Hooray for Sheffield!

Earlier in the year than usual, it was the Sheffield Regional today. It was at the Megacentre, a strange church-cum-children's-play-area-cum-conference-centre near the city centre, and a very nice (although expensive) room for an othello tournament.

I got up more or less in time to catch the train down to Sheffield, remembering to bring my board and clock in case we needed extra (we didn't) but somehow forgetting the most important part of any othello player's equipment, my hat. I got there to find people standing outside because the person who was supposed to let us in hadn't turned up - this seems to happen at every othello tournament everywhere, it'd be hugely disconcerting if it didn't.

Anyway, the competitors included Garry Edmead, who hasn't been seen for many years, and Iain Forsyth, who hasn't been seen for even longer (or by me at all before today). And the organiser Roy Arnold, plus Iain Barrass (two Iains and no Ians) and Andrew Burgess. I realised halfway through the first round that everyone else had been coming to othello competitions for much, much longer than I had - and since my othello heritage goes back to the late nineties, that's pretty rare. But then Marie Lightman turned up in time for round two, so she was able to take over as the new bug and relegate me to the position of old-timer.

In the first round, I beat Roy, while Andrew beat Iain and Garry beat Other Iain. I should call them Young Iain and Old Iain to avoid confusion, but that would probably cause offence, so I won't. In the second round, with Garry having the bye, all the first-round losers won their games, giving us the extremely groovy situation of everybody being on one point after two rounds, except Garry on two. It would be even groovier if everybody had been on the same score, but with seven players that just isn't statistically possible. Iain Forsyth completely thrashed me in this round, incidentally.

After another beating for me at the hands of Garry, we all went to lunch - the place downstairs at the Megacentre isn't exactly haute cuisine, but it's okay for a snack. Then we had four more rounds of othello where I did rather better, ending up playing off against Iain B for second place and losing. Still, third out of seven isn't bad, and it was a great scoreboard at the end, with everybody managing at least 2½ points and no chance at all of working out the results of individual games just by looking at the final scores (except that Garry beat everyone with no real difficulty).

Garry Edmead 7
Iain Barrass 5
Ben Pridmore 4
Roy Arnold 3½
Andrew Burgess 3
Marie Lightman 3
Iain Forsyth 2½

That was fun - I haven't played othello for aaaaaages for one reason or another, and it's nice to get back into the swing of things. Cambridge International in February! Be there or be a non-othello-player!

How memory works

"Drat," I thought to myself, "I was going to do something but then I got distracted and now I can't remember what it was. Maybe I'll write about it in my blog... oh, wait, writing in my blog was the thing I was going to do!"

What I was going to write about was the demand from an anonymouse: "plaese put some light on the loci or place method and movement that we need to associate with the words"

I get asked this question quite a lot (usually by the same person every time) and it always worries me a little. Because that's definitely venturing into the wrong territory for advice on memory. The amount of movement or the detail of the images you use varies wildly from one memoriser to another - everyone's brain is very different, and it really is very important to do your own thing and find your own way of memorising. Trying to imitate everything I do in exact detail is never going to work, believe me.

But when I say that, people assume I'm keeping secrets from them because I don't want them to be successful memory people, so I really can't win.

It's a working man I am

I've got people offering me jobs left, right and centre - who says the economy's bad? Nobody's offered me lots of money for doing nothing, though, which I'll admit is my ideal.

My blog entries lately are short enough to put on twitter, it's terrible. I'll try to do something about it soon.

Blue Monday

In Britain we're being told that it's the most depressing day of the year, whereas in America it's apparently quite a cool day where you don't have to go to work. I want to emigrate.

It's cold today!

Cold by the standards of this winter, at least, which is still quite warm, so I can't complain. I could still cycle to Nottingham and back without much discomfort.

This is, according to Blogger, my 1964th post, so maybe when I get to 1976 I'll post a blog reviewing each year of my life up to the present - that'd be cool. But then maybe something will happen on the day of post 1997 that I have to blog about and whatever I did that year will go unchronicled forever.

What did I do that year? Oh, yeah, the first MSO! That was an awesome year!

I can't talk about curtain hooks

My curtains don't have hooks. They've got ring things that slide along the rail. Curtain hooks are rubbish, anyway, they always fall off.

Look, I'd talk about memory if there was anything to talk about, but nobody's told me anything's happening - there's probably a US Championship in a couple of months that I'd love to go to but almost certainly can't afford.

