Rushed and somewhat real-lifey entry, but I feel the need to post one. Been a while.

Yesterday was perhaps the finest leaving prank ever: almost the entire upper 6th showed up to school in fancy dress. Notable highlights were the squad of cheerleaders (many male) and nuns on razor scooters (all male - Jono made an exceptionally good nun) led by a scooter-riding cardinal in all manner of bling.

Everyone's costume was surprisingly appropriate: Geo as Superman (he didn't really need the fake pecs in his costume), Ellie Turner dressed in extremely chavvy clothes (appropriate) Sophie Lau dressed as a braindead slut complete with overdone makeup and big hoop earrings (very appropriate) and Leah as a revolting deep-sea creature (you guessed it: perfect.)

Nobody told me about it (bastards), but hard to blame them because I didn't have any lessons on Thursday and thus missed the message (it was... very spur-of-the-moment, apparently.) However, during the afternoon I helped convert the JCR to a racetrack for the nuns, and borrowed Ollie Thew's wimple and scooter for a zip around. If Charlie sends me the video and I can be bothered to upload it to Youtube, you can all be treated to a number of slightly insane cross-dressing sixth formers skiving history to scream around a makeshift track on scooters.

Honest.

Tonight was the form poker evening, hosted by Geo in his family's Clifton flat, with a lovely southern outlook and lethally-slippery floors. The whole gang was there, plus Tom L (who was drunk and amiable), Mr Clark (in civvies! ... it was admittedly hard to tell) and George's girlfriend Julia (who was lovely). James Hook was a little maudlin (despite having the evidence that people liked and cared for him rammed repeatedly in his face) but brought round some absolutely stunning garlic bread. We played for pennies, and despite having never played poker before in my life ended the night £2.48 up (huzzah).

My last ever day of school is this Tuesday. Exams begin two weeks from then. These are the end times, and I walk into them with head held high.

Oh, bloody hell.

I think for once I'll just dispassionately list the facts, because really, getting angry will just obscure the point when for once I have a genuine grievance.

I ordered the Penny Arcade books 1-4 bundle, which their website proudly advertises as being $45 for four, rather than the $52 it would cost to get them seperately. The extremely badly designed online store didn't tell me how much the shipping was until after the credit card details had been entered - and it turned out to be $35, which seems utterly insane for four books, but I was perfectly willing to pay. This I covered; this you know. Agreed-on expense: US$80.

However, now that it's arrived, a few details have come to light:

1) The book bundle that I ordered wasn't charged correctly; each book was paid for individually, meaning that instead of $45, we've been charged $52. $52 + $35 shipping = $87, seven dollars more than the price shown on your site, really not much in cashy money but an extremely annoying mistake and possibly fraud, I'm not sure.

2) The shipping, which claimed to be $35, has according to cost £49. £49 GBP, which is around $97, almost three times the price advertised. $97 + $52 = $149. This is getting expensive.

3) Possibly due to this vastly increased price, a demand from FedEx came through now for VAT on the import, asking for £14.32 in tax and £6.80 "administration fee", £21.12 extra. That's about another forty dollars. $190, give or take, for four books.

I have paid (or, more accurately, my parents have paid and they not unreasonably want reimbursement to the tune of) nearly 200 dollars, over four times the value of the actual books I ordered.

Penny Arcade have a rep for running a good business and being good people, and I have no idea who I should be shouting at over this first; them, for cocking up my order so badly? FedEx, whose fault it could just as well be? The vulture bitches who are throwing taxes on thanks to the mistakes of the first two? Anyone know where to start?

Regarding Spunk.






This, as modelled by the great thkya, is wine-gum Spunk. It's somewhere between what I consider wine gums and jelly beans: a multitude of small, dry and slightly tough chewy fruit-flavoured things of various colours and (apparently) flavours. I don't want to seem anti-Spunk from the get-go, because wine-gum Spunk, between consenting adults in private, is perfectly enjoyable.



This is salt-liquorice Spunk, uniformly black as the Excession. Yes, salty liquorice, purest NaCl wrapped in hellshit. It's foul, it's evil and if it doesn't burn out your tongue and cause blindness and leprosy, you’ll wish it had. Even Jeremy Clarkson, a man who has turned a mouthful of black bile into a way of life, couldn’t handle salt-liquorice Spunk, as we see here:




So, needless to say, over the last few weeks I have had endless fun cajoling, ordering and sometimes just plain tricking classmates and staff into eating my Spunk (it's not a crime if you can get a clear “yes” out of them). The look on someone’s face when you offer them Spunk is nothing, nothing to the look on their face when the taste starts to sink in.

The taste of Spunk. If that's not been made clear yet.

And, of course, it tells you something about a person if they spit or if they swallow your Spunk. Charlie Draper swallowed instantly, ostensibly to get the taste out of his mouth. Mr Clark, proving his manliness the only way he knows, ate it the way you should, not swallowing till the very end. Nearly everyone else I’ve offered it to either flat-out refused or spat it out, commenting on the foul saltiness of it. Nobody in my Computing class will ever, ever forget the taste.

