it’s been a while, baby
Hi, guys. It is: not Saturday. It is also not several weeks ago, which is when I was supposed to be writing some stuff.
But whatever, here’s my blog post, it is about food, check me out.
(I have been moving, and working, and busy all the time. Also I have no internets, except borrowed work USB 3G adaptor internets, which is not so fast as one would hope for, for internets usage in the modern age)
Today I am cooking two things, and neither of them are being cooked on my bbq.
“What!?” some of you might say, making good use of the interrobang, “not on the BBQ?! Madness!”. I mean, actually probably only Heather would say this, because she is probably the only one who is aware that, since Rudd Money Day I have had a BBQ and I have cooked something on it every day since. I mean, this is only like three days at this point but three days BBQ in a row is still pretty epic.
But today it is raining, and I cannot be bothered going outside in the rain to cook things, when I can just cook them inside.
Also they’re both a bit easier to do inside for various reasons.
Here is thing one:
Speck and Potatoes in Peach Sauce
Basically, you get some speck, from your butcher/smokehouse/franklins. You also get some small potatoes. You get a cast iron cooking vessel with a lid, or any other cooking vessel with a lid you have that will go in an oven. You put some brandymel, if you have it, and some peach juice, in the vessel, along with the speck and the potatoes. You jam a fork in the potatoes a couple times so there’s holes for the delicious peach juice to go into. Then you put it in the oven at about 140 degrees or so.
Later, you take it out, and turn over the potatoes and the speck. Because the peach juice and honeybooze sauce will not have evaporated enough with the lid on, take the lid off and leave it off. Turn the oven up a bit to help evaporate.
Even more later, take the potatoes out and put them on a plate or something. Smash them up a bit, but not too much, just kind of rough them up. Make sure they know that you were there, you know, and that if they try that shit again, they’ll have to deal with you. Punch them in the snout to establish superiority.
Once you’ve got a beaten up but still recognisable potato, put some butter and white pepper on the top of it, and put it back in the cooking vessel. Do this until you have no potatos which are not in your cooking vessel.
Later, the juice+honeybooze should have reduced to a thickish sauceish thing. This will also have delicious flavours of delicious speck in it. Relish it, people. The potatoes will be moist and tender, but where you beat them up and covered them with butter and pepper, they will be crispycrunchy and delicious.
As I write this I am somewhere between beating the potatoes up and the sauce being reduced enough to count as a sauce. But I know it will be delicious because the sauce already tastes delicious, the potatoes cannot fail to be delicious, and speck is basically GIANT SIZED BACON, so how is there a problem there?
I might provide photos later, but probably I won’t, because a) I haven’t taken any, b) it’s not going to look that pretty.
But it will be delicious, that is for damn sure.
The other thing I am cooking is:
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork
Getcherself a crock pot. If you do not have a crock pot, do not make this recipie. Unless you have a BBQ you can get to sit at really quite low temperatures reliably for hours and hours and hours on end.
if (crockpot){
Get a big chunk of pork, for roasting. I got a way-too-large bit of pork leg, with the bone in it still, because that was all I could get from my shops at the time. Then I cut it in half and froze the bone half, and used the non-bone half.
Get some spices and stuff if you’re into that, and some nice sea-salt. Rub the spices and sea-salt into the pork roast, giving it as even and complete a coverage as you can. This doesn’t really matter but it makes you look like a pro. …Fessional. Chef Guy.
Put the big chunk of meat in the crock pot, then cover it with BBQ sauce. I would personally recommend to anyone that, instead of plain old BBQ sauce, you use this stunning example of condiment engineering, as, really, it’s the best thing ever.
Also put in some water, and other stuff if you think it will help the FLAVOUR FORCE or whatever flavour-rating system you use. In my crock pot was: a bunch of the worcestershire steak sauce, some celtic sea salt (fancy!), some woolworths all-purpose seasoning (surprisingly efficacious!), and some white pepper. I think that is probably all.
Then turn the crock pot on to low and leave it alone for ten hours.
Ten hours, at least!
Actually you could probably succeed ok after 5 or 6, but making this overnight seems easier.
This is the stage I am up to now. Tomorrow, in the morning, I will, using my hands and a fork, rip the pork to shreds. Then I will put the porkshreds back in the crockpot with the bbq sauce/water/etc juice, and smoosh it around a bit. Then I will take some of that and put it in a frypan, fry it up, then put it on a breadroll with some smoked cheddar cheese, and eat the goddamn hell out of it.
Then I will put the rest in the fridge, and go to work.
It’ll be great.
}
Hopefully, by next week, I will have proper internets, and less crazy stuff going on, so I should be ready to get back into DISCIPLINE again.
DISCIPLINE
daa-da-da-da, da-da da-da dada, dada, dada, dadadadadadadadaaaa
The above, though you would not recognise it to read it, is a visual representation of the Sonic the Hedgehog (invincibility) theme music. This is an important sound for me, and, though it is not a sound I actually make out loud (unlike the Mario theme, which I will sing or whistle at the drop of a hat), it is often going through my head.
So I was going to write an extension of my last footnote in this post, but then I listened to a lot of sonic music, trying to find the theme I was after, and then it seemed like a good idea to talk about videogame music.
