Games

Today I played several games to celebrate returning to Hong Kong. The first of these was the swearing at my computer game. I thought I'd grown tired of this since I upgraded from a four-and-a-half-year-old Hewlett Packard to a brand new Mac, but it turns out that even with a shiny new computer, I can still ascend to heights of rage, this time because of a window in Lightroom where it's impossible to click on the 'OK' button unless you change the display of the screen to a migraine-inducing resolution. At least the person (I think) is responsible is an easily contacted software developer in Kyoto, who after an email or two will probably tell me that I'm a doofus and I should have done [insert simple and obvious action here].

Not content with that, we pressganged several friends to come round and play Blokus, a fiendishly frustrating game a bit like Go, but with pieces of brightly coloured translucent plastic and the ability to destroy all your faith in your fiancee's concern for your mental well-being.  Or for her to realise that she's engaged to a man who hoots like a guinea fowl whenever he thinks he's being clever than any of the other players, and gets in a sulk when he realises he's not.

It's actually very simple, yet at the same time it's hard to grasp how you're meant to play the game without (a) ruining everyone else's chances or (b) putting yourself in a losing situation.  If I figure it out, I might put a guide to playing Blokus up here, and then I assume within ten minutes a crowd of angry twelve-year-olds will tell me I'm a doofus and I should have stuck to swearing at my computer.

Other than that, today was rather uneventful; I went to work, I deleted 200 emails, I ate some salad, I ate probably too much whipped cream and meringues, and I phoned up a customer services department in the UK via Skype, which was accompanied by the sound of a host of demons, borne aloft on the wings of locusts. Or perhaps it was just a bad line, but that seems rather unlikely. Think about it: could it really be so-called 'science' that allows us to communicate across thousands of miles, rather than some very invention of the Devil himself?

Ahem. Maybe Skype isn't the work of the devil. Or perhaps I shouldn't be calling 0800 666 666 666 for technical assistance (although as I read in a book of pedantic trivia in Malaysia, the Number of The Beast may actually be 616, which came as no news to me as I distinctly remember my nuclear-waste-recycling sibling telling me just such a fact at least two decades ago - make of that what you will.)