18/08/2003 @21:05:02 ^00:20:01

It is an enormous effort for someone as introverted as I am to try and communicate with people, and given the awkwardness, embarrassment, and anguish which generally results, I've decided that that effort is quite simply too much. I really should stop doing this site, indeed the only times I think about updating it are when the SA forums are down but everyone's been talking about closing their sites recently and sometimes it does have its uses. However there's nothing I've done recently nor will do in the foreseeable future that I feel like telling people about, nor do I feel like talking to the people whom I have known in the past to be readers. Whether or not that means I should delete the thing is a matter on which I can't decide, I've put a fair amount of time into the code behind this site and wasted enough server resources on it to simply delete it. And I know from the way people complain when it stops working that snafu gets a fair amount of use, even if newsstats doesn't (but maybe it would if people posted more, who can say)

The point of all this is firstly to explain why I hardly ever update anymore but also to explain why I never reply to any emails I get. Be these invitations to undoubtably painfully awkward social occasions or offers of employment of dubious potential in impossibly faraway lands I don't know how to respond in a way that won't cause offence. Why is it that when you say "yes I'll go" you don't hear any more about it but refusals are met with inevitable questioning of your decision? It's easier not to respond at all; gods know I'd love to be able to simply state my mind and not care about saving feelings but for some reason I can't bring myself to do it.

I could also go on again about being contacted out of the blue by people whom I haven't seen or heard from for huge lengths of time. This brings a whole new set of problems, as catching up questions are almost inevitable yet the thought of explaining how my life has gone to, say, one of the overachieving superconfident extroverts who formed the entire population of my school, and subsequently being forced to justify it in the face of certain scorn and disapproval is enough to make me have a fit.

Oh screw it I'll finish this at a later date. I can't be bothered to write the story of the whole thing with that godsforsaken computer now, it's still too depressing. Instead I will comment as blandly as possible on recent events that every other site has already done to death.

The football season started again - I swear it gets earlier every year - amid all the usual claptrap that gets bandied around. No I don't know who'll win the league, other than it'll almost certainly be a club that I don't like. While it's still annoying that all the news sources are still talking about David Bloody Beckham despite the fact that he doesn't even play in this country any more, I guess that'll die down to tolerable levels soon. What might not die down is Chelsea's spending, given new owner Roman "if the players we have don't play well together we'll just buy more" Abranovich's fiscal policy. No-one knows anything about this guy other than that he's rich enough to be able to go around sporting a beard that makes him look like a vagrant. Oh well.

I've also watched some of the cricket recently. While most of the time I don't have the attention span to be bothered with it, sometimes I get caught up, usually when England are in some kind of strong position in a game and might actually win. However I miss the music the BBC used to use. Channel 4's "Mambo no. 5" theme tune doesn't hold a candle to the old BBC theme, which was fantastic even before it was sampled and used on Mr. Roy's "Saved", one of the finest records ever made.

The A-level results came out last week, an event I would usually completely ignore because I find it depressing to contemplate yet another new batch of idiots being released into the world with qualifications like mine, thus devaluing them even further. However this time I noticed the date was back to being Thursday 14th August, like it was in 1997. Thus not only do I have meaningless qualifications, I'm getting really far over the hill too. I don't know if this years results broke all the records, but they usually do.

It seems the world and his wife have posted on forums or newsgroups recently to point out Google's new calculator, but other than mentioning my being vaguely impressed by the fact that it can handle complex numbers and accept input in no end of retarded ways to express the calculation I have nothing much to say about it. Google doesn't like SA very much. Do a search on "Something Awful", with or without the space in the middle, to see what I mean.

Speaking of SA, it seems no matter how much time I spend lurking on the forums I still miss about half of the really funny stuff. For example, the other day saw the brief return of Worst Admin Ever, but I was downstairs having dinner. A couple of days before that GBS was briefly renamed to some long string of characters, uh, here it is, "u9g70324hns'8", I missed that too because I'd fallen asleep at like 10pm. However I was awake at 4am a couple of weeks ago when Lowtax banned himself; that was at the same time as the big spews.org thread and the newsgroup invasion, which was fun to watch. But that was merely lucky, the fact remains that a lot of the good stuff happens late at night in America, i.e. around dawn here, so it all gets missed because you're asleep. Like just now while looking for that name I found a bunch of threads I missed, and wished I hadn't, for that very reason.

But I guess I should be glad I've got an account at all, thanks to Nelis again, heh. Anyway I have to take my books back to the library tomorrow and I'm fed up of writing this. Goodnight.