Truly the most terrifying thing about the increasingly irrelevant rise of China, is the thought that Yao Ming will keep getting voted an All Star Starter when really he is at best an average center. Yao scored 2 points and grabbed 3 boards in 12 minutes of play whilst racking up 2 personal fouls. In 11 minutes of play Shaq scored 17 points, grabbed 5 boards and dished out 3 assists for good measure. And Shaq is approximately 1 million years old, I was in grade 4 of primary school for his rookie season.
Thank god the 20,000,000 Australian's don't band together and vote Andrew Bogut a starting center.
I have never been raped, have never (to my knowledge) raped someone and never known anyone who was a rapist. So from the outset, let me say I understand the poorness of my unfortunate choice of analogy...
But the 800m race is a lot like being raped. Years after the last time I competed in it, it still haunts me. Even when you are 'married' to the event, it is certainly still capable of raping you.
The year was 2001, at the house athletics day meet we were all bussed to a professional like athletics track where I owned the 1500, 800, 400 and 4 x 200 relay.
So under the right circumstances the 800m can be enjoyable, when you are doing it with someone you trust and can maintain a feeling of control. But then you are married to it, beyond the honeymoon phase and suddenly it demands your efforts when you just aren't feeling up to it.
You see inconcievable though it may be to some, many of the top sprinters of the world don't even breath during the 100m sprint. There is enough oxygen in their intial takeoff for their muscles to survive and power them through to the finish line over the course of 10 seconds or less.
The 200m is probably stretching that, I imagine the athletes do their breathing around the curve then open up on the straight into an earth shaking charge to the finish.
It is even possible to maintain a sprint quite easily when you have the fitness and strength up to run full tilt for a whole 400m or one lap of your standard athletic track.
The 400m doesn't afford you the luxury of hanging back in the pack watching the other competitors pace and then making your break to take the chocolates. Chances are if you hang back for a second you've probably already missed the time when you need to start breaking.
Conversely the 1500m gives you 2-3 laps of the track to see both how you are feeling and an educated guess on how everyone else is. You can put yourself in the position to hang back as long as possible before exploding away from the pack whilst also being confident that if somebody else goes you will be able to go with him.
The 1500m in other words is a cross country race that fast forwards early to the sprint finish.
The 800m is though, a different matter all together. It is too short to pace, like the 400m but unlike the 400m it is too long to sprint. You have 4 bends to attack, not 2. You have 4 straights to open up on, not 2. You do not have the opportunity to see where the pack is at, you do not have an opportunity to see where you are at.
You can sprint out chasing the leader, hoping to put yourself in a position to win, one lap later the bell is ringing in your ear and you know suddenly you have pushed yourself too far, suddenly the guy you followed out and kheels over and dies. Not figuratively, literally - athletics volunteers leap out to the track to pull him out of the way before they start futilely performing CPR on his burst mince meat heart.
That's when you realise you are on the razors edge, between humiliating defeat or death. Winning is not an option. Humiliated you cower and drop back to a cross country 'race pace' that is not even competitive hear. Then the mob take you from the rear, violate you and leave you in their dust as they spur on to glory.
OR...
You merge in on the first bend, happy with the 4th place. The pack thins out into single file and you realise you have already lost, you can't catch the leader, his canter is as fast as your all out sprint. The guy directly infront of you spontaneously combusts, not figuratively, literally his brain overloads his fragile nerve endings and the friction of his cheep school uniform catch on fire and he starts flailing going up in a ball of fire until he eventually manages to leap into the raked sand of the long jump event.
It happens all the time, you force the smell of roasting human flesh out of your nostrils and you vear out on the straight attempting to overtake him, maybe, just maybe you can put yourself in contention for third place, or at least qualify for the state heats...
...you look around and discover you are all alone not in the blessed Samsara sense that you achieve on the cross country run, but in the cursed sense of the traveller realising they are but a stranger in a strange land.
They bloodthirsty mob watch you, silently, raping you with their eyes, their gaze penetrating you from every direction. As sure as the sunrise, the field passes you whilst the mob degrades and humiliates you. You had come to the meet a champion and go home a soiled and sullied loser.
In some divisions it is customary to take the 7th place recipient only ahead of the inevitable 'DNF' fatality that comes part and parcel with the 800m and cut out their eyeballs with disposable plastic cutlery available from the kiosk, then everyone takes turns pissing into your eyesockets and shitting into your mouth until they drag you to the maintenance shed, hose you down with cold unforgiving water as you try to scratch yourself clean and then the pissing and crapping begins again.
I know, for it has happened to me several times.
But this year, this year I refuse to be a victim. It is time to get my self respect back. Look this event in the eye, and say to it 'I will not be violated by you! Ever, EVER again.'
Some people tell me just to let it go... that the best revenge is living well, well I can gauruntee these people with their liberal 'wisdom' have never had their ventricles burst, spontaneously combusted or had their eyes dug out and their sockets used as public toilets.
It isn't about letting go, as Machiavelli said 'Fate is a women and needs to be beaten if you want it to be submissive'. I will sprint a full 800m, I have no idea how but that has not stopped me yet. I'm going to make it a personal little project of mine.
It's every move I will be watching from now on. When it turns around I'll be there. When it farts I'll know. When it thinks it is safe, I will strike.
I will rip it's larynx out with my bear hands, stuff my arm in the cavity up to the sholder and grab onto it's beating heart and just squeeze. I will break it's knees and grab it's hair and drag it across the arena where regardless of the Emperor's will I will proceed to fucking eat it's living flesh.
I will do whatever necessary to run the 800m, I will not be a victim. It has been warned.
Fuck you Valentines couples. It feels good to say that. It always feels good to say 'fuck you' to anybody, even a small child whose birthday present you forgot to bring to the party.
Anyway, one interesting side effect of the single life is that I find it much easier to write, create and generally balance out the rest of my life.
At the moment I can't envision settling down until I'm ready to become a soft bellied turtle for some condesending bitch to coo on as I lie on my back waiting for the grave.
If I was Prime Minister last week, I would have lost my job. When asking myself the question 'What is the best thing I can do in this situation?' I honestly wouldn't have come up with 'go and hug grieving people.' I understand the value of making people's grief feel real, acknowledging that their very personal tragedies are felt on a National (and indeed global level).
But I have always thought that government was there to sepperate power from the emotional personal realities, as a buffer against knee jerk reactions.
The victorian bushfires are one of those events that shifts and changes colour each minute shift of perspective you take.
I know of no victims that I know directly. As close as I get is 1 degree of seperation, and of those very few. My father's family is from Gippsland, it is our country, but then our family is in the rainsafe basin that has only moderately been effected by droughts.
So whilst conceptually I can concieve of the horror of being cooked in your car with your family, spending your last sentient moments in excruciating pain, whilst you enhale acrid smoke or sufficate as the fire sucks all oxygen out of your lungs, or worse surviving with severe burns and months of excruciating rehab, denying you the physical freedom to express the grief of your lost family as sole survivor. I can concieve that these things are terrible, but I can't empathise, it has never happened to me and hopefully never will.
But I am not even going to pretend I 'feel their pain' or am 'thinking of them' I am thinking of a generic mass of people, people who are more or less much like any other people in the world. I don't know specifically who I am thinking of.
But if I try to shift my perspective to one of the 'lucky ones' whose home has been destroyed, and I hear that some of the fires are deliberately lit I can imagine the anger and furious rage as I contemplate personal circumstances. The fire would seem like a personal attack because it's ramifications are so personal, and if I really could shift perspective as easily as that no doubt I would be writing something far more personal and passionate about it. Describing people as 'sick' and 'murderers' and so fourth. I would talk about dreams being destroyed and life work gone and so fourth. And people would completely understand, I understand.
What I don't understand is that if I shifted my perspective to a week before the fires happened and was brutaly honest, I would never have spared a moments thought for that particular 'dream' or 'lifes work'. Which isn't to say I would go out of my way to crush it, I simply would not think about it nor care about it as roughly anybody anywhere would not care about it. It is only through its tragic destruction that it was brought to the worlds attention. On PBS Newshour the US news program and one of the better News presentations in the world they referred to Victoria not as 'the state of Victoria' but 'Victoria Province' a place the average American has never even heard of.
And now shifting perspective again to that of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, being called away from the tragedy that is the Economic Stimulus Package, the biggest most spectacular summation of petty concerns and spending days and days facing problems that are all too real. Being face to face with inconcievable horror, experiences that you have never experienced and hope to never face. I can understand him getting emotional and saying things like 'Mass Murder'. 'Sick' may well be a suitable description for arsonists, but the legal system exists precisely to intervene between victims meeting out their own justice.
