1. Home
  2. Journal

Suzy McHale’s Journal: 2012

January

Sunday 1/1: New year; blocked ear

Another year begins. I have no resolutions; they seem pointless as does my life generally.

Some people in a street behind me were letting off a few illegal fireworks last night. There seems to be a lot of these around; where do people get the fireworks if these are banned? They were banned for good reason.

Today is hot and the heat in the mid-30’s continues for the next two days. My ear is still blocked so I am more uncomfortable than usual (I can’t get to the doctor till Tuesday, no thanks to the annoying substitute public holiday tomorrow).

Tuesday 3/1: Hearing again; Halo merchandise

I had my ear cleaned out today at the GP’s (eww!) so I can hear in stereo again.

Yesterday reached 40°C in Melbourne, the first for this summer, and it will be in the high 30’s today before a cool change.

I found the novel Halo: Primordium (the sequel to Halo: Cryptum) for sale at Big W today, much to my surprise as it is being released tomorrow in the USA (they are a day behind). I did not really enjoy Cryptum that much as the writing was a bit dry, though there were interesting concepts (one reason I read sci-fi), and so did not pre-order Primordium. The online excerpts did not get me very excited so I bought it more out of duty than enthusiasm. Perhaps it will improve further in. I have not read Greg Bear’s earlier novels.

A few weeks ago I bought a Halo figurine I had been anticipating at what is now the only store that stocks them reasonably quickly, Minotaur in Melbourne (my alternate source, a game store in Chadstone, closed a couple of months ago to my dismay). Much to my annoyance it had a finger missing so I returned it (fortunately the store refunded me), but now I have nowhere else to buy a replacement as Minotaur only seem to get one of each in.

Thursday 5/1: Rich Russians

I was casually looking at handbags in David Jones today (I’m in need of a new one). One of the priciest there was a Yves Saint Laurent leather bag for nearly $3000! Just a little out of my price range … I’m limited to $20 or so Made-in-China synthetic ones.

I came across this article, “Midnight in Moscow,” published in Vanity Fair in 2006, about the hedonistic lifestyle of Russia’s mega-rich (oligarches and such). A peculiarly depressing read of what the country has become now – shallow and depraved. There is an undertone of desperation and abandonment, of people trying to escape an emptiness within – at least that’s the impression I get. (From a similar article: “Hanging a nickname on the boss remains the closest they can come to the inner character of the man, which remains inscrutable, if not downright blank. ‘There is no one there,’ says one employee.”) The women described are all young and impossibly beautiful, but have to prostitute themselves to survive in that world – effectively sell their souls. Is it a lifestyle to envy? Once they get older they will be discarded for newer and younger models.

Karina, from Volgograd, is celebrating her birthday upstairs at the V.I.P. tables ringing the main dance hall. “All these girls come to Moscow,” she says, casting her eyes at the sea of women below, many of whom have traveled great distances to hunt oilmen and those who own banks. “They’re looking for a guy who will buy them a car and give them $100,000.” Karina flicks her blond hair and it kaleidoscopes through all available light. “Not me. I came here for $10 million.” In this society, it is mainly the men who practice the commerce. The fairer sex works the angles. It is clear from talking to Karina and others that these girls are not cheap. Instead of fighting for the Western ideal of gender equality, which is not an option, they have become super-feminine, exerting all the power a brutally beautiful woman can bring to bear, which is not inconsiderable.

The only good thing about having all that money is being able to afford the best health care.

I rarely write about what’s happening in the world now; I have quit caring much, due to a feeling of hopelessness and apathy. This civilization may end up destroying itself like so many others before it, only this time it would be so much worse because of the huge number of people and the devastation inflicted upon the environment. At least the oligarches would become dust like everyone else, all their wealth and power ultimately meaningless.

Wednesday 11/1: Weather extremes

In a familiar weather pattern for this time of year, a wintry cold front with rain, hail and gale force winds came through Melbourne today, a contrast to the 40°C heat of just over a week ago. There was snow in mountainous areas of Victoria and the temperature only got to 20°C or so. (21/1/2010, 3/1/2009, and January entries from earlier years.) I neglected to mention last month that the Pilbara in Western Australia had its highest-ever recorded temperature of 49°C on 23/12!

Sunday 22/1: Wallet handed in

The unpleasantly hot weather has returned after that respite, sadly!

I found a wallet on the road during my early morning bicycle road today! I handed it in to a nearby police station, so hopefully the owner will soon be contacted about it; as it contained various important cards they will be frantic with worry. They must have dropped it the previous evening perhaps after a night out. I hope that the same would be done for me if I lost my wallet! Unfortunately in this society it is hit-or-miss as to how people will behave in such a situation when finding valuables.

Incidentally, an annoying feature of police stations now is that the local stations in most suburbs were “rationalized,” closed down in the 1990s and relocated to a few big complexes in each council region. The one for my region is about 7.6 km away by the most direct road route, so it is hardly local! The nearest center is actually only a few minutes away (which is where I went to hand in the wallet), but as that is in another council jurisdiction it is not supposed to be contacted. Council boundaries were redrawn during Premier Jeff Kennett’s authoritarian regime in the 1990s, so that is another thing to dislike him for. Below is a local paper article from 2005 (not online):

City’s brutal carve-up

Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader, 27 July 2005

By Todd Cardy

MOORABBIN has lost its sense of community after a “brutal” municipal carve-up in 1994, a church leader says.

The Rev Peter Horman, of St David’s Anglican Church, wants to recapture past emotions of belonging. The priest will head a community day to rally Moorabbin residents on Sunday, July 31. “One of the things that has struck me since coming to Moorabbin is the great affection residents retain for that name and the city it once described,” Mr Horman said. “The brutal carve-up of Moorabbin city was terrible – so very damaging for the community.”

The gathering will take place at the Redholme St church where residents can meet and retell old anecdotes. Local government amalgamations in the early 1990s split the suburb of Moorabbin between Kingston, Glen Eira and Bayside councils. Residents north of South Rd are now considered to live in Bentleigh and those west of the railway in Hampton East.

Former Moorabbin and Glen Eira mayor Barry Neve backed Mr Horman’s campaign, labelling the break-up of Moorabbin “a stupid move”.

“You used to be able to cross South Rd and send your kids to preschool,” Mr Neve said. “Now you are crossing council lines.

“Moorabbin is a former city dismembered and only a shade of its former self.”

Kingston councillor Elizabeth Larking said: “I understand people feel like that, but we can’t go back.” Glen Eira Council spokesman Paul Burke said his focus was on making a community in Glen Eira, not Moorabbin.

