From The Earth To The Moon

July 20th is generally considered to be the anniversary of mans first steps onto the lunar soil. But much like the idea that the millennium began in the year 2000, it's a bit ambiguous. You see, in the US, it was indeed the 20th, but here in Ireland, and most importantly, in Greenwich in England, it was already into the early hours of Monday, the 21st of July, 1969. Regardless, we chose to celebrate the occasion with the US, and had a special movie night tonight to mark the historic event.

Opening the evening early at 7pm, we watched Mythbusters NASA Moon Landing Special, wherein they bust some of the bigger so-called "reasons" that conspiracy theorists give to "prove" that the moon landings were fake. By then, a few more people had shown up, and before we started into the trailers, we had a grand crowd of nine people in our living room, watching the big screen. The lights went down, and I started up the trailers.

It has become almost a tradition now that movie night at my place always opens with a number of new trailers for upcoming cinema releases. Tonight was no exception, and we watched trailers for Planet 51, Zombieland, The Last Airbender and District 9, among others. All in all, we got through nine trailers, ending with Moon, right before the feature presentation.

The room went silent as I placed the disk in the Xbox drive, waited for the menu to appear and pressed "Play". The music swelled, and The Dish began.

Claire and I went to see The Dish on release way back in 2000 in the cinema, and have loved it ever since. We bought the DVD as soon as it was released as well, and watching it tonight, I realised I haven't seen it enough. I remember the silence in the theater as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface and uttered his immortal line. The joy of watching a DVD with friends is that you can chat and joke about scenes, characters or events, and we did. But once those grainy images of a ladder and suited-up spaceman appeared on the big screen, everyone was silent. There was hardly the sound of breathing from all nine of us.

40 years on, mans first steps onto the dusty surface of another world still have the power to silence us, and inspire us to dream.

To everyone involved in the Apollo program, from the men who walked on the moon to the people who built the machines to do it, from those who programmed the computers to those who stitched the spacesuits, thank you all for making a wondrous dream a reality.

I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe

Seeing the unequaled talent of Sir Anthony Hopkins delivering the final monologue from Bladerunners Roy Batty, played by the incredible Rutger Hauer, sent shivers down my spine when I saw it just now on TV. The dialgue is haunting and beautiful, and to hear Hopkins recite it so naturally is surprisingly emotional.

Ironically, despite the fact that this is an advertisment for Sky HD, there is no HD version around! Harhar!

The original Bladerunner scene is easily one of my favourite moments from cinema history.

All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain.

Still Awake

It's gone 10:30pm, and I've now been awake for an astonishing 18 and a half hours without even so much as a nap. In normal circumstance, I would be dead on my feet by now. But, while I feel like I'll be enjoying my sleep tonight, I'm not feeling exhausted. I played 12 songs in Rock Band back to back around the 6pm mark, and got 100% in several of them. I'm almost treating these last few hours like some warped experiment. Testing my reaction times in games like Rock Band and Scene It!, as well as N+ on XBLA, I seem to still have a good level of coordination.

Regardless, this whole event has been a wonderfully strange way to pass an otherwise uneventful Friday. And I made a t-shirt!

Tomorrow I head home for a few days of home cooked food and pampering. Later!

Showers Don't Help

• Just had a nice cool shower to try to slow down.
• Spent entire time fine tuning RPG plot details.
• Need waterproof markers and notepad for shower.
• Still buzzing.

13:41:

• Don't feel that this needs it's own individual post, but I just yawned for the first time since 4am this morning. Seems lying out on a super comfy couch watching Mythbusters might just slow me down. It's certainly taken my mind off of any RPGs. Not because Mythbusters in boring or slow, but just because I love watching it so much. Maybe I'll get a catnap this afternoon after all.
  

Things I've Learned From Being Awake Since 4am

• My brain and mouth are moving at a mile a minute. I can't stop talking. And when I talk, it's non-stop stream-of-conscience.
• When I logged into Gmail this morning, I had three unread mails from three different people that I actually know! At 4am! I have to go back to June 4th before I find three mails together on the same day from different people, and even then, two of those three are automated system mails! Going back as far as the start of 2009 I can't find another day that I have three mails on the same day from three people I know! Weird!
• I realised I hadn't read my Reader Feed at all on Thursday, so I had over 100 posts to read. Good thing I was up at 4! Maybe, subconsciously I knew I'd forgot to read my Feeds and that's what was keeping me awake?!?
• I got hungry long before anywhere was open. I even got into town 30 minutes before Puccinos opened! Ended up nursing a coffee in O'Briens until nine o'clock.
• There is a lot of wet stuff falling from the skies.
• It's 10am, six hours after I first got up, and I show no signs of slowing down. Updates as they happen...
  

