My parents

I flew home to Melbourne for the holidays.

I like Melbourne.

I am currently engaged in a pedantic argument about something with someone.


What fun.

I miss New York

Chocolate steak, with blueberry sauce

On the other side of a few hours of tending a bar, I will be eating the leftovers of this delicious cake.



It looks delightful. I wish I baked a backup cake.

Sarah and her posse are liable to devour it.

A song and a crepe

Shenyang, China, one dreary winter morning.

My black boots trudge through the black snow, inside my toes are kept insulated from the world by two pairs of black woolen socks.

I am wearing a black trenchcoat, black thermal gloves with black leather gloves over the top. A black balaclava as a neck warmer and a black beret.

Inside the black trenchcoat I am wearing black cotton dress pants over a pair of black thermal underwear. My chest is protected by a black skivvy covered by black tshirt proclaiming my love of Darth Vader.

Hanging on my black leather belt is a long razor sharp black combat knife. I stop at a grocers to pay a child of about 4 years a yuan for two lemons.

I have sugar sachets in my pocket, part of a cache of hundreds I stole from a coffee shop someplace last week. I think they were probably complimentary, much like the bottle of Heinz ketchup and Parmesan cheese I have sitting in my fridge. Condiments are always free; I take my money's worth.

I stop at a small, greasy restaurant. The grease comes standard in this part of China.

The door squeaks as I slide it open. I make my order of fried dough at the counter and wait in line. When my order is up I take it to a corner and pull out the lemons, sugar and my knife.

I slice the lemons into wedges and sprinkle the sugar on the dough, then squeeze the lemon juice over the sticky, greasy mess.

I wipe the lemon juice off the blade and put it back in its sheath. Nobody says anything.

I look down at my vague attempt at Crepes Suzette and a song comes into my head.

And so this is breakfast, and what have I done?
Another day over, a new one's just begun.
And so happy breakfast, I hope I have fun.
I have to stop drinking; I can't feel my tongue.



I thought it was an action movie, not a guy complaining about rules.

Wikipissing

The latest wikileak is certainly an interesting read, putting the average internet user into a position of unrestricted and bluntly honest language.

Journalists could learn something from reading these documents. Not only the scandals of Countries calling each other names and gossip about who insulted who at state dinners. But the language itself, honest, blunt, straightforward and easy to understand, implying little and talking only of concrete ideas, not obsolete tit bits.

There are many around the world condemning these reports. As though governments departments being honest and transparent is too dangerous. Secrecy, diplomacy and innuendo seem to be the mainstay of failed representational government. No blood will be spilled as a result of the documents becoming public. But perhaps the questions they prompt will force a change in the political game.


It is already obvious who leaked these documents. Expect more leaks to come, and plan on having nothing to hide.

Empty bottles

Being evil is like being in love, you don't know why you are, you just are.

MASH

I have been watching MASH for a while now, and the prospect for a new season starting any day now has me excited

Of course after all these years you could hardly expect Alan Alda to come back as Hawkeye, maybe a cameo at a USO show, but he strikes me as heavily Yosarian inspired; far too insane to return to the theater of war as a spectator.


I am sure there is plenty of young, new talent in the US and Korea just waiting to get in on the action.

Danger danger, we are all in danger

"The greatest scourge visited on our community is the vile scourge of illicit drugs" -Kenneth Jones Deputy Commissioner of Victoria's police force


Image of "high potency" cannabis lifted from the ABC website. Looks like ditch weed to me; check out those stems and leaves.

Murder, rape, arson and rape are so passé.

The free market is dead.

Spider Jerusalem

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads as a tale of two cities, if the book were cut in half along the spine.

The violent conflicting ideologies, the excesses brought on in part by a cornucopia of psychoactive chemicals and in larger part by the raw psychic energy efficiently piped into vaults of the wealthiest few.

The most dangerous thing that comes to mind, is if this man were ever to become polite, sober and calm. If were to happen, we would all become a little less sane.