Then I had a great big shitfight with my family and maybe now I’ll do something else.
So!
Castle Adventure!
This is the first videogame I remember playing. I must have played it on several different machines, because I clearly remember playing it in bright green text on a black background, bright orange text on a 8″ monitor, and on our TV, on the Sega Super Control Station 7000:
That sticker, under the IO in station, says $599.00c, which is an absolutely incredible amount, given that this was bought in probably 1985 or something. I have absolutely no idea how my dad managed to afford it. But I do know that now, it is mine, and no-one will take it from me unless they are prepared to give a whole bunch of money!
The SCS is basically unheard of, as a console, so a little history: it was released at about the same time as the Master System, and had basically the same internal hardware, but it came with a GWBASIC compiler built in, so you could use it to program things. Castle Adventure was never one of the games that we had code for, because it wasn’t ever released, but we had a book of 1001 BASIC games, where we’d type in the code, line by line, and make ourselves some games to play.
We also got to learn to program at the same time, though I then forgot all of it and had to re-learn it later.
Castle Adventure, as games go, is pretty shit. You are trapped in the castle, it is full of treasure and monsters, and you need to get out.
Sometimes there’s a hole in the wall in the north east corner, and if you can walk all the way to the front of the castle without the game crashing, for some reason, you win.
Most of the time there is not.
You fight people by pressing the arrow key towards them. However, the key-resend time of the keyboard is usually slower than the clock speed of your computer, so the snake (almost always the first enemy you encounter) will pretty much kill you. The ogre in the throne room will always kill you. This is pretty much unavoidable. This is why I never finished that game.
But it was my first game, as far as I remember. Certainly my first PC game.
We bought a Master System when I was in junior school. I’m not sure what year it was, but we bought it from some friends of ours, and they used the money to buy a Mega Drive. Damnit!
But we had Sonic, and a bunch of other stuff. Sonic is the only one that counts, though.
The decision to buy the Master System was fateful. It was the first time an object contributed to my identity in any way I was aware of – because, see, I had a Sega system, which meant that Sonic was cool, and Mario was a dumb game. Also, that the SNES was rubbish, etc etc.
I played SNES intermittently at friends houses, but I didn’t own one personally until well after they were dead (2002 or something? I found one in Cash Converters for $35 bucks. I still have it, but I don’t know if it works anymore), which meant that I missed out on, basically, the flower of videogame experience, as it happened. The SNES was not a better machine than the Mega Drive, in terms of hardware (well, from memory – I am pretty sure that Sonic 2 on MegaDrive was designed to show off how damn fast their processor was. Can you imagine it, showing processor speed by how fast your main character moves on screen? Madness), but the sheer number of developers pumping out amazing games for it means that, still, to this day, there’s more games on the SNES that I want to play than on any other system.
I should look into a SNES emulator for my DS, actually. That’d be shit hot.
But I missed out on CRPGs in the meantime – all we played were platformers. There might have been a couple of top-down action games, and a few flight sims (G-LOCK, I think I am thinking of), and a puzzler or two (Fantastic Dizzy Adventures!), but there weren’t any RPGs. There weren’t many on the SMS or the MD, especially compared to the SNES – and since they were the SNES’s genre, I couldn’t really be interested in them.
I am not sure that, if I had been a Nintendo kid, not a Sega kid, that I’d have played RPGs anyway. We certainly had the attention span for it, back then. We hammered away at Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Sonic, etc. There were lots of games we never finished, but we knew the first three levels inside out, man.
Speaking of Alex Kidd, I recently played an emulated copy of it, and it is: astoundingly more easy to play on an emulator. I mean, especially since you can just go and save state, and not die immediately every time you fly near an overhang, and accidentally land on a fish in the water. Goddamn fishes. But I missed a thing and I can’t be bothered finishing it without it – my damn dad sicced a ghost on me! That shit don’t play.
Anyway, so the point is that I didn’t discover my favourite genre until I was in highschool, when I should have been in year 9. Instead of teaching myself the maths I was supposed to catch up on, I would play emulated copies of FF5 and 6, and then my friend Yun brought FF7 to school… And it was on from there.
But I wish I’d been a Nintendo kid, so I could have got my CRPG on earlier.
Short post today, as now I’m gonna go to Heather’s place, get XP set up on her machine, and maaaybe set up that MegaDrive we found the other day!
TF2, BRB
I was gonna post, but I have the, hehe, burning need, hehe, to burn some people.
later!
Fantastic Damage; or, last night in words
Hi guys! As part of my semi-resolution to, you know, get out more, stop being an hermit, and utilise the resources that living in Sydney offers me, last night I went out and saw an El-P show.
This post is not about the show, it is about the peoples I met there.
The first dudes I met were from Newcastle. I didn’t really meet them, what happened was they were next to me in line and they irritated me a bit with their stupid stories. Because their stories were dumb. Hey, it happens to everyone sometimes, it is nothing to be ashamed of. But as we got in they were talking about having to make the 11:15 train, so I talked to them a bit about the awesome limitations placed on a person by having transport stop at 11:30 or so.
Turns out, if you live in Newcastle, there’s another train at like 1:45, which is practically cheating. Not like living in the outer west, where, once that ship has sailed, it’s sailed for good.
