The past month has been a tiring one yet, as it would turn out, a satisfactory one. Exams are always a stressful period, for anyone taking them, and this is compounded when you have a Project Report due on an experiment that just refuses to work. However, exams are over and the report has been completed and submitted (and soon hopefully marked). It is fantastic to be able to sit down and not have to constantly think whether or not there is something earth-shatteringly important that I should be doing right now. Even better news was the fact that I have already passed two of my exams, and hopefully a third if mid-semester results are anything to go by. The best news was delivered via telephony less than 10 minutes after putting down my pen in my last exam.

I am pleased to announce that I have been selected as the newest addition to the team at Perth’s Horizon Planetarium as a Planetarium Presenter. While the selection process is not as gruelling as some other professions, I like to think that my unique set of skills and experiences will make a fantastic contribution to the Horizon team.

Thus we come to the final section of today’s post, where I like to make some unfounded claims, pre-broken promises, and generally set myself up to disappoint others. Now that my schedule is lighter, and I have figured out some sort of plan for the immediate future to save myself from drowning in commitments like I usually do, I plan on three posts a week for the next month. Small (relatively) easy goals are the way forward to a more productive me, I think. Let us see how things go, hey ol’ chap?

Today’s links of pure awesomeness:

• Not so much a link as a request; one of the reasons my posts kind of stopped recently was due to the WYSIWYG editor no longer working after upgrading to Wordpress 2.8. That is right, I wrote this entire post in html tags. If anyone feels like giving me a hand in figuring out how to fix this, please give me a buzz in my email: corsair@corsairsanchorage.com (and yes, I have posted in the WP forums too).

• Back to linkey goodnes – Like zombies? This is a really interesting look at the way augmented reality might be used in the near future. Personally, I am foaming at the mouth with excitement for what this could do to a DnD campaign. Are you listening Wizards?!?

• It turns out that Call of Duty 4 is actually making me a better driver. This kind of study usually makes me really sceptical, however I must say that the ABC science team have actually written something that does not sound too skewed and biased for a change, and that makes me very happy. Small victories are better than flat-out defeats, I guess.

• I am a regular reader of Dan’s Data (no, not that Dan) and rarely find myself glossing over what he writes. This obviously means that I find what he writes to be interesting; this article is no exception. I agree with almost everything he says here, and I think people should look at the way they use computers with this article in mind. Also, I think people should cut their whinging and whining, and simply make the effort to learn how to use these contraptions. I never tire of listening to people tell me that computers “should just work”, thus absolving the user of any and all blame. This is doubly true for people who complain about bad coding, but this is a rant for another day.

• Speaking of computers – This is possibly the most amazing case-mod I have ever seen. Actually, I do not think it can be called a case mod; there were no real modifications, so much as being built out of raw awesomium and refined into awesomite. Called Edelweiss, it truly is a thing of beauty. Something I would be proud to have sitting on my desk, seriously, this thing would be in photos inside my wallet!

• This just makes me angry, especially when I am looking at starting up a small business myself in the next 6-8 months. To slam small businesses with fees like this is outrageous to the point of being purely malicious. Seriously, how can the be surprised when we torrent all out music and television episodes? The answer to Piracy is not to increase tariffs and taxes, that is how you ENCOURAGE it!

• In summation, I do not think I have ever seen someone make a heartbeat sound so epic!

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While I am not a big fan of changing the spelling of a word just for the hell of it, I will lay down some extra tolerance for the short term and go with the proverbial flow. I have apparently been tagged as la Kreativ Blogger extraordinaire by my brother-in-arms, the Apocathary. Whether a true source of creativity, or just a number to fill the spots, I have been tasked with sharing seven things that I love. If one were to plot number of updates on this site versus time, they would be excused for thinking that number one on the list was Procrastination. Some days I would not disagree.
 

1. My partner: I know it is cheesy, and I know it has been done before, however the truth remains that my quality of life would be far less than fantastique if it were not for the love and support of Mel.
    