Saturday 28/1: Handbag quest; time travel

Hot and humid again :-(.

The big news of the week was the file storage sites apocalypse, much to the dismay of many, who aquire otherwise-unotainable files that way. So far the fallout is for U.S.-based sites, so overseas ones are still unaffected, fortunately.

I have spent a few weeks in a frustrated search for the Perfect Handbag: it should be metallic in color (silver or pewter), medium to large in size (I seem to have a lot to carry), free of superfluous “bling” (i.e. useless decorative chains and buckles) and have a long adjustable shoulder strap. Unfortunately, current fashions do not include these, so I had to settle for a black version – synthetic of course as leather is too expensive.

The final volume of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series, called, uh, Inheritance, was released in November, but I have found it extremely tedious reading and have stalled after the death of Galbatorix, so I will try to finish it if I ever get the motivation.

Halo: Glasslands was okay-ish, though it is the first of a trilogy so it annoyingly finishes on a climax. The alien Elites seemed too much like humans in their behavior, and the novel has polarized Halo fans. I did not find it as compelling as the first few books of the author’s original Wess’har Wars series (see 2/6/2008 and 8/7/2008 entries).

One topic I have enjoyed reading about in the last few years is that of dinosaurs; like a lot of young children I went through a period of fascination with them, but things have changed greatly in the intervening years with new discoveries. One book from then I remember having was The Evolution and Ecology of the Dinosaurs, mentioned in this blog entry. The way many dinosaurs are drawn now has changed; many are quite freakish, almost alien in appearance.

I just read The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, which was quite good. I’ll quote a couple of passages of interest below:

THE EVOLUTION OF DINOSAURS AND THEIR WORLD

Dinosaurs appeared in a world that was both ancient and surprisingly recent – it is a matter of perspective. The human view that the age of dinosaurs was remote in time is an illusion that results from short life spans. A galactic year, the time it takes our solar system to orbit the center of the galaxy, is 200 million years. Only one galactic year ago the dinosaurs had just appeared on planet Earth. When dinosaurs first appeared, our solar system was already well over 4 billion years old, and 95 percent of the history of our planet had already passed. A time traveler arriving on the earth when dinosaurs first appeared would have found it both comfortingly familiar, and marvelously different from our time.

As the moon slowly spirals out from the earth because of tidal drag, the length of each day grows. When dinosaurs first evolved, a day was about 22 hours and 45 minutes long, and the year had 385 days; when they went largely extinct, a day was up to 23 hours and over 30 minutes, and the year was down to 371 days. The moon would have looked a little larger and would have more strongly masked the sun during eclipses – there would have been none of the rare annular eclipses in which the moon is far enough away in its elliptical orbit that the sun rings the moon at maximum. The “man on the moon” leered down upon the dinosaur planet, but the prominent Tycho crater was not blasted into existence until toward the end of the Early Cretaceous. As the sun converts an increasing portion of its core from hydrogen into helium, it becomes hotter by nearly 10 percent per billion years, so the sun was about 2 percent cooler when dinosaurs first showed up and around a half-percent cooler than it is now when most went extinct.

DINOSAUR SAFARI

Assume that a practical means of time travel has been invented, and, Field Guide to Dinosaurs in hand, you are ready to take a trip to the Mesozoic to see the dinosaurs’ world. What would such an expedition be like? Here we ignore some practical issues that might preclude such an adventure, such as the problem of cross-contaminating different time periods with exotic diseases.

Then there is the classic time paradox issue that plagues the very concept of time travel. What would happen if a time traveler to the dinosaur era did something that changed the course of events to such a degree that humans never evolved?

One difficulty that might arise could be the lack of modern levels of oxygen and extreme greenhouse levels of carbon dioxide (which can be toxic for unprepared animals), especially if the expedition traveled to the Triassic or Jurassic. Acclimation could be necessary, and even then, supplemental oxygen might be needed at least on an occasional basis. Movement and activities would be constrained if oxygen levels were well below modern standards.

Work at high altitudes would be even more difficult. Another problem would be the chronically high levels of heat in most dinosaur habitats. Relief would be found at high latitudes, at least during the perpetually dark winters, as well as on mountains.

Assuming that the safari were to one of the classic Mesozoic habitats that included gigantic dinosaurs, the biggest problem would be the sheer safety of the expedition members. The bureaucratic protocols developed for a Mesozoic expedition would emphasize safety, with the intent of keeping the chances of losing any participants to a bare minimum. Modern safaris in Africa require the presence of a guard armed with a rifle when visitors are not in vehicles in case of an attack by big cats, cape buffalo, rhinos, or elephants. Similar weaponry is needed in tiger country, in areas with large populations of grizzlies, and in Arctic areas inhabited by polar bears. The potential danger level would be even higher in the presence of flesh-eating dinosaurs as big as rhinos and elephants and easily able to run down a potentially out-of-breath human. It is possible that theropods would not recognize humans as prey, but it is at least as likely that they would, and the latter would have to be assumed. Aside from the desire to not kill members of the indigenous fauna, rifles, even automatic rapid-fire weapons, might not be able to reliably bring down a 5-tonne allosauroid or tyrannosaur, and heavier weapons would be impractical to carry about. Nor would the danger come from just the predators. A herd of whale-sized sauropods would pose a serious danger of trampling or impact from tails, especially if they were spooked by humans and either attacked them as a possible threat or stampeded in their direction. Sauropods would certainly be more dangerous than elephants, whose high level of intelligence allows them to better handle situations involving humans. The horned ceratopsids, even less intelligent than rhinos, and probably with the attitudes of oversized pigs, would pose another major danger.

Travel by foot would, therefore, probably be largely precluded in habitats that included big theropods, sauropods, and ceratopsids. Expedition members would have to move about on the ground in vehicles sufficiently large and strong to be immune from attacks by colossal dinosaurs. Movement away from the vehicles would be possible only when aerial vehicles, drones perhaps, could show that the area was safe. Nor would it be feasible to simply set up tents in a clearing. The camp would have to be a protected space, ringed by a fence, wall, or ditch able to fend off the giant predators as well as a panicked herd of supersauropods. In places lacking giant dinosaurs, such stringent levels of protection would not be necessary. Even so, mediumsized dinosaurs would still pose significant risk. An attack by sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs, for instance, could result in serious casualties. So could assault by a pack of parrot-beaked peccarylike protoceratopsids. Defensive weapons would be necessary.

If the expedition protocol required minimal risk to the fauna, then transport in vehicles under most circumstances would be standard. Yet another danger in some Cretaceous habitats would be elephant-sized crocodilians that would undoubtedly be willing to snap up and gulp down whole a still-living human unwary enough to go near or in the water. One way or another, dinosaur watching would pose a series of difficult problems not seen in dealing with modern animals.

