Watcharama

The following video is strangely entertaining.

A message from Optimus Prime

WATCH LOST AND THE WIRE

THEY WILL LIGHT OUR DARKEST HOUR

LOST

The above photo is courtesy of Steve Garfield. It depicts something I totally plan to do.

I don't discuss LOST on the blog for a few reasons, namely:

* My brother Nick watches the show as it released on DVD, savouring each season as a delicious meal. This puts him behind myself, who tears at each episode as soon as it hits the plate. I like to believe that he reads this on occasion, and would not like to spoil it for him. He did me a real solid on sitting silently while I took my sweet time on The Wire, after all.

* I have purchased each season with the express purpose of pushing it on other people. I want everyone to see this show, and do not want them spoiled, as my favourite part of the experience is hearing them share their surprise and theories as they experience proceedings for the first time.

* LOST, by nature, is not the sort of show that can be discussed in vague terms. I have mentioned previously that the characters are engaging, the writing sharp, the narrative tricks delightful and the mysteries maddeningly cool. To say anything further is to delve into the mysteries of the plot, and this is something I am lax to do. For people wanting a weekly place to discuss the episode, may I suggest Geoff Klock's Remarkable blog. He and I seem to share similar views on the show, although he seems somewhat let down by this season so far, and I am having a blast.

I felt the need to address this here because if it weren't for the reasons above, LOST could well make up my every other post. On many weekdays that I don't get to blog, it's because my grey matter is devoted entirely to picking over LOST.

With all the above in mind, I just wanted to say ...

Last night's LOST was amazing, and possibly the best ever.

My mind is blown.

It's about content jerks

When will media providers learn that their platforms have become irrelevant? Seriously, no-one cares how they get the songs/movies/TV shows they want, as long as they get them when they want.

This, to me, seems to be quite a few steps shy of rocket science.

I read somewhere that when MP3s became all the rage and record companies were trying their best to shut the whole thing down, they had an argument somewhat like this:

"You have not been buying songs, you have been buying songs on CDs. You are buying music on that format, and you do not have the right to separate the music from that format, it's a package deal."

The audience responded something like this: "For real? We never thought about it before, because we never had a way to get the songs off. Do now though, catch you later. Are you crying? No seriously, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my hard-drive".

Say I want to watch a television show that I love. It is screened in America on Thursday. Living where I do, my only option is to download the show illegally. This is not hard. It will be beamed to the television in my house in the conventional way, but it could be in two weeks, two months or two years time. I have suffered through years of television stations treating me like garbage. Given the chance to avoid them, and irritate them in the process, why would anyone resist? Technology - driven by people - has kept moving to circumnavigate the faulty part of the process - television providers. I can now plug my computer into my television, or beam AVI files wirelessly to my Playstation 3. I now only need my TV for the screen.

Thing is, I'd still happily watch TV on TV stations if they'd give me a shot. I buy TV on DVD, I'm giving them my money when I can. But if you screen shows a month after they were shown - and widely discussed on the internet that I can view everyday because you do not control that - or show shows later than advertised, or not at all, or at weird times, or you cancel every show that is good, well ...

... I'm only like this because you trained me to be.

Dancing Danny

As previously mentioned, my chum Danny is competing on the current season of So You Think You Can Dance Australia.

(Here's his official, spiffy profile)

I met Danny though Leen and see him on his regular visits in between dancing everywhere there is. In terms of knowing a guy who decided what their goal was and working towards the goal and then achieving the goal, he is unparalleled. Is inclusion on television is a natural progression.

The stress of seeing a friend perform live dances weekly on television is substantial, but so far he has been great, and well worthy of support.

He dances each Sunday night, with voting lines open for the next 24 hours. You vote by texting Danny to 19 10 10.

During the voting window you should really send a message every 15 seconds.

Shotgun Blast to the Brain

So, as evidenced by previous posts, I was the wheel man this weekend for a road trip to Mildura.

Mildura is about three hours away, with a single roadhouse and dozens of goats in between.

I had a blast, but have exhausted my energy reserves. If I had to raise my shields right now to fend off the Romulans? I would totally breach my warp core.

But you know what that means ... random thoughts!

There's an ad on high rotation on Channel Ten for a show called NCIS. I have seen snippets of it and vaguely believe it to be a cop show that is not good. Anyway, on this advertisement, a female prison inmate says "You. Will Be The First. To Die" in the most smug, irritating, aggressive-yet-fake way that it makes me want to rip my face off and shove it in my ears. I have heard it ten times today.

