Cleaning Out My Closet

Because of the lack of occupancy of my room while I'm away at university, it tends to become a dumping ground for things that people don't want. The result is that I've got so much stuff in here that I really don't know what to do with it, despite my best efforts at tidying the place up every once in a while. But when someone really doesn't want to see something again, they'll put it in the cupboard built in to the wall in the darkest corner of my room. It's so unused that to open it you have to slide a heavy chest of drawers out the way first.

As part of the house tidying operation that's going on, I ventured in there with a duster and holy water (in case it had become a portal to another dimension during my absence) and saw what had happened since it was last opened. It felt slightly like opening a time capsule. The first impression was of a rather discouraging mess - boxes and other objects crammed in haphazardly with no sense of order at all. The only option was to pull the whole lot out and start again.

The first layer of the cupboard contained assorted junk, the most interesting of which I'll describe here.

Board Games

There was quite a wealth of these in the cupboard.

Stare!: I remember playing this once; it was a bit rubbish in all honesty. I think the objective was to look at a picture card for a minute then answer observation questions on it. It sounds passable on paper but translates awfully in to a game because the huge problem is that you're sitting around in silence for most of the time waiting for other people's time to run out. It has GD's Gold Seal of Excellence on it - I don't know who GD is, but he must have pretty low standards.

Atmosfear III: Do you remember Atmosfear, where you huddled around a television in the dark and rolled dice on a board at the command of the gatekeeper or something? You'd have done it when you were about twelve. It used to scare the life out of me. It might have seemed a good idea in the early nineties but video board games seem to have died out now, and that's probably just as well.

Carrott's Captions: A board game endorsed by Jasper Carrott, this involves having to write down captions to pictures, then guessing as to who thought up which one. It's never been played, but looks decently workable, though it depends on the ability of the players - despite having a job with BP years ago where all I had to do was sit with a group of people and think up captions for their press photos, I don't think I would be much good at it.

Pocket Scrabble: I don't know why this version is called "Pocket", you'd be lucky to get it in to even my jacket.

Valley of the Kings: This isn't a board game as such - it's a puzzle that acts as the starter for a MOTAS-like site on the Internet. Solving the puzzle eventually gives a password for http://www.puzzleadventure.com - I never got anywhere with it because it's one of those infurating things where you have to match up the edges of each tile in a 4x4 grid. I don't think I'll be trying this again, even if the site still exists at all.

Mah Jongg: I think I got this from my uncle Johannes one birthday. I had remembered about this last time I was in Sarah Lawrence College, when Hillel had a Chinese-themed night and I won a game despite having forgotten all the rules. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that their set had no Arabic numerals on them at all, making playing the game a slow process interrupted by looking at a translation table every turn. This is one of the few worthwhile things in the whole cupboard.

Fore: A board game based on golf. Why?

Mini Carpet Bowls: This actually works surprisingly well, but surely you'd be hard pushed to find anyone with a hallway long enough.

Mindtrap: A game involving solving lateral thinking puzzles to move around a board or something. It's never been played, but I'm sure that most of the family have picked up the cards to solve on their own, then returned them when they realised how unfairly impossible they are, usually relying on missing out a vital clue to include the "lateral" element.

Books

The Teenage Body Book: This embarrassment was given to me as a birthday present one year. It's full of answers to such comically idiotic questions as "Does drinking iced water to freeze the woman's organs prevent pregnancy?". I wish I made that one up.

The Truth: I had been looking for that.

Guide to Macbeth: No one in the family has ever studied Macbeth, nor any of Shakespeare's plays.

Feng Shaun: A collection of sickeningly cute life advice given by Shaun the Sheep from Wallace and Gromit.

Pocket Quiz Book: In German.

The Guinness Book of Records 2003: I'm sure that this used to be a worthwhile resource, but every year the records seem to get more ludicrous, only being in there because their holders were the first to think of them. The only worthwhile section in this one seems to be the athletics and sports section, with the rest of the pages taken up by people who have achieved the greatest top speed while walking uphill eating a three course meal, and other such things.

Going Online: Even though it was only written fifteen years ago the information here is astonishingly outdated, talking about telecommunication links from micros and Metadex commands. There's also the usual specifications hilarity - the book recommends a 10MB hard disk with 256K of RAM, and a 1200 baud modem. People have never had it so easy. In some ways it's a shame that the requirement of having a degree in computing to get online didn't stay, because then AOL wouldn't exist.

Miscellaneous

HexMaker: This is a cleverly named mapmaker for Hexen 2, and presumably Quake as well, with a pseudo-Biblical blurb on the back about Virtus being the savior of comprehensible editing software - it ends with "Go at your own pace and you will surely design", which is a horrendously stretched play on the original tagline "Go in peace and you will surely die". It gets worse - the summary at the end reads "The cleverest software makes itself unobtrusive and transparent, wishing only to serve and to please. It is in this spirit that you have chosen the box you now hold in your hand". I'm not sure what the people at Virtus had been smoking when they came up with that. Despite their claims as to user friendliness, it's totally impossible to use - I never worked it out at all. The memory of using this software for a few minutes makes me appreciate UnrealEd more than ever.

Toy football: Complete with flags from various countries. One of them is the Union Jack, confidently marked "England".

Reflective vest: This is the kind of thing that everyone is advised to wear at night because it makes you more visible, but no one does because it has the side effect of making you look like an idiot. I've no idea what this is doing here, but I could use it to fill a few hours at work by going outside and scaring people by pretending to be a traffic warden.

Rebound 4x4: I remember getting this one Christmas. The design was a huge novelty at the time - a remote controlled car that couldn't become immobile because it could keep going even when flipped over. Sadly the battery life never lasted more than about twenty minutes. The remote control has one stick snapped off and the battery has gone the same way as my laptop's.

Remote controlled Mini: Slightly like my ideal car, but several times smaller and without the chequered roof. It's never even been opened - the box proudly declares "3 functions: Straight, stop, spin turn" which is an impressively optimistic way of saying "Completely unsteerable, goes forwards and backwards squint".

Puzzle calendar: A novelty that quickly wore off, because at the start of every month you had to slide all the pieces around again so that they were on the correct days, and that took hours. Surprisingly it's currently set up correctly for April 2005, so it must have been thrown in there relatively recently.

Hoverdisc: A glorified frisbee that has the additional powers of being made of silvery stuff and taking up half a room.

An old Jiffy-bag from last year. I was going to send some things to Whitney in it, but I cut it to size and it turns out that Jiffy-bags seem to use a large portion of ancient human skin as their packing material. Now it's billowing choking dust everywhere in an anthrax-like fashion, so I think it's best to abandon that plan.

The pack of lies entitled the Residence Contract for 2003/04.

Two boxes of 5 1/2" floppy disks. Highlights include the red disks for the installation of the 1987 version of MS-DOS, the disks for the "Windows Graphical Environment", and the PC Plus Superdisks with things like Osbit, Quadralien and Dark Side.

Two shoeboxes, one of which was helpfully marked "Do not eat".

Nineteen bottles of assorted deodorants and aftershaves.

The entire second layer of the cupboard was composed of a boxful of old school jotters and various other bits and pieces, none of which I felt like examining more closely. I should really send them to the tip for recycling, because they're taking up about half of the world's paper resources. I was ready to throw the whole lot out, but then I opened up one of the folders and discovered some scripts that went in to the yearbook, along with some forgotten gems that didn't make it in to the quotes section. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and be all nostalgic now.