I went to Telford College yesterday and applied for the HND Civil Engineering course. Mostly because it’s all they had that looked remotely interesting. I then made my way home asking myself ‘Is that really what I want to do, or did I just apply because it’s there?’
I applied because it’s there. That’s it. Not that I have any *objections* to Civil Engineering at all, nope I do not. I would very happily be a civil engineer. It’s a bloody good and very important job. But
I’m lagging way behind on posting intentions, mostly due to having brief oases of calm amid a shitstorm of fucked-offness. I never fare well this time of year, and this one is an absolute stinker.
I have had two good days with Daughter though, which has been much required and very nice indeed.
So, things to come:
Having free time is not agreeing with me. I do believe I have a case of Cabin Fever coming on.
I avoided taking time off for all these years not because I like making money, or out of a dire sense of duty/responsibility, but because I knew full well I’d get nothing done at all. I am totally useless at holidays. [not that this counts as a holiday]
I was up all last night listening to Meshuggah Radio on Last.FM. I here define ‘up’ as lying on my camping mat swaddled up in a duvet [dear Lord how I love that word] with earphones in trying desperately to sleep. Failing. Anyway the thing about Meshuggah and bands that sound like them – as one would expect to hear on Meshuggah Radio – is that it involves lots of clean, crisp, interesting technical precision drumming. With very strange timelines, often quite jazzy or even tribal.
I have a Djembe drum. I bought it a surprisingly long time ago. Hannah helped me chose it. That was a good day. I have not played it since moving, but I thought “Hey, I’ll go up to the Meadows with my drum and play it for aaaaages”. I had a lovely vision of several other people joining me with their own instruments and a small crowd forming, dancing merrily along. That plan didn’t get very far, because I did finally fall asleep at 10:30am, and it was horribly foggy out. Not safe for cycling with a bloody big African drum strapped you my back.
So if it’s clearer tomorrow, I am going to get out there and do it. I’m going to go to the Meadows as early as I can make it [has to be light, has to be clear. Otherwise I'll likely get hit and die] and play until my hands go numb.
I will Tweet my arrival, assuming I get there. You are welcome to join me.
I’ve been playing around with undeadbydawn.com for the last few days, and am a fair bit happier with how it now looks and works. It’s not perfect by along way, but it is better.
Go look, tell me what you think. If you’re technically minded feel free to tell me how to improve the site further.
my most popular post of late has been a question regarding the mechanics of WP and LJ. Something I posted on a whim because I wanted more page views. Or wanted to know how to get more page views.
which I can only presume means that my dear readers are more interested in how the web works than what’s on it.
or, me asking questions is a lot more productive than ranting away at a keyboard.
I have a mildly obsessive personality. It bothers me now much more than it used to, purely because I accept that I do it, and I’m aware of how badly it affects my judgement at times. I used to be more or less oblivious to my quirks but they have been exposed to me many times over in the last few years. Usually in a bad way.
My most recent obsession is the Good Doctor, specifically the David Tennant presentation. I had ignored the show because I assumed it’d be the usual silly lightweight UK SciFi. Not worthy of my attentions. Certainly not worth following with the religious fervour certain of my [curiously very sensible and highly respected] friends.
Pretty much because everyone else did, I watched BSG. Which was brilliant until the heartbreakingly bad finale.
I was then convinced to watch Children of Earth, that ooooh so very good TorchWood series. Five episodes of perfectly written, serious, adult, dramatic SciFi. That was The Shit. It’s the only TorchWood I’ve seen, and I probably won’t watch the previous series.
But that led me back to the 2005 reboot. I watched the initial Tennent show first, but was persuaded by Ben Templesmith, via Twitter, to go back and watch Eccleston. I did, and swallowed the full series on a week. It was that good.
On to the delightful Mr Tennent. Legend has it, the most popular Doctor ever. I’m not sure how that’s been established [I'm going to assume it's viewer ratings], but by the Gods his Doctor is infinitely better than I could have imagined. To reiterate: this is a show that I had zero intention to watch. I did not care for it at all and assumed – against all evidence to the contrary – that it would be a bit.. rubbish. How wrong can a man be? Very wrong indeed.