White cholera

Does your clothing define your profession. Physicists and engineers by and large seem to have split from the mandatory lab coat common to the technical application of scientific theory.

I work on a boat (motherfucker, don't you ever forget). It pays well and the crew are some of the most charming and motley people I have ever had the privilege of having met.

I work behind a bar, pouring drinks for the astute and the abominable, the influential and the abysmal.

My uniform is white. The collar tight around my neck when I try to wear it done up is also white.

I now owe ~40k AUD for an education at the university of Melbourne and the university of Queensland. I have learned fascinating things about the minute and gigantic world that surrounds us. I have learned terrible things about the people that surround us.

Working in a bar makes me happy. I serve drinks to people who are out on the river enjoying themselves. Their jovial attitude is at times contagious. I work very hard, but I enjoy myself.

The easygoing and touching people I find myself in contact with at the bar are not the same people I have found in a lab. My research work at MUARC was fascinating and the people I worked with were interesting. But my honors year has provided a different perspective.

Perhaps it was merely the small lab I was working in, and the specific staff with which I came in contact. My sample size is small, yet I fear a possible dystopic propensity towards self deception and malicious skulduggery that goes with a career in a laboratory.


Or maybe I have yet to see it on the boat. The world is mine. So it goes.

World's Scariest Police Chases

I finally got a epsxe working on kubuntu 10.04 with a PS3 controller.

This thread did most of the work for me.

joypad.cfg was a joy to configure, but once I got it working it felt good. Though it kept trying to use the sixaxis which is upsetting. Manually assigning keys using the .cfg file saw that through.

So, best games to play. Well Symphony of the Night is a classic that makes the latest DS releases pale in comparison. The difficulty is pleasing too; a far sight from the soft, bared underbelly of Dawn of Sorrow. In fact, it even gave the steep yet truncated Order of Ecclesia a thrashing. A skeleton killed me before I realized that saving religiously was essential to progression.

The only things I miss from the DS titles is the secret walls at every junction.

Actually thinking back, I don't miss the piles of useless items and abilities to collect.

I do miss the extra side quests from Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia. Though both games suffered from a chronic case of the shorts and really needed the padding.

Having discovered a good 23% or thereabouts on my first hour of play, I figured eh, the game is five times as long as that, give or take retracing my steps.

Then I discovered it is ~200% exploration and the castle inverts itself at some point.

Oh joy! I started wishing the latest attempt at 3D was more Metroid Prime 1 or 2 and less Devil may cry about the rent while living in a loft of a Castle named Devil Castle Dracula.

Well, dying often and having to reload from the title screen derails my playing. For times like this I have World's Scariest Police Chases.

I didn't do any research into the title, just thought world's blankiest blank was a good genre to get into and popped it on.

Well. I got in some GTA style driving on free patrol then tried the missions. Stopping cars by ramming them was pretty fun, the driving tests not so much.

Then I was told to pull out my gun and disable the car I was chasing.

Yep, the narrator explains in a serious voice, that split second decisions like steering well or deciding to shoot at a car you are pursuing is what police must do to "save lives and keep the peace". I really hope this game was funded by the police in part.

By now I am back in freeplay, pulling drivebys on pedestrians that dare to dodge my SUV as I bare down on them. I start thinking that GTA is only so fun. You are a criminal, that is your shtick. Break some laws, get money, take your cousin bowling...

I think a police sim that allows you to be crooked as hell, generally disobey the law and cause chaos would be a great game to play.

And I just remembered the millions of hours spent with nelix playing Crackdown. Now it all makes sense.


I am going to keep pretending World's Scariest Police Chases is a simulator designed for recruitment. It feels better to drive the opposite direction from cars you are meant to chase, do burnouts through white picket fences and wildy discharge firearms while driving along the middle of the road.

Yes

Turns out I have liked progressive rock and progressive house for a long time without knowing it.

Or knowing what is progressive about these genres.

Drama by Yes is on par with Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.

I can see the inspiration that the Boards of Canada must have taken when making The Campfire Headphase. The opening Machine Messiah is so deliciously animu, I ^.^'d.



