Welcome to Sleepless Jaymis

Your own personal hell. My very own playground, complete with human bouncing castles, clowns giving me sugary substances and huge cylinders of nitrous oxide. Many may think that the roles would be somewhat reversed there. They would expect that someone who’s been spending 18+ hours a day in a university multimedia lab for a week straight would be about as difficult to fuck with as a retarded kittien. They would be Very Much Mistaken.

Actually, I’m probably be selling my co-multimediators a little short here. Everyone’s had a blast. Everyone who was in my production group that is. The other poor bastards who have been trying to get work done but who are doing it solo rather than as part of a seven-strong group of 3rd year students who know they can do whatever they want to and are coordinating a rather involved 20ish minute piece of interactive television spanning multiple computers and hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space and thousands of man-hours.. Well they may have just found their last couple of days of lab time to have been a little on the hellish side.

Recipe for a bloody good time while doing something which should ostensibly be pretty shithouse in a uni lab filled with (stupid fucking) Mac G4s and other students cramming their sorry little bollocks off:

Shitloads of caffiene – Not long ago I decided I would try Dan’s No-doz Technique (for those who couldn’t be bothered reading Dan’s rather humorous and informative treatise on NO2 the relavent passage is “I take a No-Doz Plus in the morning to assist me in waking up (just like a cup of coffee, but you don’t have to get up to make it).”) in an attempt to cut down on my morning coke consumption (I have this vague idea that drinking coke for breakfast may just be a bad idea. Like most vaguely well-intentioned ideas of mine, this one misfired slightly, because like most I prefer to have something liquid to accompany pills on their way into my stomach, and water is ever so bland, you see…

I could have just skipped that entire paragraph and said “I am caffienated all the way up the wahoozey”, but then you wouldn’t have been treated to that lovely mix of long sentences and probably redundant nested-parenthesis.

Juggling Balls and other silly toys to pass the time away – If you’re going to break the lab rules, both written (no drinking, no eating) and unwritten (no throwing things around a lab stuffed with approaching $500,000 worth of assorted high-end computer gear), then you might as well break them good and hard. Combining 2 sets of juggling balls with 7 people who possess negligable juggling talent is a great way to go about this, and apart from the actual juggling those balls are a great way of gaining the attention of someone who’s editing on the other side of the room and encased in headphones.

Sleeplessness – Multimedia labs are generally pretty subdued affairs. Kids intently geeking it bathed in their own personal $2400 glowy thing aren’t usually prone to random giggling outbursts of “Hey everybody, guess what? SCROTUM!*“. But when a finely honed group of mediaterrorists have been collectively awake for a number of hours well within triple figures, then SCROTUM! is not only commonplace, but met with the kind of enthusiasm generally reserved for a stripper at a buck’s night.

Speaking of sleeplessness: I’m rather dosed up on it at the moment. There’s a lot of material which is ready to come cascading from my brain into yours via some lovely finger-wiggling, but as much as I would like to regale the world with pointless but witty tales of time-wasting and study-disruption, I would much prefer to be unconscious. So I’m just going to mention my group members by name, as I have this vague notion that one day a potential employer may vanity search them and I would like to make sure that there’s some good words about them on the net:

Hajley Petein
David Tilburey
Carmel Dunn
Alicia Cullen
Steph Skuja
Douglas Pack

These people are all amazingly talented, great in a team environment and loads of fun to work with. If you have the chance you should give them loads of money.

The End.

A note on SCROTUM! – Our production was naturally an extravaganza of light and colour, and the climactic point involved 4 narratives being played out simultaneously on a single screen. While planning everything out on a whiteboard we referred to “the main bit” enough that it warranted its own special name. I’m not sure who came up with “the scrotum” as a designator, but it was immediately hailed as a feat of superlative nomclamenture and the name stuck, and even the most serious wrangling about the project immediately became lighthearted when the scrotum was brought into play.

04-11-2003@16:44

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