IF DINOSAURS HAD SURVIVED

Assume that the K/P impact is what killed off the dinosaurs, but also assume that the impact did not occur and that nonavian dinosaurs continued into the Cenozoic. What would the evolution of land animals have been like in that case?

Although much will always be speculative, it is likely that the Age of Dinosaurs would have persisted – indeed the Mesozoic Era would have endured – aborting the Cenozoic Age of Mammals.

Thirty million years ago western North America probably would have been populated by great dinosaurs rather than the rhino-like titanotheres. The continuation of sauropods should have inhibited the growth of dense forests. But the flowering angiosperms would have continued to evolve and to produce a new array of food sources including well-developed fruits that herbivorous dinosaurs would have needed to adapt to in order to exploit.

What is not certain is whether mammals would have remained diminutive or would have begun to compete with dinosaurs for the large-body ecological niches. By the end of the Cretaceous sophisticated marsupial and placental mammals were appearing, and they may have been able to begin to mount a serious contest with dinosaurs as time progressed. Eventually, southward-migrating Antarctica would have arrived at the South Pole and formed the enormous ice sheets that act as a giant air conditioning unit for the planet. At the same time, the collision of India and Asia that closed off the once-great Tethys Ocean built up the miles-high Tibetan Plateau, which has also contributed to the great planetary cool-off of the last 20 million years that eventually led to the current ice age despite the rising heat production of the sun. This should have forced the evolution of grazing dinosaurs able to crop the spreading savanna, steppe, and prairie grasslands that thrive in cooler climates. In terms of thermoregulation, dinosaurs should have been able to adapt, but the also energetic mammals may have been able to exploit the decreasing temperatures. Perhaps big mammals of strange varieties would have formed a mixed dinosaur-mammal fauna, with the former perhaps including some big birds. Mammals may also have proven better able to inhabit the oceans than nonavian dinosaurs.

The birdlike dinosaurs evolved brains larger and more complex than those of reptiles toward the end of the Jurassic and beginning of the Cretaceous, but they never exceeded the lower avian range, and they did not exhibit a strong trend toward larger size and intricacy in the Cretaceous similar to the startling increase in neural capacity in Cenozoic mammals. We can only wonder whether dinosaurs would have eventually undergone their own expansion in brain power had they not gone extinct. Perhaps the evolution of large-bodied, big-brained mammals would have compelled dinosaurs to upgrade thinking performance as well. Or perhaps smarter mammals would have outcompeted dinosaurs still stuck with inferior mental capacity.

The specific species Homo sapiens would not have evolved if not for the extinction of dinosaurs, but whether some form of highly intelligent, language- and tool-using animal would have developed is another matter. Modest-sized, bipedal, birdlike predatory theropods with their grasping hands might have been able to do so. Or perhaps arboreal theropods with stereo color vision would have become fruit eaters whose evolution paralleled that of the increasingly brainy primates that spawned humans. It is possible that actual primates would have appeared and evolved above the heads of the great dinosaurs, producing at some point bipedal ground mammals able to create and use tools. On the other hand, the evolution of superintelligent humans may have been a fluke and would not have been repeated in another world.

DINOSAUR CONSERVATION

Taking the above scenario to its extreme, assume that some group of smart dinosaurs or mammals managed to survive and thrive in a world of great predatory theropods and became intelligent enough to develop agriculture and civilization as well as an arsenal of lethal weapons. What would have happened to the global fauna? The fate of large dinosaurs would probably have been grim. We actual humans may have been the leading factor in the extinction of a large portion of the megafauna that roamed much of the Earth toward the end of the last glacial period, and matters continue to be bad for most wildlife on land and even in the oceans. The desires and practical needs of our imaginary sapients would have compelled them to wipe out the giant theropods, whose low adult populations would have rendered them much more susceptible to total loss than the big mammal carnivores. If whale-sized herbivorous dinosaurs were still extant, their low populations would also have made them more vulnerable than elephants and rhinos. By the time the sapients developed industry, the gigantic flesh and plant eaters would probably already have been part of historical lore. If superdinosaurs had instead managed to survive in an industrial world, they would have posed insurmountable problems for zoos. Feeding lions, tigers, and bears is not beyond the means of zoos, but a single tyrannosaur-sized theropod (assuming it were tachyenergetic) would break the budget by consuming a couple of thousand cattle-sized animals over a few decades. How could a zoo staff handle a 50-foot-tall sauropod weighing 30 or 50 tonnes and eating ten times as much as an elephant?

February

Friday 3/2: Big lunch

I went out for lunch today to McKinnon Pub for a relative’s birthday, something which I rarely do. The serving sizes were enormous – at least twice as much as I would normally have on a plate! The meal was nice, but I could only get through about half of it (Chicken Parmigiana) and felt a bit guilty about wasting the rest of it. No wonder there is a national obesity problem if that serving size is considered normal now!

I went into the city to get a comicbook at the Minotaur shop, a frequent haunt for me. It is somewhat amusing to see the place mainly populated by stereotypical male nerds (either with weedy or tubby physiques), though a few females visit. Not that I’m one of the Beautiful People myself, but I do have standards :-). Even if one is not blessed with good looks, you can still put some effort into improving your appearance (grooming, exercise).

The comic I bought is one of the Jurassic Strike Force 5 series – aliens and dinosaurs! It’s as cheesy as anything – it features a villain who wants to conquer the Universe, no less – but it’s good mindless fun.

Thursday 9/2: Ghost Warrior

I found a movie online that I mentioned way back in my 23/9/2007 entry – Ghost Warrior (1986). It was a little different from my vague memory of seeing it as a teenager, but still not a bad movie despite its obvious implausibility (freezing someone causes tissue damage).

A cryonics page linked to from that Wikipedia article makes for some oddly disturbing reading, or maybe I just find the thought of being frozen rather creepy (especially if it is just one’s head!). Assuming damage to the body could be repaired after reviving, I don’t see it as unrealistic that the mind would be preserved too – or some of it. I do think mind and body are inextricably linked, in many ways still not fully understood, as noted on that page: “But many people believe that their bodies contain information they would not want to lose. In subtle ways that future science may be able to decipher, life experience may cause the mind to leave impresssions in the body the way a footprint leaves impressions in the sand − impressions otherwise lost if reconstruction of identity in the brain is less than perfect.” Memories are stored in physical form, as chemicals in parts of the brain, so it seems logical that these could be resurrected if the brain were revived.