When I spend time with people who are happy I feel I am making them sad by contrasting emotions. A sort of contagious Eeyore.

The Dao of Pooh, simplistically approaching perfection, fell short in its analysis of Eeyore. True melancholy is knowing things will always be bad, no disappointment, no excitement, no change. A perfectly harmonious and unpleasant life.

Spend you time with people who are unhappy. They have the most realistic understanding of the world to be found in the world. Believe the worst will happen and you will always be right.

A words in a pattern

The world I build of myth and play,
I gladly tuck inside today.
Without a world of truth and sorrow,
The path I walk has no tomorrow.

Sass found this

I had written this on the back of a birthday card while asleep. As such I forgot it existed.

Law is enforced with practicality and governed with ideology.

Nostalgia is my time machine

Sitting back and coping with it seems enough some days.
Technically I am still moving forward.
I get the feeling I did high school and uni because I wanted to in part, but also because I didn't want to worry my parents about my future.
But no matter what I do I will be fine at it.
I believe that.


You know the little buddha in the temple in thailand? I am more jaded than that buddha

Perception is not a cone of information you are aware of, it is a filter of all the information you do not see

One cannot listen and talk at the same time, as well we are aware. Already there is more information than can be communicated within a human lifespan. Since expanding lifespans would only expand information, as with day to day conversion of sensory data to perception, filtration is the solution.

Superior secret pizza dough recipe

You will need: Things to cook pizza.

Put on the oven before you forget, it really sucks to have it ready and a cold oven to put it in.

180C probably will work.

Put a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and some yeast in a cup, put warm water in the cup and let it sit.

For the dough you mix two cups of flour together until the flour is evenly spread throughout the whole bowl. Add in some oregano, basil, parsley, paprika and cayenne pepper along with a tablespoon of olive oil. Mix that through as well.

Put the yeasty drink in the flour and mix it up until you get a dough. Be gentle, you do not have time to mess around waiting for it to rise a second time. The less you handle it the softer the dough.

Flour everything in your kitchen, flour is the best lubricant for this sort of nonsense. Graphite is better than oil in a lock, flour is better on your pizza.

Do not put graphite on your pizza.

Roll it, put it on a greasy tray or pizza stone, but if you have a pizza stone you probably already know how to make good pizza. Bake it for about 12 minutes 23 seconds or so.

Take it out, put on tomato paste or sauce, sprinkle some oregano and onion if you are into that sort of thing.

Cheese goes on, you can use a lot of bad cheese and get something soggy and bland or buy some decent cheese and get something crispy and delicious. I used coles brand pizza cheese because I am currently financially poor. A good mix of cheese suits your taste buds, but as a general rule use a 2:1 ratio of mozzarella to cheddar and top with some Parmesan.

Mushrooms are the key here; there is never a good reason not to eat mushrooms. Eat lots of mushrooms. Mushrooms.

Then some other stuff.

Bake it for a while longer, maybe 23 minutes, your guess is as good as mine, then pull it out and eat it.

I make two pizzas using this method. Since pizza is mostly flat the only thing that limits the size of a pizza is the oven. You can make one massive pizza.


Remember Area = Pi times radius^2

Best regards jessta

Grow your own China

China is an interesting thing to watch.

There is a building pile available money, and more economic freedoms for the increasingly fat middle class.

But without freedom of expression of the individual, to what will it amount?

It is easy enough to find dissent against a authoritarian regime; no matter how submissive a population you breed, there will always be idealists.

But enough of that, I do want to go back someday and more importantly, I doubt I will change any minds based solely on flawless logic and biting wit.

I am more interested in what a lack of freedom of expression does to creativity.

Ask anyone where a cheap forgery of a famous brand name comes from, they will say China. Ask them where the real thing comes from, it is China again. The same people make the same items in the same factories in near identical conditions. The branding is markup, well that and the intellectual property.

Here is the crux, the mistaken believe that ideas can be possessed, this hideous concept sees children being bullied by Liar Cohen.

