Cake And Polka
Gregory Jakobsen collects odd and obscure video and audio clips. Strange, weird, and bemusing.
Antipixel
Jeremy Hedley is a West Australian who now lives and works in Japan as a copywriter and designer. Nice insights, pretty pictures, a voice of calm.
All About The Juice
Alinta Thorton is a Sydney-based "interaction designer" by day and SF writer by night. She's a also a cancer survivor, addicted to coffee, and simply getting on with life.
Spam Poetry
Kristin is a Canadian poet who has decided to turn the copious amounts of spam in her email box into a source for her art. And you are welcome to contribute.
The Blog of Miss Chris
Christina Laria is an RMIT "media" student prone to making up words and getting away with it. Since RMIT media students were also responsible for Hannah's House, the blog of a fictitious Indian-Singaporean, it's entirely possible Miss Chris is also a made-up entity. I like her made-up words, however, so I'll give her existence the benefit of the doubt.
And there's my five! Yay!
Roblog
roblog.com is an online window into the life of Rob, Sharon and Lachlan Roy who live in the village of West End near Woking, Surrey, just outside London. They are expatriate Australians living and working in the UK.
Britblogger
A day in the life of a pom stuck in New York. He's into word play, has a wicked down-to-earth sense of humour and misses cricket. I'm sure he's really an Aussie in disguise.
David Dylan Thomas
David is a writer and film-maker based in Philidelphia. When he's not making films or delivering content to five different publications he's writing some of the most insightful film and DVD reviews I've seen.
Starving Actor's Loft in Harlem
As the name of the blog might suggest Husky Dave is an actor and one, it seems, with an interesting and most likely promising future especially given that he started filming on the Robert DeNiro directed flick The Good Shepherd this week. When he's not mingling with the likes of Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon and Keir 'they're all dead, Dave' Dullea he's writing some insightful commentary about life.
Life Between the Shoeboxes
By her own admission tp - not ToxicPurity - is a corporate whore by day and a wanna-be artist by night who lives in Sydney. She also has a fetish for shoes - she has 45 or 46 pairs, she's not sure - and wrote her film studies essay on Deep Throat. Fun chick.
BlogDay 2005
Today I get my hands on one of our brand new hot-doggetty high-def cameras. Woo-hoo.
Am somewhat less enthusiastic now since I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to work out which *keys* unlock the storeroom door (large key ring with many near-identical keys), then sat there in the dark going round the same key ring several times trying to find the key that unlocked the security cupboard, then lugged bloody heavy case across building to my editing suite, where I was then flummoxed by the clasps on the camera case.
I haven't got to the bit where I have to start plugging in cables, checking its settings, and then actually capture from it yet.
Am obviously too sleep-depped and too bloody-minded to go spend another half-hour looking for the manual.
This is going to be such a fun morning. Whee.
Just a reminder to all bloggers that this coming wednesday is Blog day.
What will happen on BlogDay?
For one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post recommendations of 5 new Blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.
Those of you in Perth can attend the blog awards nite at the Brass Monkey in Northbridge. Starts at 7pm.
Some animals have an extraordinary capacity for finding their way home across unfamiliar country.
This week, I present you with the odd cases of the homing pigeon who returned to the right town, but wrong country, and the dog who became seperated from his owner but managed to catch the right train home anyway.
One of the funnier things I've seen today is a link farm - a blog just providing links to a site to increase their search engine rating - being comment spammed.
Either I'm going mad, or Channel 9 is a lying prankhole and inept.
Just at the end of their 6 o'clock news, as I walk back into the lounge to change the channel to something tolerable, they off-handedly recommend you tune in to Geoffrey Robertson's latest Hypotheticals: Australia Under Attack, with such featured guests as Beazley, Abbott, and Australia's favourite "recalcitrant" Dr Mahathir.
Cool! thinks I. When? But apparently that bit wasn't important enough to repeat. I've been frantically Googling and even scouring 9's wretched website and TV guide and finding not one reference to it. If Geoff wasn't doing the Denton show I'd have sworn I'd imagined the whole thing.