I have to admit that sometimes I would like to extend my lifespan – as long as I could remain physically young! There is so much I have not done – I still haven’t found my purpose in life – and I am getting older, and what looks I had (admittedly not much) are declining. Maybe live for another one or two hundred years, though I am not sure how I would cope with that mentally as human brains are simply not evolved to live that long, and seeing everyone else that I had grown up with die would be depressing. There are a lot of human “immortals” in fiction, but I get little sense from those writings of how living such immense spans of time (hundreds or thousands of years) affects such characters.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels are one such example – many of the formally-human vampires in these had lived for so long. One aspect of being a vampire in that series is that they no longer slept – what would that do to a person’s mental health, to literally have no respite from themselves for (presumably) eternity?

A lot of the other transformation processes in that series make no biological sense, but it’s magic after all, I suppose. Meyer’s vampires effectively become superhumans – a form of wish fulfillment.

Incidentally, I recently watched Breaking Dawn, Part 1, and it wasn’t too bad, though the movie only began to pick up in pace and interest once Bella got pregnant and the freaky birth happened :-).

Saturday 25/2: Walking distance

Some very hot weather (mid-30s) from yesterday to Monday. Hopefully the last for this summer!

Using Google Maps, I did a rough measurement of how far I walked today, and it came to around 11 km!

It’s a bit more than I normally do (the morning walk is the bare minimum, and I usually try to do more). My legs are rather tired!

March

Wednesday 7/3: ME3; Putin returns

The Mass Effect 3 video game has been released (though not till tomorrow in Australia). I won’t be playing it though as I can’t afford it ($90!) and my computer would need a graphics card upgrade in any case as my NVIDIA GeForce 9300 is “below minimum system requirements” (and probably more memory as I only have 2 GB). So all I can do is watch other people’s playthroughs on YouTube.

Vladimir Putin is Russian President again, to no one’s surprise but a lot of protests. He really should consider what recently happened to dictators in the Middle East such as Gaddafi and retire gracefully (though I can’t see things getting that drastic in Russia). His time is over.

Monday 26/3: Cameron down

Tweet from James Cameron re:Mariana Trench

It was a bit of a surprise to me to learn a few weeks ago that film director James Cameron was planning to make a dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly 11 km down! He is currently at the bottom, having begun the descent at 7:52 a.m. (Melbourne time – happily, it’s in our time zone). The official website is Deepsea Challenge, and updates are posted on their Twitter feed (he sent the deepest-ever Twitter upon arriving down there).

He will spend around 6 hours filming and collecting samples, then – hopefully! – surface safely. He is crammed into a small sphere for that time. I mentioned way back in my 3/8/2007 entry about my phobia of deep water:

I seem to have always had a phobia of deep water; I have a memory of being too scared to go near the deep end of a swimming pool where I was having some lessons when young. I can remember the instructor lowering me in the deep end slowly by the arms and trying to reassure me! And that was only 6 feet of water. I think the phobia is a type of claustrophobia; something associated with the thought of all that weight of water around me. In air or in space it is different; there is light and emptiness. Under water, though, you can’t see the sky, and in the deep ocean there is only a crushing blackness.

If the craft imploded it would be an unpleasant, though quick, death.

12:33 p.m.: James Cameron began ascending around 40 minutes ago, a bit sooner than expected. He resurfaced around 1:00. That has to be the most awesome feat in quite a few years!

April

Tuesday 17/4: Battleship

I saw my first cinema movie since Predators back in 2010: Battleship. No surprises as to why I went to see it (aliens and spaceships!). Yes the premise was rather silly but it was 2 hours of escapism and enjoyable enough, if you try not to think about the plot holes (how does a radio signal reach Glise 581, 20 light years away, in only 6 years or so? [The signal was sent in 2006.] How is a decommissioned battleship resurrected in 3 hours? Etc.). The special FX were flawless and the soundtrack thundering (I was covering my ears at some points!). The film quality this time (i.e. the screen projection) was excellent, with none of the annoying specks and streaks that the Predators screening had. So I felt I got my $13 (discount day) worth! It is predictably getting bad reviews from some, but people don’t go to such movies for their intellectual stimulation! Interestingly, the movie opened internationally before it does in the USA (not till May there).

I was a little disappointed with the aliens (the main point of interest for me), called the “Regents”: they were very humanoid with rather brutish faces, reptillian eyes and odd bristly chin beards – somewhat ugly in fact. Their morphing metal armor and spaceships did look cool (very Transformer-like). There was an extra scene after the credits which hinted that there were more aliens who had landed elsewhere on Earth.

Update 20/4/2012: this video at the film’s YouTube site gives a glimpse of an alien.

Friday 20/4: Story id’d; fanfiction entitlement

In my 3/1/2010 entry I metioned a short story in Omni magazine that had remained in my memory since I read it in the early 1980s, but could not remember the title of. Yesterday I happened to find it, via this AskMeFi page – apparently other people wanted to know too (“Heh, you're not the only one! Something about that story obviously left its mark on readers of a certain age back in 1979”)! The story is “The Great Moveway Jam” by John Keefauver from the March 1979 issue. (There is a link to PDFs of it there; I think I will convert them to HTML when I can be bothered sometime.) So that’s another personal mystery for me solved, thanks to the Internet!

I have developed an intense dislike of the fanfiction community, mainly because they are some of the most entitled whiners on the planet. The latest furore is over this article about “Famous Authors on Fan-Fiction” (reproduced on another site); some authors don’t mind it, others are opposed to it. Fair enough. But what I find irritating are the howls of outrage and hundreds of irate comments from the Internet lynch mob should an author have the latter opinion. Fanfic writers don’t seem to understand the concept of ownership: that an author’s characters are his or her intellectual property and no one else has (or should have) the right to appropriate them for their own use. Only an author can truly know their own created characters, and for others to think they can rewrite them is an insult. But it is futile to try arguing such points to the fanfic community as they are so convinced of their righteousness on this topic.

“There is no such thing as your own worlds and peoples” one commenter asserts. I disagree – there are few if any original ideas now, but you can still create your own worlds and peoples that will reflect your unique worldview and personality.

I wrote an external blog post on the issue back in 2010. There is a writer’s blog with various posts also (against fanfic). This page gives information on the legal issues surrounding fanfic – I do wish the copyright and other laws for creators were stronger.

Monday 30/4: Dentist visit

I went to the dentist last Friday for a check-up and clean – no cavities, thankfully, though the cleaning was rather painful! Like being stabbed with needles. My teeth are sensitive so perhaps that’s why I felt it more. I still have receding gums but little seems to be able to be done about them, apart from some expensive surgery.