2. The sound of rain: I would go so far as to say that I love everything about rain, but the sound of it is usually enough to satiate my lust for winter. Sometimes, when I am stressed, I will listen to rain on my DAP. Now, I should make it abundantly loud and clear; I am not talking about you lah-dee-dah, rainbow vomiting, pitter-patter, raindrops keep falling on my head, rain. When I hear rain, I want those motherfuckers to be mistaken for Armageddon. The soundtrack to my tranquillity is something between a category 5 and a waterfall. There is nothing that gets my goosebump on like lying down with closed eyes and listen to the sound of Mother Nature bringing her wrath to bear.
    
3. Artificial Intelligence: This actually came up today as a matter of conversation, but I love stories with AIs as characters. Cortana, GLaDOS, HAL, Daedalus, Skynet and Holly; there is something really exciting about the idea of machine intelligence and being able to interact with it in games will often be enough to put it in my favourites column. Transhumanism and the idea of an AI approaching something that cannot be differentiated from a human intelligence (HI) is truly fascinating. I remember my first contact with Daedalus in Deus Ex when it freed me from my prison cell; later finding out it was an AI made me completely revisit our earlier interactions in my mind. The subtext that plays out between Master Chief and Cortana is also a personal favourite of mine. The concept of a genetically engineered “post-human” and an AI having a subtle love story woven into a game is something that I do not think most people really appreciate. Then there is Mass Effect. I have always wanted an AI companion of my own, ever since I was very little. As a massive Transformers fan, I always looked forward to having a car that could talk to me, just for the companionship. Then, as I grew older, that desire turned into the love of AI in all it’s forms. After reading Neuromancer and then Asimov’s work, the need to be able to interact with computers on such a primal level grew. This probably explains how I feel about computers today, and why I am so willing to spend such ridiculous amounts of money on them. Eventually, it became a dream of mine to have a suit or watch/belt with an Artificial Intelligence in it that would always be with me. Probably says a lot about my subconscious mind. Seriously, I could talk about this forever…
    
4. Roleplay: No, you dirty bastards. I am talking in the greater sense here, things like Dungeons and Dragons, White Wolf’s World of Darkness, MMORPG games etc. I think that the obnoxiously close-minded view that roleplay is for children, or for adults who have not grown up is the most juvenile and retarded thing I have ever heard. I love being able to enter the mindset of a completely different person and become them for a period of time. Being able to play outside of your usual personality and bring a completely new face to bear is a fantastic thing that I think everyone should be able to experience. If there is one thing I wish University did not impinge upon, it is the fact that I cannot play as much DnD as I would like with my friends. What I would like to do is take it to the next level, however, and DM a game of people I do not know. I think that experience will be something I would really appreciate, and will help me become a better DM and a better player.
    
5. Fonts and Etymology: I love words and their roots. I love languages and typesetting and the shapes words make on a page. I love the symmetry, the assonance, the dissonance, rhyme, rhythm, timbre and time. Words in themselves are wonderfully pure. Sometimes it pays to look at a page of writing and look at it not for what it says, but for where it came from. When you see the similarities between languages, and where they differ, you start to see a little piece of history and I really feel I can appreciate that. The English language as it stands today is a marvellous patchwork of roots that all trace back in different directions, and yet they all (mostly) come from a single source. I think everyone should make the effort to learn a little bit more about their own language, not just how to speak another country’s native tongue. However, if you do want to learn another language, I recommend Lojban.
    
6. Tallships: This should come as no big surprise to anyone who even remotely knows me. I have been a Watch Officer on the STS Leeuwin II, a position I held with pride for two years before University dug it’s claws into my skull. I have also held a crew position on the Duyfken when she sailed our shores, not to mention a handful of recreational classes out of the South Perth Yacht Club. I have never been so at peace with everything than when I am sailing at night, or in a storm (see number 2). I love sound of the ocean, the feel of the swell beneath your feet, the salty air on your face, and the utter lack of humanity. Somewhat obvious that a misanthrope would dig the sheer remoteness that only the open ocean provides. At night, with an overcast sky and a new moon, there is no way to tell where the horizon is. The result is something truly otherworldly; a place where you are alone on a deck, floating through a vast empty space with nothing above nor below. I miss my Lioness.
    
