Not So Unwashed

Trolling in the Name Of

Tim — Sat, 22 May 2010 06:41:23 GMT

On the outside, it’s easy to misconstrue “Draw Muhammad Day” as a noble cause, a peaceful protest of sorts. It’s easy to believe that you’re doing the right thing by scribbling down a picture of the prophet Muhammad, posting it on the internet, and flipping the bird at any Muslims who might happen to find your actions insulting, and that they should lighten the-fuck-up because “free speech lol”.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What we have here is a classic case of very popular internet forum mindset – specifically, confusing the right to free speech with the right to act like a toolbag.

It’s trolling.

I’m serious – what else can you call it when a bunch of non-Muslims who live comfortable Western lives, and whose freedom of speech is not threatened in any way, deliberately and enthusiastically engage in an activity that they know will be offensive to others? Offensive to people who have never personally done anything to offend them?

It’s trolling of the highest order; textbook in execution, industrial in scale, and dripping with extra lashings of the misguided self-righteousness that only the greatest breed of troll – the unwitting – can summon.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. But let’s examine it in more detail.

Draw Muhammed Day has its roots in the Jyllands-Posten controversy of September 2005, during which the Danish newspaper of the same name printed twelve images of the prophet Muhammad. Some of these were deliberately offensive, depicting Muhammad as a terrorist and oppressor of women, and some were completely irrelevant. Needless to say a lot of Muslims found this offensive – as the newspaper knew and intended that they would – and a lot of protests followed. Some of these protests were completely outrageous, violent and disproportionate, which made it even easier for the “supporters of free speech” to convince themselves that they were doing the right thing and Muslims just “couldn’t take a joke”.

Then nothing much happened for a while, until April this year when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone received death threats through the Internet after they aired an episode depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. Complaints were submitted to Comedy Central and they pulled the episode from air.

Bad idea, Comedy Central. You upset the Internet.

Cartoonist Molly Norris created this cartoon espousing a “Draw Mohammad Day” as a joke and it caught on like wildfire, specifically across social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube. Norris was horrified the overtly racist overtones the “event” was quickly taking and immediately distanced herself from it, even going so far as to publicly condemn it, but it was too late. The Internet was angry, and there’s nobody who can take up a self-righteous cause and convince themselves that they’re making a difference like an anonymous man behind a computer screen.

So thousands and thousands of drawings began to flood in on May 20, the official “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day”. Some of them trying to be respectful. Some of them trying to be funny. Many, many of them trying and succeeding to be horrifically racist.

All of them offensive.

Doing something that you know will deliberately offend somebody else deeply proves nothing about free speech. If I went up to a man on the street and explained in great detail about how much of a syphilitic whore his wife was, I should expect that he should get angry about it. If I stroll through a funeral parlour during a moving service, farting wildly and shouting about how the deceased enjoyed carnal relations with donkeys, I should expect that those people at the service would get angry about it. And if I tried to say, as they advanced upon me with murderous rage, that I was just exercising my right to free speech and they should all get over it, I highly doubt that would carry any weight at all. They would be finding small pieces of my body clogging nearby drains.

Yet apparently, knowing that Muslims believe visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad to be deeply blasphemous and then doing it anyway, it is okay to act surprised and say “Woah Muslims, get over it, free speech lol”.

Having the right to free speech also comes with the responsibility of knowing when to exercise it meaningfully and respectfully. Yes, I have the right to put pen to paper and draw the prophet Muhammad. But I have the responsibility to realise the effect my actions will have on others who share this society with me, and I choose not to exercise that right. I’m willing to put money down, that nobody who took part in Draw Muhammad Day has a single Muslim friend in real life. It’s easy to deliberately upset people on the Internet, but it’s not so easy to have to look your friend in the eye the next time you meet, knowing that you’ve deeply offended them and their beliefs.

The only thing that Draw Muhammad Day has conclusively proved is that some people don’t deserve the right to free speech. And that it’s easy to drape yourself in moral righteousness and confrontational attitudes from behind the safety of a computer screen. I should know.

I’m not trying to upset anybody who took part in or supported Draw Muhammad Day. I’m just exercising my right to respectful and well-meaning free speech.

Oh, and before anybody jumps in with the well-worn line about “But we show pictures of Jesus all the time and Christians don’t get angry!”, stop for a moment and consider that it’s not actually blasphemous to depict Jesus under the tenets of the Christian religion. In fact it’s encouraged.

That said, I’d be interested to see how any Christians who took part in Draw Muhammad Day would react, if there was a “Draw Jesus Fucking A Dog” day. Free speech indeed.

The Comic That Never Was

Tim — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:17:02 GMT

So as most of you know, I do a weekly Refried comic for games.on.net. My editor found this week’s comic delightful (Pure gold, mate) and in fact liked it so much that he showed it to his manager – which turned out to be a bad move. She decided that it was possibly so contentious that it had to go all the way up the chain to the CEO of Internode to make a decision on – and he said no. Given that its subject matter is a South Australian politician and Internode is an Adelaide-based ISP, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to go upsetting the establishment.

But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so click here and enjoy.

Dumb Things I Wrote When I was 10

Jess — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:53:08 GMT

We’re coming home soon!

Finally, after eight long months, our time here is finally coming to an end. And now, as is my wont, instad of focussing on coming home, I’ve started worrying about all the things I never got around to doing. And all the things that I want to do before I leave. Y’know, the ones I probably won’t do because of Christmas, and the fact that I’m sick AGAIN.

Like seeing Maddie. Man, I meant to call her and email her so many times, and I put it off and put it off. And seeing Greg! What was that all about, huh! At least he came to my surprise party, which was, you could say, a huge surprise. And Kate. Oh, Katie. Kate left for Africa about the time that I arrived, and came back about a week or two ago. So I haven’t had a lot of time to see her either. And Nidhi! She’s not even in the country, I believe, which is sad.

I am a bad person.

Tim threw me a surprise party the other day, which was the best thing ever. He was all “We’re gonna go out to dinner for your birthday!” And I’m all “Yay!” So he blindfolds me, and Sarah drives us to the place (our car was unavailable, long story). It took about forty-five minutes, and I got completely lost. I had a good idea where we were for a lot of the time, but then she started taking some turns that were totally weird and I lost track of where we were. Anyway, we got there, and they were leading me toward the place, and they take off my blindfold and we’re BACK HOME. Man, I was so weirded out! I thought it was a big joke, that Tim was going to be all “Just kidding, I forgot to bring something, NOW we leave” but then we went inside and all my friends were waiting for me!

It was the best thing.

In hind sight, I’d been pretty dumb about the whole thing. There were a lot of clues I could’ve picked up on that I didn’t until it was too late. Such as the fact that nobody had asked me if or when I was having a party, and the fact that Mum had started cleaning the house for grandma’s annual visit more than a week in advance. But oh well! Maybe I was just sub-conciously willing to go along with it. In any case, I have the most wonderful friends, and the most wonderful Tim.

Speaking of cleaning, the other day Tim and I were cleaning out the back room of all my stuff accumulated over the last 23 years. We found some pretty cool stuff, and gave a lot of things to charity, so we felt really good about it all at the end of the day. We finally organised all our boxes to ship home, which cost substantially more than last time, but we have like, twice the boxes to ship home now. One less computer though!

In fact, neither of the computers we shipped over are getting shipped back. Weird.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is, we found a lot of neat stuff, including some old journals and draft books from school. I would like to share some of the entries with you, ’cause they are weird and awesome. Debari, you love my stories, right? You are gonna LOVE these.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen? What kind of satanic monster was I as a child! Also, my brother is not that much older than me, I find it weird that he would be allowed to babysit us on our own. We could’ve taken him.

The exciting peak of a ten-year-old life.

I’m not going to bother putting (sic) in anymore. Just assume they aren’t my fault. Anyway, a whale. In the sewer. I can believe I fell for that, but everyone else? Weird.

The next one is one of my favourites! It is a story.

Good ending, little me! “Uhh, uhh, uhh, a sea monster! Ate everything! Yeah.”

The rest are from my draft book, so they mostly aren’t finished. Still good reads though!

WHO KNOWS WHAT HE REPLIED!?!?! He probably just got et anyway. Honestly, fibrocement. I have no idea where I pulled that one from. But if you think THAT was weird, the following is a short excerpt of a story that I, unfortunately, never finished, because DAMN, I would’ve liked to see where it ended up.

Space… bat… angel… dragon. Space-bat-angel-dragon. Spacebatangeldragon. Or perhaps its the space-bat, named Angel-Dragon. But I don’t think so.

Oh man, I missed this one, and it’s great!

Oh man. Low self-esteem is an artform.

This last one (promise) is the only full story in here, and it’s dumber than hell. Man, I was a dumb kid.

Yep. I don’t know if I wrote in present tense cause I was trying to be all clever, or� it was just ’cause I didn’t know what I was doing. But yep! That’s this episode of “Dumb Things I Wrote When I was 10″.

Bah-byeee

It is a post, you see.

Jess — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:39:35 GMT

Hello!

I was reading through the archives of my old blog the other night, and it left me with a desire to put finger to keyboard again. What’s more, I yearn for the days when I blogged about whatever popped into my head while I was writing as well. My fingernails are inconveniently long for typing on my lappy keyboard though, so I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it.

Also, Tim last post was a monstrosity of a comment magnet, and quite frankly, it’s time to get that beast offa the top of the page.� Seriously, he wrote that post like a month ago, and he’s been getting like a comment a day lately. From people in America. We’re not sure where its been linked, but it must’ve been linked somewhere, ’cause these are all people we’ve never heard of. At least, I’VE never heard of them. And Tim SAYS he’s never heard of them. So if I find some sort of secret other family on the other side of the world, I’m gonna be pretty pissed, lemme tell a whut.

Specially since whenever I ask “do you have a secret other family” or “are you gay” he specifically says no. So, y’know, its not one of these “well, you didn’t ASK if I had a secret other family!” cases. ‘Cause I asked!

We watched The Sound of Music last night. Another movie, along with Mary Poppins that I haven’t seen since I grew up and started to learn what things are. Things like Nazis, and the division between Nazi Germany and Austria, and y’know, hills. The hills are ALIVE. You’ll never catch me taking an innocent stroll up a hill again, no sir.

It has been an interesting trip down nostalgia road though. It’s surprising to learn how much you actually missed as a child, and yet you sort of thought you knew what was going on anyway?