Yes, the taste of my Spunk. What?

I’m still not sure if the commercial sale of salty Spunk is a specifically Danish thing (random fact: they disavow “Danish” pastries, calling them “Viennese”) or if other countries are getting in on it, but no matter how forcefully someone offers you their Spunk, don’t let it get past your lips.

(Note that everything in this post is really, really true, and I dont know what you’re reading into it, you dirty people.)

This is yet another post about tortoises, though also SUBTLY DIFFERENT. This is about our real, alive tortoise, Charlemagne.



Here is he, being fed lettuce by mum.

I have been very worried about him recently. Though generally about as active and enthusiastic as a stubby-legged mobile pie can be, he has of late been unwilling to eat, stomp around or even do anything except crawl under a flowerpot and lie there. This is rather similar to the behaviour of Charlemagne's utterly tiny brother (probably), Ptolemy, during his last days (his short life ended in the care of our neighbours over Christmas, refusing to eat until eventually he just... stopped).
He's lost weight, and seems to move more slowly when he moves at all. Just like Ptolemy, we've been keeping him warm, offering different things to eat, doing everything every source says we should. But, just like with Ptolemy, it doesn't seem to make a blind bit of difference. Every day I try, with varying levels of success, to get him to eat.

The prescribed diet for a Hermann's Tortoise is green leaves - dandelion and companula for preference, but lettuce is also fine - with other miscellaneous planty things. Though variety is encouraged, too much proteiny tomato-like-stuff is apparently very bad for little tortoises and gives them deformed shells. This used to be something of a problem, because he loves tomato and carrot and red pepper (anything red, in fact) and will take them over leaves any time. Nowadays, though, it would be nice to see him eat anything, regardless of its long-term effects.

Today, for once, he went for the red pepper eagerly (nomming on my finger in the process, ow). A cause of celebration on its own, we rolled out the carrot and dandelion to see if he was interested in those as well, but no luck - he would only go for the red pepper. Then, I had a Cunning Plan.

It turns out that the Hermann's Tortoise has two interesting abilities when it comes to eating. One is telling the difference between red things and green things, with a strong preference for red. The other is chomping away at something put in one's mouth, regardless of colour, until it is all swallowed.

By cutting a red pepper into tiny pieces and putting a piece on the end of a bit of cucumber or a folded dandelion leaf, you can trick a tortoise into nomming the whole thing down.

As a direct result of this method: Charlemagne, for the first time in ages, ate a great deal today, and I am now feeling far more hopeful about him and his prospects.

A note for anyone interested in booking tickets from the Royal Shakespeare Company: The process is... well, to call it "byzantine" would be to do the Eastern Roman Empire a great insult. Still would have managed it if a) Mum's credit card wasn't bouncing for some reason, b) they were capable of understanding Danish letters, c) their hotline didn't suck like a fleet of Dysons.

However saddening the lack of hot Tennant on Stewart love will be, there are other attractions this October, including - miniature steam trains! In fact, that's so fun that I think I'm going to go there on Saturday. May also at some point during this holiday: be seeing a local production of Pirates of Penzance, visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum, doing some work.

In other news... parents decided to award me £20 for letter in Metro, so I proceeded to request Penny Arcade books bought with the (frustratingly, now working) credit card. $45 for the books = nothing. Proceed to checkout, select international postage, put money in, and the postage is $35?! Still worth the extra few notes I handed over, but... the fuck?

Random entertaining things:
HAHAHAHAHA (Worksafe. If you don't get it, you're lucky.)

YES. Want one.

OH GOD YES YES YES YES WANT ONE SO VERY BAD.

( Further Tortoises! )
All comments to first tortoise post, if you please.

For anyone I've linked to these out of the blue: UK Webcomix Thing 2008, odd chap wandering round with a sketchbook requesting tortoises? That was me. If you want your name appended. If you don't see y. The scan quality is a bit poor, they all seem to be about the same size - blame meteorakuli's scanner for that. If you drew a tortoise for me but don't see it here, it may be on the second post; if it's STILL not there, shout at me.


Warning: bandwidth-murdering image dump below.

( TORTOISES )

If anyone has any ideas for, you know, organising these... I'm open to suggestions.

I think I might have worked out a reason why my actually interesting posts are light as of late: when I’m doing something interesting, I don’t blog about it because I’m too busy doing something interesting. Quite unforgivable, I know; here are some retrospective posts, which shall have scores of pictures and supplements appended to them as soon as I get home.