Insomnia Sucks

Yes, in a revelation that is sure to shock no-one, insomnia sucks. Not only am I wide awake at the ungodly hour of 4am, having had very little sleep since I went to bed a little before midnight, but I can't even muster enough enthusiasm or inspiration to come up with a witty title for this post. Instead, I'm just being blunt and to the point. Also, expect numerous grammatical errors and incorrect spelling.

I'm not usually the one to suffer from insomnia. As soon as I crawl into bed, I can be out like a light in minutes, especially if I attempt to read anything in bed. It's like a Pavlov's Dog effect at this point. Bed+reading=sleep, guaranteed. Usually. This is probably the first time in recent memory that I've been so bad I just had to get up and do something. Normally it's Claire that wakes me from my deep slumber to tell me she can't sleep and is going to get up, to which I do my best Frankensteins Monster impression, reply "mmmurrhhh" and roll over.

So, what's keeping me up this morning? I could easily blame poetic justice. Just a few hours ago, after finishing up playing DS at Robs place, I mocked Neill for his inability to sleep the night before. In response to "I got to sleep at 6am and was awake again at 9", I said "I got to sleep around 11pm and wandered out of bed just before 10 this morning. Hah!" So... yeah. I totally deserve this to be honest.

But based on my erratic, yet speedy, heart rate I'm going to go out on a limb here and blame the Mars bar and one-and-a-half liters of Lucozade I had while playing DS at Robs place for my currently alert but unstable status. Yup. Yeah. That'll do it all right.

On the upside, my sleep deprived state has driven me to insane, yet crystal-clear thoughts. I have decided to entirely kill my attempted Tuesday evening RPG for the time being. I shall have to wait until a far more sane hour to text my players regarding this fact. Chances are, a few of them will read this before they get that text anyway. On the other hand, I am now considering running not one, not two, but three RPGs over not four, not three, but two days!! Yes. That means running two games on one day. Insanity, I hear you cry!! Allow me to explain.

Previously to this early mornings events, I had offered to run an RPG on Monday evenings for Kris, Neill and Gar, though this has yet to be confirmed. Recent Mondays have found us sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, either playing Xbox out of boredom, or watching a movie, also out of boredom. The biggest issues with these are that Xbox ends up excluding some of the people present, and movies are a very passive activity, at a time that I would be much happier doing something with. So an RPG fits nicely. Also, the prospective players have been turning up when there has been nothing of interest on, so surely when there is an RPG on (which will hopefully be interesting), they will continue to be around.

A similar situation has grown around our Sunday afternoon group. Meeting for breakfast in town is great, and I do love getting together to catch up with the weeks news, but afterwords, we've been at a loss with what to do. As with the Monday group, the Xbox has been fired up out of boredom, but it doesn't last long. It seems that everyone apart from myself has grown tired of Rock Band already. Card games and board games got dragged out, but I'm fairly sick of replaying Battlestar Galactica and Fluxx (both awesome games, but I need an extended break for a while), and it's hard to get everyone to agree on a game with just a few minutes notice. So I got thinking, why not run an RPG? I usually think of RPGs as evening events, running after dinner, from seven until late, but that's not really necessary unless it's mid-week. On a weekend, why not start at, say, two, and finish at six. In fact, that would seem to suit my friends better. They still get home nice and early for work on Monday morning.

And that's where the third game comes in. Some of the players from my first Spirit of the Century campaign (have I mentioned before what a huge success that was?!? I have? Oh... well... it was. Huge!) can't really make it mid-week, due to a variety of commitments. But a Sunday evening game might suit them nicely. Say, from seven until half ten, eleven o'clock? That gives me an hour leeway between games, time to grab dinner and re-energise (without Luzoade from now on), and get the two player groups swapped around. Easy.

I think I could totally do it. Yes, it is now creeping towards 6am as I continue to write, so that may have more than a little to do with my hyperactive state, but my games are very much player driven, requiring very little work on my part. Events are moved forward by what they want, expect or make happen. Apart from a small number of special event sessions, my previous Spirit of the Century game (huge!) required almost no preparation between sessions, and I usually only worried about what I was going to do each evening an hour or two before everyone turned up. To quote Mythbusters, I think two games in one day, and three games a week is... "Plausible!" And we all know that it'll only be through scientific testing that we can learn if this myth is "Proven", or "Busted".

