In the mood for misery porn?

I've spent a lot of time over the last week, listening to Ak Nation News. In case you're wondering, No, I've got no idea what the name "Ak Nation" is a reference to. What I can do, however, is tell you what Ak Nation does. It's a news agregation and commentary channel on YouTube, that exclusively covers black violence in America. The bloke who runs it is a former drug dealer and "straight up hood nigga", who doesn't beat around the bush with his analysis. Very entertaining to listen to, but the constant barrage of horror does wear you down after a while. Try listening to somebody talk about "yet another shoot-out at a six-year-old's birthday party" without getting a little misty-eyed, I dare you!

Here's a few things I have learned from listening to Mr Ak:

1. Whites commit a handful of mass-shootings every year. Blacks commit—on average—two mass shootings every day. And remember, that's only MASS shootings we're talking about.
2. Despite making up only 13% of the population, Blacks commit more than 50% of all violent crime.
3. Statistically, the correlation between violent crime and poverty is much MUCH weaker than the correlation between crime and race. A town full of poor Whites will almost always have less violent crime than a town full of middle-income Blacks.
4. This trend holds up when you look at cities with Black (African) populations all over the world, not just in the United States.
5. Any town in America that has a Black population above 10%, will have a serious problem with violent crime.
6. The cities that have the highest rates of violent crime, also have the largest Black populations, and tend to have Black mayors, Black cops, Black police commisioners, Black judges—are sometimes in states with Black governors—and are almost always top-to-bottom Democrat run.
7. Since George Floyd's death, a number of these cities have scaled back their police presence. This year, Black death's have risen by 35%. So, for every 100 Blacks who were gunned down in May last year, 135 were gunned down this year.
8. A growing number of young Black men are now openly bragging about their crimes on social media. Some have even taking to filming themselves in the act, as a way of garnishing "street cred".

So, what conclusions does ol' Ako draw from all this? I'll try my best to sum up some of his thoughts:

White liberals don't wanna admit it, but niggas just be wired this way. You can throw all the social programs, and mental health experts, and youth centers you want at these neighbourhoods, and it ain't gonna make a god-damned lick o' difference. What you gotta understand is that smokin' a nigga feels good. When you kill somebody, you get a rush, it makes you feel powerful, it's how you build status with your peers. When a nigga smokes some little kid, he don't feel bad about it. Ain't no sleepless nights spent tossin' and turning' - tormented with regret - thinkin' about no grief-stricken parents. You wanna know what niggas actually be thinkin' about after they kill somebody's kid? They be thinkin' "Shit man, I hope I don't get caught." The only way you gonna get a lid on this thing is with more cops and more life-sentences. Let these niggas rot in prison. And even that ain't gonna be no solution. There ain't no solution … 'cause the problem be hard-wired, man … but at least you can keep things under control … unlike what we got now … where things is completely out of control … and getting worse every god-damned day.

A lot's been happening … I guess

Hello there. I'm back. hopefully, for more than a week, this time.

As you might have guessed, I've been up at the new house—where things have not been going particularly smoothly. I've decided I'm not paying to get the NBN put on until people are living there permanently. My folks are fine with this, since they're already used to not having a home internet connection, and have been accessing the web with prepaid mobile SIM cards for close to a decade now.

Of course, because they like to travel to some pretty remote places, they use Telstra almost exclusively. Being the clever clogs that I am, I decided to save some money, and buy a 500GB prepaid data package through one of the 1001 Vodafone resellers. After all, it's not like this new place is out in the fuckin' sticks somewhere. On the contrary, it's part of a new estate built on the edge of a major urban area. Boy, was I in for a rude fuckin' shock, let me tell you.

… Not a single fuckin' bar. Oh, except if I walk down to the end of the street; then it's all guns blazing. What an absolute cunt of a situation. I tell you what, I'm thankful for the existence of technology which allows you to work offline, and then periodically sync your work with a master version of the project on a remote machine—AND—which is smart enough to only upload/download the chunks of files which have actually changed.

Which reminds me, I don't think I've ever been as ragged as when I got back home the other day. While I was away, I spent every day doing renovations, every evening catching up with rellies, and then every night on the computer, trying to catch up on work-work that actually pays the bills and stuff. Sleep was generally something that occurred between the hours of 3am and 7am. By the end of it, I was absolutely rooted. I got home and slept for two days.