Or, I guess, until about 5:30. Whatever.
Around this time it came to me (as though in a dream) that I required some chewing gum. So I went out and I got some chewing gum! At the seven-eleven, there were two folk who were kind of semi-standing in line, but not really, so I stood behind them, for politeness sakes. The girl told me she wasn’t in line, and the guy did too, but he pushed in front of me to ask the counterman where the Gaelic club was, at which point I informed them that I would escort them to said club in a short while, after I had finished buying my gum.
Their names were Jaime and, I think, Lisa. They were from Canada, in Australia for a couple weeks, rocking out at shows because, once you are a tourist, you are already mostly over the ‘man, guys, going to shows is hard’ thing. Because, check it out: you already in another country! So it’s not such a big deal to go out and see things, I guess? Also, what else you gonna do? Sit on the internet at home? Implausible!
So we talked a bit about the respective hip-hop scenes of our respective towns. Calgary, guys, it’s a place. It’s got… snow, and dudes with mics. I think that’s about it? That’s all Jaime told me about, anyway.
I don’t know anything about the hip-hop scene in Sydney, so who knows what I told him? Probably a tissue of lies!
It’s how I roll.
At this point there were maybe 40 people in the venue, so there was a lot of space and it was a bit depressing to think of some guy coming from over the ocean to perform there. How would that be, on part of your world tour, looking out at the gaelic club and seeing 40 loosely clumped, mostly disinterested people?
Not super-great, is my understanding.
So anyway! I watched some dudes drunkdance with the hippity-hopstyle, for a while, which was pretty entertainment. Then a guy called Scott Burns came on stage, and I seriously thought it was a guy I knew, a guy called Dave. Because basically they are the same person? Only one of them rocks out on stage, I guess. And Dave… I guess he rocks out all the time. He’s a pretty cool guy.
Anyway! Scotty Burns had songs, and in every single one of them, there was a reference to something which made me laugh. This is a good scheme to make me interested in your music. Also, random references to Trevor Chappell and the underarm bowl, good times. I have, somewhere, a tiny, tiny cricket bat, signed by Greg and Trevor Chappell. This is not relevant, but trivia is awesome (guys, let’s get some trivia going).
Later, as the show unfolded, and the venue became actually occupied, I was right up the front. Next to me was a girl who had previously been drunkdancing in the open spaces offered by not having any people around, but who was now also kind of wedged up against the stage. She was from Wollongong. I know only two things about her, one that she’s from wollongong, and two that she’s got an extra-large Public Enemy singlet top, which was the only size they had left when she got to the merch stand, which she will only wear when she is pregnant.
Which I didn’t really know how to respond to, as a conversational opener. So I guess I told her her baby would be awesome.
I mean, probably that kind of environment would be awesome for a baby? Public Enemy has some words to say, about some things, which instill the appropriate attitudes in our youth from Wollongong?
Yeah.
I dunno.
Then, someone I did not meet: El-P. He was surprisingly not involved with the fans who were, like, right there up at the stage. It was a bit disappointing, though I guess eventually he shook my hand. Hmm.
The show was pretty awesome, though, so that was good.
Scott Burns had mentioned in one of his songs that he was going to the Strawberry Hills hotel after the show, so I went there, for, maybe lols, maybe nothing. I ended up sitting on a table with a man from Kiwistan, an Islander dude, and his girlfriend. They were pretty cool, we talked about music (as I had just come from a show and they are going to the future music festival today), and languages (the kiwistani guy was threatening to teach the islander guy kiwanese), and other stuff. But it was also awkward because, what the hell, sitting at a table drinking and chatting with people you don’t know?
I mean, that is part of my no-hermit (no hermo?) plan, to be able to speak more to whoever without it being a thing, and I think I reasonably executed it, but also it is straight up weird.
So then I went to shorthaus, and some people were there, and it was good times. There was cake (oh man! such cake!) and cakesoup (oh man! such cakesoup!) which I spilled all over the place (Sorry Tab!), and talking about stuff and things. So that was good, I think I prefer to hang out with people I actually know, rather than randoms, on balance.
Then I came home! Then I talked to the internets! Now I am awake again and I am sore, goddamn.
oh crap, timetabling!
Yeah, hi.
I was going to write a post about kaballa and gnosticism as pre-scientific models of the big bang and evolution, but check out how much I’m not doing that, now: 100%. That is how much I am not writing that post.
For various reasons, including, argh, first year religious studies was a long time ago and I’ve conflated a bunch of things which, if true, would make the post a lot easier to write, but they’re not true, which makes it much harder.
So, whatever. I will talk about telephones.
I fucking hate phones.
I have a weird relationship with things that annoy me – mostly, I can put up with things, as long as they’re not happening all the time. But if some critical threshold is reached, and breached, I lose the ability to deal with it at all, for some time, and have to take some time entirely away from that thing.
This is also how I am about people, but ‘annoy’ isn’t the right word there. I really like hanging out with people, and I miss seeing my friends on a regular basis, but occasionally it is too much and I need to hide away and not see anyone for some time. If I do see people during the hermit times, it kind of resets the hermit-time-clock, which is bad and inconvenient. So if I disappear for a month or three, that’s why. Don’t send search parties.
