Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve had this computer for about one and a half years now, and actually, between My Documents and Shared Documents, I have 13 gigabytes of inane rubbish cluttering up my hard disk (including this website). Adam and Lee’s documents folders pad this out to almost 14GB. Some would argue, I’m sure, that this is a reckless waste of space and it would be better employed elsewise. (Elsewise is not a word in the traditional sense, but I like it and I think its meaning is clear enough.) To those people, I say “and just what the hell are you doing snooping round my hard drive anyway?”.

The fact of the matter is that I am a natural hoarder. I’ve never been one to get rid of anything if I think there’s even the slightest chance I might ever want to see it again and I can find somewhere to put it. And I’m just the same with computer files. Until I have filled all 110 gigabytes of my hard disk, I am not going to delete any of my rubbish unless it really is worthless. As a result, as well as 10GB of music, I have several megabytes of chatlogs, some pointless photos, amusing videos, and a variety of zip files I can’t remember what’s in them. Today, I felt it was time I had a look around.

You see, when you have this much disk space, it would take you, in the normal course of things, about twenty years to fill it, so when you look back on it, most of what’s there you’ve forgotten about. It’s like looking back over an old photo album, but one with sound, video, music, and a bizarre sense of humour. For example, I have a programme to convert text into l33t-speak, the terms and conditions for websites I’d forgotten existed, some random Photoshopped images, a video file of Leonard Nimoy singing “The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins” (I think he should have sung The Logical Song instead), every Leeds University Physics exam paper for the last three years, Stavros’ letter to the house, and a variety of re-written song lyrics about my friends. I also have the backing track to Don’t Stop Me Now, the vocal track to Gay Bar, and my attempt to mix the two. I have two spoof Matrix videos, something called the Assboat, and a delightful ICQ chatlog from a girl who wanted cybersex. I wasn’t in the mood, so I thought I’d have a little fun. It was a little mean, since I hape to God that English wasn’t her first language, but as I’ve said before, if you’re on ICQ talking to someone chosen at random by a computer, what can you expect? Besides, just look what appeared on my screen without any warning:

Her: hii
Me: hi
Her: how long
Her: cock
Me: wow, you get right to the point, don’t you?
Her: y
Me: i can’t say i measure. (i don’t even know how tall i am)
Her: have sex before
Me: why? does that make it longer? i can’t see how it would.
Her: have or not have
Me: er.. have, please.
Her: how many
Me: well, as many as possible.
Her: virgane
Me: even better.
Her: what do want me to do?
Me: oh, do whatever you want. i’m not naturally domineering.
Her: order me but do like me
Her: u are gay are u
Me: no.
Me: why would you think that?
Her: i siad order me and u did not
Me: that doesn’t mean i’m gay - just uncooperative. hell, i don’t even know who you are. you might be 7 for all i know.
Her: ok bey
Me: bye
Her: fucku
Me: byede bye then

I closed the window here when she didn’t respond.

Her: u have not sex yet still baby
Me: you only gave me two minutes, give me a chance!
Her: talk it now
Me: what?
Her: chance
Me: i’m guessing english isn’t your first language?

She went offline after that. She contacted me again the next day, and we failed to have even more raunchy cybersex. I also have two images on my hard disk simply titled “And You Thought Half-Life Was Clever”. The second is a group of bots standing in a corner on each other’s heads, and the first is this:

[pictures not there yet - Andrew]

Also in that folder is a photo of two men riding the escalator to the gym, entitled “Americans Have No Sense Of Irony”. There is a cartoon of a zombie version of the leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, to which I have appended a Worms-style name and health meter. There are some very amusing webpages I’ve saved for my own limited posterity. There is a Flash drawing of Pinky And The Brain, and a version of myself drawn as a South Park character by another Flash app somewhere. Another Flash app I have in my shared folder is the Saddam Hussein version of The Real Slim Shady. I have a handful of songs my brother recorded, which I will never delete, two videos of the Star Wars Kid*, a video of a man saying “People mostly just call them Squirrel Nuts” for which I have absolutely no context, and a video of a Ferrari crashing. I have eight pages of scanned doodles of Professor Olmsted, and a blurry photo Adam took of me at the Ship sporting a feather boa and looking at least as camp as Olmsted, along with another photo he took of a doner kebab cut (terribly amusingly) into the shape of a penis. I don’t think we’ve been back to that takeaway since. I have the entire contents of Adam’s phonebook. I have a photograph I took of a random experiment in lab because it looked like the Gin and Tonic Laser we’d heard so little about, and a photo of the “Self-Clearing Area” sign that used to be in the Coffee Bar but is now in our living room (where people pay exaclty as much attention to it as they didin the coffee bar). I have videos of people completing Minesweeper pointlessly quickly. In that same folder, there is a version of the Wamdue Project’s King Of My Castle mixed with the background music from Lemmings (you’d be surprised how well that works). I have five versions of Bohemian Rhapsody (from best to worst: Queen, Weird Al, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Rolf Harris, then The Fugees) and the heavy metal version of Eleanor Rigby and a version of I’ll Be There For You that turns into the Wormsong halfway through. I have a scanned copy of Stavros’ sheet of passwords, which gave me ultimate power over his email and webspace. I have the old Bingo sheets we used to disrupt Professor Savage’s lectures. I have a sheet of physics formulae. I have a photo of Adam in a tree with a bottle of Gordon’s Ice trying to ‘retrieve’ a frisbee that was never ours in the first place.

But enough about my hard disk. The time has come for me to get some sleep, so I’d thank you if you could hold your excitement until the year 2005, when I will have built up enough new junk to make a new column, by which point I will have forgotten which junk went into this one and therefore repeat this entire thing. Enjoy!

*The Star Wars Kid, in case you don’t know, is a fairly recent thing that has swept the internet. The basic story is that some kid was messing about with a golf-ball collector (no, I’ve never heard of one either), pretending it was a light-sabre. He videotaped himself doing this, which some would argue was asking for trouble, and therefore he has no right to sue his mates for putting the video on the internet. The video, thanks to one of the few legitimate uses of KaZaA, spread around the web like a wild fire on a hot bun, and soon people started uploading new versions, with light-sabre style effects and sounds. Some of them are very good.