While The Descent did nothing to improve the thriller/horror genre’s standing in my books, I did find myself being somewhat affected by The Reader (and not because Kate Winslet is naked in half of her on-screen appearances). There’s a lot of tension as Michael Berg (played by David Kross) grapples with his conscience as to whether he should keep silent and see his unrequited love go to jail, or speak up against her wishes and shame her in front of the court (and presumably, country). While Jenny was weeping by the end of the movie, the whole time I was going “is it really worth being sentenced to prison for life, just to hide the fact that you can’t read and write?” while secretly choking back a tear.

This probably reveals just how much of a geek I am, which is to say completely out of touch with my emotions (feelings that can’t be expressed with an emoticon don’t exist :-P) – but maybe like the cliché about the speck of grit being the source of great beauty, flaws are necessary for the telling of great stories, and it’s only by allowing yourself to ignore these flaws that one can connect emotionally. I blame my inability to appreciate this on being exposed to too much awesome.

So where does that leave The Descent? The oyster must’ve gotten a mouthful of dirt, choked and died.

For one thing, I’m immensely proud of the fact that I wrote the poem completely unaided. It was entirely conceived, crafted and completed using only my brain. No computer, no dictionaries (rhyming or normal), no thesaurus – just me hacking away at the words using pen and paper.

I forget where the title and topic came from. I just remember that I heard or read the words “danse macabre” somewhere, and it sounded interesting. The rest sprang from my current, dark muse.

Here is the first draft of the poem. It starts out exactly the same way, but you’ll notice that it started off in a very different direction:

And here’s the last draft – I made some minor changes while typing it into the computer:

All up I had about 11 pages of drafts, working notes, scribbles. I must admit though, my handwriting has become extremely lazy as a consequence of doing almost all of my writing on computers, and often resembles a backwards form of Arabic more than English!

It’s hard to say whether my choice to forego technology affected the outcome. I feel that it’s about the same – in terms of how long it took to get from conception to completion, and also how my brain is almost as reliable as a dictionary in providing the words that I’m looking for (maybe I’m biased towards using words that I know than the ones that I don’t).

How would you rate Macabre compared to my other works?

There’s no point in crying and no use in trying,
Your life’s endeavours will fail.
Whatever may be, in the end you will see,
That I will always prevail.

Which Tom, Dick or Harry will you run off and marry?
‘Til death do you part – what a lark!
In sickness or health, in poverty or wealth,
My role I’ll most faithfully hark.

And what of a job, or which bank will you rob,
To fund your miserable life?
P’rhaps dig your high-heels in and touch the glass ceiling,
Or be kept as a mother and wife.

You cannot decline the ravages of time,
The clock is also my slave.
With the years at your tail like the hare not the snail,
You’ll rot as you race to the grave.

So will you heed? Come ride my black steed,
Stop hiding behind a façade.
In the end young or old, the meek and the bold,
Will all dance the Danse Macabre.

There is a flood of information out there, and part of our lives involves wading through and picking out the bits that are relevant to us. We’ve essentially reverted back to a hunter/gatherer species, except with abstract needs such as information and entertainment instead of the basic needs of food and shelter.

The Internet is one such morass of information, and Google purportedly came along to help us sift through it to find what we want. Hooray! we think, under the delusion that this would slowly push back the ever-increasing encroachment of advertising into our lives. Oh how wrong we were… Google is now probably the world’s largest advertising company. It’s entire revenue model is based on the selling of ads, and the total volume of ads that we now see on a daily basis has increased, not decreased.

Will we ever arrive at the stage where we can be rid of advertising? Not if Google has anything to do with it. Their overarching mission is to dominate platforms where they can flog a product, or if that’s not possible, use it to increase the leverage of their other products that can (usually Search). The company  rarely innovates or invents, and simply refines and improves what already exists: Yahoo, Altavista and many other search engines existed before Google, Cloud-based applications were available long before Google Apps, and surely nobody is deluded enough to think that mobile telephones didn’t exist before the Nexus One (iPhone, anyone?)

That’s not to say what they do is without merit, but look at their business strategy: identify a technological category which could be monetised by advertising, assimilate it into the Google family, crush the opposition, and move on. It might seem benevolent for them to offer something that previously cost money for free, but in doing so they’re making the true costs opaque. Users of Google AdWords simply trust that the cost of bidding on a keyword is driven by “market forces” but how do we know that Google isn’t taking a bigger cut than they deserve?

Even more scary is their recent foray into the political realm, provoking China over the issue of censorship. Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on in regards to the Great Firewall, Google’s actions should be troubling: they are leveraging moral issues for financial gain, turning their corporate mantra of “don’t be evil” into a mission statement.

With its superpowers, will Google don a metaphoric cape and start fighting against what it perceives to be “evil” – i.e. countries, religions and political systems that stand in the way of its financial gain?

This recent weekend though, I sat in front of the TV for a lot longer than I can remember doing for ages, watching both the men’s and women’s finals of the Australian Open. The match between Serena Williams and Justine Henin, despite being Henin’s big comeback after having a child, was largely uninspiring. Andy Murray however, put up a great fight in the 3rd set against Roger Federer, making for some truly riveting moments. While still not back to level of the glory days of Edberg, Agassi, et al, men’s tennis hasn’t been this good for a long time – thank God that the era of the ridiculous serving machines and baseline bashers is over (women’s tennis is still there though, no thanks to the Williams sisters).

Getting to the point, I experienced an epiphany while watching a sport that I used to enjoy. I found myself getting bored (Jenny quit watching as soon as Federer started winning). My mind started wandering during the longer rallies, and I was itching to go Google something in between every point (15-0: the recipe for green onion pancakes! 30-0: did anybody respond to my Facebook status? 30-15: am I missing out on a deal at OzBargain? etc.)