This is a problematic way to relate to people because I shut down any overtures towards doing stuff with people during these times. So people stop asking me to go to things. Then, later, when I am ok with people, again, I fail to call people and organise things and so I am a hermit again. Good times!
Anyway, so, I hate talking on the phone, but most of the time it is ok. I find it difficult to focus on what the person is saying, rather than, for instance, any text which might be in front of me (I can’t not read something if I am looking near it). I don’t like the real-time nature of the conversation, because small distractions can entirely derail it. Also, if you miss something, you can’t check what it was, like you could with, say, IM windows.
To counteract my tendency to pay attention to the visual world, not the audio one, I have to sit with my eyes closed if I am trying to talk to someone on the phone about anything important. This is occasionally impractical and sometimes a terrible idea.
Interestingly, I don’t really mind talking on the phone at work. I think it’s because, there, I’m expected to be looking at some other text, and there’s a different register and… various other things. but basically I can ask people to repeat things as often as I need to and they expect that.
This kind of makes me sound like I don’t hear things on the phone at all, which is not true. I am listening, really. But I’d probably rather IM you.
IM is a much less rich mode of conversation, so it’s kind of strange to prefer it, maybe? But it’s also a less invested mode of conversation. Pauses (most of the time) aren’t critical, and it’s ok if you’re reading other things at the same time (most of the time). Because the text is there, as an artifact, not as a memory trace, it is amenable to analysis in a different way. Positing readings of other people’s text helps me tremendously to maintain my not-craziness. Sometimes it’s difficult to get over a first impression, if something is phrased in a way which seems to imply something negative, but often the space afforded by IM allows you to re-assess something and not instantly get upset at the person, and cause trouble? Even though you lack communication cues like intonation and body language, you’ve got a better-developed set of tools for coping with language in text, I think.
Also, because it is a richer mode of communications, I think we think we can relate to it as though it was a face-to-face conversation, which is also fraught with danger. If you can’t see that I’m making a stupid face, you can’t really understand what I am saying (or, not as easily/in as much detail?). So telephones are kind of a crippled actual talk, rather than an enhanced text conversation? And text is text is text is how I like things?
There is: no point to this post, except maybe send me smses for a while because right now I can’t be having with telephones for whatever reason?
But also, we should do some things, guys, let’s go to a place or something, soon.
The Internet: An Learning Device; The Make Good Teachings Superhighway
Or: Things I have learned from the Internet today; a short and incomplete list:
1) Superman will save the day
Actually I didn’t learn this from the internets. Except, uh, I guess, as a delivery mechanism. We won’t talk about that. How I, uh, “ordered” some comics. On the Internet. Then I read them. And they taught me all about how Superman will save the day.
So really, Superman, usually I don’t care about Superman, you know? I think this might be a smartgeek default position, as Superman occupies a kind of jock-resonant position in the, the, fuck I am going to say ideosphere again, the ideosphere. You know. He’s big and tough and punches things to solve his problems.
I’m not really down with that. I am more of a Batman guy, despite the fact that in the final analysis, Batman is big and tough and punches things to solve his problems. The difference, of course, is that Batman punches things with his brain, and that makes it ok.
Plus, he’s not superpowered, and so everyone gets to think “If I dedicated my life to this, went and lived in a monastery for a while, learned some mad skills, got my science on, I could be Batman”.
Except, no, you can’t. Batman has two superpowers, neither of which you have:
1) Money, motherfucker.
I will illustrate this point with another timely interjection from Most Excellent Superbat, probably the coolest character who has only ever been drawn like six times ever, uh, ever:
Haha, you tell ‘em, Superbat.
2) Guy, like, never, and for reals I mean never gives up.
This is not a character trait. This is a superpower. No-one doesn’t give up when a maniacal doctor, pretending to be your dead father, wearing the costume which inspired everything you do, everything you live for, tells you you’re a bad boy, doses you up with meth and heroin and dumps you on the street to hallucinate magical negroes who may or may not give you superpowered radios from beyond space and time. No fucker doesn’t give up, then. Especially when, before the dosing, the doctor rocks a hypnotic command he implanted in a learned helplessness test many years ago which entirely erases your personality. No, you give up. Oh, and later the lady you love is all like ’sorry, guy, it was a ploy!’ and then they hit you really hard, in the face, with the Joker, and also bury you, at a crossroads, at midnight. You give up.
You’ve given up, here, several times. You have died at least twice. The Batman didn’t die because the Batman didn’t give up. The Batman didn’t need his personality, he had a spare one, in his Utility Belt, motherfucker, and he’s not gonna give up, not even when the world is ending and a black hole is forming at the centre of existence and the personification of decay and death and futility has turned most of the planet into zombies that only want you to give up, just a little bit, whereupon it becomes easy to do, whatever, anti-life justifies my lack of expository dialog. And this guy, this personification of death and fail, he’s got you strapped to a machine where the god of torture (I have spoken about this before! bear with me. I have a point, a point about Batman) is fucking with you, like, so hard and this is maybe two days after all the shit with the doctor and the madness went down, so it’s not like you’re in top condition, or anything? Anyway. The Batman doesn’t give up in this circumstance where the cosmic embodiment of Seriously, dude, just pack it in is there, whinging at him. You would. But the Batman pulls a God-bullet out of his Utility Belt and he fucking shoots him, right? In the shoulder. And then he saves the fucking day. Then Superman, like, super-saves it, but that’s the paragraph after the next one.
