Category: Geekery

The Ghost Who Lurks

Wheelchair bound freaks!

I am by nature a lurker. Rather than being involved with things I prefer to stand on the fringes looking in. If I won the lottery (not likely since I never buy a ticket) and decided to hire a nightclub to throw a big party for all my friends (well what would you do if you won the lottery then?), I’d spend most of it sitting in the office keeping half an eye on things through the security cameras. Like I said, a lurker.

The reason I mention this is because it explains my attitude to forums. I keep an eye on quite a few forums, but I am not a member of any of them. I just drop in and check the threads, often on a daily basis. And 90% of the time that’s fine. I feel no social impulse to jump in and take part and feel in no way deprived, isolated or left out.

Occasionally however I come across a thread where I’d actually have something to contribute. An idea, or a comment, or some experience relevant to the subject being discussed. It’s times like this that I wish I was a member of the board – not enough to actually sign up – but enough to be mildly irritated at my inability to contribute.

So, what better to do than ‘contribute’ through my blog? Sure, the people on the boards may never see it, and probably wouldn’t care if they did (apart from wondering who this anti-social weirdo is) but at least it gets the ideas out of my head.

So that’s what I’m going to do here.

The board in question is Whitechapel, one of the domains of Warren Ellis (King of the Internet), and the thread is the latest “Remake/Remodel” challenge. Rather than go to the trouble of explaining what this is, I’ll be lazy and let Warren explain it…

So, every week or two, I set all the artists at my message board a challenge called REMAKE/REMODEL. I pick a character — usually some ancient pulp character from the claggy depths of the public domain — and tell the artists to reinterpret said character from a modern perspective.

This week he selected a certain Ivan Brodsky (Note: At least one of the remodels is seriously not safe for work, or anyone of a sensitive disposition. You have been warned).

Now, I’m no artist. I can – if I try very hard – draw something that probably wouldn’t be laughed out of town, but it certainly wouldn’t be applauded either. But I have a very good idea of what I’d try to draw if I could draw, and if I was a member of Whitechapel, and will describe it here in a ‘pen portrait’.

(Yes, I realise Warren specifically outlaws pen portraits and hence would be likely to set his eels on me if I tried this kind of crap in his thread. But this isn’t his thread, it’s a blog post aimed in the general direction of his thread, so I think I can claim a certain amount of immunity. I hope. Get the iron trousers Marion! 🙂

So imagine if you will, a wizened figure in an electric wheelchair. His withered body is strapped in and his oversize head is held up with braces. The left side of his body and face are scarred and burnt, and his left arm hangs limply. His right arm grasps the joystick that drives his mechanical conveyance. Hung around his neck are the sacred insignia of a multiple faiths. A crucifix, a hand of Fatima, a seal of David, a Khanda and a dozen others.

Various metal rods and wires stick out of the left side of his bald head which is heavily scarred. His left eye is clearly artificial, a bulging, oversize globe painted with a spiraling, hypnotic pattern. His remaining eye has a piercing, penetrating quality with more than a suggestion of madness…

Dr Ivan Brodsky was a brilliant, if amoral brain surgeon who was the only survivor of an operating theatre explosion. Flying surgical instruments severed his spine and were driven deep into his brain, altering his neural pathways to let him perceive things men were not meant to see! His patented hypno-eye(tm) was a later innovation to enhance his hypnotic abilities.

Eat your heart out Stan Lee! 😀

So yeah. The pine nut curse has dissipated (for now), I’m busy cataloging and sorting the photos of my UK trip back in 2004 and uploading them to Flickr and I saw Watchmen yesterday which I quite enjoyed despite leaving my glasses at home and hence having to watch the entire film through my sunglasses. Apart from that it’s business as usual at the Wyrmcave. Boring, awful normal ;D

That is all.

Anyone who tries to hug me will be shot dead…

Some general updates

Every week I like Miki more and more. Mind you, she’s been my favourite FreakAngel ever since her first appearance, it’s just that the more we see of her the more my initial opinion is confirmed.

Of course Kait is growing on me too.

I do have to ask though – in the last frame is that a tentacle?!

OK, enough FreakAngels (except to say that the Google Earth file has been updated).

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and put Abandoned in Perth out of its misery. It’s been sitting in a state of abandonment (how ironic!) for almost five years, and I while I’ve been taking photos of plenty of derelict sites I just haven’t had the time to process them all and get them up.

