Articles in “Strange Conversations”

When Facebook-specific games engender competition:

ME: I’ll get that high score, though, eventually. (Makes defiant fist gesture)
NICK: I’m sure you will. (Makes punching fist gesture)
ME: No, no: it’s not aggressive. It’s like this (makes defiant fist gesture). “I’ll get you, Gadget!”
NICK: (raspy voice) Next time, Gadget! Next time!
ME: See, I was waiting for that. The minute I did the voice, I thought, “Nick’s going to one-up me, here.”
NICK: Of course!
ME: No, one-upping your girlfriend is never good.
ME: But Doctor Claw impersonations are a special case, because I’m so good at them.

What happens when Nick trots down to the Fiveways to buy fish and chips, because we’re too lazy to cook:

NICK: It is I! Your Nick! Returned from the East, bearing strange gifts!
ME: You’re not really, though, are you?
NICK: Well . . . no. No, not really.

We were listening to Jonathan Coulton’s “Chiron Beta Prime”—the Christmas letter from a family banished to an asteroid by their robot overlords. Did I say overlords? I meant protectors—when we had this conversation:

ME: If you like, you could make up a playlist for my birthday.
NICK: Yes! I will!
ME: Songs I like.
NICK: Oh.
ME: Well, good stuff—you can have some Space, and Catatonia, and so on.
NICK: Well . . .
ME: But not the Planescape Torment soundtrack, okay?
NICK: Oh, okay.

You know you’re living with a geek when his idea of appropriate party music is a video-game soundtrack.

[Actually, no, you know you’re living with a geek when you have the following follow-up conversation:

NICK: Whatcha blogging?
ME: Read it.
NICK: Ha! Hang on, I’ll just check you spelt Planescape Torment correctly.

For the record, I hadn’t.]

As always, all of Jonathan Coulton’s songs can be streamed directly here and I strongly recommend them, though the site’s been a bit buggy lately.

I do love the various incarnations of Mario Party, but . . .

ME: I hate Yoshi!
NICK: But you always play Yoshi.
ME: Yes, but he just rolled an 8.
NICK: And that’s bad?
ME: When he’s rolling three 10-sided dice instead of one?
NICK: Ah.
ME: I’m going to cook him and eat him.
(Note: He’s a dinosaur, so this is nearly but not quite as creepy as it sounds.)
NICK: But he’s you!
ME: No, I’m him. It’s similar, but less . . . ideologically complicated.

The strange conversation we held just before this afternoon’s massive storm hit.

NICK: The sky was all sorts of weird colours when I was walking home from the shops: green, French gray, blue. I thought I was tripping for a while, there.
ME: You probably were: I’ve been putting LSD in your food for a while now.
NICK: That explains so much about my life.

Post True Blood conversation:

NICK: That was Michelle Forbes!
ME: Who?
NICK: The woman in the road!
ME: The pig woman? (Note: She definitely had a pig with her, whatever Nick says to the contrary.)
NICK: Yes.
ME: The pig woman?
NICK: Yes.
ME: Was Ensign Ro?
NICK: Yes.
ME: She looked fifteen years younger!
NICK: What can I say? She looks good naked.
ME: She was naked? (Note to self: pay more attention to the television.)
NICK: Yes.
ME: The naked pig woman was Ensign Ro?
NICK: Yep.
ME: Oh, that’s got to be a recurring role.

I think the humidity—or eight hours’ marking in a west-facing study—has softened my brain:

ME: It’s so muggy!
NICK: I know, it’s horrible.
ME: Stupid Brisbane.
NICK: It’s supposed to be cooler tomorrow.
ME: But it’s like the carrot and the stick! Only you don’t know what the stick’s for, so you’re just shouting, “Stop hitting me!” Because Brisbane doesn’t actually want anything from you.
(Pause)
ME: Was that metaphor too much?
NICK: No. (Pause) No.

Five minutes after Nick walks in the door:

ME: I haven’t updated the blog today.
NICK: You’ve been busy.
ME: It’s been mark, mark, mark, mark.
NICK: That’s okay—soon you’ll be able to update with a brief, informative history of Fallout 3 and how your partner’s completely disappeared to play it.
ME: Right.
NICK: It will be very interesting. You’ll be able to talk about the pit boy. [Which, Nick tells me, I should have heard as PIPBOY.] And the vault system. And the power armour. And the fact that when you get a big plasma gun, you shoot people with it and they melt and go (sound effect).
ME: You shoot people with a plasma gun and they melt and go (sound effect)?
NICK: Well, sometimes you shoot them and they turn into ash and go (different sound effect).
ME: Great.
NICK: They’ve always been violent games.
(Pause)
NICK: Right, I’m off.

And that’ll be all I see of him this weekend.

Partly a strange conversation and partly a terribly geeky conversation, held while Nick was making a post-prandial cup of coffee and I was sitting out having a cigarette.

NICK: Now I’m going to pour the milk into the cups.
ME: It’s Twitter, isn’t it?
NICK: Pardon?
ME: This tendency you’ve developed to tell me everything you’re doing in minute detail.
NICK: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
(Pause)
NICK: Now I’m going to go into the living room and sit on the sofa.

Yet another Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law-inspired conversation:

ME: And what’s Avenger going to do now? Who needs a giant purple eagle who can type and do the filing?
NICK: Well, I do.
ME: Yes, but we don’t exist in the same dimensions. We’d have a two-dimensional giant purple eagle, and what use would we have for that?
NICK: True. (Pause) I’d say Avenger was blue.
ME: He’s purple.
NICK: Well, jacaranda blue.
ME: Jacarandas are purple.
NICK: The way I see it, it’s a continuum (with hand gestures). There’s blue down here and purple down the other end, and jacarandas are closer to the blue end.
ME: They’re purple.
NICK: Can you actually offer any evidence, rather than just saying it?
ME: Everyone knows jacarandas are purple.
NICK: Well, that’s not exactly evidence now, is is, Treena?
ME: Would you like me to look it up on Wikipedia?

(For the record, Wikipedia says that each flower has “a five-lobed blue to purple-blue corolla.” But, honestly: they’re purple!)

While running errands this morning:

ME: I have a headache. I’ve had a headache for three days, now.
NICK: It’s getting hotter. You’re probably dehydrated. (Nonchalantly) I’ve heard dehydration can cause irritability.

And there was me thinking I’d been in an exceptionally good mood this morning.