You would give up.
Like me. Like every other person who isn’t the Batman, which is everyone. Because you can’t be the Batman and it is absurd to base your overweening love of the character on the slim glimmerings of the idea that maybe you could be him. You gots to base your love on the fact that he is impossibly bad-ass, and just deal with it. Did I tell you I might get a Batman tattoo? I might get a Batman tattoo.
Oh, ignore the thing about the paragraph after the next one, up there, I am going to import a paragraph in, right here, and call it item 3 on this two-item list:
3) He’s got a Utility Belt, and you don’t.
You are not prepared, at any point, to be transported back through time to the dawning of humanity. Batman is. Impossibly bad-ass.
Superman! So, yeah, by default I don’t really like Superman for a host of poorly-examined reasons about how basically it is boring to be invincible. This is true. Superman is invincible and this is boring. So, the things you do with Superman which do not depend on him being impervious to damage for their interest, those are good times. I recently gave to Heather a copy of the first All-Star Superman trade paperback, because that was the thing that began to teach me about how awesome Superman is. I mean, the fact that he’s pretty hellaciously stoned on the front cover is pretty good, too. Heh. But I strongly recommend that anyone who might even think sideways that maybe they might enjoy to read comic, reads All-Star Superman. You will learn some things about mythic resonance and how important it is to have people to look up to, even if they are only imaginary, and how even if Superman wasn’t real, we’d have to make him up, and how he’s actually, probably, the King of the Universe by virtue of being the Nicest Dude Ever, but that is a weaksauce way to put it and I expect you to ignore it. Don’t pay any attention to what I am writing, here, except the part where you maintain a strange urge to read All-Star Superman.
Ok! And then, after I read All-Star Superman, I read all of Final Crisis. It’s this whole thing. It’s pretty epic, actually, and I had a good time. We rocked out, me and these comics. There was laughing, and sometimes nearly tears, but don’t tell anyone that, I cannot be seen as weak or my position will become vulnerable. But yeah, it’s also not everyone’s cup of tea. By which I mean that it actually seems to actively offend people who read comics. Not, like, everyone who enjoys to make comics reading time, but the guys, who, what they do, see, is Read. Comics. Those guys got a bit of a hate-on for this fucker because it is Different and Other? Also a bit complicated, kind of, in that not all of the things which make up the story are there? Some of them are implied. What is a much more effective way to build, oh man, words, a mythopoetic space, innit, than, say, an conventional narrative.
But fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Any two year old can read stories with holes in them[1] now. It’s the modern condition and if you can’t hack it, the internet is gonna chew your head up in a couple years. It’s all the post-modernism the kids get injected with in the womb these days, parents playing the Ramones at their soon-to-be-baby, but not out of love, but like, ironically. Baby trucker caps with “Love it or Don’t. Whatever.” written on them (shit, I would buy that). I have no idea what I am talking about! I like to make words. Also the Faint are constantly saying ‘erection’ right now, it is kind of weird, and there’s a big, swelling (no, it’s ok) bass-swirl-thing, and it’s ok, really, what they’re doing here.
Anyway the point is that Final Crisis is pretty good but it’s not the easiest thing to read if you’re not prepared to engage with your media. Also, half of the story happens outside Final Crisis, in Superman Beyond 3D!
This isn’t, like you might think, “Superman Beyond” in 3D. It is Superman, being Beyond the Third Dimension.
Also, it’s in 3D some of the time.
It is hot as fuck, guys, you should read this. So, Superman Beyond 3D, All-Star Superman, and then the end of Final Crisis. Not only does it make Superman the cornerstone of all the universes in the multiverse, in a way which does not make me irritated that an overgrown moralist has been promoted to a position of power, he wins the (first) big fight like this:
Things that this is:
1) Not punching your problems away;
2) awesome;
3) other.
So, that’s good. That makes me feel good about thinking that Superman is awesome. Additionally, the magic of the Prismatic Age makes me feel good about thinking Superman is awesome. I am not going to spoil this, just open the link, ok?
Thank you, Internet Jesus.
Ok, that is way more than enough about comics. I will not talk about comics anymore. Nor will I post any more pictures which may or may not have been sourced from the Internets Pira-sea.
You know, this week.
2) How to do an FFT
This is important for me, because it is important for my job. It is also important for my brain, to find and figure on some things which previously have not figured, in my brainings. There are exciting properties of signals which defy common sense! And make analysis difficult! There are times when adding noise to something makes it easier to understand! That’s all good times.
I, actually, you don’t want me to talk about how it is that an FFT is important to my job. There are dry mathematical details. And there are things I can’t talk about on the internet in case later it is a problem if someone wants to write a paper and that someone is me. And also there is incomprehensible reasons for doing things, anyway. And, I dunno, I can’t think of a way to talk about it engagingly without spilling all my beans. I need those beans, them shits is magical and if I hoard them right, later, there will be a shining ladder to a land of golden opportunity? I am unclear on the specifics, really, but I think that’s pretty much how it goes. That or a giant tries to… chase me? with a goose? I have to stop taking the special hypno-induction-sessions, I think, even though they are much more interesting! … I think.