George Orwell put it best, and I hope and believe that there is nothing served by revenge, and that the only justice is rehabilitation. Shifting perspective out, to a long term view where one must way up the pro's and con's of societies ongoing and continuous existence, bringing out the trudgeon of punishment in the heat of the moment is a poor choice.
Those that have suffered this incalcuble loss and survived need to experience and come to terms with their grief, to feel the sadness and accept the loss over time, to begin focusing on what they have, and the joys they have had and to do that joy justice by living on as best they can. They do not need revenge. Any individual responsible, whether forced to haul dead bodies out of vehicles, or burned alive at a stake, or tortured on public display may bring a momentary satisfaction to the aggrieved but no matter what is inflicted, they will not feel your pain, they will not understand what was done to you and they will not take away anything you can't let go of yourself.
The only way they will come close to feeling the feelings they have caused you is if they are innocent. Someone caught up as a scapegoat and sacrificed to the mob. Except unlike you they wouldn't survive to claim revenge, and you in condoning such revenge and inflicting such trauma on an individual would only have brought yourself closer to the sickness of the arsonist.
Which is why there is a seperation between the justice system and the legislative. It was not ill concieved and it is a perspective that must be maintained. The perspective of the long term, of the greater community would lose far more by relaxing the 'beyond resonable doubt' standard for criminal charges to the 'people need closure convict a likely suspect' of mob justice.
From this perspective a guilty party could walk free and we would all be better off for it, for we don't wish to be a society complicit in wrongful improsonment. It is the very nature of bending over backwards to protect the innocent rather than blurring the lines to punish the guilty.
Which is frustrating from the perspective of the Victorian Police, now charged with investigating the possible arson, because the law bends over backwards to protect the innocent, and knowing nothing of the forensic evidence I assume it is very hard to catch an arsonist in the country unless they are caught redhanded or confess.
The country where alibi's mean nothing, because people constantly dissapear for hours unseen and unknown as a matter of course. Where everyone has good reasons for having a jerry can of petrol or carrying a cigarette lighter around. How do you pin someone down beyond reasonable doubt? In one of the few countries where it is possible to be a mass murderer with nothing more than a box of matches and a hot day.
You could have a suspect in the right vicinity at the right time and still find reasonable doubt that they started a fire. No doubt they will pull out all the stops on forensics to pinpoint the exact moment and exact spark that set off each respective blaze.
Where you can shift perspective to the guilty party. Are they sick? God appeared as a burning bush to Moses (if you believe that shit) can we shift perspective to a broken and distorted one, one that obsesses with a primal lust for fire. Can we possibly see the obsession, the temptation to burn down the world? The mind that hears the news report 'worst fire conditions since Ash Wednesday' on the news and cannot stop themselves? Was the arson pre-meditated or the murder? Did they just want to see the fire and didn't give a damn about the people in the way? Were they themselves found in the way? Playing with fire they got themselves burned?
Or was their sickness a different kind. One that didn't give a damn about fire, but nihilistically a misanthrope living out in the country to get away from all the people they hate saw an opportunity to punish people for their mere existence? It didn't matter who they where, just that they were people?
Here in the perspective of the Police force, many of whom in the country are no doubt personally effected is someone that society needs protection from. This 'mass murderer' that having done the crime must be found and restricted from such future opportunities.
And from the perspective of the survivors and general public, we might adopt the catch cry 'Never Again' and from this perspective what extraodinary measures must be taken? For me it would mean actively combatting the policies of environmental degredation that provided the means, not restricting the freedoms and liberties of people to grow up into the various individuals that provided the motive.
If these people were obvious, it would not have happened. If they were the person that played with a lighter constantly and all their clothing was singed and their eyes were red and their lips salivated when they sighted an open fire the police (hopefully) would have been watching them like a hawk.
If from the average perspective though they look like an average person leading an average life all the time, then we do not want the extremely intrusive policies that would lead to weading these people out. Inserting RDF chips into the necks of all country people to track their position and thermal signatures on satellite GPS?
Subjecting every resident to mandatory psychological evaluations where the slightest indication of any psycho-sexual fantasies puts you under house arrest? From the perspective of a movie goer I will admite that even I find it exciting when Bruce Willis causes something big to explode.
Now we shift back to Kevin Rudd's perspective, he represents the people, the people are shocked, alarmed that the security they had taken away could be undermined so rapidly over one weekend. As has been established, if the fires had behaved predictably, if the event could have been predicted it would not have happened. (borrying Taleb's Black Swan analogy). Many of the victims had seen bushfires before, their decision to stay and fight, and subsequent decision to flee too late were all based on the assumptions made that the fire would be normal. That it wouldn't be travelling at 130kph.
Presumably the mass murderer whilst unquestionably irresponsible and criminally negligent could not have been counting on their contribution to the fires (they weren't all deliberately lit) could have been counted on to be Australia's worst semi-natural disaster. Up to 300 people have died though, and whole towns have been declared crime scenes.
Which from the prime ministers perspective makes his perspective one of the most difficultly twisted of all. Because his perspective looks inwards at Australia and outwards at the world, and it is a very different perspective looking outwards.
From the perspective of a certain person from a certain quasi-state/occupied territory, some cunt from some gang that you don't elect 'makes a choice' to fire a rocket into a house of another country's settlement on a day. From the perspective of the person who lived in that house it was an all too personal attack, none of us know whether it was or not, but assuming their was no personal relationship between the cunt that fired the rocket and the civilian that lived in the house one can only assume it was a criminal act of attempted murder and destruction of public property.
Since the gang also has a political branch of the same name their is a possibility that that person was acting on the orders of an elected official as an act of war. This angle is assumed, there was no investigation no orders that I am aware of were presented by elected officials. It could be a result however of the breaking of several ceasefire agreements and also the failure of some other states to recognise the political branch of the gang as elected government and thus refuse them any diplomatic recourse. So really from a legal perspective here one cannot both not recognise a government as legitimate and thus worthy of diplomatic negotiations whilst recognising them as legitimate and thus capable of declaring official acts of war.
At any rate, from the average perspective that cunt didn't consult you and did you no favors by firing a rocket into a settlement. There is no question that at the very least it was a criminal act.
Which from an Australian perspective is where the state is meant to get between personal vendetta's and angry mobs full of blood lust to ensure that justice is served and the guilty parties recieve fair trial and their guilt proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The state is not then supposed to adopt the perspective of the aggrieved party that understandably takes it personally and therefore seeks to fulfill the lust for vengance. Frustrating for the victim, but that is what a state is for.
There are even rules for a state that are recognised by the community of states that thus represents (not perfectly) all the communities of all the individuals in the world. It is called the UN. They lay down rules for which countries are supposed to be beholden to and occasionally (as in the case of Iraq in the 90's, and Bosnia in the early 2000's) are held to account.
Permit me to paraphrase the perspective of a journalist from said state that appeared on Dateline on SBS:
'War crimes are not a matter of opinion they are a matter of facts. Under UN charter you cannot use tanks for shelling among civilian populations, that's a fact. Under UN charter you cannot bomb a people under siege, that's a fact. Under UN charter you must either provide medical care for the wounded or you must allow the international red cross to treat them, that's a fact. ...'
From the UN perspective the 'aggrieved states' reaction was criminal, using (I don't know how to spell it) phospherous shells to burn down buildings, shelling buildings containing civilian populations, denying any medical aid for 4 days to the under sieged population, destroying civilian structures, destroying UN buildings (that had made their coordinates known to the state in question's defence force) and so on and so on are all criminal acts. UN war crimes in other words. In colloqiual language from the perspective of the organisation that represents every last individual in the world 'mass murder'.
Shifting perspective again to that of John Brumby in the helicopter looking down on the charred remains of Kingslake and those people around the world watching the newsfeed the inevitable comparison of that perspective to other perspectives was 'it looks like it has been bombed'. To shift the perspective to that of Journalists on the occupied quasi-state after the seven day 'mass murder' the comparison could hold up because one could verify that it did look a lot like a place that actually had been bombed.
Yet from the perspective of a Prime Minister looking inwards it is easy to call one an act of 'Mass Murder' when in the perspective of the law and highest bodies that represent it from my limited understanding it is probably mass manslaughter accompanying an arson charge. But from the perspective of the Prime Minister looking outside at as clear cut an act of 'Mass Murder' as the UN Charter can provide it is very hard for a Prime Minister to come out and say such superlatives.