I haven’t abandoned the concept however, as almost all the photos from the site (and a whole lot more) are now up on my Flickr account. Flickr makes everything so much easier, so expect the Abandoned in Perth collection to grow and grow! (Assuming that is that I can find more places to photograph).

OK, that’s all for now.

(Ah! It’s art!)

Flickr Mania

Photo fest…

Well I somehow seem to have managed to avoid pneumonia. Good. Work is currently hellish however, so I haven’t had much time to do anything let alone write any decent blog entries.

I have however been easing my frazzled nerves at the end of the day by uploading a whole bunch of old photos to my Flickr account. Most notably of the derelict South Fremantle Power Station and the old ANI Foundry in the same area.

I’ve also put up a few pics of Perth’s sad attempt at a Chinatown, photos of William Street before the whole place was demolished for the railway and an absolutely massive spider.

Enjoy!

Getting annoyed about nothing at all

The people of central Massachusetts are seriously letting the side down.

Being a chronically over-educated and pedantic curmudgeon I sometimes find myself getting extremely annoyed about things of little consequence at all. Currently causing my blood to, if not boil certainly simmer, is an article in that renowned organ the Worcester Telegram and Gazette News, which has served the people of central Massachusetts since 1986.

The article is actually pretty good news – a woman (allegedly) abducted her granddaughter and was tracked down with the help of cell phone co-ordinates and Google Maps. What’s annoying me is the apparent complete ignorance of the authors regarding something as simple as reading co-ordinates off a map.

I quote…

“It then became a back and forth effort between the cell phone company, the police officer and Deputy Chief Lozier, who received latitude and longitude coordinates and triangulated them to learn where the two missing people were.”

So Deputy Chief Lozier “triangulated” the latitude and longitude? I find this hard to believe.

Triangulation is the process of taking bearings from two or more known locations towards an unknown location, and plotting said bearings to determine the position of said unknown location (where the bearings cross). A deceptively simple process, it was absolutely crucial to the making of accurate maps before the development of aerial and satellite photography, and remains important in cartography, navigation and the tracking of radio signals.

It is not used however in reading latitude and longitude off a map, which is a simple process of finding the appropriate markings on the margins and tracing them to where they cross, something even a child can do with minimal instruction.

To the authors of the article however reading co-ordinates off a map (not that you even have to do this if you’re using Google Maps) is apparently a strange and arcane science, involving high level mathematics and possibly the sacrifice of a goat – as opposed to simply “looking” and “reading”. Such a complicated process needs a suitably grand title, and “triangulation” fits the bill because it has something to do with maps and no-one (or at least no one who reads or works at the Telegram and Gazette) really knows what it means anyway.

This frankly is sloppy journalism. Sure, I understand the need to simplify concepts for publication and that a newspaper is no place for a detailed exploration of cartographic techniques, but a certain level of accuracy in terminology is surely not too much to aspire to? To refer to reading co-ordinates off a map as “triangulation” is akin to referring to a horse as a mule – sure they’re related, but no editor would let such a slip get through to print.

So yeah, that’s what’s annoying me at the moment – the general ignorance of the population in relation to basic cartographic and geometric terminology. Honestly, it’s like they’re not even trying. 🙂

Back to work tomorrow. Urgh.

Don’t Filter Me Bro!

Ah! Activist chicks!

OK, it’s again been a long time since an entry. I’ve been oscillating between not feeling like writing, or feeling like writing but being plain too tired to do so. End result? Decals for turning lego men into the Freakangels, and no blog entries.

But I’m pulling myself together today and actually getting some writing done (it’s 35 degrees outside, so it’s not like I’m doing anything apart from cowering under my air conditioner).

So anyway, yesterday there was a nationwide protest over the Government’s plans to force a mandatory net filter onto everyone. This is an absolutely terrible idea on any number of fronts both technical and social, so I figured I’d go along and make my voice heard. Ryan was also sufficiently motivated to go along, so we met up at Stirling Gardens for the rally at midday.

