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Would you shag this man? If so, then why not contact him via his website.

I’m spending some of the afternoon adding rooms to Cal’s “Choose your own adventure” game. Rather than introduce you to the game from the beginning, where it’s experienced a fair amount of ‘game-rot’, I’m going to introduce it to you from the point at which I started adding rooms – lost in the foliage, you have decided to scour the ground for a tunnel. Finding two, you have chosen the one with the humming noise and the faint green light…. Now choose your own adventure…. [REQUEST – please try and keep the plot in character and mood – it would be interesting to see how this might emerge…]

Over the last week I’ve been holding down a full-time job while working a couple of hours a night trying to polish of a piece of freelance work that even now is still lingering around my head. And over the next week, I have yet more to do. I’ve only been managing five or six hours sleep a night at most. On Thursday evening, when I was trying to prepare for an interview the following day, it all got a bit too much.

I was cooking some pasta with my flatmate Kate. When I picked up the pan I splashed my hand with boiling water. Reacting on reflex my arm twitched more, splashing more water onto my arm and onto Kate’s sleeve. I started swearing – my arm was hurting, and part put down, part threw down, the pan. Filled with horror about Kate’s arm (which was completely fine), I started apologising profusely – looking at all the hot water on the floor and the mingling pasta shapes, and running my arm under the cold tap. I had a sudden flash that I was clearly simply incapable of running my life to even the slightest degree – a feeling compounded by not getting the job at the BBC and the last six months of fighting for money and worrying about bills. A minor emotional collapse followed, only calmable by a substantial couple of shots of neat vodka. The following day, I felt fine – and managed to get to my interview in plenty of time, smart and collected. Only to discover that I’d prepared by looking at completely the wrong site. I came home early that evening and promptly slept for twelve hours.

Today on Barbelith: Shamanism in a Nutshell (I) – “Shamanism, a widely misunderstood and misused word, has been used to describe everything from tribal magicians, spiritual healers, medicine men, and sometimes any nature based form of spirituality, magic, or religion. This broad and vague usage brings with it a lot of miscommunication and confusion. Lothar Tuppan investigates.”

I am (barely) old enough to remember Pong before it got 3D. Mo isn’t old enough to remember Elite on the BBC (which I used to play in the flint ‘New Buildings’ at school). When I think of the games that I used to love when I first got my own computer I think of Paradroid on the Commodore 64. What do you think of?

Political cartoons and infographics from around the world have been posted on Barbelith. Well worth a look.

All week at work I’ve been using an old Apple laptop and it’s cemented in my mind exactly how much I need an iBook and how much I want to try OSX and how cool and useful Office X looks. Now all I need is a couple of grand.

Tiny Tom Adventures: Being one potential direction for a project I’m working on at the moment which will almost certainly come to nothing or stress me out or both:

Max and Liz to go Bonnie and Clyde in the new series of Roswell? Say it’s so! [UPN.com]

Possibly the best headline that I’ve ever written goes as follows: Britney’s home raided, Britney remains untouched… [full story]