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Apr. 17th, 2009 @ 01:35 am
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Heya guys,
I know i haven't been here in a VERY long while -- problems upon excuses. But here, now, for one post only, I am announcing a brand new blog, created entirely to house my musings and meditations while i travel the world:
http://daveabroad.livejournal.com/
Sign up, keep your eyes peeled, and sometime in mid-May i'll start updating regularly.
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Happy birthday, Jeanette!
Many happy returns!
I hope your significant others planned ahead and assisted you in preparing for the imminent zombiepocalypse -- one's duty to the continued survival of the human race is the best birthday present of all! |
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Is it ok to beat Kaleb into oblivion????Oblivion is a big place... perhaps his obnoxiousness will grow to fill the void, like a goldfish grows to fit the size of its bowl. Perhaps he will hunger for a larger bowl, pushing at the edges of oblivion, searching for more space to infect, leaking into our space, a strange energy, like gravity, becoming entwined with existance, a force of nature...
Eventually, realspace will come to its final, crushing end at the hands of humans, influenced from before birth by this radiated annoyance...
Perhaps the only way we may combat this insidious energy will be to cancel it out with another, equally powerful yet entirely opposite concsiousness.
There, in oblivion, beyond all natural laws and science, they will battle for eternity. Neither will emerge victorious -- indeed, neither can, or our reality will be rendered unto dust.
... I just want to be sure he deserves it. |
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I went to see this film on opening night, at about the time people would be getting off work and having dinner. I expected the cinema to be relatively empty - I prefer them that way, to be honest - but I did not expect the cinema to hold a grand total of 5 people (including me). Perhaps this just means that people are waiting until the weekend to go with their kids, or perhaps people have been getting the wrong idea about the film.
Let's not get the wrong idea here, then: it is a kidsy film. There's no swearing, very little sexual content (read: one kiss) and its cup overrunneth with family values. But all of this works. The script and story match to a tee the visuals -- a loud, bright, cliche-saturated caricature of the world of today, as told by the world of tomorrow. You won't miss the point of the movie - it pounds that in hard enough - but it's subtle about it, like being hit with the iron fist inside a velvet glove.
And the visuals -- gorgeous! The physical sets are interesting without being overpowering. The visuals effects -- all the car racing -- were a perfect fusion of cartoon and realism, as if it had come out of a child's imagination. The versatility of the animators is obvious - it takes skill to create settings that were as beautiful as they were implausible, and yet have me believe that one day they could exist.
As for acting, I found that the cast was wonderful. I believed in the characters, in their relationships, because the actors played them perfectly. Aside from the inclusion of the chimpanzee, a bit of comic relief that you got used to after a while.
There was one scene that kicked me out of suspension of disbelief comes right at the end of the film, and once that's over you get right back into things - and every film is allowed one stupidity.
Speed Racer is a paradigm shift. The idiotic flashback/remake market has been given a smarter, funnier, dare I say it sexier angle with this film. And the kids movie market, dominated by blunt, politically-correct cartoons has been given an adrenaline shot. This film seems to make its point without becoming pretentious, and bridge the kids and adults markets without removing itself from either. It is, truly, a movie that everybody will enjoy.
Dave
(Crossposted to TP.net -- with additions) |
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People will be unwilling to acknowledge the truth of things -- that which was started by academia, the noble tradition of obfuscation for the sake of sounding intelligent, will backfire as a public unable to understand anything more complicated or involved than thirty-second soundbites reacts only to the best spin, and not the true state of things. Chaos will reign as the greatest good for the greatest many suffers under society's futile and selfish idealism.
Those countries that have been overlooked by the leaders of the world bide their time, consolidating their power, and only at the last will Western society realise that they no longer control the world, as they so long thought they did. And with realisation will come the understanding that they have lost the great game. A man shall strike out against his brother, and the entire world will take sides, polarising into those alliances built on old money and power, and those alliances built on mutual benefit. The former will be powerless before the latter, as the latter controls the world's production.
