I’m starting to suspect my Artificial Inspiration friend might be messing with my head. I mean, is this a threat?
HAL 9000: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Word of the day: parallelepiped – solid figure with each face a parallelogram
Any of you keeping track might know that I bought a new laptop a few days ago. And in many ways it is great – it doesn’t take half an hour to open Word, it doesn’t crash at the sight of WordPress and it’s not held together by elastic bands and bulldog clips.
However, there’s one small problem. When I was looking at the website, the size of the hard drive was listed as two different amounts: 1 terabyte (huge!) and 250 gigabytes (foolishly small). After reading the reviews and asking Hamoudi what he thought, we came to the conclusion that it had two hard drives and one was 250GB and the other was 1TB. We were both wrong.
So what turned up was a laptop that has only 250 GB of space, once I put photos and music on it, it was half full. So I wrote to the dealers, and said very sweetly, ‘YOU LIED TO ME’.
A nice woman wrote back asking for proof of the misleading website, which I sent, she said ‘Urrr, ok I’ll get back to you in a bit.’ I said ‘cool, btw I don’t want to return the laptop, I just want to be compensated for the external hard drive I’ll have to buy.’
Yesterday afternoon I checked my email, nothing. Then late last night the doorbell rang with a parcel for me. It was an external hard drive for 1 terabyte. No note, still no email, but exactly what I wanted. That they didn’t contact me to tell me it was coming made this an obvious shut up and go away gesture, which is fine by me, I love being paid off.
Complaining can work, my friends. Just don’t abuse it.
Word of the day: Gudgeon – a person easily cheated
“there’s no defense except all the errors made”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
Word of the day: Autology – scientific study of oneself
Just throwing this piece of Artificial Inspiration out there, because it may very well be right.
So I saw Brennan! He’s alive! He wasn’t even walking with his head down!
(For anyone passing by who doesn’t know, Brennan is a man who walks slowly up and down my street with his head hanging so low it’s as if his neck is elastic.)
He was still walking slowly, but head up. I was probably staring trying to work out if it was him or not (I’ve never properly seen his face) and then I realised it was. And he was now looking at me, so I smiled shyly.
And he leered in response. And I don’t mean a nervous smile gone wrong, or a slight sneer, I mean a full-throttle, Bela-Lugosi-vampire, lip-twisting leer. I don’t think I’ve even see that face live on a human before. It reminded me of this Uno Morales cartoon (if you don’t know the rest of the cartoon, you don’t want to). Except that Brennan’s eyes were more hollowed out, looked almost bruised.
If I assume that Brennan hasn’t been possessed by demons, then he is a deeply troubled man, at least when he’s looking at me. Think I need to steer clear of him and accept that I’m terrible at making friends. I may be cursed.
Word of the day: weirdward – bordering upon the supernatural
Well here’s some inspiration I actually agree with!
Then today the scaffolding was down and the painters had gone. I was wondering yesterday how they would paint underneath where the scaffolding was against the wall/step. The answer is: they wouldn’t, they’d leave it unpainted. UWnpainted squares all over the walls and ground.
At least there’s no way the landlady can pin this on us.
Quite a few politicians at the moment seem to be making the leap from self-interested-and-incompetent to fucking-despotic. So AI has come up with a great ambition to aim for.
Word of the day: Barbarocracy – government by barbarians
I’ve been a bit confused about how our painters have been painting the house. They’ve got scaffolding up which is attached to the wall, covering small sections of it. It also rests on the steps that they’re painting a nice cheery red. But how can they paint under/behind the scaffolding? Will they do those bits after?
No sign of Brennan, the sad walking man. It’s been days now.
Artificial Inspiration gave me nice poster today! I feel all validated.
A couple of friendly painters put up scaffolding outside my house yesterday. It’s odd, because my house isn’t big, I’m sure a ladder would have been fine, but maybe it’s safer this way. I offered tea, but they didn’t want it.
Then today they were burning off the old paint from the side of the house with a blow torch. I’ve not heard of this method before, is it normal? Anyway, I’d been in about an hour when the doorbell rang. One of the friendly painters was at the door with a sheepish grin hiding behind his curly beard.
‘Hello, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just need to have a look at your window from the inside. You see, I think it’s on fire.’ He didn’t seem in a huge rush, so we trundled up to my flat chatting about the patchy weather.
He was right, it was on fire. Wisps of smoke were wafting across the lounge. Apparently a bit of fluff inside the window had caught alight. I got him a glass of water to put it out. He poured the water over the sill, thanked me politely and went back outside to pick up his blow torch. He still didn’t want a cup of tea.
Word of the day (one of the finest ever): ucalegon – neighbour whose house is on fire.
I’ve never been able to use this word in real life, but today I’m proud to have given my neighbour the opportunity.
Sub Tropical land. I need a short flower interlude from inspirational posters. So I decided to share with you some photos from our sub-tropical border, cos it’s beautiful.
I also thought I should let you know the bloke I see every day, who walks slowly up and down with his head hanging, I haven’t seen him since I wrote about him. I’ve decided for simplicity to call him Brennan, since that name means sorrow and he looks like the most desolate man I’ve seen. I’ll let you know when he comes back. I last saw him on his knees facing a house at seven in the morning so I’m a bit worried.
Word of the day: nullibicity – state of being nowhere
I don’t think the Artificial Inspiration likes me very much anymore. I’ve been watching Jessica Jones recently, and this has a Kilgrave vibe to it.
HAL 9000: Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?
Word of the day: theologaster – petty or shallow theologian
I really hope someone’s got a plan.
Word: Gardyloo – warning cry
inkbiotic 