Pfangirl Through the Looking Glass

Most of this weekend, I’ve smelt like smoke, thanks to the 2 braais we had. Friday evening was braai-less. Paul and I, along with my sister, her boyfriend, and my father went to see The Burning Bush, the play at my mother’s school. We go to the Benjamin Pine school play every year, and this year my mother was co-producer. Anyway, you’ve got to love school musicals that have happy, catchy little choruses like ‘Kill kill kill kill, kill all the Hebrews’. On Saturday we went to Paul’s place and spent the day working on our Honours projects. I finally organised my Forum Users survey questions and put them online. I really hope that people take the time to actually complete it. And I’m bracing myself for the little shits who either refuse to take it seriously, completing the survey with utter garbage, or try to appear all ‘cool’ and ‘heavy’ and produce utterly false responses. I also finished reading Snow Falling on Cedars again on Saturday morning. In just over 24 hours I had re-skimmed th...

You know, it’s interesting thinking about relationships and the difference age makes to them. I ended up at a 15 year old’s blog the other day and I was confronted with all kinds of ‘Oh woe is me’ whining about broken hearts, and half-baked Love poetry with a capital L. I like to think that Shakespeare wiped out Romeo & Juliet for that same reason- they annoyed the crap out of him. The much older Antony and Cleopatra, with their cross-dressing and sexual games, who also end up killing themselves in error, are a far more interesting couple. And then there’s watching Gareth with Denbeigh. That relationship just seems so much more relaxed, and comfortable, free from hormonal teenage angst. As a sidenote, Gareth in a relationship reminds me of my bachelor uncle who got married last year. There’s that exact same kind of personality change from a brooder to a light-hearted, smiley, physically affectionate (dare I say cuddly even) guy. That’s a compliment BTW. It all makes me extremely g...

Ha! After much stress-induced trembling and mood swings, I finally finished Prince of Persia: Warrior Within today. Although, the accomplishment is tempered with the knowledge that I no longer have a procrastination activity to keep me from working on essays and assignments. Ho hum. Anyway, I finished the game scratching my head over the plot. I ended up back-tracking to one of the major boss battles earlier in the game and the cut-scene that followed it. Watching it again, the time travel mumbo jumbo, and motivations for the Prince's actions, began to make sense. Although the plot was ultimately pretty weak, at least I now know where I stand for the Babylon-set game. And yes, I have finally reached the conclusion that my favourite overall game genre is Action Adventure. Puzzles, killing and jumping- instant gratification gaming at its best.

As promised, a few images from last Saturday’s (1 October) steam train ride from Kloof to Nottingham Road (a part of the Natal Midlands by Mooi River) for the Vintage Steam Fair, or something like that…

I’ve written another demo gaming column. In the past I tried to get in on the whole gender issues in gaming angle. However, as some of you have pointed out to me already, restricting yourself solely to such subject matter is really pigeon-holing your discursive abilities. You’re just re-treading the same ground over and over. Gaming is sexist. Women are excluded. Gaming is sexist… So this time I’m trying to break away from the restrictive category of ‘women and games’, and prove that, despite not being one of those obsessive gamers whose hobby consumes their entire life and bank balance, I can actually comment on gaming. Besides, my comic strip covers gender issues. Anyway, any feedback would be appreciated: Jesus is a LANer Competitive gaming is the key. LANs are going to elevate gaming into the pop culture mainstream. At least that’s what I hear every so often, however ineloquently put. The fact of the matter is that there are small group of gamers out there who believe that it is on...

Right, last Friday I drove down to university for the sole reason of attending a Eng 102 Tutors Meeting. Part of it involved setting another time to meet and discuss the Cosmopolitan essays we have just received, and make sure we’re marking to the same standards. After much wrangling we decided on Monday 17th, because that’s when most people are on campus. Today I receive an e-mail that the meeting has been shifted forward to this Friday, 14 October so we can talk about the next course section we’re covering. So I’m pissed off. I’m not going to waste my petrol and part of my day off again to schlep all the way into Durban for a 20 min meeting. So I’m skipping it. I’ll phone my fellow tutors afterwards and find out what happened.

Apart from Friday night, the weekend was a pretty lazy, inactive one. And it felt pretty wasted for that reason. I was in the mood to do something; be social. But it was rainy and cold so I just passed the time doing reading and research for my English presentation (tomorrow, Tuesday), playing some pool, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Quake III and Warcraft III, and watching Paul play Half-Life 2. On Saturday evening, G came over with Shirley’s PC (which makes a weird ambulance siren sound when it is recovering from a fried power pack), and he and Paul were having great fun literally throwing the boot at the Combine police force. For a messiah-like figure, Gordon Freeman is surprisingly childish… Beautiful, beautiful game though, and I’d say pretty experimental in approach.