This is so inane. I refuse to accept that the only way to find out current information on what Channel 9 is screening is by leaving the TV permanently tuned in to them. Feh.
We're likely to be scarce around here for the next few weeks because we're putting together a pre-production package. It's for the the screenplay I mentioned before. We're hoping to get it financed and into pre-production before december. More details as they occur.
Meanwhile we're still putting together a pilot for a new show aimed at commercial/pay tv. It's a new idea that we haven't seen anywhere before, which is surprising given that it's so obvious now that we've had it - don't they all?
Also in the works is a feature film that, if all goes well, we will be shooting sooner rather than later and we're also working towards a new season of Byte Me.
So you could say we're a little busy =).
If you're planning to visit Liaoning province in China anytime soon then perhaps it might be a good idea to bring along your crocodile repellant just in case you run into the 13 runaway crocs. If you don't happen to have any repellant then you could always use the hotline they've set up.
One of the keepers is reported to have said that the crocodiles might become more aggressive if they cannot find enough food in the wild.
Only if they don't like Chinese food.
The PM is a little unfair, describing Australians who get caught with drugs while overseas as stupid. What's probably really happening is that there's a new reality show being produced.
I mean, what could be more thrilling for the Jackass generation than a reality show contest to see who can smuggle the most drugs into Indonesia and get back out alive? You have exotic locations, the chance to win fabulous cash prizes, subterfuge and trickery and the manipulation of the public, really wild parties... and just like on Big Brother or Australian Idol, even the losers become media stars and household names.
You just wait til the next season's new shows are announced, then you'll see. Oh, wait, maybe it's already on.
. . . you can't walk your cat on the foreshore for all the people making whoopee under the trees.
Sure, it may seem dark out there, but we - that is, the cat, I, and everybody with a riverside view - all could see your silhouettes thrusting away with the sort of vigor and agility trees aren't known for, perfectly backlit by the lights of our fair city and the glow of the moon off the river.
Quite romantic really. Except for being in one of the cat's favourite spots.
No, not the Soviet satellite - Sputnik's a saltwater croc in the Adelaide river in the NT. Here are his latest positions.
From what we can see above, Sputnik hasn't moved a lot in the last few weeks.It's a cold-blooded reptile that spends most of its life pretending to be a log. It's moving around a hell of a lot more than I was expecting. Maybe it's drifting on currents.
As a Tangerine Dream fan of twenty something years I grew up listening to Moog synthesizers. Vale Dr Mood
Did you know that it is illegal for British Nationals to use nuclear weapons, except in an officially sanctioned armed conflict?
For the last three weekends I've been involved in a program funded by the Office of Multicultural Affairs to provide training in video production to migrants. Have met some very lovely people. It's been interesting, the trainees coming from countries as diverse as Sudan and Sweden, with equally diverse skills and experience.
Mainly, it means I haven't had a day off since July. Whee.
Today was the last day, so we had a closing ceremony and handed out certificates (most of which had misspelt names). The Hon. John Hyde, the current Member for Perth, was a no-show (he had to fill in for a sick Premier at some Vietnamese do), so he was replaced by a former Member for Perth Dr Ian Alexander.
Pictures were taken, hands were shaken, warm beer was drunk, and most everyone ppromised to return in September to help put together a new show called Kaleidoscope which will be about, can you guess, migrant communities in Perth.
Snaffled some leftover chicken curry and biryani for Skribe, came home, and then we went and sat by the river and did absolutely nothing.
We watched mites and other unidentified insects scuttle over the water, and a leaf carried high overhead on a current. We noted the grid-like interference patterns on the river, made even more surreal and lovely because the surface tension hadn't broken, thereby causing the glossy water to resemble a rather expensive CGI effect from the early 90s.
Occasionally, we took silly pictures of each other and conversed. T'was bliss.
Ah, well. Back to work tomorrow.