My other must-see movie for this year is Prometheus, and a lot more information and images are coming out now that its release is a little over 5 weeks away (7 June in Australia). I am not sure whether I will see it in 2D or 3D as I wear glasses so having to wear 3D glasses over these is a nuisance! It is also a few dollars more. There is much feverish anticipation from Alien fans (the main forum being a dedicated one at AVPGalaxy). The most intriguing characters for me are the “Engineers” (or Space Jockeys as they have long been nicknamed).

Australian actor Guy Pearce is one of the cast. I remember watching him long ago (1980s) on Neighbors; he’s come a long way since then! (And I still love his cheekbones! :-))

May

Saturday 5/5: Stomach migraine

I was posting in a forum thread about migraines and while looking the topic up I found out about abdominal migraines. I remembered that odd severe pain I had last year (11/5/2011 entry) and the symptoms seem very similar to the description. I have not had a repeat of that pain so far, but might mention that possibility when I see the GP again. I don’t think that pain was food poisoning – I had only eaten my usual foods – and it wasn’t appendicitis I am sure as the pain was down the middle, not to the right. It is a peculiar place to get a migraine! I have previously only had the more usual head migraines occasionally since 2002.

Symptoms of abdominal migraines may include:

The abdominal pain may last for one hour or up to three days.

Migraine headaches are generally preceded by an “aura” by which the migraine sufferer can sense that a headache is coming on. Abdominal migraines, though, are frequently sudden and quite severe. They can occur without any warning signs and can increase anxiety in the person who gets them.

Friday 18/5: Autumn color

Liquidambar tree on a Moorabbin street

It’s late Autumn, my favorite time of year, with the awful humidity of a couple of months ago gone at last, and the exotic deciduous trees turning gold and red (native trees remain green year round). The large liquidambars in the neighborhood are particularly nice – though they are gradually being felled, unfortunately. There must have been a fad for them a few decades ago.

A Facebook group linked to a Melbourne University map collection page featuring 1945 Melbourne aerial maps. A treasure for me as I can see familiar areas in the south-east (north is to the top of the page) as they were a long time ago: where my parents’ house would be (not built then – the suburb was still mostly open fields) and where my grandmother’s house was (Mum and her mother were already living there). It’s like time travel in some form.

Someone on MetaFilter linked to a couple of pages of my Russian spaceflight site for a post about some Baikonur launch photos, which was a bit disconcerting! I suppose they found the site through a quick Google search. I’ve been lurking there for some years but don’t want to expose my bank account to an online site (Paypal in this case) so I can’t pay the fee and join as a member.

June

Wednesday 6/6: Venus transit

I saw the transit of Venus for the second time in my life today! The previous transit for this century was 8 June 2004. I saw it the same way as last time, projecting an image from binoculars onto a sheet of paper – crude but effective. There was a lot of cloud cover that I though would not clear, but enough gaps appeared by 11:00 a.m. or so to enable periodic viewing. In Melbourne the transit times were 8:16 a.m. to 2:44 p.m. with the peak around 11:30 a.m. The next transit pairs will not be until December 2117 and December 2125, so unless life extension technology is common before then :-), I will miss those viewings.

Venus transit Venus transit

Prometheus was released in Europe last week and is released in Australia and the USA tomorrow. Reviews have been out on the internet and they seem mixed: the movie is visually spectacular, but the plot is a bit rushed and muddled, especially in the last half or so. The scriptwriter was setting it up for a sequel so there is some plot elements left out or not explained. I am not seeing it until next week (I plan to go on the cinema discount day, Tuesday), but have been unable to resist thoroughly plot-spoiling myself and looking at leaked images due to impatience. Despite the disappointment expressed by many (a lot of fans are vociferous online in their dislike of various elements), I hope it will still be worth seeing. I have the movie artbook on order, so am looking forward to that also.

Tuesday 12/6: Prometheus

I saw Prometheus today, in 3d. I generally enjoyed it, though I could see what others were complaining about regarding some aspects of the plot and irrational behaviour of some characters. It seemed to be trying to be both deep and meaningful and also a horror movie, and these two themes didn’t quite mesh at times. Still, it is visually spectacular and worth watching. There is a lot of symbolism, intentional and otherwise: religious, mythological, references to other movies (David modeled himself on the titular character in Lawrence of Arabia, and the introductory scene imagery was influenced by one in The Seventh Seal).

I loved David the android and the Engineer characters, and the scenes with David activating the alien spaceship’s hologram controls, and the Engineer getting ready to fly away were my favorites - these had some of the awe and wonder (and, sometimes, terror!) I want to experience with science fiction movies. Even if the Engineers were humanoid aliens, they were still cool-looking and creepy.

Some analyses elsewhere (spoilers):

Tuesday 19/6: Earthquake

An earthquake was felt across Victoria not long ago! I was lying in bed watching TV and at 20:54/8:54 pm felt a strong tremor for around 30 seconds or so – my ceiling light was shaking and bed was trembling. It was quite unnerving! I just turned my computer on again to report it and see what others were saying. According to the USGS site, it was 5.2 magnitude, 9.9 km deep and 10 km SW of Moe Victoria (120 km east of Melbourne). Annoyingly the relevant Australian sites (Geoscience Australia, ES&S Seismology Research Centre) have crashed under the server load! News reports at The Age, Herald-Sun, ABC News. (Previous earthquake felt was on 5/7/2011.)

July

Wednesday 11/7: New particle; joined Reddit

The Higgs-Boson particle was apparently discovered last Thursday – or, more accurately, a new particle that physicists have 99.99994% confidence is the H-B. The Age newspaper had the perhaps-prematurely optimistic headline “Origin of the universe revealed”! There are some doubts emerging about whether the anamoly is the H-B, however.

I joined Reddit and have made some posts.

Saturday 21/7: Earthquake

There was an earth tremor last night at 7:12 p.m., a month after the previous one in the same area (19/6 entry), south-east of the state near Moe. It was measured as 4.3 so it was not as severe or long. There have been many aftershocks there so this was a noticeable one. I was lying in bed again and felt it – a creaking and cracking of the house for around 10 seconds – but my parents in other rooms of the house didn’t! Many others across Melbourne felt it too.

The Moon, Jupiter and a bright Venus were lined up last Sunday morning as shown in this APOD. I did get a glimpse of it. Those in Europe were also treated to an occultation of Jupiter by the Moon.

Someone at Reddit posted a link to a 1966 video of life in Melbourne from government film archives. It looks to be a little sanitized, but is still a fascinating glimpse of everyday life back then. Dress standards have declined since that period! The homogenous appearance of the population is also notable – most immigrants then came from the UK, Europe and southern Europe (Greece, Italy).