Item one – I was recently (well, a fortnight ago) visited by Lene (thkya, who for those who don’t know her and should is a paragon of niceness who hails from fair Copenhagen), as part of her Easter trip through the UK (and surely the high point of it, excepting Torchwood and eofs and... bah), although our initially agreed-on date had to be changed because I had to go to London on a school trip (to see lectures about... Hamlet. Ironic, I know). Lene, already one of the funkiest people I know, raised my estimation of her to “goddess” by bringing Dalek biscuits and a Lego spaceship (two of the five keys to a man’s heart). She also brought the fascinating abomination known as “Spunk”, but this is perhaps a matter for another post... When I can get the entertaining Lego pictures off her, you shall be treated to the never-before-seen-online sight of me frolicking with little plastic things, a smile of pure and untainted joy on my face.
Alas, her visit was over all too soon, but it is likely that I shall be visiting her in Denmark to explore all that is good about Copenhagen some time after the soul-eating exams. Also a chance that she will be visiting our shores this autumn to watch the RSC production of Hamlet, featuring David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.
(Random tangential note: Having been taught to pronounce the name of my cousin Simon’s wife Claudia in the appropriate Argentine fashion, “cloud-ia”, it is now weirdly difficult to say Claudius in the correct “clawed-ius” way.)

Item two -
As you all know from the Space Owl/Golem post I visited Eli, known to ye mortals as meteorakuli, for a short stay in London and my very first UK Webcomix Thing. The cardboard tube creatures were well-received (even the fugly, lacklustre giraffe seemed to give lizgreenfield a tiny, fleeting happiness), and I plan to make a wizard for eruditebaboon and a cylindrical character for housd as soon as he introduces one to Afterstrife.
I pestered virtually every artist (and some writers) in the hall to draw me a tortoise, and ended up halway filling Eli’s sketchbook with chelonia in various styles, which have all been scanned. A Post of Tortoises will follow sometime in the next few days.

Item three – IT IS NOW THE EASTER HOLIDAYS! (Yes, my school’s calendar is monumentally screwed up.) Following this two weeks’ grace comes the final term of sixth form, the beginning of the end.

Why, why, WHY aren't there any sources out there that try to defend Goering's actions in the Battle of Britain? Seriously, the goddamn Holocaust deniers get a look-in, but not people who like fat, overconfident air marshals? Ugh.

Regarding which: My history coursework is finished to a standard that I think will get me about 70% of the marks, with most of tomorrow available to polish off the last 30% (the deadline is 4pm tomorrow, and I mean deadline, as in they hand you over to the Totenkopf division if you miss it). I shall then reward myself by making several cardboard tube creatures (a giraffe for lizgreenfield and possibly an Arm Peewee from Total Annihilation), and a lot of sleep Dawn of War: Dark Crusade.

I just noticed that this blog was one year old two days ago, and in that year I've put out sixty entries - a mere five a month, for you mathematically challenged types. Posting once a day (as I have for the last five days) is sort of interesting, but it's getting harder and harder to put in actual content. I may be reduced to reviewing webcomics. Then again, I could just not bother.

Oh, and a link I shockingly missed out from Friday's entry: Singapore has the coolest approach to nationalist propaganda you can imagine. Go here and click the "Nation Moulders" thumbnail. That is hot to death. I didn't even know you could do that with plasticene!

He thought less and less about his relationship with Clarity, which barely changed – sometimes, he felt, barely existed. There was, of course, the physical aspect (but they had both honestly believed that meant nothing from the beginning; once basic fact gathering, more an endurance test than anything else, these days). After that, the only question that remained was whether she was planning to betray and kill him, which was such a mundane, everyday worry that it barely mattered.

( Read more... )

It wasn't very long ago that when a twelve-year-old female asked an eighteen-year-old male to "come to my house and play with my wii", the general reaction would be EXTREMELY DIFFERENT to that of today. How things change, eh?

A bit of a linkdumpy entry today, a few things I find excessively awesome.

Some eyecandy for the forthcoming Watchmen movie came out pretty recently. Here are my thoughts, along with a post by the unfailingly opinionated Mr McAlpin which features the pics themselves.

QF fuckin' T. Nail on the head with the head of the hammer. Randomly digging through other people's tags can be weirdly rewarding, you know?

I 1 HIT KO U IRL. It's creepy how appropriate stupid Scape pk slang is to actual warfare, sometimes.

Doing an essay that requires actual research has taught me a lot about what a sublimely untrusting, suspicious, downright petty thing history is sometimes. Reduced to its fundamentals:
"... and Hurricanes of 11 Group accounted for 8 Me 109s on this day"
"SOURCE!?"
"This old dude I asked who was THERE and actually shot down two of them."
"OVERCLAIMING OF KILLS ENDEMIC TO RAF COMBAT REPORTS! HUMAN MIND IS FALLIBLE! YOU SHOULD HAVE CROSS-REFERENCED LUFTWAFFE CASUALTY FIGURES ON THE DAY AND CHECKED UP ON LOCAL EYEWITNESSES AND RADAR RECORDINGS! MAYBE YOUR SOURCE WAS A LIAR AND A PAEDOPH-"
"f u"
"no u"

So today, as with all Thursday Bs, I traipsed down to school for Military History club, the only thing that can draw me to that benighted building of a Thursday B, but more than enough in itself. The tragedy of Military History club is that despite being run by the unfailingly engaging Mr Dougall, despite having his entire library of conflict-related books, dvds, board games, computer games and a small wall of home-made games from previous years, its target audience neglect it and I frequently end up almost alone. Today, however, this was ideal, as it meant I got an hour picking Mr D's brain about my coursework.

