Well I hope we’ve all been living and loving GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations for those of you not in the know) this week. I’m slightly ashamed to be starting a blog post with such a sensible and grown up topic, but it’s actually had quite an affect on my general day to day so guess what – you all get to be involved. If I have to adult, the rest of you do too.
My real life job is pretty heavily censored by the GDPR guidelines (which makes me sound like some kind of secret agent – Spoiler – I’m not) so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when bucket-loads of emails came through asking if I was happy to continue being subscribed and sharing my information with various companies. To be honest, I was mildly surprised to see how many I was actually signed up to – I think I recognised about 60% of the names which is a little concerning, but it’s been a rather timely little exercise in personal housekeeping and fingers crossed I can actually start to make my mailbox a tad more presentable (I am definitely one of those people with over 1000 unread items).
It has been rather annoying to find myself logged out of nearly every online service I use though; I’ve had to scrabble around trying to remember passwords with embarrassing desperation. I still haven’t been able to log back into my Youtube account, and who knows if I’ll eve be able to access my GiffGaff portal again. I sometimes really get Neville and his password pains. I would have definitely had a list of common room entry passwords tucked into my pockets at all times.
My new phone is quite fancy in that you can use your fingerprint to log into certain systems rather trying to remember all the different combinations of characters you’ve been prompted to create. I do see it as a bit of a double edged sword though. On one hand, I feel like a kickass lady spy with super cool gadgets and I don’t actually have to remember anything. On the other, I’ll be screwed when I do have to get a new phone because I’ll never ever be able to remember my passwords by that point and I have a slight fear that I’ll be kidnapped and have my thumbs cut off so people can rob me like every Mission Impossible film ever. So, you know, swings and roundabouts.
To get back on track though, I can promise there will be limited mention of any further adulting. We’ve been having a lot of fun educating ourselves about ridiculous (and mostly unhelpful unless pub quizzing) subjects. We’ve been binge watching Vikings again (we’ve actually made it past Series 1 this time so that’s good) and TMM has been fully immersing himself. I’ve definitely started to affect him with my weird obsessional personality. He’s treated us to a fancy copy of Neil Gaimen’s “Norse Mythology” and has been entertaining me with retellings in his charmingly brusque way. We spent most of the car journey back from the Motherland (where we’d been visiting family members with much joy) to his personalised renditions of some of the more ‘unusual’ myths. I’ve been regaled with Loki’s exploits (literally don’t know how anyone managed to get anything done with that numpty hanging around), journeys to visit Frost Giants and the various trials and tribulations faced by Thor, but through the possibly unexpected medium of working class Northerner from the early 1950s. He’s basically been channelling Fred Dibnah and it’s fantastic. TMM’s somewhat unjustified Northern roots (he has the heart and soul of a proud Yorkshire man, despite being born in the Midlands and raised just above) come out spectacularly when he’s story telling and he’s definitely spoiled me for anyone else – if I’m not hearing about Norse Gods in the dulcet tones and somewhat questionable terminology of a disgruntled coal miner, is there really any point in hearing about them at all? I honestly think if we weren’t both hideously awkward and slightly more tech savvy, we’d have a hilarious vlog and be Youtube famous by now. Though seeing as GDPR has proven how useless I am and stopped me logging in, maybe its for the best we’ve never actually managed it.
My love has the dulcet tones of a grubby imp, and the photographic eye of an angel.
In fact, we’ve been making the best of our shared nerdiness and generally questionable hobbies all round this week. On Tuesday we spent an enjoyable evening finding particularly hilarious words from my birthday book (please refer to last week’s post) and reading them out at each other in lieu of normal home time conversation. We are particularly fond of “Softoff: noun the opposite of a hardon” (I was in hysterics about this for far longer than is appropriate) and “Jobbernowl: noun a blockhead, clodpate”. It seems to be very much the case that these words are either completely ridiculous or so vague and undefinable that the only summary they give is a quote detailing the one time they were actually used and literally no other information. As we can see from the following example, George Stone Saussy (the Third) has no freaking clue what this meant but decided to just roll with it and hope nobody would notice.
We noticed George. We noticed.
We’ve pretty much been at it all week really. Our Bank Holiday Monday was mostly spent in bed eating two day old apricot pastries (don’t judge, they were super tasty) and playing Zork like the old school, socially conforming hipsters that we are. TMM heard something on the radio that had him diving for his app store and by the time I had managed to drag myself to the land of the living, he was elbow deep in word based intrigue and adventure. After letting me drool unattractively on his arm and stare blearily at his phone for a while whilst I tried to get myself online, he handed me my phone (with handily downloaded Zork maps to my surprise) and told me to make myself useful. About 4 hours later we’d physically moved about 3 inches (there was some accidental hardcore napping which resulted in us being late for a first birthday party like actual badmen) whilst simultaneously managing to be killed by one (1) grumpy troll and then two (2) thieves with shifty expressions and bags full of stolen loot. However, we did also fill our virtual trophy cupboard with six (6) jewelled treasures so I’m pretty sure we achieved. Annoyingly, we have since come to the conclusion that although we’ve gotten this far, we’ve bypassed some pretty vital sections and consequently are going to have to start from scratch. Still, our team work skills are on point and I’m pretty sure that if, for whatever reason, I lose my physical form and have to have my consciousness downloaded into some sort of virtual network, I’ll make an excellent on-board computer and TMM can just download me as his personal AI.
Since then I have been trying to convince myself that I am actually cut out to be a real life person, but it’s proving to be a little tricky. Let’s be honest, I would be so much better as some kind of intelligent computing system. Sign me up to be the next Cortana (though I think I’d be far less JARVIS and far more Red Dwarf Holly (series 2) – All right dudes?)
CuriousMonthofMay 