Also, have you ever thought about that Max character? The one who puts them in the concert at the end? Might as well rename him Plot D. Vice. I guess they probably left him in there from the actual story, but still! He’s a giant deus ex machina from start to finish. “I’m here for no reason at all really, and here I am putting your children in a concert you didn’t want them in and oops, saved your lives did I? Two birds with one stone and all that.”

We’ve been watching a lot of movies since we came here. A lot. We basically ran out of movies that we were actually interested in a month or two after we got here, and just started renting things that looked vaguely interesting. Some worked, some not so much.

I convinced Tim to let me get out 2001: A Space Oddesey the other night. Man, what a great… not so much movie but… book companion? I don’t want to be one of those elitist jerks that’s all “Oh, the book was SO much better than the movie!” ‘Cause its really not true! Did you know the book and the movie were made at the same time? So I really like to think that the book is just sort of the film’s explanation, and the film is the book’s visual companion. You can’t really appreciate one without the other? Sort of?

Anyway, I love those books. The other day in Kinokuniya, Tim bought me the first one again, since the older copies we had have been, let’s say, lost to time? It is still totally great.

And we’ve been watching a LOT of NCIS. We’ve made it through just about 5 seasons now. I honestly thought I’d watched more when it was on TV, but apparently I watched less than a single season! Who knew, right? Now I’ve seen every episode on DVD! Wooo!

I have a personal fantasy now of having Gibbs as a father. I think that would’ve been pretty much have been the best thing in the world. He’s so infallible and protective and, sigh! I’m seriously considering inviting him to my wedding so he can give me away. But only if he comes in his marine duds. Yeeeeeah, that’d be pretty sweet alright. I bet he’d come too! For the novelty.

Maybe not.

Yeah, we’ve been pretty bored here. Not bored like we have nothing to DO. We have plenty of video games, and lots of my friends around and things, and lots of movies! But bored sort of like… what are we doing here? Why is our life on hold? Why even get out of bed today, I don’t have anything to do.

I’ve been managing to keep myself awake all day these days, and sleep really well at night, getting up at a reasonable hour, and no naps during the day and whatnot. But its becoming a struggle. I have all these hours to fill, no car, no money, no energy. It was okay the first couple of days, ’cause we would do things to keep me awake. We went into the city one day, another day, Tim set me tasks that I had to complete in a day. But I can’t rely on Tim to keep me awake every day. I need something that I can actually fill my time up with. But I just can’t get that here. I’m totally in limbo.

What really scares me is, I sort of blame it on being here, but then I think, well, what would I do differently in Perth? I tell myself that I could get a job in Perth, that when I get back I’ll be doing uni again, but I just don’t know. Maybe I’ve just become bored with myself.

Wow, that’s depressing.

You know what else is depressing? Heavy things! When they’re on you! Geddit!

I’m having an early birthday on Saturday. Not only did my beautiful friends back in Perth send me an incredible present, namely, two tickets to see Dream Theater, but Sarah has said she is taking me out birthday shopping! I’m not 100% sure what to expect of that, but she’s promised to spoil me, and I don’t know how to stop her. She wouldn’t take no as an answer! So I’m pretty excited! I’m having this great pre-birthday birthday! Then a week later it’s real birthday time!

I don’t know what to expect of that either, ’cause I doubt my brother has remembered or has time to come over for dinner or anything, so when Mum says she wants to do a “family thing” I mean, just what the hell IS that? Frankly I think I’d be better off going out with Tim somewhere. It’s easier to organise, there’ll be less fighting, we’re likely to have more fun. But there’s this weird obligation thing with your parents. I mean, I’m sure it started out being like “Oh I want to be with my family for my birthday!” but then it sort of became “Please pretend like you want to spend your birthday with us to make us feel better about ourselves as a family” or something. I don’t even know. It’s not like I don’t want to spend a nice evening out with my family, it just never works out to BE a nice evening. Dad drinks too much, talks too much, Chris disagrees with something he says, Mum and I back him up, Dad takes offense, we all agree to be civil while in public, we get home and everyone’s angry, Chris and Hannah leave, Dad goes to bed, and Mum cries, probably. If there were just some way to… shut them all up. Yep. Good person, I know, right?

Fact is, Tim and I get along like a house on fire, there are never any awkward silences, we always have something to say that the other will find interesting and engaging and funny, and we enjoy the same things and all that. Y’know, everything that makes us a great couple. And I find that the time I spend with him, makes time I spend with my dysfunctional family all the more bitter. It’s like eating delicious bread and butter everyday of your life, and then discovering gourmet pizza or something. You still like the first one, but you’ve just had SO much of it, and here’s something so much MORE delicious.

Weirdest analogy ever. And tangent, really. You all know how much I like Tim, I don’t have to blog about it.

Long story short, I can’t wait to come back to Perth. I can’t expect everything to be the way I left it, but I hope it still welcomes me back.

Also, my brother is moving to Switzerland. Don’t get me started on this.

Very Dangerous, Remove Immediately

Tim — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:12:31 GMT

In the middle of October, Jess and I travelled down to Newcastle. I had just won an eBay auction for ‘Ere We Go and Freebooterz, two of the few remaining out-of-print Games Workshop Ork sourcebooks I did not own. This was tremendously exciting for me; previously these books had always escaped me as I was either outbid or I could not make it to the place required to collect them. But this year, fortune smiled and they popped up in sunny coastal Newcastle, only available by pickup, and I happened to be in the right state at the right time. The seller and I even agreed to meet, fittingly enough, at the local Games Workshop store in Newcastle. It was perfect.

Little did I know, when we undertook this labour of love, that this would be the very thing that would cause me to lose my own job with Games Workshop.

You see, while we were waiting for the seller, I took the opportunity to converse with and get to know the manager and staff at the Newcastle Games Workshop store. We chatted about this and that, about how their store was doing, what it was like to work at my store up at Castle Towers. We got along. When they asked me what brought me down this way, I gleefully exclaimed – over the moon as I was – about how I was finally going to pick up these Ork books that had eluded me all these years, and that I had arranged to use their store as a meeting point with my eBay seller.

It turns out this was a huge mistake. Because you see, the first thing that the Newcastle manager did upon seeing my manager at last week’s manager’s conference, was to step over and inform him that one of his staff – he even remembered my name for the occasion – had used his store as a meeting point to purchase goods over eBay.

Apparently the fact that the item in question was an out of print supplement from eighteen years ago and that eBay is the only place it can be found was irrelevant: I, a Games Workshop staff member, had purchased Games Workshop goods from eBay and was publicly announcing it at a Games Workshop store.

The Newcastle manager also went on to add that I had “acted like a smartass” by discussing the Ten Commandments of Customer Service with him and his staff. Specifically, when I was first approached by him, I congratulated him on completing the First Commandment (”Acknowledge and approach everyone who enters the Hobby Centre”) and introduced myself as a fellow employee. Now I don’t know if Newcastle has some fucked-up personal definition of “smartass” but where I come from, that’s called breaking the fucking ice. Finding common ground. Starting a conversation.

At the time he laughed and we got along fine, as did the other staff member whom I had roughly the same conversation with. I was not to know that the hypnotic conditioning in his brain had kicked into overdrive, and that my name, rank and serial number were being filed away to be reported later.

After spending maybe ten or fifteen minutes in store, I realised the seller was late and decided to go stand outside to look for him. I made my excuses and left; not knowing that when this whole story would be reported to my manager, the ending would be completely fucking rewritten to the Newcastle manager asking me to leave the store.

I had no idea of any of this at the time; in fact I had no idea up until today, over two weeks later when Jess and I went into my store to do some painting. My manager had asked me to come in so he could speak to me personally before he drew up the roster for the week. I jokingly asked when I arrived if I was being fired. He looked at me sadly and said “Yes”.

After having the whole ridiculous farce of a situation (complete with bonus alternate ending courtesy of the Newcastle manager) explained to me, he went on further to add that in any case he didn’t think I was a very good “fit” with Games Workshop – primarily, because I was not loud and energetic enough. You see it’s very important, at Games Workshop, that you make the hobby fun and exciting – which according to the company policy, means shouting all the time, something I struggle with. And Games Workshop take ~~their shouting~~ their “fit” very seriously; through some contacts, I’ve actually had the chance to read the Little Red Book, which is the top-secret management handbook written by the CEO of Games Workshop himself, Tom Kirby.

At the time of my hiring, I mentioned to my manager that I possessed this illicit knowledge. Recalling this fact, he used it to illustrate why I was being fired.

You see that top left corner? That, he explained, was where I was. Talented, yes, but not a good fit. “You’ve read the book, Tim,” he said, “You know what Games Workshop policy is about this.” Oh yes, I do.

When it comes right down to it, I still don’t know why I was fired. I can see why I might have been told it wasn’t working out a few months from now and perhaps asked gently to leave, or just quietly given less and less shifts until I quit of my own accord. But fired?

If enjoying the Games Workshop universe enough to collect all their sourcebooks is a crime, if trying to find common ground with other Games Workshop staff through entirely reasonable conversation is a crime, if being loyal veteran of fourteen goddamn years is a crime, then lock me the fuck up, you guys. Because I will re-offend.

The Plight of the L-plater

Jess — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:47:20 GMT

I’ve had my learner’s license for a long time now. Some might say a ludicrously long time. Some heartless people may even laugh if I tell you I’ve had it so long that it’s expired once already and needed to be renewed. But let me assure you, it is not from being unable to achieve the ridiculously high number of recorded hours in NSW. It’s not from any retarded motor skills or eye condition. I have extremely good vision, in fact, and am a pretty skilled driver, if I do say so myself, if a little speedy at times. No, it’s none of these reasons. It’s mostly apathy, actually. I just never really bothered. And now that I have Tim to drive me every which where I can’t get at by public transport, I’ve seen even less reason to upgrade to being able to drive on my own. So, as I watched all my friends, from as early as our senior years in high school, more than 5 years ago, getting their P plates (we have two over here) and having their parents buy for them their first cars, because they’re rich, I’ve only had occasion to drive myself somewhere when it just so happened a parent or other full licensed driver was with me, and purely for my own driving pleasure.

But this extended period, I feel, has put me in a unique position to champion the rights and protest the injustices that are done to these poor L-platers, myself included.

Since we came to Sydney, my parents have given Tim and I use of my Mum’s car, as long as she isn’t working. This is very kind of her! It’s given Tim and I a lot of freedom, such as it is, to be able to get out of the house when we’re developing some nasty cabin fever. Until recently, I was doing all of the driving in these situations, as Tim has his full license, so can be my supervisor, and it was thought that he was unable to drive our tiny car. So, as you can imagine, I’ve had even more time lately to come to realise just what a large percentage of full-licensed, and -gasp!- P-platers hate and overtly look down on these poor people who are, for the most part, teenagers, who are just beginning to learn the ropes of being in a very serious, and sometimes difficult situation.

