i can't be bothered writing in this piece of crap any more.

Name: Mrs. McWooble
Age: 14, but (non sequitur!) I have a video of her eating some cake at a birthday party many years ago.
Birthday: 25th of December
Eye colour: Bluey-greeny-browny-reddish! Nah, just kidding. Blueish.
Height: Almost as tall as me! XD
Facts about Mrs. McWooble:
    - She is Mr. McWooble's wife ("who?" you may ask? and well you may!)
    - She is an amazingly interesting person
    - She is one of the rapies. Scary.
    - Mr. McWooble thinks P*******e is awesmoe. (Uh-oh! A name!)
    - Mrs. McWooble was nameless to protect her identity, but I forgot. Ah well.
    - Mrs. McWooble is skilled at making frozen jelly icecubes, which are cool (yet completely inedible).
    - Mrs. McWooble told Reciprocal Man to write this blog. (Who is Reciprocal Man? Stupid question.)
    - Mrs. McWooble and Reciprocal Man will elope and get married in Europe.
    - Mr. McWooble and Reciprocal Man are going to travel around the world!!
    - Mrs. McWooble should be flattered. And is.

In short, Mrs. McWooble is Reciprocal Man's new (and old) favourite person!

   {    
    The setting: a frozen meat truck. MOLLY CRAIG,
    the interviewee, and ALBERT XARAZOV, the interviewer,
    huddle around a pile of flaming Italian suits. ALBERT
    is a reporter for Radio 113581321X1337Q8421H; MOLLY is
    a member of the so-called "Stolen Generation".
   }    
A    Good evening. You're listening to Radio 113581321X1337Q8421H.

M    You said this was private!

A    I say a lot of things. [shivers]

M    Why are we in the back of a frozen meat truck?

A    [shiftily] There's a body in my hotel room.

    [awkward silence]

A    Anyway, with me here is Alison Finkle, the world-famous
    elephant impersonator, who will talk about her experiences
    with the giant hallucinogenic centipedes of Southern Borneo.
    But first, I'd like to---

M    My name is Molly! Molly Craig!

A    [shocked] I'm in the wrong truck!

   {
    ALBERT leaps out of the back of the speeding truck
    and lands in the middle of the road. There is a soft
    "crack", followed by a brief scream, and he stops moving.
   }

   {
    There is a movement in the rack of dead animals
    near the back of the truck.
   }

    [sound of an animal carcass splitting open and a
    blood-soaked, shivering journalist falling out]

   {
    This is XLEPHIER PRIME, a journalist with the pirate radio
    station Perdido Street. He sits down heavily on a pile of
    skins, too close to the flaming suits, and his coat-tails
    catch fire. He beats them out with a piece of raw meat.
   }

X    [shakily (and understandably so)] Hello.

M    Hello.

X    I'd like to talk to you about your experiences at the
    Moore River settlement, and your general experience as a
    member of the "Stolen Generation".

M    Well, I my experiences as one of the "Stolen Generation" are
    quite similar to many other "half-castes" who were forcibly
    removed from their families and communities and "assimilated"
    into "white" culture.

X    How would you say this affected your identity?

M    Well, I had always lived in the traditional way of my people,
    even though my father was a white man. I think it was because
    he was almost always away working on that rabbit fence that
    my upbringing was mainly in the hands of my mother and the rest
    of the Jigalong mob. However, when that sleazebag came and
    shouted at Maude (whoever that was) about "the papers", and...
    [breaks down into sobs]

X    [sympathetically] Stop sobbing, it never comes out right over AM.
    Sounds like a bronchitic rhinoceros inhaling a pine cone.

M    Sorry. [composes herself] When McSleazy stuck us in that car,
    my whole life changed drastically from a harsh, dangerous, and
    spartan existence surrounded by my friends and family and people
    to a harsh, dangerous and spartan existence surrounded by complete
    strangers, most of whom were either sadistic or exceedingly
    misguided white people who saw themselves as our "protectors"
    for some unfathomable reason, or fellow "half-castes", who tended
    not to be the world's greatest conversationalists. It was a trying
    time indeed.

X    But apparently "half-castes" at the settlements were forced to
    adhere to the customs of a culture almost completely alien
    to theirs, with harsh penalties for failing to do so.
    Was this the case?

M    Yes.

    [pause]

X    Of course you and your sister and cousin are remarkable in that you
    managed to escape both the physical "settlement" and the ideology
    of Mr. A. O. Neville and his cronies.

M    Yes. We just couldn't take the lack of good food, toilets,
    dignity, and freedom, and we had to speak English all the time,
    which, as we all know, has one of the most nonsensical
    spelling-to-pronunciation relationships in the world. My native
    language doesn't even have an orthography, but if it did, it would
    be more sensible than English. I swear.

