I'm not dead, but my laptop is.

Sorry I haven't posted, and sorry in advance for the limited, possibly lack of, posting that will occur during my trip in the USA, I took a computer so I could let you all know how I'm doing but it does not want to pick up wifi anywhere in either Hawaii or Washington and when I got it looked at it stopped booting up at all.

I am currently on the terrible computer in the lobby of the hotel I am staying at and it is terrible so don't expect me to use it much.  I also don't know if any of the other hotels even have a desktop in their lobbies so chances are I won't be getting any information about this trip up here until I get home.

Anyway, I have now blogged from the other side of the planet, so that's done.  I promise to try and post again from here, but we'll have to see if I have time, the schedule is pretty busy.  Suffice to say for now that I'm having a ball and am loving the States.

Have fun and stay tuned because normal broadcasts will resume in February, if not before.

Defragged: the consequences

So two days ago I mentioned on here that I defragged my computer and it was running so very much faster.  I also mentioned that this meant that a lot of stuff that I was having trouble doing online was now possible for me to do but that my family were already giving me a hard time about not using too much internet.

Well it is two days later and the internet has slowed right down to the point that animated gifs are too challenging for it (seriously pages that include even one are refusing to load at all).  So of course now my family are telling me that I shouldn't have used so much internet.  The only problem with this?  I HAVE BEEN AT WORK BOTH THOSE DAYS.  At most I have watched fifteen minutes of YouTube in that time, meanwhile certain other members of the family have been lounging on the couch for two days straight doing nothing but using up internet.

Sorry, I know I've had a couple of negative posts just lately and it feels to me like I'm just whining in a public space - and at Christmas too.  I promise to try and keep the rest of the posts this year positive.  I'll even get this whole positive thing started now by pointing out that this post has made me feel good: I've referenced a previous post for the first time, I'm starting to feel like a real blogger or something!  It's the little things, you know?

I has comments!

I am feeling really good today, it might have something to do with the fact that I got to play with rare books all day.  This included first editions worth up to $800,000 (Australian so even more in American dollars at the moment).  As I've said before I'm studying to be a librarian and one of the many things that made me want to be a librarian was the thought of getting to work with rare and unusual books.  Today did nothing to shake that desire.

Somehow, though, I feel like one of the big things that has made this day really spectacular was discovering that Hayden from Ultimate Gourmet had left a comment on my blog, not only was it fantastic to get my very first comment!  YAY!  But it was also a message of support from the blogging community which I'm now a part of still trying to feel like I'm part of which was extra great for my blogging self esteem.

Still being new to the whole blogging thing is a little tough, but I kind of feel accepted by having another blogger comment on my work.  It's affirmation that I'm on the right track with my blog, not that I'm entirely sure there is a "right track" at all, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

Double Standards

As someone who hasn't smoked for almost a year now, I understand how difficult it is to quit.  I also like to think that I'm not one of those people who point out that because they've quit everyone else should as well - like snap your fingers and its done or something.

This is as an introduction to a rant, because I was sitting on the bus today and a woman sat down in her seat plus half of mine.  So I'm now squashed against the window, trying my best not to get annoyed with her overly loud admonitions to her kid who isn't listening anyway.  About two minutes after she sat down the woman announced that her kid's grubby handprints on her tracksuit pants stank so this resulted in more yelling at her kid and a squirt of perfume

Followed by another 17 squirts (yes, I counted) in quick succession, all aimed across her face so that it went practically straight into mine.  After the fifth squirt I asked her to please stop and she informed me that it was a free country and if I don't like her perfume then I could get off the bus - quite ignoring the fact that as I was partially wedged under her bulk I could do no such thing.  When I said something again another five or so squirts along, this time asking if she had considered that someone nearby might have an allergy to the perfume, she didn't even bother to reply and just kept squirting without pause.  I would have said more but other passengers were giving ME some fairly dirty looks.

At this point I think she decided that she had a terrible taste in her mouth because she started waving her tongue about and wiping it with a tissue before putting some gum in her mouth and chewing it without closing her mouth.  Really loudly.  In my ear.

