Good deeds

It's probably just the tiredness talking but if a complete stranger does you a good deed, without being asked, does it take something away from them to give them a reward?

I mean, if someone does something because it's the right thing to do (and perhaps also they get to feel like a good person) and then you give them something for doing it, does it create a hidden subtext that the receiver assumes they did it for gain - even if this isn't the case?

To get a little less abstract, I took $500 out of the ATM at the Canberra mall this afternoon - or rather I asked the ATM for that money and then in the middle of the transaction it flashed up a "Can't issue receipt, do you wish to continue?" message.

I said, yeah, sure, just display the balance on the screen afterwards. Now apparently this is some kind of funky whiz-bang silent ATM because I didn't get the whoosh whoosh whoosh sound of the money being dispensed, just a display on the screen that said account balance $168.

Now I've been juggling money around between accounts in the last few days so I assumed that this was the machine telling me that I didn't have sufficient funds for that withdrawal and to go away. Not entirely sure why I thought this but there was a queue behind me and I figured that I'd just do my shopping on the other card, that I must have transferred this money to instead.

Twenty minutes later, heading away from the counter at JB Hifi, some bloke stops me and asks if I was just using the ATM. I had no idea what I had done so I said yes, waiting for enlightenment. He paused for a while - I guess he was trying to make sure that I was the right guy - and asked me if I had completed my transaction.

Suddenly the penny drops and I realise that I've just left $500 sitting in an ATM and presumably this guy has it. So I tell my story and after a few moments he opens his wallet and starts counting out the cash. (Knowing how much money it was meant to be was a help to me here I'm guessing).

I am feeling so relieved and grateful at this time that I tell him that he can keep 50, figuring that if it wasn't for him that I would be out 500 bucks having 450 is a whole lot better than that.

He asked a few times if I was sure and mentioned that he was just trying to do the right thing. Anyway, he took (and I was happy for him to have it) but now I'm wondering if that might have cheapened the moment for him a little.

Oh well.

How do you defend yourself against a man with two dildoes?

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Borat when it came out so I'm holding more hope out for Sacha Baron Cohen's new film Bruno



I actually get the feeling that this isn't one of those trailers that gives away every good joke in the film (a rare occurrence these days)

We don't want zombies on the lawn

Coming soon from Popcap, the insanely successful developers of casual games like Bejewelled and Peggle, is Plants vs Zombies.

It looks somewhat like a Tower Defense style game, where you add different sorts of cannons and other weapons to a winding path that advancing enemy hordes stream down but who can say for sure.

All I know is that they have a hella catchy promotional music video which is rather cute (and features zombies with butter on their head)

Computer says we're doomed

Terminator over-watcher that I am, I like to keep an eye on our robotic and computational friends for signs of imminent uprising and Judgement day.

The top entries on my feedreader this morning didn't exactly fill me with confidence.

(Click image for full size version)



Two separate instances of robots and computers learning things under their own steam. Riiight.

And by the way, what is going on with the Google ads - are they being written by neo-cons now?
Two stories about President Obama and in the same space, two ads for the National Security Hotline - dob in a terrorist service.

Implying much?

A what-now peeler?

(Kudos to Shane for tweeting this when it first happened and leading the way to the Facebook group dedicated to this moment)

3.6 pages in the red and counting

 

(Image by Aaardvaark )

Got up early this morning and managed to write 3 fairly decent pages. 3 handwritten pages anyway - not really sure how this will translate to typed pages but I'm hoping it's around 1:1.

I've had a few realisations about my writing - I'm better than I was afraid I would be, I can be a somewhat twisted motherfrakker at times and so far I have struggled to write a line of dialogue without a "fucken" in it. (In fairness, pretty well all of these were justified by the action).

Where previously I would write ideas down and almost always pop a question mark after them, when ideas are coming to me now, I'm tossing them in to see where they might lead.

I have only a scant idea as to what the next scene is but I'm on the way and feeling a little buzzed about it.

(Ooh and I just found an image of self-bite wounds on a cockatoo, which may actually be kind of useful)

3.3 pages in the red and counting

It's now been around 11 or 12 years since I completed the first draft of my zombie movie screenplay (working title Boonsville) and I'm thinking that I've now had (way more than) enough time for new ideas to percolate and mature.

Enter Script Frenzy. 

This is a month-long writing activity, brought to you by the people behind NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which is intended to provide the impetus for people (such as myself) to blow the dust off old ideas (or bring forth new ones) and write one hundred pages of script by the end of the month.

By my calculations, this means 3.33 pages per day.

