Archives, eh
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# Links for 2007-08-31
- sp!ked review of books | Towards an age of abundance ✴
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# Links for 2007-08-30
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# Links for 2007-08-29
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# Really, I'm just playing with inserting images and wanted a longish post
Californication. It’s all right. Dying inside is the perfect role for CalculˆHˆHˆH Duchovny.
But first, a short anecdote involving Duchovny.
Reading a yearbook is like traveling in time; except of course you can – and do – always come back, and you never change the present. So, not really at all like traveling in time, but I like the metaphor so I am not deleting it.
In the course of cleaning up in the garage over the weekend I was re-organising all my stored-in-a-plastic-box books. As all Good and Right people should, I have more books than I can possibly store in shelves. Anyway, in the course of this cleaning up, as I was craftily and cynically performing a kind of three-card-monte on my old university textbooks that I will never ever read or even consult again in this lifetime but will also never discard, I came across an old copy of a Rolling Stone yearbook. From 1995.
I expect I kept it because it had David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on the cover, in bed. Presumably I thought it would be worth something in the months after publication, worth something to frustrated US-located X-File fans, ‘shippers to be precise, because it was an Australian Rolling Stone and upon publication the US fans were refusing to accept that the picture even existed let alone have copies of their very own.
I more or less knew about this magazine, its not like I had forgotten I had it. I’ve even spied it a number of times; just a few months ago I was looking for one of the afore-mentioned textbooks – An Introduction to Formal Specification and Z Notation, an unequivocal denunciation of the hopelessness of my IT degree if ever I saw one – and had pushed the magazine aside. This time though, I actually looked at it, judging whether it was time to admit that, hey, The X Files is so 1990s. Besides, that Mulder and Scully might be doing some investigations in dark rooms together is not exactly an X File anymore. But there, just left of Anderson’s left arm as it snaked around to clutch at Duchovny’s right shoulder, appears the name Helen Demidenko.
My younger, or less-Australian readers – which covers all of my readers except me – wouldn’t really recognise that name. Nevermind, it isn’t important except that I kind of sort of tenuously know her now and it was kind of a spin out to see the name. At that point I, of course, had to read it. And I do mean read it, not re-read because I am quite sure I wouldn’t have read it when it was first published. I’ll keep my opinions to myself except to say how quaint – and dare I say, undergraduate – it all was.
But still. Time travel.
Anyway, Californication. That sixteen year old that was being statutorily raped? D thought she looked kind of familiar, asked me if I thought it was one of the yummy mummies from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. A bit young, I thought i. But D was on to it, was already looking at imdb just in time for the sex scene.“zomg, it’s Gracie. From The Nanny.”
“But…she’s naked.”
They were very nice boobs; but I’ll have to close my eyes when they are on the screen from now on because they make me feel so dirty-old-man ii.
Naturally, there are objectors to the show and its contents.
But Family First senator Steve Fielding said the complaints process and the industry codes were flawed.
“Family First is concerned that it is very difficult for families to get action against such programs,” he said.
Yeah. That Off button can be a right fucking bitch to get your finger to.
Another short anecdote. D and I are fairly liberal in terms of content tWM can hear or see. The last time I turned off Southpark because she was in the room is at least a few years back now – she’s fourteen now. Back in the day D was singing along to You Oughta Know and realised that so was tWM, in the back seat, except tWM was radio-editing as she went.
A couple of weeks ago D was taxi-ing some other kids home from dancing class when she suddenly realises that the song that is playing on the stereo is Sexy M.F. ; realises it at the penultimate point, almost too late, but her arm lashes out like a striking rattlesnake, and skips to the next track before the ten-year-old in the back seat could be subjected to our lax morals and poor parenting.
i And by the way, that wikipedia entry is so the collected effort of many ex-Romys and Micheles.
ii Old (adj): To be born prior to the mean birth year of Playboy centrefolds for the preceding twelve months.
