iClue

I got a spam message today with a subject line more inventive than most:

"research shows girls like it rough"

I don't now why, but the image of a guy in a crisp white lab coat - and nothing else - conducting such an in-depth study elicited a smile.

I was tempted to open it and see who had commissioned such an investigation and what the outcomes would inevitably require me to purchase, but cooler heads prevailed, and I did not open the proverbial Pandora'z 1337 Virus Box.

Spam sucks. Scams suck. Spam is a hassle, but the filter on gmail seems quite adept at filtering it out of my daily life. Scams, however, serve to illustrate the immense ravine that sits between those who do and those who do not have, how you say, computer savviness.

That's probably the right term, but I'm going to make my own. So, do you have .... an iClue?

Allow me to demonstrate.

Them: "Hey! This jittering banner flashed up with a message that I won 40 gajillion rupees! Huzzah! If only my computer hadn't inexplicitly shut off as I clicked it in an unrelated fashion. Dammit. I hope I get the chance to click it again."

Me: "Dude, you need to get an iClue."

Them: "No way! My computer must work, because my MySpace page is still sending ads to everyone I've ever meet, and everyone I ever will meet! It's cool. And I can do stuff at the library computer anyways, like answer important emails from my bank!"

Me: "Man, you be iClueless."

Them: "I gave them my PIN over the phone but then I asked what they wanted it for and they hung up!"

Me: "i to the Clue mofo. i to the Clue."

iClue is totally going to be a thing. You wait.

The night I ate too much Milo. A cautionary tale.

Like many people, I moved out of home immediately after finishing school.
After a short period I found myself living alone in a small flat that looked like a lego block, surviving on the meager wages a cadetship provides.

Like many more people, my financial priorities went like this: First - things I want but don't need. Second - things I need and want. Third - food.

This led me to spending much time playing X-Box and surfing the internet while smoking cigarettes, throwing parties and being hungry as fuck.

All the while I was surrounded by the fetid remains of the only meal I had made during the six-month period in question. Each morning I smelled every t-shirt I owned to ensure it was still only kinda dirty, instead of being properly dirty, which would require me to lie it flat for one month before wearing it again.

My belief that eating McDonalds each day was nutritionally viable if I walked there and back was sorely tested by my desire to not walk anywhere, but my reluctance to purchase petrol kept it afloat.
I became intimately familiar with the fluff-encrusted console of my beaten up Torana as I spelunked weekly for forgotten five-cent pieces.

All in all, I was a typical 18-year-old guy, striking out to seize the world on his own.

In the process however, I ate some truly awful things.

When my brother and I moved out of home our mother provided us with a box of staple ingredients to furnish our new kitchen, undoubtedly so we could set the world alight with our flamboyantly prepared delights. In reality, the grey-bricked room swiftly devolved into a large, overheated box in which we housed a toaster, four pans and a potato.

The pans were quickly burned beyond recognition through our abortive attempts to boil rice. "There's no water left in there? Oh well, keep boiling".
The toaster saw regular use and the potato sprouted offspring whose serpentine growths - obviously on the cusp of sentience - reached painfully for the light.

Once my brother was gone I would gaze at the tip of the potato sprouts as their young tips peeked out from between the cupboard door's slats. I imagined myself as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise. I would give a stirring speech that would convince the heartless officers of the Federation that yes, Commander Potato had a soul, and he was a valued member of my crew. I'm sure he would be an invaluable resource for study, but he was alive dammit, and he wasn't going anywhere.

Needless to say, the box of staples remained just that, never convalescing into anything approaching a meal.
When I was hungry and sans cash I would peruse the random ingredients, seeing what I could eat. Sadly, it never occurred to me that I should view them as components, rather I would look for something I could eat in its current state.

This was not a new habit. During high school I would defer breakfast by eating a raw packet of two minute noodles on the bus or in the first class of the day. Motivated by the promise of additional sleep I would continue to defer my morning routine until I reached the point of arriving at school with a noodle cake in one hand and my shoes in the other. Teachers patiently informed me it was not appropriate to attend math shoeless - maybe fearing that I would push into the realm of pants - and that getting dressed was more of a home thing.

