Cavalorn

it's big

2008-05-15T17:30:29Z

it's shiny

and it's fast.

:D

I have fired up a much loved piece of early 90s Cock Rock in its honour.

plan for today

2008-05-15T12:27:57Z

1. Buy new hard drive

2. Decomission old hard drive with hammer

3. Tackle work backlog resulting from defective old hard drive

4. (optional) Buy Age of Conan

marathon

2008-05-13T08:27:47Z

They're changing the name of those peanut choccy bars back to Marathon.

Thank God. I can sleep at night.

cavalorn @ 2008-05-10T22:40:00

2008-05-10T21:40:49Z

da na na na NA NA NA NA NA NA

2008-05-10T15:54:25Z

MOTORIN

*tschoom*

WHAT'S YOUR PRICE FOR FLIGHT

The Great Pyramidal Necropolis of London

2008-05-09T16:24:19Z

As with fearful fingers I turn the pages of half-forgotten books, in my delerious quest to learn things unwholesome to humanity for a purpose of which I can not - MUST not - speak, I learn of a horror that was within a hair's breadth of befalling London, and perhaps still looms through fog-laden skies in Londons other than our own.

It happened in the year 1842. The dead of London were numerous, too much so for conventional means to withstand. Some method had to be found for coping with the cadavers.

It was in ostensible response to this crisis that one Thomas Willson, a member of the General Cemetery Company Board, came forth with his proposal. I have seen the blueprint; it is stark and soul-harrowing.

Willson proposed nothing less than the erection of a vast pyramid, its base the size of Russell Square and its height 'considerably above that of St. Paul's', in which some five million corpses would be entombed. This blasphemous immensity would contain 215,296 individual catacombs, a number whose occult significance is presumably most singular.

My brain raced feverishly. The consummation of some horrendous plot of ancient Khem? A Cabalistical battery of the dead? The legacy of Nick Hawksmoor? A Victorian Battersea cum charnel-house, built on subtly corrupt geometric principles of which the dark Pharaoh would surely have approved, and may even have supplied?

But there is more.

No sooner had I broken out in creeping gooseflesh at the thought of this titan monstrosity and its five million silent, eyeless tenants than I learned of the final, insolently blatant, element of the plan. The very topmost tier of the pyramid was not to be an angel, nor a crucifix, nor any wholesome thing.

It was to be an observatory.

And as I took refuge in foetal whimpering, the thought arose ere I could crush it, and went howling on tenebrous wings down the desolate alleys of my mind: for what dreadful and long-predicted astronomical conjunction was that foul observatory designed to watch?

cavalorn @ 2008-05-07T15:38:00

2008-05-07T14:38:49Z

I am totally naked right now.

Peter, you've lost the news!

2008-05-05T13:39:02Z

inquiry

2008-05-02T16:28:30Z

What's the name of the fallacy in which lack of sympathy is dismissed as lack of comprehension?

Example: Sian Busby explains why she hates Jane Austen, and a commentor responds 'Sorry to hear her wit goes over your heads.'

It's a very simple argument.

'I don't like X.' 'Clearly you just don't understand X.'

Alternatively: 'Clearly you just don't get X.'

For 'X' read 'modern art', 'the Mighty Boosh' or 'Stockhausen' as you choose.

I'm not sure if it's fallacious because it assumes that comprehension always implies appreciation, or because it assumes that comprehension is necessary to appreciation, or both, or something else.

But like obscenity, I know it when I see it. And it ought to have a name, like the No True Scotsman argument.

Back from Whitby

2008-04-29T11:25:36Z

I arrive home to discover Inside Track have gone into administration. Oh, the hilarity.

Whitby just gets better each time we go. This year contained several elements of Win and a hearty serving of Wrong.

The Win consisted of meeting all the lovely peoples (wave wave wave) and of the Bean's first Whitby. She was adored from all sides, all the time. I stood outside the Elsie on Friday night and was instantly surrounded by cooing goth ladies. The sound of ovaries going off like popcorn echoed across the beach.

Gentlemen, if you really want to attract women, carry a baby in a sling. Of course, having attracted them, it is (in my case) not appropriate to do anything other than chat happily, but that is the joyful irony of being a happily married parent.

There was also some measure of Wrong.

Erithromycin off of alt.gothic stuck a rolled up £20 note up his urethra for a bet. He won the £20. And then had to spend it on medicaments.

This was the talk of Whitby until Sunday night blessedly trumped it with the 'six naked goth chicks getting it on in the hot tub' story.

Incidentally, siani_hedgehog has epic hangovers. They are so epic that if she had speech bubbles, they would have black dribbles round the edge, like a leaking damp course.

oh blimey

2008-04-24T12:28:17Z

Blake's 7 remake on the cards... again.