I am very proud of my coursework as it stands, and will be prouder when it is actually complete. I have been able to incorporate little footnotes like 3 It should also be noted that the combined Allied air strength at Normandy was approximately 12,000 aircraft, not counting gliders, against some 300 Luftwaffe fighters. (Keegan, John. The Second World War, Viking Press, 1990), which in context are, I assure you, hilarious.

Mr Dougall tends to go on about things a lot. When he's telling me that I should be idealistic about things, as in Politics last year, it was something less than fun. Now, when he's talking about the effectiveness of the Stuka, the capabilities of Luftwaffe Blitzkrieg-optimised fast medium bombers (and hence their drawbacks as the strategic bombing force that was needed), the strengths and weaknesses Leigh-Mallory's big wings, it's mesmerising.

During Mr D's extended lecture, Dr Massey poked his head round the door and gave me a grin and a "Nice results!". "What results?" I asked, all agog, and he, shocked, reminded me today was the day my AS retake marks (the ones I took just after India) had come through. So it was with some trepidation I stood at the school gates at 2:30, clutching a white envelope. The contents justified celebrating with a fat kofta.

The short of it (a summary in a different place to the last entry! how devious!) is MY RETAKE MARKS CAME BACK, THEY WERE BOTH AS, I WIN LIFE.

Watched all of Oban Star-Racers in two days flat. The short review: A mad Frenchman's glorified Podracer fanfic, featuring extremely nice (stylised - obviously, they've got no noses) animation, worth time and possibly money (Veoh is your friend, though.)
The long review: Oban is an independent animated series, the result of nine years of hard work and the brainchild, pet project and [nurture metaphor #76 not found] of Savin Yeatman-Eiffel (yes, descendant of the Eiffel). The show seamlessly and beautifully blends French and Japanese animation styles, decent voice talent and a convincing attempt at plot in a series which is, completely unashamedly, a kids' show about whizzy things with big engines and lasers.
It also has engaging and humorous peripheral characters (a weird catlike alien who controls her ship with a DDR pad - the ship has a big screen on the front which displays cat-like anime emoticons depending on her mood, and fires swarms of missiles tipped with same; a big grumpy Space Viking With A Heart Of Gold who gets a wonderfully tragic ending; a pair of completely gratuitous Vampire Lesbians on knobby jetbikes that are actually kind of interesting). The first thirteen-episode cycle alone contains the sort of shipper possibilities that makes me amazed there aren't actual physical wars fought between hordes of rabid, frothing Rick x Molly and Jordan x Molly fangirls.
Oban closes its 24-episode narrative with an enjoyably bittersweet coda, one which leaves the possibility of a sequel without being a dick about it. Although there’s not that much “new” in this series (Paradice a notable exception - I'm willing to bet nobody saw that coming), the familiar tropes and lines and settings are played well and never become trite.

Of course, to you lot the only purpose this post serves is an overly long explanation for Humbug-Head (Don Wei) in my latest icon, but I hope it has served with distinction.

My History coursework is preying on my dreams. The preparations and plans supposedly began a year ago, but, like the best laid of mice and men, they didn't survive contact with the enemy. The deadline is Monday. I'll make it. Just.

My mission, which I chose and therefore somewhat obliged myself to accept is:
to, in three thousand words (same as the English), counting quotes but not footnotes and appendices, pick a historical issue (in this case, the Battle of Britain) and argue the toss over trivia relating to it (in this case, how far was the outcome the result of flawed German strategy and tactics?).

Three thousand words! I could toss out twenty thousand on that, without the historical references and argument that I need to get more than five marks out of ninety... which are, quite coincidentally, the things I'm having real trouble with. On which topic, guess where today's entry title comes from? Winner gets a cardboard tube creature of their own choosing.

And on the topic of dreams, my sleep cycle is messed up. Pre-return-of-internet, I had a healthy routine that afforded me time for school, food, gaming, procrastination, eventual work and eight hours of kip each day. With internet, a few late-night binges sent me into a sleep cycle of between four and six hours' worth, with no ill effects beside a nagging feeling of "why aren't there any ill effects? what sleep-deprived horror will manifest itself soon, and when?". Last night, I put everything down and had my sleepybyes at eleven, assuring eight hours of healthy sleep... with the result that I woke up feeling as though my head was crammed up an elephant's arse, completely unwilling to even sit up, let alone put on my cleanest dirty shirt and stumble down the stairs to meet the day. Weird.

I’ve broken down what would have been a much larger post into several little ones, which will be posted as the week continues. I get the feeling somehow that people get intimidated (I know I do) by a vast, multiple-issue-spanning wall of TL;DR. This way I'm more likely to get the comments and human opinion which drive me and fuel my existence! Huzzah.