From the perspective of the aggrived in one case the cry of 'Never Again' is difficult but achievable to make progress on by combating the climate change that provides the means, to start reversing the policy of clearfelling all the best growing land for making grass and hay (or bushfire fuel) such that over time such dry conditions are statistical non-events. In the other perspective the cry of 'Never again' involves theoretically a military offensive designed to bring security to the people of your state by bombing any structure (and indeed container) that could possibly contain an RPG. I hope that from an objective perspective such a policy is unworkable and impossible, and that the human cost to such an offensive would be disproportionate to any short term sense of security it might achieve.
From the aggrieved perspective I'm sure it makes perfect sense, which is what the state is supposed to intervene in.
From the perspective of a 'No God, No Country' believer like myself, they are all human tragedies, all regrettable. But I honestly can't feel more for people I don't know because they are the same nationality as me than I can feel for people I don't know who aren't. I have been biting my tongue a lot because people hate a buzzkill (which isn't the right term at all in this sense, maybe a grief kill) by shifting the perspective when they are trying to feel bad for people they are supposed to feel bad for and making them feel bad for people they are not supposed to feel bad for.
The morale of the story is that no matter what perspective you adopt, life will present certain individuals with the right circumstances to make terrible and ill concieved decisions, but society as a sum of individuals we hope is capable under the right circumstances of making good sound and well concieved decisions. An individual mass murderer is scary, a mass murdering society is terrifying.
Which isn't the morale of this story, that's my own personal bias. The moral is that the ability to shift perspectives results in better understanding if not any real answers.
I just finished tapping in the last keystrokes of my dedication page. It is more or less done. With the most important word being 'less' I still have to figure out layout, printing and binding. The stages of which I have 0 confidence.
I won't fill you in on the dedication, in the vain hope that if you are reading this you may just be interested in actually reading my cryptic achronim one day. Nevertheless it ended with a 'note to self' if you will a quote that I hope to use again and again in the future:
when a book opens its mouth the author should shut his. - Nietzsche
I love that old syphalitic madman, but I find this quote particularly profound. Its something all authors should keep in mind, it was prophetic that Nietzsche (fuck I hate typing his name, from now on he shall be known as 'N-dawg') jumped on this long before Dawkins coined the term 'memes'.
I think it's a practical discipline. Drucker also defined communication as 'what the listner does' that being said it is up to the speaker or communicator to make sure the listener shares the same understanding of meaning.
Saying 'that's not what I meant.' doesn't cut it.
I think all authors need to hold themselves to the bench mark of making their message as clear as possible before they release the book, and not spend the rest of their lives (and others too) trying to explain what they really meant in the book.
By this standard the worst author in history could be considered God, who's 'Thou Shall Not Kill' was clearly, not clear enough. (This is perhaps because God doesn't actually exist and that the original texts were written by early semi-literate tribes taking down oral traditions and then being collated over centuries and revised and reedited by a religious beauracracy).
So Anyway with all that preamble, I thought I'd cheat a bit and try and tell you without telling you what it is about, because frankly once I publish it, I really own it about as much as you do, (except I will have the rights to it).
The story begins with my favorite emotion - despair. I felt it and felt it pretty hard. Despair unlike other emotions has to be concieved, it takes usually two people coming together and removing all hope.
My despair had two daddies, the unlikely couple of Noam Chomsky and John Butler.
I had been stressed out in Prague because I was booked into unsafe accomodation and somewhat strapped for cash over the weekend that I was marooned there until banks opened (australian time) and I could wait the 24 hour period for a transfer of funds.
While travelling I had relentlessly kept placing myself in this predicament and it had proved to be an effective if not somewhat traumatic budgeting technique. To go days on end with hardly any cash at all, not even enough to have three meals from a supermarket.
So on the monday morning I logged onto a computer, transferred some more money to my card and hopped on the first train going to Nernberg.
As soon as I was in Germany the tension melted from me. At last I was in a country that made sense. A country that worshipped sausages.
I went to withdraw some money at the station and discovered surprisingly I had no money.
I had $16 euro in my pocket, which was exactly enough to get a nights accomodation, so I decided I'd go see if I could pay on checkout and failing that have to pony up my eating money to secure a place to stay.
I got the accomodation to what was definitely one of the top 3 hostels I have ever stayed at. The guy trusted me to not even take any collateral.
It seemed to be also fate that at this particular hostel's bookswap I would exchange 'I-robot' a poorly written interesting book for 'Deterring Democracy' by Noam Chomsky. I have read Chomsky before and was always blown away by the sheer calmness of his writing and this was a big thick book.
Anyway over the next month or so I would end up finishing the big thick book. In Rotterdam, one of the 3 cities in Europe I would actually like to live in. (the other two being Barcelona and Genova).
I was thinking about the book and all it contained whilst walking across town looking for a bike shop that could sell me a new rear wheel for Rosanante whose spokes a had pushed too far riding down from Amsterdam (and all the riding I'd done since Dusseldorf when I probably should have got it repaired/replaced).
I was listening to John Butler Trio's Grand National Album and had reached it's track 'Good Excuse' and if I didn't swear it was impossible, it seemed that JBT were going out of their way to taunt me personally.
'you don't even know which side you're fighting for' struck me particularly and I found myself walking down a major street of Rotterdam on a beautiful spring day sobbing uncontrollably.
Now I've been Anti-American since the Clinton years, always knew to chose jail over going to war and opposed to the war on terror since Sep-11-2001. I have infact if anything somewhat mellowed since Bush was in control because I have come to accept that most evil in the world is an act of sheer mindless naivety. Corporate incompetence and so fourth.
It had in other words been my assumption that most of the suffering was an oversight of less cruel ambitions. So to control oil you needed to dominate the balance of trade, sometimes with military monopoly right? and then the decimation of domestic populations was the result of a dispationate and incompetent approach to economic ends.
Deterring Democracy though, presented me with a rational framework for cruelty that made stunning crystal sense. A new notion.
Democracy hates democracy.
Now of course in many contexts this doesn't make sense, but understood in the context of economic game theory it does.
The first issue, which I knew is that GNP is a terrible measure of wellbeing but this we use. Without sidetracking into all the oversights it has the crucial one for foreign policy is the understanding that GNP will only improve by
1. More productivity (making more from less) or 2. Command of more natural resources.
Number 2 is I'm told overlooked in most teaching of neo-classical economics, the allocation of resources at the start of 'the game' though has a lot to do with why most wars are fought, including the US war of Independance, pretty much every war in European History and even the US Civil war.
The second issue is that of collective bargaining.
This notion was recently illustrated by the Bush administration when they went 'free market' and got rid of the Surgeon General's collective bargaining powers on behalf of people on the pharmaceuatical benifits scheme. Instead each person was left to themselves to negotiate prices.
The veterans affairs group though provided a direct comparison as they were still able to collectively bargain, and got a much cheaper price for pharmaceuticals for vets.
It's just plain and simple, the more people you represent (through individuals delegating the bargaining role to fewer people and increasing coordination) the more bargaining power you have.
Vis-a-vis mother fuckers if you were to be an angry customer and go into McDonald's and say 'I'm deciding what to have for lunch today, what kind of prices can you do me?' vs 'I'm deciding what 120 of my school students will have for lunch today, what kind of prices can you do for me?' will have two very different results.
Now democracy represents collective bargaining on a National scale.
If someone offers you $14,000,000 a year for access to your forest you might think that's a lot of money. If someone offers you $14,000,000 a year and you represent 14 million people, it won't seem like a lot of money.
The difference between the first case and the second case is the difference between dealing with a democracy and dealing with a dictatorship (in whatever guise it takes).
Someone with absolute control over a nation doesn't have to worry about bargaining for money to support expensive health care, education, environmental restoration and other expensive social programs, you need only a little bit of cash to support whatever military regime you use to keep yourself in power.
Lavish palaces and exorbitant displays of your personal military powers are peanuts compared to feeding, clothing and educating a poor nation.
So there's two sides to this story, you have a democracy in your countr, which is good, the higher living, education and welfare standards make your country far more productive than one without it, but it is more expensive to maintain. Do you want to meet with a democracy with it's collective bargaining responsibility or some self interested dictator prick?
Now our collective moral conscious (hopefully) tells us to say that we believe in universal morals and to punish dictators whilst rewarding democracies.
Economics is clear cut in the opposite direction, punish expensive suppliers/unprofitable customers like democracies and reward and promote the cheap/profitable dictatorships.
And hence deterring democracy made it clear why attrocities committed by the so called 'good-guys' weren't acts of incompetent misguided foreign policy. They infact made sense.
It's why our collective governments prop up dictators, and only take action when they start demanding more money for social reforms. It's why foreign policy does everything in its power to undermine real democracies, hosting show elections with huge campaign donations to hand picked puppet rulers.