Today an open-air evangelist encouraged me to attend his presentation tomorrow, as he is certain he shall be arrested. I am definitely going.

I have not mentioned it here, but my friend Danny is currently competing on So You Think You Can Dance Australia. He's two weeks in at the moment and I think I can say, in entirely unbiased terms, that he is the best dancer there is in the world. Seriously though, I'm mega proud of him and he is doing great.

When driving through Mildura as midnight approaches, one is reminded of a zombie apocalypse. 

Gummi bears, gummi snakes and Coca Cola can be used to create the approximation of energy when the need arises, but the comedown lasts for days.

On a related note, a half-full bag of gummi bears left in a car during the heat of the day creates a sugar-rich soup, and it is delightful.

The game "F**k 'em, Stuck 'em, Chuck 'em" asks players to choose, of the three names provided, whom they would throw off a cliff, who they would have intercourse with, and who they would be stuck on a desert island with. In our car, when Hitler, George Bush and John Howard were the subjects, everyone immediately elected to murder John Howard. Yep, over Hitler. We decided we'd be stuck with Bush, for the obvious reason of endless comedy.

Our friend D'Arcy has succumbed to our demands and started watching LOST. PRedictably, he is now chained to the television and is sending us a constant flow of text messages expsing surprise, theories, and his wish to "throw Michael's wife off a cliff! A cliff!" Today he polished off the first season, and it's fun to hear him theorise in his own time bubble, transposed years after the episodes in question were dissected on the internet. When he said "so are they in Hell? Purgatory?" I lost it. 

See what I did there?

I think Final Crisis is kind of a massive failure, but worry that the comic reading community's wholesale condemnation of it as 'too weird' may hamper innovation in the future.

I wish they wouldn't show The Biggest Loser at dinner time.

When you hold a dinner party...

... everyone lends a hand

Blogged from the hip

Road trip

It is 8.16am and we are in McDonalds, preparing to drive to Mildura. We
drank until 1.30am. D'arcy, pictured above, is really digging the
fluorescent lighting.

Blogged from the hip

Blogged from the hip

One of many examples

I cannot have nice things.

I've spent this week wrangling with my old, superseded laptop, which fell to its death when a cyclist recently bolted out in front of my car. I am not good at such things, and the operation has been unsuccessful.

In many ways its unsurprising. I've had the damn thing for over five years, and much of that time it has been held aloft in my hand as I careen around the house. It ... has had a good run.

Sadly, much like my need to follow the opening of a packet of chips by eating an entire pattern of chips, this is a bit of a pattern of mine. I love gadgets, but they tend to corrode in my presence.

When I was taking a bus to school every day I bought myself a cheap-ass cassette Walkman - moving parts were all the rage in the personal music scene back then. The Walkman lasted all of three  weeks, and was replaced by what would become a long line of cheap-ass Walkmans. It was always the same. One headphone would drop out, a minor problem, but one which I would grow to recognise as the beginning of the end. When a headphone drops out, you can eke another week of life out of it by fiddling with the cord, bending and forcing it to re-establish and increasingly fleeting connection. The whole experience is an exercise in despair, hearing just enough of a song to not enjoy it until finally both headphones drop out, the tape unspools and while you're winding it back in with an old pen the Walkman slips out of your lap and hits the ground with a sickening crack.

There is nothing more frustrating that an object that appears intact but simply will not work. iPods and the like have removed a great deal of mechanical malfunction, but not the frustration of inexplicable breakdown.

Eventually I invested in a Walkman of quality. Costing ten times that of the previous models, it's main selling point was that it was drop-proof and nigh indestructible. It was coated in thick, rubberised plastic and could be locked shut by a giant, silver key on the side. It lasted for months.

One day I lent it to a friend and he accidentally left it on a desk in a computer classroom. Despite its distinctiveness it was never seen again. I took up humming on the bus.

Mind Games. Board Games.

I am almost through the second day of a five-day weekend I unceremoniously gave myself for no reason. Such a state of being breeds inaction, and renders inert my ability to form wholesale thoughts. More so, it feels somehow wrong to type on such a day.

With the above in mind, it's that time again: random thoughts!

* LOST this season? Loving it. I shall not spoil, but it's like the show is rewarding me for watching for so long, while whispering "those other jerks just tuning in won't get this, but it's blowing your mind" into my soul. I take on board and recognise the criticisms that are circulating across the internet, but I simply do not care. 

