So what, we’re using this blog as Twitter now?

I needed them to get into a restaurant to celebrate my birthday since open toed slippers apparently weren’t acceptable. I tried to pay for them but my dad wouldn’t let me, then…

Last night I dreamt that I was buying a pair of shoes from the girl in the office next door.

I have no idea what this means.

On the Democracy Front

Threats are coming thick and fast…

Well thankfully it looks like South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson has backed down over his ridiculous and anti-democratic laws concerning political blogging. Excellent!

For those late to the party, Atkinson got some new laws put in in South Australia this week forcing anyone who wants to post anything anywhere online about the upcoming state election to sign their comments with their real name and postcode. It seems that he was motivated to create such laws because he believed the opposition were using a false identity to harass him in the comments section of a local newspaper website (oh poor diddums!). Apparently this wouldn’t threaten free speech in any way because people could still say what they liked, they’d just have to say who they were at the same time (the fact that the option of anonymity is crucial to genuine free speech seems to have evaded his tiny mind).

In the face of (unsurprising) public outrage he’s had to back down and promised to retroactively cancel the laws after the election. He’s attributing this outrage to the “blogging generation”, which only goes to show how hopelessly out of touch he is.

Additionally, in a nice bit of irony it turns out that the ‘fake commenter’ created by the Liberal Party to harass him in the Adelaide Advertiser is in fact a real person who lives less that 500m from his office. Nice to know he keeps in touch with his electorate.

Of course Atkinson is the same guy who’s singlehandedly preventing an ‘R’ classification for computer games anywhere in the country, apparently on the basis that anyone who wants to play anything more sophisticated that Mario Cart is a ravening sociopath. He also claimed that the gamers lobby (who are trying to get such a classification set up) are sending him death threats – on the basis of one threatening letter that turned out to be related to a completely different case.

What can you say but roll on the election!

Social Energy Crash!

An excuse for appalling behaviour

One of the things about being both an Aspie and a severe introvert is that you have only a limited amount of social energy.

Social energy may be a bit of an odd concept for the majority of people out there (most of the population being extroverts) but basically it’s a measure of your ability to be around and interact with other people. Extroverts replenish their social energy reserves by being around other people – making them sort of social perpetual motion machines – but we introverts need time alone to recharge before we can go out and do stuff – even with people we like.

This was brought home to me particularly this weekend. By Friday my energy reserves were approaching critical and I intended to spend a quiet weekend in doing chores, chilling out and recharging. Then Fabes called me up and suggested we all (that is to say me, him, Ryan and Paula) get together on Saturday. Against my better judgement I accepted – not to say that it didn’t sound like fun, it’s just that I really needed time off from people.

So I headed over. We had a great time playing Munchkin and running through an really old Dragon Warriors RPG scenario (I controlled a surprisingly intelligent Scottish barbarian named Grignr and an apparently mute Sorcerer named Zzardoz, while Ryan ran a very English Knight named Sir Spiffington and a Mystic by the name of the Comte Merde de Gallo). We then hung around for ages watching late night TV (including the end of The Core which we mocked mercilessly and a promo piece on the Commonwealth Games in Delhi which we also mocked mercilessly then felt guilty about).

Now the plan was to spend the night and head home in the morning but by 1:00am my levels of social energy had completely crashed. As a result I was overcome with an intense need to get the hell out and retreat to my own territory, so I called a cab and bailed.

I spent most of Sunday asleep, getting up only to walk down to the village for some laundry detergent and to watch a couple of episodes of the Boosh (Trapped in a box by a cockney nutjob! ‘ave a cup a tea!). As a consequence my energy levels are now sufficient to see me through the working week, but I’m going to have to spend this weekend being totally anti-social to get back up to an acceptable level.

So, I guess my reasons for recounting this tale are to apologise to the gang for my sudden and rude departure, and to make a plea for understanding and tolerance for all my introverted kin out there. It’s not that we don’t like you – we just need time to recharge!

We need to get back in the Game!