Anyway the point is that I can implement an FFT now, and I can port that implementation, maybe, into a microprocessor, and then gold will fall from the skies and mum won’t be mad at me for trading the cow.
But I will probably have to learn weird ways to fake floating-point maths using bit-level operators on things that look like integers. This is a bit sad, but will probably, in the future, contribute to my awesome levels, but only in ways that pure compsci nerds will appreciate. Also, probably, I will learn it enough to use it in this project then forget everything about it, which is pretty much how I roll whenever there’s something hard but interesting around.
Ask me about statistics, go on.
I’ve done courses, and everything.
3) that I cannot keep my shit together, Georgiiiiee Giiiiirl.
That, right there, is a classical reference, and that makes me cooler than most of the hipsters on the internet.
It is not really a classical reference, it is a lyric from a song.
A Beastie Boys song.
And, I mean, it’s not really even a lyric from a song, it’s more a half-arsed pass at a reference, you know?
Shut up, it’s seminal, you guys.
Look, I’ma drop some knowledge on you brother[2]:
aww, forgit it. You wouldn’t understand.
4) seriously man I cannot even keep my focus on one thing for like, 100 words.
I was going to talk, above, in point three, about how there is a post in my head, and a little bit in my hard drive, about … questioning the working class through the medium of Pulp songs, I guess, maybe, and why is it like that and why does it keep happening like that and will it maybe change. But I can’t keep my focus on so I can’t write it, plus I get all conflicted talking about the working class (like, I took out a thing about The Faint that was my original point 1, about the guy and his reflections on, I dunno, hookers and why are they doing that and why don’t they stop, also institutionalised gang violence in areas where the only institutions are gangs. I took it out because I was uncomfortable talking about this guy, who I assumed to be a middle-class white guy like me, talking about those kind of things. Plus I looked him up on Wikipedia and he never went to uni [or at least it is not part of his official bio[3]] so I felt like I was unfairly characterising him as a middle-class wanna-be guy, and, oh, what? Why am I even talking about this? That’s why it’s gone), because self-exposure by examining the Other is hard and dangerous.
The song that started it was called Sex is Personal[4]. Instead, I have learned that class is personal. Oho! An revelation.
But, actually, I am working class, or was, certainly. So surely I can talk about it. Now that I have improved my lot. But why is my life improved? My dudes from highschool are, generally, having a pretty good time. You know. This sort of thing is hard, and waa waa waa. So that post is probably never going to happen, but I will take one line of it out and put it here, and that will be the end of things:
Holy shit, Help the Aged Jarvis is the same as Black Books Dylan Moran.
[1]
Why is this not already a thing, eh? We’ve got people constructing narratives out of any fucking thing they please, these days, and calling it art, basing it on all sorts of esoteric shit. We have comics which are supposed to be widescreen, and movie-esque, cinematic games and literature, we have taken the language of the movies and applied it to everything in our lives! Why has no-one ever tried to write a zoetrope story? Or, I mean, probably they have, I will explain what it is in a second, but why has no-one appropriated the term zoetrope for their narrative art? I think I might do it. I am inventing a discipline right now: zoetrope narrative. It is a story composed entirely of descriptions of things which are not moving, static scenes. Let me beta test it right here:
He is standing at the door.
She is sitting in the bedroom.
He is standing at the stairs.
She is sitting in the bedroom.
He is at the top of the stairs.
She is sitting in the bedroom.
He is at the door.
She is standing up.
They are standing together.
She is lying on the floor.
He is standing at the door.
She is lying on the floor.
It seems like it could be a thing that could work, but I am envisaging long and detailed descriptions of these static scenes, maybe that would be tedious. But describing the people with equal importance to the contents of the room could be cool. Whatever!
[2]
This is also a classical reference, but I’m not gonna explain this one.
[3]
In my words I had been meanly predicting he was a rich white boy who dropped out of uni in his final year of business, or maybe fine arts, to pursue his artistic side. I don’t know why. Don’t judge me.
[4]
But actually while I was not really listening and was writing a post, I was thinking about Worked Up So Sexual (note this video is terrifying and hilarious), which is a whole other song, but is actually guy going ‘how you gonna play me that way, strippers?’ as far as I can see. A little bit, anyway. Don’t judge me.
Things I have eaten today, a short and incomplete list:
No pictures, one link. This shit? The way we are kicking it? Oldschool. That is the method by which it is kicked.
So!
Things I have eaten today, a short and incomplete list:
1) Bacon Rice Crispies, motherfuckers.
Inspired by the fine work of the Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York, today I made me some goddamn rice crispies, mit also the bacon. Let’s get down to brass tacks, here:
- Six cups of rice bubbles
- four slices of delicious smoked bacon from my local butcher
- 200gm packet of No Frills pink and white marshmallows
- a little bit of butter
Also I used two slicepans (though one is for actual reals a pie dish, not a slice tray) and a mixing bowl, but you don’t need the mixing bowl. And really you only need one slice tray. And you probably need more bacon.
