joke.enterprises

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31/07/2026 - Emotional Nerdsnipe

I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago! (a horrible fate, i'm aware). This was to cap off a weekend of me *absolutely* overdoing it and apparently because i'm 83 years old now i have to like, pay attention to my health or something. ugh

I won't go into the contents of the weekend too heavily, i mostly just went to a (mediocre) hardcore electronic rave which was fun and included me making out with multiple women *and* reconnecting with an ex-coworker, which was cool!. The subsequent Birmingham trip was largely just to play the arcade game Sound Voltex at a venue called Retro Realm up there, i woke up around about 6am to get on the coach there and then ended up going to bed about 2am in the end. so it was a pretty long day.

ANYWAY, the subject of this blog post is a weird interaction i had. I was absolutely fried eating Dave's Hot Chicken before getting on my coach home, and someone waved at me through the window of the restaurant. Like they were clearly waving at *me* specifically, they waved for about 20 seconds before managing to actually get my attention.

The weird part was that i did not recognise the group at all. they clearly knew who i was but i had no idea who they were, and they ended up walking off without coming in to chat! so i have no way of knowing who they could've been!

This like, absolutely fried my brain, because this made me actively try to figure out who they were, at which point i began "recognising" them as a huge number of potential friends from secondary school, university flatmates, relatives, and other people i would've met like, 5 years ago at this point. At a certain point i begun to recognise that i had put my brain in "recognising mode" to the point where anyone i recognised was essentially just a hallucination, so it was pretty fruitless figuring out who they were at that point.

It's interesting thinking about how the actual interaction with these people could've gone had i talked to them, it could've gone a number of ways depending on *who* they were, and not knowing that was absolutely maddening to me. it brainwormed me for like 3 hours in the end!

One interesting sidenote of this is discovering that a *surprising* amount of stuff from my secondary school was archived on the Wayback Machine, meaning that i was able to go back and see literal pictures and posts of my time in secondary school, mentioning people i hadn't talked to or thought about for *years*, frozen in time just as they were back then. This is probably especially interesting to me personally for a number of reasons (covid cut my secondary school years short, transition meaning i only really became a "real person" years and years after knowing these people, the knowledge that some of them are actually super cool, etc etc etc).

that being said, all these reasons probably give me more reason to *not* pull on these threads too hard, wouldn't want to confine myself to the hypothetical past, yknow?

(the funniest hypothetical scenario here is those people didn't know me at all and were just fucking with me, in which case lol congrats u got my ass)

see blog for many more new posts!