* I played RISK 2210 last night. For the uninitiated, or those who are sufficiently adjusted socially to have never used board games as both armor and lubricant, RISK 2210 is RISK -- in the future! With robots! And the moon! And nuclear weapons! It is, suffice to say, right up my nerd alley. [gross]. For anyone who may one day google "how to win RISK 2210", my advice is thus: grab a continent but make no enemies until the fourth year. Attack sparingly, then use your well-preserved forces to annihilate all on the final year, during which you should go last. Although enemies are unwelcome, do laugh at people who fail. You want to have fun, yes?

FYI: I totally won.

* On a similar, groupie-encrusted note, I am all about the Dungeons and Dragons right now. I'm running a 4th edition game and it is the system of my dreams. Today I created for a friend a paper-based avatar within which resides a creature that kills like a dog but walks like a man, who shoots arrows as big as the sky. Next week he shall stand alongside two con men - one whose dad was a demon and the other with the head of a dragon, a stab-happy human in a shiny shirt, an insane, pointy-eared loner with a God complex and a direct line to God, and a crippled gnome who is blind in one eye. That is, suffice to say, how I roll.

* After a few phone conversations and a healthy does of hold music, I discovered that our modem, the magical box which brings my voice into your head right now, was likely malfunctioning. After replacing it, our internet was suddenly running as fast as it should always have been. Depressingly, it transpires that our internet had been running at approximately 1/10th its intended speed for years. We are now basking in the swift stream that is internet as intended, able to download a 350mb file - the size of say, an episode of LOST, but certainly not an episode of LOST - in 10 minutes, rather than eight hours.

* Beauty and the Geek is on. I worry the title could be used as a label on my home life.

* For reasons I won't go into, I have recently discovered that if I am punched in the stomach immediately upon exiting the shower, it makes a noise much like a drum stuffed full of beef.

These guys?

Not helping me win.

Blogged from the hip

Kittens!

The following video is fantastic.
All who disagree are mistaken.



Thanks to Georgia for showing me this.

I apologise for the short post today, but I replaced our modem and suddenly our broadband is running at the speed it always should have been but never has been, and am busy downloading the internet.

Lord of the Rings Conquest: A Review

Everything pictured above? I killed it. Photo by piston9.

I recently played through Lord of the Rings Conquest on X-Box 360, and had a solid-gold blast.

The game is a button-mashing affair that pits you against endless waves of enemies.
The game follows the broad story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but neatly condenses it all into short cut scenes. The only parts left are the epic battles, with each level plopping you down on a battlefield in the midst of hundreds of marauding enemies. It's an effective mechanism which allows you to play through Lord of the Rings while skipping everything that isn't wholesale slaughter.

In each level you are given a set of objectives, such as taking and holding an area, killing a leader or disabling a siege engine. These form your real goal and lend strategy to proceedings, stuffed as they are with soon-to-be corpses. I repeatedly failed the first level before realising that victory could not be achieved by killing everything. If you are tasked with collecting something, for example, enemies will endlessly respawn until you've got it.

I played through the game in split-screen mode with a friend, and while it was hellishly fun, I doubt the game would hold up as a solo affair. It's quite shallow and much of the enjoyment is in having someone alongside you to see how badass it was that you just shot an orc in the head with a flaming arrow and he pinwheeled off of Helm's Deep to his doom.

While it's similar to the Dynasty Warriors series, which also sees you fighting entire armies purely to destroy all comers, this game reminded me more of Star Wars Battlefront, as the button mashing is given some depth by the inclusion of a character class system.
When you enter a battle, and each time you re-enter it after dying, you play as an anonymous solider. You can choose to play as a Warrior, Archer, Scout or Mage. Each has their own attack style and suite of special abilities, and it succeeds in adding variety, with each demanding a very different style of play. A warrior charges in and swings his sword as fast as possible, for example, while the archer hangs back and peppers foes with arrows, some coated in fire or poison.

Periodically you will get the chance to play as a hero such as Legolas or Gandalf. Heroes play as  turbocharged members of the other classes. They add further variety and give you a nice feeling of power, but's a shame that in two-player mode only one becomes a hero, as it sets up a noticeable difference in power.

One of the main selling points of the game is that, having played through the campaign, you can play through it again as the bad guys. It does feel a little tacked on, as the evil levels are not as fully realised as the good ones, but it's perversely entertaining. When your first mission is to kill Frodo Baggins, a move which spins the story off into a 'What If?" style tale in which the bad guys win, an already shallow experience becomes one of pure fanboy indulgence that's hard to resist. The final evil level sees you in the Shire slaughtering endless waves of defenseless Hobbits. I've always wanted to do that.