I can think of numerous occasions in which I feel I was being looked down on as a learner-driver. I have been tailgated, as we all have. But I can guarantee you, not in the frequency that I have been recently. People will push behind you, no matter what speed you are doing, simply because, as they see it, if I’m an L-plater, I can’t POSSIBLY be going the speed limit, so without checking their speedometers just speed up to what they feel is the correct speed. In suburban streets this can potentially be VERY dangerous. On a one-lane road, where the speed limit is 50, I’m doing 60, and you’re pushing me to do 70 behind me, if a kid ran out in front of me, I might not be able to stop in time, and quite frankly, I’m so distracted by you that I might not even SEE them in time. And let me tell you, that sort of shit is NOT going to hold up in court OR my conscience. “Please, your Honour, I only killed that kid because the person behind me was pressuring me to go faster! I thought it would be okay!” Lemme tell ya, buddy. It’s not.

But as soon as I follow this mental path to its horrible conclusions and slow down, they start getting MORE aggressive. More aggressive? Where the hell are you going in such a hurry that you can’t get down this road 10 seconds slower?

The same sort of attitude is proven on three-lane highways and such as well. We have a very busy, very arterial road quite close to our house, that we find ourselves travelling along on a regular basis. I’ll be a- cruisin’, perhaps or perhaps not for a-bruisin’, at about 70, which is the speed limit, or because, as I admitted before, I do go a little too fast sometimes, MAYBE 75-80. Please don’t trace this blog and arrest me, officers! But lo-and-behold! The same bullshit attitude from before! Only this time, they have the room to do something about it. So, after tailgating me for a minute or so, they’ll over take me, right, and get this, right, right, this is the good bit, they’ll check their speedo and then SLOW DOWN.

Maybe I’m a little over sensitive, but seemed to me you just overtook me BECAUSE I AM AN L-PLATER. I am doing the same speed as everyone else. I am doing the same speed as YOU. But no, no, I’m probably a crappy driver, right, so you just GOTTA get in front. To be fair, aren’t I more likely to misjudge the distance when braking and hit you from behind, than slow suddenly and have you do the same? It just doesn’t make sense. And yet, people do it. It’s pure aggression. This has happened to me on many occasions.

What finally drove me to write this rant was an event that occurred last Saturday, as I drove Tim up to Newcastle, some 2 hours drive, to pick up an eBay item. It was cool, we both wanted to go, thought we’d make a day of it. Now, going back a few weeks there was some, uh, trouble, with a federal police officer, in which I recieved a speeding ticket while hurrying down to Canberra to see my renal- and heart-failing grandmother. I don’t wanna make excuses, honestly, I felt like the ticket was justified, even if Tim and my Mum didn’t. I just felt the dude could’ve been a little more lenient considering the circumstances. Which were, in particular, apart from my hospital bound grandma, that I was doing under 110 in a 110 zone, I’ve had my license for something like 4 or 5 years, AND everyone around me was going much faster. This was what annoyed me the most. I had been flashed at, tailgated, all kinds of things, by people who were really speeding. 120, 130, I don’t even know. But because I was an L-plater, and thus, MY speedlimit was supposedto be limited to 80, I got pulled over, I got the ticket. If I’d just removed my L-plates, like so many others I know who would’ve, no-one would’ve ever known.

But I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details. As I said, I felt like I deserved it, but the dude could maybe have been less of a dick about it. But the point was, I got a speeding ticket. Now, again, going back to the weekend of the Newcastle roadtrip, the speedlimit was 110. “Screw that!” thought Jess, “I’m not getting another ticket!” So I dutifully remained at 80, maaaaaybe 90 when I got really frustrated, for the entire trip. So, there I was, being a good, law-abiding L-plater, when some BITCH comes up behind me. I’m going sooooooo slowly, she thinks, so what can I do about it? The bitch starts flashing her headlights at me, and making hand gestures behind me. Not flipping me off or anything, just frustrated. I speed up to 95. “What do you want me to do, lady?” I think to myself, “I’m already speeding!” Finally this FIRST-CLASS BITCH gets the message that, no, I’m not going any faster for you, and overtakes me, speeding past me at what I can only assume is LIGHT-SPEED. I promptly flip her off, and begin grumbling to myself. Does she REALLY have to get to the beach in that kind of hurry? It took millions of years to form, lady, I think it’ll still be there if you take an extra twenty minutes.

Of course, I apologise if she really did have some emergency to get to. But consider her actions against mine in the previous scenario. Going to Canberra, we DID have an emergency to get to. We had no idea what condition my grandmother was going to be in when we arrived. If she’d even still be alive. And so, I was speeding as well, according to my plates. Not even going over everyone else’s limit! But never once did I harass any of the learners who were slowing me down by sticking to 80. Or the older cars and vans that just couldn’t go that fast. I overtook them if I had an opportunity, and I waited behind them if I didn’t.

And who gets the penalty? Me. Cause I didn’t lie, and take off my L- plates.

What really shits me, though, right, is the red P-platers. For those playing in Perth, we have two P-plates here. Red and green. Haha, yep, green Ps, gets funnier everytime. So you do your multiple choice test to get your Ls, do a ridiculous amount of hours, and six months to get your red Ps, a hazard perception test and another year to get your green Ps, and then some… other test? Or something? And another 2 years to get your full license.

So, let me remind you that I’ve been driving pretty steadily for what I’m going to call… 4 years? 4 years. At least. Four. Years. Let’s do the maths here, shall we? Assuming they all advanced as soon as the time limit was up, that takes 3 and a half years to get your full license. What I’m getting at here is that, I don’t really count the green Ps, ’cause that could be close time-wise, but almost ANY time I see a red P-plater tailgaiting me, or giving me guff for not going as fast or as… I don’t even know, as THEY want… chances are, I’VE BEEN DRIVING LONGER THAN THEM. I have MORE experience on the road than them. Going back to my introduction, it’s not like I can’t pass these tests. I just haven’t. But they assume, incorrectly, that I can’t drive just because I have my Ls. I have been driving since you were a tweenie, whippersnapper!

At this point, to Tim’s dismay, and others, I suspect, I’d like to use a Ctrl-Alt-Delete reference to illustrate my point. I won’t actually link it, mind, but I’ll give you the gist. Try to keep up.

It essentially described the difference, in online gaming, between ‘n00bs’ and ‘newbies’, ‘n00bs’ basically being gamers who are just, well, tools, and should be taught NOT to be tools, in whatever ways are most effective, mostly harassment; while ‘newbies’ are potentially valuable members of the gaming community who are simply trying to learn the rules and flow, structurally and socially, of a particular game, and should be encouraged and taught, that they might benefit the community once they get the hang of it.

Now, let’s apply this analogy to the world of learning to drive, shall we?

Harrassing L-platers is just WRONG. They aren’t doing anything, for the most part, I assume, to actively hurt you, or inconvenience you in any way. Just the opposite, in fact. If you see an L-plater going a little slow it’s not because they’re using their L-plates as an excuse just to piss you off. They are doing it because they just don’t feel SAFE driving that fast yet. If you tailgate, if you flash your lights, you are sending entirely the wrong message to a person who is new to this driving thing. People take driving for granted. It is NOT a videogame. If you hit someone, if you hit something else and injure or kill yourself or a passenger, you CANNOT just reload and try again. Next time you feel like a learner just isn’t going fast enough for you, imagine your son or daughter, or little cousin Beckie or that adorable little kid nextdoor that you always wanted to play with but never had a chance, imagine them running out in front of an L-plater, imagine them being killed, and imagine them turning to you and saying “I was being tailgated, what could I do?”

That is NOT the correct answer. And it is NOT setting a good example for these newbies. What goes around comes around. It isn’t karma, it’s just a fact. You give these learners shit now, when they’re the full licence holder, how many do you think will say to themselves “I’ll just relax and take it easy, I remember what it was like being a learner.” Not too goddamn many. They will relish the chance to get back some of what they took when they were teenagers. And maybe that’s why we’re in the position we are now. Someone’s gotta break the cycle, and just goddamn RELAX. Driving is serious, but it’s also fun. Just chill, listen to the radio, think of all you’re going to do today, or what you’re coming home to, and just relax.

I think I’ve been a little all over the place, I was basically just writing as it was coming. But I hope you all don’t mind my ranting. It’s just something that’s been getting to me a lot lately. Oh man, and I totally forgot the time I accidentally left the L-plates off, and before realising I’d done so, mentioned to Tim how “reasonable” and “patient” everyone was being today. True story. Coincidence? I think not.

So, at the risk of sounding a little preachy, next time you see a learner driver, just relax and remember, they’re only newbies.

Worst

Tim — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:40:30 GMT

A lot of people think they’ve had the worst day, ever. A lot of them will sigh as they sit down exhausted, reaching for the half-empty whiskey bottle on the table, and say to you “Man, what a day. What a fucking day.” Some people may in fact have actually had a somewhat bad day.

Well, these people don’t know shit. Let me tell you a story about yesterday, Thursday 1st October 2009. The 100% official, swear-to-god, worst day, ever.

It all began with the arrival of a package from back home. Jess and I have a wedding to attend here in Sydney, you see, and I cleverly left all of my formal clothes back in Perth. My parents were good enough to attend to my needs and send them over, but in my infinite wisdom I left it until the last minute, and indeed told them to send the wrong trousers.

With the wedding on Saturday, there was no time to get them to send over the correct ones. We decide to quickly run out to Target and get some new trousers, foregoing showers in our rush to do so. It is quickly warming up to be a stinking hot day, and my nose responds appropriately by deciding it is going to drip relentlessly throughout all of it. We are tired, sniffly, unwashed, sweaty, hot, and probably coming down with a cold. And we’re only just getting started.

We have organised to meet up with Sarah, Saturday’s bride-to-be, at her house. She is going to hang out with Jess and keep her company while I go into work three hours early (to what is only a three hour shift in the first place) to organise my cash-register login details and learn how to use the thing to actually sell products to customers. I am led to believe this is an important part of retail work. I am told this will only take about half an hour.

Thanks to Target, we are able to pick up pants quickly and easily, and then pick up Sarah. We are late and stressed, but that’s okay. A quick tour of her house follows and then we are off to the shopping centre in which I work. I leave the two lovely ladies in the food court and saunter off to work, arriving on time and expecting to jump straight in to training and learning.

