Day 81: Speaks

Iya. Turns out it's easy to get up at seven in the morning. You just need to have a training session you're giving at work later that day to be awake for already and worrying about.

By the time my alarm went off I'd been sat up in bed for half an hour running through my presentation in my head. It was only some basic beer training for the staff, going over some fundamentals that I thought they should know, but still, I was feeling stressed about it.

I abhor public speaking. I spent ten years of my life growing up with really severe acne. My skin is still not good. I do not like the spotlight being on me in social situations. Even just in conversations with one other person I've been known to get sweaty and nervous when I sense attention shifting towards me. Having a group of people all focusing on me is my idea of absolute hell. It makes me want to crawl up inside myself and disappear.

But I knew I had to give this training session. I knew it wasn't objectively a big deal. So I tried to be as prepared as I could be in the time I had. I made sure I was solid on all the points I was talking about. I ran over the presentation again and again, muttered it to myself while changing barrels in the cellar, practised key parts over lunch. And in the end it all went fine. Yeah, I was nervous to begin with, but I settled into it, and I think I managed to teach a few things, and hopefully the staff had fun. They certainly didn't seem to hold the same opinions as the negative voices in my head, which like to tell me how pathetic and worthless I am every step of the way.

So it was good. And it was another test that I have faced down and made it through while completely sober. I wanted a slug of whisky so badly before starting, that moment when the staff began traipsing in and I realised I was going to have to actually do it, and I thought of my opening and how unfunny and lame it was and how I'd made the whole thing too esoteric and how I was going to lose my words and trail off and blush and spontaneously wee myself and cry in front of everyone. I really wanted some whisky right at that moment.

But I didn't have any. And in the end I didn't need any. Chalk public speaking up as one more occasion where being sober isn't just possible, but perhaps even preferable. I was present for the whole thing, alert, and I'm not going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover.

But I am going to wake up tomorrow. And I am going to wake up early (for me), and go to work, so for now I will leave this here, and bid you good night.

Good night, lovely people, and take care.

Day 34: Do Androids Dream of Cardboard Glasses?

Eesh. I've burnt myself out. Couldn't get up until 1pm today, just could not do it, and when I did my entire brain felt like some kind of horrendous fat slab of ham that had been left out rotting in the sun all day. So I took some paracetamol and codeine and disappeared into virtual reality.

A beer rep brought us a goodie bag of pins and bar blades and whatnot yesterday, including this Google Cardboard-style VR headset into which you slot your phone. The idea was to scan a QR code and use the headset to go on a virtual tour of the company's brewery -- but as a long-term gamer and technology enthusiast I saw it as my responsibility to liberate the device and investigate what the world of VR has to offer.

Here are the loose impressions that my fat ham head was able to discern thus far:

Google Cardboard Demos:

So here's the premise. You download the Google Cardboard app onto your phone, launch it, then slip your phone into the headset, which is just a cardboard case with two magnifying lenses glued inside. Compatible apps and videos split your phone screen into two images, identical but for showing the scene from subtly different perspectives, which tricks your brain when looking through the lenses into combing the images into one 3D picture. Then add tracking of your head's movements by the app, and automatic adjustment of the in-game camera accordingly, and it's as if you were in the world in the headset, looking out on a virtual landscape existing around you.

The demos that come installed with the Cardboard app are very limited, but provide a pleasing introduction to the form. There's a polygonal arctic tundra environment in which you can chill with a fox and fly with some seagulls and watch a whale breaking the sea's surface and crashing back down. There's a narrated tour of the Palace of Versailles. And then you can load Google Earth -- which, let me tell you, when you get to be a boundless celestial god swooping around your home planet just as the codeine in your system begins to kick in, becomes quite the ride.

I flew around New York like Spider-Man, some mountains somewhere by accident, then went to my mum's house and looked down from the air at the limits of my childhood adventures spread below me: the path to my friend's where we'd sit on the Sega dreaming of secret missions, the back garden with the tyre swing and the drop down to the woods in which we'd play soldiers, the quiet suburban road that stood in for loading bays, football pitches, Dunya grounds. I remembered the campaigns, the victories, the feuds and the tears; saw us as children soaring with our arms out as the afternoon stretched before us... It was strange, the enclosure of the glasses, the transportation to another place set my imagination alight. It was nice.

Lanterns:

A pleasant little retreat to a Japanese lakefront, on which you stand and look around at trees, hills, sky, water, listen to the lapping of the stream, watch joyous paper lanterns bob downriver and float off serenely into the air. Nothing much to it, but it's quiet, calming and lovely. Meditative is the word used most often when describing such pieces, and this one lives up to the term.

Minos Skyfighter VR:

But I mean who doesn't want to fly in a spaceship blasting enemy ships with your lasers? Everyone wants that. Sadly, despite looking fantastic, this game is a bit naff. The only interaction on the headset is a button on top that clicks a pressure pad onto the screen, so all apps have to be designed to control with a single screen press. In this one your viewpoint is locked to the front of the windshield, so looking around steers the ship, which means you can't peer about your cockpit to look at the gearstick and furry dice and all. It sounds insignificant, but that stuff really adds to the sense of actually being in the simulated location.

