Requiem for a Quiche

More astute readers will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging. A lot of things have changed since my last post in October 2008.

Let’s sidestep the ones which currently feel most important! Gosh, don’t you love hearing that.

I’ve moved from high school to university; from a shared house with a travel agent and a bunch of Chinese in Adelaide’s leafy south-east to living alone in a flat in a suburb of Italians and retirement fortresses – a suburb all but unique in not being scorned by Adelaide Metro.

Well, I had approximately 6 months here without internet at home. I’m going to over-simplify matters by saying “yes, that is exactly as hard as you think.”

I hadn’t blogged for some time before that, and not for some time since. That is because blogging is really not important to me. Blogging often seems like pissing into the wind.

Successful blogs require dedication – and do I even want a succesful blog? Probably not. I certainly do not want to be a “dedicated blogger”.

I do not even think I have anything that special to say. There are more good blogs than could be read, and they are just the tip of an iceberg composed largely of utter rubbish. If we narrow the pool of blogs to a group so small as those made by people I know personally – there are blogs with more interesting things to say than me (fig 1, fig 2), more interesting ways to say them (fig 3, fig 4), or both. Does that mean I follow them? No. I talk to these people.
If I say that any distillation of their views is less wholesome than those people themselves, I hope they take it as a compliment.

I’m still listening to a lot of music! My music profile is still here, and while you can see from the charts what I’ve listened to most between now and October 2006, I’m going to recommend to you the bands I’ve gotten into much more recently. And don’t go thinking they are an accurate representation of my listening habits at large.
Eluveitie are not pronounced the way they are spelt. It’s “Elveyte”, I am told. They are Swiss, sing in a local dialect of Celtic (extinct, of course), and use bagpipes convincingly – it’s not a gimmick. I suggest you Youtube their song Inis Mona, and also Uis Elveti if you’re at all interested in Folk Metal.
The Cinematic Orchestra is, hm, chill-out jazz with electronic elements. Check out To Build A Home, it’s my favourite of theirs. You’ll probably recognise it from a Schweppes advert.
Kronos Quartet. So the elementally themed “Ghost Opera” freaked you out with the moaning and shrieking and splashing that accompanied the oriental tunes? You were scared away by Act III: Dialogue with ‘Little Cabbage’? Suck it up, go out and get their latest album Floodplain, a musical exploration of the middle east. Here is a serious review on the BBC website. It gushes compliments. And rightly so.
Yoshida Brothers are instrumental Japanese folk rock on traditional instruments, and remind me more of Altan Urag and Apocalyptica than Bond or Twelve Girls Band (which means they are actually good).
David Garrett is a classically trained violinist. Lots of people are taking violin in new poppy directions, he is one of them. He does it well, and owns obscenely expensive violins. That doesn’t bear any relation to how good he is, as proponents of the “Andre Rieu is a talentless Belgian” theory will tell you. You’re best off looking up his cover of Smooth Criminal, which I am keen on.
Globus – I didn’t think of this at first. I’ve had it so long, but I’ve ignored this blog longer. It’s cinematic music, as used in dramatic trailers. It may seem cheesy because vocals are almost always in English (rather than the Latin favoured by this genre), but if you approach this from a pop music angle, it’ll blow you away. It doesn’t feel contrived like E.S. Posthumus, and it doesn’t grow immediately old like the prolific X-Ray Dog. I have positive things to say about Corner Stone Cues, but I don’t know about their lasting power, as I’ve only had the album Requiem for a Tower for a month.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is a bit of a hack. I don’t have any pretentions of being able to compose music, but I find his work overly simplistic (not the same as minimalist) and over-emotional (not the same as melodramatic). Get your hands on Requiems by Giuseppe Verdi, Gabriel Fauré, and Johannes Brahms, in addition to Mozart’s which you doubtless already have.
I have recently banished Академический ансамбль песни и пляски Российской (known to the proletariat as the Red Army Choir) from my media player of choice because I have grown tired of them. Just so you know.
Tenochtitlan is a Russian-language band from Russia. They are Aztec-themed ethnic doom metal (if I were more of a hat, I’d call them ambient and progressive too). They were rather better than I expected from such a description. I expect novelty concepts to be something of a joke, but this is done really well. If the description doesn’t appeal to you, then you probably shouldn’t be getting it.
Gogol Bordello is gypsy punk. Sounds like a novelty, is likewise good – I’ve had this band for a long time, too. You should get it whether the description appeals or not. Be safe and YouTube Not A Crime or Zina-Marina.

