thank you zeldadungeon.net) at exactly the same point in the trading sequence as when I last played this game about 4 years ago.

In total I played Twilight Princess through 3 times. I played Skyward Sword twice, and got half way through hero mode before realising that it really wasn’t adding any extra to it. I played about 75% of Phantom Hourglass, got distracted (by moving house and starting a new job, so a legitimate distraction) and then months later failed to pick up where I had left off, so I played it through from the beginning again. Similarly I rage quit Ocarina of Time and returned 3 years later, restarting from scratch. I have spent hundreds of hours roaming the hills, valleys, shores, clouds and villages of Hyrule. That’s pretty good value for the £300 the console cost.

In December 2013 I blogged about how I had spent most of that calendar year finding a new job. I actually posted that one on Christmas Day. I was obviously killing time before Doctor Who started.

When I handed my notice in at my old job, one of the reasons I gave was that the new job included the opportunity for international travel. In the 5 years of my previous role, I had one overnight trip to the National Science Learning Centre and the new job was dangling the tantalizing prospect of a trip to Florida. As it turns out, I ended up flying to New York first, prompting this Facebook status a couple of weeks ago:

Awesome right? I was now officially an international jet setter! I was getting paid to travel to New York, where I would co-deliver a couple of general graduate study recruitment sessions, then fly down to Florida where I would tour 4 of the universities with whom I have been working all year, promoting a specific scholarship & meeting with some (very) high ranking members of those institutions to discuss the strategies for raising awareness of this opportunity to their students.

As I posted the above update on Facebook, I remembered that conversation with my former employers about the opportunities this new role would afford me. Here I was, finally about to embark on this exciting experience which was the primary reason I had given for jacking in my old job.

There was just one problem. This was a complete lie. I wasn’t excited. I was terrified.

I didn’t take the job at Oxford because of the possibility for international travel. I took it in spite of that possibility. I very nearly didn’t apply for the job at all because the prospect of taking a trip like this was so scary. Eventually I reasoned that there was every chance that it simply wouldn’t happen. Business trips like this get cancelled all the time for a variety of reasons. I applied for the role as the rest of it sounded genuinely interesting to me, and I thought I could do it well, but I told myself that the line in the job description referencing overseas travel for recruitment purposes was probably only there to entice prospective employees. Even if a trip did take place, I reckoned that there were plenty of other far more senior people who would manoeuvre themselves to go in my stead.

So when the preliminary meetings started being held in early 2014 I made a point of saying that if it all fell through (as I expected that it would – although I kept that part to myself) I wouldn’t be too cut up about it. I contributed my expertise, talking about which universities had been particularly engaged and figuring out which ones to visit. I researched flights and dates and hotels. And somewhere along the line I started to envisage what it would be like to actually do this.

It was probably around early Spring I realised that if I really didn’t think I could cope with this trip I had to speak up before we got too far into the arrangements. Which would mean admitting that I had never wanted to go in the first place. It would mean betraying the trust my new employers had placed in me when they offered me the job. And, more than that, it would mean knowing that I had let my nerves and neuroses get the better of me and actually stopped me from doing something.

And so I made a decision that, even though I had been lying through my teeth when I told my previous boss I wanted to travel, even though I had almost convinced myself that the trip would never come to fruition, and even though the thought of boarding a plane was still making me break out in a nervous sweat, I was going to go on this trip. It would be hard, it would be scary, it would be tiring but I was going to do it. I wasn’t going to let my fear get in my way.

Bravery is sometimes described as the capacity to ‘feel the fear but do it anyway’. As the Doctor puts it during a recent episode, humans have a superpower-esque ability to forget their feelings. I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. The feeling of fear was transitory, but the fact that I took the trip anyway is an achievement that will be with me for the rest of my life.

I flew back from Tampa, Florida yesterday morning after spending just over a week in the US on business. I had woken up at 05.30 Eastern Time the previous morning in an attempt to maximise my chances of catching some zees on the plane. In an unexpected act of financial generosity my workplace had sprung for premium economy seating for my overnight return flight (actual business class was out of the question – I work in the public sector) and I had selected my bulkhead seat on the BA app a week earlier so I had all the legroom necessary for my 5’4” frame.

Thanks to the combination of my trusty neck pillow, the foot rest, a gin & tonic followed by a perfectably acceptable red with dinner, and my sheer exhaustion from the trip, I actually managed to lose consciousness for a good couple of hours somewhere over the Atlantic. My plane landed early, border control was well staffed – so no queueing, and I collected my suitcase in record time. These minor miracles all resulted in catching the coach from Gatwick to Oxford an hour earlier than the one I had expected to be on. In a final confluence of serendipity the clocks went back in the UK while I was away, meaning that the time difference shrank for 5 hours to 4, thus making it 20% easier to adjust back to GMT on arrival. Never before have the deities of international travel made it so very easy on me.

