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Recently I’ve been trying to force myself to write in styles I wouldn’t normally delve into. One of those is haikus, mainly because it’s close enough to poetry that I really struggle with it. But there’s a symmetry to a haiku that does appeal, and so I decided to try to sum up some movies in haiku format as a test. I’ve followed one of the more conventional western interpretations of the haiku, and gone for a layout of 5 syllables for the first line, 7 for the second, and 5 again for the third.
This is part 1…
Alien
Damn scary monster Explodes from chest, killing crew Ripley kicks its ass
Aliens
Found floating in dark Blamed, sent back to the horror Saves world yet again
Amadeus
Maniacal laugh Fantastic musical gift Dies, work incomplete
Amelie
Lonely girl finds box Dreams of giving happiness Finds love with dreamer
A nightmare before Christmas
Halloween is bored Decides to takeover christmas Santa saves the day
Austin Powers
Mojo is frozen Awaits return of evil Fights for our freedom
Batman and Robin
Batman gets sidekick Two villains for price of one Franchise almost dead
Brokeback Mountain
Two lonely cowboys Love that dare not speak its name Too early in time
Chronicles of Riddick
Verse or underverse That is the question we’re asked Riddick answers it
Color Purple
Celie sent away Bad husband breaks sisters heart Love and life transcend
Connie and Carla
Cabaret singers Flee crime and find gay heaven Drag numbers solve crime
Contact
Prime numbers from high Great machine is constructed Contact disputed
Cosi
Music therapy Great hilarity ensues Audience happy
Dancer in the Dark
Mother protector Framed by greedy man for crime Dies to save sons’ sight
Dogma
Two fallen angels Want to get back to heaven God denies passage
Donnie Darko
Dark Donnie sleep walks Flees death, paradox ensues Dies, universe saved
Elizabeth
Elizabeth, girl Danger, treachery and deceit Elizabeth, Queen
The Fifth Element
Evil comes to earth Beautiful savior finds love Saves the universe
Girl, interrupted
Nice girl goes off rails With her treatment she becomes Girl, interrupted
Head on
Angry horny greek Sexed up and nowhere to go Happy as a slut
Jurassic Park
Ancient monsters back Born from frog and D.N.A. Quick, run for your lives
Lilo and Stitch
Genetic mutant Exiled to Earth, adopted Finds love, family
Matrix
Neo takes the pill World is run by the machines Freedom fighter born
Pitch Black
Ship crashes, some live You’re not afraid of the dark? Killer’s redemption
Predator
Hunter in jungle Killing men for sport, trophies Arnie is tougher
The Sound of Music
Bad nun cares for kids Forgets Jesus, marries man Quick, flee from nazis
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Plastic enemy Returns with terrible plans Khan! Spock dies, maybe
V for Vandetta
Masked man wreaks revenge Dictator loses control Democracy back
The Wizard of Oz
Girl kills witch with house Creepy midgets serenade There’s no place like home
Almost two weeks ago now, Australia went to the polls for our federal election, and it would appear that the overwhelming consensus from the Australian population was “meh”.
With 76 seats required for victory in the lower house of parliament, neither of the main parties (Labor or the Liberal/National coalition) managed to secure enough seats to govern in their own right. This has created the interesting situation where 4 independents (and to a lesser degree, one Green) hold the balance of power, and are still deciding which party they’ll support to create a minority government.
The last time we had a hung parliament/minority government at the federal level was apparently around 1940.
Since then, a lot of people have been running around bitching and complaining that four independents are wielding too much power, that it shouldn’t be the case, that…
Cry me a river, bucko.
If you don’t want the risk of independents holding the balance of power, then get out there and canvas for constitutional change to require any sitting member to be aligned with a party. I’d love to see that go to a referendum, just to see how badly a proposal can actually fail.
Neither party has done anything to endear themselves lately, and their lacklustre performance during the election meant that they got exactly what they deserved – the “meh” vote. Politics has become the art of pandering to bogan fears rather than actually leading. It’s become doing what the shock jocks and the rabid morons on A Current Affair think should be done, rather than actually doing the right thing and leading through inspiration. It’s no longer about morals, just scruples – an unpleasant lack thereof.
Don’t get me wrong, one or two of the independents I think are a bit whacko. But no more so than any other federal politician at the moment, and a whole lot less than some crazy-arse politicians who’ve constantly confused homosexuality with pedophilia, or who think the earth is only a few thousand years old, or think climate change is just a big lark.