Hey, I just got out of work and...wait...dude, are you having sex?...While I'm on the phone with you?...You...you're having sex with Amy?...What would...you mean you think the fact that it's Amy makes it all right to pick up the phone?...No! No! That makes it worse!
We just returned from the latest meetup of Perth bloggers in which we spend a relatively large amount of our time looking for the Canadian with the hat and the companion. You'd be surprised at how many people were wearing hats in the Brass Monkey tonight and, as the entire crew of the USS Houston is celebrating their leave there, a lot of them just also happen to have North American accents. We still managed to have loads of fun but we never did find Keet.
Does it mean that I've been hanging with too many yanks when the first thing that I think of when I see the headline Sonny Bill sorry for drink driving is that it has something to do with copyright extension? Or perhaps it just means I don't do rugby league.
Overheard on TV. Cop brags about getting serial killer to confess:
"He sang like a parrot."What, badly?
After attempting to brazenly kill too many fellow Shakespearian characters, I scored a laughable 6%, and have been rated "A Comedy of Errors". To be fair, I haven't played a text adventure game since... since... um, yeah, that long ago.
Think you can fare better? Then take on The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and see how far you get.
Well, it's this or wash dishes.
At the moment, every 3-5 seconds or so, my firewall is blocking a packet from telstra - namely placer2.lnk.telstra.net. The packets are aimed at port 5450, which according to sources is the port used by the windows trojan called Pizza. Now it could be that that machine name is just a masquerading link for the infected machine, but I feel it is more fun to believe that I still own 51% of an infected windows box.
Everybody, thank you. It's certainly been an interesting twenty-four hours or so, making announcements, with responses ranging from "It's about time" (my mother) to "Do you feel pregnant?" (my doctor), to insane giggly shrieks transcribed in an email (best friend), to the cryptic "Good" (boss), to the politely cautious "How does your partner feel about it?" (colleague).
And it does seem a little comical being congratulated for something that, well, we really didn't put much thought or effort into. It's a strange experience. I feel almost fraudulent. Skribe and I have somehow achieved this amazing thing, as if we'd been bashing rocks together and against all odds produced a Faberge egg.
Well, we've been "practising" making babies long enough, and our practice-child test subject is still alive after five years of our attention, so I guess we're as ready as we'll ever be. On with the show.
I'm glad we weren't fighting against Denmark 60 years ago. Otherwise today would be called VD Day.
Perth readers might be interested to know that our own beloved Swan Bells is currently gracing the Main Page of the Wikipedia (English version) in the Did You Know section.
I've just completed writing the first draft of a new short film - not the schizophrenia one I was writing before. I need to do more research on that one. This one is about euthanasia - yes, my muse is such a cheerful creature - except I've written it with comedic elements - I think. I won't know if it works until TP reads it.
I've been ruminating - composting, as Neil Gaiman likes to call it - on this one for over a year. It hasn't exactly turned out the way I originally envisioned it though. The original idea was to create a black comedy with a twist at the end. What I ended up writing was less funny yet more dark with better developed characters. Well, better developed for a first draft anyway. I think I prefer trhis version. Less of a gag film. More to say. Ideally, what I'm aiming for is a combination of both - a dark, comedy with well developed characters and a thought-provoking, yet still funny, twist at the end. Maybe with TPs assistance we'll get there.
I've never really credited myself as a particularly gifted writer, but there are signs of definite improvement. I'm finding myself actually starting to use some of the techniques I was taught in university - which is very strange indeed. Who knew?
If this one turns out as well as I think it will we might have to see about getting it made.
When Skribe and ToxicPurity discovered they were expecting their first child in March 2006, their reaction was:
Two Wednesday mornings ago, as I trudged up Pier St, I heard a surprising sound: the unmistakeable laughing cry of the kookaburra. It was as if someone had started playing jungle sounds from an old Tarzan movie at full blast in the middle of Perth.
