patrick

@marginalgloss.bsky.social

116 Followers 198 Following

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

Cover of A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton
Screenshot from my Samsung health app showing various stats: a 15.20km run in 1 hour 29 mins, avg pace a somewhat sluggish 7'04, avg heart rate 149bpm which is a little lower than usual for me?
A cat dozing under the back wheel of a stationary white Tesla on a very hot day.
Photo of a very rusty black longhaired cat curled up in a tight ball, deeply asleep in the longish grass on a canal towpath, alongside a the large red side of a longboat named MEY BE KNOT
Screenshot of workout details for my morning run: 47 mins 50 secs, 8.51km, yadda yadda yadda
Motto on the wall: DON'T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY
Spectacular view over a landscape in Mexico with Sam in the foreground, dressed in a long coat and backpack and boots, carrying an infant passenger in a babybjorn type sling.
But whatever they said, he knew that all was now lost. Leaning his head against the doorpost, he stood in the next room and heard a shrieking and howling such as he had never heard before, and he knew that these cries were coming from what had once been Kitty. He had long ceased wishing for the child. He now hated this child. He did not even wish for her to live now; he only wished for an end to this terrible suffering. ‘Doctor! What is it? What is it? My God!’ he said, seizing the doctor by the arm as he came in. ‘It’s nearly over,’ said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so serious as he said it that Levin understood this ‘nearly over’ to mean she was dying. Forgetting himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was Lizaveta Petrovna’s face. It was still more stern and frowning. Kitty’s face was not there. In place of it, where it used to be, was something dreadful both in its strained look and in the sound that came from it. He leaned his head against the wooden bedstead, feeling that his heart was bursting. The terrible screaming would not stop, it became still more terrible and then, as if reaching the final limit of the terrible, it suddenly stopped. Levin did not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt: the screaming stopped, and there was a quiet stirring, a rustle and quick breathing, and her faltering, alive, gentle and happy voice softly said: ‘It’s over.’
A dimly lit break room in an industrial space; a couple of pool tables and other assorted tables/chairs scattered around the place; a Christmas tree stands far right, rather sparsely decorated.
An untidy heap of junk with a basket of assorted DVDs: a couple of Band of Brothers box set, a very faded Ashes cricket collection, a FIFA thing, Prisoner of Azkaban, and (very prominently) like six copies of "HITLER'S HENCHMEN"
"He knew it was impossible to forbid Vronsky to toy with painting; he knew that he and all the dilettantes had every right to paint whatever they liked, but he found it unpleasant. It was impossible to forbid a man to make a big wax doll and kiss it. But if this man with the doll came and sat in front of a man in love and began to caress his doll the way the man in love caressed his beloved, the man in love would find it unpleasant."
The bit where you have to climb a really really long ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater while an instrumental version of the greatest song in the world plays in the background.
Image of a note pinned to a wall: "Sometimes I got about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky. - Ojibwe saying"
Screenshot from Thank Goodness You're Here: a queue of four unpleasantly bloated people waiting in a greasy little chip shop; I like the sign on the wall that says "Kids deal: have some of your mum's" and the plastic carrier bag with the old Tesco logo on that just says WANK.
Screenshot from Sword of the Sea: a sweeping view of desert like landscape with a towering mountain in the background.
Screenshot from Silent Hill 2: James looking sorrowful in the reflection of a big old TV monitor.
Screenshot of a photo of somebody's living room: it's uncomfortably overlit, with bare white walls, and a front door that opens straight into the middle of the room; the only furniture is an armless settee to the left and a large blue beanbag sort of huddled in the opposite corner, and a tiny table wedged in the corner by the settee; the blinds are fully drawn; the wall to wall carpet has a sort of brushed velvet texture in which some sort of unsettling Lynchian pattern might soon arise.
Screenshot from DUSK of a hexagonal shape in a ceiling in shades of yellow and brown, with odd little claw like protrusions and a sort of spiral design in the centre. There's so much weird stuff in this game that I hardly know where to start with the alt text.
Screenshot from the Silent Hill 2 remake: a painting or photo of a very strange and unsettling room, lit by a row of high windows at well above head height, entirely bare apart from a bench or seat in the middle.
The red barn from The Sopranos. It's all spooky and shit.
A shot from the opening of Brazil (1985): a family seated next to a Christmas tree, two kids and a mother and father; the former is reading A Christmas Carol to her kids (they even do the Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die bit here). The room is drab and sort of 1950s style but for the horrendous snakelike metal ducts that crisscross at ceiling height.
Screenshot from Silent Hill 2: James stands before the Silent Hill Ranch sign, a barn and farm buildings in the background, shrouded by menacing fog.
A shot from Manhunter of two people standing on a jetty before an outrageously good-looking sunrise bathes the scene in all tones between yellow orange and blue.
