I return

As the great Octavia Blake once said: "We're back, bitches!"

Like Octavia, I too am ridiculously annoying at first, have a middle stage of being kinda cute, but then eventually end up being feared for my legendary battle skills. To be fair steps 2 and 3 are conjecture, but given I've got #1 down, perhaps I've got a bright future...

^If that made no sense to you, then you should go watch all 8 seasons of the 100, then come back.

Serious. Stop reading. Go watch it.

"I've really missed Condensed Irrelevance, what have you been doing Alastair??" - I hear you cry. Well, I've been using the time that I used to write to take a few online courses, specifically an AI intro course and programming languages A, both of which were free, quite enjoyable and extremely educational. However, I don't have the drive to do another one, so at least for this week I'll get back to writing blog posts on completely random topics.

In other news, I've been conscripted into a number of home improvement projects as part of the covid package... I finished playing the Witcher 3... been watching a bunch of YouTube...

OH. AND I FAINTED!

Here's the story (appropriately fictionalized). In third person for some reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Let's set the scene. It's after dark in Alastair's room, although he has long since lost track of time as the glow of his computer screen illuminates him and his surroundings. Hunched over, he feels at home as he chats to a few friends and taps inanely at the keyboard every few minutes. He's a little tired, and is thinking of going to bed, but then again maybe not.

*blink*

In front of him he sees a chair leg. He has to get up to fight the orc! Up! He moves, but the direction he moves doesn't even resemble up, and instead he bangs his head against the chair in front of him and lies back down. He closes his eyes and moves his head in small circles for reasons we will never know. Orcs? Opening his eyes with a series of blinks, he sees his computer lying sideways on the desk. Groggy? That's a cool word. Groggy. Think logically Alastair. Take things in steps. Glacially, he gets up, first on to all fours and then his unsteady feet. Still blinking, he looks down and sees the frozen faces of his friends on the computer screen in front of him, partially obscured by the computer itself, which had fallen in front of it. For some reason, it seems important to put that back right first. Alastair heaves and put the computer back upright, but his headphones clatter to the floor in the process. He deduced later that they must have been attached to his head the whole time.

Feeling hot all of a sudden, he takes of his jacket and sits down on the couch. It only takes him a few minutes to deduce what must have happened, and he decides to call his friends back in case they were worried. The computer is frozen, so that isn't an option, so he grabs his phone and navigates to Discord.

"Hey guys, anyone see what happened?" He is genuinely curious, but apparently nobody cares about him because the best answer he can get is "nah bro you just went quiet". Useless. Although one of them suggests he wake up his mum, which isn't such a bad idea.

15 minutes later, and his blood pressure, pulse, temperature and everything else you could think about have been taken. His mum's still confused.

"Alastair, you didn't try and make yourself go red in the face did you?" His mum has hit the nail on the head. The fog over his memory lifts.

"...", Alastair says, burying his face in his hands, and that's all the answer that his mum needs to sit back in her seat and burst out laughing.

THE END

wot a story mark. Anyway, I won't be doing that again. You can expect another short post tomorrow of a similar quality. And yes I will be offended if you unsubscribe.