It isn't incompetent, it is extremely competent.
All in the economic mindset, the betrayel of East Timor by the US and Australia. The rejoicing at massacre.
On that day in Rotterdam it all made sense and I despaired because for me - there was no way out.
I felt betrayed. Betrayed by people who had made me complicit in their crimes long before I was born.
People who no doubt, embarked on these very endeavors in the name of 'our children, and our childrens children, and our children's children's children.'
But they didn't ask me.
And you really should read Deterring Democracy because then you might understand how up to my neck in blood and guts I felt. Every act of intolerable cruelty detailed, documented and unapologised for.
For what? If they had asked me, these people who did these things in my name, if they had stared through a crystal ball into the future and asked me if I actually appreciated the economic excess that has defined my life, what would I have said?
'Don't bother, ipods are pretty good, but that's about it. Just stay in school, who cares if we have to pay 50c more for a banana if YOU DON'T KILL MASSES OF INNOCENT PEOPLE'
And so it was, FOWP was concieved, of course, there's a book that makes the above point much more clearly and intelligently and I urge you all to read it and it's called 'Deterring Democracy' by Noam Chomsky. FOWP is about a feeling I felt, that I hope to capture and convey through the medium.
It's an obvious work of fiction, and frankly poorly crafted. What remains to be seen is if it does the job, if for all it's cruddiness it succeeds in making people feel, what I the author wanted them to feel - namely despair. Which is a big ask, but once it hits the shelf(s) I wont be able to tweak it to do what I want.
It will have opened its mouth, I will have shut mine.
Disclaimer - if you believe that jaywalking is inherently bad behaviour. Kill yourself, that's how darwin would have wanted it.
Jaywalking is impressivly statistically much safer than crossing at a pedestrian crossing.
And to ease into today's lesson let's start with the pedestrian crossing and how to cross it.
1. wait for the green man. 2. look out for oncoming traffic.
How not to cross it is to follow the 1 step process.
1. wait for the green man.
Which is why more people die crossing at the designated place than jaywalking. People run red lights, check their mobile phone sms, or just want to kill somebody.
Now let's move onto how to jaywalk:
1. look out for oncoming traffic.
It is much less confusing than the traffic light cycle, because instead of trusting everyone to obey flashing lights and know the road rules and be sober and keep their eyes on the road and have their cars serviced and not be riding a fixed gear brakeless bicycle... ...you simply trust nobody. Well you do trust space that appears to be devoid of solid matter travelling at a given velocity, the laws of physics have proved pretty trustworthy since they were discovered in the late 60's shortly after LSD.
That said, this wouldn't be (and admittedly isn't) much of a post if I didn't also point out that there is an incorrect way to jaywalk.
Namely it is to walk out onto the street trusting cars to slow down and stop and wait for you to get the fuck out of their way because they are decent human beings that don't want your idiotic death on their conscious.
Why this is so popular I don't know, I have a theory though that it has something to do with the release of 'Back to the Future II' where Marty's son in the future keeps crossing the street and when cars stop and honk at him yells out 'I'm walking here! I'm walking here!' which seems like a cool thing to yell out since its so annoyingly obvious.
But none of the bad jaywalkers ever yell this out, so I remain perplexed.
That said, sometimes when jaywalking it may be advisable to cross halfway across the street before the next lot of traffic arrives and stand between the lanes for the other side of the street to clear and the drivers in the far lane slow right down like you are going to suicidally leap in front of them.
These drivers I feel don't give the average jaywalker enough credit. And the whole thing slows everyone down. This method of jaywalking is a lot like frogger, its usually slow moving and deceptively safe. That said unlike the frog in frogger, a person standing upright generally does fit safely between the lanes, so if you see such a jaywalker slow down to be confident to stop, but maybe just enough so you clip them at 5km or so if necessary, no reason to let the fuckers off easy if they do turn suicidally stupid.
Remember all, the good jaywalker is the unseen jaywalker!*
*and by that I don't mean jump out from between two SUV's parked by the side of the road into oncoming traffic. I mean cross when there's no traffic to be bothered by you.
I noticed a few of my old work colleagues had become friends with their employer on facebook.
It immediately raised questions in my mind. Who exactly from the company is that profile belonging to? I would guess HR, and I would guess it is coming off the back of some article written on the importance of using social networking sites as a resource for HR decisions.
HR decisions are hiring and firing decisions as well as myriad other important functions like training and development services, maintaining and recording job descriptions and keeping tabs on all relevant personal transactions such as promotions, departmental shifts and organisational reshuffles.
But hiring and firing are the only ones I would raise my eyebrow to, because really HR involvement should be restricted to supporting managers in due process and legal compliance. It ultimately should be the managers decision as to whether to hire or fire somebody.
But I can see no advantage at all to adding a faceless corporation to your friends on facebook. My suspicious nature would conclude that they would immediately scan for pictures you might post of yourself being drunk. Or exhibitionist soft core porn photo's you may take of yourself.
Of which I have both, but at manager tools they say 'feel free to draw conclusions about that person' because they feel it is fair game when people publicly post pictures of their own stupidity. Furthermore you can question the judgement of anyone who refuses you friendship, because they must be hiding something right?
But what if, they are simply drawing a clear clean line between public and private life? Which I think is absolutely fair enough.
There isn't a day that I log onto facebook without being annoyed by Bryce's twitter account. Bryce is one of the most effective marketers and promoters I have ever met. Unfortunately for me, we met way back before he was a professional (although he had pretty outstanding talent from day 1) when we were just friends.
For me, Bryce's facebook profile is one of the big nonevent's amongst all the profiles I rarely visit, for the simple reason that it is professional first and personal second. Which isn't to say that Bryce is doing something wrong, it is merely to say that I am a fan of Bryce, not the various things that Bryce works on.
I believe in the luxury described by Ann Rand:
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Even though she couldn't have been further from the mark in terms of what actually went down.
But this is the issue of economics and perhaps the central issue of our world. Our obsession with growth demands 'more' and not 'better'. Keyne's also incorrectly predicted that we could maintain (then) luxurious lifestyles and channel economic growth into more leisure time, eventually working 4 hour days.
Humanity would be at the very top of its game if we only worked 4 hour days. Think of all the extra time devoted to thinking.
Instead all economic growth has lead to a smaller concentration of wealth and longer working hours. A reduction in wages in real terms against the cost of living has been the other great fruit.
And having taken time off to travel (which flirted with being a waste of time and money) and now to just work out who I am and what I want to be (the best time I have spent in my life) I start to suspect that most people work cradle to grave more or less being productive and never live at all.
Some people may remember that as late as 2003 I didn't have a mobile phone. I picked up my dislike for them early on. My dad got a car phone installed back in the brick days, and was probably one of the first people in Ballarat to get a mobile. And instantly I knew that his work hours increased.
I disliked it from the get go because I knew it was a device that allowed people to work overtime without having to work overtime.
Now I maintain everything I know about business I learnt from basketball. Today I watched Kobe's Lakers take down Lebron James at home ending their 23-0 home record. Lebron's Cavs are Lebron's Cavs and for me they represent the mindless way business is done today.
Kobe's Lakers are Phil Jackson's Lakers. Phil builds great teams. Kobe is unquestionably the most talented career player since Jordan left. Very different, Kobe is just Kobe but he isn't the key to the Lakers win today/yesterday (timezone difficulties). In the 3rd quarter the Lakers came out and turned a 12 point deficit into a 5 point lead.
Coach Mike Brown of the Cavs typically sits Lebron out in the second and fourth quarters to try and teach him to build trust in his team.
Today he didn't. But Kobe was benched, not just Kobe but all bar Pau Gasol of the starting line up were benched and the reserve team continued to build the lead confounding Lebron James who remained unable to score in the fourth.
Lebron James is the popular genius with 1000 helpers model. His team is weak, his bench are allright against so-so teams, but when it comes to the crunch he can't rely on them. Lebron must rely on Lebron.
Today's match was infact lack lustre from Kobe and Lebron. Kobe deferred or delegated the responsibility of winning to the team from the more common balanced effort and the rare superstar performance.
The team is networked in a way that makes them versatile. They still have a big gun to real out in times of trouble, but they are also a team who's regular season efforts have been entirely in the interests of championship winning.
Lebron's Cavs are a team hardwired through the central node of Lebron James. Without Lebron, the team will collapse. Lebron is unquestionably mighty he is the 'more' champion. He is bigger, taller, stronger than any other Forward in the league. He can play Center and he can play point.
Kobe is talented as well. But it is a Lakers story, the lakers represent 'better'. Kobe can sit on the bench out of the game and count on the second team wiping out defecits while he rests.
