Archives, eh
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# Blood and Souls
If you don’t know the name, then this post is worthless to you.
Anyway, Michael Moorcock is just about the only fantasy author whose work I am prepared to read these days – he and Robin Hobb and China Miéville and let’s face it, China goes to bed every night praying fervently that Balo will descend and Remake him as Moorcock. My complete inability to make any headway in converting my story ideas to pixels has sent me back to reading books again – Brave New World, Stand on Zanzibar, and Elric of Melniboné
There’s been noises about Elric having being optioned by Hollywood for years now; certainly Moorcock has been answering questions about it on multiverse.org for awhile now, including casting threads – presumably not that perennial fantasy movie thread favourite Sean Connery as Elric or even Smiorgan, please! – and various casting threads, threads on who not to cast. There’s a lot of casting talk. The best one though is a question on who will be chosen to forge Stormbringer, which reminded me of an interview with Moorcock in an old British gaming magazine – either GM(Games Master) or its later incarnation GMI – in which he mentioned some Yorkshire blacksmith – read, spotty fan with delusions – who had queried Moorcock for secrets on runeblade manufacture since he was clearly an Initiate.
Last week I heard that the option is actively being exercised again, by Universal, and a script had been written for a live action movie.
...
Oh Cino, who art in cafés, please oh please, if it is true, let it not be Elric of Melniboné novella they are adapting, but The Dreaming City.
Elric of Melniboné, chronologically first but written eleven years after The Dreaming City, is Moorcock after he grew up and settled down a bit. The Dreaming City is pulpy and the prose veers towards purple, but it is punk; it is Moorcock kicking out at Tolkien years before Epic Pooh
They’d never show Elric watching the southern barbarians being tortured by his servant Doctor Jest. They’d certainly never show Elric summoning his demonic patron, Arioch. They’d probably also never show Elric sentencing his cousin Yrykoon to eat the traitorous captain at the celebration feast.
But maybe, just maybe, if the film The Dreaming City, they’ll depict Elric leading the assault against his own capital city, fighting and ultimately killing his cousin Yrykoon, accidently killing his cousin and lover Cymoril, abandoning his own allies to the dragons and then, right at the end, throwing himself in the sea to retrieve Stormbringer, the demonic, sentient and soul-eating sword he has a parasitic relationship with – Elric is the parasite.
Yes sir, I’d like to see Hollywood make that movie.
Remember, that battle cry is “Blood and souls. Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!” Let’s not namby-pamby it up at the last minute, eh.
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# Slightly less farcical than reality
October 1, 2007: Canberra 1 Roosters 0
It took till the 199th minute for the 2007 NRL Grand Final to be decided after 16 Canberra and 17 Roosters tries were disallowed when the video referee – in a rare display of consistency – ruled that the ball carrier obstructed the defense on every single occasion.
Channel Nine identity Phil Gould could not be contacted for an opinion and is said to be holding out for a $10,000 fee before speaking.
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# Kill files
It seems like only last year that Blog was still in short shorts and so shy until we offered it a nice crisp fiver to sing “I’m a little teapot”. But they grow up so fast. Even now Blog is catching up with its big brothers, Usenet and Online Community, and adopting their mannerisms.
Bless. A killfile for blogs. I get that there are some people who are just not worth reading, who are so irrelevant and content-free and resistant to discussion that you don’t want to waste your time reading anything they have to say. I understand that. That’s what my mouse wheel is for. To hide it completely and pretend it was never there strikes me as a bit cowardly.
Proud to say that I never used a killfile on Usenet.
I wonder if the people who wrote that Greasemonkey script at least had the intellectual honesty to have it replace the killed comments with a block of text reading something along the lines of:
You are a big girl’s blouse.
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# I should support who?
In my capacity as a sportsblogger, I feel I should note that while the closest I got to seeing the game was peering out the window past the wing to try and spot Telstra Stadium, a really sucky team of loud-mouthed thugs were routed by a squadron of towering, clear-browed heros of mighty thews and glinting eyes. Fi! Back to your bogan caves, you craven dogs!
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# My brief hour as a potential terrorism suspect
So yeah, my manager is in Melbourne so I am spared having to attend meetings on a day to day basis, the closest I usually get is irregular work in progress meetings over the phone. I am spared them because I rev early and often, usually deploying a new release into demo once a day with a description of changes emailed to the interested people.
The flip side is, when I do have to have meetings, when they fly me down to Melbourne to do the kind of meeting that is impossible to do on the phone, it means day long meetings. I got to the office at 11.30 Thursday and was straight into meetings till 17.30. Get into the office next day at 8.30 and straight into meetings to 16.00 when I had to dash to make my plane.