7. Information: I do not know if I love this, or whether I just have an addiction problem. I need information, and I love having it. I have RSS feeds intravenously fed into me at all times, and I freak the fuck out when I miss out on something. I do not know why I react to information this way, but when I read an article talking about something obscure, and I already know it, I get a rush similar to the kind one would normally find in an illicit consumable. My Internet browsers (usually Chrome but sometimes Firefox) have more open tabs than they were ever designed to handle, and culling them is a painful experience that I do not relish when the time comes (usually around about the same time that my RAM starts crying). Information is not limited to just news and science, either. I hate low bit-rate music because I cannot bear the thought of not hearing all the subtleties that were in the original track, as a result my 32GB DAP holds fewer songs than one would expect. I hate JPEGs for their lossy encoding and the way it collects artifacts like the way Yahtzee’s proverbial Scarlet Harlot collects venereal diseases. While RAW is phenomenal when employed in photography, Internet browsers do not natively support the file, not to mention it’s size is prohibitively huge. I use PNG as a happy alternative with an acceptable trade-off as a result.

So, there it is. I have no doubt that if I actually spent some time thinking about it my answers would probably be slightly different (or just longer). I am meant to tag seven people here, but to be quite honest I do not know seven people that have not already been tagged, so I will just nod to those who have0 already done it and that I respect enough to read (that is, they are in my IV RSS machine).

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photo credit: Midnight-digital

I don’t really believe there is a word that can accurately describe the amount of time between my last post and this. Gigantanormoriffic springs to mind; so does “crepuscular”, however, so I would not hold much by the fact. It makes one wonder if it is no small coincidence that crepuscular means “during twilight”, and twilight was “craptacular”? A pondering for the muses, I am sure.

It being so rediculously late, I am going to keep this one short. Monsieur Flax_ has brought down the ethereal bludgeon of guilt and so I have resolved myself to update this site a sight more often (see what I did there). I have some things that I want to talk about, and anyone who wants to listen is more than welcome to refresh this page in two days time. Two days.

I promise.

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photo credit: Midnight-digital

I have been told many times that my lifestyle is a brooding monolith on the corner of Hedonist Ave and Obsessive-Compulsive Blvd. The sustainability of such a lifestyle has been debated at length; I maintain it justifies the mindless hours lost behind the event horizon of the heartless singularity that is customer service. Sure, spending 4 hours changing soft-returns to hard-carriages a 26 000 word document can be perceived as obsessive-compulsive; having an intricate zombie plan can be percieved as crazy, but we all have one. Personally my Zombie Plan involves a certain well fortified building with supplies, near a mechanical workshop and a readily available supply of chemicals. Of course, I can’t divulge anymore for security reasons, and my meager fortress can only sustain a manageable number of zombie-plague refugees. In case of emergencies, however, there is a quickly accesable bag of clothes and equipment should the Zombies catch me at a moment of weakness in my ever vigilant stand. This, however, is not the point.

Hypothetical Me is confronted with two products or services; one of a high quality with a matching pricetag, and the other its inverse. Hypothetical Me doesn’t hesitate to spend the extra dollar, and feels justified in doing so. I concur wholeheartedly with my hypothetical doppleganger, of whom I now feel needs a name. This is not to say I will squander my earnings on pointless lavishness. Comfort where comfort is due should not be seen as a sin. However it should be pointed out that with a premium product comes premium service. A case example at hand, my leather jacket by Sinikka. A $500 pricetag adorned its sleeve, extravagant for someone on a student income, however the value is in the lifetime service from the store. One button thread came loose four months after purchase, and upon my return to the store, the friendly leatherworker removed the rotten cotton (I hear a song title there) and replaced the button while I waited. I should note that he also did this to the exclusion of other customers entering the store. I thanked him and within 10 minutes I was on my merry way, freshly stiched fasteners and all. Should a customer come to myself or my colleague at my work and purchase a couple of $2000 DSLR Cameras, we are more than happy to go out of our way to track down an obscure lens for them at zero profit for us. Head on over to Headphonic in West Leederville and you will be amazed at the fantastic service you are immediately presented with. A staff member will walk you through your needs and custom select the perfect audio device for you, making sure you trial it first and are happy with the choice. Why? Because it is a premium headphone store. You spend $600 on a set of AKG 701’s, but you come away knowing that you now possess exactly what it was you wanted. Again, I digress.