As the evilses, you get the opportunity to play as the Mouth of Sauron, the Witch King and the Balrog. It's terribly fun, but the Balrog takes some of the fun out of it by being completely unstoppable and devastating.

Having played through both sides, I can now say that I slaughtered every single inhabitant of Middle Earth. If that appeals to you, you're in the right place. All told, we played through the entire experience in under eight hours, so rent this and pick up some beers, but don't buy it.

Whohub

I received an email out of the blue yesterday, inviting me to join whohub.

A quick perusal indicates that the site is a collection of interviews. Despite my complete lack of knowledge about its meaning and goal, I threw caution to the wind and set up a profile, which centres around my answers to a series of set questions.

My exciting profile can be found at:

http://www.whohub.com/stefandelatovic

I have spent the majority of my morning saying 'whohub' as many times as I can as fast as I can.

Public Comment

Jay showed me this.

It's a montage of recent public comments made at meetings of the Santa Cruz City Council.

The video is hilarious, but having attended a number of Council meetings, it fills me with the cold chill of recognition. Terrifying.

A message to all readers...

Blogged from the hip

Best magazine EVER? or BEST magazine ever?

This week I encountered the publication Shorthorn Beef.

I was unprepared for the awesomeness that lurked behind the cover. And quite the cover it is:



The publication wears its heart on its sleeve, but isn't afraid of mixing it up in the muck.

There's deals that are almost too good to be true.

And even a tasteful yet alluring centrefold.

So yeah, I'll be getting this every month.

Dome

He stares down at the dome. It's small but bright inside. He has to keep the blinds closed or the polished surface hurts his eyes.
He shuffles a few metres over and turns the airconditioner on.
Inside the dome they discovered fire a week ago. They've just figured out how to use it to make the trains run on time. Soon the trains will carry heavy equipment to the interior edges so they can dig into the table and find more things to burn.
He fiddles idly with the dials and switches on the console. Time inside the dome speeds to a blur as he wrenches his wrist to the right. He's terribly bored.
When he's tired of watching the speed lines - they remind him of the comic books he read as a child - he brings his wrist all the way to the left, and time stands still.
There's a tiny man in a silver suit hovering against the underside of the glass, attached by a thin cord to a boxy craft. The little man can't see out and never will.
He likes stopping time inside the dome. That way he can look at everything for as long as he wants. There's always someone kissing somewhere, and he can pretend that those sort of things last forever. He doesn't like to look at the people who have just died, but he imagines that those who are dying can feel their last breath being stretched out forever.
He's not supposed to get involved with the little people inside the dome. His boss says. His boss is rude and smells like the inside of an old cupboard. His boss takes an extra 20 minutes for lunch every day.
Time is still missing inside the dome. Everything is still. He opens up a door in the top and reaches inside.
He helps people. He tells them its a nice thing to do. That it won't hurt anything. He moves some objects around and pulls a boat out of the water, carefully moving it closer to the shore before putting it down.
The still little people don't notice.
He sees a scientist, just like him, working on a chalkboard. He picks up the board and looks at the work. He pulls out some tweezers and chalk and makes a few corrections.
He closes the dome again, turns on the projector that makes the inside look like stars, and turns the dial back to the middle.
Time rushes back to the dome, and he watches people swim to shore before they drown. He watches the scientist dance by himself. He watches kisses end.
He scribbles into a little notepad and turns off the airconditioner.
Putting his breather on he opens the door and steps out into the arid air, tripping on a piece of crumbled concrete as he does so.
The counter at his belt starts ticking and screeching. He should hurry home quickly. He still has a lot of work to do. He has to write a report about the world in the dome. They've almost caught up to us. Soon they're be ready to lead by example.
On his way home he passes a homeless man whose mask has fallen off in his drunken sleep. Blotches are forming on his skin. He doesn't like to look at that.

They'll probably go back up to $15 when they hatch.

Blogged from the hip

25 Random Facts

1. I suspect I smell bad at least 80 per cent of the time.

2. Signing up to be a journalist when I was 18 has influenced my person greatly. I have a fierce interest in politics and government, and am often found boring the hell out of everyone at dinner parties as I drone on about how inequitable this world is. When presented with the rare opportunity to stand up for the little guy, I do so with reckless abandon.

3. Sisqo's Thong Song has been stuck in my head for years, and I find myself humming it at least once a week. The phrase 'dumps like a truck' is unparalleled.