This morning, crossing Murray, I heard it again. It seemed to emanate from behind Miss Maud's, in that area that's also behind the Deanery and the Playhouse Theatre. There're some trees in there, but not big and old enough for a rather largish kigfisher to nest in, I would have thought. No expert I on urban kookaburras, though. Kamikaze wattlebirds, sure. But kookaburras outside of King's Park? Not a clue.
I hope to hear it again in the following days. Twice is merely coincidence, but thrice...
Kookaburras in the heart of Perth, hawks circling the R&I Tower,... what a great city for birds.
This is cool - exploring a website without once clicking on your mouse. Alright, once. But once only. You get the hang of it really quickly.
Is it viable? Don't know. There's something to be said about the near-instantaneous response of a mouseclick. Also the habit. That said, the best part of the experiment is thinking about - and exploring - how we use mice/pointers with web interfaces.
Fun, stylish, occasionally slow and frustrating. Yes, it's a geeky thing.
The tragedy for the Islamic community is that the terrorists are about Islamic as George Bush is Christian.
To hell with psychology-, biology-, and even astronomy-based attempts to model human relationships: scientists claim if you want to understnad the singles scene, you need physics.
Richard Ecob adapted a system for modelling atoms in radioactive decay to investigate how we look for partners [...] At the root of the system, says Mr Ecob, is the similarity between the probability of the nucleus of an atom decaying and that of a couple breaking up.So there's the secret to successful dating, folks, if you haven't found the love of your life, you're not decaying right.
Seen on a wall in Hay Street Mall:
Thems cops are liarsSomeone else has written underneath it:
Yeah, but they're our lies.
. . . a large hirsute bloke in Padbury Walk:
"You look better when your skirt's too short."Uh, right. Thanks for the fashion tip, mate.
A new study shows that if a man is told he is not "man enough", he tends to overcompensate by acting macho.
The study shows men whose masculinity is challenged are more likely to support the Iraq war, exhibit homophobia or think about buying a four-wheel-drive car.
WiFi not fast enough? You need WiFi Speed Spray!
Awww. The auction's ended. We could really use something like this to clean up the talkback radio frequencies, I'm sure.
"It's a scientific fact. Radio waves become sluggish under a variety of common environmental conditions. Besides air pollution, radio waves slow down in noisy environments, at night, and in "high emission" areas such as computer rooms, offices that use fluorescent lighting, and even in the kitchen (those pesky microwave ovens are to blame!)." -- ad
We succumbed. Or rather, Skribe did. He bought the Da Vinci Code and we're reading it in turns.
Twenty-odd chapters in, I don't get it. Maybe it improves later?
Yes, it's competent. But that's all it is. It's a good example of good pulp writing. Punchy plotting, filmic settings, cliched characters, what more do you want in popcorn literature? Reminded me of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in fact. Another fine example of competent writing, etc... Plus fun wordplay, which fact alone endears Rowlings to me over Dan Brown any day.
But neither of them are particularly fantastic writers, nor do they tell particularly interesting stories. So why are they so phenomenally successful? It can't just be PR.
There's only one real explanation: the world's become less literate.
Something like the Da Vinci Code - whose core ideas I first encountered in dog-eared old conspiracy paperbacks during the 70s and which had evolved into source material for vampire role-playing games in the 90s - offered nothing new. (And if I wasn't scandalised as an impressionable Catholic schoolgirl, I sure as hell am not going to be outraged now). Similarly, Harry Potter rehashed so many old children's fantasy books I grew up on that I didn't so much read the book as play spot-the-originals.
I mean, kudos to Rowlings and Brown for getting people to read again. But, honestly, there are better writers and more interesting books out there. I'm sure of it. The fact that grown-ups are devouring the Harry potter books, and the mainstream public are intrigued by the "dangerous" ideas in the Da Vinci Code is something that genuinely surprises me. What have you been reading that any of this is new to you? C'mon, world, stop scaring me already.