I love boxsets. There, the words have been given form and now roam free in the ether. I have been recommended to experts in the field, and common concensus is that I have something akin to bibliomania. I maintain, however, that I just really like them. The words Collectors Edition and Limited Print drive my blood into a wild frenzy that threatens to boil out of my very pores. I simply cannot pass up a chance to own something as beautiful as the leather-bound Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide. Their silver etched pages and gilded edges sparkl in the dim light of a dungeon crawl, as if their brilliant display was put on specially just for me. Deluxe Ghosts I-IV sits in a large matte-black box, standing resolute against the feable attempts of photons to reflect off its surface. Thrice I own Nightwish’s Once, each a different special release. Opeth’s discography graces my drawers in its entirety twice over, myriad limited editions and re-releases scattered in their midst. In more recent days, I hunted down the last collectors edition of Warhammer: The Age of Reckoning from a small warehouse in Towoomba! The harrowind ordeal of nearly being unable to attain a copy left me a broken shell of a man, cradled only in the warm glow of hope and determination.

What brings this bout of self-convincing revelry you may ask? I am in the middle of my fourth year exams at Curtin University and sitting next to me are a disgusting pile of collectors editions of games that I can’t touch until next week! The pain of having Fallout 3 so close to my body, yet so far away in time is simply agonising!

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photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

My good friend over at Response Function felt the need to justify his personal grooming habits and associated thought processes. Now, so there is no confusion from the outset, I do not share his favourite flavour re: flesh (though if I did it probably would not surprise my girlfriend). As Response Function’s author is my gym partner, one can assume we share certain days working out. In addition, my luscious locks reach the bisector of my shoulder blades, and anyone with long hair can understand that it requires more attention than your average Fridén styling. As far as scheduling dilemmas, I wash and condition my hair every second day, unless I have been swimming, in which case I wash, condition and protein treat it straight away. However, looking at his reasons, I don’t think they justify his choice of sexual appetite at all. So, in response, I present unto thee the small army that resides in my bathroom cupboard.

Pictured Above (left to right): Ear Piercing cleaning fluid atop swisspers, hair product, stress relief skin lotion, Body hair clippers with assorted attachments, Nivea sensitive skin aftershave lotion, Shaving soap applicator and Nomad shaving soap, Mach 3 razor with spare hair lackeys, different piercing balls for variable spikiness, moustache wax, DaVinci deodorant, Christian Dior “Higher Energy” and “Farenheit” colognes, Delva leave-in hair protein treatment, Joico moisturising shampoo and conditioner, Dettol handwash disinfectant, floss, Liquid and Pen eyeliner, hairbrush, Lux Gentle Loofah bodywash, Pirate bandaids, Shower mirror, Listerine (1L bottle), electric and “stealth” toothbrush.

So, there you have it. Proof that a perfectly heterosexual man can have a strict body maintenance regime without compromising his image.

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photo credit: mdezemery

For some reason the Auzentech Prelude X-Fi 7.1 soundcard always makes me think of Sarah Blasko’s Overture and the Underscore. Maybe that’s Freudian, maybe it’s the rogue soviet psychics and their mind control microwaves. The soundcard, however, is one of my favourite purchases this last financial year gone. While only hooked up to a set of Logitech’s Z-5500 5.1 speakers through the optical connection, the quality of the sound output is phenomenal. With the new Beta drivers out from Auzentech, I thought I might write some of my opinions should someone find them interesting and google manages to find me in this ocean that is the blogosphere. However, a caveat before I continue:

Sound quality as a premium niche is somewhat akin to elite wine appreciation. It is populated by complete and utter tosswanks who use more colourful words than Shakespeare himself. In principle they are reviewing sound quality and timbre, etc. You would be forgiven if you thought they were eating a delicious brownie, or smelling an orchid.

