Matthew Walton’s Blog

Well, it was last night actually, but I couldn’t resist being able to use as a title for this Entry a line from the folk song ‘Lowlands’, which is sung by June Tabor (excellently of course) on the Oysterband Big Session Volume 1 CD. Which everyone should get. There’s a song about making beer (John Barleycorn), one about the end of the world (When That Helicopter Comes), one about sex (The Cuckoo’s Nest), one about commercialisation (Country Life) and even a song which makes very little sense at all (Ten Thousand Miles) but which is good.

But I digress.

Last night I had a dream. A strange dream it was. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody to be told that it was about police recruitment. I do that moderately often, although rarely in such detail as this (not accurate detail, just detail of some sort, as it wasn’t a very realistic dream).

Firstly, it seemed I must’ve got through the initial stages of trying to join the police, because I had been stashed in a small room much like one in a University hall of residence on a big park-like campus somewhere in… err… Britain, I assume, since it was definitely an English or Welsh police force involved.

There were other applicants there. While we stayed there, we had to complete a sort of combined fitness/obstacle course/memory test. The dream seems to have skipped over some of it as I remember dreaming that it was a lot longer than I remember actually dreaming about (that made sense in my head, honest). But there were three bridges to run over. One was like the bridge over the A10 between Impington and Milton, which I cross on my way to and from work each day. Concrete, footpath-sized. The one in the dream was rather steeper though, and over a deep deep chasm.

The second bridge was a rope bridge with a deck made of wooden slats. Each of these was painted a different colour and had two words on it. We were supposed to remember as many of these pairs as possible, while crossing the bridge as fast as we could.

The third bridge was styled much like the cycle bridge over the A14 at Milton, which I also cross on my way to work (my brain is clearly a dreadful inventor, so it has to steal bridge designs for dreams. It has to steal characters too, more on that later). Except that it was very narrow, had steps up the side we went up, and required one to slide down a pole to get to the ground at the far side. The far side was a street which looked like it came out of Paragon City (which is the virtual city where City of Heroes is set). In fact, if you come in-game and go to Kings Row, you can go and stand on it. As I said, my brain is a terrible plagiarist. Well, either that or I’ve been playing too much City of Heroes, hmm?

Anyway, on that street stood a Sergeant who was asking each person coming off the bridge to recall things from the second bridge, usually by saying a word and expecting us to shout back all the words which had been paired with it on the bridge slats. I did appallingly, because I’d gone over the course far too fast, but I was first off and had done a good time and apparently they’ll substitute speed for memory. Odd indeed.

After that it seemed the residential thing was over, because we were at the local nick (although I very much doubt my local nick looks anything like this one did) and we were waiting for an interview. One of the officers was a familiar character from The Bill (plagiarism again), the others had indistinct faces. While we were waiting for the interview to start, we chatted amongst ourselves. One girl was wearing half blues and wondered why we weren’t. We told her we hadn’t been issued with uniform yet, and she seemed surprised because she’d gone and bought hers already! We thought this was silly. I can think of someone I’ve encountered in real life who could have been that girl.

Then we got called into the interview room. It was a sort of two-way panel, as there was all of us candidates (about eight), facing off the panel of five, all being interviewed simultaneously.

The thing that really makes me think I was playing too much City of Heroes is that we suddenly all gained floating text above our heads with our names on. That and the first question involved the interviewers calling up a hologram of a level 30 hero who’d just got themselves an aura, and asking us what the range of the power was.

Then I woke up, before I could explain that auras aren’t powers and being merely cosmetic, have no effect on other people at all so it’s irrelevant to ask what range they had.

So am I mad, or did I just play too much City of Heroes this week? It’s actually the best dream I’ve had for a long time, so perhaps I’ll get to revisit this bizarre little alternate universe and find out what happens next.

Just to let you know that yes, I’m still alive and doing the usual things, no nothing massively exciting has come along for me to write about, and yes I have been playing too much City of Heroes. Check out the gallery for a few screenshots from City of Heroes EU.

In other news, I think I finally figured out how to do the positioning system for Growl. It’s not the total solution I originally intended, but it’s probably more practical to do it this way than the way I wanted to do it — which was far beyond my small mind’s ability to cope with.

But before I can engage on that again, time for work.

Well, thanks to Andi for lending me the appropriately-sized and -shaped screwdriver (I had the right size but it was not the right shape) to replace the hard drive in my Powerbook. It all seems to be running fine and dandy now — and it’s got 20GB more space in it. I shall now mollycoddle it excessively so that it lasts long enough for me to be able to afford whatever the next-generation Powerbook turns out to be, whenever it might be announced.

In other news, I’m feeling a little angsty and on edge tonight. I haven’t figured out why yet.