I did take a look at some of my notebooks yesterday in search of ideas that I've jotted down over the intervening years but didn't quite get to writing anything.

I must admit that I'm rather terrified of this process, particularly the possibility that in spite of the plethora of brilliant ideas I have and the artistic vision, it will come out rather crap,

Just need to keep remembering that this is only a second draft, each draft gets easier and good films often run through 20 or 30 drafts.

Inappropriate for the workplace

I'm wearing a black t-shirt inside out today.

I hadn't intended to wear it inside out but faced with a choice between that or my sweaty bikeride-to-work top, this is the better option.

This is what it looks like around the right way.

Now personally, I think that this image is a celebration of a woman's right to celebrate the more sexual side of life - it was a gift from a (female) friend who went to (and loved) a Peaches concert a few years back.

Funnily enough though, it's not considered "appropriate" in a snaggy PC ACT public service workplace - and in fairness, on first glance without understanding the underpinning philosophy, I admit it could be confronting or discomfiting to some.

So I'm wearing it inside out to play nice and counting how many people notice. (Just one so far)

Ironically, the tshirt that I thought I had grabbed and which I had considered appropriate enough, had this rather grotesque depiction of a slobbering diseased heavy metal looking fly.

 

Go figure. 

Update: One of my cluey co-workers asked me if my t-shirt was inside out because there was something inappropriate on it - clever woman.

Hanging on The Wire

I came to The Wire a little late - the 5 series of this show had long finished by the time I found it but this kind of works for me anyway as it makes it available to pick up a season and plough through it in big slabs, without having to wait for the next episode. (This has its own excitement - the current season of Battlestar Galactica for instance, but waiting is so 20th century)

Last night I finished watching season 3 and while I've been hugely impressed with the show since the start (seriously from the first episode), I hit a new point last night where I thought to myself, this is actually better than Goodfellas.

TV has the advantage of being able to take its time in developing stories and characters, dropping tiny details here and there that form a full, rich viewing experience. The Wire brings this like virtually no programme I have seen before (and you'd better believe I've watched my share of good tv).

The show itself is a gritty cop show set in Baltimore. This description alone was enough to provoke a big Meh in me the first few times I heard/read people raving about it but the chorus of raves grew louder and louder (particularly from British TV critic Charlie Brooker) and eventually I grabbed a copy and checked it out.

From the first episode I knew that this show was something special. It drops you right into the middle of the police department (and the corresponding ghetto drug trade), they're all doing their thing and speaking their fairly distinctive jargon heavy language and you are expected to keep up. The writing is sharp and intelligent and most importantly, it's real.

The characters are the real core of the show - there isn't anyone who gets more than half a dozen lines that you don't feel some measure of sympathy towards and interest in and they all behave like real people.

Rather than focus on crime of the week, The Wire tells a story (or rather several stories) across the span on a whole series. You get the perspective of the crims, the cops and some of the people living on the periphery of these worlds. From Bubs, the hapless but likable junky informant to Omar, the ultra-cool robber of dealers, from McNulty, the talented and slightly self-destructive detective to Stringer Bell, the sharp, business studying head of the dealing operation - everyone has a life and a soul.

There's a lot of twisting and turning in the story so I'm not going to dig into that but each season is underpinned by a theme/location - the housing projects in the first, the docks and the wharf unions in the second and city hall/politics in the third. (This is nicely reflected in tweaks to the opening titles each season) This included a serious examination of the drug war as a whole, including a possibly quasi-legalisation scenario that played out over most of the series.

It also maintains its own universe - there was a nice moment in the last episode last night where a guy (nearly said who but avoiding spoilers) threw some guns off the pier and a faded election poster for one of the main union characters from season 2 flapped sadly on a pole - just for a second but long enough.

As I mentioned at the start, I'm no huge fan of cop shows but The Wire is so much more than that - it truly does deserve the critical acclaim.

(And oh yeah, it's an HBO series as well, so you know it brings the awesome)

Here are a couple of clips, including a funny one where Bunk and McNulty examine a crime scene using only swear words.

Treating my inner child

I've been in the mood for a little retail therapy this weekend, I wasn't planning on any big purchases, just a few trivial items to give me the economy a little boost.

I had read on my favourite tightwad site, Economical Gamer, that JB HiFi will be running a "trade in 2 DS games, get GTA:Chinatown Wars free" deal, which ties nicely with the fact that Game has a sale of old crappy DS games at $8 a pop, giving me a $50 game I was bound to buy anyway for $16. (Just like hunting, isn't it)

So with that and the need to pick up some new tubes for the pushbike (oh and food and stuff), I set off for Canberra Mall.