The new DTS option isn’t yet stable, and I have experienced a couple (not many) cases of weird distortions in the sound, but the caveat was on the Auzentech website so I had expected them. The question on my lips was, however, will it make a difference to the DDL that I was currently using. The answer is yes. The difference is noticeable, but will likely not knock you out of your chair. If you are using a good amp and a set of floor speakers of reputation then you will probably appreciate this difference more than I, but the fact that I could tell an improvement in sound on these high end computer speakers speaks volumes in my opinion. The main difference in sound is a broadening, or to put it visually, as if each element looked more resolved. My test was the special edition DTS DVD of Opeth’s Ghost Reveries. The strings and keys were more pronounced and Åkerfeldt’s vocals sounded clearer. I don’t want to say that I could hear his individual vocal cords vibrating, but that is the only way I can think of describing. It’s not a case of being louder or more sound, just clearer; crisper.

However, imagine my surprise when I had finished the album and put on a 128 kbps mp3 of Sweeney Todd’s soundtrack, only to find that the sound quality was much better. I guess it’s all a case of diminishing returns, but the lower bitrate being filtered through the Crystaliser (“tha bit wot maeks bad fings not sound so bad” in common person speak) actually sounded better with DTS than through DDL. Go figure. I guess the moral to this story is something along the lines of “You won’t ever know if you don’t experiment”. Which, of course, is just my retroactive excuse for breaking things by fiddling.

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photo credit: SARhounds

Before anyone attempts to correct my spelling regarding a Bravia watching Monochromatic bamboo eater, it’s a pun using homophones. I’m quite proud of this one, bear with me (Get it? Bear? Bah! amateurs). Having seen Hancock last night, and The Dark Knight a couple of days prior, the oxidised cogs in my brain were forced to start ticking over in the crude imitation of thought. Before anyone starts firing up the hate; I thought Dark Knight was one of the most amazing films of our generation. However you cannot tell me that the entire audience was beaten around the head with the whole “Sometimes a Hero has to be evil to be good” bullshit one too many times. This is where the imitation of thought comes in, and it is an imitation because there really is nothing left to think about. As if the title of the movie weren’t enough to convey the notion clearly enough, someone thought that the viewer simply wouldn’t understand the overwhelming complexity of the topic unless every lead character in the movie (and several minors) all say the same thing every seven and a half minutes.

Hancock, however, takes it up a notch. The movie seemed to be a series of catchphrases repeated ad nauseum, strung together on the worlds thinnest plot and threaded through the audiences brains with something resembling a cricket bat more than a needle. After the credits began to roll, I honestly could only sit and wonder what exactly just happened. My head was sore and any hopes I had once had for the movie lay impotent around my feet, like the remnants of a spiderweb after a hailstorm. So much potential. What happened to the concept they originally showed us? A fallen superhero, hated by the world for the lackluster style in which he goes about his trade, decides to disappear for a spell leaving the world to quickly succumb to the darkness that is “evil”, only to show up once again to kick ass. Hell, the posters for the movie looked practically Post Apocalyptic! This is where something inside me died and I realised I couldn’t take it anymore.

What the fuck happened to subtlety?!

Stop pandering to the lowest common denominator and bring back the reason we go to a theatre in the first place. I don’t want to see Colin Fucking Firth in “Sometimes You Need To Hurt Someone To Show Them You Really Love Them IV”. The theatre was never a place for redneck hicks and back-alley whores. We gave those guys the Television to hold sway over their simian minds while we enjoyed a more complex palette. The cinema, as an evolution of the live theatre, was somewhere were we could take a situation and explore its nuances over the course of a couple of hours. The audience was given a seed with which they would nurture and cultivate into something that could be quite beautiful. This is sadly no longer the case. Our cinemas are flooded with the kind of pond scum one finds in Cannington on a Thursday night. I tire of having a narrative punctuated with cat-calls and hyena-howls from an audience with the collective cognitive capacity roughly approximate to that of the afformentioned pond scum. The only answer is to deprive them of their low-brow fart jokes and bludgeoning quips on morality. Bring back intelligent cinema and stop pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Also, I hate Brendan Frasier. There, I said it.