Also, my fuckin' feet hurt, and I don't know why. … by which, I mean, they REALLY fuckin' hurt.

On a positive note, I am hoping that my Autumnal allergy woes might have come to an end. It seems that—somehow—scented bog roll had found its way into my toilet-paper cupboard. … and yes, I happen to have an entire cupboard devoted to storing toilet paper … who doesn't these days? And it also seems that, before I left, I had been using said scented bog roll to blow my nose. Imagine the bitter irony of realising that for weeks, every time you sneezed, you'd been unwittingly smearing your face with the very shit that was making you sneeze. At this point you may be wondering why I didn't wake up to this fact sooner. Well, because I make it a point to never ever buy scented bog roll; so why it was even in my cupboard in the first place, I do not know. I suspect my parents probably bought it for me as a gift. We generally don't do Christmas and birthday presents in my family, but it's not unusual that the first thing my folks do when they come to visit is hand me a grocery bag and say something along the lines of, "When we were shopping the other week, they had a really good special on toothpaste, so we got you a dozen tubes." I suppose I shall have to be more vigilant from now on.

Hey, remember my story about using BitCoin for the first time? Remember how I said, I had to pay forty fucking dollars in transaction fees, and that I'd read that there were alternate coins that were designed to mitigate that problem? Well, it turns out the person that I paid the BitCoins to has started using said alt-coins … which will be great, if I ever want to deal with them in the future; but it also means that I could have saved myself forty fuckin' dollars if I'd dealt with them now rather than a month ago. I know that forty quid isn't a great deal in the grand scheme of things, but there's something about the way these little niggly things build up that really gets my goat.

Finally, Eurovision happened. This must be the first time in quite a while that I haven't put up a page going over what I thought of all the acts. It just felt like too much work this year. Plus, none of the acts were really that exciting. I didn't hate Italy, but didn't particularly like them either. I am glad that France didn't win, as I thought they were exceptionally shit. I noticed there were a few "black power" songs in the mix, which got under my skin a little bit. It felt like another case of the world getting sick because America sneezed. I found the sassy, fat, black woman from Malta—singing about how powerful and sexy she was—to be particularly obnoxious; the Serbian women looked like they belonged on a reality show about the horrors of plastic surgery addiction; and Latvia's entry was either a troll or some sort of artistic statement that went completely over my head. My favourites were Iceland and Greece, in case you're wondering.

Oh, one last thing. I barely read comics anymore. It's some combination of not having the time, and not being able to find anything that really grabs me. There are two long-running strips—by which I mean, a single ongoing story rather than a collection of adventures—which I have been absolutely devoted to in my lifetime. The first is an Aussie strip called Platinum Grit, which was put on indefinite hiatus by its creator several years ago. The website disappeared last year. I'm not holding my breath for it to return. The second, is a Japanese manga series called Berserk. The creator of Berserk has been writing and drawing it for thirty years. Apparently, he has stated (in Japanese) that he is on the last leg of the story and expects to finish it within about ten years or so. The other day, he dropped dead from a sudden heart attack at the age of 54.

It's weird. That was the last bit of pop-culture I can think of that I could say I had any real, serious, unironic investment in. I'm not plugged in anymore. The last cord's been cut. There's nothing there for me now. Everything I care about culturally (beyond a superficial level) is now past tense. I dunno, it's like I just started feeling old in a way that I never have before.

How's things been with you?

Why, Autumn, Why

I used to like Autumn. You get the nice mild weather of Spring, but without the hayfever. No longer. For the last few years, I've had serious—SERIOUS—bouts of hayfever in Autumn. I can't describe how bad it's been. Like a really bad bout of the flu, but with constant sneezing, endless streams of mucus, and insufferable, unbearable, unrelenting fucking itching. It's been hell.

In other news, I used bitcoin for the first time the other day. After the shit that happened in America in January, a lot of people got kicked off of payment platforms like PayPal. On top of that, a lot of people who didn't get kicked off, came to the conclusion that their days were numbered, and started moving towards dealing with less fragile payment options—such as crypto coins. Last week, I purchased services from somebody who has transitioned their business dealings entirely to bitcoin.

I have to say, the experience was kind of shit.