In my time without internet, I read a lot of books. I’m still reading now. I re-read C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels, which are as always terrific. I re-read The Dice Man, which is the single book I have forced onto the most people. It was gratifying to see that a book I enjoyed so much when I was 15 is genuinely brilliant.
Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar series is excellent, and so is the Empire series he wrote in collaboration with Janny Wurtis.  I insist you find and read Feist’s Magician, and you will probably hunt down the rest of the books based on that. It is one of those books which you finish in a surprisingly short time and cannot think of how to improve. I read Feist’s later (and much longer) revision, though. I think it is called “preferred version” or something, much in the way of a directors’ cut.

So far, this talk of books has been one-dimensional. Those were the best.
Well, A. A. Attanasio’s The Last Legends of Earth is presumably an okay book, but he seems to have no idea what he is doing when he manhandles a large clichéd soft sci-fi vocabulary around. I only picked it up because of the emphatic reviews on the back from such plausible sources as Locus, the L.A. Times and Silverberg. Why do people think being compared to Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is a good thing? Just because something is a milestone work in a major genre of literature doesn’t mean it is actually good.

Richard Howard’s works must be burned at every opportunity. I speak of Bonaparte’s Sons and Bonaparte’s Invaders. This omnibus was dirt-cheap for a reason.
The style is reminiscent of the “chapter books” we read in junior primary, at age seven.
[Dialogue] [character] said, chuckling.
[character] looked [emotion]
It was evidently written by a congenital idiot (who enjoys period films) in consultation with the list of words which can be used place of “said”, which he has pinned to his wall.

I found a nice English-German bilingual school dictionary (Cassell’s, Great Britain) from before the war, in which all the German is set in Fraktur, the blackletter typeface long favoured by the Germans, which you will recognise from the side of the Hindenburg.

Since I’ve been talking about books for a while, I’ll just repeat that China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is brilliant. I must have said that in a previous blog.

I also have a tumblr. I’m certain it has been called “picture blogging for idiots” at some point. For exactly the same reasons, it is much more accessible and maintainable than a traditional blog. Q: Is mine safe for work? A: Maybe.

It is perhaps the knowledge that my ramblings go on for so long that keeps me from blogging.

My sleep cycle is about seven hours out, which means I’m jet-lagged from Istanbul, without actually leaving Adelaide. That means I should probably be making towards bed.

So; good night, internet~

Silent in a heart of steel

Hello, I rarely blog.

That shows that I’m not afraid of blogging, that I am capable of blogging, and most importantly that I can be trusted to do so in moderation.

I’m quite aware that this is too small for adults, now that it’s been scaled to fit my blog.

The other day, I was walking along a cloister, and I passed a limping security guard muttering about how it was at the time “too bloody early in the morning” – though it was in fact early afternoon.  More notable was that he was followed at a short distance by a short (5′7″-ish) Indian man who looked very much like a dark Leon Trotsky.
This doesn’t go anywhere; that’s it.

I had a dream the other day, in which the rear tyre of my bicycle was flat.  The satisfaction you glean from this blog is like some unique drug, it’s dreamshit.  I just conveyed to you an entire dream in that one sentence – and not in such a way that you’d think Martin Luther King Jr. was unfamiliar with punctuation.  Oh, in my dream I kept forgetting that the tyre was flat, and I’d notice en route, and worry that I was damaging the rim.

More recently, I had a dream which may have begun with someone not entirely unlike Stephen Fry, and ended with me feeling profoundly inadequate.  And it had nothing to do with him, though it easily could have.  Stephen Fry makes us all feel inadequate, deep down – but only during our waking hours.

I’m well into reading the third last Hornblower book, and while I thirst for more, I’m also afraid of finishing the series.  C.S. Forester died 42 years ago, and I have no hopes of more.  I shed non-Euclidean tears t_t, they curve with sadness.  You’ve never wept Bézier curves.  Isaac Asimov’s estate authorised three Foundation novels from three of today’s respected Science Fiction authors – and we know how they turned out.

