is this thing on?

yeah i’m still here, just haven’t felt much like writing anything here for a bit. so time for a status update:

the bump is getting bigger by the day – not long now and i won’t be the smelliest, noisiest, least mature member of the household

and i think i am having sympathetic pregnancy issues – or it could be all the junk food and complete lack of exercise. not looking forward to my diabetes/cholesterol check next week…

on the uni front last semester i got a way better mark than i expected/deserve for one of my subjects which is a good thing cos it would have been really embarrassing to have a fail on my transcript for a subject called “How Should I Live” (it was a philosophy subject about ethical theories – why they couldn’t just call it Ethical Theory i don’t know). still waiting for the results on my other subject for last semester which haven’t been posted as yet – that’s what happens when the guy running the subject is a scatterbrained academic – makes for amusing lectures but is hopeless when it comes to paperwork. next semester i am taking a break to spend sleepless nights with the new arrival rather than last minute essay writing.

no i haven’t quit my job. yes i still work with incompetents and idiots.

and in the ‘jumping on the bandwagon after it has stalled and run into a ditch’ front i have discovered the sound editing software on my PC and have been making mash-up / noise CDRs. quality is variable but at least some have turned out kind of interesting – 15 to date.

also have started on my first collaboration effort with the venerable Shit Magnet – we have managed to complete two tracks so far and who knows we may even get around to finishing a whole CD at some point.

watch this space.

rattling around the void

 i am too lazy and too tired to bother with a proper post but felt like putting something on this thing.

so a brief wrap up of activity around void central:

the bump: growing nicely thanks, heartbeat was at 155bpm at last check up so  right on target according to the doc which is good. what’s not so great is J feeling knackered all the time and having stretchy ligament pain. i try to empathise but the only thing stretching on me is my gut from sitting behind a desk all day and eating too much bad food when she is not around…

work: for fuck sake somebody please just make a fucking decision already.

uni: deadlines rapidly approaching for essays that i haven’t even looked at the questions for yet – and a new and exciting habit i’ve developed recently of falling asleep in my lectures, literally.

so procrastinating a lot then?: you bet. procrastinating to avoid study combined with the fact that J was interstate for a few days and the cat didn’t care if i stayed up till 4 in the morning fucking around on the computer has meant some prime procrastination action. it’s amazing how many new blogs you can find and decide that you MUST book mark ‘cos you know you will OF COURSE go back and read them regularly if you really try. but i’ve also been mucking about with noise mash up/cut up manipulations which has been at least fun to make if nothing else.

the results so far:

the two women ep (cdr) – noise manipulations and a remix thingy of one of Kami’s shitfinger tracks.

search and destroyed (cdr) – an hour and a bit long desecration of the stooges song  search and destroy

mangles the classics (cdr)  – a big mash up mess – 13 tracks of wank jokes, mismatched guitar riffs, out of time drum samples and wholesale songs smushed together in a noisy, ugly stew.

pointless and stupid but it keeps me amused.

treehugger

before i start i should point out that i am NOT any kind of rabid anti-environmentalist or such, i quite like trees… (i am not necessarily some sort of advocate for Singer or his philosophy either)

i have learnt a lot since i started going to Uni and often the readings are thought provoking and even if you don’t agree with the text there is usually things to think about and discuss or form an argument against / opinion of, and then of course occasionally you come across some horseshit like this:

direct quote from text assigned as a reading:

“Singer defends his exclusion of allegedly non-conscious vegetable life with the claim that ‘if a tree is not sentient, it makes no difference to the tree whether we chop it down or not’ (Singer 1997). But if a tree is a striving (teleological) and adaptive being, it must select some states to strive for (for example continued life, best development) and others to avoid (death).” 

here’s another one (and yes i may now be pulling out quotes from a different (assigned) text without context but still direct quote nonetheless):

“Because I see the oppression of women and the other animals as interdependant…”
and
“… vegetarianism acts as a sign of autonomous female being and signals a rejection of male control and violence.”

