friday : 16 may 2009

Shock, horror. A journal update. It's not a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination. However, it seems that only a short flight out of the state of Victoria can prompt a post here. These are brutal times, for your Humble Narrator at least, and on a number of levels.

Now, while Kevin Rudd's budget has skipped the unsung moral minority of Australia yet again, namely single blokes who binge-drink to cope with work stress, and collect imported genre DVDs to address the paucity of true 'culture' in Australia, it takes a lot more than that pissy amount of government persecution to demoralise us. Par for the course. That's the curse of being Generation X: you know much more than the previous or next generation (strangely, we like to read and learn new shit), but somehow we have far less power or visibility than either demographic.

That said, I cannot complain. Tomorrow morning I'm jumping on a jet aircraft, bound for Queensland to celebrate some birthday occasions. The new Canon digital camera I purchased last night – my first, actually – should have its 16Gb memory card filled up with 90 mins of 16:9 720p video or 9999 photos by the time I return. Maybe...

sunday : 29 mar 2009

Hello Constant Reader. I've been ferociously busy at work in the last couple of months. This situation has eroded most of my mental energy reserves. Doing anything more complex than navigating DVD menus or paying an electricity bill tends to be left in the too-hard basket.

And for next two weeks, I'm the acting team leader of our BI project while the real team leader flies to Bangladesh for a well-earned holiday and tonnes of home-cooked meals. I know that works for Bogan the Wanderer, and it certainly works for me. For instance, the last time I was in Brisneyland, mum used me to road test her new chicken korma recipe. Needless to say, it was delicious. Mind you, this coming from someone who eats spicy Indian food at least once a week.

As for other matters, a lot has happened in the world during the last couple of weeks. There's the new digital TV station run by Channel Ten called One, which is dedicated to, umm, sports. Not my cup of sake, but there you go. Channel Nine are planning an entertainment channel, while Channel Seven will announce for their Freeview channel soon. I can guess that it'll contain children's shows and/or documentaries.

What else has happened? Labour Senator Stehpen Conroy was on Q and A the other night, swearing that mandatory internet filtering will stay within the existing "refused classification" banned content guidelines. Given that Queensland police have cracked peer-to-peer criminal activity, the need for internet filtering seems to be less vital than ever. However, he did make the useful point that it was the Liberal government who set up the original 'black list' of banned websites. In other words, it's always been the federal government's intent to close the classification loophole that the internet provides. The current shitstorm (to use Kev's term) is nothing new. My view is that the current guidelines are too restrictive to be applied to movies and magazines, let alone online material. In other words, they should stop trying to ban so much content, and simply classify it properly. After all, that's what the OFLC keep saying their role is when the question arises.

Last night I went to see the Florida death metal band Malevolent Creation at the Hi-Fi Bar. A very fine evening of extreme music was had by all. Unfortunately, the amplifiers in the venue couldn't deal with the volume levels, so there was way too much distortion. Frankenbok sounded much better (hello Yeti). Of course, this didn't stop me from spending time in the mosh pit. It felt like I was 34 all over again.

Oh yeah...the Toxic Top 5 Lists for 2008 will be posted later this week.

monday : 16 feb 2009

Nice. I was just poking around my ancient Western Digital C:\ drive while waiting for Good Game to start, and chanced upon two scans of ink drawings I produced for my fanzine Skintomb, issue #666. Shown below are the front (Medusa) and back (Lovecraftian monster) covers respectively. I forget where the images came from. An online review page?

   

The originals were A3 in size and drawn on semi-gloss 130 GSM paper with black markers using stipple technique. This is one of the few ways you can render grey tones in black and white that don't tend to breakdown when photocopied and passed on to the printer. These days, you just e-mail high resolution scans, or draw it all digitally using a tablet. If I'd gone to art college in the 1990s, pen and ink would have been the preferred method. Some experimentation with steel nibs and India ink showed that I liked the convenience and neatness of markers (aka "Nikko" pens) much better, although the line you get with steel nibs is fantastic once you've mastered the buggers in 15 year's time. Check out the B&W art of Bernie Wrightson to see what a master of these tools can do.

I've also dabbled with sable brushes and India ink. Using this elegant combination is even harder to control than steel pens, which tend to leave blotches of wet ink that are prone to accidental smearing. However, with a brush, there's virtually no friction, so you have to glide your hand above the paper and hope that the brush touches down and lifts off in the right spots – usually at the tips of two other strokes nervously laid down earlier.