Just so, in business you might have a leader, a top manager. Technology advances allow them to be available 24-7. You could run every play through them if you like now. They can verbally approve or deny every single decision there is to be made. This is a terrible way to do business.
A great leader should be able to walk out the door into the desert, lay down and die and the company will still perform. Hopefully it is better if they are on board. But not categorically so.
The way to do this, is to build your team, your organisation, your company this way from the beginning. It is said to take about a year for a Phil Jackson team to know their way around the triangle offense, meaning they will take a lot of hits learning to rely on their play and not their stars.
But once they learn they become league leader offensive threats, and entertaining too. Same as Musashi says 'if you have the strength to hold two swords you should train this way from the beginning' or thereabouts in Go Rin No Sho.
The lines have to be drawn, not blurred. You have to teach your organisation not that you are reliable, but that they can't rely on you.
The only thing reliable about me at my old workplace was that I was out the door at 5. If people wanted me to do the work, that work had to take place in the time I had actually sold to work.
People don't seem to understand this statement much. It means if you and I are paid the same salary, and you work 8-6 and I work 9-5, I am paid considerably more than you.
Even if work recognises your extra efforts down the track, pay rises of 4% are very good in very good years. You can knock at least 2% off that in inflation (a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow) and furthermore, the pay rise won't come with the expectation that you drop back you're hours now.
You are literally running a line of credit to your employer on that mentality and they have no legal obligation to recognise your effort.
You are giving them more, in the hope that some of that will trickle back to you, where I focus on getting better.
Thus far, it's worked for me.
I go home and read books like Jim Collins 'Good to Great' in time other people spent going through their emails, one of the biggest wastes of time in the modern era.
But alas, the world we live in is the 'more' world. Where we can live in awe of China's Economic 'Miracle' because they achieve 10 percent growth for a couple of years while neglecting the fact that China was 50 years behind, a shit heap and most of that growth is to no meaningful end.
Instead of the 'better' approach of Scandanavian states that whilst not having global hegemony like the US, or big mineral exports like Australia, or Rapid economic growth like China, have great education systems, health care, beautiful Alpine scenery and very efficient business practices.
That's macro, let's cut back to micro. Micro is workaholia. And workaholia is 'more'. I dedicate most of my private life to 'work' I never got home at a friday to shower desperately and get down the pub, I got home on friday to read, blog or sit on NGO committees. Even playing basketball I think about business. It's just something I love. I enjoy it.
A lot of people don't though. Bryce I think definitely loves his work, he is a passionate businessman. Very different style to me. He is a mighty champion of more. I may be like a bench player on the Lakers. Both systems work, and work well. Bryce's style is I feel more celebrated in our society, brilliant networking, flawless promotion, charismatic speaker.
But does he have to watch what he says because the line is so blurred between his friends and his employers? Can he post a status update on facebook that says 'cunt, fuck, pussy, dick, shit, motherfucker, arsehole'? or does he have to worry about 12 year old kids from a theatre troop who's parent's might monitor their web activity?
I for one favor bringing more privacy into work (although I also support the Johari window model of leadership) and less public life into the private. Because I believe it can work.
For those confused, that would look like - less professional attire more casual clothes, freer speech, more personalised office environments, more social interactions. The opposite is having managers and faceless companies listed as your friends on facebook, removing personal photos from your profile because of work ramifications, answering work related emails in your leisure time, sunday golf games with clients, earlier work starts, business travel... pretty much the modern business world.
Things that fuck me off right now: Premature celebration.
Is it just me, or is it incredibly sad that the time of most jubilation, excitement and general warm fuzzy feelings is before anything has a chance to dissapoint us?
11 months ago I walked past a cover that made my heart sink, Alan Moore's watchmen was being adapted into a film. This saddens me in the same way I imagine Barack Obama is saddened when he sees a black guy asking for change at a bus stop, if that ever happens to Obama. But as a fan of comics, I pray for the upliftment of comic fandom to self respect and not pandering to validation from the movie industry.
But what ticked me off the most was that Empire magazine ran the tagline 'The Citizen Cane of Comic Book Films.'
Watchmen is yet to be released. But it's theatrical trailer has spawned such excitement that swathes of new people rushed out to buy unprecedented numbers of copies of Watchmen, something that sadly denies Alan Moore ownership of his work so long as DC can continuously reprint it.
But what is this reaction. People get excited about a film, then rush to read the originl print before the movie ruins it for them? But to call something the 'citizen cane of' anything before its hit the market is just an outright lie. Watchmen may well be the 'citizen cane' of comics, but the movie hasn't been seen. What little I have seen from the trailer promises none of the innovation in film techniques that Citizen Cane brought with it, nor does it look like it will be critically reveared like the original.
THen you have Lebron who has actually been fucking me off for years. Micheal Jordan was a statistical anomoly not just for basketball, but sport. He captured the whole world's imagination. He is quite literally more popular than Jesus. If their is one thing that Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindu's can all agree on it is that MJ is the best.
Unfortunately he made squillions of dollars for Nike and boosted ratings for the NBA, sold merchandise for the Chicago Bulls and probably tipped his caddy generously. So the industry found him not only amazing but quite lucrative too. A big fat cash cow they could milk like wringing someone off through a glory hole, so thick and creamy was his payload.
So naturally the industry is going to feel sorry that he's gone. And not just the winners, the losers like Adidas, Reebok and Converse who missed out on the MJ gravy train are going to not want to miss the next one.
So what do they do? They make one up. A bit of a truth and a lie situation. Truly Lebron James from an early age had the makings that come as close to gaurunteeing a champion as you can get. The lie is that he is guarunteed to be a champion.
MJ was the most phenomenal athlete on the planet for his first n seasons. It wasn't till he got Phil Jackson and Scottie Pippen that he started collecting rings. He couldn't do it alone.
Nor probably can Lebron who has Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, The Boston Three Party and so fourth to contend with. Coming up behind them are the next gen of stars Chris Paul, Deron Williams, OJ Mayo, Derick Rose, Beasley, Brandon Roy (probably the more similar player to MJ mentally) and so fourth.
The point is, that the time to say Lebron is the next MJ is after he is the next MJ. After he has 5 MVP's and 6 Championships. The League, the Cavs and Nike have invested so much money into trying to make Lebron a star that they honestly seem desperate that it isn't happening.
I mean he is a star. But if he had a season ending injury tomorrow his legacy would be up there with Penny Hardaway and Shawn Kemp. THat is to say 'a never was' because he hasn't fucking achieved anything yet. He refused to go in the Dunk Contest so you can't even really say Lebron is the next Vince Carter.
Meanwhile there's Kobe who actually was the next MJ. Except he got dicked around for 4 years with the worst lineup in the league. And just like MJ without a Scottie Pippen calibre player he couldn't do it alone. He could go deep into the finals alone, year after year and this probably cost him too.
Anyway, the Kobe vs Lebron debate to me is just like the Isreal vs Palestine debate. You want to voice your opinion on it, but everytime you do, you regret it because there's a world full of douchebags out there that are obsessed with these issues that in the face of eternity are really quite pointless.
I mean I'll eat my words if in 10,000 years the Isreal Defence force invokes the right to temporally defend their territory by combating the Dinosaurs that originally occupied the middle east before the holy book was written by a bunch of ordinary people from oral traditions past down from ordinary people as well. Just as I will if Hamas wage Jihad through time on Tyrannosaurus Rex as King of the Dinosaurs in the holy land.
But I'm fortunate in that I don't have to deal with Middle Eastern conflicts apart from in the annoying Lebron v Kobe way that writers of columns on NBA.com have to.
But Barack Obama does, and if there was any clear evidence of humanities sad new tendancy to knowingly prematurely celebrate it is in the political realm. Where people intuitively know is that the real victory in politics is when you manage to elect the guy who said he intended to institute reforms, rather than celebrate the departure of a president that actually did institute reforms.
I know Bush had his audience too, that celebrated as much as Sarah Palin supporters did at the resounding moral victory for them of naming a pro-lifer as running partner.
So here is what fucks me off. If people think it is good enough to celebrate the vague promised intentions of Watchmen to be the Citizen Cane of Comic Book Movies (hey it might, except Citizen Kane was not an adaptation and was fully endorsed by its enthusiastic author) and Lebron to be 'The Chosen One' (which is kind of true, he is the poor shmoe chosen by the NBA and Nike and SLAM magazine to be jammed down our throats) or Barack Obama to tell us 'we can', rather then holding out our jubilation until these promises have hit the here and now, then there is simply no hope for humanity.