Allow me to explain my methods, here:
I sliced the rind off the bacon, and chucked it in a pretty small frying pan, with a cover, to render out the delicious fats held within the rind. While it was frying up, I cut the bacon into pretty small chunks, the better to get a mix on with the rice bubbles.
Once I’d cut up the bacons, I took the rind out of the pan and fried the little baconbits up until they were supercrispygood (because if they weren’t, that’d be a bit weird later, probably). Usually I would use a sandwich press to make supercrisp bacon, but I wanted the bacon fat left over for the melting of marshmallows in.
Yes, this is a perfectly sensible idea. Shut your mouth.
I took the pan off the heat, and set it on an angle, so the fat ran out of the corner-piled baconbits. After a while, I put the baconbits in a mixing bowl to cool down, but I could have put them straight in the slicepan, really, had I been thinking that shit through.
Then! Marshmallows.
First I checked to see if the bacon fat tasted like bacon (sometimes it does!), but it didn’t, so that was ok. I chucked a bit of butter in the pan with the baconfat (seriously, this is delicious, shut up!), and put it over a very low heat. While the butter melted down, I got the rice bubbles out, and put two cups in the pie dish, mixed up with the bacons, and four in the slice tray, baconless.
Once the rice bubbles were arranged, and the butter was melted, I got my marshmallow on, put them all into the pan with the baconbutter. Marshmallows melt weird, it’s kind of disconcerting. They stay big for ages, then all of a sudden they’re not, anymore, they’re liquid marshmallow goodness. I did this over a fairly low heat, because I didn’t want to burn any sugar, you know?
I put about a third of the mixture into the pie dish, and left the rest of the marshmallows on a (really, really) low heat. There was just about a flame, but not enough to burn anything.
Mixing marshmallowbaconbutter into baconbubbles is weird and messy. The marshmallow starts to turn to, like, sugar-ropes, almost immediately, and this is not helpful. I am just saying: get your mix on fast. Use two utensils. I used the rice spatula from my rice cooker, and also a spoon, but if I’d had another small spatula, I would have used that.
But eventually I got most of the ricebubblebaconios attached to the marshmallowmix, and it was good.
While I had not been paying attention, the marshmallow mix in the pan had kind of shrunk down, and was threatening to caramelise, so I hastily tipped it into the slice tray.
It was at this point that I realised that you should not use a slotted spatula to mix marshmallows and butter, because that shit does not come out of the holes. Not ever.
So I was a bit short of marshmallows (my packet was 200 grams, I had wanted 250, but you can’t always get what you want), but still, enough of the rice bubbles were incorporated. This is not as supersweet as I recall them being as a kid, probably due to the higher rice/sugar ratio. That kind of makes them healthy, right?
Anyway! If I was going to do this again, I’d use three times as much bacon, and I wouldn’t bother making any non-bacon rice crispies.
And I will tell you why:
They are fucking delicious, that’s why.
Don’t even joke about ‘eww’, and ‘gross’, it’s not cool. You are disrespecting a beautiful thing, you disrespecter of beautiful things. I will have no truck with it.
So, thanks, internets! You have learned me up some valuable lessons today!
(those lessons being that anything that you’d be happy to cook on a stick, over a fire, will taste delicious with anything else you’d be happy to cook on a stick, over a fire. And rice bubbles. Also that you can trust the internet to feed you, because everything there is the truth)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some delicious treats to consume.
wherein I derive meaning from random events
So yesterday at the bus stop, waiting to go to work, this lady comes up to me and she’s all like can you hold my dog for a second mister, just for like thirty seconds.
And I’m like, ok, I guess, but if a bus comes I’m gonna yell out for you, ok?
And she’s like, ok, that’s fine, and then she hands me the leash and I take it, and then I have this dog, and I’m concerned, because if I hold the leash too tight in my hands, my hands will be tired when the dog decides to run intro traffic, and it will escape, and the honda civic will hit it, and it will be my fault, and suddenly I am responsible for the death of a friend that this lady clearly values – and which is clearly a gud dog, too, a nice dog, not stupid, not smelly, smart and bright and loyal and interested, the kind of dog I would have if I had a dog, but I can’t have a dog because they make my hands feel dirty and I’d wash them so much that I bleed, again, and I’d still have to feed it, and even dogs which are not smelly actually smell, and then you smell of a dog and no-one will sit near you and on the bus you’ll be that guy, that guy with the dog, only you can’t see the dog, you can just smell it, and feel it, and you feel dirty just being near him because now there is dog on you, somehow, through the air.
Have you ever thought of that? If you can smell something, then it is on your skin. Life gets a lot more complicated when you realise that smells are particulate solids, and when you smell it, it is in you, and you can’t wash your lungs, can you? And now you’re dirty because there’s dog on your lungs, or vomit, or other people’s bad Breath.
