Bending Point

Here I am.

Following my last post, gosh! Changes in my life have been smooth but sharp, light but weighty. I am now a full-time editor (of BOOKS, my friend, yes! I am an honest and professional editor of BOOKS), which is an interesting new lifestyle to adjust to. My time is different: no more of the student life for me. Strange and not strange.

So. I've been thinking about this blog. I think it's time to make a change here, too. My personal time is more limited than it used to be, and my non-blog creative commitments (scripting & noveling) have been backburnering for too long. So I think it's time to refocus myself on those other things, and to put these Mistakes Being Made on a more permanent sort of hiatus. Possibly actually permanent, I mean. As in: no more this blog.

This has always been a very casual, experimental & ad hoc little blog – something for my own fun, rather than any serious attempt to build an audience or anything – but I've got to the point where, like I said, things need to change. Focus or no focus, do or do not. Etc.

When I come back to blogging – whether here, or somewhere new – it'll be with a much clearer sense of purpose and focus, I hope. If I decide I want to focus on music, then I'll do a Rage Roundup every week and I'll be an active presence on other music sites to try to actually build an audience, and so on. Or if I decide to do a blog that focuses on some other thing, then I'll focus on that some other thing instead. And if I decide to do another random meandery half-hearted self-indulgent blog like this one, then I guess I'll do it like this again; but at least I'll try to do it in a much more focused and wholehearted way, I think. If you're going to do something, better to do it right; better to try to do it best, don't you think?

(Or, better to do something that will actually get more readers to comment more often, at the very least...)

So, anyhow. That's what I've been thinking. And that's what I'm going to do, I think.

In the meantime: I may be about to give up long-form textual blogging for a while, but I'll be continuing to post beautiful (mostly) wordless content over at my other miniblog, the wonderful looktime.tumblr.com, which is freaking awesome and you should totally be following. (Seriously, go there, it's great. It's mostly not my stuff, it's just stuff that I like. You'll like it too, I bet.)

Thanks for everything.

More later.

:)

: O

Still on blogging hiatus (more-or-less*) while I wrap up the final weeks of my postgrad course, but I absolutely had to share this:

OMFXZG people, freaking NINJA BEAR! Bear thinks it's Donatello!

awwwww yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh

(via twitter@laura_hudson)

*full disclosure, re the "more" of "more-or-less": I have, in fact, lately begun miniblogging** over on Tumblr. Rather than writing full-on wordy wordfests like I do here on this blog, over at looktime.tumblr.com I've just been posting all sorts of interesting images & things, as a kind of record of my internet-image-discovery as I go along.

It's like scrapbooking, the way I see it; it's assembling and collaging, rather than creating content from scratch. Tumblr is built around the easy re-blogging of other people's content, so it's good for that sort of thing. And also, compared to real blogging, Tumblring takes pretty much no time at all! (It's the lack of vowels. And, uh, the general lack of words. And the fact that you can "generate" all your content just by copying stuff directly over from other people's Tumblrs, if you like...)

So, looktime! Please enjoy.

**In the olden times before the "personal computer" existed, the "minicomputer" was a type of computer just a bit bigger and more complex than a "microcomputer"; and so if Twitter is microblogging, then I figure Tumblr must definitely be "miniblogging". Please spread the word.

Priorities

So, it turns out that under pressure, my work priorities resolve like this:

1. Work that I am being paid to do

2. Work that I am paying to do

3. Work that I wish I were being paid to do

I bet you can figure out which category this blog falls into.

Lucky me, though, I only have one more month before my #2 ceases to exist! And that will bump my #3 endeavours up into second place! Right on. Looking forward to it, definitely . . . :)

In the meantime, let me tell about my Saturday morning. I was at my relatives' house in Essendon, looking through the window and wondering what time it was. The sky was a really stunning bright blue, but the clock said 5 o'clock, so that didn't seem right. I looked at the other clock, over on the bench; but that clock said 8 o'clock, which made even less sense.

It was about then I realised that it didn't make sense because I was dreaming. Feeling a bit silly about that, I woke up. (It was kind of neat that I woke up because I realised I was dreaming, right? That doesn't happen every day, definitely.)

I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, but there I noticed that the toilet cistern was missing – weirdly, it looked like it had somehow become completely recessed into the wall. That didn't make any sense.

It was about then I realised that it didn't make sense because I was dreaming. Still. Ha! Fully conscious of this fact and feeling quite ridiculous, I put in a more serious effort to make sure that this time, I was waking up properly.

Having woken up properly now, I was immediately compelled to tell this story to someone else. How ridiculous was it that I would realise I was dreaming and so wake up, only to realise that I was still dreaming and then actually wake up?! Bizarre, definitely. So I was telling this story, but I couldn't actually hear my own voice very well because my ears were a bit blocked up. I tried blowing my nose gently to make the air pressure pop. Now, I'm always a bit wary of doing stuff to my ears (you can burst your eardrums if you do something stupid, can't you?), but I kept blowing and then I started to feel kind of weird, and the weird feeling kind of 'expanded' in my head – it was very strange, not entirely pleasant, and it didn't seem to make any sense.

