I'd just like to note that the local rock radio station was on at the dentist. I spent a morning having my head irradiated then my teeth assaulted with sharp instruments, in a chair with a broken armrest, listening to Linkin Park.

I had meant to do another NES game this weekend, but I didn't quite get around to it - I instead stuck myself fiddling with various codecs and formats, trying to find the combination that would involve the least amount of post-editing, as resycnhronizing the commentary on the Little Nemo video took me absolutely ages.

To test things, I started up Shadowgate - a game that I'd played before but could only vaguely remember the solution to - and proceeded to mutter to myself throughout, narrating actions as I did them so that I could line up the audio and tell whether the timing on the sound and video were off from each other. Most of it wasn't worth posting, but I thought that this part was too good to waste. After forgetting exactly what was in which coffin and failing to cross that room the first time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOw7-oaWhGg

By some coincidence, the portion of the video ID after the "-" is quite similar to the noise I make during it.

The good news is that the video worked - I could just put the video and the two audio tracks together and they suffered no misalignment at all, so the next real video will be much easier to produce this time around. For my own future reference, the magic combination is:

Window recorded through Camstudio: FFDShow codec at 50fps, maximum framerate, no auto-adjustment
Microphone audio recorded in Audacity through the Front Mic audio device, exported to FLAC
Game audio recorded in Tracktion through Pod X3, through a line physically coming out of the speaker headphone socket and into the Pod's guitar input, also exported to FLAC

Video still seems such an inconvenient thing to work with, what with desynchronization and worrying about potential compression artefacts... somehow, a standard format that everybody can play (like MP3 and OGG) still hasn't emerged, though I think that MP4 (and H264 or whatever that is underneath - this is part of the problem) might be going a reasonable way to change that.

Up until yesterday, the most uncomfortable thing that I've ever tasted was probably bubble tea, a Taiwanese concoction with beads of slightly frogspawn-like tapioca floating in any type of plant-flavoured hot water. I'm sure that it's an acquired taste and it was made wonderfully by the friend who offered it to me (I do apologize for calling it "the worst thing that ever happened" slightly later on, by the way - that was a bit rude) but I found that drinking it through a straw was not entirely unlike having an alien ovipositor inserted into your mouth and it forcing its eggs down your throat.

But yesterday at work, somebody had left a supply of... nondescript snacks out on the kitchen table. These things came in a packet with a squid, fish and lobster on it, written entirely in Chinese (or it may have been Japanese - I didn't want to go back and check) apart from the name "Treasure of the Sea". And if whoever invented this thought that the things inside were any sort of treasure, then I'd really like to see his face when he's first introduced to any of those three creatures actually properly prepared or cooked. Instead of any of the above, the packet contains a number of smaller packets that encase sort of... brown-green speckled lumps, about three inches long and approximating the shape of a fish. What most distressed everyone around me upon opening it, though, was the smell - almost uncannily as if somebody had shoved a three week old mollusc into the space heater.

However, I knew that there were some foods that smelled awful but tasted rather better - or at least overoptimistically half-remembered that. So I hesitantly put my tongue on to it, tasting that its primary ingredient was salt and that it seemed to be made up of a compressed roll of... stuff wrapped into the lump. Finally I bit down on it, whereupon it ejaculated a payload of fish juice into my mouth and the attempt was abandoned as the plan instantly changed to spluttering and hurling it binwards. Even after taking a drink of water to rinse my mouth out, it took a ton of soap to get the pungent stale fish smell off my fingers, and the odour even after burying it deep among the other rubbish was so offensive that I felt moved to surreptitiously swap bins with the one next to the paper-shredder out in the corridor. I'm still almost convinced that I'm now pregnant, and that a fish is going to pop out of my stomach and start singing showtunes at any moment.

Maybe I misinterpreted the packet and they were actually some sort of fish food. For really big fish. Who were unencumbered by a sense of smell, taste or indeed sight.

1. Go to the supermarket and buy a box of cake mix. Realize halfway back that said box doesn't include icing.
2. Go back to the supermarket and buy icing. Go back home.
3. Go back out to the supermarket and retrieve the icing from where you left it on the counter after buying it. Trudge back home.

I think I'll just stay in bed for the rest of the week.