4. I attempt to live by the motto of "try not to be a bastard". My stance on racism, homophobia and sexism stems from that. My sarcasm does not.

5. I am left-handed. The three chords I can approximate on a guitar, however, are produced in a right-handed fashion, as is my Guitar Hero wailing.

6. I love to write, and attempt to blog about something each day as a way of indulging this. I periodically contemplate turning it into an enterprise, but fear it would suck the fun out of the endeavour quicker than Jar Jar Binks.

7. I can watch the original Star Wars trilogy without having the experience tarnished by the God awful-prequels. I cannot watch the Matrix without having it a little ruined by the terrible sequels.

8. To my mind, good art leaves you contemplating it long after you experienced it. I count Watchmen and The Wire as the best of their breed for this reason. I read Watchmen in a few days, and chewed it over for the next year. I finished The Wire last month, and still think about it constantly.

9. I am unapologetic about playing Dungeons and Dragons.

10. I credit my childhood love of comic books with my present love of writing and language. They exposed me to reading - and words such as "dimensional continuum" - at a young age.

11. My favourite superhero has always been Spiderman. I suspect this is because he is a desperate four-eyed nerd, and I ... may have been able to identify with him on some level.

12. As a child I wanted to be Spiderman or Wolverine very badly. This fantasy evaporated when I realised that there were no buildings in my city that were high enough to facilitate web-swinging, and that adamantium claws would be fun for the three days it took for me to be incarcerated for vandalism and murder.

13. The first CDs I ever owned were the Batman Forever soundtrack and Michael Jackson's HIStory, which I received, as requested, for Christmas alongside my first CD player. I coveted the Batman soundtrack solely for "Kissed by a Rose".

14. I was not cool in any way whatsoever until I was at least 16, and then likely only in my own mind.

15. Almost everything I say is an attempt to elicit laughter from others. I have trouble turning off my sarcasm, which can be difficult when meeting new people. Often I have made sincere statements and offended people who assume I mean the opposite. I like your hair!

16. I love video games, but am not any great fan of playing online. If I wanted to interact with people, I would not be playing video games.

17. The first CD I ever bought for myself was Smashing Pumpkins' 'Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'. It was the first band I ever grew obsessed with and I played the album on repeat for months, only stopping when my mother asked if I could stop flooding the house with 'music to slash your wrists by'.

18. I did not get drunk until well after my 18th birthday.

19. My hair has a long and varied history, much of it regrettable. I always had long hair as a child, and in primary school had a long, ringlet-ridden mullet. When I started high school I tied it into a ponytail that reached down to my ass. Upon deciding the mullet's time was done I grew out the fringe while keeping the back, leading to me looking like some '70s disco hippy. I then rocked shoulder-length hair, tied back at all times save two unco-operative pieces at the sides, for years. When I finally got the stones to cut it off, I died it purple and filled it with gel. Over the years I got increasingly bold and moved through the dye rainbow until I was sporting twelve-inch-long spikes sticking straight up with the consistency of concrete. These days I do nothing to my hair whatsoever, and routinely put off haircuts for years. I secretly believe I've already used up all my grooming time.

20. I prioritise internet access alongside electricity.

21. I try to recognise that things retain importance despite not holding my interest. I likely do this because, as a journalist, my profession and the system in which it sits is constantly attacked by others. It is rare for a dinner party to go by without someone - stranger or no - saying the media is pointless/wasteful/mean/broken, that journalists are stupid/bad spellers/mean/self-absorbed, that my newspaper is terrible/inferior/pointless or all of the above.

22. I really, really hate sport and it's position in this country. I struggle to integrate this pure stream of hatred with the previous point.

23. Anything set during a war immediately loses my interest.

24. I watch a lot of television shows, but never watch Australian television networks.

25. I am out of ideas.

This is a response to me being tagged or something by Luke on Facebook. I believe, through some techinical wrangling, that this will end up there as a not or whatever. Social networking FTW!

The House Bunny: A Review

The House Bunny is the worst movie I have ever seen. It is also the most entertaining experience I have had in a long time.

This film is a holy grail for that part of the population that enjoys watching movies in groups, primarily for the purpose of a shared comedy experience.

The film sees Anna Faris as a Playboy Bunny who is kicked out of her home - the Playboy Mansion. Faced with homelessness and possessing no life skills whatsoever, she heads to a sorority house for no other reason than its passing resemblance to her former abode.

She ends up getting a job as a house mother for Zeta, the lamest sorority on campus, and tries to turn around the fortunes of the nerdy, unpopular freaks therein.