It's like eating a celabratory cake because you started the new diet. It is simply shifting responsibility from you to act to wishes to come true.
The only person that will make Lebron the next MJ is Lebron. And if it's going to happen it isn't going to be because his contract is bid up into the high numbers and he makes all his choices keeping the interest of his sponsors in mind. If Watchmen is going to be innovative it will be up to the director to sit down and think of exactly why the fuck the film needed to be made and what the medium of film brings to it, and not considering the interests of the studio wanting the low risk of a preexisting fanbase demanding a faithful adaptation ala 'Sin City' aka 'Give your money to some studio executive to see something which you have already read' and if Barack Obama is going to be an Abe Lincoln then that's something he needs to take up with his barber, outfitter and the next John Wilkes Booth.
I checked facebook, meh. my friends are boring. I checked NBA.com, not much excitement today. I checked hotmail. A notification from facebook. I went to CGtalk. No updates, no contests.
I was scratching my head faced with the dilemma of two unpleasant options - going outside or getting back to work. When it occured to me that I hadn't read bikesnobnyc's blog in ages. That bastion of my travelling days.
And I came across a link where he had highlighted this quote from some fixed gear owner:
Hi from Singapore! This is my first fixed gear bike, custom built by Vanguard Designs here in town. I told them I wanted a bike that was futuristic, but as if someone had designed it in 1983 thinking about the future. Picked it up yesterday and I think they nailed it.
Which is in other words - Japan!
Yes, I was amazed to see that someone else in the world had a hunkering for this aesthetic quality - a future concieved in the 80's. And low and behold that person is from Singapore, confirming certain other theories I have.
A few weeks ago I filled out the Getup.org survey. I don't know how many responses they got, but I thought the issues would reflect the media.
Namely I expected the great central tenderiser that is democracy would choose the most popular concern of our times - where's my superanuation?
But no, survey returns listed priority 1 as
Climate Change.
I am blown away, like when you log into NBA.com expecting another 24 point performance from Kobe and he's dropped 61. I didn't expect so many Australian's to want the lobbying to concentrate mainly on climate change.
Before you get excited, no I haven't made it with a chick that turned out to be a man. (boo) I mean, man, what a great film. (yay)
Anyway, Yesterday I was going to do a piece on my influences in comics, that I will still do, but cannot be bothered doing now or later.
Instead I watched Gran Torino, and something unexpected happened to me. At the end, I found myself on the verge of tears and wanting to go out to the garage and sob uncontrollably.
Any sript editor, screenwriter, director or movie goer wouldn't see anything particularly emotional about Gran Torino that I should cry at that and not say every single movie someone could go to including 'The Devil Wears Prada' when Ann Hathaway discovers her nose has it's own post code.
But really there are only three films I can recall that made me cry in my lifetime.
1. Harry and the Hendersons (which to this day I don't understand, but at age 6 I felt really sorry for the sasquatch hunting cryptozoologist and had a cry for him because everyone thought he was crazy). 2. Life is Beautiful (which only a cold hearted robot or a white supremecist nazi wouldn't cry at) 3. Gran Torino.
So number 2 is probably the only one that isn't a bizarre statistical outlier. I think for me Gran Torino just resonated with me personally and was a subtly brilliant performance by Clint Eastwood, who in my view is quickly becoming the best director since Kubrick and perhaps the greatest man in hollywood, a man that could only have been bested if Kubrick and Robert De Nero where one and the same person.
Anyway Life is Beautiful, I feel was not like Gran Torino because the full impact was felt in a very calculated way, right when everyone was supposed to feel it and created that crystal like clarity of just what had been achieved and what had subsequently been lost.
If you haven't seen it yet, shame on you (or alternately, good on you for not only learning to read already after being born after Life is Beautiful, but actually tuning into this blog what with it's gratuitous use of fuck, cunt, shit, arsehole, douchebag and Ann Hathaway).
But basically the first hour is made so you fall in love with Roberto Begninni's character and just wish you could go back to italy in the days of innocence. Then suddenly, these characters you love are hauled off to the Nazi death camps, and you watch in horror as suddenly these people are plunged into the unmittigated horror of liquifying the Jewish problem. Except for the kid it is mittigated because the father manages to not only survive life in the concentration camp but conceal the existence of his child, sacrifice food and convince the kid its all some kind of game show.
And he nearly gets away with it too, except that his wife who could have been safe and sound put herself in the concentration camp and this indirectly leads to the fathers death.
All of which the kid doesn't understand at all because amazingly his innocence has been preserved in a place where children were literally destroyed and so the kid celebrates completely unnaware that he has lost the greatest father any kid could ever have.
And so you are supposed to cry right then and there.
A text synopses will perhaps ruin the story for you whilst not doing it justice. But for me, being able to make a complete stranger in the audience resonate as such is the holy grail of writing.
Much like Alan Moore's guide to writing comics puts it, you probably don't know anything useful about your audience except that they are a thinking feeling human being. So if you find something funny chances are somebody else will too, and if you find something moving chances are somebody else will too.
But no matter how good you get at empathising, pushing people to emotional extremes is something you can never 'know' as such.
All that said, to do it in film is where you have sound, lighting, motion, voice and everything to help that empathy along. To do it in comics is nothing short of complete mastery.
I know in fowp I have tried clumsily and rather obtusely to make people feel certain feelings that I regard as the entire reason for why I felt compelled to write it. I want the audience to empathise with me. I suspect it may be a bit too cliched and have a bit too prolonged a build up to actually succeed but I can't wait to test it out.
In comics though, I think Alan Moore came closest to really moving me in Watchmen with roujach's final fate, and I suspect the movie will try and ham it up, even though from what I gather they have already miss cast him and misinterpreted the character, I don't intend to see Watchmen but would urge you to read the comic.
Watchmen is incorrectly labelled as the most celebrated comic of all time, this is alas an error given from a western bias. The most loved comic of all time in the world would have to be 'Slam Dunk' by Takeo Inoeu, a comic that many in the west would perhaps fail to comprehend which is why it is unparrallaled.
I don't think I have ever read anything ever that made me feel more, nor have I seen any movies for that matter, than Slam Dunk. And I read an english translation. I broke down crying when Specs hit the three to send Shohoku through to the national championships. This was bad because I read it in Borders.
It still however gets me in its masterful execution after two, three... I don't know how many readings.
I will say this though, there is perhaps no reading experience that will ever rival Slam Dunk in my mind. Many of the classics I haven't read though, so who knows, maybe Watership DOwn is truly great.
That's all I have to say on this now. Back to work.
Since the election and inauguration a feeling of unease has crept over me to the point where I find myself as afraid of Obama's charm and appeal as I was of Bush's beligerence and inflexibility.
Hopefully this is the last time I write about Obama.
Becuase inking is relatively mindless, I've been able to sit down and go at it until my neck is cramp, my eyes are unable to focus on anything I can't reach out and touch from where I'm standing and my arm starts spasming.
One of my fingertips I guess it would be my index finger on my left hand, I'm a lefty by the way feels more or less constantly like it's just been jammed in a door. For the first three days of inking I had taken to jamming a wad of cotton under the elastic tape I use normally for taping my feet together whilst in the long distance trainign mode.
And by that I don't mean literally taping my left foot to my right foot, but taping my muscles onto the underlying bone structure and taping over the raw open weaping blisters that I get whenever I return after an ugly hot summer like this past week.
This is because the bone in my thumb I rest the pen against, which is really crucial for operating both chopsticks and pens was fucking sore. Now I don't feel anything at all there, so I hope I'm just forming calouses all over my hand for this.
I did not encounter any discomfort like this when pencilling, even though gripping the pencil is the same.
I really want to finish up the inking because the inking is really boring. I do get a sense of satisfaction after I do a page and look at it and it actually looks like a complete fucking picture, but overall the process isn't adding that much.
I'm glad it will be a black and white production because I couldn't take another phase of colouring in. Because then I'd insist on learning about lighting which I should be tackling now.
I saw a book in boarders to da called 'rendering in pen and ink' and it was the 60th anniversary edition. That said it was also $60 and would take me longer than a university degree to complete all the exercises in it. But my interest is piqued, I really do want to go and learn how to be a proper comic artist and inker.
Thus far I'd choose the pencils over the inking any day. I'd also career wise choose writing over pencils any day. Because I figure I could do the rough composition for any money shots, but believe me, it is so much easier to write 'people are panicing, running from the beach while police run in the opposite direction' than it is to draw it. But it's easier to draw it than it is to ink it also.
Particularly when inking is also like proofreading for comics. Whilst drawing I kept thinking 'should I go over that? no I'll fix it up in inking' as if I was ignorant that the inker would be me.