Cruising around JB though, I came upon this baby, which pretty well leapt out and started begging in a childlike whine to come home with me. After all, here we have zombies (tick), a big fake gun (tick) and shooting virtual stuff (tick), all wrapped up in a sleazy 70s style exploitation film style video game. (tick and tick).



I remember playing the original House of the Dead game in the arcades, back in the day - they did a nice job of hyping it up by having the playing area/screen covered up by a curtained off area that you had to step into - such was the horror and gore of the gaming experience. The game itself was fun enough, a zombie killing rail shooter (you don't control where you move in the game space, just where you shoot) and it had a nice line in badly translated Japanese dialogue.

This spun off to Typing of the Dead, which replaced the guns with a keyboard and had you quickly type words at attacking zombies in an oddly effective typing practice exercise.

Anyway, I haven't even played this game yet, I've just been impressed enough with the peripheral - which actually feels pretty good in the hand - and the box it came in.

The House of the Dead Overkill also has some nice functionality, including a poster generator that I used to put this baby together. (click for full sized version)




Guess I should go and have a play now.

Pew pew pew urrrrhhhhhh

Update: That should probably be POW POW POW

And man, that gun gets heavy after a while - two handed grip is definitely the way to go. Music is very 70s exploitation funky cool though and shooting zombies is rather satisfying. I have died a few times already though, so better get some practice in before the (real-world) inevitable zombie apocalypse

Wondering if Ed will sing Weeping Song with Nick

Old news to some no doubt but a few weeks ago I heard that Ed Kuepper is joining the Bad Seeds, replacing the recently quit Mick Harvey. (Me fail English? That's unpossible)

I've been a fan of both outfits since I was a (relatively) little tacker and so I'm pretty interested to see how this will all play out - particularly if it brings a little of the Kuepper deep north gothic sound to the band.

It's a little unclear as to whether this is just for the tours over the European Summer season or a longer term thing but I'd love to hear a version of the Weeping Song with Ed taking Blixa's place in the duet. (Who has been singing that since then, by the way?)

Lexcorp needs a bailout

Nicely done - and featuring the guy from Mad Men as Lex Luthor

"Lex Luthor Bailout" with Jon Hamm - watch more funny videos

How to jump off a cliff and live

A few weekends ago, on a damp afternoon in the late summer, I jumped off a tall cliff over the sea north of Wollongong.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I guess it was probably more like running off the cliff but jumping off a cliff sounds better - judge for yourself whether it was a run or a jump.



Anyways, either way, this was one of the great moments of my life and the fulfillment of a childhood dream. As I was growing up, Dad worked for TAA/Qantas and one of the perks of this was a fair amount of air travel and trips to the airport as a kid. He also had a fair interest in planes as a hobby so we'd regularly trundle around to various airshows (most commonly the Easter airshow at Mangalore, near Seymour) to take photos and watch the spectacle.

Undoubtably this left its mark on me but my own love of watching birds soaring led me to an interest in what seemed a purer form of flight and a more absolute form of freedom - non-powered flight.

I don't know when I first saw hang gliders but I remember being blown away that this was something that people could do as well.

The first book I read about this sport was the tale of an Aussie guy called Wayne Blackmore who got into Hang gliding in the 70s - he had actually paralysed himself in an accident while flying rudimentary man-sized kite that he had built himself a about a week after I was born (not that the two events were connected) and then pursued his interest in the sport a few years later when friends introduced him to proper gliders in the U.S. (He went on to become a leading figure in the sport in Australia)

The fact that I wasn't the least bit put off by the fact that my role model in this was a paraplegic gives some indication of the interest I had in soaring with the birds.

Of course, life gets in the way of these dreams sometimes and it took a while longer to get up in the air than I had expected.

Fast forward to late Feb, 2009.

It had taken several months to organise a good flying day - hang gliding is heavily dependent upon getting good winds and the people I flew with (HangglideOz) are based around Stanwell Park, north of Wollongong - a 2 to 3 hour drive from Canberra. The routine involved booking a flight on a weekend (the tandem flight was a gift from the PC so I wanted her to be there for it - and potentially to collect my shattered bones) and then calling first thing in the morning to see if the weather was right. (And was likely to still be right when I got up there in a few hours time)

Even on the clifftop (Bald Hill), there was a waiting game to be played. It was a slightly drizzly sort of a day (though with good winds) and evidently flying through rain isn't particularly fun, so a few brief squalls had to pass before getting up in the sky.