Throughout the story, she teaches the girls to be sexy and popular, and they teach her that there's more to life than getting your tits out in a magazine.

The film wants to tell you that you should be yourself, but gets confused and ends up telling women that if you're not at least a little attractive you'll never get anywhere.

This movie is awful. Truly awful. It's made all the worse by a few brief moments that are genuinely funny, that remind you how crap the rest of it is. But the film burrows so deeply into the continent of awfulness that its feces-laden head pokes out of the ground in Awesomevania, on the other side of the globe.

The first 20 minutes made me want to die, as we're given no reason to care about the main character. The other characters are 2D cutouts and the nerdy/freaky/misfit Zeta girls are pure examples of stereotypes over characters.

All of the other characters are worthless.

There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, mainly when the movie frees itself to head into pure farce, but the plot is threadbare and any time spent on it is wasted.

But the bits that aren't funny are funny because they're so unfunny.

This movie is highly recommended for groups of people seeking something to laugh at. All others should avoid.

Empathy

I woke up this morning to discover the city's fever had broken, and that our eleven-day-long run of eleventy billion degree days was at an end. 

When the act of getting out of bed did not cause me to break into a sweat, I knew the world was off to a better start.

However, minutes later when I turned on the television - I live a life of action - I discovered that bushfires were raging across the adjacent state of Victoria, burning entire towns from the map. Through the course of the day, fires would kill over 120 people.

My relief was replaced with devastation in the face of such immense tragedy. The flames have been fed by the intense heat and dry conditions that have been chaining me to the sweat-drenched floor through the week. I had awoken to find what I had perceived as a nightmare to be over. Others had awoken to find the real nightmare waiting for them, waiting to claim all of their possessions and even members of their family. The only difference between these people and I is that their homes were - up until recently - surrounded by lush bushland, while mine sits in the outback desert.

It begs the question, how much empathy is enough? Too much? Just right?

A horrible thing has happened, and all day every time I expressed relief at the weather's change, I felt a pang of guilt. Even expressing that seems too trivial to mention.

I think everyone in Australia has turned their thoughts towards the affected today. Should we do more? Can we?

It's natural to feel guilty about having a good time while others suffer, but does disallowing one's self to feel good help others? Or does it just make us feel better?

Other questions worth pondering:

Why is distance a factor? We are bombarded by horrible things happening every day, but only when it is close to home do we come together to grieve and empathise. Do we prefer to feel bad for people like us? Is it easier to identify with those who are similar? Is it just that the line must be drawn somewhere?

Where should we draw the line? If we stopped for each pile-up along the road of life, we would never get anywhere. But who to stop for?

Crazy two guitar video game theme dudes.

Kyp pointed me towards these today. He said I must see them, and he was correct.

Rob Liefeld

I don't know if I've pointed this article out before, but it is the funniest thing that's ever happened, and I have read it repeatedly.

Rob Liefeld CANNOT DRAW.

Boyfriend oblivion

Blogged from the hip

Between Twitter and here, I am all out of heat puns.

The doll pictured above, which lives nestled amongst Leen and my DVD collection, is blind.
Apparently, you determine a goal and fill in a pupil, and then add the second pupil when the goal is completed - giving the doll the gift of sight at the same time as awarding yourself smug satisfaction. If your goal is to be not spied on by dolls I can't help you.
As the doll is so awesome, I want to think of a really great goal before crafting a cyclops.
This week, however, it has been difficult to stop myself from scribbling across the left eye while yelling 'to not die as my body's entire mass streams out of armpits as fetid liquid'.

It will be 45 degrees tomorrow [113F], marking the tenth day of temperatures in the 40 rang

At this point, I'm boring even myself with constantly droning on about the heat, but am unable to break away - it is omnipresent, oppressive and inescapable.

Monday will apparently see the temperature drop to a level capable of sustaining human life. On that day, I shall post again! Huzzah!

Sorry

So, it's 2.16am, and I am at work. An electrical transformer exploded shortly after I arrived this afternoon, pushing my entire life out of phase with the rest of reality.
This was no doubt caused by it being the eight consecutive day of oppressive heat, which has left me pinned to a chair made of my own sweat.

This is an interesting addition to a week that, up until I heard the sound of power exploding, I honestly believed could not fit any more stuff into it.

So yeah ... no posts for the last couple of days. I do apologise. I'll be back soon.

Sad Kermit

Sometimes, the internet just wants you to know that you'll never be happy ever again, as some things can never be unseen.

Good God

Sometimes the internet just wants you to know that the world is supremely messed up.