As usual, super busy. (Studying for three language exams is hard.) Meantime, apparently the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the EU Parliament.

Discuss.

Winter is creeping upon us here in Sydney-town, and I am freezing to death with terrifying regularity. Once I could endure the cold, feeling it no more than a mild twinge on the throat and in the fingertips! Those days are long past.

I blame the loss of my hat.

I still don't have the internets at home. This is due to a combination of laziness, apathy, and working all the dang time. In the interests of getting at least some of the things I want to talk about off my chest,¹ I here resort to that most clichéd of postings: the blogdrop. If I had a Twitter I suppose I could just dump these links on there, but then I wouldn't get to talk at length, and where would that leave us? Down a slippery slope, that's where. At the end is a barren wasteland, where I talk scarcely at all and am forced to use my excessive verbosity on my essays. The horror! The horror!²

There is just so much amazing creative output on the internet, I cannot keep up with it all. With some of what follows you are undoubtedly already familiar. Others, maybe not. I cannot keep it all to myself and so much of it pulls at me, begging and screaming to be talked about, that I must hurl it all toward you. Hopefully some of it will stick.

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On Wednesday, Penny Arcade announced that they would be putting fragments of three universes on display. Voters would eventually select one of the three to endure, and a story set in that universe would be birthed some point later in the year.

Today, Tycho and Gabe revealed Automata, described by Tycho as "film noir, during the Prohibition on Machine Intellect."

Oh God. This is so for me that it makes my stomach twirl and the film-noir sections of my brain dance into joyous, ecstatic overdrive. We have artificial intelligence and film noir grizzled detectives. Sarcastic parts of me want to say that it would only be better IN SPAAAACE except it would be a lie. Nothing could make this better.

Except maybe female leads.

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The periodic table got a new element today! So that's neat.

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Recently I've been thinking about science fiction. As the digits of the year switched from '8' to '9' I was reading a lot of cyberpunk (well, a lot of William Gibson anyway), a genre in which I intend to spend more time. Now that the year is half-way through I've been thinking about post-apocalyptic fiction. Do you know, I haven't actually read much? Not A Canticle for Leibowitz or Earth Abides nor even I am Legend which is pretty super-famous these days. I have read World War Z, but it's hardly a classic of the genre.

I am particularly interested in post-nuclear worlds, and that is where I shall probably turn my bespectacled eyes the next time I am allowed some peace from study to read for pleasure.

[On a side note, my university has an impressive collection of science fiction... in the Rare Books Library. Does anyone know why?]

Why am I telling you this? Well, partially because I sat down the other morning and wrote a brief introduction to a post-nuclear story I now want to write,³ and partially because today's A Softer World is on that theme.

While I'm on this post-nuclear note, does anyone know a way to keep poor Dogmeat alive in the original Fallout? I mourn his death every single time.

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Oh, and on the subject of cyberpunk (these bullet points really are science-fiction themed, aren't they? Still a medievalist guys, promise!), Robert J. Sawyer's Wake sounds incredible. The Grumpy Owl has delivered a stunning review, ensuring that I am going to go out of my way (and injure my pocket) to get this book.

I mean, come on, look at some of the features: a blind female protagonist. The theme of the internet gaining consciousness- potentially hackneyed, but it sounds as though Sawyer has done some truly original things with it. I wants to reads this novel.

Even if it is a trilogy.

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yuki_onna, aka Catherynne M. Valente who is rapidly becoming my favourite new(ish) fantasy author, is in relatively dire financial straits. Rather than begging for help like a starving orphan dog on the streets of Stalingrad, she is instead offering to write up the book-within-a-book from her recent novel Palimpsest. For free. And in return, she hopes for donations.

I have yet to write about Palimpsest here, but in short: it is amazing.⁴ There are a number of people reading this who have read it, and more who should read it; several people who no longer speak to me would, I think, be able to get more from it than I could.

Any and all of these folk (i.e, "y'all") would enjoy reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and so I urge you all to sail on over to yuki_onna and start readin'.

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Recently there were 'tweed rides' in Sydney and Canberra. I didn't attend, mostly stymied by exhaustion and apathy. However! For your viewing pleasure, I present the 'tweedride' tag on Flickr, which should more than make up for my absence. [And this way there are no pictures of me. WIN-WIN.] The sheer amount of sexy men and ladies wearing tweed, bearing moustaches, and riding bikes should end your day pleasantly.⁵


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1: Where 'chest' translates as 'starred list on Google Reader. Without the internet, I truly would (have) wither(ed) and die(d).