I was never a fan of the drink Milo, despite its tastiness I was never a big milk drinker and so shied away from the 'energy food' enjoyed by many.
Amongst my stores, however, was a gigantic tin of milo powder. I developed the habit of having a spoonful occasionally on my way past. They were tasty granules, and I liked the way it dried out and stuck to the inside of my mouth.
As one does, I decided one day that maybe I could have two spoonfuls, and weeks later I was having half-a-dozen at a time while reclining on the couch.

One night soon after, tragedy struck. I sat down for my customary spoonfuls and became engrossed in whatever I was watching at the time. A clang brought me back to reality as the spoon scraped the tin's bottom. Awareness dawned.

I had accidentally eaten a kilogram of dry Milo.

I was understandably concerned, but for the next hour or so all seemed fine.
But then I felt full. Then I felt fuller. The inside of my mouth felt coated in powder and drier than my sarcasm. My stomach felt the same, with the added bonus of containing a bowling ball-like mass of coagulant Milo.
I was twitching and freaking out. It was awful. The advertisements were correct.

I was full of energy, but I could not move.

My limbs thrashed with the energy of one hundred after-school sport participants, but they were pinned down by the dense mass my torso had become.

I cannot stress this enough: Do not eat a kilogram of Milo for dinner.

I slept little that night. I did learn a valuable lesson. Until the next time.

Lest you believe my Milo incident was isolated, allow me to briefly outline some other bumps in the culinary road. Here's a few other horrendous dinner decisions I've made:

A packet of jelly crystals. Another example of my eating ingredients without taking the time to develop them into their destined meals. Raw jelly crystals are interesting as they start to become jelly in your mouth in the seconds before you swallow them. These gave me an almighty sugar rush, in which I accomplished many great, blurry things. Regrettably the comedown was instantaneous and brutal. I woke the next morning with an extra third of HALO completed, the furniture moved, a long night's sleep behind me and a headache in front. I was also hungry.

Chicken Tonight. For an entire year. Even after I made the leap to preparing meals, it took me a while to perfect the concept.
Enter Chicken Tonight! Add it to chicken and BAM, you have a meal. Sadly, I made their Butter Chicken variety - a pale imitation of the actual dish - for a very long time. It is now ruined. Forever.

A few cigarettes and a can of Coke. This traditional dinner is an important marker on my road to adulthood. I can proudly say its out of rotation. It is now breakfast.

My first comic

Click on the picture above to view this at full size over on my Flickr page.

I've been reading Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, which Leen graciously gave me for Christmas, and which was delivered promptly in March.

With comics theory tumbling around my brain yesterday as I idly sat in the police station, and idea was born! Huzzah! I think you'll agree on the genius.

Because no-one demanded it: Another sermon against racism!

Looking for a fun way to spend 15 minutes? Wait until someone says something racist. Immediately afterwards say: "Why do you hold these racist beliefs?"

When confronted by the fact that their comment is racist, more often than not said racist will launch into a spirited defense, arguing either that the comment is in no way racist, or that their racist beliefs are justified.

The most common tool used by the racist is that of previous experience.

For example, a racist making a throwaway joke about the odour of someone from a different race will defend this because they once encountered someone who smelled like that. In their mind, this proves their point.

Similarly, someone who says all people from said race are lazy/violent/filled with natural rhythm will back that up by relating a tale of how they once met someone who fit both criteria. In their mind, this proves their point.

Insidiously, the previous experience method is used to justify both arguments. The 'I'm not racist' argument ("I'm not racist, I simply speak the truth, like Jesus did"), and the 'justified racism' argument ("Yes I'm racist, how could I not be given that in 1976 a person of a different colour to me was drunk in the street? Remember that football club trip to Adelaide where I threw up a watermelon on passers-by? That was raucous.")

As an aside, I've now used the word racist thirteen times. Solid evidence that I am either a left-wing nutjob or, possibly, communist. Sadly, speaking out against racism seems to attract more scorn than racism itself in many situations.

We've all had negative experiences. Where the 'previous experience' argument falls down is in allowing them to influence your opinion of people who were not there, not involved, and will never do anything of the sort. Would you punch Steve Martin in the face because the last season of SNL sucked? I think not.

I have often heard it said that, by the time you are about 15, your personality has been all but set in stone. Therefore, the "my parents raised me a racist and now I can't change" argument comes into play, a subtle change of the 'previous experience' method.

There is truth in that. Fundamentals are established early, setting you on a lifelong path of telling your therapist about your mother's cuddling technique and its impact on your lost promotion before you've even old enough to understand the film 'Mommy Dearest'.