But consider this: the independents clearly do have scruples. In the case of several of them, they actually previously belonged to one of the major parties, then eventually threw their hands up in disgust, proclaimed “screw you, you forgot your WHY, I’m going it alone”.
They not only went it alone, but they proved that people wanted them to go it alone. They retained their seats as independents, and worked hard for what every politician should work hard for – the people who elected them.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we need a better approach to democracy.
I’m happy to give this hung parliament a go – at least for once politicians are actually seriously talking to each other rather than engaging in endless points scoring and seeking the next 30 seconds of media adulation.
A long time ago I thought up the name I’d give my autobiography, if there were ever call for me to write one – “Memoirs of a gay geek”. Later, I rethought and wondered if it should be called “Memoirs of an introverted gay geek”, but that title seemed way too long. (Until of course my first book was published with quite a wordy title…)
I’ve been thinking a lot about who I am lately. Everyone tends to use labels of some sort – the human brain is an incredibly proficient tool when it comes to sorting and filing information, and I think it’s particularly good at this when you’ve got a good left-brain/right-brain balance in terms of mixing creativity and analytical processes.
The downside though is that labels are very easy to misuse, and I don’t mean deliberately. I read once when I was quite young, “Once you start dividing the world into us and them, you become one of them“. At the time (I think I was only 12 or so) it didn’t quite make sense to me, but later I recalled it and realised precisely what it means, and how useful a saying it is to keep in mind when you’re compartmentalising things and people.
In short, labels are helpful, but they’re hardly critical. There’s plenty of labels that can be applied to me, and I’ll wear each label as a badge rather than as a definitive statement on my personality. Take enough of those badges, merge them together (“will it blend?”) and maybe you start to build something that synergistically describes my personality. So a few labels you can apply to me: Geek, Gay, Introvert, Bear, Writer, Son, Brother, Uncle, Atheist, Australian, Country boy, Reader, Consultant, etc. Not a single label completely defines me. When you combine all the labels you do get a better picture of my personality – but no single label by itself can truly tell you anything about me.
I’ve always been a rather bookish person. When I was quite young, I had a severe speech impediment, and so before I started primary school, I had to get speech therapy in order to be able to communicate, and my parents (my father in particular) were remarkably patient in going through speech therapy flash cards with me every night for months. As a consequence, since every card had both the written word and a picture on it, I effectively learned to read as I learned to talk, and while I don’t pretend to be a reader of great skill, it did see me start school with a much better reading ability than any of my peers. I’ve carried that love of reading throughout my life (with the one exception that as I went through the frequent edit/re-edits/re-draft of my book in 2008 in particular, it left me feeling a bit cold towards books for a while).
I really had no heart for sport from a very early age. My brother on the other hand was an absolute natural at anything he tried, and as a consequence I spent many a Saturday and/or Sunday sitting on a sideline reading a book, or otherwise occupying myself, or otherwise feeling dreadfully bored, while he kicked a ball around, or smashed one across a boundary, etc. Though having inherited a little of the shit-stirer from my father, I spent years needling both my brother and father into an argument about the same cricket match. The first time my father ever umpired a cricket match my brother was playing in, he gave him out, LBW. It was a sore point for over a decade :-) Maybe it still is – they’re both as stubborn as I am.
On the other hand, when I was reasonably young we got our first computer in the house. It was a Vic-20. It had around 3KB of RAM available, and it was remarkable to behold, even attached to a black and white TV as it was in its early years. It was a shared present for my brother and I. A few years later I traded him two cricket bats autographed by the then Australian cricket team for his half of the computer. (Why I had such bats is another story, to be told another time.) I most definitely got the better deal.
It was with the Vic-20 I had my first epiphany as to what I wanted to be when I grew up. Other kids were content with becoming a fireman, or a doctor, or a teacher, some even dared to suggest they wanted to be prime minister. Perhaps influenced by seeing Flash Gordon at an early age, I decided I wanted to be a Mad Scientist. Not just a regular scientist, but a Mad one. And of course, as a Mad Scientist, my end goal was to take over the world. Honest to goodness, I grew up wanting to be a mad scientist who would take over the world. There were going to be lasers and mutant monster servants and weather control and things that made nuclear bombs look tame. (Looking back, I could have settled for Sarah Palin and Pauline Hanson wailing like banshees…)
As such ambitions go, it was a pretty good one to have. I decided I’d needed to have a database to actually keep track of all my subjects based on their physical characteristics, so there I was on a Vic-20 writing tape-based access databases in BASIC. I didn’t complete the database – I didn’t take over the world, either, but I at least catalogued a bunch of friends and family at the time.
