New Year, Same Fear

Happy new year folks!

I’ve been working on a number of projects lately (should be ready to reveal one in a few weeks) and as such have been neglecting the Wyrmlog a bit. But I figured I should jump on and let people know I’m still alive.

So let’s see…

Trump has invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president. I have reached the point where I am no longer surprised by anything the maniac in the Whitehouse does – each new atrocity just makes me feel even more tired and even more sad. Maybe the mid-terms will castrate the orange monstrosity, or maybe we’ll be stuck with him wielding absolute power until 2029, who knows?

The Bondi terrorist attack. Appalling. Just fucking appalling. And what’s worse is all sides of politics jumping on board to exploit the hell out of it. I think it’s fair to say that Albanese has made a major fumble by not calling a Royal Commission and has now been painted into a corner where the opposition can tear him to shreds for resisting a Commission, or tear him to shreds for ‘flip-flopping’ if he does call a Commission. Zionists and pro-Israel Fascists are jumping on the attack to label any criticism of Israel or support for Palestine as antisemitic, while the genuine antisemites are cackling with glee over dead kids and shattered families. And the Jewish population are caught in the middle and living in fear. The whole thing is utterly fucked, which is of course why the unspeakable scum that carried out the attack did it.

(For the record. Disliking Israel because they’re Jewish – antisemitism. Disliking Israel because they’re behaving like a bunch of cunts – not antisemitism.)

On less serious matters, a major storm swept through Perth (on the Sunday of the attack as it happens) and knocked out power to huge areas of the state, and the city, including my complex. I was standing at my window just after 4:00 in the afternoon watching the horizontal rain switch back and forth when the power went out. I didn’t mind so much at first as it had been a disgustingly hot day and the storm pulled the temperature right down. The initial estimate for restoration (checked on my phone) was only a few hours so I did some reading, then got the bus over to Morley (which still had power) and had dinner at Varsity. I then decided to kill even more time by walking home.

Walking through the suburbs as it got darker and darker, with fallen branches and occasional uprooted trees everywhere was distinctly eerie (I tried to capture the mood with some photos but my stupid phone lightened them all). The weirdest bit was when I passed a guy doing some work in his yard by the light of LED lamps mounted on his ute. I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go and sit in the light to get relief from the oppressive darkness – a feeling I suspect dates back 2 million years to the African Savannah when we’d huddle around the fires to stay safe from the lions and hyenas.

By the time I got home they’d revised the time to restore power until the early hours of the morning, so I went to bed and without my fan and CPAP machine slept extremely poorly. I eventually crawled out of bed at around 5:00am, and on noting there was still no power had a cold sponge-bath and caught the bus into work.

Power was restored mid-morning, but my fridge had been off for about 18 hours, so I had to throw out a whole load of food I’d only just bought on Saturday. Thankfully I was able to claim $120 from the power company for it, so all’s well that ends more-or-less well.

Oh, and the rather lovely tree that the council spent so much money moving from the train station to the library to save it from redevelopment was snapped clean off at the base, so that’s sad.

On another matter it has come to my attention that the Wyrmlog has lost all styling. This is what happens when you modify a Theme directly rather than creating a child theme (because you have no idea what you’re doing) and then maybe ten years later absentmindedly turn on automatic Theme updates, causing your changes to be overwritten. I will get everything re-styled when I have a minute, which could be any time between today and the Unix Timestamp Epoch (did I mention that I have been semi-officially diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD?).

The second season of Fallout has dropped and I’m very much enjoying it. So far it’s not quite as good as the first season, but it would be insanely difficult for it to be (in my opinion the first season is just about the greatest TV series ever made). I can’t help wondering if the two Mr Houses are a way to keep Mr House alive after the events of New Vegas – the Courier may well have killed a Mr House but did they kill the Mr House? Time will tell…

I have voted in the Hottest 100. Expect a post about my choices soon.

That’s about it I guess. Go make your own entertainment!

Operation Sunburst

The Fallout fan film Operation Sunburst is pretty good!

The dialogue probably needed another round of editing to handle exposition in a way that doesn’t have characters telling other characters things they should already know, calling rocket-launcher armed troops ‘sappers’ seems odd, the mutant qilin cavalry are a bit silly (and why are they using cavalry to attack a fortified building?), and it’s weird that the NCR don’t seem to have reinvented the mortar, but overall really well done! Highly recommended for any Fallout fan!

Roll on the 17th!

He Gets Everywhere

Andrew Eldritch pops up in the most unexpected places. From the Wikipedia article on Numbers Stations

In the British television spy drama Spooks episode “Nuclear Strike”, a Russian sleeper agent is awoken by a numbers station broadcast to detonate a nuclear suitcase bomb in central London. The radio broadcast states in Russian, “2.5.0.0.2.5, Finland Red, Egypt White, It is twice blest, It is twice blest, rain from heaven, rain from heaven.”

What’s to be done about that?

A List of Entirely Fictional Women I am Embarrassingly Obsessed With

One of a series of posts documenting my precarious mental state for purposes of education and enlightenment.