It wasn’t huge with about 300 protesters turning up, but that’s reasonably successful turnout for a city the size of (and apathetic as) Perth. There were a number of speakers, most of whom were pretty good once they abandoned the farcical PA system they’d bought along and switched to a megaphone (the one exception was a 911 conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t give his name and tried to tell us that the net filter is the work of the Bildenburg group, as are laws forcing children to wear bicycle helmets and restricting when you can water your lawn). I even got interviewed by a journalist and quoted in today’s paper, which is pretty gratifying on a personal level 🙂

(There were also a number of rather cute activist girls around the place, one of whom kept glancing at me. I’m not sure if she was glancing at me because I noticed her glancing at me once and kept glancing at her to see if she was glancing at me again which prompted her to keep glancing at me to see if I was glancing at her, or if she was actually glancing at me. She left before I had the chance to go over and say hi, which is convenient, as it meant I didn’t have to walk around cursing myself for being too timid to go over and say hi ;))

We also ran into Sam who I used to work with (actually I’m surprised there weren’t more people there I recognised). She and I had a quick chat while Ryan distracted one of the 911 Conspiracists who was trying to force pamphlets on us. Then we all cleared off before the riot cops arrived.

(That’s a joke by the way, we’re not quite a police state yet although this proposed filter is a good first step)

Apart from that I haven’t done much else lately. That should change as Christmas draws near, I’ve still got plenty of gift shopping to do at least. Watch this space for Astounding Tales of Holiday Commerce!

That’s about it for today. Expect more entries soon! (I know, I always say that… 🙂

Sky Shock

Musings on servers and human gullibility

It’s 2:43 in the afternoon and I’m sitting in the office unable to do any work because the co-location facility that hosts our severs has been down for the the last 90 or so minutes.

This is not much fun. Yes, on the one hand I’m being paid to sit around and do nothing, but there is a whole lot of work that needs to get done before Christmas, and every minute the servers are down is one minute we’ll have to find elsewhere to fit it all in. On top of that there are dozens of our clients who wouldn’t know a hosting facility from a hat rack, and naturally jump to the conclusion that their site is down because of us, and having to tell them (when they ring up in a huff) that we have no idea how long it’ll take for the server to get back up (because the guys down at the server racks aren’t answering the phones) doesn’t help matters.

So I’m passing the time actually writing a semi-decent blog entry – something I haven’t had the time to do for quite some time. Writing it into a text editor that is, since Wyrmworld is hosted on the same server that is currently causing us all these problems.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk ’bout contrails.

I saw a contrail on the way to work today. I mention this because they’re fairly rare here in Perth. Something to do with our weather conditions – and the fact that Perth is not one of the most trafficked airports in the world – makes them comparatively rare. So rare in fact that the overwhelming number of contrails lacing the sky is one of the things I really remember from my trip to the UK in 2004. In any case, a long, fluffy contrail was decorating the sky as I walked to the railway station, and that got me thinking about sky-shock.

Sky-shock is what it’s called when someone who hasn’t really looked at the sky since they were a kid happens to look at the sky and is shocked and horrified that it doesn’t look quite like what they’ve been imagining all these years. The stars are too bright, the moon is too small (or too big) or the clouds (or contrails) are the wrong shape and colour. They immediately jump to the conclusion that something is very wrong and ascribe this to a number of sinister factors including (although in no way limited to) shadow governments, terrorists, aliens or the Rand Corporation.

This is how you end up with reams and reams of web pages about “chemtrails” (those contrails don’t look like what I imagine contrails should look like! It’s a conspiracy!). This is why people see the planet Venus, or Jupiter, or even the moon and think the aliens are coming to get them (it’s big and bright and it’s following me!). This is what happens when the general public are poorly educated in astronomy and meteorology and don’t bother to look above the horizon for 99% of their lives.

And this brings me to an idea I had about ten years back when I was in TAFE. And idea that I shall have to elaborate on later, as the server has just come back online… 🙂

The Human Condition

It’s a sad, tired world spinning around a dying star.

Watching the footage of the attacks in Mumbai on the news last night I was struck with a vision of the view from Colonial One in the Battlestar Galactica episode Exodus Part 2, where the resistance fighters start setting off bombs all over the city.

We all cheered that scene. Our guys were finally fighting back against the Cylons, and salvation (in the form of Adama and the Galactica) was on its way. Take that you evil minded toasters!

The thought that people all over the world are looking at the Mumbai footage and having the same reaction – cheering and thinking “take that you evil minded [insert whatever term you like]” – says something truly awful about the human condition.

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