Single-handedly putting together the Mortal Engines page on TV Tropes has reminded me of an important fact: I love Philip Reeve so very, very much. (The article is nowhere near finished, point out any glaring errors you see.)

Visited Xavier (chiyachan) in Swindon over half term! A good time was had by all, fun chiefly consisting of staying up late watching Red Dwarf, playing Timesplitters 2 and sexually harassing Xav's friend Mark. Xav isn't just an incredibly nice person to meet, know and mooch bandwidth off, he's also a media fiend with an anime collection measured in terabytes... so he graced me with the complete Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu and Myself; Yourself, as well as a lot of manga. (In return for this and postage of Azumanga when he downloads it, I bought him a kebab and he made a copy of Dawn of War; our relationship is not entirely one-way, it just seems like that at a glance and more like that upon close inspection.)

Myself; Yourself is... interesting. At a glance, it's an anime based off a visual novel, involving a lead male and a selection of cute (school)girls filling the various stereotypes: meganeko, TallDarkAndBishoujo, lolita... doesn't look terribly promising, unless you're a fan of that sort of thing (Xav is; I'm not.) However! Since all the interesting characters are depressive, suicidal, vindictive, in love with someone they can never have or some combination, I really like it. It also has Jantar Mantar sundials, which to the uninitiated (read: everybody) look like "a purposeless flight of steps. What is wrong with you?". I, the artist and both of Jaipur's otaku may be the only people in the world who appreciate them for what they are.

The male lead constantly wears a watch to cover the scar of a botched suicide attempt and has a fear of knives. The female lead (the TDAB) broke her leg jumping from a first floor window out of a burning building. The building was on fire because her supposed father had just burned himself and her mother alive, because said mother had been unfaithful to him for AGES with said female lead's violin teacher... the violin teacher turns out to have been the female lead's biological father. The teacher dies of cancer a little before the fire, of course. Let's not get started on the twincest, the eleven-year-old falling in love with the male . Watchable stuff.... the creepiest moment so far is when the granny tries to sacrifice Shuri to the trees in order to bring her dead granddaughter back. I knew the twist about Shuri and Asami in advance, but it's really well set up. It would come out of nowhere if I didn't already know it.

Yeah. My kind of thing, really.

English coursework done and dusted; shaved the bastard down to exactly 3,000 words, to discover that they would have let me get away with 3,200. Dammit. I also put in a cover picture, necessary to explain the structure of the novel. I hope that doesn't take me to 4,000...

Last night I was literally MSNing in the pale moonlight. IMing underneath the genuine open fucking sky. Chatting by midnight to sarisia , hugh_mannity  and thkya . Yes, out in the goddamn garden. In February.

The explanation? The network I had been leeching off like a dirty... well, leech has (for whatever reason) mostly disappeared up its own fundament some days ago and my attempts to get a stable connection with anything have gone from the desperate to the ridiculous. It's still possible for a desperate fella to, in this neighbourhood, get delicious free bandwidth. But not within his own walls.
CUT TO house, exterior, midnight: a gibbous moon set in an almost cloudless sky casts a silvery light on the proceedings. It is dry, dark and so very fucking cold. Our Protagonist, a mid-tall dark chap who is, if not a stranger, at least very strange, makes his way to the wooden table, sets down his laptop and, shivering, begins his illegal, immoral and above all necessary hunt for wireless.

So, I had three frankly awesome conversations with three of the finest pals one can know through the magic of electrons, got the daily dose of Internet that stops me going insane and crumbling to ashes, and did probably the geekiest thing I have done in my entire life, up to and including correcting Games Workshop staff on minor bits of fluff.

AND TODAY THE MOTHERFUCKING LIVEBOX DECIDES TO ACTUALLY WORK AGAIN. So now i have unlimited internet, in the comfort of my own bed. Irony, irony, irony, irony, irony, irony, ouch. (Oh, it's coincidentally coincided with Jagex's SECOND giant "fuck you" to pvp, so there's no chance whatsoever of me getting re-addicted to Runescape. Every frosty cloud has a silver lining.

Myself and meteorakuli shall on the 22nd of March be proceeding to the UK Webcomix Thing, to view (in a controlled environment) such fascinating e-comic personalities as James Turner, John Allison and Liz Greenfield. At the Bristol comic convention I presented the explosively talented Mr Turner with a stick of space celery.

I have produced for Messrs. Turner and Allison cardboard-and-poster-paint creations that I believe accurately reflect The Golem and Space Owl, before his ascendancy to the premiership of Wales (don't ask.) The Golem is actually the second Golem, the first having been lost somewhere.

( Pictures Within )

Scene-setting for my own amusement, comments welcomed.