The EFF makes more articulate arguments on the subject, so I will not dwell here, but merely pause to remark that information wants to be free and charging for ideas slows, not facilitates their transmission.

In a world where knowledge is fast reclaiming its place as the only true capital, it is vastly important that people interact. Vocal and overly vocal idiots from all over the globe can get together to mock every topic of thought. This is a fantastic thing.

Back to China, music, the arts and especially writing have taken damage from the lack of freedom of expression. Unable to safely express themselves, potential artists have taken to coping western classics to sell as cheap forgeries rather than creating their own work.

The latest pop hits in China last years, being rehashed and remixed slightly while reeking of vanilla. There are no surprises here, with active repression of creative tendencies endemic in the culture, children grow up learning that to be unique is a bad thing.

Am I asking too much of a civilization that is over nine thousand years old? Surely all the good ideas like umbrellas, gunpowder and the Dao have dried out the cultural creativity and left little more with which to innovate.

No! If America can reinvent the toaster for over a hundred years, China can continue to innovate and create new works of art long into the twenty third century and beyond.

How? Well turning around a culture of ridicule of difference, isolation and fear of an authoritarian regime is not an easy task. Luckily the government needs to do absolutely nothing to allow a renaissance of free expression and exchange of ideas. Unfortunately no government has ever willingly conceded power, censorship or control.

Where does that leave the people?

Well, I would say that is up to them.

China has been looking West since Nixon dropped by for a chat and some tea.


West China is where the next change will start.

Console wars

Not one game has made me want a third generation console.

Motion control, hrmm...


One of these looks like fun.

At least Sonic vs Mario as means of console decision is no long an issue.

Oh wait.

Building blocks

I just got Linton in the Melbourne cup sweep for MUARC.

Number 23.


Thanks Erin, you've been buying me a ticket in this race for longer than I can remember.

If you rung it then you should have put some like on it.

The socially acceptable are asphalt
Ubiquitous they pass without notice
Worn down by societies movements
They crack underfoot

An unsent letter

Property of Earth

23 The Small Blue Thing

Near the Big Yellow Thing

Dear Human,

I love you.

There seems to be something wrong with the world, maybe you have noticed too. If you haven't I might be hallucinating again, I do that sometimes out of curiosity.

Why do people settle for things that aren't quite what they want?
I know if someone swapped my oxygen for sulphur I would not complain.

Dictatorships fail because children ask questions nobody can answer. What does your boss smell like? Committed any thought crimes today?

Alcoholics: drink your beer
Diabetics: eat your glucose
Nymphomaniacs: call me


P.S. look up, they know you know what I know




Have you ever felt like killing her with your size?

"I knew that madmen have unnatural strength; and I knew I was a madman..."
- Renfield, from Abraham Stoker's Dracula

'In this society [sic], universities are like vultures [sic], picking the bones of an economy already stripped by the wealthy and stupid [sic].' - Glyn Davis

"...creatures that don't have sex are compensated by potential immortality."
- John J. Medina, The Clock of ages

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should
automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." - Gore Vidal

Song of flag raising / cheese worship

$ (Question)

The world fears me,
I will not hide,
My frog watches my back,
My quest just started.

The moose in the tree,
Points eastward,
To where I will not go,
The weasel munches cornflakes mournfully.

West I trudge again,
The snow melts under my feet,
I stop to build a snowman in prayer,
It shows me the path to myself.

Resting stops the complaining of my shoes,
But I cannot as often as my monkey tells me to,
So I bribe the deity in my glasses to recreate them,
And make me some sugar.

Town is quiet,
It is petrified with fear,
I walk amongst the still faces,
Recognising those I once cared about.

I float in the id of myself,
The peace is unbearable,
I crave the suffering of all,
I am no more than that.

I object loudly,
But the people will not listen,
They worship false power,
And ignore the ignorant.