I also remember deciding from an early age that I was an atheist. Maybe it was partly because of the pugnaciously obnoxious and child-loathing presbyterian minister in our town at the time. (On reflection, better than that than a child loving catholic priest, of course.) This led me to being beaten up for the first time at school for daring to say that “god doesn’t exist”, which gave me my first introduction to the levels to which some extreme religious people practice their little intolerances. Just so you know, that was by a girl – a particularly vicious and unpleasant one at that.
I survived primary school relatively easily, all things considered, and did the expected jump into a much bigger pond at high school. In NSW at least, there’s two “parts” to high school – years 7-10 (junior), then years 11-12 (senior). “Junior high” passed in a bit of a blur, and suddenly by “Senior high” I found myself in an eclectic group of friends ranging from fundamentalist christians to seventh day adventists to atheists and agnostics. There were, so I was told by someone who liked to gossip a bit, rape and molestation victims as well as people who’d had a perfectly safe and happy child-hood. There were self-declared bisexuals who became homosexual. There were people with ambiguous sexuality who ended up surprising the hell out of me by ending up heterosexual. There were closet homosexuals, and then there was me.
You see, I’d struggled with my sexuality from 13 through to 16. Or rather, not my sexuality, but my perception of it. It even led to what I jokingly call a crisis of “unfaith” where I started praying. In short, I wasted 3 years of my life hating myself. Undoubtedly it’s left me with some mental scars, but it did also leave me quite strong when I realised enough was enough and snapped out of it.
So cutting back to senior high; I decided that I was going nuts being closeted at home, so I actually came out at high school. First to the group of friends I belonged to, then it became over time one of the worst kept secrets in the school. That though was good because it at least allowed me a certain amount of “being myself”.
Somwhere along the line after starting work and getting settled into a relationship and a career I forgot the lesson of “being myself”; it became too easy to aim mainly for being conformist. Don’t get me wrong. I was – and still am – happy, very grateful for the choices I’d been able to make. Yet conformity is boring and stagnating, and personally unfulfilling.
Ironically, it’s social networking as much as anything that’s helped me to learn to ditch that conformity again, since it’s started to merge into one social circle customers, friends met through traditional means, friends met online, and (to a lesser degree), family. It’s one big melting pot, and it’s got me over a lot of hangups.
I’d like to think most close friends knew I was quietly wicked, but at the end of the day, quietly wicked and externally conformist isn’t me. So bring on the tattoos, bring on the mohawk again – this time, full time; bring on being happy as myself and not being concerned if I don’t conform to someone else’s narrow view of reality.
Who am I? I’m me.
Everyone knows that I like working with Apple products. Much as I love Apple products, and I find myself at my most productive on them, there are of course times when various features in UI design seem to have … failed … somewhat, and those little failures sometimes drive me nuts.
Take for instance, Finder’s schizoid approach to presenting my iDisk account. My Mobile Me account name is “prestondeguise”, and on my Desktop, my drives are presented as follows:
That’s logical – it’s got a (urgh) cloud icon; it names the disk after my account, and all is well. However, every time I go and open a new Finder window with the purpose of going into this storage area, I suffer a momentary glitch where I can’t find it. The reason, of course, is simple:
Can you spot the “prestondeguise” volume there? No, you can’t, because Finder calls it the “iDisk” volume instead. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, and it catches me every time. Sure, I may pause only 10 seconds or less, but I shouldn’t have to pause.
There are three key things that interfaces need to get right:
While some would argue that Finder is a classic example of something that’s only barely functional, I don’t see it as being quite that bad. It does remain largely elegant, simply because it’s to the point and doesn’t unnecessarily clutter. Consistency though is where it fails when it comes to Mobile Me accounts – to present effectively the same “volume” under two different names is poor UI design.
It’s not often I call Apple on poor UI design, but this is definitely one of those times.
Democracy seems to be a process that increasingly suffers in the age of information and mass media. To a degree, this comes down to the oft touted notion that too much information eventually adversely affects a decision making process.
It could be argued that the age of immediate information is a double-edged sword in a democratic society. The prevalence and tendency towards transparency (or to be cynical: the voyeuristic nature of people demanding to know everything about people in the media spotlight) significantly reduces the chances of politicians becoming excessively corrupt. To be sure, there’s back room deals and quid pro quo deals always going on, but there’s far less chance of it remaining out of sight.
