Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has cancelled the upcoming Commonwealth Games!! Say it ain’t so!!
Personally I think it’s approaching obscene to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on a glorified sports carnival when the country’s in the grips of both a housing and cost of living crisis, but many people have a weird and unhealthy obsession with sports and are likely now losing their minds. They’re probably already tweeting (and/or threading) up a storm about how people need sports to make their miserable lives bearable, an argument with a real panem et circenses feel to it. Gotta keep those proles entertained!
The only reason people like the Commonwealth Games anyway is because Australians are the only people in the Commonwealth who can actually swim. Our swimmers reliably bring home a massive pile of medals and everyone cheers about how we slaughtered Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Then at the Olympics everyone is baffled when our world-beating team picks up maybe two golds and three or four silvers. Questions are asked about how our performance could have collapsed so far in only two years, completely ignoring the fact that the Americans preemptively quit the Commonwealth back in 1776.
The vast majority of spam I skim through each morning as part of my job can be categorised into one of the following categories
This AI tool will make you rich!
This marketing tool will make you rich!
Your website is horribly flawed, pay me and I’ll fix it and make you rich!
Do you have common nail problems?
Does your dog have common nail problems?
Does your dog need a harness for its common nail problems?
I Elena from Ukraine me and horny friend need a MAN!
But every now and then you come across something so nutty that you wonder what possible purpose there could be for spamming the world’s contact forms with it. A fine example of this was submitted through a number of our websites this morning – all of them seeking to contact a different Archon (a builder of the universe in Gnostic theology, although I prefer to think of them as alter-egos of Patrick Bauchau…).
So, be aware! You are a robot that was put to sleep and now an upgrade to the Earth’s quantum field is going to cause an extinction level event! Or something…
Trying to get in touch with Archon named Leandro. You were put into sleep status to gain more awareness of the mechanics of earths bots known as humans to gain a better form of gnosis. It is time to bring to your attention now the pandemic has dwindle down. This was engineered as a direct extraction of loosh of those infected compounded naturally occurring version of it by fear and anxiety it has caused. With the transferred consciousness of 6,000,000+ humans that reached an abrupt end was enough energy to develop more sophisticated AI engines for the quantum field of Earth. Due to the code of the virus these humans did not respawn into alternative timelines and end of life cycle was made short. Now that AI engine has been upgraded an extinction level event will occur as the humans are gaining too much awareness and the reality mechanics of the quantum field of Earth need to be rewritten.
I’ve been MIA for the last couple of days while caught up in the throes of white hot creative obsession on a project that (based on my history with these kind of things) will likely never see the light of day. But such is the lot of the autist, and at least it’s keeping me entertained and out of trouble.
Anyway, after a solid twelve hours of sitting in a chair and pounding out code I got up to go to bed and was hit with a sudden bout of dizziness which almost toppled me to the ground. As I regained my balance (a quick and easy feat due to decades of living with a dodgy ankle that has a tendency to suddenly go on strike without notice) I thought to myself “I’m so dizzy!” and a memory that has been lost in the depths of my mind for a good twenty years abruptly raced to the surface.
Said memory was of a song. A song called Dizzy from my high school days in the early 90s. I immediately recalled the tune and 90% of the lyrics, although for the life of me I couldn’t remember who recorded it. I also remembered that I was kind of obsessed with it, and – that based on the version dragged from my memory banks – being obsessed with it was rather embarrassing because it really wasn’t that good.
So off I went to bed humming the tune, and trying to remember the second half of the second verse – something about “you’ve got control of me” and needing to find a doctor?
So first thing this morning I hopped online to look it up, and discovered three things…
It was by Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff – of course it was!
It’s actually a much better song that I remembered, so there’s no need to be embarrassed about liking it
Wait! Vic Reeves?
Yes! The guy who regularly turns up on Eight Out of Ten Cats does Countdown and famously formed a comedy due with the other guy who regularly turns up on Eight Out of Ten Cats does Countdown and who with said guy and the lovely Emilia Fox starred in the remake of Randal and Hopkirk Deceased! That Vic Reeves!
So, my mind is rather blown. One could almost say that my head is spinning…
Pills! Pills! Wonderful pills! Nothing quite like them for healing your ills! My body won’t mug me, And pain will not bug me, As long as you drug me, With wonderful pills!
As a kid in Australia in the 1980s there was no getting away from the first 54 seconds of Brian Bennett’s New Horizons, which was used as the theme to channel 9’s cricket coverage. Over the long, hot Christmas school holidays you’d switch on the TV to try and find something to relieve your boredom (which was still preferable to being in school, naturally…) and find nothing but hours and hours of cricket – possibly the most boring sport ever devised. It was probably being commentated by Richie Benaud too.
So it’s downright bizarre to discover that past the 54 seconds mark New Horizons turns into the theme from a second-rank 1970s spy thriller!
Confirmed magical powers of the individual known as Ronnie James Dio:
Apotropaic hand gestures
Transforming foes into rats
Shape shifting into a frog
Please inform your local authorities of any further observed instances of magic use by the individual known as Ronnie James Dio. Remember – an alert community is a safe community!