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photo credit: divemasterking2000

If I were to say that I am sitting in a wooden chair, watching the clouds drizzle down on my oily, sweating skin, and not noticing because its so humid that the rain feels dryer than the air… I could not hope to convey just how relaxing it is to be here in Phuket. Sure you need to shower around six times a day, but seeing as every time you open the shower door there is a freshly folded towel sitting on the marble bench opposite the sliding Japanese doors, that doesn’t seem all too bad. Besides, instead of showering you could go for a swim in one of the lagoon shaped swimming pools among the palm fronds. Or maybe a spa this time, letting the bubble jets pulverise the tension in your back to Oblivion. After all, once you have done that you can go straight back to the continental buffet that is provided as a courtesy. Or back to the bar and order another half-litre of Remy Martin VS with the spare 120 Baht in your pocket. Perhaps a trip back to the marketplace is in order, you know, so you can be treated like the emporer himself as you get measured up for your second suit to be tailored that day.

What the hell, I’m going back and renting that Jet Ski again. Besides what else was I going to do with that five dollars?

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photo credit: Esther Kirby

Sweet merciful fucking nipple-jesus! If that was not the most harrowing experience… do not put yourself in a position where you have to export a Wordpress install between domains. I’m pretty sure I just lost a decade of my total life expectancy there.

Good news, www.corsairsanchorage.com is now our permanent residence. Update your RSS feeds accordingly, because I guage how good every day is based soley on my visit statistics. No, really!

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Before I start, two points of order. If Ninja Kangaroo’s with an unhealthy car fetish makes you hot in the pants, you need to CLICK HERE and subscribe to Response Function. “Ajay” promises to keep it updated regularly.
Secondly, if you like to have your brain stretched out and kneeded like metaphysical postmodernist dough, then you need to claw your way through this small tear in space-time.

I doubt I’m the first, nor the last to make comment on this particular topic. No doubt I’m late enough for the issue to have already seen it’s peak and resolution already. Regardless it incenses me enough to point my own grievances with the issues of today’s concept of anti-piracy laws. I should point out that I’m all for those whose job it is to be creative to protect their works. Just like a writer has the right (I love homophones) to have his books published and purchased, rather than freely distributed into peoples bookshelves, so do other artists deserve the commission of the sale of their work. To maintain the analogy, a writer’s wares are usually available for a full preview at public libraries. These Government-Subsidised institutions allow people to read a book at no (direct) cost to themselves, however the book does not belong to the reader, and must be returned when finished. Music artists have their songs played on the radio and on free-to-air television. The songs are not available to listen to on demand, this domain of power is reserved for those who chose to pay for the cd/record/mp3/clockwork music disk.

Being the self-crowned King of Analogy, I could go on. The point here, however, is that the Game Industry hasn’t yet got the memo about the “Real World” and the way this so called “Reflected Sound of Underground Spirits” works. Yes, we have demos, but last I checked there are security measures involved that work, and have worked for quite some time. I define work not as “make the game impossible to pirate”, but “make paying for the game an attractive prospect”. Books can be scanned and uploaded to the webosphere; as the more than successful Dungeons and Dragons franchise shows, this doesn’t hurt profit margins. This “Piracy” may not be acceptable by these business models, but it is still manageable, and that is the key point here. No business model is perfect, and manageable is the realistic goal here. Games will be Pirated and Cd’s will be burnt, books will be scanned and TV series will continue to be torrented ahead of their broadcast dates. If the current levels of Piracy made these endeavours less than “Horrifically Profitable” they would not be pursued so fanatically. Hell, I downloaded and completed both Call of Duty 4 and Sins of a Solar Empire and then went out and bought a copy. Why? Because I enjoyed them and wanted the convenience of being able to install and play them whenever I liked. Sounds familiar…

My personal history with SecuRom is one of the more tarnished relationships one can read on the interblarg. Legitimately owning almost all of my games, and cetainly all of the games I play with any frequency, I can say with sincerity that SecuRom more often than not proves more problematic than your average frozen planet treat. To this day, I have not completed Neverwinter Nights 2 thanks to a handy little fuckup in SecuRom’s code that wont let me load a previous save from a different installation of windows. As such, when I learnt that the Masters Of The Universe (Sony) had developed a new batch of SecuRom that requires a connection to the ‘net every 10 days to make sure you are sill legit, well, there was shouting involved. The next logical step is to just send a “Legitimacy Guardian” to your house and check for “Teh Warez” everytime you turn your computer on. Also, if you haven’t got the Sauron reference yet, you either need to hurry up and hit puberty, or stop failing at life and pick up a book once in a while.