We weren’t really in the mood for clubbing on Friday evening, so after gorging ourselves on pizza and pasta at the Musgrave Mimmos (where I had my fave- the Rustica with its marinated chicken, bacon, onions and jalapenos), we headed upstairs to the cinema to see Sin City . Kill Bill: Volume 1 was the coolest film of 2004. Sin City is the coolest film of 2005. Essentially Sin City , based on the graphic novel series by Frank Miller, is the Pulp Fiction of comics (unsurprisingly, Quentin Tarantino is a guest director here, alongside Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller). Sin City is a gritty retro look at urban corruption, chronicling the seediness of life in Basin City, a metropolis that exists in perpetual darkness. It’s also known as Sin City. There are prostitutes in bondage gear dishing out vengeance, hitmen, strippers, serial killers, paedophiles, crooked and straight cops, evil clergy, as well as a healthy does of gun fights, beatings, hand-to-hand combat, cannibalism and dismemb...

Yay, it’s over. I’ve just finished writing my Media assignment, due for next Monday (or Thursday depending on who you listen to). Either way, it’s done and I don’t want to look at it again. I was really afraid I was going to be working my ass off on it this weekend, but I managed to round it off this afternoon. I don’t think the essay is too bad actually. It’ll be interesting to see my mark though. It’s always a bit unnerving to be marked by someone you don’t really have any contact with. Anyway, the essay is the reason I’ve been a bit AWOL from this blog at the moment. I’m not intending this to be a particularly long entry either. I want to get my Tutorial preparation for Monday out the way this evening because I’m doing an English presentation on Tuesday (on Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History), and, apart from reading the novel, I haven’t done any other preparation. Plus I’m speaking about the novel in terms of autobiography genre conventions, and that’s one of my weak spots. After...

I’m not going to lie and say how thoroughly I’ve enjoyed studying again, because I haven’t. Honours is a heavy workload and a lot of stress (because, yes, I'm a student who actually works). But today I did get to enjoy one of the benefits of not being a corporate wage slave trapped inside an air-conditioned office. Today was a beautiful day, so, once I got home from university, I spent my afternoon in my bikini outside in the sun reading about, of all things, Apartheid era black oppression. Anyway, the weekend was a good one. On Friday evening, Paul and I missed Shirley’s Red Eye do (and some apparently very drunken shenanigans at Tiger Tiger) to join my family for dinner. It was mother’s birthday so we all headed up to John Dory’s in Kloof to enjoy their current series of prawn specials. Paul and I both had the rack of ribs / 8 prawns combo. But beware John Dory’s. They’re pretty stingy, Their Coke is that horrible water-syrup mix, and all that my mother received for her birthday...

This is kind of a second part to last week’s post, but today (Wednesday) I was up from 6am driving around Yellowwood Park with Paul, counting garbage bags and then following a garbage truck around the suburb, to check out vehicle speed and routes for Paul’s Simulation Honours Project. At least this time, it wasn’t boring like last week. The whole experience, particularly the search for the garbage truck, was weirdly Grand Theft Auto-like. Anyone who has ever done the “Collect unusual vehicles” missions, they’ll know what I’m talking about. The other funny moment was when the garbage truck men came to pick up bags guarded by a nasty little runt of a dog (think Paris Hilton’s Tinkerbell). The one man simply picked the dog up like one of the bags and dumped it back on the pavement. Anyway, in other news, my Media assignment has been postponed for a week so that means I get to have a weekend after all, as opposed to stressing over a Monday deadline. So I’m going for a train ride on the Umg...

This last weekend was mostly consumed by a weekend at Mark’s place while his parents were away. Paul and I arrived there midday on a very hot Saturday and didn’t end up leaving till past 4pm on Sunday. It was a really cool, game-centred weekend, in which there was much gaming (Quake III, Warcraft 3 and FlatOut on the PC, a Capcom Marvel Fighter and Mario Warriors on the X-Box, and the boardgame 30 Seconds), as well as raiding of hard drives, swimming, TV watching, drinking and eating. Pictures speak so much better than words, so here is a selection of pics from the weekend, with commentary where necessary. Gaming underway. From left, G, Natasha, Paul, Mark, Matt and moi. Gareth in the background, getting his Quake III shit on. I found the most awesome skin on the PC I was playing on- Batman’s Harley Quinn- but her unfortunate habit of yelling “Wheeeee” every time she jumped wasn’t the best for sneaking up on people. For the record, Gareth emerged as the LAN’s Quake III champion. G and ...

Clearly I’m a bad person. At the moment my mother has a bad cough. And I can’t help but glare at her when she has one of her incredibly loud retching fits. I just can’t stand it. Despite it being a dry cough, I keep expecting her to bring something up. It’s like living in a TB ward. And that makes me think that if, God forbid, either one of my parents were ever to develop lung cancer (my mother has been a second-hand smoker to my father’s Peter Styvesant Reds for 35+ years now, and my father’s dad died of lung cancer before I was born), I don’t think I could handle being around them. On so many levels, I wouldn’t be able to take it. Persistent coughing is really nails-on-chalkboard stuff for me. But actually, thinking about it, I have a similar reaction to the sounds of most body functions. My grandmother’s indigestion-induced burps have me clenching my teeth in irritation. And if I hear, see or smell vomit, the gag reflex is automatic. I just have to get out of there.