I could talk about Captain Hook, he was extremely cool. Or no, I can't really be bothered.

I didn't know you cared!

I wasn't expecting to get quite so many replies immediately after posting last night - with my only updating this thing once a week at best, I assumed people weren't checking it so regularly. Anyway, the feeling seems to be that I should talk about memory, but there's not much to talk about at the moment - we're in the usual winter quiet period between competitions, and as usual (as far as I know) there's no definite plans about what's going to happen this year. I'm still intending to run a "Cambridge" competition at some point, probably not in Cambridge again, but I can't really announce anything about it yet. As for whether I'll compete anywhere, that's another question - we'll have to see how I'm feeling.

I do have an interesting offer for a Spanish advertising campaign which I'm in danger of losing through sheer apathy and I should make an effort to do, since they're paying well over the odds, but I'll let you know more about that when the time's right.

I'm starting a new temp job tomorrow, Friday 13th (it's an Unlucky Year again) in Derby (most haunted city in England), which I'm confident will go well. I'll take my lucky ladder's foot with me. I'm determined to devote any time I spend working as an accountant from now on to actively pursuing some other career, whatever it is. That, I think, will help me psychologically, or at least keep me off the streets for a while. Although my brother's staying with me at the moment, so spare time is more at a premium, although he does cook dinner for me every night, so I really can't complain.

I also have a book to co-write with Alberto some time when I get a moment - I'm sure it'll be a roaring success.

What do you want from me?

What brought you to this blog? Judging by the stats page, most people who come here from random searches are looking for Krypton Force, Coco Pops lyrics, old coins or how to give oneself food poisoning, but what about my regular readers? Do you want my insight into memory matters? Othello? Comics? Cartoons? Life in general? Let me know, and I'll blog about it.

Oh, you want an update?

Here's the number one thing I learned in 2011 - foreigners don't know what Christmas crackers are. I always thought they were sort of universal things, but it turns out they're exclusively British.

The number one thing I've learned in 2012 so far is that there's a Chinese memory forum that I urge everyone to use some sort of translator on. I haven't had time yet, but I will.

Be nice to squirrels!

I got a lot of stick last week for saying squirrels were great and not vermin, so I think the people of the world need to be educated - did you know Mickey Mouse would have killed himself in 1930 if not for squirrels?

Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip, 24 October 1930, story and art (despite the "Walt Disney" signature) by Floyd Gottfredson

No, really, this is the end of a week's worth of strips in which Mickey, thinking Minnie loves someone else, tries to commit suicide in a variety of different ways. Suicide wasn't an uncommon theme in comics and cartoons at that time - the Wall Street crash made it headline news and a part of the public consciousness like never before - and you'd often see the kind of gags that nowadays you only find in Suicidal Syd in Viz, or Moe on The Simpsons (where the joke is that it's not the kind of thing one makes jokes about), but it was still a surprise to find that a loveable icon like Mickey Mouse was tempted.

Slightly disturbing aspects aside, I'm very glad I got the compilation of Mickey Mouse newspaper strips for Christmas! Buy it on Amazon and see for yourself - it's maybe not the best early-thirties newspaper funny strip (that would be Popeye), but hey, it's Mickey Mouse, and the phrase "like you've never seen him before" is probably accurate.

Can I just point out...

That's it's the 22nd of December, it's officially winter, and I haven't got my heating on. It's lovely around here at the moment, and I hope it stays that way! I still want to emigrate to Australia (actually, maybe New Zealand, there's an Australian I want to avoid), but I think I could tolerate wintering in England this year if it's going to stay like this.

And I'm sure it is, just because I've been seeing tabloid headlines for the past several months saying "icy horrible nasty snowy weather coming right now, definitely!" and if they've been wrong so far, it stands to reason that they'll be wrong forever.

Meanwhile, please go to memrise.com and learn things! They've got lots and lots of things to learn there! Enrich yourself!



PS If you're reading this and you're Australian, I wasn't talking about you. It was another Australian.

Goals galore

Hooray for Marc Albrighton, scoring the 20,000th goal in the Premier League like that. And for having the same name, nearly, as the Mark Albrighton who briefly played for Boston Utd and is now, according to the internet, playing for Nuneaton. And also the same name as the Mark Albrighton who was briefly my boss in a temp job I had many years ago, and who was a fairly athletic type who jogged to and from work. It must be a football kind of name.

