Day 334: A bit fishy

< 30 Seconds. & it shows too.

Day 333: This one's ugly

Yuck.

Day 332: Gasbaggin' with Rellies

I'm lucky I got anything up at all before midnight.

Day 331: The rellies wanted to watch Junior Eurovision

I normally stay away from it, and here's why: 99% of the time, the kids are jumping around, yelling, looking like they're having the time of their lives, and then you'll catch a glimpse of one of them looking like this …

… and then I start to worry. And the news today's been all about Don Burke, so my mind kept going to some of the darker stories from the Harvey Weinstein fallout. Jeez, I hope all of these kids are okay.

Day 330: High-waisted men's pants

Much like pointy shoes, this is a trend I never expected to see coming back; however, I've spotted a number of these in the wild now.

Day 329: Queenslanders go to the poles

Also, there was an election or something. I dunno, I wasn't really paying attention.

Day 328: Minimum Effort!

Goodnight

Day 327: Hmmph

Another rush job.

Day 326: Oh shit, it's 11 o'clock already

So here's 3 minutes of doodling.

Day 325: Ending on a high note

Just watched the final game in The Ashes series, and it was a fantastic show. Mooney came out to bat for Australia, and set records for both the highest individual total and highest team total in an Australian T20 match. Then a shocking performance in the field allowed the Poms to fight back for the victory - breaking the newly-set team record in the process. Very entertaining indeed. Bring on The WomBBL, I say!

I think this sums up Australia's day pretty succinctly.

Day 324: Stranger Danger

I've had the second season of Stranger Things for a while, but I finally sat down and watched it yesty, with me cousins, after we ran out of things to talk about.

Dear, oh dear, what a mess.

I will come back and elaborate, once I've cleared the hordes out of my home. In the meantime, feel free to share your opinions.

Day 323: NOT sleeping in today

Another elderly rellie dropped off the perch. Got family members here for the next few days. Again. Might be on auto-pilot here for a little while.

Probably not an appropriate picky, but I haven't got time to do anything else right now.

Day 322: Slow Day

It rained, and I laid in bed reading shit on the tablet for most of it.

Day 321: Australia retain The Ashes

It's amazing how even a one-sided T20 match is leagues more exciting than a bloody test.

When I was young, I used to think that it was called "The Ashes" because of the fag sponsorship.

Day 320: Boiling Frog

The web has always worked because of standards. The big players in the game come together, they all argue in favour of the things that will give them an advantage, they all argue against things that will give their competitors an advantage, and at the end of the process, they come to some sort of compromise which they all decide to implement. This process is very slowly going away. It'll no doubt continue as an empty shadow play, but for all intents and purposes …

Google control some of the most popular and essential sites on the internet, in the form of Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs (thankfully Google+ never took off against FaceBook); they also control the most popular search engine in the world and one of the biggest advertising networks in the world; and they've long used this fact to shape the web how they want it; basically by telling website owners "Do what we want, or we'll cut you off from our ad revenue and bury your site in our search results so that nobody will ever find it".

Now that Google Chrome has cemented itself as the world's most popular web browser, they're finally in a position where they can ignore standards completely and start unilaterally dictating how the web should work. Chrome recently implemented its own built in ad-blocker, that only blocks "low quality" ads, which—surprise, surprise—doesn't include Google ads. And now they've announced that they're going to block whole websites that behave in ways they don't approve of.

No doubt, the first batch of sites that end up on Google's shitlist will be really obnoxious or malicious, and everyone will rejoice at their blocking; but personally, this isn't the direction I want to see the web heading in.

Apologies if I've covered this before. My memory is terrible these days.

Day 319: Spit-take

My tap water currently tastes like it's being siphoned out of somebody's swimming pool. I take back every bad thing I ever said about bottled water.

Day 318: Tech News

This is another story that's a bit old now, but I often forget that most people don't listen to the same news shows that I do. Just recently, there was a bit of a kerfuffle, when Google locked a bunch of people out of their accounts because its automated systems detected that they were distributing hate speech. To be clear, these were people who were writing collaborative documents in Google docs that were NOT public. One woman was a fiction writer who was sharing a manuscript with her editor.

This is not a warning against using cloud storage, just a reminder that you should also be keeping copies of your files on a local hard drive as well.

I've already lost one Google account permanently and been temporarily locked out of this one twice. All because I hide my IP Address and won't register a phone number.

Day 317: Flying Fuckheads

This afternoon I heard a racket coming from outside my window. I looked out to see old mate Currawong being chased by two Noisey Miners. About an hour later, I heard a tapping sound, and looked out to see Currawong hopping across the neighbour's roof with one of his wings hanging down. Fucking cunts!