My hands are still very warm, as they have been all year.  We are in late spring, and I am not looking forward to the sweltering heat and swarming flies of summer.  Clare is escaping to Japan, and I will be all Clareless and alone for two months! D:

I’m plotting to hide in her suitcase or disguise myself as her mother, but there are several other people with designs on her luggage, and I’m too tall and hirsute to be her mum.  Also, I can’t speak Japanese. She objects strongly to me selling a kidney, so I’ll be down here, while she’s in the country responsible for Iron Chef.

If we swing away from organ trafficking and dreams (even the one I had at age four where I fell through a manhole down a long tunnel into my own bed through the hatch in the ceiling), I can return to discussing this blog, or perhaps blogging in general. To quote a demotivator, “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.”

Also, Fi.  Fi blogs a lot.  If I had a dollar every time she posted a blog, I’d have $202 from the last 4.33 months.  At that rate, it would be $559.82 a year, which is far far below a taxable income.  But as an effortless supplement to any legal wage, it would be lovely.  I’ve noticed a slowing in the last couple of months – perhaps she has less to say, or perhaps she is being distracted by less worthy things such as her schooling, twitter, and her boyfriend.  N’awwwww.

I can ramble all I like.  But I won’t do it through that wretched mouthpiece that is twitter any more than fortnightly.  That’s what you get for slamming down your metaphorical hobnailed boot at 140 characters.

My blog.  My blog does not see me often, nor does it see many readers.

It does get a strange selection of Google search traffic, though.  I’ve taken this from my WordPress dashboard:

Don’t let yourself destroy yourself

At 5:30 this evening, the sunlight was a curious amber.  The clouds were a peach colour, yet the sky behind them was a rich blue.  At the fluffier edges, it blurred into purple, and the stubby yet brightly coloured rainbows in the east.  Slightly surreal, with colours normally associated with HDRI photos.

The overall effect was a mormon propaganda piece. Why the mormons? Well, I notice that their website is quite attractive.

It didn’t rain today.

I went for a walk after dark last night, with no phone or wallet.  Mainly because it was completely spontaneous.  I went through two parks, up a road even bendier than the one I recently discovered (they’d be the same if they were properly lined up), and discovered where my bus turns around.

It’s always muddy in the long thin park with olive trees.

I’ve recently gotten into a pile of new music, and approve of the vastly improved automatic recommendation system on last.fm.

Wow, this was a short one.

Trapped in yourself, break out instead

Ok, I thought I’d cover the holidays, before it gets into the distant past.  It was a two week holiday between terms, and a week has already passed since it finished.  I could have blogged four times while it was happening, but it was a holiday, and I do not think that is time best spent blogging.

I took three friends over to Kangaroo Island at the beginning of the holidays, and this time it was not all on fire.  We were therefore able to go to the tourist spots, which we naturally decided to do on the day with the … least friendly weather.  I will be getting the photos of us leaning into the wind, tomorrow.

There is now a video on YouTube of me at Remarkable Rocks, in a corridor type formation, struggling against very strong wind.  You can hear their laughter, as it begins to hail, and I scream in pain.  This is, I think, the third video with me in it.  The first currently has 28,499 views merely because a certain someone uploaded it with a misleading name.

I put on a few kilos, which I have already lost.  All have conceded that both of my parents are excellent cooks.

We played Risk a couple of times, and there was much stomping of Ukraine.  We did this during Rugby matches and late night films.  Oh, we watched some good films, we watched some fun films, we watched an atrocity.

And to put this atrocity in perspective, The Godfather and V for Vendetta are good, Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze and Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie go in the “fun” category.  Yes, the 1992 Jim Henson Ninja Turtles film has the best opening sequence ever, involving a teen pizza deliveryman who knows martial arts fighting a large mob of thieves.  Did I mention that he’s asian?  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles intervene, there are giant flowers, a snapping turtle, a wolf, a Samurai who lives in a car yard and Vanilla Ice doing the Ninja Rap.

Anyway, in Turbo, the lion Munchkin wizard creature from the planet with a blue filter was captured by the scantily clad woman who lives in a submarine with mutants, where the Munchkin’s mate and child are being held hostage.  He then reluctantly takes her to an island in a parallel dimension, so she can marry a lava monster (which she begins to have doubts about).  Being the “Queen of Evil” is not quite worth being married to a sentient molten rock formation.

Of course, the Power Rangers must also go to this parallel dimension, which they achieve by somehow getting their Zords (Transformers cars) onto the Ghost Ship.  Yes, a dilapidated wooden ship will take them to another dimension.