Skribe describes the success of Rowlings and Brown as "doing an Eddings", except even Eddings didn't become a media celebrity. He was twenty years too early, apparently, and more to the point, his style of ludicrously successful bookwriting featured characters over plot, and what plot there was consisted of travelling from point A to point B and so on down the alphabet, and then doing it again. Nobody read the Belgariad for its plot, and subsequently, nobody would ever have considered wanting the film rights to it.
Which is where Rowlings and Brown, alas, get it right. Plot, however hackneyed, sells. Characterisation, on the other hand, is something only the actors will have to worry about.
And ideas? They kept telling me in uni that there are no new ideas, only new ways to tell old stories. Rowlings and Brown are certainly proving it. Disappointing, really. Some day, we're going to look back at this era, and hold up these books as the great literature of our day, and that's just tragic.
It's peculiar to think that in a nation which enshrines freedom of speech in its constitution, that there'd be a need for the First Amendment Project. But there is. Eternal vigilance, etc, and the Sisyphean task of combating ignorance in the Jackass Generation and intolearance in the Jesus-For-Greed camp.
All of which requires donations. They're not-for-profit after all. And they have a hell of a cool fundraiser.
A group of authors are offering Insert-Your-Name cameos in their upcoming books to the highest bidders. Ever wanted to be a corpse in a Stephen King thriller? Or an utterance by Sunny Baudelaire? Howabout a name on a gravestone in Neil Gaiman's next kid's book, perhaps?
Other authors involved include Amy Tan, Peter Straub, John Grisham, Karen Jay Fowler... etc. Check it out.
We got confirmation from Foxtel today about when Byte Me will air. Thursdays at 7pm starting September 1st, with repeats on Fridays at 1am, 7am and 1pm. Yes, folks after being snubbed by Access our extremely topical and up-to-date show is finally about to air on Aurora - six months late.
Ah well, you pays your money...
You know, I’ve done cunt and now vagina, I really should focus on cocks next.
Apart from suffering from the same bleah-bleah cold that TP suffered from over the weekend, I spent much of today - and last night - reconfiguring our server so we could move our adsl modem from pppoe mode to bridge mode.
What does this mean the unadulterated may ask? Pain, worry and loads of confusion is the answer.
To cut a long story short, after 13 hours - 2 on the phone with our ISP, who were trying their damndest to fix the problem btw (Westnet rock) - the problem was eventually solved. Thanks to Cyberknight Leon Brooks, who sight unseen figured it out in about a minute.
NASA TV is wonderfully informative - well it is when there is something actually happening. Most of it's trivia but it does skew your perspective when watching scifi films.
For instance, before doing an EVA (spacewalk), the astronauts sit in the airlock fully-suited up breathing 100% oxygen to remove all the nitrogen from their blood. For an hour! I don't know about you but sitting still for an hour is hard enough for me particularly without a tv, but to do it in a spacesuit. These guys are superhuman. Of course, they have extra incentive. If they don't do it they get the bends. There's something I'd love to see in a flick.
Hang on Captain, we can't check the type 3 deflector for a least an hourIn the hours before returning to Earth the astronauts take in specific amounts of fluids and food so they'll be able to cope with the effects of gravity. Another one I'd like to see on film.
Prepare to land. Break out the beer and chocolate rations.A couple of hours before the shuttle is due to touch down NASA flys the shuttle test plane along the landing route over and over to check for things like windshear. This of course involves flying up to several thousand metres and then throttling the engines back so they can glide/plummet to the ground. They continue this right up to the point where the shuttle lands. Talk about team effort.
Eileen, you are go for ammonia reconfig.What ever happened to control-alt-delete?
To the person sliding down the rail on his arse, we installed the stairs so you could use your stubby little legs.
Decided to look up my old family name for the hell of it. I'm sick, bored, and just bloody-minded enough to go do some etymological sticky-beaking in a language I'm functionally illiterate in.
This list has been reproduced as part of a comprehensive online dictionary. My only gripe is that I don't know which way to read the list, right-to-left (conventional Chinese) or left-to-right (Western style). Does this mean my family name is the 102nd or 82nd most common surname in China? Just even out the differences and place it at 92nd.