Day 316: Slow Day

Test match reached its inevitable conclusion today by fizzling out to a draw. Most exciting part of the day was trying to count how many times Georgia Elwiss picked a wedgie.

Must be uncomfortable having the elastic go when you've gotta spend all day standing in front of a crowd of thousands.

Day 315: The Bullshit Bandwagon

*sigh* I suppose this was inevitable, but it's not like I've got anything better to talk about tonight …

I was fiddling with a computer today, while catching up on my news podcasts, and amongst a whole bunch of stories regarding the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein debacle, there was this one about Kevin Spacey "attempting to rape" an underage boy. First of all, I'd like to say that my opinions on this matter are specific to this one story as it was presented to me and should not be applied to any other version of the story or any other story about Spacey or anybody else. Here's what I heard: Eighteen year old "boy" approaches Spacey in a pub; Spacey buys this "kid" drinks all night long; at the end of the night, Spacey goes the grope; the boy leaves; end of story.

Call me old fashioned, but even when I was eighteen, I understood that if I let a bloke buy me drinks all night, at some point there was going to be a hand somewhere. I'm not saying that anyone who accepts a drink from someone is obligated to fuck them, but when you accept drink after bloody drink, you're sending a message that there's some interest there, and so naturally, at some point, that person is going to try to advance things—at which point you can accept or reject said advance. Calling this attempted rape seems so over the top to me that it completely boggles my mind. Believe it or not, I'm not particularly in favour of trying to engineer a society that is so sterile and robotic that all forms of physical contact have to be preceded by explicit and enthusiastic verbal consent from a non-intoxicated second party. Think I'm being hyperbolic? Well, this story was followed by an interview with a feminist academic who enlightened me on the types of male behaviour which constitute rape culture:

• Looking at women in a sexual manner.
• Talking about women in a sexual manner.
• Touching women in any way without explicit and enthusiastic verbal consent.
• Escalating a sexual situation without explicit and enthusiastic verbal consent.
• Engaging in sexual acts with women who have consumed drugs or alcohol, regardless of how enthusiastic or explicit their consent might be.

Putting aside the fact that there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between this and the homosexual encounter described in the story, I kept waiting for her to pepper her rhetoric with some nuance; but nope, these rules are supposedly meant to apply across the board. Ever tried to have drunk sex with your husband/boyfriend *cough*? Apparently you've been sexually assaulted, and are the victim of rape culture.

Why is it that whenever we get examples of legitimate bad behaviour from blokes in power, these fuckin' lunatics crawl out of the woodwork and try their best to make the whole damned thing look like hysterical nonsense dreamed up by delusional women with no grasp of reality? It's not helping.

Day 314: Watched the women's test match this evening with the rellies.

It seems test matches are all the same, regardless of who plays them.

Day 313: Angry Birds

There's these birds that live near my place; I dunno what they are 'cause I don't come from here; but they're, like, three shades of grey, with a little bit of black and white trim, and really yellow beaks. Anyway, they've been here for at least as long as I have; but this year, for the very first time, they've decided to go full magpie bomber mode. I am puzzled by this sudden change in behaviour. I wonder what caused it?

Day 312: More rellies arriving tomorrow

At least these ones were thoughtful enough to ring ahead, but I'm still reeling from last weekend. I honestly feel like I could sleep standing up at the moment. Definitely won't be drinking this time around.

Day 311: Quick and Easy

Scarecrow thing? Something?

Day 310: Cousin Tanya Returns

I think the last time I wrote about cousin Tanya was in the days when it was just me and Melbs here, so apologies if some of this is a bit cryptic. Anyway, it seems me cousin and her fella have finally split the sheets for good. And now she's got … some bloke in Thailand that she met over the internet. Hoo-boy. So she dropped in for a few days before she flies out to meet this fella for the first time. So, I got to spend my weekend listening to her gush like a sixteen year old while she texted this bloke non-stop.

I'm wishin' her luck, but I'll be buggered if this whole deal doesn't seem like a bloody disaster waitin' to happen.

Jeezus, I hope this isn't me in ten years.

Day 309: Recovery

There was a reason I gave this up

Day 308: Hangover

Sick as a dog

Day 307: Unexpected Guest

Cousin blew into town a few hours ago looking for a place to crash. Don't expect much from me for the next few days.

Day 306: With people like this on the job, the kids in Africa have nothing to worry about

Hi there, can you stop and talk for a minute?

No, sorry, I've got somewhere I need to be.

That's okay, I'll walk with you.

...?

So, where are you from?

All over the place, how about you?

Oh, can you guess?

...? Well, judging by your accent, and the job you're doing, I'd say you're a German backpacker.

Wow, high-five!

The high-fives came thick and fast after that.

Day 305: Something Different

Not necessarily good, just different.