The money once unclaimed,
Unjustly is taken by the righteous,
I hide my objections,
They will eventually find me

As I watch the whale whither,
I wish because it makes me feel powerless,
And sell the potatoes,
For minimum metal compound.

The fields are empty,
Children all laugh,
The humour is beyond them,
And yet so much less.

It is time to leave,
I stayed too long,
But learnt nothing,
And am better for it.

Alone in the dark I think of myself,
I am remarkably normal,
It scares me,
I open my eyes.

My sound is rested,
My lion is safe,
My feet rest in ice,
And I finally regain consciousness.

I continue forever,
Watching the endless movement,
Realizing without me,
Nothing would change me.

The paths grow more frequent and longer,
I want to follow them all,
The short ones are often the hardest,
But the change is unacceptable.

Truth is defined by the time and place,
I am innocent in the future,
The past is a place I fear,
But will never forget.

The temple closed to me,
I am too open to enter,
The truth of my journey,
I will never hate them.

The maybe and perhaps,
In the dish of work,
Question the animal,
Find the response.

The frog is silent,
It is over now,
The real release,
Is a fake truce.

The end is in sight,
So the end will happen,
It is inevitable,
And starts now.

Reductio ut duplicitas

Reduction of experience to a collection of thoughts is a good means of rendering the content meaningless.

Something happens and then something else; coincidence becomes synonymous with parallel.

A pun on the theme of guilt, catharsis and redemption

We all hurt.

Some reflect.

Some of those hurt less.

Folly has a new meaning

I thought I understood the world and though I am as foolish today.


I do not.

Mushroom sauce with some bacon

If you think liquid exchange is a bar selling alcohol you are barely half right.

Perhaps reality is softer than we pretend while awake.

Dreaming is a higher order function. Its use to an organism must be related to the limbic system, though whether this means emotion or higher order consciousness of a different nature it is as yet indeterminate.

Spinal paralysis allows disassociative rewiring of the peripheral nervous system. This implies memory access is dependent on state of the peripheral nervous system.

The regular pattern to dreaming state change does not imply absence of emotional content. Merely that memory storage and access is based on a pattern to which emotional context must conform.

The REM may be a random sensory input generator or perhaps a memory cue device?

Our consciousness interferes with recall while awake, hence reduced understanding and acceptance of perceptual reality.

The is testable by presenting excess stimuli, selecting that with am optic maintenance score of zero then testing presentation of stimuli post REM sleep.

If a significant response is found, it may be concluded that reconciliation of data occurs during REM eye position acting as cue to brain recognition.

A pathological fear of psychologists

I am very cautious about any person or organisation that exists to monitor or understand my mind.

I wonder why.

Belief is the antithesis of morality

Though this is likely an old chestnut, I have dwelt on it long enough to bother putting it into text.

Morality cannot be forced, it must come from questioning and understanding motivation, personal bias, utility, normative claims, whatever.

The important factor is that to get it, you must question and challenge the perceptive set of your own design.

Belief is what happens when ingenuity and inductive logic fail to create valid scenarios for input data. The fragile western mindset balks at a contradiction.

The end result is belief; aborted knowledge borne of a mind incapable of grasping the true nature of things.



It is a greater fool than I that regards a contradiction as 'zen'.

Cancer: The world's number one growth market

Young people get older
Some things they learn
And others they never do

Teleology and symmetry

Maybe symmetrical hypotheses are not valid by definition, maybe definitions validate symmetrical hypotheses.

Red flavored licorice

Soul catcher by Frank Herbert has proven to be an interesting read.

Of course, I have not read a Frank Herbert I did not thoroughly enjoy. Pity about his son.

Soul catcher seems to have inspired Robert Cormier's After the first death


Native Americans >> Ambiguously nationed terrorists though.

Genuine authentic 100% food

Whelp, the potato are all dead.

Thank goodness we have google brand 'In Real Life' Authentic food like substance to tell us how organic chemicals used to taste.

Sour cream cupcakes

Oven at 180C

Cream 123g butter, 230g caster sugar and 5mL vanilla essence together.