It's funny, because it's not a common name, and I've never heard of anyone with the surname Albrighton who wasn't called Marc or Mark. Perhaps it's a family tradition. Perhaps they're all related, although the jogging boss assured me he wasn't related to the Boston player. Perhaps they're all the same person, in fact, because I've never seen two or more of them together at any one time.

You know what memory sport really needs?

Apart from a swift kick up the backside and general telling not to be so silly and go out and do something worthwhile, of course? A Wikia site, that's what!

Okay, I was bored, avoiding the important task of deciding what kind of new and exciting career I want to new-year-resolve to get, and it occurred to me that this kind of thing is by far the best way to produce the kind of memory competition database that everyone wants. I'm envisioning a huge, sprawling website, with profiles of every competitor detailing their results, records, rankings, favourite foods and other important information like that; pages for every memory competition that ever has or will take place anywhere in the world, complete with results and stories about what happened or will happen there; a page for every discipline's rules, regulations and records as well as when the rules changed and what they were in the olden days, and much much more.

Currently I've written a basic page for the first world championship, and a profile of David Berglas, a very important figure in the history of memory competitions, just to show you what it looks like.

I'm also envisioning a website where everybody works together harmoniously to produce something informative, 100% accurate and also (since this is the real spirit of memory competitions) light-hearted, occasionally silly and irreverent without ever containing anything that could possibly offend anyone, ever. At all.

I think (I'm quite new to the whole wiki thing) that it's currently set up so that anybody can edit anything they want but nobody can go around deleting or disciplining other contributors. Except me, because I created it, but I hereby solemnly promise never to use these great powers, ever, because otherwise it would go to my head and turn me into some kind of mad despot. So come on, memory aficionados, add a page or two and let's make this into a big thing!

Oh, and don't edit your own page. That's just sad.

The importance of feeding the squirrels

I accidentally knocked my laptop off my coffee table this morning and it dropped dead on the spot - instantly shut down completely and wouldn't turn back on when I pressed the on button. I assumed that something had come loose somewhere and could possibly be fixed by dropping it again, the other way up, but I didn't have time because I was on my way out to the blood donor place.

On the way there, I saw that men in a van had been gathering up all the leaves piled up at the side of that road with all the trees on it (it's probably got a name, but I don't know what it is) and left a long strip of bare ground on which well over a dozen squirrels were digging around for nuts. I know a lot of people would describe squirrels as annoying vermin, but I think they're awesome, and I was worried that some of their nuts had been scooped up by the workers, so on the way back from having blood sucked out of me I bought a big bag of nuts and scattered them around the squirrel zone for them to find and eat or bury according to taste.

I took the long way round to check whether the shop that used to be SAS Furniture actually does fix computers (I thought it did, but it might have been my imagination), and found that it does, but when I got home my laptop had fixed itself and was working fine again. I suspect it was fixed by a grateful computer hardware expert squirrel.

Scale It Back even further

The video to "Scale It Back" has been up on Vimeo for a month now, and it looks like the last couple of days have seen an upsurge in the number of views! People are still watching the thing!

There's also a version on YouTube that I actually prefer - it cuts my bit at the start down from sixty seconds to ten, while still adequately explaining what I'm doing.

I want to make another one of these videos now! I've already forgotten how tedious the day of filming was! Come on, movie producers, it only takes me thirty seconds to 'write' a story, does anyone want one?

That's it. No more cherry coke.

It gives me terrible heartburn, makes me fat and is almost certainly really really bad for me. It's back to a healthy diet of water and occasional lager, at least as far as drinks are concerned.

So let's all clink our mugs of tap water and toast the extraordinarily groovy news that they've rediscovered two lost episodes of Doctor Who from the sixties! "The Underwater Menace" is generally considered to be terrible, although there's a body of opinion that episode 3, the only previously-known-to-still-exist one, was the worst of them. And I actually thought episode 3 was a lot of fun and I don't know what everyone else is complaining about, so I'm sure episode 2 will be even better! It's got Ben and Polly in it, and they're awesome!

And as for Galaxy 4, episode 3... well, nobody ever really talks about Galaxy 4 except to say "it's a shame that the entire serial was destroyed without so much as a telesnap, seeing as it involves a race of evil blonde women from space," so the fans who wrote fanfics about themselves being captured by the Drahvins will be a little disappointed that they don't look quite like the hand-drawn illustrations that accompanied their story, but everyone else will be pleased to see it at last after 46 years of non-existence.

