WAAA!

littlefurycreatures:

Internet superstardom has deemed me fanciful for it’s “nod”. That’s right, Karl Lagerfeld wished me happy birthday. Thanks Karl! Love your work.

We are working together on a Childrens Book - I am doing the images and Karl is doing the Brilliance. They wont be much like SG, but it should be fun.

Also, it will mean I am busy - but I have about 5 SG’s in my head. Hopefully they will come out well.

x Fury

Is it really just all about f-eight?

It’s interesting to me how something that is enjoyed by large groups of people can become something akin to a religious experience for a lot people. The number of times when one is at the football and in a large crowd singing away and getting into the banter there is deeply primal feeling one gets. The same feelings are also experienced when out clubbing, and most definitely when on a rave as well.

The feelings at a football match or similar, is very different to the feeling in a rave. This is unsurprising given ones mental and emotional state is very different in the two settings. There is a big community feeling while at the stadium, or even when we are on the way there talking to other fans, meeting up with randoms. A lot of the later feeling will depend on the result. On the surface it seems like it couldn’t be more different there are several similarities.

A big part of having a good time is enjoying the company of other people there. You will inevitably have some sort of chemical agents, to help you make sure you have a good time. Whether its alcohol, nicotine, caffeine or anything else. I think the main reason why I think it feels like a religious experience, is that on some level you just realise and accept there is something there that is bigger than yourself.

Which is why I guess football matches are such heated and passionate affairs, after all we know what that bigger thing is. The club, the badge maybe sometimes the nation. That is why it can so often be violent. At a rave however it rarely gets that heated. Why don’t know what it is, or why it’s there, we just know it makes us feel good, so we should try and enjoy it with as many people as possible.

There maybe other reason for these differences of course.

Yes se-Venth there

How does fiction happen? I mean I know people write stories or think of character and plots and try and gel them together. But I was thinking more and more about how real life jobs like police, soldiers etc get portrayed in movies or TV and even books, most of the times they’re not realistic and we as the reader kind of know they’re not but we are used to them. I mean people think the police have to tell you they’re a cop, because of TV. I mean that’s ridiculous how would undercover policeman do their job?

I can understand part of it comes from romanticism, but most of it is probably something some writer wrote once appeared in some form of popular mass media and viola we have an instant fiction trope. I always thought in a lot of ways a good fiction writer is constantly trying to balance the occurrence of realism and romanticism. But I beginning to wonder if it isn’t just that writers are trying to balance meeting the audiences or readers expectations and defying them. After all a work of fiction should be original and move the reader in unexpected ways, but at the same a lot of the drama and character growth can only be done with some sort of reliability to the audience. SO it must meet some expectations. 

Perhaps someday it won’t like this. Writers of fiction may be able to write works that affect their audience by constantly hitting them unexpectedly. Causing them to question everything they thought they knew about life and the universe.  Or we may have works which use language or portray drama so eloquently that we as the audience cannot help but be moved and captivated by someone who relates to us and helps us better understand ourselves.

Its debatable whether these new and daring works would be any better or even as good as fiction as it is currently written though.

The Sixth Column. (see what I did there)

So thinking I had done a reasonable amount already which I could use to tide me over content wise, I was a bit put of to have to resort to lists this early in the 30 blogs endeavour. Having had a pretty manic weekend, I was just too lazy to put in any real effort. So what sort of list should I use? Well obviously I need to generate controversy to try and get our comment count rising, heck maybe even a flame war. Basically what list is both easy and controversial? And then I had it…

The Top 5 most awesome fictional characters to originate from the 90s

5. Darkwing Duck.

A glorious parody of 90 darker and edgier super heroes, while still remaining interesting and innovative (for the time). A true man-er Duck of the 90’s whose greatest strength and weakness was his giant ego. And who can defeat a hero with a giant arsenal of deadly weapons and even deadlier one liners.

4. Spike Spiegel

The cool Jewish Cowboy of the Bebop crew. He is a lean mean bad guy capturing machine, unfortunately he is also a lean mean property destroying machine.  With an elegant swagger which seemed to imply that the awesome jazz tracks of Cowboy Bebop were just his theme song, and one hell of a suit, he is the late 90’s embodiment of cool.

3. Ser Jaime Lannister 

The badass knight with shit for honour, Ser Jaime is one of the biggest base breakers for fans of George RR Martin’s, A Song of Ice and Fire. He established his jerk off credentials by defenestrating an eight year old in the first book, and the very latest threatened to trebuchet a new born infant. But in between he has had enough awesome duels, delivered enough cool one liners and just kicked so much ass that he still remains the best character in the series despite all the competition.

2. Tyler Durden 

Do you know Tyler Durden? Chuck Palahniuk probably didn’t realise what a cult figure his protagonist in Fight Club was going to be. The David Fincher movie just went on to grow the legend. There is something about him that made every male growing up in the 90s. Some how even the most irreverent one liner delivered by this man seemed poignant and meaningful. Already he has transcended into something so much more than his original appearance and scope.

1. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

At one point in the 90’s as soon as you walked into a room and shouted “Now this is a story…” you would start and impromptu group MCing session. The Fresh Prince was proto-bling, without being too garish or ostentatious. It just seemed oh so effortless and simple, and everyone one of us who tried to imitate him learned it was impossible. Will Smith had this character down. Thanks to his popularity we even got to see what it would be like if the Fresh Prince grew up and became a Miami cop, or a fighter pilot who defeats aliens, or join a secret police for that handles earth-extraterrestrial affairs.

The elderly in a fifth about stuff

I read an interesting article on boing-boing that apparently older people liked to read stories about the stupidity of young people. The article also finished on the interesting note that young people liked to read positive stories about young people. There’s all sort of issues and ideas at play here. First let us check the result of the test, i.e. older people prefer reading negative stories about young people, and that young people mostly liked reading positive stories about old people.  

There is a bunch of definitional issues that we can choose to try and resolve or ignore. Being that this is me, I will just ignore the definitional problems because frankly it’s easier. One could write entire theses about what young, old, positive and negative mean, let alone one mere blog. We will just assume for our purposes the age ranges chosen by the study and their choice of stories what ever they happened to be, were adequate. What I want to ask is whether the researcher’s hypothesis was correct. They believed “it boosts their own self-esteem”. They even did surveys to confirm that the older people got a self esteem boost after reading said articles. Unfortunately the article doesn’t say if young people got the same self esteem boost from reading their preferred articles.

So does the conclusion seem right? Well yes. I mean everyone enjoys schadenfreude to some level, and as you get older it only becomes easier to appreciate. But is this so much and age thing or an intergenerational thing? Was there group of old people from another time who didn’t enjoy reading about the misfortune of young people? (Let us not go so far as to say they didn’t enjoy the misfortune of others, we are trying to be realistic) Is there something about generation Y (or the millennials) that makes them more likely to look for positivity? Or the reverse that the Baby boomer generation that makes them particularly dislike commercialised and fake current generation and just enjoy reading about them being put to there place. God knows I do.

Or is this merely something that happens to every generation? Forever yearning to lost youth and feeling more than a little dejected about how the current generation behaves and their choice of values. Is schadenfreude just all that more sweet when it comes to those who seem to have everything, and to senior generation the young just always seem like they have it all, and don’t know what to do with it. Some things are just not going to be answered in one blog. Especially if it’s written by me.

Go fourth to the great beyond

One of the first requests I got when I first announced the 30 blogs project is to write a travel blog of a trip I made in New Zealand. I think the very nature of travel blogs mean you kind of have to do it while you are travelling or shortly after. The longer you it takes for you to write from the end of your travels, the closer your writings become closer to being a blog about travelling rather than a travel blog.

You tend to miss little things that you would if you were properly travel blogging like little shops you stop at weird roadside statues, crazy signs that make no sense. All the little travel bit like pranks played on the guys who are asleep, or strange people you chat to in airport bars. A great writer once said when you’re on the road everything own is travel sized, everything you eat or buy is meant for a single use and disposed, and the people you meet they are single serving friends. So it seems in that way a travel blog is single serve and limited time as well. If you didn’t get to use it then and there well to bad cause it’s done and dusted.

Fortunately for though, the request was to talk about a trip that I have made in New Zealand, and I think with the passage of time I am possibly in a more enlightened position to judge the effects and merits of my trips around our great country. First of all lets get this straight I don’t count a day trip to Whangarei, Hamilton, Thames or anywhere closer (with respect to where I am living i.e. Auckland) to be a real trip. Yes they are nice places but if I went there on a car and came back the same day or the next day it doesn’t really count. If we discount those I have my road trips with friends, family trips, and solo adventures.

We can share the story of my solo adventure to Wellington for another time, epic as it was. And let’s face it Family trips are all the same, especially if you have a family like mine. Which is not to say they were bad, it just kind of predictable. Though to be fair I did manage for the first and so far only time to the South Island with my family during winter and it was amazing. Seeing actual snow for the first time was even better than I imagined (and I thought it was going to be pretty fcuking good) and going to the Milford Sound on an actual sunny day is unheard of.

My first and so far only road trip with friends was going to Taupo, in Central North Island. It was a great trip. We ended up staying for four days from memory. Somehow the drive to and from there was made more epic just from the people participating, and little did I know that once I got there I would meet people who would change my life forever. Basically we went there for the Taupo Joust. Yes it is exactly what you are thinking it is, if you were thinking of people in armour with lances on horses attacking each other. It was epic. Amazing match ups on the arenas, meeting weird and wonderful people from all around the country doing gladiator fights, roasting on Viking spit roasts, and throwing up from drinking too much (there was lots of that).