Miranda Feigelsteen – Mysterious Ways (TV Show)
Miki – FreakAngels (Comic)
Abby Lockheart – ER (TV Show)
Lorelai Gilmore – Gilmore Girls (TV Show)
Claudia Donovan – Warehouse 13 (TV Show)
Talla Keyali – The Orville (TV Show)
Adora Belle Dearheart – Going Postal (Novel)
Abby Sciuto – NCIS (TV Show)
Susan Ptolemy – Giant Days (Comic)
Sara Sidle – CSI (TV Show)

I’m sure there are more, so I’ll add them as I think of them.

Shaggy, this isn’t a Weed…

Alan Titchmarsh: This is a holly, but it’s not spiky, it’s a small leaved form named Ilex crenata…

Me: Ilex crenata! Prowl off! Jump an prance! Ilex crenata! Prowl off! Jump an prance! Ilex crenata gal prowl off! Gal yuh fi jump an prance!

Breakin’

I discovered this weekend that the ABC – in their ongoing attempt to fill up their plethora of channels with anything they can haul out of the archives – have finally run out of episodes of Love Your Garden and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and resorted to rebroadcasting 90’s classic (for a certain definition of “classic”) Heartbreak High.

(I am slightly miffed at the absence of Love Your Garden as I have developed quite the crush on Katie Rushworth. There’s nothing quite like a woman who’s willing to get her hands dirty while pronouncing /a/ as /ʊ/…)

As a teen in the 90s I was presumably the target demographic for Heartbreak High, but I considered myself far too cultured to waste time watching it (I was actually nowhere near as cultured as I thought, I was just a contrarian douchebag). So prior to yesterday I’d never seen as much as a single episode. I did catch an episode yesterday however and good lord! It was easily the most awkwardly 90s thing that I have ever seen!

The episode started with a girl rapping in the schoolyard with all the other students gathered around clapping in time. I can categorically state that this is not something that ever actually happened in any Australian high school in the 90s ever (if you remember differently then you are hallucinating). Her rap was about how school sucks, and the teachers don’t like this, and so after a discussion in the staff room about how awful rap music is (naturally including a claim that it’s ‘not even music’) they ban rapping. This upsets the students to the point that they stage a sit-in to protest their right to rap. After some back and forward the teachers back down and the right to rap is restored. The episode ends with an impromptu rock concert, with serious “It’s a party Marge, it doesn’t have to make sense!” vibes, and – of course – rapping.

There was a B-plot involving a guy harassing a girl (the rapping girl? I can’t remember, the characters are all so interchangeable…) to go out with him, and then roping his mates in to harass her as well. These days that would be presented as a bad thing, but this is the 90s when people were stupid. In the end he wins her over by completely changing his personal style, which is just as terrible a lesson in the opposite direction. And the style he chooses – oh good lord!

Urge to punch growing…

I did try and take a screenshot of it from the ABC’s iView service, but they’ve cunningly set the screen to blank itself when any kind of capture is attempted, so I’ll need to use the old ‘photograph the monitor’ trick so beloved of the technologically inept. In the meantime simply imagine all the worst excesses of 90s male fashion distilled into one human being. Curly hair with a lock strategically dangling across the forehead, tinted hippy sunglasses, an embroidered waistcoat, black baggy pants, multiple necklaces, the whole shebang. He looks like a goddamn clown! If anyone had turned up to my 90s high school wearing that, he would have been beaten to a pulp! I can say that with authority because – despite my status as a pathetic nerd – even I would have been lining up to deal out some justly deserved punishment.

Naturally the girl instantly falls for him – presumably because if a guy is desperate enough to dress up like a court jester to get your attention then he’ll do anything you ask.

So that’s Heartbreak High. Overall I don’t think contrarian, douchebag, teenage me missed very much by skipping it.

Just A Few Notes

Had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving dinner at Chae and Liz’s place on Friday. While everything was extremely excellent, the pecan pie was an absolute standout and is now one of my favourite foods.

I happened to stumble over Into the Spiderverse – which I’ve been meaning to see it ever since it came out – on TV the other week. It’s great! Easily the best movie I’ve seen all year. Great animation, great script, (dare I say it) heart warming story and just a fantastically enjoyable production. I’m also kind of embarrassed to admit that there’s just something about the film’s version of Doc Ock (Dr Oliva Octavius) that I find wildly attractive. She’s evil and insane, but extremely hot, and I don’t know what to do with that.

Lesser Known British Crime Solvers

Inspector Borse: Only solves murders in European stock exchanges.

Inspector Corse: The mouth on that man!

Inspector Force: Surprisingly gentle.

Inspector Gorse: Spends most of his time tramping around the moors.

Inspector Horse: The result of some misfiled paperwork at the Police mounted division.

Inspector Norse: Depressed, brooding and fond of drinking mead from a horn.

Inspector Sorce: Has a side job as a Sous-Chef

Inspector Worse: Ask for anyone else. Seriously.

Inspector Semaphore: We don’t talk about him.