Rob went on walks towards the end. He thought this was an awesome place.
“What does lighting a candle symbolize?
The candle symbolizes light in the darkness of life especially individual life, illlumination; it is the symbol of holy illumination of the spirit of truth. Lit in times of death, they signify the light in the next world, and they represent Christ as the light.”
I asked Skynet/Google what it meant because I’d seen people do it all over the world but I didn’t get it. His mum texted me with the date and time of the cremation so I could apply the time difference and light one. I think it’s been this long because of Corona restrictions. He couldn’t even have people with him in hospital sometimes because the UK had very strict protocol around the Coof.
I’m writing this as his body is finally committed to flames. But I know that we are energy, and energy doesn’t die…it just changes forms.
Doesn’t mean I’m not crying like a toddler that dropped its icecream right now.
My friend, Rob,
I hope that you’re moving onto another place that’s better than here. You must have been very scared towards the end. You were too cool to say anything other than “it’ll be rate,” and change the subject, having just sent me pictures of bloody hospital gauze talking about the “agony” the latest procedure was. I wish I hadn’t got as complacent because of that. I’d tell you to take it easy or to go to the hospital when you found yourself with swollen limbs etc but then you’d go in, sneak out of your ward, and come home.
Old school, stereo-typical English boy…cheeky, flirty, silly and a rude yobo streak, telling me how you and the lads were going to beat up people.
You’d tell me about the time you followed your favourite football *(soccer) team around Europe, having the best time and going to places I never will. You showed me the tattoo of their logo that you got when you were younger and you’d get me to choose who to bet on when they played other teams.
I always won that cash for you, didn’t I?! Despite telling you to stop making me choose because I didn’t want to lose the money for you. I didn’t know anything about soccer.
Sometimes we aren’t able to stop doing the things that have become a staple of our lives, even when we know we should. I wish that it didn’t happen that way. We were supposed to have a meal and drink together. You promised you wouldn’t die until they let us do that. I’ll have that nice guilty meal, and another shot for you tomorrow, even though I feel fat and ugly, lol I’ll try to think of you telling me I was “fit af.”
You once thanked me and said I’ve done more for you than I’ll ever know. Again, you got me through some of the loneliest times in my life too, as well as health issues. You knew what it was like to be sick but try and live a life anyway. I miss you, and all the nonsensical jokes and pictures. I’m also hoping your family can move forward now that this part is over, and they can begin to remember all the good times when the sad stuff subsides.
We will meet again…
and you will no doubt piss me off with all your dirty talk and stubbornness.
Thank you for being my friend. I will never forget you.
All content is no copyright infringement intended. All posts are opinion only and are subject to change due to experience, kicking ass and learning how to adult more effectively. If you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Elements of original content may be reproduced with expressed permission from Ever Eden
Back4Good Times
Again, like all these types of posts, if you are not a gamer…it still stands. Just quit yer bitchn and read.
I’m an OG gamer who weened themselves off and tried to get a life a little under ten years ago. I both succeeded and failed.
If you play games, you’ll know that sometimes you get douchebags on your team who are angry, high, or just one of those people who want to watch the world burn and antagonise others.
Most times, in my experience, there are good people to team up with and play. I’ve had a lot of fun with randoms on several games but the standouts in my life are Overwatch and L4D. (LEFT4DEAD, 2008 the classic, arcade-like zombie shooter.)
Zombies are (mostly) overdone now…but get enter my time machine and come back to when L4D was a thing.
L4D was a very successful co-op. You could play with up to three other friends and take on zombies as you made your way through infected cities while ugly undead people tried to kill you. There was an option to have bots as your team if none of your friends were online, but they were frustrating. They’d go down so easily then the other two AI bots would run off to help them.
Being the only female in my core group, we had no problem selecting our characters. I was Zoey, and the guys naturally chose characters who reflected their personalities. We played every night for the better part of a year. We’d stay up late until it was early again. There were certain maps we liked and didn’t like, short ones, and other ones which dragged on and confused us. There were ones I was actually scared to play alone because they were very creepy. And most were nearly impossible to play with the AI bots as your teammates, unless you had the difficulty set to easy or normal.
I always played on ADVANCED, professional setting if we were going for certain achievement/awards for that category. But one of our teammates was unco and accidentally empty a magazine in out backs while we climbed up a ladder.
One of my friends now looks like Bill.
The game took over everything. It was so.much.fun. The story was interesting and so were the battles against hordes and strange mutants. But it was the team dynamics that gave me the utmost joy. Every single night meant barely being able to breathe because I was laughing so much. There are things that happen in-game that are so funny and only 4 people, and the FBI, will ever hear it.