Natural resources are bartered away by corrupt officials looking for a quick profit. The public will realise that when the oilfields run dry, so do plastics, and they will not care - they will be happy to lose themselves once again in the trance of capitalism and the addictive sense of comfort they get from useless philanthropy. Pirates will once again take matters into their own hands on the open seas, and they will be the only ones who make a difference.
Scientists will create machines so powerful and alien that nobody will understand their true power until it is too late. The nature of reality will be as putty in their hands, but their great power will not be tempered with morality, only with the need to understand. They will discover with the rest of the world that some truths are meant to remain hidden.
The downtrodden and the hidden will rise up in a popular revolt so powerful that it can never be killed or silenced by their opressors. Once touched, a person becomes infected by what they represent, carriers of ideas that will spread until they control the world. Politics will continue unaltered, an old boys club that pretends to run the world, a footnote to the infected that will shape history in their image.
Mark these signs well, for then you shall see that we have reached the end of the world. |
| » Fabio's unquiet spectre |
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Is it just me, or are modern-day men just a cut below our 80s counterparts? I mean, in this day and age we sing about our bitches and our cars, and about how much we're gonna be getting, but way back in the day we had role-models that really knew how to treat women.
Rick Astley, for example, will never give you up, never let you down, never run around and desert you, never make you cry, never say goodbye, never tell a lie and hurt you. Isn't that just the model of responsible dating? Plus, he had a dancing black barman.
And Meatloaf. The man is so full of love and lust that his poetry comes spilling out at every opportunity. He'll do anything for love -- anything at all. But he won't do that, and gods help you if you suggest it.
Songs and lyrics are iconic of the times we live in - a time full of R&B, Hip-hop crap that objectifies women, but at the same time sells so well to women that it perpetuates the genre. We are slaves to capitalist demand, and slaves to our own lust for escapism through the driving beat and fantastic lyrics.
This has been a poorly thought out post, and poorly executed... i'm writing this as i'm working, so i've lost the idea a number of times, only to rediscover it through the magic of old music. Sorry, older.
Dave
Panoramic doom (sorry, thought of this phrase by accident when looking through Canadian travel brochures)
May. 31st, 2008 @ 10:28 am
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| » It's cruel. |
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How dare you accuse me of charity, pity or philanthropy. Not in person, not in a text message, and certainly not while you're dumping me.
May. 17th, 2008 @ 10:43 pm
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| » Talk to me. |
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I can't help if I don't know what's wrong.
May. 6th, 2008 @ 06:51 pm
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| » Stop me if you've heard this song before |
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Finally the world is shaping in my image. The fog has started to linger all day. The leaves are changing from sickly green-and-brown to a dead orange and red. The days have suddenly shortened to five hours long, three of them usable. Provided, of course, that you aren't working full time, in which case you get up when it's dark, sit inside at your computer when it's slightly lighter outside, and walk home when it's cold and dark. The nine-to-five cycle is a cruelty that we visit upon ourselves for the sake of the fun we're supposedly going to have when we're out of it, but the entire outside is constructed on the foundation that we have to be fresh and ready for the following cycle, necessitating an early bed and a distinct lack of legal narcotics. Full timers live in a state of constant disappointment, punctuated by bouts of hopeless drive as they plan their "big break." There are also moments of comic depression, but they're hardly funny.
I'm always tired. My body refuses to adapt to my full time status, and my brain yearns for something more. I'm a young man, only twenty-two years old, and i'm working in the travel industry selling other people, full timers like myself, the one chance at happiness they'll have for a full year or two. I know at least ten different passwords for programs that I use once a week. I know the differences between One World and Star Alliance around the world fares. I know which seats on a plane have the most legroom, and why you'll never get them. And what's more, I have, in the past, felt that knowing these things is an acheivement. I'm twenty-two years old, a full time employee, and I feel like i've should have lived a lifetime. But I haven't. And the reason isn't me - perish the thought - it's the world I live in.