Now when I was smoking I had to put up with people complaining about my habit and I mostly tried to not have a problem with it, even when people would try and tell me that I was a complete asshole because having a puff over ten metres away downwind of them was going to give them cancer and it would all be my fault, even when I'd been standing there for considerable time and they'd walked up and decided to complain, even when I was in a designated smoking area.  The reason I mostly tried to not have a problem with it was that as soon as I opened my mouth to point out any of these perfectly reasonable factors, every single non-smoker present would instantly have an even bigger issue with me because not only was I a filthy terrible smoker who was going to kill everyone with cancer, I was also rude about it.  I put up with this because I knew that it was a bad habit that, on occassion, could have pretty serious effects on those around me.

While chewing loudly and encroaching on other people's personal space with your girth are annoying they are pretty much guaranteed to have long term implications for no one, the perfume spraying almost killed someone because when I got home I discovered that my brother's girlfriend was over and she is very seriously allergic to aerosol propellant, as in hospitalisation, so before I could go and say hi to her I had to put all the clothes I was wearing in the washing machine and have a shower.  What I hadn't thought to do, though, was leave outside the bag I had been carrying and if it hadn't been for my brother going to the hallway before his girlfriend and smelling the very strong perfume smell (this was over half an hour later, which hopefully gives you an idea of how much was sprayed).

It is essentially a form of discrimination that a person could be trying to do completely the right thing and still be considered some kind of devil spawn purely because it was nicotine related, while most other people can be particularly rude and inconsiderate and it is the person who makes a fuss who is considered evil.

This is pretty rambly even for me and is unlikely to make a great deal of sense to anyone, I know, but I am just so very angry at the moment - over five hours later at this point.  I needed an outlet and you're it, so thanks for that.

On a happier note, this is another first for this blog, the first time I've mentioned family members.  Yay!

Why you want me on your trivia team

So I was talking on the phone to a friend earlier today and unexpectedly and the conversation turned, I'm not entirely sure how, to Mahatma Gandhi.  I happened to mention that today is the anniversary of the execution of Nathuram Godse, the man who shot him at point blank range as he was on his way to a prayer meeting.

This was of little interest to my friend and also of little interest, though he humoured me through it, was that when Nathuram was sentenced to death among those who protested were the first Prime Minister of India, who in large part owed his position to the work of Gandhi, and Gandhi's own two sons.  This may sound strange, but it was because the death penalty was something the Mahatma was staunchly opposed to, but it lead to a rather unusual situation whereby those closest to the deceased were asking for the killer's life to be spared while others pushed for his death.

I finished explaining how this situation (despite the terrible crime, the effect it must have had on those involved and its long term repercussions for India and Pakistan) is interesting to me because of the irony of the children of a man who was killed in a political assassination asking for the death penalty to be stayed because it goes against the victim's political ideals.  The response from my friend was something along the lines of "you know you think about these things far too much, and you're weird" which made me think I should probably record it here (which makes this the first time I've posted about thinking about the blog in real life).

The other thing he said was "you are full of these strange facts, next time I'm at one of those pub quiz trivia nights I want you on my team!"  Which is fine, just don't expect me to be any help whatsoever in the sports round.

Still, I guess I can't be too weird, I had to look up the spelling of Nathuram Godse.

Enough to be going on with

So, with one post down which explained virtually nothing about me or my blog, despite being all about me blogging.  I thought I'd dedicate this post to some kind of (probably half-assed) explanation of these topics.

First, me.  I am a person of the male persuasion from sunny Melbourne, Australia, for those of you who know Melbourne I say sunny because for at least five minutes now the sun has been out and as this is surely some sort of record for consistent weather I hereby add the appropriate epithet.  I am studying a masters in Information Management (librarianship for all you laymen (and laywomen? although that sounds vaguely sexist for some reason... (also, yay for nesting brackets!))) which actually has a hope of finding me a job unlike my BA in creative writing and media studies and honours in adaptation studies.