Did I mention that the police are stupid, the blue ranger is a child (yes, it’s a film of that season), and the pink ranger has an Australian accent?

Anyway, there are fight scenes, explosions, mecha fight scenes, dodgy cuts, volcanoes erupting and a bald man’s head in a giant tube..  If that doesn’t make sense, the good guys win.

So, that was the fun and bad one.  What about the atrocity I mentioned? I should skip to the far side of the next picture now, if I were you.  It’s more fun that way.

It is called Soul Plane, and stars ‘Snoop Dogg’ as an ex-con who was trained to fly by terrorists.  This is the poorest taste film I have ever seen.

When a man who is not Chris Tucker is stuck to a toilet seat in an aeroplane, and through the window sees his dog being sucked into a turbine, mid-flight, the jury of a civil court awards him one hundred million dollars.  I’m shocked that anyone would misrepresent the court system so.

This sounds like a lot of money, but it is not enough to build ‘Terminal X’ (or ‘Terminal Malcom X’ for long), buy a heavily customised full-size jumbo jet painted in purple livery, and hire a full crew.  A white family is transferred to the maiden flight, and they too are terrible caricatures.  The jet has hydraulics.  And I mean the pointless kind that rice-cars have, along with sub-woofers and furry dice.

I … don’t want to talk about how bad it is, any more.  It has the most juvenile humour I’ve ever come across.

I’m disgusted.  I’m insulted.

I’m ashamed for everyone in it.

It’s the most racist film I’ve ever seen.  The co-pilot is African, and there is a Muslim on the plane.  What is the least tasteful way these characters could be treated?  They did it.  They did it to women, blind people, white people, gays, and every black stereotype yet.  And I hate them all, and they deserve it.  The characters are all repulsive.

We laughed less and less, as we realised that it wasn’t going to get any better. I’m going to give you some links with which to follow this up, as I’m washing my hands of this.

(Link) IMDb User Comments

I am agreeing with the negative ones, naturally.  You can also look it up on Wikipedia if you like, but they are expected to follow the neutrality policies.

This is ruined now.  I don’t feel like blogging about the other awesome things we did, or things that have happened since.  Not how warm my hands are or a strange dream I had.

I may be gone for some time.  I hope this hasn’t spoiled everything.

I’d like to point out that we spent more time watching good movies than bad, and we had fun.  It was 2 in the morning, and this crime against man seemed funny at the time.

Nothing to do with me.

I’m ambivalent to Last.fm’s new look.  Some things are massively improved, but a lot of things are disappointing.  Unlike deviantArt, which looks better than ever – which is just great, for a site I never use.

DDoS, on my 4chan?

Yeah, so.  We’re back at school, and seeing everyone again is great.  Some lessons are dread.

Ooh, we had bonfires, to burn all the wattle that had fallen in the storm.

The title of this post is a lyric.  I’d be a bad person not to tell you that.

The goose in the night

See how complex this is? Let’s pretend every reference – especially the obscure ones – is intentional.
Adding to the convolution is the fact that I begin this post with something that happened before the contents of the previous post.  Oh my.

On the subject of the disjointed nature of my posts, I realise that they are just microblogs, arbitrarily grouped by when I write them.  And yes, conversations with me are actually like this, to a degree.  It depends on whether the other participants moderate or amplify the rambling nature of the discussion.  With the people I choose to associate with most, they tend to make it stranger.

So, down to the goose.

On Sunday night, I got three hours of sleep, because of last-minute summative essay writing for Modern History.  I leave the Russian Revolutions to the last moment, just like Lenin.  “Summative” is a word invented by the people responsible for our state’s high school diploma thing.  It means “for assessment”, rather than formative.
There is still no coffee in this house.  I had already had my weekly cup, that morning, but it’s not like it effects me strongly.  So I finished my nutella (I will assume that this is available everywhere in the world), and drank a lot of cordial, which I do not actually like.  I was really peppy the next day, and the assignment was done.  Screw it – Nutella is a chocolate hazelnut spread, which I keep in my drawer and eat with a spoon.

When I got home, I did what I normally did for a few hours – squandered my time on the internet.  Then I took a “nap” for four hours.  This was followed by a very conveniently much delayed dinner, after which I returned to the internet.  At 2 AM, I decided to sleep.

Yes, I turn my computer at the PSU – because there is a blue LED under the on button which would otherwise stay on all night, keeping me awake.  I must sleep in complete darkness and silence.