The flip side though is that instant polling creates an insatiable need amongst many politicians to pander to the most vocal people, making policy decisions on the run and appealing to the basest parts of human nature, rather than the best parts of human nature.
One might argue that this means that politics is becoming more responsive to the requirements of the majority, but I’d argue this isn’t likely to always be the case. Consider the Dunning-Kruger effect:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”
So, if the Dunning-Kruger effect can be extrapolated to apply to those who are most vocal in their demands of politicians, it could be argued that politicians are pandering to those who are least qualified to have an input in the decision making process. If nothing else, it certainly suggests that one should doubt the notion of a “vocal majority” – and cause us to question decisions made to appeal to the noisiest.
Next, consider Simon Sinek. Simon comes from the advertising and marketing world, but actually probably understands more about human behaviour than 90% of the rest of the population. One of his theories is that there’s two ways to motivate: the most complicated is to inspire. The easier is to create fear.
In a democracy, politicians should motivate through inspiration, and maybe they did when things weren’t so instantly judged all the time, but to me the evidence is that they’ve almost 100% moved to motivation through fear – and instead of motivating people to grow and change, the main motivation focus is to get them to vote.
We see this in election slogans. Stupid, inane 5 word or less quotes that are designed to pander to the basest of human instincts. “I’ll stop the boats” and “I’ll stop the waste”, Tony Abbott has been saying in an incessant onanistic orgy of self righteousness. Both of these are designed to get people afraid – afraid of terrorists hiding as asylum seekers, and governments wasting money. Neither fail to consider the reality of the situation: many Australians are boat people – that’s how causcasians first arrived on the bloody continent! And more importantly: the government wasted some money, but they kept the country out of recession through the global financial crisis.
Logic and politics have very little to do with one another, I’m afraid. And it only seems to be getting worse.
It’s time to consider a new democratic model, one which would have several phases of implementation over more than likely at least 50-60 years, and so would allow for growth as society becomes more connected.
The primary goal of a new democratic model should be to replace the elected senate (or upper house, depending on where you live), with vetting by the people in secure internet polling. That’s right, no senate, just direct response by the population via an iPlebiscite to legislation proposed by the elected officials.
Don’t believe it can happen? Well, here’s a few theories on why I think it can:
Contrary to what some people may think, I can’t see the “business of government” being ground to a halt under such a scheme. After all, governments routinely suffer weeks and even months long delays in legislation getting officially passed – if anything this might even allow for a faster model.
And this wouldn’t be something that is introduced in binary fashion. I’d imagine at least a 6, but more likely 12 year trial (using the Australian political model as an example – 6 years is the term of an elected senate representative) where a new senate position is created as the “Internet Senator” for want of a better term. (OK you know I’m wanting to say it: iSenator).
So the iSenator trial would be a fairly important one, but it would be limited in a very critical way: the iSenator’s vote would be recorded, but not counted. Every 6 months both a detailed and summarised report should be generated showing what the physical senators and the iSenator voted on each issue, and highlighting any vote where it would have made a difference had the vote been counted.
We would expect some issues in the voting of iSenator for at least the year or so until the security model is appropriately sorted out, but the long-term goal of the first phase of the trial should be to instil enough confidence of a second trial phase where iSenator’s vote is eventually counted. Just one vote at that point – one vote amongst many other normally elected officials. That as well would be likely to last at least 2 senate terms.
Then of course, a complete referendum would be required before “turning off” the physical senate and going electronic.
I’m in IT, and I acknowledge whole-heartedly that the safeguards required would be enormous, and having observed the kerfuffle in the United States over electronic voting machines I recognise that what has been developed so far by corporates seems inadequate at best for this sort of model – much improvement on these models would need to be done to actually achieve home-based voting – but high-end security experts are out there willing to help.
But just because something is challenging doesn’t mean you should avoid it. Often it’s exactly the opposite.
The big question someone might have on this is: am I forgetting the bogans? I.e., if we move to citizens actually directly partaking in democracy, is this not likely to make the political practice of pandering to 30 second fear-based sound-bites more prevalent? Well, potentially yes – for a while at least. But consider that the real “silent majority” – not the people who are being Vox Pop’d – but the people who are sitting at home affected by issues and have views on what governments should and shouldn’t do – they too will be getting a say. Over time though, without being able to directly negotiate and enter into quid-pro-quo arrangements with individual senators, I’d imagine governments would have to put out a lot more information about why they want their legislation passed, so we might even see an evolutionary switch back to intelligent democracy.