2: I never, ever go over a word limit. Nope. Dead on, that's me. Succinct.

3: The protagonist's name is Suxie, and she dwells in the ruins of Haymarket.

4: Which is not to say that it is not problematic. It is.

5: daiskmeliadorn: This is NSFW for you.

I sit here, typing my translation of an extract from the Táin Bó Cuailnge,¹ and it occurs to me that I have been promising content for some time, and not delivering. I am extremely busy! ...but so say all who write things on the internet and then pause for no reason.

The next few weeks are busy for me, with translation a-plenty (one piece from English into Latin!), but I am being honest when I make repeated assurances of content to come. In the meantime, some more bullet-points to hammer into your brains:

Jake Seliger at The Story's Story writes an insightful commentary upon Dune. He highlights the flaws of the book: no humour; excessive monologuing; and an old-fashioned focus on honour and proper behaviour which dogs at the reader endlessly.

I personally feel (and I doubt Seliger disagrees) that Dune still offers much of value, particularly in the concerns it raises about messiah-complexes and religious war. The flaws of the book are heavy, and they are something which -the universal contempt for many of them aside- will prevent me from pursuing the sequels.


Jeff Sypeck of Quid Plura? once commented that Old English was a 'gateway drug'. Studying that language has not made me particularly inclined to move onto German or Old Norse, languages I have long intended to study. It has given me a new appreciation for poetry, unsurprising for a language in which The Dream of the Rood was written, but that is not quite what Sypeck had in mind.³

The combination of study several languages with 'Old' prefacing them has begun to work that addiction. I stare at words in Latin, in Old Irish, in Modern and Old English and begin to see the beauty and symmetry of Indo-European underpinning it all. It awakens in me a yearning to finally learn Russian and German, French and Polish. I stare at the languages outside the IE family tree and wonder just how different they are, and what makes them so. I only tear myself away from Finnish and Hebrew because B you are already learning three languages at the same time.⁴

My course in Old English offers a choice of five essay topics: on the Life of St Edmund; the story of 'Cynewulf and Cyneheard'; "The Seafarer"; or the individual and society in any text... or "discuss the features of Old English as a Germanic language".

Guess which it is that I have chosen.


As my final offering before I turn to the slaying of Etarcomol (and if any deserved death more in ancient epic, I have not met them), I present this analysis of Star Trek by Eric Burns of Websnark. The essay is spoilerriffic, as they say, so if you haven't seen the movie yet (and you should, Trek fan or no), steer clear. Within, he discusses the Heroic Journey in Trek, and who the true villain of the piece is. He does not mention how awesome the Romulans looked, but I suppose I can forgive him for that.

I must say that I agree with much of his thesis, although I did not find the hot alien chick to be quite as attractive as all that. Then again, I spent much of my time peering at Young-Spock and Uhura.

Ahem.

On that note, perhaps I had best be going. Dobranoc!

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1: Incidentally, does anyone know how to make Word (or, better, Open Office) allow a format whereby I may have my text run down the left column, my translation upon the right? Using the 'column' feature means that the left column text will simply continue into the right column, defeating the entire point. [Okay, everyone's suggestion of 'tables, duh' has been taken, and it worked. Thanks! -Ed.]

At some point, gentle readers, I became obsessed with formatting.²

2: Probably when I decided I wanted to become an academic. Have you seen journal style guides?

3: Perhaps surprisingly, my favourite poems in English are The Dream of the Rood and Paradise Lost- both Christian poems fundamentally about the redemption story.

4: Those of you who know me realise that I collect languages on my to-learn list like a numismatist collects the faces of rulers. I found an introductory grammar of Middle Egyptian today and it was only by a supreme effort of will (and the exorbitant price!) that I did not purchase it.

I swear! Like the new Australian federal budget, and some other things and there is that really interesting thing and the fact that I got a 96% for that Old English translation + commentary. For now, here is what is to be the BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:



[H/T yendi]

I'm not dead, just busy. Also I think I'm getting sick. In the meantime, check out this interesting thing.

I am so busy right now. I spend my time at uni, study, or work and scarcely have room to sketch marginalia of personal time into the manuscripts of my weeks. I feel like I am neglecting personal friends -even local ones- let alone The Internet. Please do not take it personally, Internet! I still love you.

I have some writing I want to share. There is some prose, which wants to be poetry. In the current form, wordsketched with black ink in the notebook, I am unhappy with it. I am going to try and find some time to forge it into something I am happier with, then inflict it upon you. The problem is that I cannot write poetry.