Non-existent attention span aside, my point is that the Internet has ruined me for the mundane. A daily dose of awesome, served up fresh to my browser via RSS at my every beck and call, has skewed my sense of the ordinary towards the extremes of FTW and Epic Fail. Think about it the next time you Twitter or update your Facebook status: are you self-censoring by only posting things that meet some kind of criteria of what you feel is worth your friends’ time? Against this tide of vanity, how can you not start to feel that your own life is inadequate?

I realised that this affects my writing too. I couldn’t marr my blog with any old crazy thought that graced my mind – each post has to inspire, demonstrate my clearly superior intellect, and impart knowledge that transcends mortal understanding. Likewise my poetry was for naught if it didn’t tear at the very foundations of your soul… you get the idea.

I resolve in 2010 to be more mediocre. Next time you see a boring blog post or status from me, you’ll know that I’m doing it for you.

—-

btw, I still haven’t found a good recipe for Green Onion Pancakes yet. Do share…

Reflecting upon the stats from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, it seems that the thing I do best is choosing and tagging images. My blogs rank consistently high in image-related searches, and visits are almost entirely from people looking for various pictures. If image clicks paid like pay-per-click ads, I’d probably be turning a buck from my efforts.

Notable (blogging) achievements from last year include the redesign, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m greatly indebted to my friend Jan for the logo execution – I’ll get around to putting it on a t-shirt one day, mate – as well as Rodrigo Galindez for the theme, and also for popping by to leave a comment. I’m very happy with the result, and glad to have moved on from the dull grey/black theme that I was previously using.

One other thing that I’m proud is my post rate. If blog posts were heartbeats then you could say that my blogs were barely alive in 2009. Hopefully this year I’ll be able to turn that into a pulse. A fitting analogy, since Jenny always encourages me to post more from my heart than from my mind. Har har.

At any rate (ah! I crack myself up), I hope you’ve been enjoying my various ramblings and look forward to more, because the words, they are a-flowing :-)

• Join the Megatron Club ($10 annual fee)
• Apply for a P638 gun collector’s license from the NSW Police Firearms registry
• Apply for a B709 import permit from the same

I didn’t know about the B709, so when I got back from Hong Kong customs confiscated it while I organised the necessary paperwork. Annoyingly, they had scant regard for it being a collector’s item – they plastered the box with sticky tape and ripped it off roughly, and manhandled the box, leaving a few dinged edges and dented corners. Oh well, I wasn’t collecting the Masterpiece series MISB anyway.

Here are a few choice pictures, with the rest over at Flickr (by the way, I do this because I have a bandwidth limit on my hosting plan and I don’t want it to be used up hosting [often very large] pictures):

In gun mode

Standing pose

Face off between Optimus and Megatron

Dunno whether it was just being away from home, and all the stress that is here, or the hardcore retail therapy and excellent food, or the safety of being “parented” by my awesome mum and dad while we were there, but Jenny’s blues also took a holiday.

We also went on a tour of Seoul, but joined a really crappy tour, so I’d say that I’ve experienced Korea only very barely. The other Honkies on the tour decided that they were more interested in shopping, so at every non-shopping destination we arrived at, they’d take the obligatory photo and get straight back on the bus, leaving us to always be the stragglers. The “Korean” tour guide was also an idiot, constantly taking pot-shots at Jenny being an ex-pat despite the fact that she herself was from Hong Kong and had only lived in Seoul for 6 years, making outrageous claims about how she was more Korean than my wife. Grr… I’ll stop there before I get even more angry. Suffice to say, she was full of bull, and spent more time talking about herself than the country.

We did manage to get some time away from the tour to visit Jenny’s relatives, and they cooked us up a super Korean feast! Beat the heck out of the crappy food we were getting from the stupid tourist restaurants that the tour took us to.

Back in Hong Kong, we did some more last minute shopping, and finally managed to get across to the Hong Kong side, having only explored Kowloon up to that point! 2 weeks definitely wasn’t enough, and like how I’d dearly love to revisit Japan, Jenny now wants to make Hong Kong her home away from home!

A few pics below. More over at Flickr.

If you have ever experienced Clinical Depression yourself (not just feeling depressed, however bad), or known somebody close to you who has suffered from it, you will know that even if I were to try to explain, it would not make any sense. It would leave you feeling frustrated and wanting to help, but you can’t – the mind of a person suffering from Depression is not rational. Rest assured that she is currently getting professional help.

I thank you to pray for us and keep her in your thoughts as she heals, and allow our (her) story to be revealed in the fullness of time.

Here is the poem I wrote. It is partly a description of what I’m seeing, and partly my way of trying to understand what’s happening to my wife. It’s not a happy subject and does not have a happy ending, so please bear that in mind (especially if you’re suffering from depression…)

—-

What must it be like to live
When your purpose is to die slowly
To give life to light.

The agony as your wick is burned
And your body is consumed by fire
Until nothing is left.

To keep on living in pain
Hurting those closest to you
Seeing them suffer.

Affected by the merest breeze
Flame wavers but fights to stay alive
For what reason?

But if you want to end it
You extinguish yourself
And create darkness.

Each day they post a word to Twitter, and it’s up to contestants to use that word in a Tweet. Points are awarded based on the number of retweets and votes that your tweet receives, and the winner is the tweeter with the highest score at the end of the day.

I received the award for “tautology”, with the tweet: “I adjure the cacaphony of #artwiculate mavens, in my mellifluous voice, to consider my previous assertion that sempiturnal is a tautology“. (Adjure, cacaphony, maven, mellifluous and sempiturnal were the previous days’ words, so I was basically being a smartass.)

It’s a nice little combination of Social Media, vocabulary building and gaming. Check it out: http://www.artwiculate.com.