Naturally, I could not sleep.  Those missing hours, I do not think I reclaimed.  I guess I did not need them.

Just before 3:00, this rhythmic hissing started.  Of course, I assumed it was a goose outside my window, the type of red-faced white goose that headbangs when angry and sounds like a bicycle pump.  The type my parents have or had, depending on whether they reproduced.  I think they are down to two ducks and five chickens, actually.

The throaty hacking continued, and I would occasionally, from my bed, reach behind the blind to tap on the window to make it shut up.  “STFU, goose”, was the message a tapped.  It later occurred to me that it was a cat coughing up hairballs, because cats are quite common in the city.

The end.  Oh, I bet you were expecting a punch line.  It went away at some point, and I got a few hours of sleep.  It has not returned on any night since, which is something I hope continues.

On unrelated matters, I made $20 earlier today for dicking about in a tricky bastard of a real estate program.  Once I have got my head around how fiddly it is, it will be “data entry” and not a “learning session”.  Property valuers have quite a workload.  The information is confidential, and I am technically not doing it, so there is no tax.

I’m liking the sound of this.  Also, this is really near where I live.

And I am totally getting my kicks from writing self-referential posts.  I’m the Ouroboros of the blagosphere.

Oh, those black men are fighting the system.

What fine veins you have

Like some sort of premium cheese.  I am a closet Belgian.

So I went to donate blood today.  Through sickness, dictatorial parents deciding that blood is important during exams, and other engagements, everyone pulled out except Fi and I.  Hmm.  Australia is a country where you are not paid for doing this, so we get to feel good about ourselves.

Well, the people there are very thorough, very friendly, and very efficient.
I have good iron levels, blood pressure, and all of that.  Hooray? I also pass all of the probing questionnaires about drugs, transfusions, illness, man-to-man sex, prostitution, time spent in foreign lands, time spent in Queensland.

The vampire guy … um.  They are all registered nurses, I think, and they are there to bleed you for an excellent cause.  I’m not saying that they consume the blood, oh no.
Anyway, I nominated my left arm, as that is my less used of the two.  I am more comfortable with a thin piece of metal being stuck into that.  After pressure was applied by the armband and I pumped the “foam thing” in my fist for a while, any veins that are theoretically present in my arm were still efficiently stealthed.
So we went to my right arm, where at last, my fine veins were found! They extracted just bit of blood out of me, and then the needle slipped through the vein in question, and flow ceased.  So they stopped.  They will find out my blood type, and that shall probably be all.

“Yes, I have had plenty to drink today.”
-For me.  Some days I do not drink at all, and do not feel thirst.  Sometimes I have 8 glasses of water.  By this time of day, I had had more than usual, but probably less than recommended.  Oh, I’m unhealthy; bicycle commuting and teetotalism aside.
But that is not all: my mother says my veins were very difficult to locate as an infant, when I was submitted to hospital for seizures.

As far as my rambles go, this one was less amusing than I expect of myself.  And I like to think I’m a man with very realistic expectations.  Oh, forgive me for not entertaining you.

I’ll just continue to string you along with not particularly engaging half-stories and the promise of an eventual laugh, and hope for a cult following.  Oh, those would be the driest acolytes ever.

And by this, do not think I am promising either consistency or variation.  We shall see.

Ethics, politics, Little Bear and computer games can wait indefinitely.  I owe these subjects nothing.
NOTHING.

[downward spiral]

Hopefully that is a tag I will be closing soon enough…

In a continued effort to destroy my education and myself, I now have a WordPress account.
I intend to never – or at least very rarely – use it.  But we know how these always work out.

The nefarious Fiona tricked me on here (I’ll blogroll her eventually, once I get over how laggy this website is).  Oh, and the fact that, spontaneously, a lot of people I know seem to be bloggers.  I am such a sheep, but an elitist sheep at least.
I’m not going to trap myself by defining my content; what I’m going to share, if anything at all.  Likewise, who I am, or what style I will use.  Blah blah heroes blah social commentary blah science fiction blah blah crying.

Where I am from,  what I do or don’t believe in, why.  They can wait.  Politics, funny things, blah blah blah.

Most blogs aren’t worth reading.  And there are too many worth reading to actually read (yet they are very difficult to find).  Sturgeon’s Law applies, as per usual.

I have other, better ways to waste my time.
But that’s never stopped me before.