Spent the night at a hotel I am sure is perfectly nice but because of my state of mind after long meetings might as well be a flop house. The rest of the IT team in Melbourne have told me that the hotel is the same hotel that Kel and Brett stayed in when they were kicked out of their respective homes in Da Kath and Kim Code, so…err…ok.
I don’t really remember much of the last hour or so of the meetings; actually, while I was getting ready to leave to get to the airport, one of the people I work with was talking to me about the circumstances around my next trip down – in June – when I held up my hand and asked “What did you say to me twenty seconds ago?”. When she told me, “Ok, you need to stop talking now, because I have no memory of that topic at all. My brain is full.”
That should have been the end of my Melbourne trip.
Except there I was, at the gate waiting for the plane to start boarding when an announcement came over the PA. Someone was being asked to show up at the baggage service desk, someone with a muslim-type name. Mohammad I think, but don’t remember exactly. I have to admit, I didn’t actually think too much of it, I was trying to catch up on the podcasts I hadn’t been listening to for the last fortnight. And then I saw the policemen strolling down the concourse past all the gates. I remembered the Mohammad. I realised that my day was about to be fucked. In this age of the Paranoid Security State, anything unusual involving a muslimy name meant they were going to call themselves a security alert.
Sure enough, two minutes later there’s another announcement on the PA. Everyone at gates 1 through 10 had to leave the concourse to be re-scanned by the x ray machine. Sat in line for fifteen minutes before they started to organise themselves and called up the flights that were already late – i.e. me – to go through the scanners first. Then another fifteen minutes in line waiting to be scanned. I was about ten metres away before I realised that having my iPod in an inside pocket of my jacket with one cord – the one with the set of controls – dangling beside my hip with the headphones plugged into that and looping around to my back and up to the neck of my jacket, if I went through the X Ray machine like that, I might as well have put up my hand and asked “Please sir, can I have some special attention, you Western Imperialist Crusader Pig Dog!”
It ended up being an hour delay. If I had American readers – by which I mean American readers living in America as opposed to ex-Americans who are now Australians building a home in country Queensland – they would now be saying, “And…?” to which I would laugh my arse off because at least for me it is an inconvenient one-off experience. For them, in their self-involved plastic paranoia, it is a way of life. Secretly, I bet they enjoy it. Getting so much attention just for flying on a plane must be like appearing on a talk show – so much fuss over something so boring and bland.
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# And then there were two
I flew down to Melbourne today to have meetings with my manager and project leaders. Yes, my manager is in an office some hour’s flight away, which is largely meaningless anyway since he can call or email me, but it does leave me in peace and quiet on a day to day basis.
It was a reasonably early flight – 8:15 is about as early as I want to be checking in – so most people there hadn’t seen the news yet. So when one of the bland morning info-borement shows started showing footage of the Australian cricket team gently cruising into a finals birth against some hapless minnows, suddenly a flock of menfolk perked up and gathered around the cathrode ray tube to suckle, like piglets bothering the sow.
It was best when some young shark-in-a-suit nudged his companion and said “What do the South African cricket team, Greg Norman and Mama Cass have in common? She didn’t actually choke.”
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# Links for 2007-04-24
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# A bad run, or karma I may just have to cop to
Since I quit GR:
- Sacked fifteen minutes before I could quit from the porn palace. Candor forces me to admit that unlike the rest of the list, this is probably a good thing as it spared me the temptation to use the C-word while quitting.
- Worked four months at GR as a contractor.
- Main computer started spontaneously rebooting, a process that has changed only in the ever decreasing cooldown between repetitions.
- D’s computer started making a horrendous noise. Not Duran Duran, although it makes that a lot, but like a broken fan, which oddly enough was exactly the problem except it wasn’t the power supply fan like I thought, nor the CPU fan but a third fan attached to the top of the case. I found this out only after spending $60 for a power supply to be installed.
- tWM gets noticeably more pissy and snippy and generally teenagery. Dan and Shaun and Kriss, I hope you’re paying attention here—good luck.
- Car gets dinged up when D – possibly after being told that no, the doctor won’t help dispose of tWMs body with some sort of surgical acid – rams the doctor’s surgery with the back of the car in a retributive strike. Or accidently. Mine sounds better.
- The same fucking day we get the car back from the repair guy after being subjected to a fucking automatic – how do people drive the fucking things?!? – some fucking fucker fucking fucks the car with further dings.
I am beginning to think that maybe I was supposed to stay at GR. Maybe I’m actually dead, GR was my own personal hell and quitting was the only way my consciousness can comprehend my escape. But because I was supposed to be in hell, Cino has sent all of these things to continue punishing me. I don’t remember consuming any green tea, but it seems the only reasonable explanation.
Or maybe I really am just some trapped soul with my experiences being manipulated by a cruel and deceptive demon. It let me escape from GR just so it could fuck around with me in new and interesting ways. That would explain why my brain always seems so set against me.