That’s exactly what I did today (Thursday). I got up at 6am to sit in a car at the Kingfisher intersection in Yellowwood Park (by the Spar and civic centre) to count, and monitor the speed of cars. For two hours. Actually, I did it twice in one day, also counting cars from 12:00 to 1:30 at same spot. After that, Paul and I spent an hour driving around Yellowwood Park, checking distances, and car speeds, as well as marking a map with every speed bump in the suburb. All this tedious work is for Paul’s Computer Science Honours Project. Think Sim Garbage Truck. He’s making a game / programme that is intended to simulate a municipal garbage truck’s movements on garbage collection day. The idea is that it can be used to optimise the collection process- avoiding traffic, reducing unnecessary back-tracking over the same routes, and minimising the number of times the truck has to return to the dump to offload the trash. (Anyway, it reminds me that I need to get the questions ready for my projec...

Here's the latest- inspired by real life events:

If I seem a bit absent these days from online life it’s for a couple of reasons. Firstly I’m on my Spring Break this week, and away from university so I don’t have access to their free, though extremely slow, Internet. That means I’m falling back on my home 56K dial-up connection for my Net fix. That in turn means I have to put up with parental scrutiny of the phone bill. Secondly, I have a couple of essays due in the next few weeks, so I’m busy with those. The topics, in case anyone is interested are: For English: Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the representation and treatment of women’s experience in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Forster’s Howards End. In considering this question, you should give particular attention to the implications of the chosen narrative technique. And the other assignment, for Media, is: Choose three commodities of different kinds (both material and intangible goods and services) known to be widely marketed in South Africa, and point out ways in ...

Either my ears or the bridge of my nose is crooked because it is very rare for sunglasses to sit straight on my face. Wire frames are the absolute worst. As a result, buying sunglasses is something like my own personal equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail. And there’s no Dan Brown book to shortcut this process. Anyway, I was messing around at the sunglasses stand in Clicks while my mother was buying prizes for her school’s fundraiser Big Walk, and I actually found a pair of wire frames that fit well and (I think) look really good. I’ve been without sunglasses for a few months now since my beloved, much dropped, much chewed R90 pair snapped at one of the hinges after 3 years. Before that there was my identical R10 flea market specials, which are now chilling with a pineapple under the sea somewhere near Margate (When the wave flattened me I had to make a decision of Sophie’s Choice proportions- save my shades or my bikini top). I was intending to buy another cheapo pair next time ...

Wednesday evening was a lot of fun. We managed to get pretty much the entire Durban Pond collective (see www.inthepond.za.net) together with less than 24hrs notice. I had posted these pictures on The Pond, but due to offending and hurting someone, which made me feel pretty guilty, I removed them. Anyway, the night out started first with dinner at Mimmo’s at the Pavillion. We had time to kill before the bowling leagues finished their use of the lanes so it was off to the pool bar for some fun and games. Ashley, Paul and Mark around the table: Umm, Natasha and moi assume the position… (This is what happens when someone won’t calmly pose for her photo): Toti Gareth looking suave. (Ignore the mad chickie in the background): Time for a turn at the foozball table: After Shirley was bounced from the bar for not having her ID (in all fairness most of us 23+ year olds were asked as well), we finally got to bowling. Guess who? A really nice pic of most of the gang (G, Shirley, Gareth, Paul and M...

It’s amazing. Whenever its time for First Years (or is it under-graduates in general?) to hand in essays, or take tests, the South African mortality rate soars. People’s grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters and brothers drop dead in large numbers. Very often, more than one relative pegs on the same weekend. Meanwhile, mothers and fathers are fighting for their lives in hospital. Or the student is them self recovering from double pneumonia. Now I don’t mind the personal illness story. If the student doesn’t actually look injured or ill, a doctor’s certificate can be requested. (Apparently we can ask for death certificates too. And that could be interesting). However, my main point, and anger, is directed at the shameless way these 18 year olds lie. And the way that they are quite content to fabricate something major like family deaths to get away with something trivial like their own laziness. Perhaps I’m superstitious, but as far as I’m concerned that is something dangerous to do. Per...

There’s nothing quite like electronic gaming to time steal. Apart from a few random games of Desert Combat with Paul, I hadn’t played any PC games lately. My two games in progress, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time required more concentration, effort and time than I was prepared to give. I didn’t mind leaving KOTOR because, as an RPG, it does require attention, and long sessions of playing to get the most out of it. You can’t rush it. I started playing Sands of Time while I was on holiday back in July. I breezed through 80% of the game in about 3 days. Then I got to a damn sequence in an elevator in which I had to defend a princess, and myself, while fighting reanimating corpses and trying to charge up my super-power. I repeatedly failed, and left the game for a month. On Thursday evening, I tried once more, and, unbelievable did it. By the next day I had finished the game. Although I felt the ending, though clever, was a bit flat (the final fi...