Yes, I know I didn't follow up on my earlier intentions to post regularly. In fact, it only came to mind today that I haven't posted on my blog for ages. Deal with it.

Kids are an interesting phenomenon... or, I suppose, they are interesting phenomena. Given that I only have the one, I'm not sure how that goes.

I have a son. I'm pretty bloody proud of my son, and being as how I try to be as objective (many say cynical) as possible, that may be quite a feat.

Here's the thing, though. My son is so much more exuberant than I ever remember being. I remember being quietly enthusiastic about some things, and blatantly unenthusiastic about a lot of others. My son, so it seems, can become unbelievably excited by life. Awesome.

Example: went to my son's Christmas concert (daycare, he's four). He is, apparently, one of the most popular kids in his peer group. Fuck knows where that came from, but it seems it's an honour, among his peers, to be chased by him. I don't get it, either.

Now, the kids had to get dressed up in something nice and Christmassy. My boy's mum, bless her gorgeous butt, bought him a Santa costume. She called me bizarre when I told her it looked like a red judogi (with white trim). I had a recurring urge to show him how to do lapel chokes. (In a good way).

The boy is a boy. Totally, a boy. Fearless, and a little mad. He jumps off things twice his own height for amusement (to be fair, so do I, on occasion).

So the concert happened, and was largely unremarkable save that there were no major crises, which is remarkable in itself when an event consists of fifty-odd kids on a stage at once. Bugalugs (we'll call him that) decided that he was hot in his costume, so took the most direct route to deal with this. He disrobed. Not entirely, happily.

After all the singing was done, it was time for the Santy Man... the man in red came in, did the rounds saying HO HO HO, and here was where I had my crisis of faith. Bugalugs goes apeshit. Not in a bad way. We didn't have to force a fifth of scotch down him to shut him up or anything. But I did for a moment think he might have an aneurism or something.

Being as he was dressed as Santa, he wanted Santa's attention. Thank fuck I haven't given him a knife yet. He probably would have stabbed the Red Man in the thigh. "Hey, hey, hey..." I thought we'd managed to teach the tyke to say, "Excuse me..."

Santa did well, though. "You look like me!" and Bugalugs was enormously satisfied.

Now I'm left in a quandary... I hate lying to my kid about anything. Santa is ... a lie? make-believe? bullshit? imaginary?

The thing my child is most excited about is bullshit. How do I deal with that?

Sex & Death

This is the first in a short series where I have challenged myself to finish a first draft of an article on one page of A4. Hence, it hasn't been revised, and any arguments are probably incomplete.


It fascinates me, the way that our culture deals with these issues. The two most basic aspects of our existence as a carbon-based, sexually reproductive lifeform.

Perhaps that should read 'the ways'. We alternately hide and overexpose, and none of it in balance.

See, I don't agree with hiding these things from children. Without both sex and death, our world as we know it and us as a species wouldn't exist. Hiding this duet of irrefutable fact from children can do no good in the long run, and if anything it must ultimately do harm.

But what is interesting about the way things stand is that we avoid real dealing. We tend to hide children from these issues, in the process pretending that we are isolating them from harm. At the same time, much of popular music (and the media such as video-clips that goes with it is (are?) explicitly or implicitly sexual. Meanwhile, incredibly violent/gory scenes appear on our screens as widely accepted popular entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong. I spent a lot of time and effort in my 20's becoming as good at sex and applied violence as possible. I like fucking, and I like fighting. But I was raised on a farm, and sex and death are things that children on farms can't really have hidden from them. We slaughtered sheep for meat (I took part as an active participant first when I was about 9, an age I judge as too late, really). We put the rams in with the ewes, when tuppin' time came around. Wouldn't have any sheep if we didn't.

But these things were just aspects of life. If you wanted to live, you had to do these things. You have to kill, and things have to fuck (including you, if you want the species to continue).

I guess the ultimate point is that if you don't educate and expose children to these ineluctible truths, they will never develop a sense of how their actions can result: If I cut your throat, you're dead. If we fuck, a child may well happen. Sex is fun (awesomely, when done right), but ultimately is aimed at making babies. Teach the children this. It's important.