Terry Pratchett has written that people have so many demons because we're so good at imagining them. Demons are of our own making. Greed, sloth, avarice, pride, envy, wrath and lust are outlets, the first resort of a mind that is consumed by boredom. Humanity is an incredible beast, a hollow shell within which inhabits the horrific beauty and incredible complexity of consciousness. It is a temple where the human mind invokes its deepest fears and is consumed by them, enacting its vengeance on the world around it for wrongs simulated by a mind diseased with imagination. But the human mind is a mere amateur at creating demons when compared with its excellence in creating barriers and constraints. The nine to five working day is but one of these: racial inferiority, politics, self-importance, international borders, common courtesy, education, capitalism, and law are the tip of a terrifying iceberg that lurks not beneath but over the heads of our entire culture, ready to drop at any moment and sever our lives.
I can imagine only two things worse than their existence in the first place. First, that humanity actually enjoys constraints - they provide our lives with definition, a framework within which to prosper until we can forget about the outside world and say (according to us) truthfully that we are the very best at what we are. The second is that our boundaries have begun to evolve and grow without our help. Political correctness, once a nebulous issue for politicians and public officials alone, has grown to a point where you can no longer refer to someone by the colour of their skin, but by their racial background instead.
It isn't entirely true, though, is it? Humans are well equipped to imagine something worse. Take your worst fear - perhaps it's being trapped without water in the desert, or being chased through your house by a knife-wielding maniac. Now in your nightmarish reality, set yourself on fire. Add biting snakes and spiders. Flay your skin off slowly. Wait, there's more. Imagine that in all the universe, you are completely unimportant. That nobody is watching out for you. That none of your choices matter, and everything you do will eventually mean precisely nothing. That your destiny is, in fact, to be another pile of dust.
Humans have a unique ability to blind themselves to the truth of things, and to the worst of things. Perhaps that's optimism. On that, I will not comment. What I know is that i'm tired all the time, and the day has been grey from start to end. And there's a feeling lately, that the world is about to pass something important. Pass, like a kidney stone, or perhaps pass like a person ignoring an opportunity. Both terrify and excite me. I only hope that we recognise the opportunity when it comes.
Dave
May. 1st, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
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| » Australian Media's Reconciliation Message: Let Your Spirit Flow! |
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CANBERRA, ACT -- Tensions mounted today as the nation's capital played host to thousands of Tibetan and Chinese protesters. As the only Australian city to hold a leg of the Olympic torch relay, expectations were high for violence from all three sides, but went largely unsatisfied as AFP officers seperated both camps and prevented Chinese government torch guards from beating anybody "for the good of the party," or setting any Tibetan protesters on fire.
But not all desires went unfulfilled, as the Australian media led the public in one of the largest televised spiritual masturbation sessions since the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Channel Seven presenters David Koch and Melissa Doyle commentated from the Melbourne studio while Mark Beretta, a sports commentator with great deals of experience in similarly large events, was on the scene to participate personally in sharing the Olympic spirit. "I just couldn't hold on," said an anonymous Canberra resident, "As the torch got closer my Olympic spirit just came rushing out early. I'm so glad the rest of Australia was as distracted as I was, or it would have been really embarrassing." Another spectator, Canberra resident Justin Cray, commented that "It was such a welcome release, Olympic spirit was dripping off me. I haven't felt so spiritually satisfied in my life."
The Olympic torch relay has been hailed as a rousing success. Officials have formally thanked the Chinese government for the opportunity to host an event so important to the spiritual and emotional needs of the nation, although many jaded Australians have criticised the spirit in which the the gesture was made, citing unconfirmed sources that have quoted a high ranking political official as stating off the record "Stroke our egos and we will explode with Olympic spirit."
Government and media officials are reportedly quickly rising again in the aftermath of this orgy of positive public opinion to face the challenge of organising the Olympic team for the Beijing Olympics itself.
--Dave Ellis
Apr. 24th, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
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