( The False Coast )

1) WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS?
2) Rest in peace, TS unit. May you never be forgotten.
3) ( By fairly popular request: Letters between Nutters )

O hai, Feb 14th. I don't know who annoys me more: the smugly fluffy couples (though there are few enough of them), the grumpy bastards who go "OMG SINGLES AWARENESS DAY" and complain about how shit their life is, or the ones who make a giant fuss about how it's nothing but a load of commercial evilness forced upon us by the Big Business Demon. It's a Marmite holiday; they love it, they hate it, nobody seems to be able to just not care (except the people who go on and on about how it means nothing... yeah, this post is coming perilous close to putting me in that category. It's metapathy!)

But folks, don't lose sight of the enemy here. Valentines' Day is not some entity, some creature that deserves to be hated. It is a concept, an idea, created and perpetuated by people. Hate people. People are the enemy.


Moving on...

Handed in another draft of my Iain Banks coursework (The Bridge, a novel almost as fun to read as it is easy to deconstruct for marks. I wanted to do Use of Weapons, but this is fricking paydirt. There's so much symbolism and so many themes in this it's tricky to fit them all in, rather than tricky to expand one into a proper essay, as I had to with The Great Gatsby, the frankly appalling glorified anecdote of the 20s. Use of Weapons wasn't literary enough (being technically science fiction, it was excluded, thanks to the ridiculous elitism that the whole English department and possibly all English departments depend on perpetuating), but I'm glad I had to do The Bridge instead; it's easier to write about. UoW has about five plot threads all going in completely different directions, in space, making The Bridge's mere three-thread surreal comatose-bildungsroman seem simple.

On the topic of Banks, I picked up his latest, Matter, in Borders today. This book is a building block worthy of Paolini himself, almost six hundred pages thick and massing five long tons. It has its own aura, a sort of minor L-field that occasionally flickers with threads of science fiction awesome. And I get to see The Man Himself on the 23rd in the city.

Passed an extract of my story to Mrs Maddock along with a previous draft of the coursework last week; she gave it back today, scrawled with small comments like "amusingly unpleasant" and "?!", which was exactly what I was aiming for. If anyone wants to read an exchange of mail between two characters in my story (a cheerfully, violently depraved psychopath and a nihilistic savant), drop me a comment or tell me on IM.

(yes, home internet still fucked...)

In India, everything worked near-perfectly. Despite the fact that most of the technology being used was of the "washing machine motor strapped to bicycle" technological level, the trishaws carried us reliably if not comfortably (even when the roads weren't actually there), the computers chugged and bubbled and gave off clouds of soot but were still capable of connecting to the internet, the fans at least went around.

It should come as little surprise that as soon as we touched Western technology everything turned to crap. The plane took off two hours late (the pilot had trouble at immigration, apparently...) This testament to the reliability of advanced modern transportation got a supplement upon landing: we discovered that we had missed the 8:15 coach (which we had booked seats on), the 9:15 coach was cancelled, the 10:15 coach was fully booked and the 11:15 coach didn't exist.

Getting on the coach to Street, jumping off at Bath and taking a taxi to Bristol, we finally returned to a freezing cold home, and those wonderful old British delicacies of frankfurters, kofte kebabs and french fries. It's been a couple of weeks since I've managed to get online now, because (in case the inactivity didn't tip you off) my home internet is once again fubared and the useless, incompetent swine at Wanadoo have no clue how to fix it.

*rage!*

The autorickshaws in Bikaner are generally the same round type I remembered from Sri Lanka, though a more unified black and yellow colour scheme which appears to be required by law. In Udaipur, and almost everywhere else since, slightly smaller, rounder trishaws with the light mounted on the wheel rather than the body and a paler yellow front are more popular. The ones in Chittor are similar, but unique to that burg have a weird angled roof, open at the back with two extra seats taking advantage of the fact. The larger, also packed-to-the-gunwales trishaw minibuses (or Tempos) aren’t popular in Bikaner or Chittor, but in Bundi, the lange-snoot wooden-framed ones which I for some reason really like are popular, whereas in Udaipur off-cream flatfaced ones with knurled silver railings are more in vogue. Jodhpur and Jaipur have large quantities of the newer flatfaces, all glaring yellow and glossy black. The drivers, in every city, are uniformly insane.

Let’s examine my experience in Rajasthan thus far in terms of the weapons. I’ve visited and examined at length the armouries of every fort, and every armoury of fabulous four-barreled snaphaunce pistols, camel guns, elephant guns, captured WW1 German machine guns, mountain guns, great cannon, a huge bombard stolen from China (fuck knows how), Afghan jezails, muskets, katars, throwing knives, recurve bows, weird arrowheads, battle-axes, war hammers, bladed and spiked maces, spears, lances, straight swords, curved swords, serrated swords, pata sword-gauntlets, sword bayonets, spike bayonets, tusk bayonets, guns which fire arrows. The Bikaner armoury was the best, the Udaipur palace decent, Meherangarh frankly disappointing past the Sword of Akbar (but it had a battery of the most excellent cannon, from what was basically a lead pipe on wheels to a nice WW2-vintage QF 105mm). Never thought I’d see the day, but I’m weaponned out.