You fly wearing a sleeping bag type contraption, tightly strapped in to the frame of the glider, that allows you to tuck your feet into the bottom in the air. It was snug but reassuringly so.

The experience of standing near the edge of the cliff, strapped into the glider and pushed up close to Jim, the nuggety American pilot, wasn't a frightening one at all. The wind was whooshing up the cliff face and I could feel it trying to pull the glider off the ground already and after a lifetime of waiting, I just wanted to get out there amongst it.

The closer we got to the edge, the more it pushed up until we were just out in the beautiful empty space. There are handles on either side of the pilot's flight suit to hold on to - not so much holding onto the a-frame controls as I'd expected but given that these are the controls, that makes a certain amount of sense.

Jim kept up a stream of informative chat about flying, what we were doing at any point and the area in general - I don't think I've ever asked so many questions

The experience was interesting in that for most of the time, I didn't really have a sensation of being high in the air - the glider felt so solid in the air that it was only when we suddenly dived for a little extra speed or ran into the wake of another glider in the sky that there was even that much of a sensation of movement. (Yeah, gliders leave wakes just like boats - something I'd never thought of before). It was much more like everything was just moving beneath us.

Turning was a little like this as well - you swing yourself a little to one side of the glider to dip the wing enough to start the turn then quickly swing the other way to stop the wing dipping any further. When the turn is done, swing the other way to even out the wings.

After a little while in the air, I got to have a go at this and think I did pretty well, if I do say so myself.

The view was what I had only been able to imagine - truly the birds-eye experience. Flying around the densely wooded bushland cliffs (it really is a beautiful area up around there), I was surprised at the number of car bodies littered the area - dumped over the side for the most part and never visible but from this perspective. It wasn't really that different from the view you get a few minutes before landing in a standard plane, just much more interesting scenery and at a much more leisurely pace. (Also with that same kind of 360 perspective that you get on a bicycle as opposed to the boxy window based view in a car/plane)

The landing was equally smooth - just a few gentle swooping turns taking you lower and lower to the beach/park and then pushing the nose right up at the last second to slow you down to a stall, plopping you gently down. (Seriously just like the way birds land). Being a little taller than the pilot and possibly slightly out of position, I took a small whack in the face from the control a-frame thing but this couldn't get past the joy of the whole experience.

Next stop is presumably to go through the whole process of getting a student license, which is a few weeks of daily flying and lessons - and around $2000+. From there, a basic glider is probably another $5000, so this probably won't happen super soon but a lot sooner than the first flight.

Very cool notes stuck on things in Windsor, Melbourne

Found this originally on Digg, linked to from imageshack
(Click image twice to see full sized version)

I'm really not sure where to start with this - man sprays poo perfume

This story on the ABC website caught my eye -

Man guilty of spraying own faeces in English shops

An Algerian chemist has been found guilty of spraying English shops with a vile-smelling cocktail of his own faeces and urine.

Sahnoun Daifallah, 42, blasted the shelves in two stores with litres of the concoction, squirted it in a pub and drenched the children's literature section in a bookstore.

It goes on to say that when he was caught, Daifallah "claimed someone else was responsible for the spraying".

Clearly this guy has some psych issues but a small part of me does like the sound of this as a somewhat disproportional revenge technique. (Does that make me evil?)

Some nice wordplay

This is a few years old but it is still pretty clever.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational once again asked readers to
take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or
changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's
winners:


1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that
stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately,
shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the
purpose of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders
the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit
and the person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are
running late.

7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got
extra credit.)

9. Karmageddon (n): It's like, when everybody is sending off
all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes
and it's like, a serious bummer.

10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the
day consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12 Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
smarter when they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just
after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets
into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a
grub in the fruit you're eating.


And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

All music videos should be this literal - White Wedding/Take On Me/Under the bridge

These guys (Dust films) have made a few videos like this now - big effort but hugely amusing.

White Wedding: Literal Video Version - watch more funny videos

Take on Me: Literal Video Version - watch more funny videos

Under The Bridge: Literal Video Version - watch more funny videos

John Turturro talks about playing Jesus in The Big Lebowski

This guy is one of my favourite actors of all time - this clip put him up into the most awesome list as well

That's some nice subtitling there

There have been hundreds of Downfall videos now but I love the way this one sticks it to the grammar nazis



From the same guy, finally a translation of R2D2s blips and bleeps.

Christian Bale versus the kid from the dentist

Bless you internet - this is really nicely done