To my great delight, I now actually have an understanding of how the family name evolved, even if I still need to concentate in order to write it. I still don't know how Chinese surnames originated. European surnames, for example, derive from four distinct types - occupational, patronymic, geographical, and descriptive - Chinese surnames just seem to be random words.
Still, it's always fun to find out the meaning of names, doubly so when you discover it's a something you like, and doubly doubly so when you've managed it in a foreign language.
Just spent the entire weekend helping run a training course in video editing, nine to five, with a cold. Am tired inside and out, and feeling totally bleah. Back to work again tomorrow. Then another weekend training. Then another regular week. Then the third and last weekend training.
Right now, extremely unmotivated to do anything but crawl into bed and stay there with hot milo and loud loud music.
And if that wasn't enough, we lost the cricket. Double bleah.
It's getting so no bare concrete wall is safe from the graffiti artist, especially if that wall is the nearly 700km long security feature being built by the Israelis to protect them from the Palestinians, and the graffiti artist is Banksy.
Anybody who can complete nine pieces of artwork while dodging warning shots from the Israeli army deserves to have his voice heard. Wonder how long before the Israelis whitewash it?
www.attackchi.org.au has the perfect solution for getting all those dangerous dog breeds out of our communities - simply disguise them as some other breed of family-friendly dog. That way, everyone's happy. Except maybe the doberman...
Grug says:
When: Monday the 8th of August @ 7:30pm
Where: Fast Eddy's Cafe. Cnr of Milligan and Murray St Perth
Why?: Do you seriously need to ask this?
Who: If you do a webcomic / draw / read comics feel free to rock up / bring friends.
Ooh, tempting...
What to do while waiting for the laundry, hmmm... vacuum? clean toilet? scrub bathroom? Nah, go find some more unreal desktops to download.
A couple of nights ago I finally got around to ditching my embarassingly large collection of Tolkien desktops and replaced them with a handful of nifty ones.
Which would have been cool, except that every morning and night when I hopped on, I'd find myself staring at the same bloody desktop. That's what happens, of course, when you set your desktop slideshow to change on the hour, and you only have six image files.
Obviously, I needed more. Lots more. The weirder and lovelier the better.
Them funky Russians. I don't think it's just because I've been working on the St Petersburg 1900 episode either, or that I've had Tchaikovsky and some heartbreaking Rachmaninoff aria pounding through my brain, but there's something so beautifully morose and cynical about Russian art that just makes you want to let go of the railing and be smothered by the deep waters. Hell, even their techno has an edge of nightmare to it. Must be those long and bitter winter nights.
It seems that Sydney plans to use SMS messages and email to alert the public to evacuate the CBD in case of a major emergency. I guess this means that those that haven't kept up with the digital age are doomed to die. Pity, I just learnt what the all clear sounded like too.
Is your relationship stuck in a rut? Sick of the sight of your partner? Then you need The Akin Method1. With just one wallet you can be free and single in next to no time.
1 Some gaol time may be incurred.
Round 1:
"Hey, Jonno. You hear they found explosives in Langley Park this morning?"
"That bloody Neil."
And that was it. With the recent bombings in London, Cairo, Bahgdad...etc, you'd think we'd all be running around like headless chooks at the first hint that bangshit has been found in the city. Nah, not us. We all know it's bikie gangs, or geeks trying to impress each other. Islamic extremists... not even on the list of likely suspects.
Even so, www.news.com.au tried to play up the Terrorism angle, but really weren't convincing, no matter how many times they repeated the T word. On the other hand, Aunty did such a perfunctory job you'd think they were covering the under-14s lawn bowls qualifier.
By the way, best London Bombing joke I've heard so far: suicide bombings are like the bus - you wait ages and ages for one, then four turn up at the same time.
I've added a link to our short film Frisky in the sidebar. It's a windows media file and costs just $US3 to download. Enjoy.