That’s just it: I’ve seen everything there is to see. I’ve seen it; been there, done that, had the T-shirt thrust in my face by eager red-toothed vendors. That which would make me want to clamber around and giggle with polite insanity now just raises a smile, and sometimes a camera. That applies to just about everything now: the food, the informal-to-the-point-of-anarchy approach to transport, the birds, the cows and pigs wandering through the streets, the scenery, the filth, the chaos, the pollution, the litter, the poverty. Even the giant-arse forts: once you’ve seen Kumbhalgarh, no other castle or fortification in the world can possibly hold your interest (except Taragarh, because it’s like a rather smaller Kumbhalgarh with the crumbling, overgrown redolent-with-the-violence-of-ages feeling which I love – which is basically the only thing there is to love, once you’ve seen Kumbhal - about British castles. There are also insane amounts of monkeys, who threw their shit at me). Besides Taragarh, possibly the Great Wall of China.

The individual cities had their high points. Udaipur, basically the only part of the state where water is in evidence, had amazing palaces on the lake, but I was so horribly sick through Udaipur (over about twenty hours, water leaving body by any means available: not fun. Maybe it just wanted to be with the other water in the lake rather than have to stay around in this kid who eats too much salt) that I didn’t get to enjoy them past a half-hearted pedal-boat ride (two kingfishers looked at me evilly and I saw a dead pigeon floating around the jetty). Bikaner didn’t have much exceptional going for it, but it was my first city and so was new and vivid and exciting. Chittorgarh had possibly the worst defence history of any fort (three times it was besieged by a sizeable army, three times the Rajputs inside decided it was hopeless, three times the women and children all jumped on a giant fire while the men put on saffron robes and sallied out to certain death) Jodhpur’s gimmick was that it – the city- was blue. (I shit you not.)

So I’ve had my camel rides, I’ve had hordes of rats crawl over my feet, I’ve sipped opium from a village elder’s palm in a Vishnoi hut. (No, I haven’t the least desire to try it again: it tasted foul and I felt nothing.) I’ve sat on the Jaivana (biggest wheeled cannon in the world), followed an ant road a hundred and fifty metres, been in the Jaipur “observatory” which has several dozen amazing ways to tell the time from the sun, all made of stone and some thirty metres high. The finest miniature painter in the world (so he and the Guinness Book of Records claim) gave me his paint set as a present, and I bought avidbeader some home-made beads from an upmarket craft shop that is still proud of Clinton visiting it in ’99 (which I didn’t care about, but it was still interesting as a place: I didn’t even know you could actually mould clay like that). Now India has ceased to surprise and is beginning to chafe. I’m done and I want to go home. It’s shocking how jaded you get in a little over two weeks. Travel is narrowing the mind amazingly.

In two days I’m seeing the Taj Mahal, and two days after that touching back down at Heathrow to a History retake and a fixed laptop and a set of watercolours and a British January. Sacks of Beaver and Steve, Swizzels Matlow and Corb Lund merch should be waiting on my doorstep. And apart from the retake, and the weather, and the English coursework I should have done three weeks ago, I actually can’t wait.

Also: Happy 2008, folks.

Tomorrow: Get on car. Then get off car and get on coach. Get off coach and get onto London Underground. Get off Underground. Wait. Get on plane. Get off plane. Be in Rajasthan.

There may be some travelling involved at some point in the above.

25th December: Nothing. Pointedly.

5th January: Arrive back in cold, wet and dismal Blighty. Look all about. Despair.

12th January: History Retakes.

":@"

...and the big business Satan and cops who'd love to kill you if they had half a chance.


A little list of crap I need to get for me/for others/for consumermas pre I-day (catching the jet to Rajasthan, 16th December):

- copies of Beaver and Steve books 1 and 2 for every last person who'd want one (mini-James, Idict, Ned, cousins (Steph/Anna & Nathan & mini-Anna/Owen?). However, should wait a little while before ordering so that the Explosively Talented Mr Turner can get over the backlog of orders, as he has apparently been overwhelmed.
- a new hoodie, the excuses not to have worn about as thin as the current one
- another (!) copy of The Bridge.
- HORSE SOLDIER, HORSE SOLDIER. And maybe "Modern Pain", "Unforgiving Mistress" and "Five Dollar Bill" if my Christmas credit stretches that far. My love for Corb is getting from the "appreciative" to the "clinically obsessive".

Being assistant leader of Team Demolition is kind of fun, except that dick Fin keeps trying to undermine me, cause he's sore I got promoted ahead of him. (He still acts like he runs the place. It's not true: he runs two things, Jack and shit, and Jack left TD because there weren't enough single-combat events. WOO INJOKES) Fin can suck it, anyway; I got chosen, he didn't, and he couldn't organise a deck of cards anyway. I hope he gets some kind of comeuppance for bsing half a dozen people on the pk trip last night, but he seems to be one of those above-and-beyond-the-law types. Serves me right for being in a clan run by humans rather than immortal killing machines, but my combat isn't high enough and my standards ain't low enough for Divine Forces.