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# Links for 2007-08-26
- XRAY ✴
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# Links for 2007-08-21
- Shakespeare in love | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books ✴
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# zomgwtfbbq!!1!eleven
How can it be 2007 and I am still seeing articles on Why you should convert to CSS! And people were arguing the point in the comments!! Wow, it’s like I accidentally fell in a time warp and woke up in 2001.
Note to self: This time, don’t go and see any M. Night Shamalayan movies after Sixth Sense; they just get suckier.
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# D&D 4ed
Cino, I was excited when Third Ed came out and even bought the books. It was soon after I had moved to Sydney and still thought I would be able to find a group to play with. Hah! I found a group except it was in Redfern, which is forty minutes by train on a weekday, about three weeks by train on the weekend. They seemed fun, but it was just so much effort to get there and back.
I found a second group in a game store near me. I say group, but what I really mean was a mob; the shop was more of a Warhammer store so half the other players were fourteen year olds waiting for their turn on the Warhammer tables and the other half were…
hmm, how do I say this without casting aspersions upon myself?
They ranged from their mid-twenties to their early forties. They were without exception fat, and I don’t mean beer belly, I mean permanent-doritos-dust-on-their-chin fat. They always wore black metal band shirts for metal bands that generally hadn’t existed as a going concern since the mid-eighties. All that I could, can and have coped with. But they also talked about the characters. Incessantly. To me. I would find myself trying so hard to just escape and leave my body behind, ala Homer.
I swear, every time I think about D&D my brain is flooded with the interminable descriptions of that fucking homebrew campaign world based on some bug-fuck crazy meshing of Hindu mythology and the Greek elementals/humors theory of reality. One day they’re going to find that guy’s corpse and I’ll be in trouble.
That the group would range from 3 people to 20 – really – depending on the week was the coup de grace to my D&D hobby.
So yeah, five, six years ago I would have been excited and obsessively looking up details. Now? Meh.
Which is a shame, really. I had a lot of fun playing make-believe with polyhedral dice during my teens and twenties. World of Warcraft just doesn’t even compare, which is probably why I eventually gave it up; it had stopped being a game and became a chore. D&D was never a chore because you could always do something different if you were bored.
Man, I still remember when we were on the Rogue Mistress and we used to deliberately work up a beserker rage out of the demon hearts we’d had implanted at the beginning of the campaign i. Pull up a seat and I’ll tell you every stat and the delicious absurdity of my character’s name.
i And people think Jack Chick was a tad inaccurate in Dark Dungeons ; not so much, Brother Vecna.
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# I am rolling my eyes at the troll-feeding
Can you imagine the hysterical blathering if Peter Costello or Tony Abbott had been revealed by the Age as having been warned to control himself in a New York grind-house? (and if you’re warned by the management then your behaviour has been pretty ordinary).
Oh come on, now I really must protest. While I agree with the central idea – Rudd’s blog supporters would be screaming – the bit in the brackets is clearly an indication that the writer has never actually been in a strip club. Being told to keep your hands to yourself is the first thing said to everyone on their way in.
Or so I’m told.
Come on, everyone knows it that’s the case as well. And yet, the media are too coy to say upfront that it is a standard warning. The dis ingenuousness is thick and amusing :- )
Actually, candour forces me to admit that I am fantastically uncool – I’ve only ever been to a strip club once and it was for a mate’s bucks party. The girl on the table was bored, which more or less made me bored as well.
Meanwhile – if you actually wanted my opinion on the whole thing – who even cares. I suspect the segment of the male electorate that has also been blotto in a strip club is pretty damn high, and the success of the various male strip shows suggests that quite a few women have dropped a lot of grog while watching gyrating, semi-nude sock-stuffers. While you should never underestimated the power of hypocrisy in the human race, I can’t imagine Rudd will cop too much of a hit; the Liberals are busy losing this upcoming election to the drover’s dog.
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# Links for 2007-08-17