But I am concerned because if I hold it too tight then it will escape, because my hands will be tired, but if I am not holding it tightly enough when it tries to run onto the road to, I don’t know why, maybe it is to chase that very short man who does not appear to have a neck, maybe he is the reason for why the dog runs on to the street and the, now it’s a taurus, I hate tauruses, they look like cockroaches, only they are always the colour of the hawkesbury river, that time when the algae was blooming and you couldn’t swim anymore because the algae would get inside you and make you sick. Or sometimes they are silver and that is sometimes worse because things which are silver should be clean you know, but then they look like cockroaches and cockroaches are the opposite of clean, they are the worst most dirty things, and they sneak and creep and walk on you in the dark if you lie really still so they don’t hear you breathing but if you smack them then they leave their filthy guts on you like some kind of revenge like the suicide bombers of the filth agenda.
I don’t know if there is a filth agenda though most days it feels like everything is a conspiracy to dirty things, to make you hold the poles on the buses so the grease of a thousand people is on your hands and then you have to shake hands with your boss and then your boss is dirty because you don’t see him wash his hands and then later when he is telling you you did a good job, jimmy, jimmy that’s a good job and that layout is a good layout and the Client will be happy to see that, jimmy, and he lays his hand on your shoulder he is laying the hands of a thousand strangers on your shoulder and you have to be quiet and careful because if you explain to the boss about the thousand stranger’s hands on your shoulders then you will not have a job or a boss or a Client and then the only things you can lay out will be the posters you are working on, only you can’t finish them because you are not sure if the filth agenda is a real thing that you need to tell people about, or if mostly people should just wash their damn hands, damnit.
I am concerned about the dog, which will run onto the street and die and it will be my fault, so my hand is white and shaking and sweating, which means that when the dog tries to die on the street that my hand will be slippery and I will not hold it and the dog will die on the street and the bus, oh, the bus is here, oh, no, that is the 445 which is not my bus but sometimes I catch it if I am going to the shops which are not the shops on the other side of the park, the bus will hit it and it will die and it will be my fault because I am dirty and scared and my hand was slippery.
The dog is a good dog but it looks at me and it breathes on my hand and now my hand is dirty even more. But the breathing does not smell like the breath of a dog so actually it is not that bad, which I do not understand because even when a person breathes on me and the person is the pretty lady at work who does the colours and her breath smells like honey and another thing that I don’t know what it is, but it is not Breath like most people have, which is a smell like yesterday’s food if you found it still on your plate at breakfast, and then you found that you were eating it for some reason and you couldn’t stop, that is what the Breath of most people is like, but hers is not, but hers still makes me dirty, but the dog, which is a good dog, does not have a Breath and my hand is not that dirty. I can’t eat with my hand, obviously, because I am holding the leash and the leash was on a dog and in the hand of a lady who I don’t know and so it is dirty and so my hand is dirty but the dog did not Breathe on my hand like a person Breathes on my hand so it is not more dirty.
And the dog smiles, he is a happy dog and he will probably not run on to the road to kill himself under this taxi because he is a good dog and not that dirty, for a dog, and probably he doesn’t want to make me, and the lady, and the taxi guy, and the guy in the taxi who is not the taxi guy, probably the dog does not want to make all of us sad and besides then there would be a dead dog on the road and that is not a good thing because dead things are dirty and I didn’t touch the dog, who is dead, but not dead yet obviously this is a thing which is going to happen not a thing which has already happened, but when he is dead, the dog, and I have touched the leash which has touched the dog who is dead, then I will be more dirty and I will be too dirty to go to work but probably the boss will not be mad at me and call me crazy jimmy because I will tell him how the dog I was looking after ran onto the street underneath this I don’t even know what kind of car is that, oh it’s a miata of course, that was what the dog I was looking after ran under and the boss will understand that it is a sad thing when a dog you are looking after runs onto the road. And he won’t know that it’s because now I’m dirty because I touched a thing which then was touching, later, on the street, a thing which was dead.
But he is a good dog and so he is not running on to the street even though there is another lady on the seat now, who is not a nice lady and who has a Smell, which I cannot even talk about because Smells are the worst thing, worse even than being smelly is to have a Smell, and she has one and it is making me dirty by coming off her skin and getting onto my skin through the air. She is the kind of lady that when she walks through a place you can’t walk there for a while because behind her she leaves a path which is her path through space but also because it is a wall of the things which make a Smell which come from her skin and stay in the air behind her and then when you walk through it it gets on you and if you breathe it gets in you and then there is the Smell on you and in you.
But the dog is brave and does not run, and even though I do not know how to hold the leash, which is dirty, so I do not want to touch it, but I have to hold it so that the dog, who is a good dog, does not run away and die, even though I cannot make up my mind and even though I am holding the leash as tightly as I can but also not touching it as much as I can and even though he breathed on me and smiled, he does not run and then the lady comes out of the shops, and she has some cigarettes and she wants her dog back, who is a good dog, and I nearly don’t give her back her dog because she is going to smoke near him and smoking is the worst kind of dirty because it is in the air and it gets on things and it sticks to things and it makes you have a Smell and it makes your Breath like a thing that hurts as well as makes you dirty, because she shouldn’t smoke around her dog who is a good dog.
And she says thanks for holding my dog.
And I say that is no problem, ma’am, anytime.
He is a good dog and friendly.
And she smiles and takes her leash and she goes away to Breathe smoke on things and people, and the bus comes, and it is dirty like always but I have to go to work so I get on and I give the man my money and I go to work.
