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Second place is far from bad when the winning team was a grammar school. Eliezer, Miles and Pritesh were amazing. Go QPCS! Go Brent!

Damn Grammar School Zombies.

It's amazing how often I find myself defending the earthly. I'm always arguing that we need to disregard religion or ceremony or tradition in the name of saving lives, of ending war and poverty and much preventable death.

It's part of Marxism: nothing comes from dreams. We're materialists, the lot of us.

I was saying this to John today: we don't understand the universe, and we don't understand the constructs we make to deal with it. There is no definition of art, for example, that satisfies us all. And we still don't really know how anything works, not really.

I was also saying this: I am a sceptic when it comes to reality. And a lot of other things, but reality is what I've been thinking about. I don't think it is possible to prove, at all, that the world- in the sense of the physical world, not the planet- is actually real. And that it may just be possible to prove that it isn't. Of course, you can't prove anything- but it's that feeling that you can never know. It's the sense that I can never, ever know the most basic thing about these things I interact with that has begun to drive me mad.

I keep feeling trapped by gravity. Like I can't move in enough dimensions.

Maybe I'm just tired. I don't really have reason to be.

Since I wish to lose no geek points, here is the follow-up post for yesterday.

We- Amber and I- went to the place in-between platforms thirteen and fourteen of Waterloo station, where we found a whole bunch of geeks immersed in playing Ticket to Ride, which seems to be the fourth most (as opposed to forth most, which is reserved for War on Terror) complicated board game on Earth. Since the two of us were rather late, we instead played Whot, although not without adding the Prime Number rule, the Multiplication, Addition and Division rules, the Wind rule, and, eventually, the Justifiable rule, which made it actually entertaining.

I love Geohashing, in all its geekiness. Maybe the true joy of it is that it is amazing, poignant, even: an utterly random location is picked, and, without two words being said to one another, people assemble there. It's a sense of community, really. (Pictures are here, BTW.)

I feel like there is community everywhere now. Marxism has always been like this. You feel safe for once, at home. Strangers, who all share at least one aspect of your ideology. Geek culture is like that. But it's quieter, more subtle. That feeling, though, of finding out that someone you know is a geek too, is incomparable.

Geek points for saying that? Loads, right?

I thought I had something vitally important to blog, but on inspection, it turns out it's just that I dreamed I promised Alice I'd blog about my week.

Which would have been a brilliant post. I'd start it: "I killed a man on Monday."

Even in my dreams, I always say the things that make me sound mentally unstable in front to Alice.

Anyway, I should probably go and get ready so Amber and I can hang out in-between platforms thirteen and fourteen of Waterloo Station because a webcomic told us to.

Geek points for today? If I add that I went to a debate club thing already today? Pretty high, I'm guessing. Maybe thirty-one?

Ha, yes. We- QPCS's debate club- won the Brent Heats. We are, sometime this month, going through to the London ones.

Oh, dear Lord! This is... this is good. This is very good. This is brilliant, this is fabulous, this is wonderful, this is fantastic. I really care too much about Debate Club, but, Christ, we all work rather hard for it. And it's fun, obviously.

The only real competition was JFS: St. Gregory's were mostly reading from sheets of paper, and we didn't end up arguing against Preston Manor and the other school who turned up. (Two schools dropped out at the last minute). We had beaten JFS before, of course, in two debates, but this time it was purely the years nine and ten team and they have gotten a lot less formal and a lot more confident. Somehow, and I think it was mostly Mile's speech (the team for this debate was him, me and Pritesh), we beat them again.

Seriously, w00t, minus sarcasm.