One scene features milk bottle delivery by horse-and-cart – this used to be done in my suburb, and I would wake up and hear the carthorse clip-clopping along my street early in the morning. This unfortunately got phased out sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, though, and the volume of traffic now would be dangerous. The grey Holden car the couple ride in at one stage is the exact model my Grandpa used to drive – I remember riding in it!

August

Friday 10/8: Syrian dream; back pain gone

I had a peculiar dream last night involving the current civil war in Syria, of all things! I (or a dream character whose eyes I looked through) was on a mission to extract President Bashar al-Assad from harm’s way. The location was a city overlooking a deep valley, almost like a volcanic crater. We initated a plan to fill the valley with water; I’ve forgotten the reason for this (to thwart the approaching rebel army somehow), kind of like a fleeing army burning cities in its wake so an enemy couldn’t inhabit them. We evacuated him through some tunnels as the water rose.

I have largely become indifferent to such politics, but feel dubious that a new regime under the rebels will be much better, seeing as a lot of Islamic foreign mercenaries have seen an opportunity to join in. The latters’ ultimate goal is a strict Islamic state, which if nothing else would not be female-friendly. So, to quote an over-used saying, it may be out of the frying pan into the fire for the Syrian people.

I recently noticed that the lower back pain that had plagued me since January 2009 (see 1/11/2009 entry) has decreased this year – I am no longer stiff and hobbling when I get up in the morning, or after lying down generally. So whatever was wrong with it has hopefully mostly healed.

I was looking at upgrading my site to HTML5 specifications, but the new tags that can be used are still inconsistently displayed by browsers, and not at all by older ones, so I just changed the markup in the header for now. My site now has around 350 or so pages, so any major changes are a chore! My site’s appearance could also do with a makeover, but I am creatively dead as to ideas – I want to keep it simple, not over-elaborate like some I see.

Saturday 11/8: Plane crash; conlang started

A video of a Plane crash video from inside cockpit has been posted and commented on at some forums. The opinions about the pilot are very uncomplimentary (to put it politely)! According to them, he didn’t account for the warm air being less dense at the altitude he was taking off at, and was thus overloaded – rather than the downdraft the pilot said he experienced. The pilot has previously crashed.

One aspect of the video that I found notable was its uncanny similarity to dreams I have sometimes, of flapping my arms to get off the ground, but only being able to ascend a few meters and being dragged back to the ground. These dreams are quite frustrating!

One project I am trying to start is a basic conlang (constructed language) for some alien characters I have. I have done a lot of reading about conlangs on the recommended places on the Internet (such as the Language Construction Kit), but am left utterly bewildered! I am not good at languages (my attempt at learning Russian stalled a few years ago) and the grammatical terms can get dauntingly technical. There is also the problem of infinite choice. You know when you go into a shop such as a supermarket that has a huge range of products, and you can end up frozen with indecision about what brand of product to buy? It is like that with languages – there is so much variety in human languages that you get overwhelmed with what to include or not. The only decision I have made so far is to use the letters in my own name (s, u, z, a, n, e, b, r, o, w, y, m, c, h, l), an arbitary choice but it does help put some limitations. (The c is pronounced as k, an oddity of Irish surnames – thus the ch in McHale is pronounced kh, rather confusingly!)

Sunday 26/8: Moonwalker gone; cramped desk

The first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, died today (Saturday in the USA) of complications from recent heart surgery. He was 82 (born in 1930), but his dying is still an unexpected shock.

The London Olympics ended two weeks ago, but I did not take much notice of them as I was not particularly interested. They have become so expensive and excessive that they are a burden to any country hosting them. I would rather see the government athletes’ funding spent on more important services such as health and public transport.

My desk and computer in my bedroom, 25/8/2012

A photo of my desk and computer that I took yesterday (I was going to post it on a forum but decided not to). It is quite cramped as I have to fit most of my posessions in my bedroom (an approximately 10.23m2 space). A lot of possessions, such as books, are stored in boxes, like the ones under my desk. Having a book-buying addiction does not agree with limited space! I have to find ever-more ingenious ways to squeeze more things into the same area. I am unable to move out due to my dismal circumstances, so I am stuck here for the forseeable future.

I came across this page showing Hong Kong’s High-Density Housing & Cramped Living Conditions; my bedroom doesn’t look too much different! Though the rooms in those apartments appear to be the entirety of the residents’ living spaces; they sleep and eat in the one room (don’t know where the bathrooms are!). I guess it’s preferable to being homeless, but such cramped conditons aren’t an ideal way to live.

One personal site that I visit now and then is “Swankivy” (Julie Sondra Decker). Hers is a huge site as she is a very prolific writer – a trait I envy! I have to struggle to get out anything creative now, though I was more prolific in my teenage years, despite being at school (and perhaps to the detriment of my schoolwork). Though I still get ideas in my head, trying to write or draw anything is an agonizing and often abortive process. An example is the language I mentioned in my previous entry – I am still stalled on it (mainly the grammar, the technical aspect of which has me flummoxed).

Tuesday 28/8: Wallmeyer twins gone

I just saw a news article reporting that the anorexic Wallmeyer twin sisters (last mentioned in 4/6/2011 entry) had died in a house fire, aged 42. There are no suspicious circumstances, but given their past history, I wonder if they had some sort of death pact. At least they are freed from their mutual torment, but it is sad they never were able to fulfil their potential and spent much of their lives in the grip of an eating disorder.

September

Saturday 1/9: The Avengers

I watched The Avengers, which came out earlier this year. It was reasonably entertaining, but much overrated considering how successful it apparently was. This review summed up my feeling about it: “This film is is an empty shell covered with dazzling lights. Sure, it does look pretty but that is as far as it goes.” If you havn’t seen the previous movies that led up to and tied into it, you might be a bit confused in places. (Of these I have seen Thor, Iron Man, and The Incredible Hulk, none in the cinema – I found Thor and Iron Man more enjoyable.) I did like Loki, the main villain, who made a salient point about people really wanting someone to look up to and lead them. The aliens (Chitauri) just seemed like cannon fodder and weren’t very threatening.

Friday 7/9: Windy

Melbourne and Victoria have been battered by strong (100 km/h+) winds since Wednesday, which have caused quite a lot of damage, including power outages and the usual felled trees (over 2000). At this rate there will be few trees left :-(. September seems to be the time of spring storms here; it is nearly a year since that huge scary thunderstorm passed over and cut out power overnight (29/9/2011 entry).

October

Thursday 4/10: Café gone

Today is the first warm day of Spring (around 30°C or so). Daylight Savings also begins next week, unfortunately. I have to reluctantly get into warm weather mode.