I didn't anticipate how annoying this would be. I can be in a trance like state and churn out 5 pages in one sitting, then suddenly discover that I have to draw up a character over the top of some rough geometric shapes. Suddenly I have to think, a very different type of thinking from tracing (which is mindless) and shading (which is thinking about light, texture and motion) I have to think about scale, anatomy, position, rigging and emotion.
All of these things I fuck up in my shoddy amatuer ability, but that just means I spend more time thinking about them than I would a pro who actually knows what to do, has studied anatomy and what not.
Anyhoo, this stage is productive, I'm getting between 10 and 15 pages done a day, I'm up to 65, which means hopefully I'll be on page 80 tomorrow. Then fingers crossed I can finish up 100 tomorrow and hit Harvard's scanner again on tuesday night. I have a double page spread to do for 74 & 75 which isn't even pencilled yet, but thankfully I have reference, and inking is one area where landscapes can become easy because you can go abstract and rely on texture.
And I'm sure Andrew Bolt will dislike FOWP, but it would be an honour if it generated enough interest to pass under his nose and have him say 'smells like shit'.
Sometimes you hear half a sentance when you think you hear a full one, and it can take a huge stretch in space and time until you catch the end of it and an even huger stretch in space and time before the two meet in the middle and become one.
In this case I heard the sentance over the course of what must have been 2006 and only put 1 + 1 together earlier today.
Yesterday I made a throwaway comment about an inherant flaw in democracy that in the absence of a suitable candidate you have to elect somebody.
Anyway here is the sentance, the first half came in my Economic Forecasting evening class one time. If you have ever studied part time, you like me would know that the last thing anybody wants to do at an evening lecture is be there so sidetracking is particularly prominent.
My lecturer said this 'the value of a degree isn't the specific knowledge of what you've studied. It's a communication to the employer, that you can do something without having to be told all the time.'
Later that year, I heard the second half of that sentance from my friend Tommi who was talking about being an extra. (he probably doesn't like me dropping the fact) anyway he said '...on the heirarchy the extra ranks lower than props, because they are props that need to be told what to do all the time.'
You see, put those two sentances together via a space time continium and you get:
'A bad employee is someone with no initiative, someone who has to be told what to do all the time.'
A lack of initiative for me is equivalent to risk aversion. I'm not a psychologist, but low initiative is best demonstrated by the behaviour of asking questions in the form of permission.
Now there are no 'stupid questions', but there are stupid people to direct them at. And asking for permission is one of those stupidly directed questions.
For me the definition of a bad employee is one that asks you a question they should know the answer to, typically 'how do I run report C?' with the answer 'the same way you did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and two days before that day because you took a weekend off. In other words, the same way you always run report fucking C!'
It's basically questioning routine actions that sends flares up into the sky.
A good employ in my book says 'what happens if I tweak this variable in the accounting rules?' and does it, and if it goes horribly wrong spends tomorrow and the day after trying to repair the damage. But who of this type of employee and the above type would one day end up managing the budget?
The one that took a risk, fucked it up and learnt the whole system inside out repairing it.
Miki loved the very unjapanese saying of 'Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.'
That's initiative.
Now whilst we here of government initiatives all the time, when did we last experience any? Never. GST could be said to be the last government initiative. But in implementing it the government demonstrated a remarkable ability to not learn anything from the experience.
Now to really take that completed sentance above and put it into the political realm it seems appropriate on our 4th 40 degree plus day in a row to put it in the context of climate change.
Climate change requires initiative, a change in behaviour in order to effect change, observe and learn from the experience. In other words, our systems need to be broken a couple of times in order to figure out how best to address this problem.
I for one, have no qualms about 10,000 australians or more losing their jobs. Even in the great depression, Australia has never experienced a 'famine' something experienced regularly in the good times of the past century by the majority of the planet.
SO if hutting down a lucrative coal industry is one way to address climate change, I would give it a poke, or tweak or whatever. The economy would break down, and then I would spend the rest of my term trying to fix it.
But not in a way that simply reversed the decision. I would try to get those 10,000 employees new jobs. Somewhere.
In other words, if the industry came to me and said 'under your plan you will put 10,000 people out of work if you don't give us money, and credits and surplusages etc.' My response would be
'Give them to me. I'll use some of our savings to support them, and then, not me personally but some people of mine will sit down and talk with them extensively about their priorities, what they want to do and what they can do, and we'll try and get that happening for them over the next 5-10 years. But I'm not handing you a bunch of fucking money to piss up the wall now so we can face the exact same problem ten years down the track.'
This in political circles would be considered very risky behaviour. For one thing, it seems that our democratic institutions have a fear based apoplexy when it comes to swearing, they seem to think that swearing is a higher priority to the voter than competency to build a future for the race, planet and nation.
So instead they pursue the avoidance of voter backlash by investing their time and effort into being an 'all rounder' supported by both public and captains of industry.
Which is exactly how we end up with a 5% emissions reduction target. A goal that is:
1. A death sentance. 2. Uninspiring. 3. Small. 4. Still likely to be resisted by industry.
Yet combatting climate change was one of the key issues for which the Rudd government was elected to address.
But it's too risky to address so they aren't.
Now the public has to look at it's recourse.
Which in a 2 party system is Malcolm Turnball.
Now in a 2 party system the only real option is to churn our leaders until a good one pops up if we want an issue to be addressed.
SO if you want climate change tackled you need to send Rudd some negative reinforcement. You let him know that his 5% target is too weak and he is out of a job because of it...
Except that you then send Malcolm Turnball some positive reinforcement that his 0% reductions target is good by electing him primeminister.
So to send him the necessary negative reinforcemen you have 2 options. You reelect rudd, or elect Turnball and wait 3 years to reelect a Labor government.
If you reelect Rudd you send the message that his climate change policy is good enough and it stays at measley 5%.
Churning through leaders to wait for a good one is on a 3 year cycle, We are looking at a minimum of 4 years before even the remote possibility that there is one that will actually put the cobra clutch on climate change.
Which is why I am thinking ideals.
You see, manager-tools.com believe that interviewing is an elaborate ruse set up to say 'no' that the default response to any question of employing a candidate is no. Until you are absolutely 100% certain that the candidate in question is the absolute best for the position in question. Then and only then do you say 'yes'.
This is captured by the matrix:
Q1: True Positive - say yes to a good candidate. Q2: False Positive - say yes to an average or worse candidate. Q3: False Negative - say no to a good candidate. Q4: True Negative - say no to an average or worse candidate.
You see manager tools argues that you accept the inevitability of some Q3 false negatives to avoid the ultimate damage of Q2 false positives. That hiring a bad employee is so damaging you are better off having no employee at all.
If you have not experienced this in your workplace it means 1 of 2 things:
1. You have a truly exceptionally talented and competent manager making your staffing decisions.
or more likely:
2. You are a bad or mediocre employee and are constantly dumbfounded by how 'smart' everyone around you is how the can work their fancy 'kom-pu-tah' and cook with that magic tv in the kitchenet.
But in democracy you can see it is all reversed. We are infact forced to pick a leader. Turnball or Rudd. No third potential.
Thus instead of passing on all mediocrity, we have to say yes to the one we believe is the least mediocre and incompetent. Which sadly they interpret as people liking them by a landslide.
Even in America where the voting isn't compulsory someone will still be elected president, even if 3 people turn up to vote.
This fact makes people vote for the least incompetent out of fear that some idiot will turn up and vote for the most incompetent. But really with something like climate change, or the economic recession, it really doesn't matter much if you are regular incompetent (Obama/McCain/Rudd) or super incompetent (Turnball, Bush, Palin, Howard, Costello, Swan).
They are guarunteed to fuck it up anyway.
Now not that I'm a fan of Japan or anything, their system is quite fucked, but they do make a point of the beuracracy or administritive wing being able to competently run a country without any meaningful imput from elected officials.
This is because in Japan the beuracrats can write their own legislation. A power that is seperated in the west.
But that said, that means the administritive arm of government should actually run things in the absence of effective government. We should have a legislative government hiatus, since the government should only be legislating when they need to show some initiative, which they don't. So we should be able to have no government, until we actually need or demand the necessary reforms, in which case instead of just having to be better than Turnball or better than Rudd, a priministerial candidate would actually need to have the cajones to do what needs to be done.
It may be the reform needed to wrest back democracy from campaign 'contributers' or lobby groups that fund election advertising.
Over the past week I'm feeling strangely attractive even though logic should tell me the opposite is the case. I'm heavier in body fat than ever, am growing a goatee because I want to have a metal goatee for once in my life, I live in a garage, and I'm wearing shabby clothes and pretty unemployable.