Instead, I find that the assistant manager who organised the whole thing is off sick. The actual manager is on the phone, just back from holidays, and continues to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes while I kill time in the store. When I am actually able to speak to him, he professes confusion and says he is trying to organise my login details now, but it needs to be done synchronously with an IT Guy in head office and that said IT Guy may not be free to do it for up to an hour.

Enraged, I ask what “it” actually involves. It turns out I am just going to have to speak to the Guy to provide a password for my cash-register logon. I say that this is crazy: if I just need to talk to the Guy on the phone, he can call me on my mobile anytime, and exit the store saying that I will be back when my shift starts. By this time it has been forty-five minutes and absolutely nothing has been done, though I have taken a peek at my upcoming hours for October – which were promised to be “pretty intense” due to the school holidays, only to discover that October sees me working a whole six extra hours, in total.

Sarah needs to get back to her house, so we take her home. Once we get there, I receive a frantic call saying that I need to be back in the store because the policy is that I need to speak to the IT Guy on the store phone, while being physically located in the store. Jess and I swear violently and leave Sarah’s house to go back to the shopping centre. On the way back, I flip through the Myer gift registry for the Saturday wedding (something else we left until the last minute). Once we get to the centre, I toss the registry on the dashboard in the car and forget about it. This is important.

I head into work, still with over half an hour until my shift is to start, and begin to finally learn the things I need to learn. Jess waits around in the store for a while, and then decides to go down to Myer and grab some gifts for the wedding from the gift registry. The layout of the shopping centre means that Myer is about a ten minute walk away. She makes this journey only to realise that I have left the gift registry in the car, and hikes back again to accurately inform me that I am a cocksucker and she is going to go read in the car, and get gifts later.

When she gets to the car, the growing heat of the day has made it fairly uncomfortable to be in, even in the covered carpark. She reads for a while and then decides to use her laptop, which uses its blast-furnace like heat output to turn the inside of the car into a tiny sauna. Sweating in rage, she flees the car and decides to head down to Myer again. When she finally gets there, she discovers that Myer’s catalogue is mind-fuckingly insane and the products on the gift registry either do not exist, are wildly more expensive than listed, or are available, but only in damaged boxes.

Meanwhile, at work, I have actually sneezed so hard I split my lip open along some sort of geostructural fault line. It bleeds profusely and continues to bleed for about two hours, or almost all the remainder of my shift. Combined with my running nose, I am being slowly driven insane. My shift ends and I flee the premises towards Myer. It is 8:30 PM and the shopping centre is closing up. I trundle towards Jess at top speed.

We meet up and she regales me with tales of shittiness, while I continue to apologise profusely for leaving the gift registry in the car. We realise we are both hungry, and decide to get some corn-in-a-cup (it’s delicious, and nutritious!) from the nearby corn store, only to be informed that the corn store is out of corn – in fact the last corn-in-a-cup was just sold to the customer before us. We turn to the bubble tea place a few metres away, and desperately ask to order bubble tea. Unfortunately, they are out of pearls and in fact, they only just sold their last bubble tea.

By this point every second word coming out of our mouths is a furious expletive. We rage over to the food court and get in line at KFC for some “Mashies”, because we both want to try them. Unfortunately it appears that KFC was staffed exclusively by vacuous morons that night, as we were left in line for ten minutes and completely, blatantly ignored by no less than four counter staff before being served. In fact we were ignored to the point that the lady who queued up behind us was pulled out of the queue up to the front counter and served ahead of us.

In keeping with the pattern established today, the woman orders Mashies. In fact she wants a large one. And it just so happens that there was only enough left in the warmer to fill a large box. Jess ragequits the queue. I stand there out of spite, forcing them to serve me and make up an entire fresh batch for me. This takes another ten minutes.

We finally get our Mashies and head back to the car. They’re not even very good. In fact they sort of taste funny, but I am fucking ravenous as I have not eaten since 2:00 PM and scarf down all of them. On the way home, we remember that we need to get petrol, and pull into a service station.

Jess goes to fill up the car, only to realise the pump has malfunctioned and backfired, soaking the side of the car, the ground and her skirt with petrol. A lot of petrol. Things just keep getting better. I go inside to pay, while she heads off to the service station toilet to try and dilute the petrol with water and wash as much of it off as possible. I pay and head back out to the car, only to receive a surprise phonecall from Jess: “You know how this is the worst day ever,” she says. “Well, I’m locked in the fucking toilet.”

Locked in the fucking toilet.

I run inside to the counter and explain the situation to the clerk, who throws me a key and says something about “they’ve been having trouble with that door”. Taking the key, I run over to the toilet and try to open it. The key doesn’t fit in the lock as it has been damaged. The handle won’t turn, and the door barely gives. Jess and I have to shout to hear each other as trucks are barreling by on the road ten metres away. Eventually we are able to communicate that there is no fucking way to unlock this door, and I just begin repeatedly yanking at it, trying to force it open. Empowered perhaps by adrenaline, or a dreadful resentment at the universe, I wrench the door open, mangling the lock beyond repair and freeing Jess.

Taking the key back inside, I try and explain what happened to the clerk again, who only shrugs and says “Yeah, that door is pretty broken”, explaining that they reported it to head office weeks and weeks ago but nothing has been done about it. This does not exactly placate us but there isn’t really anything we can do, so we storm out, to finally go home.

Once we get home, we finally sit down and relax for a few hours, thinking that the day is finally over. But the fates have one last surprise in store for us: when I go to return Jess’s mum’s bank keycard to her, I can’t find it. Anywhere. We search the room, the car, the driveway, the garage. It is nowhere to be found. Up until now were starting to come to terms with the day, as all the shitty things that had happened had only affected us. But now, on top of all this, we had lost the keycard.

We pile into the car and drive out to the service station, thinking it must, surely, have come out of my pocket during my frenzied wrenching of the toilet door to free Jess. The clerk we talked to before has gone home and the new guy doesn’t know of any cards that have been handed in, and we can’t find it anywhere searching around the grounds of the station.

Desolate, and truly fucking infuriated, we return home, only to find the keycard lying on the floor under a pile of clothes.

Worst.

How I Mine For Reality: Addendum

Tim — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:34:43 GMT

On the road to Canberra, as we enter the magnificent rolling hills and plains around the Lake George area, I am momentarily stunned by the majesty of the vista before us.

“Wow! That’s incredible! It looks like something straight off a, uh. Hrm.”

“You were going to say desktop, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Goddammit.”

How I Mine For Reality

Tim — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:44:35 GMT

Hello everyone. My name is Tim Colwill, and I have a problem.

Hello, Tim!

Actually, I have a number of problems. For example, my facial muscles tend to operate on a ten-minute time delay, which causes me to sometimes be unable to properly communicate emotions to people important to me. In the same manner one can look up at the sky and see the stars as they were hundreds of years ago, my face is a delightful mirror of the emotions I was feeling ten minutes prior.

Working in combination with my expressionless voice I often, to my great chagrin, give people the impression of being either utterly disinterested, monstrously sarcastic, or having actually passed away several minutes ago and now operating entirely on volatile corpse gas and twitching nerve reflexes. My thanks to all those who have frantically, and mistakenly, dialled for an ambulance. I appreciate it.

But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today I would like to talk about my unnerving tendency to not so much blur as demolish the line between the internet and real life. I have, at various times in the past done, and probably will do again in the future, the following things.

Yes, I have done all of these things. I am not proud of these things, but they are my things, and I have done them. I will probably do more of them in the future even, until the time comes when I am found curled up in the foetal position on the floor, sucking binaric dregs from a blue CAT-5 cable and cackling quietly to myself.

Still, at least when I am asked in job interviews whether I “eat, sleep and breathe the internet”, I can hold my head high and say proudly: “Yes. Yes I do”. And then I can break down in a series of embarrassed, choking sobs.

I’ll always have that.

Twimage Release

Tim — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:41:35 GMT

Ever since I joined Twitter, it always bothered me that there was no way to display my tweets in a controlled web environment, one that didn’t allow scripts or embedded Flash content. Twitter offers plenty of badges in Flash and Javascript, but if I wanted to display my latest tweet in, say, my forum signature, I was basically screwed. Most forum software such as phpBB is very restrictive on what users can and cannot put into their signatures, but the one thing they all allow are images. And so Twimage was born.

Twimage is a PHP script I wrote that grabs your Twitter account’s RSS feed, reads it, strips it down, and then prints the latest tweet from it to a 648 x 40 pixel PNG image. You can then display this image anywhere you would normally be able to put a regular PNG image file - including your forum signature! The final result looks a lot like this (resized for width, see full size here):

Because Twitter’s RSS feeds are painfully unstable - often returning HTTP 400 errors for no fucking reason whatsoever - I’ve also included a Twimage Feedchecker (see it in action here). This is nothing more than a simple PHP file which tries to print your RSS feed in plaintext, and will helpfully tell you any errors it encounters so you can accurately troubleshoot. I’ve also included the source file for the background image, if the colours I’ve chosen don’t take your fancy.

I’m not going to lie: this script is basically a complete and total hackjob and is very, very rudimentary in nature. RSS2HTML does most of the heavy lifting, and I just polish it, clean it up and print it into a PNG. It’s nothing that somebody else couldn’t write for themselves in about ten seconds, and indeed if anybody out there wishes to improve on it (which shouldn’t be hard!) I welcome them. I’d love to see what you do with it. Enjoy.

Download: Twimage 1.1.1 (260 KB ZIP)

If you can’t sleep, blog!

Jess — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:37:58 GMT

Good morning Cat-Dogs!

That’s right its morning here, almost 5am to be exact. Which I guess makes it morning over in Perth as well, and in like 50% of the world. But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m AWAKE. AGAIN. Tonight I realy can’t blame anyone but myself, I did nothing but sleep and drink tea and eat sugar all day, so I sort of saw this coming. Anyway, I figure, if I can’t sleep, BLOG.

My only problem with that, you see, is Tim’s ridiculously loud spacebar. I basically have to turn and see if he’s woken up after every word, which will make this post, at the very least, well thought out. Every space might be your last!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve already implied at least two things there that are out of sequence. Three actually. First is that we got all our electronics shipped over successfully, and CHEAPLY, which is very important. 6 boxes, 3500km, less than a hundred bucks. Also, over the weekend, which I thought was surprising as I was under the impression it took a week to drive from there to here? Perhaps that’s with breaks, I dunno.