And with that, off to Whitters!

for all those who won't be able to make it to Whitby 80s night

2008-04-24T10:31:12Z

GAAAARRRRRYYYYYY!

(NSFW)

Is My Toaster Sentient?

Sitting in a gas mask waiting for World War 3125 Million
Sitting in the park with a friend called Doctor Six
Oh look, there's JG Ballard in a burnt out fridge with a Spitfire pilot
Took so much smack, I nearly married a car

Back in my bedsit, there's nothing to see
Just four grey walls and me and a TV
And faded photographs of Nazi stormtroopers in PVC

Is my toaster sentient?
If not, then how does it know how not to burn the toast?
Is my toaster sentient?
'Cause when mine broke down, I could swear I heard it crying

I don't know why
What do you think?
Maybe you'd cry if you couldn't make toast

Standing on the staircase in a black rubber top and a long, grey trenchcoat
Pink neon light bulb swinging over my bonce
I am not a Romo or a New Romantic, I'm a Cyborg rapist
I'm made of gas and wires and electric tubes and tarmac

Is my toaster sentient?
If not, then why did he give Mr Kettle a kiss?
Is my toaster sentient?
He likes silent films and his girlfriend's name is Chronos

Oh, what's going on in this messed up world?
There are loads of things I don't understand
Like, what is love?
What's the difference between boys and girls?
What's that penis between my legs for?
If I plug it in the wall, will it light up?
Or will I die?

Is my toaster sentient?
Is my blender mad? Is my telephone autistic?
Is my car a genius?
Is my bin a twat? Is my oven epileptic?

Is my Dad a photograph?
Is my Mum a spy? Is my grandad made of circuits?
Is my face an alien?
Is my arse a film? Are my elbows electronic?

Do you wanna come back to my place?
We can look at my secret mucky Polaroids
Just please don't tell my Mum

saints, goffiks and cars

2008-04-24T09:23:12Z

serpentstar has some wise words to say on the subject of St. George's Day. I can only point and mumble 'what he said'.

So, the family (self, wife and sprog plus ashbet) is off to Whitby today, in a hired car - a silver Ford Focus which I spent much of yesterday getting used to.

Oh dear lord, modern cars.

Reader, remember that I've spent the last two years driving a 1980s VW Polo C. No power steering, no power braking, no air conditioning, nothing between you and the drive. As my father told me, 'there's a wonderful feeling of adjacence'. Yes. One is at all times adjacent to the abrasive tarmac beneath one going by very fast, to the traffic, and to the elements, and one knows it.

But I've come to like it, even if doing a three point turn does involve hauling away on the steering wheel as if one were piloting a clipper through a tempest. I know that little car and it knows me. The noises and vibrations tell me exactly what's going on.

Driving the Ford is like driving a car over the Internet. Everything's compensated for. You're no longer adjacent, you're distanced. You brush the brake with your foot and you slam into an invisible padded anvil in the road. The steering is loose and easy and, because of this, disconcerting. It was like being on some sort of powerful steroid.

In the Polo, I always feel directly responsible for whatever the car does. In the Ford, I felt numbed, almost as if it could pile into something and the only result would be an automated voice saying 'Oh dear. Never mind.'

So I drove the Ford around until I felt used to it. I accomplished this by the simple method of getting lost, which meant much extempore driving and the development of a sort of forced rapport between myself and the car, as obtains between strangers who are trapped together in hazardous circumstances.

I'm rather looking forward to the trip now.

Three years today

2008-04-23T20:33:26Z

It's nice being married.

Okay.

2008-04-22T21:39:15Z

There is a lot of talk on the interweb right now about this.

Here is my potted response.

You do not get to exorcise the pain of having been a social reject in high school by intellectualising women's personal boundaries away.

'I felt the terrors of high school washing away from me. It could be this easy. Just ask!'

You fucking wish.

There is no magic password to the Infinite Boobs level. There is no hack that'll make the girls just get 'em out like you've wanted all along. There is no bypass. There is no Golden Liberated Space of Stardust Orgasm Ecstacy where it's okay to just ask a woman if you can feel her boobs as if it were no more of a big deal than it would be if you were to ask her to pass the salt.

Geeks think that everything must somehow succumb to ratocination; that all they need to do is steep the pain, the frustration, the shame in their own brain-juice for long enough, and there will be a Solution Found. And sometimes they believe they've found one, and it seems to work, and they bubble over with delight, because now they don't HAVE to face the difficulty and the pain any more.

They're supposed to be intelligent, so why don't they learn? Why is there such a stupid, pompous hubris about them, which refuses to give up its belief that Potent Secrets, Winning Methods, Can't-Lose Strategies and the like must get them what they want?