The next big question is whether this will result in a senate that’s more likely to pass legislation from the government of the day, given that people have just elected the lower house. I don’t think so, mainly because I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as “I support party X and everything they do”. Sure, some people will just blindly vote a particular party (I know people on both sides of the political fence), but others have multiple political views – a common mix is you get right-wing economic conservatives who have left-wing views on social rights, and vice versa. These people usually remain unrepresented by any party.
The final question I can immediately think of is what happens to legislation that currently flows in the reverse direction? I.e., where the senate introduces something for the lower house to consider? Still possible, I’d argue: maintain an issues register of things people want considered, appropriately count unique votes and have a cut-off point at which point it becomes eligible for consideration. “For consideration” is complex, and there’d be a wide variety of ways it could be handled. Perhaps elected lower-house officials could nominate, under a conscience vote, whether they nominally agree with what has been proposed, then become the “sponsor” to flesh it out and introduce it as a private member’s bill for consideration.
So, it’s an internet democracy already out there – kick the tyres in my theory and let me know what you think.
For a long time, I had been somewhat interested in getting a tattoo, but could never quite think of the right design. (Recently a friend clarified why I’d been cautious when describing his tattoos as shrines – it’s not just a random bit of art if you do it right, it’s actually something fairly significant.)
When blogging on my IT blog though, I did a topic about “fake” support contracts, which prompted me to remember the legend of Icarus.
If you’re not familiar with it, Icarus and his father Daedalus in Greek mythology were imprisoned by King Minos. In order to escape, they fashioned wings using feathers held together by wax. Fleeing their prison, Icarus enjoyed the sensation of flight too much, flew too high, and the heat of the sun melted the wax holding his wings together and fell into the sea and his death.
It’s a powerful parable and holds special meaning to me. I work in backup and recovery, and so my entire career is about risk, risk mitigation and failure recovery. But it’s actually deeper than that for me; much of my life I’ve spent avoiding risk, and so while Icarus represents the potential disaster of taking a risk, Icarus can equally represent the simple fact that failing is just another part of life. Sure, Icarus died, but maybe his last thoughts were that he’d touched the sun, and it was worth it…?
So for me the story of Icarus is a constant reminder to me that life is about taking risk, and sometimes the potential cost of failure is worth the potential success. It’s about realising that I don’t want to come to the end of my days with a bunch of regrets about things I didn’t do, and so I’ll care less and less over time about what people think. I’m here as me, not as the perceptions of others, and the story of Icarus is a pointed reminder to take those risks.
Remarkably, Icarus was to be my first tattoo – my first shrine, as you will. Not to myself – I’m anything but narcissistic; but as a reminder that risk is about the rewards as well as the costs. Thanks to an incredibly talented artist friend, the end of the first session is:
That’s the outline for Icarus done, plus some of the shading. Still to come is the rest of the shading, then colour, sun, sky, etc.
One thing I’ll say is that it’s certainly an addictive process – particularly since my skin seems to deal with the process quite easily. The test will be to determine how to convert this into a full sleeve, and I’ve already got some ideas on that. But that’s another story, to be told another time.
I’m sometimes amazed that illogical arguments can be made to justify nonsensical beliefs that discriminate against others while still keeping a straight face.
Take the issue of same-sex couples adopting children. Now, in most of Australia same-sex couples can foster children, and in actual fact gays and lesbians who are single can actually adopt, but in several states, including my own, adoption is a strict no-no to same-sex couples.
Thankfully, the NSW Parliament is at least preparing to revisit this issue, but predictably the churches have jumped in and decried this. In Sydney Morning Herald’s article, “Churches Push Gay Adoption Ban“, (Louise Hall, April 7 2010), we’re told:
The chief executive of Anglicare, Peter Kell, cites a child’s need for both a mother and father among the 11 reasons why same-sex couples should not be given the same rights as heterosexual couples under adoption law. ”Men and women complement each other in their parenting roles as a result of their inherent physical, psychological and emotional attributes. Adoptive children should not be denied this opportunity,” Mr Kell said.
The chief executive of Anglicare, Peter Kell, cites a child’s need for both a mother and father among the 11 reasons why same-sex couples should not be given the same rights as heterosexual couples under adoption law.
”Men and women complement each other in their parenting roles as a result of their inherent physical, psychological and emotional attributes. Adoptive children should not be denied this opportunity,” Mr Kell said.