Not long ago someone posted the following image (which I have shamelessly stolen) to one the Tengwar subreddits, asking for a translation.
I nicked it. When you let your guard down for that split second. And I’d do it again.
(For those not in the know the Tengwar is the writing system devised by J.R.R.Tolkien for his Elvish languages. It’s very pretty but horribly impractical – the Elves were probably plagued with dyslexia.)
Two facts were quickly established. That the squiggly bits above the eye are the logo of the Tolkien themed, Austrian, atmospheric-black-metal band Summoning, and the writing is complete gibberish, a repetition of something like ait-h dom a chon. Case closed.
Except something about the whole thing nagged me. The photo is obviously of a manufactured item, probably a promotional item for the band, and likely made of metal. It seemed unlikely that the band – either as professional musicians or Tolkien fans – would go to all the trouble of making such a thing and then just stick a bunch of random letters on it. Surely it’s meant to mean something?
Fool! Purple Wyrm writes as he pleases!
The first possibility was that it’s written in the Mode of Baloneyland. “Mode of Baloneyland” is a very funny pun, but you need to understand a few things about the Tengwar before you can understand it. Now, I could skip over this in the name of not boring the hell out of you, but this is my blog, and I write as I please!
Tolkien was a linguist (specifically a philologist), and he made his Elves linguists as well. As such the writing system he invented for them was not simply an alphabet, it was system that could be used to write any language. Each individual consonant (tengwa) is built out of components indicating the basic sound it represents, but it can be reassigned to another value depending on the needs of the language being written. The exact assignment of letters to sounds is called a mode, with examples in Tolkien’s works including the General Mode, the Classic or Quenya Mode, and the Mode of Beleriand.
This flexibility means that the Tengwar does not easily map to a computer keyboard. For a start you need to know what mode you’re writing in – the tengwa súle for instance represents “s” in Quenya Mode and “th” in General Mode. What key should that be mapped to? Also there’s two ways to represent vowels. In General and Quenya mode they’re indicated with marks (tehta) above the tengwa, but in the Mode of Beleriand they have their own dedicated tengwa – so should the ‘E’ key put a dot above a letter or print out the character yanta? It’s a nightmare!
As such, tengwar fonts don’t try to set up a correlation between the letters on the keys and the tengwar they print. They simply make all the tengwar available and rely on the person typing to know what they’re doing. Inevitably many people don’t know what they’re doing and try to write in “Elvish” by typing in a phrase in English and then switching it a tengwar font. Among tengwar enthusiasts the resulting gibberish is referred to as “The Mode of Baloneyland”. Get it? Like the Mode of Beleriand, but absolute baloney. See? I told you it was funny!
(Please laugh)
Now, if the text was written in the Mode of Baloneyland there would be no way to decipher it without knowing the mapping of the specific font it was written in. I decided to ignore this dead end and assume that whoever wrote it had some idea of what they were doing, but were just really bad at using the tengwar. So, I hopped over to Summoning’s Wikipedia page to look for any clues. I quickly discovered that in 2018 they released an album named “With Doom we Come”. Hmmm, not unsimilar to ait-h dom a chon…
A closer look at the image shows that the Redditor who translated the inscription as ait-h dom a chon missed a few things. Firstly the questionable quality of the metal casting makes it a bit tricky to tell for sure, but the final númen (‘n’) could actually be malta (‘m’), rendering it ait-h dom a chom. Secondly there are marks above the space before chom and the divider between repeated spaces – ait-h dom a’chom‘. These are clearly orphaned ‘e’s – when a tehta cannot be written above a letter it’s supposed to have a carrier (like a lowercase “i” without the dot) placed beneath it. This makes the phrase ait-h dom ae chome.
We’re making progress! The “t-h” on the end of the first word is clearly a result of the writer not realising that there’s a single tengwa for the “th” combination, but what’s with the ‘a’s? A consultation of a tengwar chart gives us the answer. While the character resembles osse – used to represent ‘a’ in the Mode of Beleriand – it’s actually not a valid tengwa at all! It’s the character vala (‘w’) printed backwards! So we’ve now decoded our way to with dom we chome.
Consulting a chart also solves the problem with “ch”. Whoever wrote out the phrase forgot to add a line to the tengwa calma (‘ch’), which would have transformed it to quesse (‘k’). Fix this and we have with dom we kome.
There’s still the issue that the first ‘o’ should have been doubled, but we’ve successfully demonstrated that the inscription is a really incompetent attempt at writing With Doom We Come.
For purposes of comparison here are the inscription as written, and how it would be written properly in both the orthographic (based on spelling) and phonetic (based on sounds) English Modes – all generated via Tecendil which is the only Tengwar transcriber you should use!
Incompetent Mode – “?it-h dom ?e chome”Orthographic mode – “Wið doom we come”Phomenic Mode – “Wið duum wii kum”
So in conclusion, perhaps get someone to check over your tengwar before sending merchandise for production, Summoning!