Second, I’m using Tim’s computer. This is because, while I say “successfully” I should really temper that with a “mostly”. We thought the XBox would red ring. We hoped Tim’s monitor wouldn’t break ’cause we didn’t have the original box and was therefore uninsured. But all this was fine. What WASN’T fine, was my computer. Thanks to the help of some courier staff who couldn’t read the “This Way Up” signs, there’s something wrong with the fan again, which is fixable, but also something wrong with the hard drive apparently. Which is more difficult to replace given our current financial situation. So, for the moment, I’m using Tim’s computer on the odd occasion I need to. Which, fortunately, due to the habits formed over the last year or so, is fairly infrequently.

Finally, we are sleeping in the room as our electronics. As everything, really. Tim and I have taken up residency in the downstairs level of my house, which consists of one big bedroom, a tiny laundry, and a tiny ensuite. So we have a space to ourselves, affording us some privacy, which, in the last couple weeks or so has been VERY welcome.

And so, to escape� my parents lately, there has been a lot of reading books, a lot of video games, and we’ve even got Foxtel hooked up down here, so we’ve gone effectively from no TV at all to being overburdened with choice. Which, given what has been showing on Foxtel lately, pretty much amounts to the same thing.

As for things not material in nature, I’ve been reunited with many of my friends, though less than I would like, and less frequently than I desire. And I miss the spontaneity of the Perthians. With all respect to any of my Sydney friends reading, we basically have to book three weeks in advance to meet up for dinner, and even then everyone is late. Every. Time.

Screw this, I wanna meet up for bubble tea at like ten o’clock at night, and talk science with Mike. Or chicks with Felix. Or shit with Deebs. Or nothing in particular with John.

Its not that I don’t LIKE you Sydney people. Of course I do, or I probably wouldn’t have bothered coming back. It’s just you’re all so busy with your scholarships and your… I don’t even know what you people do with yourselves! But it’s not hang out with me, that’s for sure.

Now that just makes me feel bad, ’cause I’ve been the one to cancel the last few appointments due to lack of money and such. And I don’t begrudge you guys your lives. So I’m gonna just quit bitching and try and reason all the nasty things I just said about you with “I just miss you guys, is all”.

My parents are the same as ever. My Mum is having physio once a week, my Dad is leaving his computer with about the same frequency. Apparently its all over with his latest American Whore, but I don’t hold out much hope for the future. She wasn’t the first, I doubt she’ll be the last. I can’t help but wonder what happened, but it doesn’t sound like it was his decision. Which pleases me on some cruel little level.

I’ve been playing through Fable again lately as an evil character, which is proving to be just as much fun as a good ‘un. Tim’s been playing it as well, which has pleased me greatly, even more so since he’s really enjoying it. Unfortunately the latest DLC came out the day we left, and we have no wireless adapter for the 360, so I cannot partake of it’s wonder.

We totally heard a chick ask for a “wireless cord” in JB Hi-Fi the other day. Made me giggle furiously.

Totally got GH: Metallica the other day as well. Which was fun, but not nearly as much fun as I expected. The songs, while incredi-fun to listen to, are pretty repetitive to play, until you come to the Death Solos, that just make you want to die. Overall, I think I enjoyed Aerosmith as an add-on more than Metallica, just because the songs were more varied, and more technical to play, while still being fun. That’s just my opinion.

That and Slayer are the worst band ever. Seriously, I’m sure I’ll get some hatemail from the guy who googles “slayer” every day and email-bombs the people who disparage them, but seriously. As a seasoned metal head, I feel qualified to say that their guitar riffs are boring, they do nothing but scream incoherently, and the lyrics are dull and repetitive. And I know what you’re all thinking smart-alecs! “Aren’t ALL metal bands like that?!” It’s true, I’ll be the first to admit there are a lot of really bad death/thrash/speed/pants metal bands out there that are just as bad. But not ONE with the status in the subculture as Slayer. I DERIDE YOUR METAL ABILITIES, SLAYER.

While reading The Count of Monte Cristo tonight, I learned the word “vomitarium”. Turns out its NOT a room in which you go to vomit. Who knew, right?

Video Games, Comics, and Navel-Gazing

Tim — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:35:13 GMT

Hey, have you guys heard of Teh Learning Curve yet? It’s a pretty cool gig; the premise of which being that a couple of guys sit on a couch, play a video game together for 30 minutes, then give their impressions of it - all of which is condensed into a five-minute YouTube video for the ridiculously short attention span of the discerning modern internet viewer. I did some logo work for them a little while back, but before that I actually took time out from my busy schedule as an international man of dysentry to appear, in real life, and show them the correct and most efficient way to play Braid.

If you’re having trouble recognising me, I am the attractive ponytailed Adonis sitting on the right hand side. I think we can all agree I have a bright future in game reviews, if not actual successful game play, or any manner of timing and co-ordination.

For those who don’t know, I used to do a (semi) regular webcomic by the name of Refried. I was looking back through the archives last night, and aside from the odd cringe or two, it really made me want to pick up the webcomic gig again. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this; it’s been almost two years since I stopped updating Refried and so I’ve had quite a reasonable amount of time to consider my position. So much time in fact, that I apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove my car off the webcomics highway into the blissful ditch of real life.

This of course begs the question of what I should do to get back on the horse, if you’ll forgive my wild switching of metaphors. As far as I can tell, I have several options.

Yet even a list like this is another way of putting off that first tentative step. And by creating this list, I’m overlooking the possibility that I could easily do multiple of these things at once, if I could just get over my outrageous perfectionism. A while back Nick threw up a link to The Cult of Done Manifesto, which really struck a chord with me (so much so that I made this wallpaper for myself). It’s a little bit pretentious, and I think I have a ways to go before I can buy into it fully, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

Aluminium Chef: It Burns So Much

Tim — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:21:04 GMT

On today’s episode of Aluminium Chef, you will learn the following things:

1) Putting a Cadbury Creme Egg in the microwave to make it all “nice and melty” to go over your ice cream will result in a loud, ear-piercing shriek as the gooey creme filling bursts forth, geyser like, from the chocolate shell and sprays all over the inside of the microwave.

2) The gooey creme filling will be superheated to a temperature comparable to that of molten lava as it exits the chocolate shell. Touching the gooey creme lava will cause first degree burns to your fingers.

3) As the filling that decorates the inside of your microwave slowly cools, you will discover that it is almost impossible to clean off. You will spend at least fifteen minutes furiously scrubbing as you hold your hand in a glass of cold water, incredulous with pain and rage, alternating under your breath between vicious swearing and confused denial.

4) Thoroughly cautious, you will gently touch the now-empty but surprisingly intact chocolate shell of the Creme Egg, only to find that is in fact stone fucking cold.

This is why I am.

Jess — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:19:50 GMT

This morning, I’d like to tell you all a story. It’s a story about the single most inspirational man I’ve ever met. Despite the length of time since I last saw him, which is probably close to 4 years, and the fact that I’ll probably never see him again, doesn’t change the fact that he often comes up in my thoughts as a vague guideline to attitudes and life in general. I’ve probably mentioned him in passing to a number of you in the past, mostly regarding his unorthodox teaching methods.

You see, he was a lecturer at SIBT, a bridging institution with delusions of grandeur, that I attended for a year. His name is Aaron. I somehow never discovered his last name, perhaps he did that deliberately, most lecturers are all about the simple firstname.lastname@dumbuniversitydomain.com.au email addresses and things, but in any case, I never knew it.

Of the three trimesters SIBT was divided into, I was lucky enough to have three units, over two trimesters with Aaron as a lecturer. I’d heard of him from friends who had previously taken the units I was, and also been lucky enough to have him as a lecturer, but I’d always assumed what people had said about him was exaggerated. I mean, how good can this one guy BE, right?

The thing that probably needs to be mentioned somewhere, so here seems like a good place, was that SIBT is like baby-uni. The tutorials were about the same size, but instead of lectures with literally hundreds of people, you were reduced to classes of say, 20? Maybe less if it wasn’t a popular class. So when I say he interacted with you personally, he really did. He knew most every student by name, greeted them in corridors, and really made you feel like you meant something to him.

I realise, reading back, that a lot of the words I’m using and will continue to use might make it sound like a schoolgirl crush was going down. But I gotta tell ya, that simply wasn’t the case. I’ll be using a lot of these emotional words, because that’s what he did to you, he made you feel like an individual, not a faceless student, or a number. But I had nothing but the greatest respect for this guy.

I’m sort of all over the place with this. It sounded more structured in my head. But I haven’t even really started yet. This is kind of just backstory. I’ll understand if you wanna stop reading now.

Anyway, from day one, you knew this guy was going to be good. He was a veteran. He has a particular way of talking that engages you, he gets sidetracked on tangents, basically always wore the same shirt, and had a long ponytail, but always managed to communicate everything you needed to know, in a way that you could understand, and frequently told you about his own history or experiences, if he thought it would illustrate a point to you better.

And what a history. Some of things he told us, you can’t help but wonder how such an amazing man, if not balanced then certainly well adjusted, could come from all that. Time has eroded the specific details, so forgive me if I get some wrong, but I believe his mother was a prostitute, while his father owned the brothel. So since before he can remember, he had always seen and known about these men who were essentially, in his words “there to fuck my mother”. He wasn’t treated badly, from memory, just neglectfully. Once, when we were discussing psychological conditioning, he gave the example of his addiction to Coke. The drink, not the drug. He said, as a child of 3 or 4, when his parents wanted to keep him distracted, or generally get him to shut up, they would give him a bottle of coke. So he gradually came to associate Coke with his parents attention, and then finally, just the good feelings that that brought. Even up to that day, he still drank at least one bottle per lecture, and y’know, sometimes I saw him a couple times a day.

But it wasn’t even his stories, or his teaching methods that make me remember him. It was his attitude. His general outlook on life. I still occasionally find myself asking What Would Aaron Do? though perhaps less often than its religious associate is meant to be considered. He opened up ways of thinking to me that I had just never thought of. Essentially, over those two trimesters, he made me the person that you know and love today. He made me realise so many things, and just taught me that to be who you are, or who you want to be is just a question of attitude, and getting over whatever hang ups you have, and that life is so short, and sometimes so meaningless, that to be anyone other than exactly who you want to be is the greatest sin. I see so many people in my day to day life that I just can’t help but wish a force like Aaron on. I used to be so shy. SO SHY. Painfully shy. Some of you can probably still see that, and it’s not gone away completely. But y’know, I used to not be able to buy things from a counter, I would have to get other people to do it, ’cause I didn’t want the social interaction. Now, I can strike up conversations with strangers! And what’s more, people see that easy going-ness coming out. The number of people who will just talk to me in the street, out of nowhere, is sometimes staggering. I even had the guts to come to the other side of the country, on my own, and met the man I’ll grow old with.