I hadn’t counted on doing anything this weekend. The whole 48 hours had already been written off to allow for the symptoms which normally accompany my jet lag; alternating between shaking, weeping and swearing at anyone (usually Terry) who, with my best interests at heart, refuses to allow me to go to bed at 5.30 in the evening. Instead, I stayed up last night until 10pm (which is pretty close to my normal bed time – night owl I am not) and slept more or less solidly until 8.15 this morning. I now have a free weekend stretching out in front of me, unstructured and free of obligations, with which I can do anything, as long as I stay awake until tonight.

So, perhaps rashly, I am going to take a shot at NaBloPoMo again. I did this 2 years ago, and found it to be difficult but very rewarding. Since moving to Oxford my blogging output has diminished to almost nothing, although ideas continue to percolate. So for the next month I will, attempt at least, to publish a blog post each day. The majority of these will be written on the fly, although I have several drafts saved from the past year or so, which will get roughly kneaded into some kind of shape and then offered up at the alter of micro self publishing.

At best, I hope this will rekindle my enjoyment of writing, and of sharing my ideas. Too often I let the maxim “better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt” prevent me from sharing my views. It’s still something I find scary, but I have spent the past week living a rather different maxim, “feel the fear but do it anyway” and I want to continue in that vein.

And at worst? At least it might help me stay awake.

Amongst the outpouring of grief, celebration of life, & criticism of other people’s reactions (see Richard Herring’s Twitter feed) an interesting but ultimately rather sad discourse emerged today about the nature & treatment of mental illness. On the one hand, there has been the expected contingent of uninformed trolls, spouting offensive crap demanding to know how it can be that a rich, sucessful, white, male celebrity has the timerity to be depressed about anything. How dare they!

There have also been the more compassionate voices pleading that anyone out there with suicidal thoughts remembers that support is available, and that they don’t have to suffer alone.

Concerningly though, a 3rd strand to this discussion has bitterly sought to highlight that this so called ‘support’ is frequently unavailable or inadequate.

I have quite a few friends who have varying levels of mental health issues. Some of them feel that they have received a decent level of treatment from their medical practitioners. Others have struggled to get any recognition for their problems at all. From this I surmise that it is something of a crapshoot as to whether you will receive the help you need, even if you are in a state to both acknowledge that help is needed and to ask for it.

One might be forgiven for coming away from the media (both social and er, the old fashioned kind) today feeling dispirited about humanity, in large part because of all the other atrocities taking place around the globe at the moment, and not just the tragedy of one beloved performer. And for all the well meaning messages about asking for help, if you don’t have any confidence that the help is there even if you do ask for it, I imagine that is of limited comfort.

I have no direct experience of mental health support, so I don’t feel remotely qualified to state that the current provision is or isn’t working, other than my 2nd hand experience of other people who clearly think that it’s not all it could, or should, be. I do think this is one of those cases where it’s easier to measure failure than success. That the headline grabbing times when nothing works can drown out the daily occurances of people fighting and winning against the black clouds that surround them. When just getting through the day is an achievement, I can’t imagine how much harder it is to feel like you’re surrounded by people saying the whole system is broken.

Someone I know suggested on Twitter today that if you don’t suffer from mental health issues then take the opportunity to reach out to someone who does. So to any of my friends who need it, consider this an open invitation. I can’t guarentee I can help. I can’t guarentee anyone can help. But I am happy to try.

I want to find Stewart Lee funny. He’s clever, he’s meta, and he’s not popular enough to count as mainstream so liking him still has a certain cache.

I read his book a while ago when he talked about zooming out from the comedy so you can see the writing in the margins. I can see where he was going with that. I listened to his bit about how he could be a librarian but you’d have to understand how traditional librarians operated in order to really ‘get’ how his brand of librarianism worked. That was pretty funny. I enjoy the quasi-confessional, quasi-therapeutic moments with Lee discussing his method with Armando Iannucci on Comedy Vehicle (although latterly some bloke in glasses because Iannucci appears to be busy with Veep these days.) I appreciated that.

The problem is that I kind of don’t find Lee funny. I cast no aspersions on his artistic integrity or intelligence. He clearly has both in abundance. But I can’t really get over the fact that for every 7 minutes of performance there’s approximately 45 seconds worth of actual material.

The past 25 minutes have cemented this for me. Because I’ve had a tough day at work, & I decided to have a few drinks this evening. I am, as a matter of fact, slightly tipsy. And I’ve realised that I have laughed more in the past 25 minutes at Stewart Lee than I ever have before. Stewart Lee is funnier when I’m pissed. Which is usually the mark of a substandard comedian. Lee got funnier the drunker I got. I *want* to like him, but the evidence suggests that in order to do so I have to engage with him on the same terms as I would with, say, Russell Howard.

I don’t get that with Richard Herring. He tells better jokes about exponential mathematics. And the drunker I get when watching Herring, the less I realise I’m understanding. I find that funny.