The next thing to decide is what game when. Currently, I'm happy to attempt a second run at my Spirit of the Century game, Mouse Guard and Dogs In The Vineyard, three dramatically differing games, but each based on the episodic style of play; adventures are usually wrapped up in a single evening rather than extending over several play sessions. I'd love to run a superhero game, but I find it unusually difficult to come up with an arc, which is usually where I start with my campaigns, breaking it down into sessions, or events. Whenever I try to think of an arc, I just end up with one I've read in comics already. Dammit! Why must I be such a comic nerd?!?

So there we have it. A kind of manifesto against boredom, and in support of creativity and hyperactiveness. Now all I have to do is gauge interest of everyone apart from myself. Unfortunately, I'm not actually around this weekend, which would be the perfect time to start asking, while my excitement towards such a big undertaking is at a high, and my brain has failed to truly realise how completely, utterly, stupidly insane it's being.

Insomnia sucks but it can be strangely productive.

Michael Jackson 1958 - ?

Unless you've been living on the dark side of the moon, without radio or internet contact, you're probably aware that Michael "King of Pop" Jackson died on Thursday, June 25th, 2009.* His death, as a friend of mine pointed out, did what the Iranian government could not- it stopped the internet, breaking Wikipedia due to an influx of updates, and taking down several major websites.

While I was shocked by the announcement, I can't say that I had the reaction that a lot of people are having. Michael is being revered as some kind of "God of Pop" now, not it's King. In death, all his past failures and indiscretions are being cleverly ignored or forgotten in favor of his music, his personality, but most importantly, the "way he was" before things started to go... weird. I really don't have a problem with this, however. I find myself remembering the good times too, like the first time I heard Black or White, and how, even at the young age I was, it brought tears to my eyes for having such a powerful message.

What I can't understand is the fevered obsession that has spread across the world with this news. It is an event that seems to be gaining as much media attention as September 11th. His funeral is being predicted as even bigger than Frank Sinatras.

Yet if death is the end, then, for me, Michael Jackson died somewhere between 1995, when HIStory was released, the last album that had songs in it I liked, and 2000, when things started to really turn weird for the King of Pop. By 2002 he had two sons christened Prince Michael and Prince Michael II, the latter of whom was also referred to as "Blanket". That was when I stopped listening to news about Jacko.

Please don't get me wrong. His death is of course a tragedy. Of course it is right to be mournful. But I feel the same way about Michaels passing as I do about a person killed in a car crash in Cavan. They both had the potential for greatness, an influence on so many peoples lives. They'll never get to do all the things they had planned. But I didn't know either of them. It doesn't affect me personally. Their loss, while sad, means little to my life and how I live it. It is their family and friends that will have to continue without them in their lives. The people who knew and loved them will have to live in a world that is a little emptier now. All these things are cause for sadness and silence.

But it is not cause for what we are seeing now. Millions across the world are mourning Michaels loss as if he was their brother. He is being called the greatest dancer and musician the world has ever known. According to the ticker on Sky News, people seem to think that we have lost one of the worlds absolute greats. Really? Eh... no. Not in my eyes.

And maybe I've just realized what my difficulty with the media attention is. Michaels death is not what is important here. He has gone onto wherever his beliefs will take him. A place where he can find peace. It is his family that must deal with the loss. Both his parents are still alive. He has eight brothers and sisters. Countless cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, family and friends. And they are who I am sorry for. They cannot grieve the way the parents and family of the car crash victim can. They are going to be surrounded by rabid fans and media for weeks to come. Leave his family to morn their loss. Leave them in peace.

What scares me most about this event is how fast the world knew. With internet, text messaging, twittering and a whole range of world-wide social networking systems, I found out about it while out at a meal, away from radios, televisions and computers. Worse still, according to his Wikipedia page, "Jackson was declared dead at 2:26 pm local time (21:26 UTC)" which is 22:26 Irish time. I was informed of his death at around 11pm, a mere 30 minutes later.

Will my death be recorded that fast? If it means that my family and friends can morn me in peace, then I hope not.

*- If that is the case, then how are you reading this now? Oh, and, sorry to break the bad news.