In the same vein, there are some interesting fragments of history which have turned up in my work. A sybaritic Roman governor of Syria; a poem of Tolkein which you may have read; and a conversation about English and insular Celtic languages. Perhaps -hopefully- I will get to write about these things.

Today I was granted an unusual honour, as my Anglo-Saxon teacher had to attend a graduation ceremony. Rather than cancel the second hour of the class, he appointed me as a sort of moderator as we read through the translation. It went okay, I think, despite my nerves ensuring that I could no longer pronounce the words of any kind of English.

Also today, my ADSL died. I will probably upgrade to a wireless, but a new instrument for accessing the internet will not appear for at least a week. Just in time for the Easter break! What ill timing. I suppose I will need to trek into the university to do my work.

On Monday, I had a Latin exam. Later, a pretty lady painted my face with a dragon.

I found this at Coilhouse, where they explain it a bit. Honestly, that doesn't really help.

Cat Shit One (Americanized as Apocalypse Meow), is a bizarre manga series by Motofumi Kobayashi. It features a team of rabbits in an American special ops team battling the forces of Viet Cong cats. Apparently it is both accurate and violent, everything we want from a series of comics about prey animals murdering predators in a reenactment of a human war.

Now there is a production based on the manga, only now the special ops rabbits are fighting Taliban camels. Apparently.

I suppose this is the 21st century's answer to Maus? Except not.

Dear readers,

I have suffered complete identity-loss amnesia. Please fill in the blanks. Tell me who I am! I trust you, my friends, to tell me only the truth and to steer me in the right direction.

[I caught the illness from ajodasso. I suspect it may spread. Please be careful.]

Despite Xenophon switching sides and so that horrible 'filtered internet' thing may well be defeated, the Australian Communication and Media Authority isn't done trying to stamp on the internet.

It seems that there is a magical list of banned websites -mostly illegal pornography- which linking to comes with a price tag of around eleven thousand $AU per day. This isn't necessarily problematic- I mean, illegal porn is illegal, you guys, and for damn good reason.

The problem arises when the ACMA adds other websites to the list- like ones dedicated to anti-abortion (and presumably also things like pro-euthanasia). Or in the case of a stunningly idiotic move, the internet-famous website WIKILEAKS which acts as a whistleblower on things like government and corporate stupidity/evil.

WIKILEAKS had leaked the Danish and Thai censorshop lists and noted that they had been expanded from rightfully banning child pornography to political discussions. Various people pointed out that if Denmark and Thailand expanded their prohibited sites from evil to 'politics we don't like' then there is nothing to prevent the Australian government from doing the same thing. As, in fact, Conroy has already stated that he would. (Although he denies it now, because he is a lying liar.)

WIKILEAKS pointed out, rightly, that "the first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship". By attempting to block citizens from accessing one of the premier websites which discusses censorship, the ACMA is setting an unpleasant sort of precedent. Already, Reporters Without Borders has placed Australia on a watch list.

Conroy's censorship thing looks pretty dead, but we need to keep an eye out for sneaky tricks like this one. Even without the insanity of the filtering scheme, there may be ways for political conversation to be silenced in Australia.

On the plus side, Google will still work just fine. So you can simply do a websearch for WIKILEAKS and read about how "Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release and Danish Internet censorship list."

Or you can just follow the link from the Sydney Morning Herald.

This post was originally going to be me talking about personal life stuff. It isn't any more.

Instead, some neat things:

1) A friend of torificus who is AWESOME (that is both of them I guess, the grammar is kind of vague?), kylieq, has started a zine dedicated to ladies in music. It is called Pretty Good for a Girl and it looks very promising! The cover for #1 is very cute.

kylieq describes it as "a fanzine for and about women involved with all aspects of music scenes, from fans to musicians to managers and everything between and beyond."

The first issue features interviews with Amanda Palmer, Mindless Self Indulgence bass player Lyn Z, and Emily White of Whitesmith Entertainment (manager of Amanda Palmer and Margaret Cho).

AMANDA. PALMER. I know there are some of you who want to own this RIGHT NOW.

So here you go! It is six dollars if you are in the USA or seven if you are clever and good looking and therefore international like me.

I think you should buy it.

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2) My good friend (and chess MASTER) richhard had an interesting morning. I don't know, I don't usually link friend's posts, but this one particularly struck me? The writing vaguely reminded me of Joey "I want him inside me" Comeau, one half of A Softer World. And that is a compliment.

Maybe you will like Richard's story as well. Or maybe not. Who knows? You do, if you follow that link.