It goes like this: do the missions and complete them, finish the games and do it over and over again, learn the maps you like. You redo campaigns you liked, or to wrap up achievements you haven’t been awarded yet and do it at your leisure and….you fuck around. A lot.
I’ve molotov-ed my friend after locking him in the “safe room.” I’ve deliberately let another one fall off a building even though his character was begging for help, slipping one finger at a time off the ledge…(LOL) I’ve done a speed-run and left the boys behind to deal with the zombies awakened by my flurry. My friends have deliberately blocked the ladder under a manhole so I couldn’t get down and away from zombies, and done things like see me limping and barely able to get to the saferoom ….then they’d wait and shut the door in my face, leaving me to die.
The other thing we’d do is wait until the credits rolled and the stats were revealed. You could see who died the most, who killed the most hunters or who had the highest FF score. (friendly-fire.) It was always hilarious to wait and all make bets on who sucked the most.
And then L4D2 came out…and my life was overrrrr. LOL All I did was play, if I wasn’t at work. My computer (shared with the household) was so shit…I’m surprised it lasted with the beating I gave it every single day. I played so much that I was seeing things. There is a witch in Left4Dead2. She is usually seen crouched on the ground and if you walk too close or make too much noise you “startle” her and she goes crazy, screams, and jumps on you. You fall, and she rakes your flesh with her long spooky nails in a frenzy that can kill you very easily if your friends aren’t paying attention to help you. There is no way to get her off you once she is on you, usually only someone else can kill her. Someone will startle her by not even realising she’s there sometimes, stepping on her or firing their gun too close to her.
So on a walk with my then main doggo, Stella, I walked around a corner at dusk, when the sky was blue-ing and the ground was starting to get shadowy…and I saw a fucking witch on the ground, cross legged and bent forward, waiting to kill me.
I had to stop and take a few blinks. I was actually looking at a stump, remnants of a small tree someone had obviously hacked and it looked spooky in the lowlight. It was then that I realised, I mayyy be playing just a little too much.
But that didn’t stop me from dressing up as Zoey for Halloween in a custom-made jacket from Etsy and a medipack I made with a red backpack I got from a thrift store. I had toy handguns and the same sneakers and everything!
We played for…YEARS. Literally. I have over 1000 hours on L4D2. And similar on L4D, the original. The guys and I have sayings and taunts we picked up from the game and still say to each other and sayings we made up back then.
The reason I’m writing this is because Back4Blood just got released and it is everything L4D was (so far) except the Bots don’t suck as much if you’re playing alone. They seem to be able to get themselves out of situations easier and come to the rescue much faster. AND it’s crossplay! (which means friends on other devices can join in if they have the same game.)
…So…I’ll see you next year…?
TLDR:
*I loved the L4D franchise
*Back4Blood is out
*It was a great time in my life
*It’s so funny being in a reality where you can set your annoying friend on fire.
*BACK4BLOOD is awesome. If you think it’s too expensive, look at signing up to Xbox app etc for a couple months instead and basically RENT it like I’m doing. *Zombies can still be cool…I think.
All content is no copyright infringement intended. All posts are opinion only and are subject to change due to experience, kicking ass and learning how to adult more effectively. If you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Elements of original content may be reproduced with expressed permission from Ever Eden
A Week in the Life#4
“A week in the life,” posts are incidental musings, pictures, memes I mined and things I’ve bought. Why? Because it’s content and nothing I wrote for today made the cut. Welp, enjoy!
I bought a pass so I could play Back4Blood online. More on this later because it’s strangely kind of important to me and I want to explain why. lol Essentially, it’s a much-anticipated follow up to an amazing game from 2010.
Lady gave my mum a dick n balls waffle.
One of my siblings made us all go to a burger joint. The mac and cheese with mozzarella was well worth the calories I’m going to feel guilty about for the next week. Good choice, nice experience. It was fun to see my mum try to use a fork and then give up and get messy eating her wingz with her hands.
I bought a red globe and took funny and freak pictures because I was bored and felt like being artistic but didn’t want to to clean up all the paints and canvas after. So I settled painting my face with great makeup, magnetic lashes, putting on a mask and bustin’ out some old modelling poses I knew from another life. It was a fun day to do random stuff by myself and wear my favourite pair of heels.
All content is no copyright infringement intended. All posts are opinion only and are subject to change due to experience, kicking ass and learning how to adult more effectively. If you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Elements of original content may be reproduced with expressed permission from Ever Eden
He said WHAT?
I walked through the city. I saw three police officers standing in front of a lady who was probably under the influence of something, dishevelled and messy, acting kind of strange. This part of town usually has a few people hanging out in groups and clearly suffering some kind of mental episode or they’re angry and already drunk at 8am. She was being rude and giving snappy answers. Call it a sixth sense, but sometimes you learn to predict people’s behaviour through experience. Profiling? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but in that area, I knew something was either going to make me cry laughing or shake my head and roll my eyes.