And I didn’t know it at the time, but Taupo is the food capital of the North Island. I mean could find somewhere that sold bad food. I couldn’t even find average food. It ranged from at least good to being absolutely excellent. And there really is nothing like watching the sunset on the lake at nearly 9 in the evening on a warm summer’s day. It was a time full of wine, women and song.

All I can say in retrospect who ever was writing that story was pretty damn good, it to bad that their genius cant be replicated in one blog.

The Misadventures of Stephan Hawking in the Three and a third Dimmension

I was thinking today that I would be writing an article on one of my previous ideas or write up one of the requests I got. But this morning when I got in twitter I noticed that the great Stephen Hawking was trending at #1. Such is my naivety that I was celebrating that there was a mass discussion about advanced physics online, with various people asking questions and people possibly even the Hawk himself answering. Of course I was wrong. So so very wrong.

It turns our that Dr. Hawking is releasing a new book (yeay!) titled ‘The Grand Design’ and it is going to try and answer questions left unanswered from a Brief History of Time. Dr. Hawking believes that advances in physics such as the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new observations such as those made by satellites like NASA’s COBE and WMAP, will allow him to approach these questions with the aim of making a realistic hypothesis’.

All this whilst exciting and interesting as it is was not why ‘Stephen Hawking’ was trending on twitter of course. One of the hypothesis’ the Dr Hawking allegedly (I say allegedly because I have yet to read the book barring one paragraph) put forward is that the big bang did not start as per say with a cosmic intelligence, but rather an inevitable result of the nature of gravity. Rather predictably this has lead to thousands of twitters going on about how Stephen Hawking says God did not create the universe. I think though for once a lot of this is not the actual tweeters fault. Most of them have been quoting this article from the Guardian.

Having read a few other sources I don’t think Dr. Hawking is saying any such thing. He is merely saying that God or rather Deus ex Machina is no longer necessary to explain the big bang. Whilst this might seem revolutionary to the layman, (which admittedly includes people like me) such ideas have probably been hashed out peer reviewed in Academia for some time. Dr. Hawking and his co writer Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow are merely using well established theories about quantum physics and cosmology that have been developed over the last few decades to write a plausible theory to explain the Origins of the Big Bang.

Of course as a tool of big media the Guardian would ignore this, and play up potential controversy instead. Inevitably this will lead to lots of people buying this book if for the burnings alone. Maybe some of these people will buy said book and think about the ideas presented and the validity of the arguments presented. Probably not though.

Just think about that for a second

Sigmund Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Whilst he may be correct, we all know that even if there is nothing behind or secretly intended by something we as people will always look beyond it. So when I had a request to blog about “erectile dysfunction as a commentary on modern society”, I had several initial images in my head which could be extrapolated from said turn of phase but I decided instead to take it at face value. Let a cigar be a cigar as it were. So once I had a clear perspective, this could be a topic I could thrust ahead with gusto. I mean it almost writes itself (oh if only).  

It’s also difficult to try and blog about something without trying to understand why it was chosen as a topic in the first place. To get to the meat of the argument I must after all understand the motivation and thought processes of everyone involved. Was it meant to be a whimsical comment not taken seriously? Did he get one too many emails selling fake v14gr4 or c14li5? Or is this interest purely shall we say academic. Who (other than …) knows?

It says something that Pzifer is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Some of you who do not remember the late 90’s, when Viagra was unleashed to the largely unsuspecting world it made a splash like an unfortunate pr0n metaphor. Needless to say looking back we wonder what the hype was all about. I don’t know that one blog enough to describe what it is that it says about anything let alone modern society.

I guess when it comes down to it if a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, most of the times it’s more or less than a cigar.

What should the first blog be about?

Now some of you may have read my earlier post, and perhaps you were wondering if it put any effort at all into it and whether I had actually gotten anything of value actually done. The answer is of course: No. It’s far too hard to think about what I might want to put into my first blog and I have always been someone who likes to approach problems chronologically. This is what actually makes me a bad writer (other than laziness); I can’t write different parts of the story separately. I need to write it the way I intend to have it read. So what’s my solution to solving my writing problem? Well what I use to solve every problem, I keep spamming something until I can figure a way to make things work.

I don’t know why I tend to be the sort of person who just enjoys this approach. Now don’t mistake this for being something like the brute force approach in programming or a dictionary attack, I am far too lazy to do something like that. This is more like a chess player who utilises the ‘pawn’ attack strategy in hope that you don’t realise how bad he is at chess. While easy to dismiss, if you have the ability to fake things well, and can judge how your surroundings, this can be an effective albeit annoying strategy.

This approach to spamming is commonly seen on my twitter and if you email me much, as I tend to reply often before who I am corresponding with has had enough time to write something especially if I am bored and or not busy.  This being said I do admire people who can do things with just enough. There is something extremely elegant about putting in just enough effort and no more. It’s the effect of being lazy yet effective and productive that totally does it for me.

If only there were away to combining spamming with this minimalist approach… in some sort of blog perhaps …