My favorite coffee shop at Westfield Southland shopping mall/center, Gloria Jean’s (part of a franchise) closed last Sunday to my and my parents’ dismay (along with many other customers!). Their rent had been increased from $140,000 per year to $180,000 – no thanks to a greedy management! (A newsagent that had been there 21 years also closed for the same reason.) The staff there were friendly and we had been going there for a few years. There are other coffee places but they’re not the same. Coffee is becoming an expensive indulgence, but one has to have some enjoyments in life!

I have been wondering what my website looks like on a mobile phone/smartphone so I made a few minor tweaks to the way some images were laid out. It doesn’t look too bad, if the Responsinator test site is anything to go by. I don’t own a mobile as I simply could not afford one, or afford one of the expensive plans available here.

Friday 26/10: Halo 4; local elections; Windows 8

The release of the Halo 4 video game is imminent (release date is 6/11, 3 days before my birthday), though as I don’t have an X-Box I won’t be playing it. A live-action series called Forward Unto Dawn has been uploaded in weekly episodes and it is quite good (Episode 4 comes out tomorrow morning).

Local council elections take place tomorrow, which few are enthusiastic about! Quite a lot of councilors seem to be bordering on corrupt, and they are rife with infighting and politics – as detailed at the Glen Eira Debates blog. There is little detail available about candidates apart from flyers. I will probably vote for a Greens party one who seems relatively young and enthusiastic (not yet corrupted).

The Windows 8 operating system launched today, but I will likely not be upgrading to it for some time, due to the annoyance over the Start button being removed and having to relearn a new operating system. Windows 7 has generally been quite stable to use (compared to XP – I never tried Vista) so I don’t feel inclined to replace it.

Tuesday 30/10: Huge hurricane

First 30°C today, so the weather is warming up.

The eastern coastline of the USA is currently being blasted and flooded by Hurricane Sandy, a tropical cyclone that formed last week and combined with a winter storm system from the west to form a megastorm. An image of the storm was captured by NASA satellites, showing that it’s nearly a third as large as the USA (east to west). Parts of New York City have been innundated, and it has virtually shut down. The East Coast is highly populated, so there are millions without power and who have had to evacuate.

The US Presidential elections are held next week (6 November) – I very much hope Barack Obama is re-elected! He is much preferable to the Conservative candidate, who cares nothing about the less well-off.

November

Saturday 3/11: Omni online

I found out via Metafilter that editions of OMNI Magazine (previously mentioned in my 20/4 entry) are now online at the Internet Archive, to the delight of many. I found the June 1979 edition where I first learned about the movie Alien; the images creeped me out for years! (Oddly, I can’t recall when I actually saw the movie.)

Saturday 10/11: 42; Obama returns

President Obama was re-elected, much to many people’s relief! I don’t agree with all his policies (mainly concerning amnesty for illegal immigrants – why bother to come in the legal way at all, then) but he is much better than the alternative, who had some obnoxious policies affecting women’s reproductive rights. I hope that will be a good sign for the Australian Federal elections – that Labor will get back in. All the Liberals (Conservatives) do here is cut services, as the current Victorian Liberal government is doing.

I turned 42 yesterday (only 8 years until 50 …) and also now have an iPad 2 which Dad bought some time ago on sale and it’s ended up with me. Setting it up was a tortuous process! I was not impressed that I had to give rather too much personal information to Apple just to activate the device. It is quite limited in use compared to my PC; I had to install the obnoxious iTunes program on the PC just to transfer some files over via a USB cable – not having a port to plug in a USB thumb drive is very annoying! The onscreen keyboard is quite fiddly so I would not want to use it for serious typing, or as a main computer generally. Still, it is fairly easy to learn to use. I will probably use it mostly for reading ebooks and such.

Wednesday 14/11: Eclipse

Solar eclipse

There was a partial solar eclipse this morning (total one if you were up in Cairns, northern Queensland), from 7 to 9 a.m. I had no tripod or telescope so I made do with holding binoculars in one hand and my camera in the other, projecting the Sun onto Dad’s shed door.

I could not access the Internet for most of the day as the modem had failed. Dad bought a new one which seems to be working again. I was having some withdrawal symptoms!

Windows has begun warning me of an imminent hard disk drive failure – my second drive, on which I have all my personal files. I have it backed up, so I will wait and see what happens.

Imminent hard disk drive failure warning

Wednesday 28/11: Storm

Had the first real storm for many months on Monday night, which caused the usual havoc! One storm front passed to the west around 1 a.m. but another came overhead while I was out walking at 5 a.m.; having lightning and thunder crashing overhead was rather unnerving! Tomorrow will be the first brain-meltingly hot day since last summer, with Melbourne to reach 38°C and into the 40s further inland. We have had below-average rainfall for spring, in contrast to the last two years – at least that means we also have not had accompanying humidity which is unpleasant.

My second hard drive that was threatening to fail still hasn’t; I put it through a disk check which turned up no errors.

December

Monday 3/12: R.I.P Sasha

There was another big thunderstorm on Friday night from around 1 a.m. so I didn’t get much sleep again. The weather was unpleasantly humid until Sunday.

Sasha on his last day

Sasha the family dog (a Bichon Friese) was put to sleep today (Dad took him to the vet) after a lengthy and stressful decline. (I last mentioned him in my 2005-2006 entries – 1/9/2005.) He had been gradually showing signs of dementia for a couple of years and this year was by far the worst. In the last 6 months he dropped around 3 kilos and was very emaciated-looking, despite eating as normal. The dog he used to be had mentally died a couple of years ago, and it was an unpleasant process of his physical body following. He is the third family pet we’ve had (previous ones being a dog and a cat), and I don’t want any more.

Tuesday 4/12: Mourning

Had a sleepless night due to distress about Sasha and various things. I keep expecting to see him wandering around and almost do, as he has been with us for 17 years (born 2/9/1995). It has been a very stressful year with him and I wish he could have gone peacefully in his sleep, and kept his mental facilities. All his quirky habits and behavior gradually vanished over the last two years or so. He became unable to jump up on furniture (though he could still get down) or go outside by himself, stopped begging Mum for food, stopped having mad flings running around the house, lost much of his vision so his formerly lively eyes became blank, and generally became a shadow of his former self; he was almost an animated shell.

Dad left him at the vet’s for disposal; I am now wishing he had brought him home for burial, though we are limited in space and there are hygiene issues. I asked John the Vet on his Facebook page what was done with pets’ bodies and the reply was: “There is a private company that collects bodies (mostly cats and dogs) from vet clinics across the entire greater Melbourne area, for burial on what used to be private farm land in Anakie, not far from Geelong.”. (I felt reluctant to press for more details.) Looking at Google Maps, the town is a long distance away (in a straight line across the bay), nearly 70 km! A lot further than I though he would be. I think the company might be Southern Cross Pet Services as they seem to fit the description. Update 31/12/2012: Emailed them and asked, but it wasn’t.