I have many interests including Doctor Who, Star Trek, using big and unusual words, musical theatre anything by Joss Whedon and reading (yes jsut reading, although I have favoured authors I felt it was unfair to my overall love of the printed word to single anyone out).  This is by no means a complete list of things that interest me, but its probably enough to be going on with.  Oh, also pirates.

Second, blog.  I think I might actually have said this last post, but I don't really know what I'm going to put here except that consistency between posts is unlikely and I make no apologies for changing opinions from one post to the next (I know weird for a blog, right?).

There is no intended theme for ths blog except my strange ramblings but that isn't to say that one won't develop in future. Stay tuned for further developments as they occur and refer to the previous paragraph on apologies for details about this.

Third, me blogging.  Ok, the majority of what I know of internet culture comes from the film Hackers and what has generally passed into everyday offline, face to face parlance.  That and Lolcats.  So to sum this up my knowledge of the interwebs esstially consists of the knowledge that animated gifs are:

Shamlessly stolen from A Quick Sucession of Busy Nothings

So there is my first animated gif, my first Tom Hiddleston reference and my first acknowledgement of another blogger, all in my second post.  I seem to be clocking this game!


As a final note to leave you with I was planning on labelling all my various references, both to pop culture and other, but I figured that would result in a ridiculous cloud with little relevance to anything.  So I won't, I will instead only label what I deem to be sufficiently well covered in a post to be noteworthy based on my mood at the time of posting.

Hello World!

Okay, so while I'm not actually a computer program, this seemed like a suitable title for my very first post evar. This is by way of explaining that various references are likely to occur more frequently here than in Sunnydale so those of you who have something against obscure homages (but, you know, pronounced alliteratively) should, um, probably stick around anyway because, er, coz i says so, yeah!

Now that that is out of the way I should probably spend the rest of this post telling my reader(s) - I'm optimistic - all about me and why I'm blogging. Instead of this and possibly in an attempt to maintain the supposed weirdness suggested by the title I shall rant about how all the good URLs for blogs seem to be gone.


So here's how it all went down. I decided I should give in to peer pressure and maybe start a blog, now fast forward something like two and a half years, so I started a blog - tadaa. I signed up and everything was going really well until I got to the part where I was trying to work out what a good name for this would be. I figured putting loquacious, verbose or sesquipedalian in there somewhere was probably a sensible warning, but predictably these were all taken - as were many different variations on this theme. My next thoughts were along the lines of verbalism, which means to say very little in very many words. This still caused me trouble because the only URL along these lines that wasn't already taken was ihavenothinginterestingorusefultosay which was far too long for me to remember, let alone try and get other people interested in .


Given that I was having so much trouble I decided to have a think and come back to it. This brought with it the realisation that although I want to be as brilliant a wordsmith as Shakespeare, or at least Dr Seuss, that this is unlikely and I shouldn't worry so much about what it is called. This lasted about as long as it took me to return to trying to come up with a title. I should probably point out that the title itself was a problem in and of itself, but in order to remember the URL I wanted it to actually have some sort of connection with it so I played around with a wide range of themes including ramblings, confusions and randomness, none of which gave me any love. It was about this time that I started thinking about what I'm actually going to put in here and realised I have no idea, probably something about films I watch and books I read, almost certainly stuff about a trip to America I'm going on in January. Generally I figured it was just somewhere that all the stuff that gets me called weird if I say it to actual real people (as opposed to my, in all probability, imaginary readership) could call home.

Thus the Home of Weird was born. If you're wondering how I can possibly say that all the good URLs are gone when I have managed to snag this nifty one, I will point out that I'm pretty sure I got the last one. Some sort of smug victory gif would seem appropriate here but as I don't have any smug victory gifs I shall instead just write "Ha Ha!" and leave you to provide the Nelson Muntz image associated with it using your imagination.


And that is the story of my blog so far, post one and already I'm getting all meta by blogging the story of my blogging, this either bodes very well or very poorly for the blog as a whole. If anyone knows which then be sure to let me know.