Now, I don’t pretend to know what the other 10 reasons are for why the churches oppose adoption by same sex couples, but I’m guessing they’re just as full of shit as this reason.
Yes, full of shit. I’m being blunt because this just annoys the hell out of me.
Can you spot the huge gaping hole in this argument? There’s a convoy of trucks being driven side-by-side through it, so it’s a little difficult to miss, yet it constantly gets brought up as an argument on these issues…
This argument denies the possibility that single parents (e.g., widowed, or separated where one parent is no longer involved in child rearing) are incapable of raising children. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t say that children raised by a same-sex couple won’t get the correct gender balance when it’s obvious children raised by a single parent would fail to pass the same criteria.
So why don’t we see the people making these arguments campaign for state-forced adoption of any child of a single parent?
And if gender balance is so important, why don’t children whose parents don’t fully provide gender balance also be forced out for adoption? You know, the dad might have a drawer of lingerie he wears, or the mum might wear overalls on the weekend while she tinkers on a motorbike because she’s always been interested in them!
Would some gay or lesbian couples make bad parents? Undoubtedly. But these would be weeded out during the adoption process the same way any other couples are weeded out. It’s not as if anyone can just walk up to an orphanage and collect a kid from a dispenser! When I commented on how much this argument annoys me on Facebook, a friend responded thusly:
What annoys me the most is this example from my trip home on CityRail the other evening: A drunk father, in his mid 40′s, dressed like a complete ‘bum’ (to use a better word). In tow, was his beautiful 4 yr old son.. whom you could see actually thought the world of his dad (which is why I started tearing up inside). As my journey home progressed, I noticed the dad walking between the carriages.. showing an increased level in anxiety as well as further signs he must have been consuming more alcohol on the train. He had ‘lost’ his son! (well that’s what he was screaming when he forced the train to stop). In fact, his son was sitting quietly, sort of in a subdued way in the same seat his dad left him in when he got ‘lost in his own state of mind’ Eventually the ‘grey’ police arrived to look after the boy, and take the father into their control. I actually cried on my way to my car.( I could not help but think of my own son, and how the ‘ovary lottery’ can be so unjust ) :-( I was on my way to Fairfield station … and the father ‘thought’ he was on the intercity train heading to Newcastle, where he was intending to travel with his son. AND he is allowed to breed, and have the birth rights to be a father as he is heterosexual, when I have so many LBGT friends who wish to give such children as this little boy, the love and upbringing he/she deserves!!
What annoys me the most is this example from my trip home on CityRail the other evening:
A drunk father, in his mid 40′s, dressed like a complete ‘bum’ (to use a better word). In tow, was his beautiful 4 yr old son.. whom you could see actually thought the world of his dad (which is why I started tearing up inside). As my journey home progressed, I noticed the dad walking between the carriages.. showing an increased level in anxiety as well as further signs he must have been consuming more alcohol on the train.
He had ‘lost’ his son! (well that’s what he was screaming when he forced the train to stop). In fact, his son was sitting quietly, sort of in a subdued way in the same seat his dad left him in when he got ‘lost in his own state of mind’
Eventually the ‘grey’ police arrived to look after the boy, and take the father into their control. I actually cried on my way to my car.( I could not help but think of my own son, and how the ‘ovary lottery’ can be so unjust ) :-(
I was on my way to Fairfield station … and the father ‘thought’ he was on the intercity train heading to Newcastle, where he was intending to travel with his son.
AND he is allowed to breed, and have the birth rights to be a father as he is heterosexual, when I have so many LBGT friends who wish to give such children as this little boy, the love and upbringing he/she deserves!!
Sadly, there’s not enough people with his attitude around!
The fact of the matter is that if you want to convince people that there are solid, valid arguments for why people shouldn’t be allowed to do something, you should make watertight arguments. Presenting emotive, blatantly incorrect and illogical statements as “reasons” really does leave anyone with a lick of logic with one of only two choices: is the person making the argument stupid, or malicious?
Someone bring me another Hanlon’s Razor please!
Having been excessively tired of Vodafone and their feculent network on the Central Coast, when it was time for the iPhone 4 to be released in Australia, I was in line for two reasons. First, I wanted to update from an iPhone 3G, but perhaps more importantly, I wanted to shift across to a real network that … worked.
So I found myself waiting from around 5am at our local shopping centre; doors opened around 6.30am and I watched a group of foolish people make their way to Optus (another network with an increasingly poor reputation) while my partner and I, as well as a much smaller group of people made our way to Telstra.