It's been a continual source of bafflement to me that whenever I try to act like one of the real human beings, the world just refuses to work in the same way for me as it does for everyone else. Take the example of scraping together some lunch - feeling slightly stingier than normal today I decided to go up to the big kitchen on the sixteenth floor at work and get something edible from there rather than spending any money or interacting with the outside world. Given previous experience it might have been better to abandon this idea at its inception, but I pressed on nonetheless.

The sixteenth floor kitchen had been entirely changed round since the last time I was there, so it took me a while to find anything, but from what I could tell it still manages to provide a selection of items that are mostly entirely separate, cheap and/or calorific, and can't really be combined to form anything resembling lunch. The closest I got was some English muffins (which aren't English and don't resemble muffins) sliced in half with blocks of cheese spread around on the top, which I intended to transform into cheese on toast with the nearby toaster oven. Putting it all in on a paper plate, I set the timer and waited. If I had kept things at this sort of level then there would have been no trouble and I would have escaped in the five minutes that they would take to toast.

But while I was wandering around waiting for those five minutes to pass, I read some of the posters on the wall, one of which was the instruction sheet for what the CIC calls the "soda fountain" - a collection of giant alchemical-looking flasks on a rack full of luminous liquids. I don't like carbonated drinks so it was probably a mistake to try it out at all, but something drove me to investigate anyway with the vague intention of finding out if Fanta with normal water was all right. Now, what you do with these things is simple and was written in a set of easy steps up on the wall - you put a cup under the spout coming off the bottle of syrup, you unscrew the handle a few turns, wait for a modest amount of the stuff to pour out, then spin the handle in the other direction to completely close it, after which you go off and fill the cup the rest of the way with carbonated water. It's simple and works fine for any normal person.

Not for me. I confidently pulled a cup off the pile, held it under the nozzle and gently turned the handle, which promptly fell off, clattering into the bottom of the cup followed by a mercifully slow but steady and relentless syrup torrent spewing forth from both the remainder of the spout and the hole in it where the handle had been stopping it from getting out.

I picked the orange-covered screw-like tube out of the bottom of the cup with my fingers and tried to re-insert it into the handle, but without any success - screwing it in in either direction didn't help, because it required more pressure than it was really possible to give it with one hand occupied holding a cup that was creeping closer to full by the second. In a smooth Indiana Jones-like manoeuvre I pulled another cup off the pile with my increasingly sticky hand, put the first cup down on the counter while simultaneously shoving the second one under the nozzle, and continued the effort, looking round at the deserted kitchen for any sort of stopper or wad of Blu-Tak or anything that might help.

Eventually a man with a beard arrived, and I mentioned the slight soda fountain related problem to him as he walked past. Helpfully he immediately ran out to get a technician before I could say that all I needed was a hand on the back of the flask to screw the handle back in, leaving me still stuck there with a growing assembly line of cups filled with bright orange glutinous stuff. By this time the level in the bottle was almost below the handle, which would have released me from syrup-catching duty and allowed me to sort the problem easily.

But just before it ran out due to the natural force of gravity, which my family have had a talent for since the 17th century so it's something even I can't mess up, I finally managed to get the screw to catch and spun the handle back in at the same moment that the man from before came back apologetically saying he couldn't find anyone. I thanked him for his help anyway, poured the luminous contents of the cups back into the bottle, recorked it, washed my hands and then went back to the oven to get my lunch, which the toaster oven had baked almost solid to the plate during the time I was distracted by the soda fountain at the opposite end of the room, and was now on a uniformly brown plate that had been white when it went in. I got some yoghurt to go with it.

This is why Whitney cooks in our house.

As I've touched on before, I'm very bad at telling whether food is all right to eat or not. Years of growing up in a country where we eat pie made out of kidneys and feed cows their own brains probably gave me a fair amount of resistance anyway, but it's compounded by the way that I have very little sense of smell after having been in chemistry for two years, and am colourblind so often can't tell whether I have green eggs or ham until they start growing cotton wool.

With that in mind, this is an accidentally rather artsy picture of my lunch today.


This collection of raw fish (and a squid), left over from an extremely overambitious visit to Fugakyu with Whitney's parents on Friday, has been transferred between the fridge and the freezer since we brought it home with us. The rice accompanying two of them had gone hard from the freezing, so I threw that out - otherwise it looks and smells all right. It certainly tastes fine, but after four days, behind that deliciousness might be death. We'll see.