His were mostly media and culture classes, so a few videos and things are to be expected. But he’d present you with things that you don’t necessarily want to see. He pushed you beyond the boundaries of what you thought you knew. He showed you wartime violence. Honest to God dead people. He made us listen to the tape of 9/11 victims jumping from double or triple digit storeys and splatting to the ground wetly. It honestly terrified me. One memorable lecture he brought in some bizarre tentacle hentai, just to present you with a different idea of sex, one that perhaps you hadn’t considered. He’d warn you, of course. He’d give you the chance to escape. But I never did, because I trusted that what he wanted to show us was worth watching, for one reason or another. Except the three-thousand times he busted out Happy Tree Friends and South Park. But even then, he enjoyed them so much because they were such subversions.

He gave us breaks in exams. He actually announced that he was turning a blind eye to anyone that wanted to take notes out in these breaks. He put a Nightwish filmclip in the final exam. And when we talked about it? The next lesson, he had burned copies of Nightwish CDs and DVDs that I didn’t have.

I know this probably doesn’t mean a much to a lot of you. But I bring him up because I often think of him, sometimes when I can’t sleep, and I wonder where he is and what he’s doing, and what I would say to him if I had the chance. “Dear Aaron, you pretty much changed my life for the better, and I can’t thank you enough for the person I am today”? Doesn’t even come close. But the point is moot. I can’t see myself ever getting that chance. The last day before graduation, he told us he was getting fired from SIBT, and was using it as a means of just getting out for a while. He hated SIBT, and constantly berated them, both to their, uh, “face” and to us. But despite this dislike, and the fact that he had a real lecturing job over at Macquarie, he stayed at SIBT for as long as he could, so he could help out people like me, who just sucked at learning the traditional way.

The last I heard, he was taking his yacht out to the Heads with food supplies and, I imagine, a hefty supply of coke, and flipping a coin to see whether he would sail South or North. I don’t know how long that voyage was meant to be. I have no means of knowing whether he got, I dunno, boarded by pirates or swept away in a heavy storm, or hell, sailed right around Australia and is living a few doors down from me.

But wherever he is, I hope he’s still out there, inspiring people like me. I hate to think of the people that he could influence into being something more, that would miss out on that kind of opportunity if he stopped teaching. I wish I could tell you how much, retrospectively, he means to me. I can honestly say that I don’t think I would be where I am, without him. And I like where I am. And I disliked where I was. So this is an infinitely good thing.

… Sorry for wanking on a bit. I haven’t had a lot of sleep.

Why I Love: City of Villains

Tim — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:13:08 GMT

As the history - or more accurately, this slightly faded receipt in my hand - tells it, on the second of December 2005, at 4:47 PM precisely, I walked into EB Games Carousel and purchased the City of Villains Collector’s DVD Edition for the princely sum of $74.85, beginning an on-and-off love affair that would last over three years.

City of Villains was pretty much my first MMO, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. And while I can look back and suspect that my shine for it might still be slightly rose-tinted for that naivete, I’ve since tried other MMO’s - World of Warcraft (for two weeks), Tabula Rasa (for six hours), Ultima Online (for… well, thirty minutes) - and I’ve even spent the last year balls-deep in development of another MMO. None of these games, no matter who I played them with, no matter how good the anecdotes about them, no matter how much I enjoyed working on them, none of these games have ever kept me interested, kept me excited and kept me coming back again and again like City of Villains.

As you may or may not know, the people behind City of Villains, Cryptic Studios, are currently working on another superhero-themed MMO called Champions Online. Naturally this sort of news is exciting to me, and while discussing it with my friends, all the good memories from the City of Villains days came flooding back. Our incessant talking about those halcyon days was enough to convince Jess that it was time to try it for herself, and so a few weeks ago we fired it up, and we haven’t looked back since.

There have been probably three distinct City of Villains eras for me before this one, and though I’ve always been pleased with the game’s ongoing development each time I’ve restarted, logging in again for the first time in nearly two years really floored me with the amount of improvements that they’ve been quietly crowbarring in. Though I’ve always loved the game to pieces, it has always had some distinctly glaring issues, or what I would consider to be incredibly obvious design decisions that needed to be made but which just weren’t. This time around, I could not help but be amazed at just how far they had come along in addressing those concerns. In fact, I’ve been enjoying playing it so much that I decided it was about time to write it all down and tell the world exactly why.

1. Costumes

Most, if not all, other MMO’s force you to begin the game as an ugly template of a character, letting you choose between 6-10 (if you’re lucky) different options for the way you look and shoving you into a world populated by countless other people who look exactly like you. As you level up and find better gear, you might start to look slightly unique. Maybe, if you’re willing to sink hours of your life into it, you’ll find the armour set that only two hundred other people are wearing. But not in City of Villains, because the first thing you do when you make your character is sit down and get gobsmacked at just how many goddamn options there are for your appearance.

No other game even comes close to the variety of what City of Villains has on offer. Not only can you adjust every aspect of your physical size including height, bulk and weight, as well as scaling your facial features, but the game offers you unlimited combinations of what must surely be over several thousand different costume pieces, all of which can be coloured or textured to your liking. You can be helmeted, armoured, brain hanging out, hooded, insectoid, scaly, freaky, glowing, winged, even wielding a goddamn shovel in your fist if that’s what pleases you.

What’s the end result of this? You can look as absolutely and completely badass as you want at level goddamn one. The game doesn’t force you to grind for months just to get a glimpse of what cool looks like, only to find that once you get there every other motherfucker around you is wearing the same thing. Your character is uniquely yours because you created it. And you don’t just get one costume either: at levels 20, 30, 40 and 50 you can unlock extra costumes, and switch between them at will. Getting sick of your schoolgirl wear? Current mission call for a bit of class? Open the costumes menu and change! Instant success.

But the costume madness doesn’t end there! As you level up, you unlock extra costume options, including the ability to surround your character in a completely customisable glowing aura just so everybody can see what a high-level motherfucker they are dealing with. And you can purchase recipes from other players on the Black Market to give your character access to crazy kit like fairy wings, dragon wings and even rocket boots. And the character creator allows you to save and load costumes to your hard drive, letting you experiment to your heart’s content without ever losing anything. By taking the aesthetics out of the level-grind-treadmill, City of Villains gives you a game where you can feel cool and unique as soon as you step out of the tutorial. And it is a good feeling.

2. Getting Around

So once you’ve got your beautiful unique character, it’s time to go somewhere with them. Now, one of the things I hate the most about MMO’s is nearly all of them making getting from place to place a chore. They insist on having huge, beautiful vistas and monstrous sprawling landscapes and this is, undeniably, a good thing. But once you’ve seen them two or three times and you just want to get the fuck on with it, you find out that they don’t think you’re good enough for any sort of reasonably fast travel until you’re level bajillion and can afford the necessary mortgage to buy yourself a horse. Not the case in City of Villains.

From as early as level three - which is, say, 15 minutes of work for even the chronically lazy player - your character gets access to jet packs, jump packs and all sorts of malarkey that let them soar majestically from place to place in seconds. Those are temporary in nature of course, but they’re enough to not only keep you from having to pound the pavement like a chump, but to get you all the way to level fourteen where you unlock one of the coolest things City of Villains has to offer: travel powers.

Whether you choose to super-leap, fly, teleport or just plain run really fast, travel powers open up the entire game to you. There is nowhere you cannot go, no building you cannot scale. No feeling is greater than bounding from rooftop to rooftop across the city, or soaring over the ocean with nothing in sight for miles. Because City of Villains uses a proper physics engine, jumping and climbing in-game feels solid, kinetic and real. Unlike other MMO’s where your character balks in terror at even the most knee-high fence, City of Villains lets you climb on houses, scuttle along ledges, tight-rope along power lines, bound up sheer cliff faces, all in a completely believable and intuitive fashion. You really feel that you are present in the world, and that everywhere is open for you to explore.

And it doesn’t matter where you do go exploring, because one of the beautiful things about City of Villains is that you can never, ever get lost. Finding your way around is a snap, because you can open up your map at any time, click on the marker of where you want to be, and the game gives you an instant, spatial heads-up view of the direction you need to go, and a ticking counter telling you just how far away you are. Simply head that way - using your travel powers to bound effortlessly over any obstacles or enemies in your way - and you’ll get where you need to be in no time. It is an almost insultingly simple system, and it boggles my mind that it hasn’t been appropriated by other games. Using a number of incredibly simple tricks, City of Villains makes it fun just to move around. But fortunately for everybody, there’s more to the game than simply getting from place to place.

3. Combat

City of Villains would be a pretty poor rendition of a superhero game if it didn’t give you the opportunity to knock helpless motherfuckers around like bowling pins. Luckily for us it gives you this opportunity, and in spades. The physics engine not only gives us realistic jumping, but allows us fast-paced and thoroughly visceral combat. Unlike, say, World of Warcraft, where “combat” means “two people standing an arms length away from each other and gently flailing until one person has collapsed”, City of Villains takes combat for what it really is.

You can propel people backwards off rooftops and ledges with well aimed blasts of concussive force. You can smash people into the sky with a classic, cartoon-style wind-up punch. You can stomp the ground, the shockwaves sending dozens of nearby enemies flying into walls and skidding across the concrete. You can summon a gale-force wind to blast a group of helpless chumps off their feet. You can pound your hammer into a poor foe and smash him into the ground, laughing as he staggers back to his feet, dazed. It feels real and exciting and you never want to stop. When Warhammer Online said an ability had knockback, it meant there was a small chance your opponent might skid backwards several inches. When City of Villains says knockback, it means your enemies better pack a goddamn lunch because they are going to get knocked all the way into motherfucking EVE Online.

But combat doesn’t just feel great, it looks great and handles great, too. The visuals and animations are top-notch and the combat, particularly at high-levels when the particle effects start flying fast and thick, is simply a joy to watch. Not only this though, but City of Villains actually generates realistic physics debris after many battles, littering the corridors and tunnels of your missions with proof of your badassery. You can kick these bullet casings and rubble chunks around just to amuse yourself, or even go so far as to swoop down the corridor in flight, watching the bullet casings swirl around in the air currents generated in your wake. It’s totally gratuitous, totally unnecessary, and totally gorgeous.