It was about then I realised that it didn't make sense because I was dreaming.

So then I woke up, for the third time, and immediately I burst out laughing and didn't stop for at least a minute.

Let me tell you, it was a heck of a way to start a Saturday.

--the Drowsy Thoapsl

Soon

Whoo!

Lately, I have been way too busy to give this blog the attention it deserves; luckily, however, my busyness is not quite at Axe Cop's level, yet. (Axe Cop being the webcomic from which the sublime moment above derives.) Most of my specific busynesses look to be cooling down soon, too – but anyhow, we'll see how that goes . . .

In the meantime, I also wanted to draw your attention to what may be the greatest news headline of all time: the "Ash Dash Rash Cash Splash". Subeditors of Fairfax, I salute you.

)

--Thoapsl

No, I Am An Unsuccessful Bounty Hunter

Woke up this morning out of a strangely vivid dream, in which I had been interested to learn that Kirk Douglas supplied the voice for Bossk* in Return Of The Jedi**.

*(Bossk is an absurdly obscure Star Wars character. The only reason I know about him, I swear, is because I once found a defective Bossk™ Official Star Wars™ Action Figure in a random showbag at the Castlemaine Show. Both of his legs were right legs, so the one attached to his left hip looked like it was on backwards. When you're 10 years old, this is the kind of event that will make a nameless character's name stick in your head forever.)

Furthermore, Kirk Douglas had supposedly done this celebrity cameo voice because he was famous in real life for saying "Tssk!" a lot. Hence, the popcultural pun value of his cameo voice for Bossk.

**(Also, you know what? I'm pretty sure Bossk isn't actually in Return Of The Jedi, he's only in that one quick scene in Empire Strikes Back with all the bounty hunters. Also, I'm pretty sure Bossk has no dialogue for Kirk Douglas to voice, unless maybe he just hisses or growls or something for half a second? – How could my subconscious mind have gotten this wrong? And also I am not a Star Wars nerd, I just have a good memory, okay, honestly, shut up)

What the heck is my mind doing, dreaming this stuff? I'm dreaming about imaginary false anecdotes from the annals of fake film history, now? And, I mean, "Tssk!"? What? I mean, seriously, whatttf?

So, in conclusion:

It has been a very long, strange couple of weeks. Sorry about that.

Absolutely Nothing To Do With Easter

– but I was just watching music videos on Rage*, and I had to share this with you:

(You have to promise to watch the entire thing, though. Or at least until you get to the part with the giant floating head of death.)

Also it's widescreen, so you might want to click through to embiggen.

UPDATE! The remarkable Geoff Klock has written a fine analysis of this very video, wherein he explains that you can interpret the whole thing as a kind of allegory for the music industry. Fantastic :)

*PS "hey Thoapsl, whatever happened to the Rage Roundup?" "yeah, um . . . I'll be getting back to it eventually, honest . . ." *excuses, etc*

YSTR!

FEAR IT

. . .

Or not, whatever.

A holiday is always a fine thing – enjoy a hot cross bun, if you like.

(Or, a cross hot bun? Hmm.)

Viva hols.

Two or Three Things for Tuesday

Hey look! Two recent points of interest, each one in the form of a pointedly interesting sequence of words. These aren't short articles, but if you've 15 minutes or so to spare then I totally recommend you check them out:

1. Spectacular true story (via Wired) of a genius Canadian thief. (Do those last three words go together often, or rarely?) It's another great story from Winnipeg – how aboot that?

2. Okay, this one may be a bit intimidating, but repeat after me RIGHT ON I AM A HEAVY THINKER, I EAT YOUR PHILOSOPHY FOR BREAKFAST AND THEN I SPIT IT BACK IN YOUR FACE and you'll be cool.* This article is a fascinating metaphysical argument for justifying the existence of reality, via a big simple idea that I've never seen before.

And yeah, I think the existence of reality is definitely a problem – as in, "why does it exist?". I've never before known an answer that didn't fall back to "just because it does, that's why", or "a wizard did it", or else some version of the anthropic principle. But while this article's argument is not without potential flaws, it's still very, very intriguing. And it also provides a really nifty angle on the old "like, what if we're all being simulated inside a giant computer, like the matrix, like – how could we tell? Like, dude, whoa" chestnut.

If you can stand to read the whole article, please tell me what you think!

*Philosophy is all about intellectual confidence, remember. Why do think Socrates drank that poison? CONFIDENCE.

Also! Bonus Point of Interest! (if you haven't seen it already):

Michael Buble, Stalked By A Velociraptor.

'night :)