Pwned trolley

Snapped this outside the back of a Coles supermarket today. Presumably it got hit by a semitrailer that reverses up the hill you see in the mirror… must have rolled into it pretty hard.

Motive of a nation

Just to say that we can. Destroying ourselves just to say that we can.

Affluence informing choices of practical indifference.

Cognition questioning its role in an indifferent and apathetic society: post-reason. Post-everything, bar one. And that is more than some (post-)structuralist theory.

For now? I’m sick of it. Over it. I’d love to argue my way out of this hole but that presumes an audience (there is one) who will bother engaging with arguments (therein lies the problem). So, I smugly reassure myself of my own correctness (though smugness isn’t as fun when no-one else gives a crap), and try and remember that all we’re doing is producing worthless material no-one will ever engage with/be enriched by/informed by/care about.

It’s not that the art is a false economy per se (though it may be), but simply that what we are producing is not, by any stretch of the imagination, of value. Hence, it is not art.

We practice our artless art-form in full view of the world, as though a patron may be enticed by its austerity. The patron, obviously, is a masochist. Our art-form is dada, we produce meaningless noise. We automate the production of meaningless noise. It is more than noise. It is noise filled with blades; more than [passively] ambient, tantamount to harm, destructive of society.

But that is, of course, what society desired all along. Just to prove that it could… what?

Australia. Football prowess > Japan.

We. Are. Australian.

Awesome night spent at Dave Roger’s house watching football (with the aide of Windows MCE, HDTV (4:3 Pan-and-Scan because I was fooled by the pre-match coverage into thinking they weren’t bothering to send 16:9 back!! Lesson learnt after the match finished and I played with it a bit, it’ll be widescreen next time) . More coverage on Flickr!

Spontaneous movie watching and awesome cinema crowds

I decided I really didn’t want to endure a game of rugby(-watching… pfft as if anyone would actually play sport) and, being halfway home, decided to give Tori a call and see if she was un-busy. So I wound up in Newtown for the second consecutive night. We were kind of contemplating going somewhere and a film was flagged as an option… so, after calling Vodafone Directory Assist on my PDA (hilarity ensues as I had called from a menu screen and didn’t have access to touch-tone numbers until I navigated various applications mid-phone-call whilst calling the phone all kinds of names, to both our amusement/my disdain) we managed to get session times (because Women’s College routes all Internet traffic through the uni, which makes for a great way to spend lots of money downloading things quickly, and Tori’s account was empty. USyd Internet rates are comparable with most private educational institution over-quota rates: that is to say, horrifically expensive per [insert metric here]. Maybe they’ve got slightly better rates for residential students but I doubt it. It’s the biggest scam on the planet, far out.) for… The Omen.

Tori’s choice, note ;-) So we headed down to Broadway for a 9.45 session and got there with time to spare (spare time being spent acquiring Podz, which sufficed as dinner for me :-/) which was nice. The carpark there late at night is retarded, though, as the food court shuts and there’s a cinema-only entrance which is accessible only from a certain end of a certain floor despite many many signs to the contrary. Anger inducing. Ah well… we did get there in the end.

The movie was crap. Predictably. It took itself seriously as I imagine only the Da Vinci Code could (though, having not seen the film — only every trailer ever made for it about three million times, which is probably the sum of its content — I probably have no right to say that. Disclaimer in place. I’ve at least read the book.) but was laughably less convincing. And gratuitously open for a sequel. Including the inexplicable jackal-giving-birth thing, which, incidentally, although presented as Biblical allusion, has absolutely no foundation in Revelation or elsewhere.

Fortunately, it was a fun audience. I love it when there are fun cinema audiences, because it’s such a linear top-down medium and it’s wonderful seeing that careful editing subverted by an audience that feeds off itself to turn rather turgid horror into black (or even not so black) comedy. One person recognises humour in the ludicrousness of a situation, for example, and their laughter feeds the other 90 people to interpret a tense moment as something truely pathetic. It is the ultimate in suspension of disbelief.

So, yes. Good fun, crap movie. Incidentally, the number “666″/significance of dates features far more heavily in promo material than the film itself. Fortunately. It just makes it all that much less ridiculous. Still, ridiculous was definitely the flavour of the film. Probably not worth seeing if you’re not there to revel in it’s crapness and generally pay it out. On the subject of such films, don’t even waste your time with the just-released-to-video film, Cerberus. Not only is it a bad movie (not in itself a bad thing), it’s also so obviously mediocre there’s no great pleasure to be derived from insulting it.

It scores points on the graphic-violence front, wherein it bears stark resemblance to the injuries sustained by a certain heavily-impaired knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but apart from that… well, I’d happily take back that ninety minutes of my life. Which I’d instead spend staying up stupidly late writing blog posts and wondering when I’m going to start actually moving beyond lots and lots of vague ideas, pick a base image (I’ve been shooting all this stuff I’d love to turn into designs lately!), and start coding CSS.

And now, I’m going to bed.

Domestic overplay

I am so sick of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium (album). Not because I’ve been listening to radio.

More often than not I delegate music selection to others in this part of the world. I’ve setup two 1RU mixers which go into a Yamaha amplifier/receiver that provides music in the office here, and generally speaking I’m quite content for someone else to sit and battle with “what comes next”. Sometimes it’s fun to play DJ, but, mostly, if there’s someone else willing to do it I’ll defer all power/abdicate all responsibility.

Unfortunately, this creates a radio-esque situation at times… as with this album. It might be absolutely massive, weighing in at 28 tracks (14 per CD), but it still all manages to sound like RHCP. Not that that should be a bad thing… I quite like their music. Just not in the kinds of doses we’ve had around here of late. Sigh.

I’m at the point where I could really go some electronica (yeah, including RnB) of some description… anything but rock with occasional acoustic tendencies. Staind would be an option, because they’re so heavily processed it’s great. Sure, all their music sounds the same, but it’s good fun. In a middle-aged-rocker angsty-kinda way. You know it’s not your normal late-twenties group when they’re singing about their kids. Well, okay, that’s not the focus of most of their music, but still. They’re old!

And I have no idea what that has to do with overplay. Whatever, music needs to change. I’m going out now and braving radio in the car. Should be great fun.

*flicks between stations to different time-points of the same song*