Combat is easy to control as well, allowing you to queue attacks even when they’re not ready to use, and even offering you the ability to auto-fire some abilities so that they constantly activate. If you only have one power so far and are sick of pressing the key to activate it, or combat is too frantic for you to remember to cast heals on your group, simply control-click on the ability and stop worrying. It’s beautiful and simple and addictive.

4. Gameplay and Level Progression

Many other games struggle with keeping players consistently interested, or place unnecessary hurdles in the way of allowing friends to play together. For example, during my time playing Warhammer Online, it quickly became apparent that my friends, who played staggeringly more often than I did, were actually impossible to play alongside. They were simply too high level, and there was no way for me to take part in any of their quests, fight by their side in the PVP zones or even get into their general area without spending 35 minutes trekking around featureless brown terrain.

City of Villains takes a different approach. The entire world is open to you at any time, and instead of quest lines, players are given missions by their contacts. Each mission is essentially an instanced dungeon set through a door or portal in the world, only accessible by the players that have that mission. If a player is in a team, all players in the team can enter the mission also, and the game automatically scales the mission up or down in difficulty as the numbers in the group fluctuate. This means that the missions are always appropriate for the team taking them on. Team leaders can see every team member’s mission and choose the team’s mission appropriately, and if several players in a team share the same mission, completing it for one person will complete it for all of them. This means that everyone advances together as efficiently as possible. You can even enter into a level pact with another character, meaning that experience is split between the two of you. So if you play your character every night for a week, even when your friend logs on, you’ll both be the same level and ready to kick ass and take names.

Even then, it is of course possible for friends to have characters who are of drastically different levels. In any other MMO, this would make it impossible for them to play together. Fortunately, City of Villains has implemented a system to counter this. If a high-level player wants to help out their low-level friend(s), they can malefactor themselves to bring their character down to the lower level, allowing them to fight alongside their friend(s) without being so over-powered as to take all the experience from their friends. On the other hand, if a low-level character wants to fight alongside the big boys, they can become a high-level character’s lackey, which brings them up to one level below that of their boss. This increases all of their health and endurance to the higher level, as well as adjusting their powers to that level of effectiveness, allowing them to fight easily alongside their friends without having to worry about getting picked off. It is a truly inventive approach and makes it possible for friends of all levels to enjoy gaming together.

Even with all this, it is still possible to eventually run out of storyline-related missions to do. When this happens, if you don’t feel like moving onto another zone, you can always just pull out a newspaper and thumb through it. Perhaps you’ll find an article about how some upstart gang lord by the docks is calling you out! What to do, sports fans? As a villain of course, your only sensible approach is to head to his family home, break in, and murder his elderly grandfather. These simple, one-off missions with no over-arching storyline are more than just instant gratification. Do enough of them and somebody will take notice of you, offering you the chance to have some real fun: running a Mayhem Mission.

Mayhem Missions are a delightful example of the developers sitting back and going to themselves: “We’ve got physics, right? You know what would be cool? Just fucking tearing shit up, man. Let’s make that happen.” And so they did, dumping you and your team in the middle of the city, with 15 minutes on the clock to rob a bank and cause as much carnage as physically possible. In the normal environment, only enemies are able to be damaged. But Mayhem Missions take it a step further: you can blow up cars, payphones, trucks, parking meters, barrels… almost anything. And the game rewards you with bonus time for your efforts, dumping another three minutes on the clock as you casually detonate your way through another carpark, sending dozens of SWAT team members flying through the air in flames. It is an adrenaline shot right to the eyeball of the game, and a great way to get the pulse racing.

Once you’ve built your character and got them to a reasonably high level, like any game, it is of course possible to start feeling discontented and want to start again. But what if you could run two alternate builds of your character, swapping between them at any time? What if one version of your character piled all their points into offense, but found she wasn’t that useful in team missions? Fortunately, City of Villains lets you do this, allowing you to visit an Arbiter at any time in the game and swap to a completely different version of your character, with all different power choices and abilities. It’s a beautiful, easy way to stay interested and keep your character performing at maximum.

5. Everything Else

Visually, City of Villains looks awesome. It has a beautiful and unique aesthetic, unlike that found in any other MMO. It has an incredibly rich and varied backstory, with all the different factions and characters having a wealth of information to sort through, but it never, ever shoves it down your throat. Each of the classes available, while fairly generic MMO archetypes, fulfill unique roles and provide endless replayability thanks to the large amount of powers available. And I haven’t even really mentioned the supergroup bases: completely customisable environments that your supergroup (or “guild” if you will) can fill with whatever items, weapons and furniture they desire. If you’re brave enough, you can even invade other people’s supergroup bases and try and take their stuff for yourself! Or, like me, you can just fill an entire room with photocopiers. The choice is yours.

I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of people don’t like City of Villains. A lot of people really enjoy grinding, questing, and knowing that they can move as fast as they do, and look as cool as they do, because they’ve put the hours in to deserve it. A lot of people enjoy waiting an hour to get forty people together to run a large-scale raid, then doing it again every night for a week because the dragon at the end didn’t drop the helmet they need. I personally think that’s bullshit, and I would question any game which actively gets in the way of the player having fun right from the get-go.

A lot of people also find City of Villains repetitive or frustrating. When it first came out, there was basically only one mission arc from levels one to ten, and every new character had to run it over and over again, which meant killing a whole pile of snake people. It is true to say that when I first played it, I found myself becoming bored or frustrated, and it was all too easy to stop playing. But I would urge anybody reading this who has been burned in the past by City of Villains to fire it up again, and give it another shot. There’s been so many tweaks to so many aspects that it may as well be a different game entirely, and it’s not hard to fall in love all over again.

I leave you with this group shot of our team of second-rate, washed-up supervillains. From left to right: Count Geiger (Michael), The Electrojogger (John), The Pinky Promise (Jess), Ms. Hellfire (Debari) and finally myself as Mechanigranny.

We’re currently rocking it on the Triumph server. Perhaps you can join us.

Matter Of Fact, I’ve Got It Now

Tim — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:26:02 GMT

Having told, and retold, this story more times than I can actually remember, I figure it’s about time that I immortalised it in print. This has two benefits: first of all, the next time somebody asks me about it I can write down this site’s address, slip it into their shirt pocket and slap them on the shoulder in an overly familiar and slightly condescending manner, saving myself time and energy while simultaneously reinforcing my image as a huge wanker. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, Jess - who has heard the story approximately seventeen-and-a-half bajillion times - will no longer have to restrain herself from choking me to death every time the story needs retelling.

But what is the story, Tim. What’s it all about. Well, I’m glad you asked…

You see, I think Victoria Bitter is great. Not the drink, of course - it tastes like somebody accidentally spilled yeast into paint stripper and let it ferment. Not the drink, no thanks, but the… the meta. Everything about Victoria Bitter - its history of sportsmen and moustaches, its constant presence at barbeques, race riots and other quintessentially white-Australian haunts and even its delightful advertisements with their barely restrained homo-eroticism and their chest-butting, sheep-shearing, bicep-crunching, sweat-dripping machismo. All these things, I find utterly fascinating. But there is nothing about Victoria Bitter that I love so much as its theme music.

You know the one. Dun dun dun, da-da-da-da dah nah, da dah nah, dah nah, da-da-da nah…. It’s great. It is, isn’t it. It’s practically the second national anthem, or at least the third if you count Waltzing Matilda. And quite frankly I do, because any song about a guy who steals a sheep and then leaps into a pond to get away has my vote.

Anyway, the urge came upon me a while back to actually try and acquire this theme music for myself. If it was in my possession, then I would be able to play it any time I wanted. No more sitting glued to the car radio waiting for an advert to come on for me, no sir! I hastened immediately to the nearest computron and found the Fosters website, hoping that they would be able to provide me with the musical crack cocaine that I so desperately craved.

In fact, they didn’t. They didn’t have anything at all, other than a glistening photo of a Victoria Bitter bottle and an angry paragraph describing to me in detail just how much more chest hair I would spontaneously grow with every sheep-shearing swig. I was lost. I was hopeless. So I did what any sane man would do in my situation.

I filed a support ticket.

A reasonable request from a reasonable man. Surely Fosters would not stand in the way of my divine imperative! Two days later, just as my vision began to blur and the shakes set in, a reply arrived.

Yes! I eagerly downloaded the file, told the stereo to kick it to the max and hit play.

No dice. It was not the Victoria Bitter theme music. In fact, it was an mp3 recording of a radio advertisement about the Victoria Bitter theme music. Close, but not quite. It was clear they needed clarification. I pulled my broken heart together long enough to compose a reply.

They had been good before - would they be good again? I waited eagerly to see if they would return to me. Days passed, then weeks. Then months. I returned to a normal life, and forgot my dark past. That is, until December, when I happened to chance across the old email in my inbox. I immediately tried to fire off another reply to dear ol’ Betty but The Man slapped me in the face, telling me that my incident number was too old and had been closed due to lack of activity. They had forgotten me!

I raced to the Fosters website, retrieved my password details and opened another support ticket. I would not be denied.

Here I was, putting my heart and soul on the line. Not to mention a 5-by-4-foot piece of polystyrene on which I had clumsily glued a Victoria Bitter related cartoon. Would they respond? It turns out they would, in fact. Four days later, I heard from the lovely and talented Moira:

Yes! There it was, in black and white pixels: an attached mp3 file promisingly labeled: “01 VB Theme Music”. I downloaded it, cranked the stereo, and hit play.

Glorious music. Sweet, beery majesty. No radio ads, no voiceovers, nothing but the Victoria Bitter Theme Music, a sweeping, uplifting piece of Australiana that looped over and over for five minutes and twenty amazing seconds. It was everything I wanted, and it was mine at last.

Jess, bless her soul, indulged me for the entire length of the song before politely asking me to not do that ever again. I agreed. I also kept my word, and sent Moira a picture of the art project I did. Here it is:

Moira never did get back to me. I guess they didn’t like what they saw, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I got what I needed, and if they can’t see fit to decorate their offices with the most definitive piece of Australian artwork since the time of Frederick McCubbin, well, that’s their business. Me, I’m just happy to be able to share this music with the world.

Matter of fact, I’ve uploaded it now.

They call me Lolspotter. (Chapter 1)

Jess — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:45:41 GMT

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I discovered these lolthings while adventuring in deepest, darkest My Place. Also, Daniel’s place. All lols are as found and not altered in anyway. Stay tuned kids, for more loladventures with LOLSPOTTER.