No more cheese before bed for me…

Some kind of worm, at least 800 metres tall, impossibly thin but with a trumpet-like mouth stands over the city, screaming “I HAVE FOUND YOUR GOD!! I HAVE FOUND YOUR GOD!!” The ground starts to shake as a hundred metre tall tsunami – black as night – appears on the horizon and the crowds start to flee. “HERE COMES YOUR GOD!!” shrieks the worm…

Don’t you love those dreams that make you wonder just what the hell is going on in your subconscious?

Hottest 100 2009 – Folk Rock Uber Alles!

The results are in…

Well, the leak was right (although it was hardly a stretch) and Mumford and Sons have won the Triple J Hottest 100 for 2009. I can’t say I’m jumping up and down with joy or anything, but it’s a decent song, so good on them.

Three of my selected songs got in, specifically Blue Juice with Broken Leg at number 5, Lisa Mitchell’s Coin Laundry at number 7 and John Butler’s One Way Road at number 39. On the other hand – in a fine showing for the irony department – most of the songs I trimmed from my shortlist actually made it.

I’ve done my usual analysis of the results (expect some kind of exciting graph soon!) and the average score for the entire countdown this year was 2.77. This works out as between “An alright song but nothing special” and “I heartily endorse this tune or composition”. The country breakdown is 36 for Australia, 29 for the UK, 23 for the United States, 4 for Canada, 3 for New Zealand (all of the courtesy of the Conchords), 2 each for Italy and France and 1 for Sweden, which is a nice spread.

OK, that’s all I’ve got to say for now. My brain is fried after nine hours of serious radio listening (and cleaning, which I was doing during the serious radio listening).

Oh yes! It’s also Australia Day! I really must get some of those inane car flags and a southern cross tattoo. Maybe I can even put a FOWF sticker on my vehicle! Hooray!!

*sigh*

I want Hermione Granger and a Rocket Ship!

Take a ride on Rumbleroar!

I’m definitely coming late to the party but if you’re any kind of Harry Potter fan you owe it to yourself to check out A Very Potter Musical – an incredibly silly, completely unauthorised musical “reinterpretation” of Harry Potter put together by students at the University of Michigan last year. I could go on and on about how great it is, but all I really need to say is that it features a tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. You hear me? A tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. What the hell are you waiting for? (And what the hell is a Hufflepuff?)

The downside is I now have a crush on Draco Malfoy. Before anyone gets out Scarf of Sexual Preference I should point out that I have a crush strictly on the AVPM version of Draco Malfoy who is played by the very cute and downright hilarious Lauren Lopez (I have no idea why was she continually rolling around the stage but it was extremely amusing).

Anyway, tomorrow’s Australia Day (Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished) so you can expect an entry on how crap the Hottest 100 turns out to be at least 😉

Tribes of Londinium

Here comes the new religion, same as the old religion.

Yes yes, happy new year all, I’ve got better things to talk about than what I did on New Years Eve (bugger all really).

I’m using some of my time off work to get some more of my holiday snaps from the UK up on Flickr. One of said photos is of a pile of the Hungerford Bridge in London, festooned with the broken carcasses of skateboards.

I presumed at the time that there was some sadistic security guard who enjoyed confiscating boards off skaters who tried to ride them across the bridge, snapped them in half then threw them onto the pile. However on later reflection it became apparent to me that it was more likely that skaters from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hall were deliberately depositing their broken boards on the pile as a sort of graveyard, and some quick Googling today suggested that this is in fact the case.

This is great. Why? Because it’s a complete throwback to the old, pagan traditions of neolithic and bronze age England!

Further upstream at Battersea there’s a stretch of river that’s yielded vast (well, vast for archeology 🙂 quantities of relics. Swords, shields, spearheads, that kind of things. The sheer concentration of them leaves no explanation apart from that they were deliberately thrown into the waters as some kind of sacrifice. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the urge to commit treasured personal possessions to the river that motivates today’s skaters is fundamentally the same one that motivated the ancient Britons of Battersea.

Even more interestingly this site compares the Hungerford pile to a neolithic mortuary enclosure – a separated, sacred space in which the bodies of the deceased were left to break down to just bones (which were then collected and buried). The author points out that the bridge pier is “an unreachable island in the Thames” – small islands (neither being exactly land or water) meeting the requirements for all kinds of sacred spaces. Great stuff!

Seriously people, there is a thesis in this…

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