My last week (a mix of stuff)

Hello there.  This is gonna be a bit of a mish-mash of traditional ‘bloggy’ content alongside a brief delve into my usual architectural musing so that will explain the potential irrelevance against my previous content.  Regardless, here is my last week and what went on:

I got a cold kinda sums it up :-\

Elaborating on that point; in the later part of last week I got a rather painful throat, drippy nose and the occasional headache that put a damper on my previous plans of travelling and doing some research.  Now I know that the common cold isn’t a particular debilitating thing to happen, it’s just I like to ‘get it over with’ and not do much for the brief day or two so that I can get back on track faster in the long run.  Unfortunately, this was hampered by the fact it decided not to clear after one or two days and that I had a busy weekend / early weekday coming up.  In this time of ailment, there were events I was involved in which I met with varying circumstance and they go along as follows:

• 1.      Field research visit on Sunday morning (5^th October 2014).  This was a rather early start to the morning which was met with a bite in the air and my throat on the mend.  The walk was pleasant but coarseness of the wild was annoying as I was looking to be involved in meetings for the visit later on.  The site itself was an old manor house in my town’s communal parkland and with its age and current restoration in progress was a den of dust; particularly its basement / cellar in which the dust created a short term skirmish with me.  Talking in the later meeting was a case of directed coughs away from the others as we discussed the current research deadlines and potential output.  Other than the respiratory side of me making itself known frequently, it was a nice morning met with some good progress made with the project related to the site. 

• 2.      Architectural talk on Tuesday afternoon (7^th October 2014).  The day before had been an aggravating grab of tissue paper every 5-10 minutes to clear my nose which followed right into the night.  This night / morning in particular I got asleep around the 7-8am mark, giving me at max 2-2 ½ hours of sleep to work on.  This would have been fine any other day, but this was the day I was giving a talk to a group of adults with an interest in art and design.  It was a group I advertised my interests and research to and by that action was hired to give a talk on architecture and its history; so giving a brilliant first impression and enjoyable talk was paramount to me expressing this world that I am involved in.  The venue was packed to some 50-odd attendees and now I had to inform, entertain and intrigue them with some 4000 years of architecture in the space of an hour or so; alongside being very tired and blowing my nose every 5 minutes.  Much to my delight, I charged head on with the talk and in the space of a couple minutes found my stride into the fundamentals of pre-historic concepts of architecture.  As of today, I called it my “academics adrenalin” in a random off-topic chat on skype which I’ll look to put into the vernacular onward.  Anyway, The talk ended to a very happy crowd to stayed around for ½ hour or so to ask questions and thank me, which in the end kept me going right back to my home where I crashed and caught up on sleep.

As of last night / today I’m now feeling very well and hoping to get fully back on track over the upcoming weekend which should be nice.  I’m kinda hoping that I ‘got in early’ so to speak with getting a cold so that any potential bug going around closer to the Christmas holiday period should be suitably avoidable and not affect one of my favourite times of the year.  I’m involved in some fun locally based pub crawls and the likes around Christmas and you can’t be on form with flu meds in your system eh!

During all this time, I didn't really look to play a lot of games which may seem odd to some of you.  With more time dedicated to lounging about, one may image that you want to kick back and not think while you command an army or further a story.  However, I kinda didn’t do too much other than keeping up with my youtube subscriptions and watching a lot of twitch.  In my usual gaming time, I like to have twitch / youtube running on my phone as a peripheral screen with audio but I wasn’t really feeling the mild multitasking it involves.  The games I watched were mostly Dota 2 and Hearthstone but it also involved Heroes of Newerth, Path of Exile and a couple random games that one sometimes browses out of curiosity.  Whenever I watch the more competitive games, I always think back to the vision of when watching competitive games will be more widespread in the entertainment industry with pubs and bars showcasing it alongside traditional sports like Football and Rugby (UK references but of course replace relevant to own culture).  I have been to a couple ‘barcraft’ events and they were enjoyable for the most part. 

As my thoughts were with my IRL work mostly this week, I haven’t really thought about any particular games / architecture crossovers this week.  That being said, while looking through my old university notes, I did feel like I should make a small note on one of my previous posts.  On my post regarding Kitsch Architecture and paint by numbers game design, I do feel that there is a possibility that one could find higher relevance in the term “Vernacular Architecture” over “Kitsch” as it’s a term regarding the everyday.  That could be up to the reader in question, but you may want to personally review whether either term is more appropriate.  However, I may do another piece which tries to address the potential differences / similarities so we shall see.

Other than that, it leaves me with thinking what I want to talk about in the coming week.  I was thinking either ‘signs and semiology’ or regionalism concepts but I’m not sure.  Assume one of them and I hope you found this view into my current life interesting at least.