As stated at the beginning of this article, it is a first draft, or rather a direct copy of a first draft. As such, no arguments are developed,and in all it needs a lot of work. I'll be posting more of these, though I'm not entirely sure why. Seemed like a good idea, something arrived at in the depths of drunkenness. I think the reasoning was something to do with exploring the writing process, with the expectation that I'll revisit various topics later.

Maybe it's just an excuse to post something, with a semi-plausible explanation, though. Make up your own mind.

Banktacular Shenanigans

One of the things I do for a crust is work in a bottle shop (aka liquor store, off-license, grog shop... I sell alcoholic beverages retail). There will almost certainly be later posts that deal with all the craptastic bullshit up with which you must put if you are to do such a job (imagine spending hours on end dealing with the public, surrounded by piss you aren't allowed to drink) but this particular rant is about banks and a certain impact they have.

See, I don't like banks very much for several reasons, most of which I won't go into right now. My major concern currently is the EFTPOS machine. Specifically, the new one they have installed in the bottle-o. (I never have worked out how to spell that particular contraction.)

Now, up until about a week ago we had this EFTPOS machine that seemed to belong to the early '90's. The card reader/input device and printer were separate entities, and the printer was some form of dot-matrix abomination that constantly needed new ribbons. And the device always took an age to process a transaction.

To my delight, I arrived at work one day to discover that the bank had given us a bright, shiny new EFTPOS device - all one unit, no separate printer, no juddering dot-matrix-ribbon-chewing monstrosity. It looked all elegant and space-agey, or something. It was quiet. It was smooth. It was Modern.

And it sucks. It sucks like just before the event horizon. It needs paper reloads about every 15 minutes. It prints out the merchant copy of the transaction record and then waits for a minute before printing out the customer's copy, which is utterly fantastic when you have 16 customers lined up waiting to pay on plastic, and you can't tell the machine to just get on with it because you know full well that Jimmy never wants a copy, so instead of 16 relatively happy customers who have to wait for a couple of minutes you have 16 increasingly annoyed customers who have to wait for longer and longer depending on where they are in the cue.

This new, brilliant, finished-in-chrome-with-ergonomic-styling-and-a-dynamic-look device takes precisely 3.2 times longer than the ancient-annoying-piece-of-shit that it replaced to do anything. This is like trading in your 1990 Commodore for a 2007 Commodore only to find that it has a top speed of 50 kph and no brakes.

But this isn't the most stupid aspect of banks that I've had to deal with in the last week or so. It isn't the thing that currently has the most of my goat. What has that honour, is the surcharge.

If someone wants to get some money out of their bank account, via the EFTPOS in my bottleshop, I have to charge them a one dollar surcharge. Because the bank is charging us a surcharge.

Let's get this a little in perspective: You go somewhere other than a bank, where they charge you money to see a teller (because they have to pay the teller, or some shit) to get money out. I, standing behind a counter, act as a bank teller (so the bank doesn't have to pay a teller. I'm doing their job, and not getting paid by the bank) and process your transaction, to the same degree as any modern bank teller does. I get your card, run it through the machine, the computer says yes or no, and there you go.

So... I'm doing the banks' work, and they are charging us. Not only that, but I have to explain to all our customers (who, because we are not a major multi-billion-dollar company, are generally just a bunch of middle-to-low income regular people) that in order to get twenty bucks (of their money) out of the bank so they can buy a pizza or two, it will cost them money.

If you put money in a bank, you are lending that bank money. They pay you a small percentage per annum. If you borrow money from a bank, they charge you ten times as much per annum. And somehow they have come up with a way to not only charge you money to take money out, but to charge me (or the pub I work for) for doing their work for them.

God, I wish I was a bank. I'd be the biggest Banker there ever was.

I have a cold.. some b's should be w's

A LOL in the Conversation

Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I haven't been in any chatroom environments, but I haven't recently seen many of the old chat-speak contractions that used to be all over the virtual place.

See, iirc ppl used to lol, rofl, even roflmao at the drop of a hat. There were so many of these stupid contractions that I'm astonished to find that I've forgotten most of them. What I do remember is the sort of low-level panic that these things seemed to induce in teachers and related members of society. Habitual use of such contractions was going to lead to universal functional illiteracy and the collapse of society (well, the latter the result of said functional illiteracy in combination with the ubiquity of net-bourne porn).