Is it weird that the real-life person I talk to most right now is the girl who played the waitress in the Edwards' house play who occasionally walks to school with me? (Don't be fucking sick, she's like twelve.) I wasn't expecting sixth form to truly bugger up all my friendships, but it seems it has. I'm on as good terms as ever with James Hook and Idict and Geo, but I only see them at registration and SPD, and they do NOTHING then but play Mao and bridge and poker. Tom L is back in school having recovered from a spontaneously collapsed lung but I can relate to him about as well as an ant can relate to a supercomputer. And he's the goddamn supercomputer.

On the topic of computers, my laptop has been putting me through one of them old "emotional rollercoaster" majiggers (an idiotic phrase which I found had some basis in fact the other day). It died, though under warranty, and the PC world staff who could get all the data off it for free informed me that the HDD was thoroughly buggered and I'd lost everything (a year or so of notes, three years of novel, which had only been backed up on my old laptop... which is now somewhat fossilized) Got him a bottle of bubbly now I've remembered my PIN (it's good to be solvent again), but I think my firstborn would have been more appropriate.

The weather just outside is beautiful. There's a pale yellow-white sun on the horizon, and gentle rain falling slowly all across the city, lit a glittering gold-white that obscures the faraway hills but only adds to the nearby trees and buildings.

I'm also seriously considering taking the beneath rant, editing it for swearing, submitting it to The Wadey and seeing if I can get to read it out for assembly. It'd be awesome to have an assembly OTHER than "help the wretched", and doubly awesome to be the actual voice of sedition "reason".

I developed and articulated to a couple of lucky people my objections to the site freerice.org, the current fad among those who like to improve their vocabulary for a good cause. I think improving vocabulary is a good cause. Free rice? Isn't.

Giving free stuff doesn't work. It's symbolic of everything I hate about charity: it's well-meaning, it's morally wonderful, everyone thinks you should do it, it's short-sighted and for every problem it solves, every empty-eyed visage of buboed poverty it removes, two more pop hydra-like from the stump.

Giving can't hurt? Yes, it can. In the capitalist society we triumph in, giving free stuff messes everything up. Example time! What would happen if, in some Western society, everyone was given something they thought they needed? A car, say. Not necessarily a flashy one, not necessarily anything more than a battered hatchback with windows that don't toll down all the way. But free, functional, one for everyone. Boom. What remnants of the manufacturing industry still cling to Western soil, straight down the drain. Unemployment. Mass unemployment, when the people whose lives depend on associating cars with sex and the wilderness for the TV-watching consumer find the TV-watching consumer doesn't give a fuck. Economic repercussions as the countries that actually do the majority of the work find that instead of getting paid pittances, they're not getting paid at all. Maybe famine and civil war in some of them. The plebs on the street are happy - they've got their hatchback. The ones that can afford a Roller are happy, because they can still lord it over the plebs on the street. Everyone else is getting fucked. In the eye.

Instead of cars, try rice. Instead of Britain or America or France, try... well, this site isn't even saying where the rice goes. Take clothes and Zimbabwe, then. The Zimbabwe textile industry no longer exists. Thousands upon thousands of people are now looking for jobs, their skills now useless, their way of life obliterated. Their livelihood has been taken away by well-meaning Westerners who decide to send their second-hands to a world of waste and woe, rather than the actual landfill. You get the point?

But this is less than half the story. (It's not even a quarter of the story - when every kid in Zimbabwe is wearing Mickey fucking Mouse on his T-shirt and a hat with "NY" on it, Zimbabwe isn't even Zimbabwe any more. But that's for another rant.)What happens when the people decide it's too much to drive their Hummers to the do-gooder bin, and just shove them in the rubbish instead? The people charities depend on, the Western populace, are fickle. Most people who give to charity don't give a damn a week later. They do it for a little "good deed of the day", +5 Karma (or however the fuck karma works), a step towards Heaven, a little extra in their heart when it's weighed against the golden feather, the feeling that they've done the right thing. They'll look at One-Legged Ahmed in the HARSH BLACK AND WHITE with the Judi Dench voiceover and cry, and give a fiver, and feel good about it. They'll toss a copper in the bucket for a fake "bless you" and walk on with a warm & fluffy feeling. They care at point of contact, and that's all charity needs. Then they forget One-Legged Ahmed and they forget the million and one babies with AIDS and they get on with their lives.

I'm getting sidetracked. What happens when they DON'T care any more? When a footballer has a baby or a crackpot blows up a bus, interest moves on and charity stops selling. The desperation of the charities (the biggest ones, the ones that can afford to spray their sentimental shit across billboards and screens) is obvious, from the ever more "hard-hitting" adverts of maggot-ridden children with BIG SAD EYES clutching Kalashnikovs or dancing around bubbly wells. Sooner or later, even that won't work any more. The people who care for those five minutes stop caring altogether. The people who do it as a curiosity decide their vocabulary is good enough. The handouts will stop.

And then the rice will stop coming in and the clothes will go to landfill, and there won't be an