In case you didn't know, when you transfer bitcoin between accounts, you have to pay a transaction fee. HOWEVER, unlike conventional payment systems, the fee isn't a set amount or percentage. Instead, you "bid" to get your transaction confirmed. The lower your bid, the longer it takes your transaction to go through. If your bid is too low, your transaction won't process at all. Instead, it'll "time out" after about 24hrs. Yes, that means that unless you want to spend a fortune on fees, you have to sit around for a full day wondering about whether or not your transaction is going to process or not.

So, "How much does it cost to get a transaction through immediately?", you might ask. Well, as it turns out, the exchange I signed up to didn't allow you to set the amount manually; instead, automatically using whatever the going rate was.

FORTY FUCKIN' DOLLARS!

Apparently, there's alternate currencies that've been designed to solve this problem. Monero and Ethereum are two names I hear thrown around a lot, but I haven't used them, so I can't comment. I just hope I don't find myself having to use bitcoin too much in the future. What an annoying and costly pain in the arse.

How have things been with you?

Early Warning Signs?

Remember Dave the tradie from my previous post? This post is about him.

Dave and his missus split up years ago, because she went insane. That's not hyperbole, she was literally mentally ill—like—with paranoid delusions and shit. And I'm not just taking Dave's word for it; I've got rellies who've met her.

He tried to look after her for years, but your options for controlling another adult—even a raving lunatic—are pretty limited. Eventually, he was getting worried for the safety of the kids, so he moved out and took them with him.

I was talking to Dave the other day, and he was telling me he's getting worried about his teenage daughter. Even though she hasn't been around her mother since she was a baby, he's starting to notice all kinds of odd little behavioural quirks that her mother exhibited, back in the days before she went off the deep end.

Maybe he's just being overly fearful, and worrying about little things that aren't that important; but it does make you wonder about how inheritable these things are, doesn't it?

What're The Odds?

Did you know that when they made the Ghostbusters cartoon, the role of the Bill Murray character was given to the voice actor who played Garfield … and then decades later, Bill Murray was cast as the voice of Garfield in the CGI movie?

What are the odds of that happening? Huh?

Okay, here's an even better one; what are the odds that I would hear that same bit of useless trivia brought up in conversation on five different fucking podcasts in the space of a week? How the fuck does such an utterly useless bit of information become so viral that suddenly everybody's fucking talking about it? That's what I actually want to fucking know!

… Yeah, okay, alright, I'll get onto the post propper then …

There's a tradie working on my parents' new house at the moment—Let's call him Dave. Dave is an old friend of my brother. They met by chance when they were both living in the top end. It's a complete coincidence that Dave now happens to live in the town where my parents bought their retirement house. But that's not all. Dave's parents also happen to be friends with my aunt and uncle, whom they met in a completely different part of the country, under completely unrelated circumstances.

Now, the population of Australia isn't that big, and I've got a pretty large, and well spread-out family, but this got me wondering; what are the odds of the scenario I just described actually happening? I mean—like—if you were seriously going to work it out—like—mathematically or whatever?

More moving shit.

I'll be heading off again tomorrow. Will try to get a substantive post up at some point, but no guarantees. If I don't get back in time, have a happy Easter.

In other news, I noticed that the dodgy hack which allowed me to pin the general conversation thread to the top of the page has stopped working. I assume this has something to do with the update that's made the Blogger dashboard look and work like a mobile phone app (even on desktop). I suppose this means I'll have to edit the template now if a want a permanently pinned post.

It's all so tiresome.*

* Let me know if you get this reference.

It's been a while ...

Once again, I apologise.

I've been helping my parents move house. The process has been slow and tedious. Work has needed to be done on both the new and the old house. So far, there is no end in sight.

I currently have half my stuff here and half my stuff there. It's enough so that I can live and work in both places, but not comfortably. I forever find myself thinking, "Oh shit, such-and-such is in the other place".

It's not the worst thing in the world, I suppose; I could have broken my leg, for instance. But it's been enough of a pain in the arse that I haven't had the patience to fight with Google, who continue to root me around when it comes to logging into this account. Their latest trick is to hit me with error messages after I type my username in. Fuckin' cunts.

Anyway, what's been going on with youse mob? Are you getting the jab? Any reservations, or are you chomping at the bit to get it?