and so on it goes, utter fucking wank!!

fucking vegetarian telepathic dolphin loving woman-nature-native construct oppressed by the patriarchal dividend sexual politics of meat eating as a cultural discourse bollocks

makes me wish i was back in cog sci

</rant>

when sub-cultures collide

overheard in the corridor at uni, one preppy looking girl screwing up her face and saying disdainfully to another: “Her! she’s one of those emus” (pronounced as e-mooz).

which apart from making me laugh and think that an emu (as in the bird) was a pretty good, albeit unintentional, metaphor for an emo also reminded me of when I was in high school (1980’s) and it was rockers vs skins. in my school that basically came down to wether you wore black jeans, black socks and black sneakers (rocker) or blue jeans, red socks and white sneakers (skin) and not much more beyond that (certainly not the racism and violence usually associated).

being the complete dork that I was I of course didn’t fit in with the ‘cool’ group of kids who all thought of themselves as rockers (which in hindsight is hilarious as they all had band names like Australian Crawl and Dire Straits written all over their schoolbags).

i also wasn’t academic enough to be one of the squares either so ended up on the fringes largely for 3 main reasons:

1) my mother volunteered at both the school library AND the kiosk

2) I had a HUGE crush on the Malaysian exchange teacher who taught the ESL kids

3) I liked bands like Dead Kennedys and Motorhead

it was hard going at the time but looking back I figure fuck peer pressure who wants to be sheep anyway (which is much easier to say and think at 36 than when you’re 14). and besides I still think I had better taste in music than the rest of ‘em

edumacation

*** Warning – gratuitous bragging below ***

so i finally got my uni results for last semester and am well chuffed; a distinction for Cognitive Science and a high distinction for foundation linguistics. not too shabby considering i did it while also holding down a full time job, if i do say so myself.

*** ok, self congratulation over now – back to the usual sporadic blogs about nuthin’ much soon ***

Get thee to a real estate agent.

Why won’t you post my results for god sake???

Ever moved to the other side of the world for 6 months and not had accommodation? I’ll let you know what its like.

deadlines, schmedlines….

and so this blog returns to its original raison d'etre…

with two uni essays due and rapidly approaching deadlines i am of course procrastinating for all i'm worth. the fact that one of the essays is worth half the mark for the entire subject and panic induced reflux pain notwithstanding.

and to think, before i had a blog i used to just waste time by tossing off while listening to PJ Harvey records performing volunteer charity work

colours

in unrelated uni stuff in the linguistics lecture today was talk about language universals.

apparently there are about 6000 languages in the world and in ALL of them (hence the universal bit) if they have words for more than 2 colour terms the third one will always be the equivalent of 'red'.

The sixth one will always be 'brown'.

i don't know why but i find that both freaky and fantastic.

BINGO!

in my cognitive science tute today (discussion of how perception and memory works in the brain) somebody actually made a reference to the movie The Matrix. admittedly it wasn't the guy I thought would do it but close enough for me.

uni adventures

my wednesday arvo philosophy tute is rapidly turning into the cognitve science comedy hour.

there is the guy who last week was quoting characters from Star Wars. this week it was a reference to Fight Club. i'm thinking of starting a pool, i reckon it is only a matter of time before there is a Matrix reference pulled out, he's still got a few weeks to go.

But the best is the special dickhead, let's call him dickhead S. this is the guy who inevitably hijacks every tute with his loud voice and overbearing nature. the same guy who likes to make grand pronouncements like "Hegel is wrong." Well he has excelled himself. i can't remeber the exact words so i will have to paraphrase as close as i can recall but the following are some of the things that he said this week…

"… and who here actually believes 9/11 really happened"

"… it's not a conspiracy theory if it's true"

"well, Galileo and Copernicus were called conspiracy theorists at the time and they were proven to be right in the end"

the really scary thing is i think he is serious and really believes this stuff