But nevertheless I feel top of my game. It's a feeling, I'm feeling it and one should not question it. For one, I'm finally doing shit that I've always wanted to do and my life feels meaningful. Should anything come of it I have to remember to tell the kids it was not a rags to riches story but riches to rags. If I hadn't passed up a secure income with excellent savings ratios and highly disposable income I never would have been able to afford the time to do all this.
This puts in context a scenario however that is stark for me. On Saturday I caught up with my dear sweet Bryce, who true to form questioned me about my sex life and when I told him it had been over a year since I had copulated (I get plenty of sex by myself) he told me 'it was unnatural'.
Truth is I just don't think about it. I had to think about this for a while before I understood the true nature of my problem, and for me it has been over a year since I fell in love with anybody.
I have learnt over the years that you don't tell someone you are dating that you love them for a ways afterwards. Because its creepy, but I think the average person needs to calm down over these issues. Surely you should be able to identify a person who just plain loves you and is a bit upfront about it, from a person who says they love you and combs your hair while you sleep at night and licks the hairs out of your leg razor. One will look creepy, the other looks normal.
But there it is, I have met only one interesting girl in over a year and she was too young for me to really contemplate any advances.
My experience tells me that going out with someone I don't really like often ends up with me missing opportunities with people I do, and I'm the kind of pussy that has real difficulty extracting myself from relationships.
People also point out that you don't have to have relationships, just have sex with people for a spot of fun and move on. The problem I have with that though is that the most attractive quality to me is someone who is interesting.
At my brothers birthday drinks last year my brother (who has aspergers) actually had my number in a big way. I was talking to a female friend of his and asked her 'what you hope for sam in the coming year' and she said 'I don't really know him, I'm a friend of a friend.' and I said 'I hope he becomes an amputee so he can compete in the paraolympics.' and she turned away.
My brother told me later that she had said to him that I was weird, and my brother had insensitively advised her that 'he just says that to people he doesn't find interesting enough to talk to.' I never thought of it like that, but that really is what I do.
So for me, I'm just not going to pretend to like someone I don't like enough sufficiently to not pursue a relationship. Casual sex is an enormous waste of my time and energy in my book. It's called being an introvert, I focus on other people not myself and thus it is important that I like them, not that they like me. (well both are important but that's the preference, extraverts tend to be more self centered in the formal sense and thus like other people a lot more for the validating effect).
So all this said, it comes down to business for me. Just as in a company if you had a position to fill, a bad manager/organisation insists on putting somebody in the seat (an inherant flaw in democracy) whereas a good organisation/manager sucks up the inconvenience and in the event of no suitable candidates simply leaves nobody there. This means when the right person comes a long they don't have to sack/shift/pay a mediocre employee to step aside or worse yet, turn down that special someone.
Clinical though it may sound, that's my exact approach to dating aswell. There are times where I've been touch and go on someone I could date, and have taken a gamble. There are other times where I have been certain of it.
An excellent example was Misaki, I didn't want a Japanese girlfriend, and Misaki was unquestionably Japanese. But I fell in love when she attempted to do a cat walk turn and botched it by smiling a smile that I predictably fell in love with.
And that was that, and despite the vast gulf of differences between us such as her insistence on almost never using logic, and my insistence on almost always, as I told a friend I would not even hesitate to marry her.
Instead I am committed to 3 months of no communication, not because we had a messy breakup or any poor post relationship relationship, but simply because its a dead end. I know who I want, I can't have her and so I shall get the fuck on with my life.
And in doing so hopefully I will either meet someone interesting, or more remotely have some opportunity to date Misaki again, who no doubt will be someone very different from the person I loved as will I making the possibility even more remote.
I recently watched the conclusion to Curb Your Enthusiasm, and hands down it is the best ending to any tv series, ever. I feel when I do get married unlike my grandfather I won't slap my new bride in the face and tell her 'I'm the boss' but I will sit her down and say 'I expect this from you:'
I also saw this 'bumper sticker' on a facebook profile that sums it up too:
'I want a boyfriend who, when I come to him crying says 'who's ass am I kicking'' which to me is a horrible sentiment unless you reverse the gender roles.
Similar to when I began the pencilling phase, I have discovered more products that normally one would never take into consideration.
I was already a fan of sharpies from my logo designing process but when it came to the inking phase I had to learn about two whole new areas: ink and paper.
Initially I'd always planned on just inking over the top of my penciling in my visual diary. But I soon realised that by being a tightarse and only buying a 120 page (60 pages, 120 sides) visual diary for a story that ran to 98 pages (later revised to 100) I had left myself with no choice but to draw one page on the back of another. Which ruled out using a sharpie or other time saving inks because they bleed through the page and make it all unreadable and crucially, unscanable.
I had also however been having increasingly frequent dreams most of which shared this basic plot:
I am sitting in a restaurant when I am approached by a friend, the friend asks me what I've been up to and bursting with pride I talk about drawing my own comic. They typically ask to see it and even though they make encouraging noises like 'wow, great' and shit they inexplicably seem to deliberately damage the work. The most vivid one was the simple cuntact of ripping the pages out of my visual diary. Not actually damaging them or scrunching them up or anything, just making it almost impossible to keep track of them and keep them intact.
I've been sleeping a lot easier since I scanned them all in, and my visual diary has remained double wrapped in plastic.
But I'd also thought that I'd ink in a light pen over the top of my pencils and then use photo shop to do the big black fills instead of using a sharpie. Except photoshop is not exactly intuitive, nor easy and I realised I'd have to spend a month or so extra just learning how to do what I wanted to do.
It took me over an hour to figure out how to draw a rectangle of my desired frame width, something that befuddled the straight forward way I thought it should work.
So I decided to just print out each page on it's own sheet so I could use any pen I damn fucking well liked.
In hindsight it probably would have been good to print them all to A3 for the really fine detail, I just thought of this then though and I also think it would inevitably double my workload and ink consumption. I am not good enough at drawing to really warrent the effort required to do it justice. Infact it wouldn't be doing it justice, like giving someone like Paris Hilton a billion dollar inheritance.
Anyway the first thing I had to learn about was paper stocks, Harvard suggested 'bank pad' because I wanted something bitey like my visual diary but that I could feed through a printer. He said he had to use it at work but hated it. And much like harvard loves rice and hates potatoes while I love potatoes and hate rice (if you follow my meaning) I figured that would be good.
Turns out Office works doesn't sell Bank Pad, but I am eager to learn about where one can go to buy and order all different types of paper. Now that I've done something where that is an important decision I find myself desiring a specialty shop just for paper stocks. I'm sure one will exist, like dean's art or some shit. But I didn't have time, because time is money and I want to finish this thing someday.
Anyway I pretty much made the decision based on the only variable available to me, or rather two variables. Price/gsm. Gsm I assume is grams per meter squared, Harvard texted to say 'thickness' but I couldn't find shit about roughness. I bought 110 gms inkjet hp paper because I figured I was inking and so something that is good for inkspots over burning must be good for ink based pens.
I have already sighted the De La Soul tribute to pens, I don't for the record like papermate, there cheaparse eraser fucked up a lot of my drawing.
But here are the various pens I have accumulated in the last 4 days:
1. Sharpies classic (for shading large areas and black fills) 2. Super sharpie (a big version of 1 when concerned about my Sharpies drying out) 3. Mini sharpies (a small version of 1 that goes on a keychain, and a super small version of 2) 4. Unineedle 0.1 mm fineliner black (my weapon of chioce for detailing) 5. Uniball 0.5 mm ballpoint black (good for detailing on larger scale pictures and doing hair textures and what not) 6. 3 x 0.5 mm fineliner Steadler (for doing thick lines and non-detail lines) 7. Shitty biro black brand unknown (ballpoint with sticky low quality ink which I use for blood effects)
The trick to inking I have discovered is trying to not swap pens as often as possible. Starting with detail is less than ideal though and I still work one frame at a time largely because this is the only way I can keep track of what I've done and what I'm yet to do. But if you start with the detail you end up using the fineliner 0.1 mm on a bunch of lines it would be much faster and really need the 0.5 for. So I like to work from big to small, but shading last. I guess there isn't much sense to that because if you fuck up the shading and have to start again you have wasted the most amount of effort. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Still though I am amazed at how much can be achieved with two colours black and not-black. Or rather I'm not using white per se, but negative space to shape textures and spaces and even the different kinds of ink make tremendous difference.
Again I'm so glad I've done this, the images are finally coming to life, and I can see close to what it will look like in print. Anyone whose life is stalling, I recommend this process over travel.
