The Werewolf Game

I went to a murder mystery on Saturday. They’ve really got with the times on those games – they come with dvd footage complete with dodgy scripts and OTT acting. Brilliant. Aside from discovering that my Italian accent is fairly appalling, I also discovered this game later in the evening:

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html

It was so much fun. Everyone gets really involved and people make accusations all over the place. I think I played it too aggressively though – instead of the ‘tapping’ suggested in the version above, we used a version where we slapped our thighs and yelled ‘sex and brains’ repeatedly until the morning section. I consequently have these weird bruises on my thighs. We also played a version where we had a healer as well as a Seer. The healer could pick someone (including themselves) to heal each night. It's a good game if you're an accomplished liar.

Be warned – I will attempt to play this game at any future party I organise/am invited to.

Re-enactment!

So I had a brilliant idea – to ward of the tedium that is human life, I thought it would be a really cool idea to re-enact album covers. I admittedly stole this idea from a website, but it occurred to me that a lot of fun could be had from this - there are thousands to choose from and I have a lot of time on my hands. They’d have to be fairly good mind, with a bit of photo-shopping here and there and a fair amount of effort, but the finished piece could be wonderful. I’m recruiting a friend tonight to get started, and cover by cover, we could really pile these up. I suggested this project to a friend of mine, and whilst I initially thought it could be a good idea to make it a competition between the two of us, I then thought that we could cover much more by working together. So watch this space. Album covers will be coming your way…

Lessening excitement

I think that the older you get, the less excitement you’ll be able to feel. Already it’s happened in certain ways – Christmas and birthdays no longer hold the exhilaration they once did. Whilst music and books currently hold an excitement, eventually you’ll have heard and seen so much that nothing can surprise you or excite you in the same way that it did when you were younger. It’s a sobering thought to think it’ll be a rare occurrence that you’ll come across something that you’ve never seen before and have no experience of. I don’t think you can really get excited about the same thing time and time again, unless you’re incredibly lucky or have a childlike mentality. And the fact is that every new thing you do experience is always hindered by yourself – the fact that it’s you experiencing it, with your history, your memories and your prejudices. You can never experience anything with a completely open mind, because you’ll always be coming at it with a mind clouded with your previous experiences. I suggested this to a friend, and he said that the main feelings of excitement that he continued to feel as he got older were mainly sexual. Thinking back, the moments when you’ve first gotten physically close to someone stand out as exciting more than anything else, where your whole body is alive with the moment, and your mind can’t think about anything other than right then and there and the person you’re with. I originally thought that this could be the only true excitement in life, and whilst I think this is probably the most consuming excitement you can feel, I now don’t think that excitement is solely limited to sexual activity, but is somewhat limited to human interaction. People will always be a mystery – you can generalise and stereotype, but most people will always have a different view to offer on something and until you get to know them you can never fully predict how they’ll act or what they’ll say. Some will have more to offer than others, and the problem is that it’s hard to get to fully know people – most are understandably very closed off to revealing things about themselves and don’t always tell you what they’re truly thinking. You’ll often have to pry deeply to discover their true thoughts, and unless you offer something of yourself in return it can come across as intrusive. But you have to try. And every now and then you’ll meet someone willing to share a little of themselves and someone who has something worthwhile to offer. So yeah, I do think that excitement will fade for most things in life, but as long as you try to meet as many new people as possible, those initial moments – the first time you experience someone’s thoughts and their feelings, their reactions to things you’ve already seen – will help to keep life exciting.