By 7.30am I had a 32GB iPhone 4, and since I suspect a lot of people were porting numbers to different networks that day, I finally left the Telstra store at 9.15 with an iPhone connected to my existing number, newly moved across from Vodafone.
I don’t want to do a lengthy review on the iPhone 4, so I’ll make it a review in ten points. That’ll hopefully keep it short(ish) and straight forward:
Anything I’m not happy with? I can’t say anything particularly strikes me as a major disadvantage. I’m not being one-sided, but thinking through how I’ve used it in the almost-7 days since I got it, I can’t think of anything that I wanted to do but couldn’t, so I have to leave this section blank for the time being.
Sample photo, scaled down to 1024 pixels high:
Sample video, edited in iMovie – watch here (QuickTime required). This file was not in any way edited on the desktop; just transferred then uploaded. [Edit: This isn't a high def export - it was exported using the "medium" setting from iMovie.]
I was sickened to read in “Parties bey they will lose” (Sydney Morning Herald) that:
Election betting is on track to reach record levels across the country. More than $1 million in head-to-head bets have been placed with Centrebet alone.
This obsessive need in Australia to bet on anything and everything that has any indeterminate result is bad enough in terms of the social problems it causes. It goes to a whole new level of inappropriateness though when we consider the notion of betting on the outcome of a democratic election.
Why?
Democracy is not something to be gambled with, and by extension, gambled on. It is thus far the closest thing to truly representative government society has come up with thus far, and it should be respected, not trivialised. It also should be as clean and honest as possible. Introducing betting ads an unseemly, seedy and easily corruptible nature to the event, and robs the people of their right to a fair and balanced election. After all, according to the SMH article:
SENIOR Labor figures have placed significant bets on the outcome of the federal election, with some punting against their own party. A major betting agency said bets had been placed on members of the opposing team to win marginal seats in NSW and Queensland.
How corrupt is that? How monumentally pathetic and disrespectful of the electorate is this? For goodness sake, even our sporting institutions ban players and people involved in a games/events from betting on those games where they have influence on the result of.
I believe this needs to be urgently addressed, and at least one of Australia’s elected officials has his head screwed on in this respect:
Senator Xenophon is demanding an independent inquiry into political punting and will expand the terms of reference of a Senate inquiry into sporting and online gambling to include tougher regulations on election betting: ”To say it is a personal choice is an insult to the electorate.”
It’s more than an insult to the electorate; it’s a corruption of the electoral process, and I’d like to think that this violation of electoral rights will be stamped out ASAP.
I’ve had the iPad now for almost exactly two months, and just like the iPhone before it, it’s become a platform that I’m really happy to play games on. Now before I say too much more, I’ll preface the rest of my comments and recommendations with the simple facts:
I.e., I’m not a hard-core gamer. Instead, I’m just someone who enjoys sitting and playing a game for 10 minutes at the most, happy to quit at any point and come back to it later. For the most part, the iPad is the perfect platform for this. I used to play quite a few games on the PSP, but haven’t picked up a PSP since I got my iPhone 3G 2 years ago (well, other than to sell it)*.
So, here are the games I’ve found that have chewed up my spare 5, 10 and 30 minutes over the last 2 months…
I’m a fan of traditional RPGs. I still shudder to think of how much time I spent playing Bards Tale III on the Commodore 64. Thanks to a bug (or design feature) in the game, I think I managed to use the same characters in 20 or more end-to-end plays of the game. Yeah, maybe I have a god complex…
Anyway, Dungeon Hunter isn’t quite of that format; it’s more akin to say, “Untold Legends” (both of the PSP and PS3 variety), but for me at least is the right mix of interesting story and no crazy-controls that are optimised for people born with an extra 2 fingers on each hand:
I’ve completed the game once, and have a couple of other characters on the boil developing different skills in the hopes that there are additional world packs eventually released. (I had heard it was a great iPhone game, but having an iPhone 3G I wasn’t even going to attempt to play it.)
It’s fun, it’s simple, there’s action and magic and it can become quite immersive at times, and while my thumbs are glad I’ve slowed down in my playing of it, overall I’m pretty fond of it. I do wish though, like other RPG games out on the market, that every few level increases would allow for adding more than 1 point to magical skills/special attacks. It’s a bit bland when it’s 1 increase per 1 level increase.
I’d give this 4 out of 5. I could imagine giving it 5 out of 5 if they add new world maps (and I’m not asking for freebies; I’m talking in-app purchases.)