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3) It is both Saint Patrick's Day and my father's birthday. He is pretty old now, but still kind of okay. Hi Dad! Even though you don't read this.

One of my great dislikes about liberal activism is cause-collation, or as people commonly recognize it, “when Free Mumia signs show up at a gay rights rally.” G20 and WTO protests, in my experience (and I’ve seen/attended a few) inevitably end up being colossal wankfests because they’re not really about anything, they’re just a giant chorus of “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” and while that’s not untrue it’s also completely unhelpful.

I know I am going all Toby from West Wing here, but if you’re going to protest labour policies or climate change policies or poverty policies, great, but pick one at a time because the inevitable message class just gives the appearance of a group of disorganized, clueless hippies and/or “in it for the experience” protestors.

The mightygodking points out the obvious. This is why I so rarely go protestin'.

Okay, just in case anyone doesn't read ulfruna, yendi, crumpetsfortea, theweaselking or anyone the hell else I read who has already posted this.

The greatest sex scene ever written by human hands:

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

You probably don't want to click those. (Yes you do)

Shorter Tony Abbott: Gee, I wish we lived in a theocracy.

Digger, the epic story of an anthropomorphic wombat woman, a dead god and a statue of Ganesh, is now FREE. FREE AS THE WIND OR OTHER ASPECTS OF NATURE.

I've never been able to afford the couple of dollars a month (I know!), and after I missed a few weeks of updates I drifted away. Having the archives opened up for free is basically some of the best news I've heard in a while. O frabjous day!

Those of you who aren't already familiar with Digger need to be. Go and read it! Is is quirky and adorable and scary and weird and fun times. There are dead gods and things in the dark and living statues of Ganesh and shadowcreatures and hyena-people and vampire squashes.

It is one of the best comic narratives on the internet, nominated for an Eisner award and everything. I would (and intend to) buy it in hardcopy in a heartbeat. This is not your regular kind of comic on the webbernets.

READ IT

I am way too freakin' tired to write lately. Well, tired and a whole bunch of other things.

I am back at university. I am doing Advanced Latin, Old Irish, Old English and Defining the Celts. Fun times. This will DEFINITELY be my final semester of not-Honours-undergrad: I checked. About fuckin' time, am I right?

I've confirmed Potential Supervisor will be my Supervisor for Honours, although I do need a Co-Supervisor as Supervisor will not be around next semester. If I can get it together enough to write a rough proposal, I'll email some people I'd love to co-supervise maybe on Friday.

There's some other stuff, but recently I've become reticent to talk about personal things on LJ. Sorry guys. It's not you, it's me.

I have a job. It starts tomorrow morning.

I saw Watchmen tonight with the ever-wonderful sommeille. I agree almost entirely with ( ... Cut because while there aren't really spoilers, I am nice. )

Harry Potter (and several others) as if published by Penguin Classics in the '50s. The artist has some other neat things as well, including a lovely depiction of Lucifer's Fall.

Australia is the home of fucking.* Yup.

The war over Australian NetCensorship is completed. We won. I urge those involved in the activism to stay wary. I would expect a return from Senator "I wish I was a Chinese Minister" Conroy.

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*Okay, so we're just home to the earliest discovered fossil record of fucking, but we're still awesome.

Amusingly, I am pretty sure that every person with an Abrahamic religion reading this will get the same score.

Well, it looks like PETA have finally just flat out admitted that their sexism and racism makes them just as bad as the KKK.

Now perhaps some people can stop taking them seriously. For fuck's sake.

[As a side note, why the hell damn are so many 'progressive' left-wing groups batshit fucking loco? I'm looking at you, Socialist Alternative/Alliance and Resistance and the rest of you crazy fuckers.]

131 dead. 750 homes destroyed. 3, 733 evacuated. Entire towns wiped out.

NASA can see the smoke in satellite imagery.

I could write about the dry weather and the drought and climate change and the how and the why and the oh god. About politics and fear and environmentalism.

I would like to write something sanguine. About the firefighters and the outpouring of support from ordinary folk and the aid package from the government and people -foreigners!- like maggiesox donating money to the Red Cross.

I won't, and I can't.

I can't conceive of the pain and fear and shock of death by fire that races faster than trains. Or of an entire town being annihilated. Homes obliterated. What am I supposed to say about any of this? I can't sketch words. I can't try and say something about such agony when it is not mine.

One hundred thirty one dead, and that is only so far. The death toll is expected to climb past two hundred. Dozens are critically injured.

I need to donate money, or blood.