Add 2 eggs, or 3 small eggs if your chickens are being stingy.

Then throw in a cup of sour cream. Mix well.

Sift 2 cups self raising flour and a pinch of salt and fold into the goo.

Pour into cupcake shaped cooking devices and put delicious berries in the middle.

Bake for until cooked, maybe 15 minutes or 23 if your oven is leaky.

Eat them ok?

No picture the ones I baked already have left.

Corn bread

I have discovered a taste sensation.

Corn bread. Made by well...

Heat an oven to 220 degrees Celsius

Sift together:
1 cup self raising four
.5 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Add:
3/4 cup cornmeal
Combine and beat:
1.5 cups yoghurt
2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter
Stir wet into dry quickly, put it in a greased tin and bake it 23-32 minutes in the oven.

Now here is the tricky bit.

Melt cheddar cheese on it, put Dijon mustard on that.


It's a rarebit wat

Can of Tin

Counter culture is for those obsessed with calculators and maybe a few abacus enthusiasts included on the fringe.


Queensland and Melbourne university computers have unpleasant mac keyboards to persuade students to avoid using them.

At the pawn shop:

Distressing allusions to unshared nostalgia
Incomplete photo albums full of empty smiles
Silent moments seeped with unspoken judgement

Are not in stock.
Check back soon.



<3 Caz

Chocolate kindness

Price and perhaps quality determines how chocolate is advertised.

Cadbury, who to this date still use slave labor in harvesting their beans, use happy families and sharing chocolate between friends as the theme of their advertisements.

But then, when your milk block is practically white chocolate you can afford to be cheap and there is little wonder people are willing to share with tasteless fools and children.

And tasteless children.

Expensive chocolate is romantic, practically loving or at worst friendly and also selfish.

A phrase sticks with me; "too good to share".

Hold on, I'll do the google search.

Looks like they pissed off some indians with that slogan too. War, chocolate, whatever.

Cadbury; you can do better.

Come to think of it.

Chocolate; you can do better.

And do your best not think about Rand when you watch TV.

If you watch TV.


Try not to watch TV.

Too fast, too brutal

Care of some old lady who might be related to me:

Taken on a golf course:

Taken on the same golf course at a different time:

Found in a mall toilet stall:

God dammed bats:

This lizard is friendly, he bites my shoes while I drink coffee:

Bike when wet:

I get the feeling I need to shoot this door to open it:

And you may ask yourself...

Entitlement to ones opinion starts and ends before one opens their mouth; when opinion becomes argument it ceases to be above the region of polite indifference and enters into the realm of free discussion and analysis.

I would like to share a rarefied piece of wisdom I have gleaned from a text that enjoys a lot of trust with very little justification.

Matthew 18:21-22

"Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."

Seems that if you are willing to tolerate behavior, you must be willing to tolerate it indefinitely.

Tolerance is based on agreement with an underlying principle while finding the act itself distasteful or in some way repugnant. A good example would be freedom of speech. While it is common in Australia to respect freedom of speech to a point, there are certain things that a person can say that are highly upsetting or offensive. It stands as a test of fine sensitivity for the strength of a person's conviction to see them quietly listen to someone state a contrary view before rebutting.

Truth rears its ugly little head here, though we concede "de gustibus non est disputandum" (matters of taste are not disputable), truth is the strange and delightful constant that plagues the rational mind. While all opinions are valid until one opens their mouth, truth is valid before it is discussed and after it is dismissed. Truth is rarely conveyed in language; verily few human endeavors are motivated by or contain much of the essential substance. Though rare and hence valuable, truth is a constant if one looks hard enough. All things contain an element of truth if one seeks it.


And now an interlude:

Seek treasure in deep places where still water pools
In lakes and ponds whose fascia reflect the sky
Transparent open bodies are oft spurned by fools
In diaphanous waters the absent glint of gold may lie

Better to rake through uncertain muck without a care
Better to look where absent treasure is not seen
Better to hide your folly, fore I have had my share
Better anything but to see such a truth so clean