It’s nigh-on impossible to be an iPhone or iPod Touch owner without knowing of Angry Birds. The plot is charmingly simple; some nefarious pigs have stolen eggs from the birds, who are, you guessed it, angry about it. Thus comes a series of levels all about retribution and mayhem thanks to a variety of bird types.
The simple touch physics are very easy to master, though some levels far less so. There’s a great deal of fun to be had in this game, even if sometimes you might have to repeat a level dozens of times before you hit on the right combination. Thankfully though, with the average level taking less than a minute to complete, that’s not a big ask…
It’s fair to say that Angry Birds deserves a 5 out of 5. It may be frustrating, but it’s cute, fun and very diverting.
I’d never really heard of “tower defence” games before I got my iPhone, but they quickly became a format that I loved playing, and of all of them, Field Runners was certainly the best. Field Runners HD doesn’t disappoint:
If you’re not familiar with tower defence games, the concept is remarkably simple. In response to countless waves of enemies, one builds defensive towers that smite the enemy either from near or afar. It’s a simple style of game, but personally I find it an entertaining way of spending time.
I’d like to give Fieldrunners a 5 out of 5, but out of spite I’ll only give it a 4 out of 5. (Why? Because I’m yet to go past 140 levels in endless mode. That’s frustrating.)
This is like 8 games in one. It’s all about world conquest – send out waves of armies to take over various neutral and/or enemy planets, until you control the entire region of space. With traditional play, solitaire (“vacuum”), 3-way strategy, “billiards” (where planets bounce around), etc., Galcon Fusion offers a variety of “conquest” options that makes for a good variety of gameplay:
With a large range of difficulty options, Galcon Fusion caters to everyone from the beginner to the expert at conquest style games, and is well worth checking out.
I’m going to give Galcon Fusion 4 out of 5. It’s great, entertaining fun, but I would like to see slightly better graphics in the gameplay.
I only discovered this game a couple of days ago, and it’s already shaping up to be a favourite. It’s spooky and creepy at times, like a cross between Loco Roco and Limbo (not that I’ve ever played Limbo, I just liked the demo that sat on the net for 2 years…); it’s got immersive gameplay and slightly at times unsettling music, but it’s a highly enjoyable way to spend some time:
Currently free on the iTunes store, I’d recommend getting Trundle HD as quickly as possible. I may be jumping the gun, but I’m going to give Trundle HD 5 out of 5. I know it’s going to at times annoy the crap out of me, but there’s something remarkably satisfying about being stuck on a puzzle for hours at a time (cumulatively, over multiple runs) before suddenly understanding the solution and leaping past the problem.
A long time ago, I played the game “Descent” on the PC. It was a 3D flight game and I’d find as I was trying to pilot the ship that I’d rotate in my seat, turn and pull off all sorts of slightly embarrassing movements. Tunnel Shoot is the first game since then to cause me to have that reaction, though I do my best to control that reaction. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s fun. Oh, and it also reminds me of The Way for some reason:
I’m going to give it 5 out of 5. It’s fast paced and rewards quick reactions, and somehow, even though I’m über un-coordinated, I manage to occasionally get into “the zone” and get a score that I find acceptable. That you can get such a fun game for $1.19 (AU) remains a big example to me of how much the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch platform can change the portable gaming market.
Pangea Software at one point made Warheads available free on the Mac, and I found it quite an enjoyable take on the old “Missile Command” concept. The iPad version of Warheads is, quite frankly, sublime:
Missile Command is now 30 years old, having been released in July 1980. Warheads is much younger than that, but plays fantastic homage to the original game, and is perfectly suited to the iPad. 5 out of 5.
I find it a bit difficult to describe this game. Maybe it’s that you play a cellular organism that has to absorb other organisms on the playing field and avoid being absorbed. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s a great deal of fun, quite challenging at times, and the almost binaural music creates an immersive yet relaxing atmosphere that you find yourself repeating any level as many times as you need to in order to progress. You may get stressed by a temporary inability to solve a puzzle, but at the same time you feel OK about it:
It may not sound like a lot, but Osmos definitely deserves 5 out of 5.
– * I really think that Sony and Nintendo aren’t really aware of how badly they’re losing mind-share in the portable gaming market. After all, consider the most fundamental aspect – an “expensive” game on the iPad/iPhone is around the $15.99 (AU) mark. A “cheap” PSP game on first release is between $50 to $70. Parents, typically responsible for the money allocated towards gaming in the younger market, are voting with their wallets.