Anyway, there'll be more Roddy W. artwork appearing when I purchase a new PC and a scanner to match. Speaking of arty topics, I hope everyone caught the Leonardo DaVinci documentary on Aunty last night.

tuesday : 13 jan 2009

Christmas and New Years. I must have had a great time, because Your Humble Narrator put on 5.2 kgs during the month of December. So I'm officially a fat fuck. However, the weight's already coming off due to my diet retuning to its usual nightly regime of steamed vegies and 100 grams of tinned fish, albeit punctuated by voluntarily gulping down quantities of liver poison to celebrate the death-throes of 2008 and usher in the arrival of summer. On Christmas Day I was invited by a work friend for lunch at his sister's place, which just happened to be on my side of town. That lasted all the way to 10:00pm and included table tennis tournaments, tons of food, a grinning toddler, three dogs, FM radio chart favourites, and several cans of pre-mix. On New Year's Evil I decided to shun two party invitations and stay home to drink three cans of Jim Beam and cola. This was because I was totally shattered after four weeks of said indulgence; I blame the rich food, mainly. At around 10:30pm, I must have nodded off in front of the TV, only to wake at 11:30pm and notice that the front door was still open from earlier in the evening. I eventually crashed at 1:20am.

Boozing and Alcotherapy. I'm happy, overjoyed, chuffed, ecstatic, and delighted to announce that I've broken my binge drinking / hangover / recovery cycle. This decaying orbit of self-abuse had been showing signs of getting out of hand towards the end of 2008, at least relative to what I was used to. After the failure of the light beer approach – I just drank faster and still got hammered, plus it tasted average – the heavy drink followed by a chaser programme I'm on now is working fabulously. Not one hangover since the end of November 2008. Plenty of drinking still, mind you. Perhaps more often than ever before, but it's all controlled. But don't worry about your stocks in the sake industry. Me and a mate have been putting away billions of gallons of Japan's precious exported supply at least twice a week. In fact, we expect Japan's (sober) leaders to announce the beginning of a Global Sake Crisis any day now. As if things weren't bad enough.

Reading. Yep, for some reason, I've swapped alcohol binges for reading binges. And I suspect there's a tenuous connection there. With the weekly bouts of brain fog now vanquished, my head is clearing little by little each day. This has manifested itself in a voracious reading appetite. Science fiction tomes are currently providing the most nourishment after I suffered through a couple of bloody awful horror novels. I even splashed out and bought a signed, numbered, limited edition, out of print hardcover of Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan from Subterranean Press via Flea-Bay. Right now I'm barely resisting the urge to take Chasm City back to bed and let it ravish my imagination. I'd thought that a detective story (of sorts) from Alastair Reynolds might be a drag, but it's turned out to be absorbing in the best way possible, despite a few clichés here and there (you knew I'd find something to winge about, heh heh). Retail spending on books has also been on the rise this quarter, with 10 or so paperbacks now waiting to be read, purchased new and secondhand. These include some Peter F. Hamilton space opera paperbacks that could be mistaken for stone blocks left behind by the ancient Egyptians.

Movies. They've not been terribly important of late. One would think that a month of gluttony to rival the entire reign of Henry VIII should inspire nothing more strenuous than chain-watching DVDs all night after work and all weekend. This has not been the case. A few titles have lit up the Loewe picture tube, but certainly nothing has been seen in cinemas, not even Australia. Hard as that is to believe. But knowing myself fairly well, the recent bookworm cycle will give way to cinephilia before long. All it'll take is one crap novel. By the way, RIP my local video shop, which closed its doors and rolled credits forever just before December 31. Nevermind, because 2009 has to be the year that I sexually assault my backlog of censorship research and post new entries, or commit ritual suicide if I fail.

Travel. Last weekend I drove out to Moe for lunch, with drive-by looks at Beaconsfield, Warragul, Morewell, Tarralgon, and other east Victorian country hamlets. I'd heard that Moe was the bogan capital of Victoria, and was curious enough to test the theory. Upon taking the freeway exit ramp – which seems to lead right into a McDonald's – and cruising the neighbourhood, I thought Moe looked all right...you know, fairly normal. Then I arrived in the town centre. This was roughly at 12:45pm. To get to the main drag (George Street), just turn as soon as you see the "Guns and Ammo" sporting shop. I parked just across from the weed-infested train station, then went in search of any shops that were open, as well as (a) a cold beer and (b) lunch. For the brewski, I went into the pub on George Street nicknamed "The Tav". It was one of those combination bars and TAB betting outlets you only find in trendy, gentrified areas of Melbourne. I must say, though, that my pot of Boags Draught was magnificent. A short stroll brought me to a bakery that sold salad rolls. Mine featured a delicious multigrain bun, which I enjoyed heartily whilst peering through the front windows at the muscle cars growling up and down the street. I even saw a roo-shooting utility, covered in mud, just like the one in Crocodile Dundee. Amazing. I also noted that skateboarding is a popular means of transportation in Moe: good to see people in rural areas saving the environment. The residents were friendly, and came in all shapes and sizes. Sadly, it was already time to climb back into my Mazdarati (with its diminutive rear spoiler and impotent four-cylinder engine) and leave Moe behind.

Gone, but not forgotten.