Of course, this fear is still with us, though now the culprit is the mobile phone and txt mssgs, which naturally will usher in the passing of the vowel in written communication. Our children aren't learning to communicate in a legitimate manner - they can't spell, they can't punctuate, and they have no idea about sentence or paragraph structure.

Da futr is now. Its 2 l8 2 cmplain...

And yes, it is true, to an extent. Literacy rates are a worry. Literacy hasn't been taught in-depth in Australian public schools for god knows how long. (Overseas? I personally wouldn't have a clue.) There are a lot of examples of poor attempts at communication out there - just look at any discussion board and you'll find an abundance. But there's a couple of interesting aspects to this that people often seem to miss.

The first is that any sort of subgroup of humans will tend to develop their own internal methods, manners and habits of communication, which for the purposes of this argument I'll call dialects. These dialects can seem impenetrable to those outside the group. And in the current age of massive and rapid technological change, the development of these dialects can be widespread and rapid indeed. It used to be that your peer group, for most people, was a relatively localised event. Not these days, matey. The younger generation right now is the first to experience world-wide instant mass communication that they can control, or at least contribute to.

That's a little scary, come to think of it.

Anyway, the point really is that such dialects arise all the time, but don't really pose much of a threat to the larger issue of literacy, because literacy in terms of functionally communicating using the english language is the biggest dialect of the lot.

By this, I mean that people who are not capable of writing lucidly in english don't successfully communicate on a wider scale - this is the big fear, no? But here's the thing: if you set up a website, or you post on discussion boards, or engage in any communication on the net at all and you don't make sense, people will tell you so. And, of course, there are plenty of good examples available to learn from. In other words, if you wish to communicate with the world, you have to learn the dialect used most widely, and people by-and-large tend to do this automatically.

That having been said, I'm still one of the guys who uses full words, sentence structure and punctuation when he sends an SMS. I like communicating as clearly as I can (even in unproofed rants such as appear on this blog).

And, of course, the ending to this article is obligatory:
kthxbye!

Unintellectual Property Theft

or: Come Up With Your Own Name, Dammit

See, here's the thing: I first became active on the Internet back in 1993, when I was a Physics student at university. At the time, there was no Interweb, or at least we people in Oz only had the "must know how to use computers to use it" version of the net: FTP, TELNET, and all those wonderful things that took three hours to do anything with.

It was fun, it was a new way of communicating, and back then the content was 90% good stuff and 10% shite (or thereabouts... these figures weren't arrived at by scientific analysis). Anyway, everyone had a nick(name), or two. I had two, and they were unique (yes, I'm aware of the inherent irony that could be derived from that sentence).

I was the only person known as Goldenmane, and the only person known as Shadowstreak. (Hey, I was in my teen angst phase. I came into it late. They were names for 'personalities' that reflected my mood at the given time. I'm not going to explain the nauseatingly trite division between them. Stay on track.)

So, I've been Goldenmane and/or Shadowstreak since 1993.

I've taken a couple of sabbaticals from teh Interw3b over the years. And every time I've done so, I've come back and there's been new software. Online stuff. Like MSN, or Yahoo, or Blogger... and, let me make my point entirely clear: every time I try to register as Goldenmane or Shadowstreak, some other fucker seems to have done so first.

Okay, I don't remember ever trying to register on Yahoo, but nevermind.

Now, obviously this could be seen as rather a juvenile thing to bitch about. It really isn't, though. Breakthrough media, first on scene, nom de plume... I was here first, dammit, with those names, and a whole bunch of fuckers have seen fit to steal them. A great deal of stuff that has seen light on the web is archived or otherwise preserved in strange little corners, including in wetware.

I've written some contentious stuff over the years, some of which I would now look back on and recognise as not representative of my current thoughts; what the hell, every writer has their juvenilia, so why be ashamed of mine? But some of it was good, and none of it I'm ashamed of. Much of it was "published" under an online nickname, and that is what is pissing me off.

I sound like grandad on the back verandah, but back in the day we would never have used a name that someone else had been identified with to identify ourself. I would never have called myself George Orwell, Raoul Duke, HPL, or whatever. I'd have tried to be original, and frankly it ain't that hard to find out if you're the original or a copy.

Unless someone can provide some evidence to contradict my claim that I was (and remain) the owner of the non de plumes (or nom de nets?) that I came up with, I remain snarlingly disgruntled over people stealing them. Get your own fucking name.