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photo credit: *** Fanch The System !!! ***

It would be poor taste to post two rants in a row, so I shall save my feelings for IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL errors for another day. Suffice to say Microsoft were wise to make use of the colour blue.

As a child I was completely in love with ancient history. There were a good number of people who had money on me becoming an Archaeologist, and indeed my man-love for Dr. Jackson was unusually strong. I couldn’t pinpoint where it was in time that my true passion shifted from the old and lost to physics, but that isn’t my point here. Rather, at some point in 1997/8 I read a book on this incredibly ancient city called “Babylon“. Immediately, it was my new goal in life to know everything there was to know about this Babylon and its people. Sure enough, one of the first things I came across was the famous King Nebuchadnezzar. So many letters, and a double Z (pronounced Zed for those ignorant of the mother tongue). His exploits and biographies became a favourite of mine, and the very next day when I had to create an account online, Nebuchadnezzar would be my screen name.

This began a trend that would continue for a full decade, for it is now that I formally pronounce my alter ego Nebuchadnezzar deceased. I may point out at this point that this was well before the Matrix movies popularised the name, and it is indeed this popularity of Nebuchadnezzar as an alias that has formed part of my decision to “let it go”. Consciously choosing to stop using the alias has been quite a hard decision for me, and while it may sound ludicrous, I truly have grown fond of the handle. I wore Nebuchadnezzar like a badge of pride for 10 good years, and like a child choosing to give up his favourite book, the choice was not an easy one. However, change is always inevitable, and the wheel of time must go on. In the interim period I will be trialling a number of avatars and handles, until I find a combination that I feel comfortable in.

~Rest well dear friend, for our parting will not be long~
~Valhalla Awaits~

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photo credit: r3v || cls

Ask yourself what would be more frustrating than having your car being broken into, having all your windows smashed and your limited edition cd’s stolen? The very day I finished repairing my windows, which is in itself a costly endevour, I parked my car outside the John De Laeter building at Uni only for it to be broken into yet again!

Like some kind of sadistic ritual of planetary alignment, such is the time of the year for my luck to turn the way of milk in the light of the shining daystar. It is this inexplicable ability to consistantly lock horns with Dame Fortuna that steers the topics of my annual resolution pledges. “This year, I will stay away from large amounts of moving metal“, or “This year, I promise to keep the fuck away from lightning!”. Maybe this year I should add an oath to steering cleer of groups of bored/retarded/delinquent children. To combat this, however, I have hatched a plan of pure villany and cunning incarnate. A very simple device, hooked to the switch on my now defunct immoboliser system, connecting the chassis of my car to the car battery itself…

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photo credit: zaido

This year I am having my annual celebration in the theme borne of the Legendary Artist’s very imagination. When I first read his books, Jules Verne had this uncanny ability to consistantly make me challenge my belief’s of justice and nobility. Captain Nemo I found to be one of the most interesting characters in prose, purely for the unique take on piracy and chivalry that seemed so unpure. It is no secret that the Buccaneer lifestyle is coterminous with my own, so the character obviously hold a certain luster I wish I myself had.

While I doubt that I will be reprising the role of the Prince Dakkar himself, I will be making some tributes in my costume. I plan on some half decent photo journal goodness happening when I start to piece the costume together, not to mention some captivating moments from the night itself being uploaded after the fact. Here’s to plan and their smooth running.

*Chink*

Also; Phill has successfully guilted me into committing to NaPoWriMo ‘08. I say that as if I don’t relish the friendly “Kick up the arse” in the name of motivation.

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photo credit: racatumba

I think Phillip pretty much summed it up better than I could. I just hope his gravestone is made of Onyx and Obsidian as is befitting.

So in the last month we have lost the Father of DnD and the Father of SciFi; I hold grave fears for the pioneers still alive, not to mention anyone else I hold in high regard for their life may just be forfeit. At this rate I think we should be glad Tolkien has already sailed west, and someone should keep their eye on Mr Clancy.

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