Screenshot from The Invincible: from a first person perspective, the player as an astronaut is looking down at a sort of transparent photostat image of a school of large fish on an alien planet.
Photo taken at dusk, under clear blue grey skies: across a big open lawn there stands a set of modern brick hotel buildings with steep red roofs, one of which vaguely recalls mid century Americana, complete with a massive reproduction grain silo/windmill type thing with a white dome atop it; what do they put inside such things, I wonder?
Image from The Straight Story: in a near dark street a small boy stands holding a ball, facing right; in the foreground an inexplicably tiny sprinkler sprays water over a tiny patch of grass, as if to say: we can only do what we can for them.
Photo of a big old tower, mid 18 century, that once housed a massive steam engine for pumping water out of a deep mine below.
Photo of the covered market area in the Pavilions shopping centre - a huge glass roof covers a series of stalls, with a big sort of tower thing at the middle, presumably intended to echo the style of a church tower but in a sort of vaguely Mediterranean style I can't quite place.
Photo of graffiti which someone has painted on a white wall with a paintbrush in mostly red paint, which has started to run and fade a bit - the text reads "If you take a moment to really look at everything that has occurred...and everything that had been exposed over the last hundred years...its clear that something unprecedented is happening to humanity." I'm not sure 'unprecedented' is quite correct, though I don't disapprove of the sentiment.
Screenshot from Cyberpunk 2077: my new character looking in a mirror in the prologue cutscene, with Jackie standing behind him. He's got the Arasaka Corpo uniform on and is giving vaguely Jake Gyllenhall vibes.
Screenshot from Norco: an elderly man, unwell, sits in a dressing gown in the light of a table lamp, barely visible in a room shrouded with darkness.
Photo of a very small boy in PJs in a darkened room light by dark blue light - he is grinning madly and holding two big red portable night lights atop his eyes.
Selfie of yours truly taken in the wing mirror of a car from the passenger seat - a cherubic sleeping toddler is half visible behind me. Trees and stuff around. I look somewhat bedraggled. Nice sunny day.
Screenshot from my running app showing a 6.99km run over 44 mins, and various other numbers which are not that great tbh
Screenshot from Norco: a young person's bedroom, lit warmly, quite tidy. "The aesthetics of disaster were central to the emerging milieu. It began to percolate into popular culture. Collapse became the zeitgeist."
Screenshot from an auction site of a novelty 1950s radio with a massive ornate black horse statue atop it.
Screenshot from The Last of Us Part One - a child's bedroom with a bunk bed, crafted with a frankly unbelievable attention to detail; there's a chest of drawers and a little desk; almost every surface is cluttered with toys; late afternoon sunlight shines through a broken blind.
Photo of the scoreline at Wimbledon, where Grigor Dimitrov (easily old enough to be his dad) is somehow up two sets against redheaded wunderkid Jannik Sinner.
Balatro win screen with a best hand score of 36,112.
Photo of Court 1 at Wimbledon, during today's match, with Cameron Norrie getting ready to serve to a pretty full house.
Screenshot from my fitness tracker app of a 7.82km run over 56 minutes.
Balatro game over screen from my tutorial run - best hand score of 6072 (which I now understand to be pitiful).
Photo: a view that looks out on a row of tiny plants on a first floor windowsill; in one little pot a succulent has shot out a stalk or proboscis of some kind with a cute but slightly menacing cluster of pink budding flowers on the end.
Photo of a couple pizzas wot I made: one big rectangular one with mushrooms and anchovies, and a slightly smaller round plain one.
Photo of a bench which has a series of long metal plaques running the length of it, engraved with various promises. These range from "I will not fight with my sister" to "I will spend less time on the PC and more with my partner" and "I will give blood on a regular basis".
Photo: a slightly elevated view of a hedge maze, arranged in a spiral broken in a few places. It's mostly very neatly trimmed with only a couple of weeks troubling the smooth surface of the hedges. A mass of different trees are arranged in the background.
Screenshot from Powerslave Exhumed: an Egyptian themed FPS with sprites layered across a true 3D engine, and some fairly nice lighting effects; here, I've called up the automap which floats above the action, demonstrating a horrendously complicated multi-layer non-linear level layout.
Photo: a few little children are playing with a huge set of blue plastic train tracks in a hall, complete with various stations, hills, etc. There's a big table with maybe a hundred assorted Thomas themed trains on it, all with working batteries; various parents are also milling about the periphery.
Screenshot from Far Cry 5: a cutscene where a new mother sat in a wheelchair is holding a weird looking baby which clearly has a grown up face, mostly concealed by the fact that it's wrapped up like a burrito in a pink blanket.
Photo from one of my evening runs: sunset over the playing fields in a local park.
Screenshot from Blue Prince: the Drawing Room, a high-ceilinged chamber artfully decorated with candelabras, high windows, and assorted tables and chairs around the edges. In the middle of the room is an in progress portrait of a man who is no longer here; on the walls are various oddball pictures and portraits of men in motion.