I, dear friends and readers, need to find another job. I am most likely *not* going to go back into care. I have had my fill of looking after other people, and am not very likely to have any peace until I move on.
Current plans include going back into education [Civil/Electronic Engineering has been ticking me for a while], giving the RAF another buzz, or working myself to death in a bookshop.
Or I could just stay unemployed for a brief time and apply for a council flat. Get my debts frozen and work on a long term ’sorting shit out’ strategy.
Everything I write here gets automatically posted to LiveJournal. That’s great and I like it a lot, but is there a way to limit the cross-post to the first paragraph or similar, so [to be completely blunt + honest] I get more hits on the site itself [www.undeadbydawn.com]
I have no idea how many people actually read this because it’s not possible to farm LJ hits. That I know of.
I love books. Glorious papery devices used for education, enlightenment, entertainment and probably lots of other things beginning with ‘e’.
I have lots of them. I frequently go into shops that have thousands of them, and every time I want to buy more and more and more.
Only recently I have begun to feel somewhat guilty about this, because books were trees, not very long ago. I am hugely against tree-death. I love trees as much as, possibly more than books. Trees are really rather important, they do many wonderful things including generating the air we breathe and the atmosphere that keeps the world inhabitable. They have hugely complex ecosystems all of their own, providing food and living space for countless wonderful creatures. I look at my library and wonder how much rainforest it cost to create it. That is not a happy thought.
The easy solution to my concerns over tree-death would be to buy electronic books instead. But there’s a problem with that:
When I buy a paper book, that book is mine. I can do what I like with it, I can lend it or sell it on or store it and I know it will never go away, never vanish, never let me down. As long as I keep it it’s mine.
I looked at my copy of Stanza today. One of the books I was halfway through gave me an error code. It is no longer accessible, because someone somewhere decided I should not be allowed to have it. It was a book I have never seen for sale anywhere. I will probably never be able to finish reading it, because someone somewhere decided I can’t have it. This book, which was out of copyright due to its age.
So I went to the inventory screen of Stanza, and discovered two other books were not available. Needless to say this was downright infuriating. I needed those books as essential reference material for my own writing project. They contained facts that I had planned to use, pass on via my own work so others would know historical events – in my opinion, very important events – really happened. How they happened. But no, that is now lost to me.
We live in an age of information. Information is God. It should be possible, with a lot of looking in the right places and a chunk of perseverance, to discover pretty much anything. Absurdly, with this wonderful new technology [whole books on my iPhone. Hundreds of them!], I have no control over whether I get to keep that information. So in effect the electronic book revolution is totally unreliable.
Thanks for that. If I cannot trust you to let me keep your product, I sure as hell will not pay for it. Similarly, I will not ’subscribe’ to music. Not if I have to rely on you bothering to keep servers running.
I digress.
My guilt over my small part in killing the Earth is countered with the freedom and ability to have what I need to have any other way. Until I have a guarantee of that freedom, I will just have to keep on buying dead trees.
AVATAR
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010No, it’s not a review of the film. I missed most of the film due to an acute bout of motion sickness, from which I am still suffering. This is a comment on the ramifications of Avatar on a curious bunch of possibly mildly mentally unstable fans.
There are now help-groups set up for viewers who are suffering from depression because the world of Avatar, Pandora, is not real. These people are so desperate to escape this miserable world and go somewhere decent that they need to speak to like-minded individuals and share their collective disappointment with this filthy planet we call Home.
I have a suggestion.
Speak to all your Pandora-obsessed friends, sell everything you have and book a one-way ticket to South America. Hire your collective selves a really, really good guide and head into the Amazon Rainforest. There, spend the next decade keeping it in existence. The Amazon is as close to Pandora as is possible on Earth, and it is being killed at a terrifying rate. The Amazon needs your help. Seriously. This is not cynicism it is actual, practical advice. If moping around feeling bad isn’t doing it for you this will.
GO save the Amazon.
Your childrens children will appreciate it. Also, James Cameron will have done the world a pretty huge favour.
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