Exact nature of the why remains undetermined. Practical effect appears to be that the answer to the question “How was your day” is now measured in averted homicides.
Or maybe it is karma. Earlier this year I told someone I would investigate the truthfulness of reports of a death. The summary of the situation is that basically a person I didn’t know who was a regular commenter on certain Australian political blogs was reported to have died of depression related causes. Certain other personages expressed doubts that the reports were true; that perhaps they were just a cover for the adoption of a new online personality.
I was really only that interested because the person who died – let’s just accept it is true for reasons that become clear in a few paragraphs – lived in the same city I grew up in; Hell for those of you who have been paying attention for the last nine years. So I mentioned that I would investigate by having my father – practically works for the local paper anyway – check the death notices in the archives.
Weeks after I asked him to check I still hadn’t actually talked to him again. I was about to call him to find out what the story was when, like a bird shitting on my head, the universe dumped on me the realisation ofexactly how ghoulish and offensive it was. I was trying to find out if someone was really dead on behalf of a pair of socially-atavistic meatheads who only doubted it because his and some other identity’s politics were antithetical to theirs.
Dad has never mentioned it. I’ll never ask, and I’ll cut him off if he ever does say something. I don’t want to know. Forget what Occam’s shaving gear might have to say, I am taking it on face value because I’d hate to think what the family might think of me if they heard I was checking up behind their back about whether or not the loved one they buried really is dead. Best case scenario is that Dad forgot about it. Worst case is that they did find out. If that’s the case, I’m quite happy to accept everything that has happened as pre- and post-hoc karma eventhoughthatsnothowkarmaworks.
I know someone else was proposing to check up as well when she swung through Bundaberg as part of her regular job, someone I otherwise have ceded a lot of respect to despite initial scepticism stemming from her earlier history. If she does, I hope I miss any announcement she makes.
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# Identity crisis
Over the weekend I got accused of running a sports blog by a reader I didn’t know I had – wow, that’s three of you now. Personally I prefer to think of it as ‘Exceedingly thinly veiled attempts to wind up the English cricket fan who reads my blog’. I’ll have to add sports blogging to the list of what avocadia is. Such list now comprises:
- Whatever the fuck it is that didn’t scurry past my brain in time to avoid being devoured, crunched up and the remains spat out into the posting form.
- Sports
Since I am a sports blog now though, I guess I should note – much belatedly – that the Wests Tigers vs Cronulla Sharks game on Sunday the 15th was – in a word – dire. At the beginning of the season I had remarked to someone or other – it may even have been on this blog but I doubt it since it’s not a sports blog – that Parramatta would at best fail specularly at the end of the season again, since at heart they have a problem. They have a halfback who is pretty good with usually one breath-takingly stupid play in him per game – I’m thinking cross field kicks in his own twenty. Paired with this halfback, they have a breathtakingly stupid five-eight who has usually one pretty good play in him per game.
I remembered this at the Wests game – technically I suppose I should be supporting them because they are local, but I’ve supported Easts since before there was a Broncos, the previous local team, if you can call living 4 hours from their home ground “local” – because, well, the reverse pretty much sums up Wests. John Morris has been asked to hand back his ‘Slippery’ by the Official Nickname Bestowing Organisation. Well, they called themselves that when I asked, but I am pretty sure they were just five moderately amusing Balmain supporters a loooooong way from home – seriously, if I’d asked them for their passports they would have whipped them out before they remembered Leumeah technically is still part of Sydney. And Benji Marshall might as well have been nicknamed The Bible, since just about everyone read him at one time or another.
I mentioned to someone at the game while Wests were busy losing that 2005 started off a lot like that, Wests were the best team not winning any games in the comp – they were close all the time but couldn’t get that last try. There’s been a couple of close games so far for Wests, including the Golden Point game in the second(?) round.
Wests did end up winning the game when Benji Marshall in a complete fluke – hey, just like Bible again – jumped on a dropped ball and outpaced Kimmorley – it’s been a long time since the Newcastle and the Mariners – to score under the posts, setting up for another golden point, which the Sharks kindly gave to Wests by giving up a penalty in their own twenty while they had the ball in hand.
Overheard at the game, all directed at the Cronulla Sharks:- “Go back to Superleague!”
- “Go back to the Mariners…wait, no, go back to the Storm..err..the Eagles?”—odd how funny that sounds when half a dozen boozed up guys are chanting it at full volume
- “Keep running back to the Shire, there’s a riot on, you don’t wanna miss it, son.”
I should point out that someone near me in a Cronulla shirt replied to the last “Yeah, they just moved over from Maq Fields”
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# Links for 2007-04-20
- Previous Edition Dungeons & Dragons Downloads
God I wish I still played ✴
- Previous Edition Dungeons & Dragons Downloads