However, as Buffy spinoff show Angel teaches us, we are all capable of change.

In high school I allowed myself to be swept up in the uninformed, racist rambling of my peers to a certain extent, many of home lent on the 'I'm not racist' argument. During these formative years I, like all of us, had experiences that could have cemented lifelong racism, if I was so inclined.
I allowed these experience to form my beliefs for some time. During a concurrent period I held the belief that I could drink 700 millilitres of vodka and gain invincibility, suffering no ill-effects. I also had the related belief that Sundays did not exist.
I shook off all these beliefs in time.

We can change if we want to. We need not change immediately. We don't need to believe we can singlehandedly achieve a utopia to maintain beliefs of equality.
The vision of an equal world has not been attained. Pretending it has is dangerous, writing it off as impossible equally so.

It's in admitting we're not there yet, and continuing to work towards it, that we show that we care.

Things I've found

Over the Easter break, which I stretched into an unprecedented five days, I found some awesome stuff on the internet.

What? How else did you think I'd spend my time? You're reading my personal blog here, if that isn't a red flag that I'm wasting my life on the internet then I don't know what is.


Garfield minus Garfield.
This was pointed out to me and is awesome. Someone, who I will refer to as "Smarter Than Me Jones", has reproduced a series of Garfield newspaper strips with the titular character removed. What you end up with is a comic about a guy named John and his battle with loneliness and ineptitude. A man saying "You're a selfish pig" to an empty room surrounded by emptiness is devastatingly bleak and hilarious at the same time. Pure genius.

The Rules of LOST.
Over on his blog, Geoff Klock is writing great reviews of LOST after it screens each week. He's written this piece about LOST and how it subverts the common practice of quickly establishing rules in storytelling. Basically, LOST avoids angering its audience by refusing to set out any rules at all. It works. I certainly didn't bat an eyelid when LOST decided time travel was on the cards, because it didn't break any rules.
It's clever because many movies and shows I've seen erode my good will by breaking their own rules. I know X-Men 3 angered me because Professor Xavier and Wolverine's behaviour was so different to the characters established in previous films. The departures from the comics didn't bother me, because they'd set their own rules for the movies. Time travel does this constantly - Deja Vu was less than satisfying for this.

Grand Theft scares Microsoft.
This obviously isn't an article about Microsoft's software being pirated into oblivion, because surely that never happens.
No, Microsoft is worried that the impending arrival of Grand Theft Auto IV will lead millions of people to buy a Playstation 3, sinking their XBox 360 console under a wave of politically incorrect gamers.
Funnily enough, the game will be sold on the XBox 360, and possibly work better there, but the franchise is traditionally a Playstation title, and the concern is that casual gamers, who aren't scouring the 'net and are still bashing away on a PS2, will just go and pick up a PS3 out of habit.
It's interesting to see the impact casual gamers are starting to exert on the industry.
To date, Microsoft's measures to attract GTA fans to the 360 are centred around XBox Live points and downloadable content, which will have no impact on the casual gamers they're looking to woo. Nice.

Shrine of the Mall Ninja.
This page ruined my day, as I spent hours reading and ended up with eye strain and the gut pain that is brought on by hysterical laughter.
Essentially a collection of message board posts from one man as his bombastic lies grow to increasingly epic proportions, it's worth a read if you've spent any time on a message board. Bonus points for liberal use of the term "butt virginity".

Happy Easter from the WORST BLOGGER EVER

Hey y'all, hope you're enjoying the chocolate-covered celebration of a man being nailed to a tree because we all suck so hard.

This is a quick word to say that, no, I haven't written for a while and I'm sure it'll pick up again after this Easter debacle.

I mean, who writes stuff in March anyway? Jerks. That's who.

And I can assure you that my lack of writing has not been at all related to my recently coming into - not necessarily permanent - possession of a PS3, Advance Wars Dual Strike on the DS, the first two seasons of LOST, the first two seasons of Battlestar Gallactica and literally dozens of meals.

Reality -- getting in the way!

This week in .... the news!

Tagteam visit from parents leads to much fun and relaxation. Writing muscles slacken under pressure. Blogger apologises. Realises apology is faintly ridiculous. To not apologise would be to admit faint strangeness of blog itself.

Anyway, back online soon.