A nice holiday

Jess — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:27:14 GMT

Well, I’m early for my lunchdate, so blogging when I have nothing better to do has always worked in the past, right? Only now - I’m doing it on my phone. So yeah, spelling mistakes. Watch out for those.

Between this and listening to music, I’m sure I’m giving my battery a run for it’s money. Or, well, my money, I guess.

Man it shits me that different songs are different volumes. There should be some kind of normalizing software built in. Or at least some kind of volume control on the headset so I don’t have to go digging it outta my pocket every five minutes.

Jeez, I’m sorry I’d I don’t have any life changing epiphanies for you! I’m pretty freaking hungry, not to mention thirsty. Does that count? I mean, that’s pretty life changing, right? If I don’t get something soon I’ll DIE. If that’s not life changing, I don’t know what is.

Alright, lemme think.

Oh right. So I got a call from Thingz in Belmont today. They want to interview me for a job. Yay, right? Well, not really. I mean, hell, I could get money, and lots of it. But… is it wrong that I don’t want to work full time? I have no problems with working. Even working full time. I just… can’t face the same thing everyday. Two jobs that equal fulltime of something. I just can’t face waking up, working all day and then going I bed to wake up and do it again. Particularly in a job I have no real interest in.

I feel really whingy, and in the “current economic climate”, as Tim would put it, I know there are lots of people looking for work that can’t get any at the moment, and I’ve put a lot of resumes out, and this is the only reply. I’m just… hesitant to invest so much time in a job I don’t want and whose skillset is so basic that I won’t even take anything away from the experience except piles and piles of money.

Goddamn, and now I’m talking myself out of it. And Tim did such a good job of talking me into it this morning.

Man, I haven’t listened to a lot of music lately. Basically my intake has been nonexistent since moving to Perth since I no longer spend 6+ hours in front of MSN talking to Tim, where all my music listening used to take place. But I’m slowly rediscovering my playlist. Slowly, slowly but surely.

I sort of feel like it’s stagnating though. And I don’t have the patience to discover new tracks like I used to. I listen so infrequently now that I just want to hear the goodstuff, not try and listen to new things. Which makes me sad. Oh so sad.

Having said that, funny story. I was going through Wikipedia last night, via the random page function, and found the page of a band that sounded interesting. Couple of iTunes purchases later, and, uh, yep. I guess it wasn’t that funny afterall.

There are flowers on the seat next to me. There aren’t any trees around of the same type, so they couldn’t have blown here, despite the substantial wind. I like to imagine the story of these flowers, like somebody brought them here after a break with a loved one, and they got left behind. Bittersweet.

Ah, young/old/middle-age love/courtship/marriage/flowerlover.

Yep. I don’t even know any more. For complete juxtaposition, I can’t wait to get so drunk I can’t feel anything anymore on Saturday. That’s going to be a nice holiday.

On Epiphanies

Tim — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:24:52 GMT

Here’s the thing.

I spent my entire childhood drawing. I devoured paper, notebooks and sketchpads, I collected books about how to draw cartoons and superheroes, I spent hours painfully slaving over tracing paper in order to blatantly plaigarise pictures I found interesting and draw my own costumes over the top. I owned entire Garfield collections, read every Tintin and every Asterisk and Obelix until I knew them back to front. It was nuts. It was crazy. It was great.

Then I turned eleven, and the strangest thing happened. I discovered video games.

Video games are addictive enough for any kid. But when you’ve spent your whole life drawing and suddenly you realise that these are drawings that move, and walk and jump at your command, something clicks and you say I am going to make some of these and good golly they are going to be awesome. I fell, and I fell hard. And so it began, years of planning and talking idly with friends about the game system we would create, designing controllers, company logos, bragging about the awesome graphics this thing is going to put out Jesus Christ man this thing is going to be the best thing ever can you imagine.

As it turned out, imagining is all an eleven year old can really do, aside from a whole pile of what are now completely embarassing sketches. But then I got older, and working through high school and into university, nothing ever dampened my desire to be part of the video game industry. I even enrolled in a double degree in Computer Science and Multimedia, thinking these would be the best things to combine to get me where I needed to go. Turns out they were working on a Games Technology degree anyway, so when that dropped, I dropped everything else and got on board.

I had so much fun at university. The Games Technology degree taught me so much about myself and about others, about the industry and the tools you use. I made some amazing friends and had some amazing times. And though I’ve never worked harder in my life, I never stopped enjoying it. We pulled 35 hour laboratory sessions, worked every weekend for 6 months to meet deadlines and stopped living our lives altogether, but we did it. We graduated and then, after a fashion, we found work.

I was lucky enough to get my foot in the door at Interzone. Getting a games development job in Perth is hard enough, especially at Interzone who at the time basically maintained a policy of total media blackout and radio silence. It wasn’t easy, and I was rejected twice before I finally got in - doing web development, of all things - but I did it. I made it and I was happy.

Working at Interzone has been the best job of my life. I will always count myself lucky to be able to work alongside such amazing, interesting and talented people for as long as I have. I found myself no longer living for the weekend, looking forward to getting in every day and tackling new issues, finding new ways to apply myself creatively and knowing that I was appreciated and rewarded for the challenges I overcame.

That was a year ago.

When I was young, I couldn’t put my pen down. I was always coming up with ideas, dumb sketches, getting excited over this or that. Now, when I come home from work - nothing. It’s just… not there. It’s not that I don’t want to draw or paint or sketch, I just can’t muster the energy to think about what I would need to do - I’ve taken all the creative energy I had, burned it up at work and left myself empty.

So, I fire up the ol’ video games, shoot a couple people’s face clean off, and call it a night. A night not wasted, I tell myself, because I’ve had a good day at work. I’m enjoying my job and I’m building a great career, after all. This is what I spent the last ten years working and striving for. This is what I want from life, right?

And though I am having fun, I am enjoying myself, and I guess I am building the start of a great career, in my heart of hearts I start to increasingly realise that… well, no. This isn’t what I want from life. It’s fun to be part of something bigger than yourself for while, and there’s great satisfaction in knowing that you’re appreciated, but when you take a few steps back it’s not hard to realise that you’ve just spent the last year building someone else’s sandcastle.

Ten years from now, if I keep doing what I’m doing, all I’ll have to show for it are some screenshots on the internet and my name in a couple of credit rolls. Twenty years from now, I might have worked up enough industry credit and connections to make it to a senior position, from which I might be able to have some slight say in what sort of shape somebody else’s sandcastle takes. Thirty years from now, if I’m lucky - very lucky - somebody will pay me a whole lot of money to design a sandcastle for them. Forty years from now, I’ll be too old to work in the industry anymore, they’ll cut me off, give me a brand new RoboSpine 9000 as a going-away present and send me on the first bus home and in all those years I will never, ever, get to build my own goddamn sandcastle.

At the end of the day, I think I’d rather be able to tell my grandkids that I was a cartoonist, writer and illustrator who was privileged enough to work on some video games, than end up bitterly recounting to their expectant young faces another story of how, many long years ago, their grandfather used to be quite good at the old cartoons. I can’t bear to think of a future where, no matter how successful I get, I will have forgotten what it means to do something for myself.

So, I’ve decided to get out.

I love my work and I’m hoping I won’t have to ditch it just yet. But it’s draining me, badly, and I fear I might have no other choice. Even if it means working shitty retail - even it means working good retail, or data entry, or something, anything to keep me afloat and fired up while I make the transition. I will do whatever it takes.

I wanted to work in video games. I sacrificed a lot to get my foot in the door and take a shot at the dream, and I don’t regret any of it for a single moment. And maybe this is all wrong, and maybe I’ll return a year from now, sobbing at game development’s skirts and begging for her to take me back, swearing that I can change. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things right now.

But for the first time in my life, I’m savouring the uncertainty.

Amazingly amazing

Jess — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:35:37 GMT

Beautiful.

What an amazing blog. It looks just amazing. Amazingly amazing. I’m amazed.

Honestly, I’m almost speechless with how good it looks. Almost, but I still gotta blog, right? But seriously, Tim has done an incredible job, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart.

Tim, thank you.

Together, we will make beautiful writings together. Or rather, separately, but they’ll be published together. And look awesome in the process. FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

I’m trying not to gush here, but really. Wow. Still, gotta move on to something new and shiny and interesting!

Well now. It’s been about a million years since I last blogged, so I’m not going to try and recount everything, cause that’d be boring, and hell, I can’t remember it all anyway. I have just returned from Sydney, so I could regale you will hilarious anecdotes from there, but honestly, I can’t even remember that far back. It was mostly sleeping really late, reading awesome books, catching up with my family and friends and spending quality time, in the form of every second of every day, with my Timly (AWWWWWGHHHH).

I’d like to say I had a great time, but really, without Tim there, the BadTimes would’ve at least equaled the GoodTimes, and that’s a ratio that really could’ve been improved on, quite frankly. It was… difficult being back at home. I’d forgotten the extent to which my family doesn’t function as a normal one. That and some things at home needing sorting out, and some money problems, meant I broke down in tears on more than one occasion. I was looking forward to coming home, but was afraid of what I’d find here.

On that note, things seem to be working themselves out more or less. Some problems have resolved themselves, others are rearing their ugly head, the money troubles are changing but not for better or worse, really. Just changing.

For example, I come home to find my company in receivership, and all staff but the store manager and assistant manager let go. So now, having lost the EB job, I’m completely unemployed. A feeling I haven’t really experienced since I’ve moved here, let alone since we’ve had bills to pay and food to buy. Combined with Tim’s company giving THEIR entire staff a hard time on the money front, we’re a little concerned.

Blah, blah, blah, enough about money.

Fable 2 came out, World Tour came out, Rock Band finally hit Australia, we got a PS3, there’s been a lot of action on the video game front. Fable was every bit as excellent as I expected it to be. I’m waiting for the story to wear off a little so I can play it again, only different. Y’know. I’d like to pick up Storm of Zehir at some point, but I’ll be putting it off till it drops some more, and I get some income. Obviously.

Also, the WeekLAN this Thursday. Hopefully someone will have games my computer can handle that I can steal sample temporarily. But at the least I’ll snag borrow some Futurama, and maybe some of season 3 of Heroes.

I’m sorry I made you take your time off for Christmas, Tim, instead of the LAN. I didn’t even think. I’m sorry.

Well, Tim’s on his way home, and we’ve got to jump back on the gym wagon, though really, the leap itself should be more than enough exercise. And I’ve more writing to do elsewhere.

So ends the first post of Jess the Eloquent of Buttsvale.