When I invent a magic camcorder that can record the past, the first thing I'll do will be to tape the 106 episodes of Doctor Who that remain lost. The second thing will be solving the JFK assassination, and the third will be Ancient Greece. Or maybe Livy's history of Rome, I'm not sure which one first. Then the first season of The Avengers.

They'll be wanting to dissect it next

I didn't mention that an added bonus of this trip to Munich was having my brain MRI-scanned by Boris and his team of German mad scientists. They've now added my brainwaves to their collection of memory athletes, and I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they successfully create a super-brain that will take over the planet Earth.

If anyone's keeping track, this means that my brain has now been scanned by scientists in Japan, the USA and Germany. Does nobody in Britain care what's inside my head? It's quite fascinating in there, I'm sure.

Anyway, the sideshow to this science was the second day of our friendly gathering to test our memories - or, rather, to see how out of practice we all were, because it's safe to say that nobody was setting the world alight with amazing feats here. I did do a pack of cards in 26.53 seconds and, more importantly, recall it with great ease - most of the time when I'm under 30 seconds it's a huge mental struggle. Hopefully this will happen more often in real memory competitions, although actually it might be more rewarding if I'm racking my brains for five minutes and only sorting the last cards into order in the last half-second.

The time (measured in the old-fashioned way with arbiters with stopwatches, since we hadn't brought enough speed stacks timers) was too slow, though - I got mentally 'stuck' on at least one image for a couple of all-important seconds, aiming for a time a bit under 25. This meant, for what it's worth, that Hannes won with a score of 6060 and I came second with 5999. By way of comparison, Wang Feng just amply demonstrated why he's the world champion with a score of something like 8477. That's what happens when you're at a real world championship instead of a last-minute unofficial get-together, as well as when you're much better at memorising things than I am. Congratulations to him, and here's hoping that next year I'll be in a position to challenge him (there's no point putting it off any more - I've got to create that 10,000 image system for numbers. I don't think I'm ever going to get over 2000 with my current one, and scores way above 2500 are rapidly becoming the norm...)

Institutionalised

Some might say that the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry is an appropriate place for a dozen or so people who like to memorise long numbers and things to get together. Some others might say that it's on Kraepelinstrasse, which is just around the corner from Bummstrasse, and giggle at the silly name, but frankly if you expect more classy blogging, you should just go elsewhere.

Also, it's been snowing all day, but not in a severe kind of way, which is good because I considered bringing my uncomfortable but much better gripping work shoes with me, only to decide against it because my rucksack was too full, so I would have been annoyed if I'd slipped on ice and killed myself.

As it is, I'm still alive, and still good at memorising cards even if I haven't really been practicing - ten minutes of flicking cards at top speed from one hand to the other gives you a sort of writer's cramp if you haven't done it much lately! Another good reason not to do all your training on computers! I'm relatively rubbish at numbers and binaries, but at least this will help keep my hand in before the next real memory competition...

It's like magically stepping into the past!

There's a Woolworth's in the shopping centre in Munich! I've missed that red and white colour scheme and wide range of cheap tat!

This is probably a new experience

I don't think I've been to Munich before. I'm not one hundred percent sure about that, though, because all day I've had the idea that maybe I have been here before, and have been hoping I'd see something familiar, but I've checked in my blog for the past six years or so, and I've never mentioned visiting, so maybe I haven't.

I've not been to the city centre yet, though, so I might see something there to change my mind. I just have a feeling that I had a day trip here, long ago, when I was somewhere else in Germany for some reason.

Anyway, I'm here now, in a nice hotel, and I'm planning to spend tomorrow aimlessly wandering around the shops, like I always like to do in a place I probably haven't been to before. I haven't done that for ages, with one thing and another.

And here's another thing - I bought a Terry Pratchett book at the airport, and I notice that Commander Vimes on the covers of Discworld books doesn't look even remotely like the person I envisage whenever I see the number 883 or the eight of hearts followed by the three of diamonds. I'm not sure where I got my mental picture from, but it's stuck there now.

And while we're talking about memorising, I've been practicing on Memocamp just lately. Just for a change - I still stick to my principles that it's important to practice for paper-based memory competitions with paper-based memory training, but it's nice to vary the routine now and then. And while Memocamp does have a few flaws, it's also good fun and a way to compare your scores against lots and lots of other eager memorisers. The top Germans seem to get higher scores on there than they do in competitions, leaving me somewhat in the dust at the moment, but I have already got the top score in ten-minute cards with a measly six and a half packs...