Might function better with a wireless controller, but I couldn't get mine to work so who knows? The game itself is a series of basic dogfights -- feedback is flat and effects are basic and there's a limp, weightless feel to it all: crash into an enemy vessel and you both just pause there, trapped together in space, until some momentum squeezes you free.

Androids Dream:

My favourite thing in VR so far. A short tour of a Blade Runner-inspired cityscape, it opens with you reclining in the passenger seat of a cruising hover car, looking out at flaming gas vents, grandiose ziggurats and towering neon billboards as a Vangelis-like score builds around you and dials flicker and thrum inside the cockpit. Unlike Minos, here your craft is ostensibly piloted by an Edward James Olmosy dude beside you, leaving you free to glance about inside the car. If you're sitting on a chair while you play, and you look down at your virtual legs in the car's seat, the sensation really is uncanny. There's a real presence to it all, you want to reach out and touch the controls, the chipped windscreen, your pilot's immaculate moustache. The whole thing lasts about two minutes, and I've sat through it ten times so far. Could only be bettered by the pilot being more animated: if he turned to you as you turned to him and nodded and asked if you know what a turtle is -- man, I'd be so happy I'd wee.

Conclusions:

Yeah, it's a tricky one, VR. For the full experience you need to invest thousands in a true headset, a juggernaut PC to run it off, sensor bars, motion controllers... and it all needs setting up, configuring, just so you can spend an evening twisting yourself in cables in your bedroom bumping into your bookcase. The costs are too prohibitive for this high-end experience to make it mainstream, meaning there's not enough demand for it to be worth the studios investing in serious applications, and you're left with a whole bunch of ridiculously expensive tech demos and virtual tours.

Then down at the other end here you've got the cardboard headsets that anyone can afford, powered by phones that we all have already, with no set up, no fumbling with wires -- except a cheap pair of cardboard glasses are uncomfortable to wear (I've cut and bruised my nose badly from strapping the thing to my face all today), the lenses are low-quality, you get light spilling in round all the edges, and the phones that process the data are underpowered, meaning low-poly, poorly-textured cheap and cheerful applications, fun as a gimmick but with little lasting appeal.

And yet you try on a virtual reality headset yourself, even one made of cardboard, and you're instantly transported. You're in another world. It really exists, not as a flat picture on a screen but a tangible reality built around you, close enough to reach out and touch.

Give it a few years, perhaps, when we've got feather-light headsets made of nano-fabrics with 16k displays in each eyepiece, running wirelessly and powered by chips in our skulls, altruistically issued to everyone by a benevolent tech giant, and perhaps we'll all be meeting up on glorious alien beaches for simulated cocktails as imaginary fireworks explode across purple heavens... while the outside world crumbles around us from the pollution produced by the manufacture of all this outlandish technology.

Or maybe that has already happened and we're living right now in a virtual reality. That would explain why I constantly require recalibration after extended periods of motion, why I sometimes watch myself take actions as if I was controlled by a third-party uncertain of the conventions of this life, and why my limbs never quite seem to sync with the movements of the rest of my body.

Day 32: How to gain mainstream appeal

In an effort to make my work more desirable to publications such as Buzzfeed and LadBible, I have written a list detailing the fifteen habits shared by all bartenders. Everyone knows a bartender, or was him-or-herself a bartender, or is still a bartender, stuck in an endless cycle of depression and self-loathing and alcoholism. So here, without further ado, are fifteen common behaviours that I've personally witnessed in bartenders the world over:

1. Holding up an attached barrel in the cellar, giving it a shake, and saying, "I reckon there's about another three pints left in that," despite no one having asked how many pints there were left in that.
2. Forgetting that the distance across the bar top is not actually soundproofed in any way, and discussing the intimate details of sex lives and bodily functions while preparing a margarita as if the customer a mere foot away was not able to hear every word said.
3. Opening bottles with a bar blade gripped in a style that is to regularly-held bar blades what the sideways gangster pistol is to just holding a gun the normal way, yet with a nonchalance that suggests the bartender has no idea they're doing anything to draw attention to themselves, and certainly didn't practise popping off bottle tops using this grip every day for the first six months of having the job.
4. Becoming instantly critical when leaving the home bar and going to an away bar on a rare night off. "Christ, that absolute amateur never even offered me a glass with my Rochefort 10, and when I asked for one he gave me, get this, a Stella glass! Harrfff harrfff harrfff," is what the bartender with the night off is custom-bound to say.
5. Laughing disdainfully at the mangled ways customers pronounce esoteric product names, because the idea of someone having, say, a full-time job, or a family, and not spending every moment of every day surrounded by beers and spirits learning what they're all called is, to the bartender, something too tragic to comprehend.
6. Putting the word "ware" on the end of the word "glass" to produce the phrase "glassware", out of a mistaken assumption that referring to glasses as "glassware" will trick anyone overhearing into believing bartending is serious profession. It won't, and it isn't.
7. Walking home at 2am and sucking the nutrients from the linings of discarded crisp packets found lying in the street because minimum wage is in fact not enough of a wage to live off.
8. Uploading flaming cocktail pics to Instagram late at night, alone in bed, in the hopes of attracting a regram from a famous bartender in the field, thus validating the bartender's many poor life choices up to this point.
9. Going for a sit-down wee mid-shift because pretending to wipe the back bar for an eighth time would surely attract the attention of the duty manager, so going into a cubicle and locking the door and pulling out the trusty phone, having a cheeky peruse, and seeing a notification of a new comment on last night's flaming zombie pic from Derek Nugglins. A beat, then a double take. What! The Derek Nugglins who can stir down six negronis in ten seconds? The one and only Derek Nugglins who was in '08 part of the Perfect-Serve Seven who turned a raw-fish fiasco on Mad Friday into the biggest Christmas sushi event the North had ever seen? The same Derek Nugglins who the bartender's own bible, the discerning Difford's Guide, named "Best at Banging on the Speed Rail in Time to the Killer's Mr Brightside while Pumping His Fist in the Air to Attract Swooning Middle-aged Women" three years in a row? Yes, it's really him. The comment on the screen, lit by the flickering toilet bulb, simply reads: "We have been watching you. We are pleased. Be at the ice machine at 0600 hours if you believe you are ready."
10. Going to the ice machine the next morning, a coffee clutched groggily in hand, to find no one there. Waiting fifteen minutes with a rising sense of self-doubt, before finally kicking the metal panel in frustration -- and watching as, with a mechanical groan and a hiss of escaping gas, a small door swings slowly open on the back of the large, whirring machine. Looking around, seeing the usually busy pub eerily empty, hearing only the sounds of the cleaner off somewhere buffing the tiled floor, and so with a hard swallow crouching and pushing through the waiting door.
11. Crawling down the clammy, moss-covered passageway onto which the door opened, feeling a lump in the throat, reaching out on the twisting downward path to grasp at jagged, cartilage-like protrusions jutting from the earthen walls, slipping occasionally in pools of clinging mucous, until finally, with a rush of fetid air, finding the tunnel give out onto a dark chamber lit only with the lambent flames of a ring of torches rising from the spongy ground.
12. Hearing a chilling voice mutter, "Welcome, my child," as a cloaked figure steps into the dancing pool of light, whereupon a thick, hessian hood is thrown back and the face of Derek Nugglins arranges itself into focus, but slowly, as if the light itself was giving the features form, and in the same place moments ago there would have been nothing save a thick, dripping blackness.
13. Listening to the voice -- a shrewd, serpentine voice, seeming to not arrive through the ears but grow instantly in the mind -- continue: "We have watched you for many years. You felt alone and yet you were not. Our eyes eternally have looked upon the dark places in which you slept. We saw your dreams. We caressed your thoughts. And now we sense that you are ready."
14. Turning, as if in slow motion, to find the entrance to the chamber has sealed itself shut with a squelching, organic slurp, feeling a surge of breathy wind, turning back now suddenly inches from the body of Nugglins -- a body now hunched, jerking spasmodically. Seeing the man's cloak flung back and a dark shape rising, rising, unfurling itself into the heights of the cavern, a towering, chitinous thing, flocculent and suppurating and horrific, insectoid arms scratching spectrally against a tumescent belly pocked with matted fur. "Witness my true form!" the Nugglins cries. "Witness and join our cause. For though powerful, I am but the gatekeeper. This great hall sits directly below what you call your bar. For it, and all bars in the land, are built upon the remains of temples constructed in aeons past by my kind in worship of the Ancient One we call in the old tongue Caa'Lyng. He slumbers yet, but with your help he will awaken. Each day more of the young and lost of your species join our ranks. You may recognise these acolytes by their long beards, haggard eyes, by the arcane symbols tattooed across their skin. Just as I serve my lord Caa'Lyng, their role is to serve the sacrificial caste, the ones above who grow round of waist and florid of cheek and simple of mind, their brains rotting from devil liquor. You will tend this flock, help our human lambs fatten themselves and lose motor function to the point where the old tongue flows from their lips and they begin to chant the summoning ritual: 'Du Ydu Caa'Lyng', over and over, building in crescendo to the final prophesied night of Baa'Nk Hoh-Lii-Day when the Ancient One will rise and engulf the world in a purifying flame of blood and semen and cheap mainstream lager. So make your choice, mortal: join us and be reborn as one with the swarm, or turn away and be immolated with the rest of your puny kind..."
15. Sighing when a customer orders a Guinness as the last drink of their round. So annoying!