Wednesday 5/12: Nearmap no longer free

After the heatwave last Thursday, yesterday and today were cool and windy, with snow in the mountains outside Melbourne – but the hot weather is to return on Friday and Saturday. Such bipolar weather is normal for Melbourne this time of year.

I was dismayed to find that Nearmap, an Australian aerial online mapping service I have been using for a couple of years, ended its free viewing for users and is now subscription-only from December. It did frequent updates of Australian metropolitan areas over each year so it was more up-to-date than Google Maps, which is a few years behind. It also enabled views of different time periods (from 2009 when it first started), so was a useful way of seeing changes in my area (none for the better, sadly) – GMaps does not have this ability. Its only disadvantage was that it did not have Street View like Google, or overlay housing lot numbers.

Friday 7/12: DRM annoyance

I found this recent post on AskMeFi today about someone wanting to clone their pet cat and thought maybe the same thing could have been done with Sasha, had we been able to afford it – thought the process is still in its infancy and the clones have various health issues. It’s too late, though, as he is buried and now decaying somewhere (though I did save a few strands of his fur).

I have bought a couple of ebooks via iTunes and was annoyed to find out that their DRM only allows them to be read on i-devices – I can transfer them to my PC but not read them. There is currently no software that will remove the DRM.

I came across an author with a peculiar name, Samsun Lobe, and he has a website with nice artwork and promotional material for his novels. The premise for them – a merging of sci-fi and fantasy – looked intriguing, but on reading the samples I cringed. Not at the story as such, but at the atrocious punctuation and grammar on every page! I was mentally editing as I read through.

Saturday 16/12: Responsive design; Silver Brumby

I’ve been fussing with my website design again, most of it behind-the-scenes (in the CSS files) so it should hopefully display better on small mobile phone screens. The main headache are laying out images and captions; these can be difficult to position so they display properly at various screen resolutions. For now I have laid out most image galleries and captions in horizontal rows.

I’m aware of the latest fad in website design – responsive design – but some of the techniques to achieve this seem unnecessarily complex. A basic web page with minimal styling can be read on any device – as was originally intended – though it probably won’t win any design awards. There is a bit of a conflict between this ideal and professional web designers, who tend to want to make their sites look pretty and complicated, even if it affects usability and accessibility. (The r/web_design subreddit for example seem to comprise mostly the latter, and are a rather snippy lot, quick to downvote.)

“The woman from Snowy River,” The Age, 15/12. I loved the Silver Brumby novel series when I was young; the centenary of the author’s birth is coming up next year, so the books are re-appearing again, and are still a riveting read – so much better than the dumbed-down children’s/Young Adult rubbish novels that proliferate today.

Saturday 22/12: World didn’t end; burial sites

The “End of the World” has been and gone in Australia, and as usual nothing happened. I do wish that society would change – reject the current dysfunctional and dysfunctional doctrine of endless growth and rampant consumerism, and proceed along a different, slower and kinder path. But it seems that nothing short of cataclysm will put a stop to this, and it would then likely be unpleasant to live through the transition.

It is still bothering me that I don’t know exactly where Sasha is buried. It is like he disappeared, though at least his physical body still exists somewhere in the ground. I felt the same when my maternal grandmother, whom I was closest to, was cremated in 2000 – her ashes were scattered at Clarendon cemetery, where her own parents were buried. There is nothing left of her physical body so it is almost like she never existed. I can understand why some cultures went to great lengths to preserve the bodies of their deceased; to still have the physical part of them nearby even if their immaterial self has dissipated. I guess these feelings come from my tendency to hoard physical items and cling to the past generally, but I see nothing wrong with this.

I understand why traditional peoples such as Australian Aboriginies place such importance on recovering the bones of their ancestors from museums and such – they have a deep sense of connection to their forebears and the land they live in. (“Jealous keepers of the sacred bones,” The Age, 13/3/2010.) I would imagine that the Ancient Egyptians would be horrified that their God-Kings had been taken from their graves and put on display for the teeming masses in museums (as noted in this MetaFilter comment). Unfortunately such cultural views are mercilessly mocked in our own shallow culture, where it is now customary to disrespect everything. (I just found that I actually wrote on this topic in a 2010 blog entry, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat my opinions on it.)

I have decided that I would like to be buried in Clarendon cemetery whenever my time comes (I haven’t yet made a will, though – something I don’t want to face up to yet!). It is the closest my family has to an ancestral graveyard in Australia. My maternal grandfather was cremated and ashes interred in Springvale Cemetery (now I wish he had been put in Clarendon as they were married until Grandpa’s death). My paternal grandmother was cremated in England, and grandfather (who died long before I was born, in the 1950s) was buried in England also.

I was also thinking that if there is anything resembling an afterlife, it might be comprised of individuals reliving their memories that have been imprinted in the fabric of the Universe – essentially the Akashic Records theory that was mentioned in a novel I read last year (5/9/2011 entry). It seems a semi-plausible way of explaining some sort of after-death existence, though of course it can’t be proven (certainly not with current technology). I relive memories daily as a form of comfort (though apparently everytime you recall a memory it gets rewritten anew – Memory Construction).

Saturday 29/12: Defiance

There is yet another aliens-vs.-humans TV series being screened next year (in the USA) called Defiance, which looks moderately interesting, if a bit clichéd. I don’t know if it will ever be screened in Australia, so will have to resort to other means to view it if that’s the case. The aliens are, rather disappointingly, of the “Rubber Forehead” variety – namely, humans with a bit of makeup – but I guess that’s due to budget restraints.

Monday 31/12: End of year

Another year gone too quickly, and it was a rather dismal one for me. Christmas Day was quiet as usual (just spent with my parents); the family gatherings that used to take place are long in the past and other relatives are either dead, or have their own lives and are not interested, or live far away. I hate New Year’s Eve due to idiots in the neighborhood letting off illegal fireworks and general stupidity (drunken louts mainly). Hope these blow up in their faces!

Four weeks since Sasha was put to sleep. I emailed Southern Cross Pet Services but they were not involved in removing him, so I don’t know where else to look (Googling is not very helpful).

Had a curiously vivid dream last night where I and parents had moved to a new house, 3 storeys high and my bedroom was on the top floor; it was quite large and spacious (in contrast to my real-life one), and a window looked westwards out onto a bay.