In just seven days I can make you a man!
They won't laugh when you transfix them with magick!
Attract women with the power of pheromones!

You cannot THINK your way around basic human decency and respect.

ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dai Thomas

2008-04-22T19:42:29Z

He looks a bit like Aleister Crowley and he plays like a fiend.

Dai has been a regular at many of the clubs where I used to sing with Lucy. For an all too brief time, New Aeon Books (the Tib Street version) was host to a folk club, and more than once Dai blew the roof off the place. This is the number I always used to request.

guh

2008-04-20T20:28:50Z

baby hed smell really DOES contain essence of purest crack.

Put THAT in your Monster Manual

2008-04-19T09:00:26Z

I was reading ursulav this morning, as one does, for she is awesome, and came across this:

So I'm reading "Bonk" by Mary Roach, which is brilliant. It's about the weird world of sex research. It's hysterical. I have learned disturbing things about what people used to think the cervix did, about sex in MRI machines, the apparently excessively lengthy debate about vaginal vs. clittoral orgasms* and so on and so forth.

This image, however, stopped me dead in my tracks...she talks about the (weirdly common, actually, still occurs today in some parts of the world) phenomenon of men believing that witches have stolen their penises, and quotes the author of that great work of lunacy, the Malleus Maleficarium:

"What, then, is to be thought of those witches who . . . sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?"

My first thought was, of course, "Exactly how much ergot was on the rye back then?" but if, dear reader, you think that my second thought was a mad urge to draw a bird's nest full of penises, you're absolutely right. Go help yourself to a cookie.

Her first thought is to draw it. Mine is to STAT IT UP.

What would 'bird's nest full of disembodied penises' be in rules terms? A Swarm, perhaps? Or some manner of Ooze?

cavalorn @ 2008-04-17T18:21:00

2008-04-17T17:24:33Z

You're a bloody argumentative and opinionated bunch, you lot.

Thanks. And I mean that honestly.

Not one of you - even among the people who I count as my oldest friends - is afraid to challenge what I say here, flatly contradict me or argue a point. That's something to be thankful for.

I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government (again)

2008-04-16T23:01:56Z

From the lovely faithais:

The Government's current definition of 'hate crime' is as follows:

* A 'hate incident' is any incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by hate or prejudice.
* A 'hate crime' is any incident which contributes to a criminal offence, perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

Within this broad definition, legislation focuses on hate crimes on the basis of race, faith, sexual orientation, disability and gender identity - and it is these categories which are currently monitored. We do not plan to extend this to include hatred against people on the basis of their appearance or sub-cultural interests. These are not intrinsic characteristics of a person and could be potentially be very wide ranging, including for example allegiance to football teams - which makes this a very difficult category to legislate for.

'These are not intrinsic characteristics of a person', but religion is?

That's utterly beneath contempt. It's the same thing Dawkins quite rightly draws our attention to when he points out that there is no such thing as a 'Christian child' or a 'Muslim child', but only a child of Christian or Muslim parents.

Religion isn't some sort of trait that you inherit, or an intrinsic part of you. That's giving it far too much dignity. It's merely a choice to invest belief.

By the way, the above is the Government's response to a petition to have the definition of 'hate crime' broadened to include subcultural identification (which has been patronisingly reduced to 'subcultural interests' in the text), following the murder of a Goth girl for being a Goth.

The conclusion is that if someone delivers repeated kicks to your face and head with such viciousness that the ambulance crew can't even tell what gender you are, and that you die in a hospital bed two weeks later without ever regaining consciousness, it's only a hate crime if they did it because you were wearing a hijab, crucifix, yarmulke or the like, and not if they did it because you were wearing black clothes, a skeleton T-shirt and facial piercings.

dear americans,

2008-04-16T22:50:33Z

The word is 'mediaeval', or in your spelling, 'medieval'.

Not 'midevil', or 'medevil', or 'mideval' or any of those other pieces of nonsense so many of you persistently come up with.

Why the fuck is that one word so impossible for so many of you to spell correctly?

New Aeon, Old Skool

2008-04-14T10:01:45Z

Funny how things pan out. I'm minding New Aeon Books for a week while Jon goes off for a well earned holiday.

So, if any of the old crew feel like stopping by for a coffee, come on in!

wombles in the hood

2008-04-12T16:41:42Z

The Wombles of Wimbledon Common have moved to New York and adopted American accents in a protest against imported children's TV shows.

oh ffs.

2008-04-12T00:36:01Z

*facepalm*

(via the lovely takhisis)

Pasty Faced No Talent Son Of A Bitch Waves His Knob At The Law One Too Many Times, Gets Incarcerated

2008-04-08T16:51:10Z

LOL.