Last night, I
did two things that I’m proud of. One was to get up in front of a whole bunch of people for the February Cottonmouth meeting at the 459 Bar and read out my short/flash story ‘Network Connection‘. A daunting task made a lot easier by the awesome attitude of the crowd*, and the reassurances of both Simon and Zoe telling me I’d be fine**. So I’ve now officially popped my public reading cherry.
The other thing that I did–and I’m still as-yet uncertain which is a more proud moment for me–is to unlock The Kid in the awesomely difficult platformer Super Meat Boy. Proof, taken on my phone after I’d run around the room like an idiot:
(I’m also really close to getting the next band-aid character unlock)
For the uninitiated, SMB is a really, really hard game. It’s like Mario, if Mario was made of meat, took one hit to die, and was antagonised by a phoetus in a suit who constructed levels of pure death for him to run around in. Look, it’s easier if I show you. Here’s a video sequence of what I had to go through to get The Kid. The cuts made for that video make it look easy, but trust me, it ain’t. I’m not actually certain how many times I died, but it was a lot. Like, genocide a lot. And that’s not even the hardest bit of the game: I still have to work my way through Cotton Alley.
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*Who genuinely wanted to hear fiction. They told a bunch of guys at the back to shut the fuck up while Tiffany Ha was reading her intriguing sci-fi short story. Kudos to that kind of dedication.
**Two pints of beer on an empty stomach also didn’t hurt.