One of the cops asked her name and how to spell it as I passed. Then he asked her “…Why is Tamara spelled with a Y?” and she SCREAMED back: “I don’t fucking know, ask my mum!”
It happens. Strange and “offensive” people exist. Although I’ve never had a complaint, let me make this clear for any future arguments; if a character of mine ever says something you don’t like or don’t agree with morally, ethically, whatever-ly…I. D. G. A. F.
I will reach into that fictional villain character and pull out his worst thoughts, and his most disgusting words. I will make you feel his horrible aura right down to your bones with the tools that I have…And if you don’t like the fact he called someone a name you don’t like, that’s too bad.
Just like it’s too bad when you walk down an urban street and a random homeless person calls you the same thing for no reason or throws things at you. Or when one of those young try-hard, thug-types walks past you swearing and threatening the friend he’s arguing with and using certain words that you aren’t allowed to say.
Do something.
Go on, tell them to change their behaviour because you’re offended.
Dare ya.
I grew up in an area that wasn’t great. You learn early that you don’t have the right to command the sounds coming out of someone’s facehole. Not much phases me, be a douchebag if you want, knock yourself out. A person being shocked at this and having never come across anyone like this will never mean I won’t depict them in my works or that directors and movie script writers won’t either.
So why does the character have to say that stuff? It’s racist/sexist/mean/rude! It hurts my fee-fees.
Characters are only as good as you write them. A “bad guy” is weak in the story if he doesn’t make you uncomfortable through his actions and dialogue. Have you ever watched a movie where you despise one of the characters for their obnoxiousness or stupidty or aggression? Yes? That means the person is a good actor, they drew a response from you. That is a form of art.
Why/How?
What does that behaviour make you feel like in real life? If you’re walking past someone who is staring at you for no reason or calls you fat, or perhaps something racist? —- It intimidates others, makes people worry about what else that person may do. They obviously don’t care that people are witnessing their shitty behaviour so there may be no rules.
It makes you walk a little faster, avert eyes, get a little nervous…and the experience of those things is real, your brain often doesn’t move on logic, primal fear dictates the control over your immediate response. You’re supposed to feel weirded out by the bad guys in the books you read and yes, there are people out there who will be living the reality you’re reading about in the fiction book. How lovely your life must be that you’ve never experienced the things you’re reading, so much that it shocks and offends you to read words on a paper attributed to a make-believe person. ;P
That scene me feel funny because I’ve lived something similar!
So have I, sometimes. I’ve read parts of books that seem eerily similar to a scenario I’ve lived, even things I assumed weren’t common enough for someone else to think about writing them. It’s part of the story I’m reading, a fictional scene.
“Ahmergherrddd I’m triggered.”
I really do wish you didn’t feel that way and have the experiences you did, but that’s a you problem. At 4am when I wake up and jot down ideas…I’m not thinking about you. I have no idea you exist. I find this one perplexing eg the person had/has the opportunity to turn back at any stage in the process. They read the blurb before they downloaded or bought the book, they saw the posts or media around it. They read part of the book and had the chance to put it down if it was shaping up to be too violent for them (etc.) If they’re that susceptible, they should take care of themselves and the stimuli they allow in, It can’t be very comfortable to exist like that.
(I’ve written about this topic before, here) I just thought I’d refresh.
TLDR:
*Just thinkin’
*If you don’t like a naughty word in a fictional book, that’s a you problem.
All content is no copyright infringement intended. All posts are opinion only and are subject to change due to experience, kicking ass and learning how to adult more effectively. If you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Elements of original content may be reproduced with expressed permission from Ever Eden
I always won that cash for you, didn’t I?! Despite telling you to stop making me choose because I didn’t want to lose the money for you. I didn’t know anything about soccer.
like zombie shooter.)
So on a walk with my then main doggo, Stella, I walked around a corner at dusk, when the sky was blue-ing and the ground was starting to get shadowy…and I saw a fucking witch on the ground, cross legged and bent forward, waiting to kill me.
I bought a pass so I could play Back4Blood online. More on this later because it’s strangely kind of important to me and I want to explain why. lol Essentially, it’s a much-anticipated follow up to an amazing game from 2010.
I walked through the city. I saw three police officers standing in front of a lady who was probably under the influence of something, dishevelled and messy, acting kind of strange. This part of town usually has a few people hanging out in groups and clearly suffering some kind of mental episode or they’re angry and already drunk at 8am. She was being rude and giving snappy answers. Call it a sixth sense, but sometimes you learn to predict people’s behaviour through experience. Profiling? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but in that area, I knew something was either going to make me cry laughing or shake my head and roll my eyes.
Why/How?