11 July 2003
I want to write, but it’s so hot. Especially here, the warmest room in the house. The window’s one of those that can open two ways: you can open it a little way vertically, or fully open it horizontally. While I’d like to do the latter, it’s a big window and if a breeze caught it then it would be almost ripped from its fastening. Not to mention clocking me in the head and likely hitting my nice big monitor.
To do something about this, I bought a fan. It’s not a very powerful fan, but it’s keeping the air moving and it was cheap. This is why I’m not too keen on going to hot places for holidays — my brain slows to a crawl but my body keeps moving. The heat doesn’t really get to me that much, as shown by my constant wearing of a t-shirt underneath another t-shirt or shirt, and then a v-neck or something on top of that. Thankfully I’m not a sweaty person.
But anyway. The point is I keep opening Word documents, banging out a couple of paragraphs, and then just getting bored with the whole thing and clicking the new document button.
To coincide with the lack of sporting action this summer (well, there’s still action, but no football means a serious reduction in interest) I’ve ordered some sports books from the library. I got Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About The Bike, a couple of days ago but haven’t even so much as looked at it since. (No, I didn’t get it because of the Tour de France, it was just coincidence.) Coming soon will be On Aggression, and Stephen Potter: Inventor of “Gamesmanship” because they didn’t have The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship itself, which sounds like a great read. A small prize to the person who knows — without cheating! — where this list came from. It might be a clue to know that I’d read most of the other books on the list, but then again, it might not.
(The IBL still needs to improve. This would be easier if they let me be an admin.)
Going to see Whale Rider at the weekend. It’s my second most-looked-forward-to film of the summer after the remake of Xiao cheng zhi chun , which I’ll be seeing at the end of the month.
I joined another Diplomacy game that I feel I can talk about kind-of freely, as I remembered to use Sneakemail this time. I’m Turkey, which is cool, because I’m Russia in the other game. That means in neither game will I be attacked from the east unless things go badly wrong.
So far only Austria’s spoken to me in the other one, wanting to divide the Balkans. I like that attitude. I’m going to tell him that Russia and Italy can get centres elsewhere, and we should be looking for me to get Greece and him to get Rumania. Of course, I don’t particularly care if he gets Rumania, I just want Greece so I can niggle away at Italy, and I might even help Russia take it off him, as long as he’ll allow me into the Black Sea.
This is what Diplomacy’s all about: never consider yourself to be in a position of weakness at the start, take the initiative, keep your eye on the board and don’t be intimidated by empty threats, but make plenty yourself. And always tell as much truth as you can get away with, but don’t be too ambiguous in an attempt to be subtle, because everyone’ll just ignore you.