X    Moving swiftly on, I'd like to hear about how your sense of identity
    was altered by your time at the Moore River settlement.

M    While the government and the people who worked at Moore River tried
    their hardest to make us "half-castes" into white people, it's
    debatable whether they succeeded fully. I suppose some of the
    inmates (for lack of a better word) did become fully "assimilated",
    but Daisy and Gracie and I didn't stay long enough, I think.
    I know that my time at Moore River (and at other similar places
    afterwards) has made me appreciate my time at Jigalong with my
    people more than I would otherwise, so in that respect, the traumas
    I suffered strengthed my Aboriginal identity. [sneezes]

X    So it could be said that, in the long run, your identity was
    improved by your experiences as one of the "Stolen Generation"?

M    I suppose so. But not as much as if I had been able to live
    a normal life in my favourite environment, with my people.

X    And with that, we'll abruptly stop the program.

Just finished reading The Scar, by China Miéville. An excellent, excellent book. It be another novel set in Bas-Lag, although this time not actually in New Crobuzon, which be a pity. I like that place. This one be set (mostly) in Armada, which is almost as cool as New Crobuzon. However, The Scar has the anelophii in it. And they are frightening. Screamingly frightening.

On other things, there be a DragonForce concer near the Hordern Pavillion in May this year! For those of you who are fools, DragonForce are an extreme power metal band who are my current favourite band.

 

Jeez, that concert was fucking awesome! It has to be our best performance ever I think. Awesome crowd! Thanks to everyone who came to see us (and those people who came to see upfunk creek but saw us too!). A video will be up on YouTube soon (within a month from now [maybe]), for all our adoring fans who WEREN'T ABLE TO COME. That means YOU (unless you came). Extreme stealth!

End communication.

Yeah, sorry for the exceedingly long time since my last post. I've been busy having my brain assaulted by horrifically boring mathematics. Plus other stuffs. Also, my Google Desktop data has disappeared, and with it all the preferences and internal data for the various gadgets I have, like my calendar, list of stuff to do, and (most importantly) my scratch pad, which is a little "sticky note"-style thing which (supposedly) saves its contents automatically and backs them up online. Sure, right.

On a different note, I fell in my pool again, wearing my school uniform (again). However, this time I had my BOOKnote and my USB drive in my pocket. And gasp! the USB drive not only floats, but is waterproof! How cool is that?! (interrobang klaxxon sounds)

My BOOKnote is kind of bent now though, 'cos it dried uncomfortably. Ah well.

 

And now to school-ness. I mad the world's coolest timetable recently: it is like 2cm x 1.5cm and colour-coded by subject, with the room numbers of each period in binary overlaid on the colour squares. And here it is:

Isn't that cool? AND it's actual size!

Now onto other things, like my new maths teacher, who reminds me of a vulture, in that she looms over you and stares hard enough to crack your skull until you pause for a second, or draw a scribble, or get an answer wrong, or otherwise falter in your working-ness, and then she swoops down and pecks out your eyeballs.

The librarians (or whoever adminsters the computers in the library) are still idiots. For example: the bios is password protected, so no enterprising young hacker like myself can, say, change the boot sequence and, say, run Linux off his (or her) thumbdrive. All well and good (except for the fact that the smart, funny, enterprising young hacker's schemes have been foiled). However, the boot sequence is already set to FDD, CD, USB, LAN, HDD. So any brilliantly intelligent, witty, mature, handsome, modest, enterprising young hacker can do whatever they want with the system, without having to muck around with pesky boot-disks and shit. Of course, this whole discussion is a somewhat academic one, due to two facts. One: the IP address of the server (and the proxy) has changed, and no-one knows what it is, which has the unfortunate effect of causing one's browser to kill itself. And (this is the really scary part) two: the library's power goes off at noon. I'll just let that sink in now.

Next Monday, we (my friends [and to a lesser extent, moi]) shall attempt to run Halo on one (or more) of the library computers. It will be an exercise in frustration, I fear, but my friends are eager to "get that bitch up and running", in Mason-Dixon's words. How eloquent.

McM!dwørth out.

[rant]
Before you read any further, I'd like to draw your attention to the book I'm currently reading. Greg Egan is an Australian hard sci-fi author and computer programmer, and he is my favourite author of any kind. His books are invariably awesome (except Teranesia, that had too much character development and shit and like no metaphysics or quantum mechanics or artificial intelligence or even any quantum ontology in it). However, if I had to pick just one for YOU to read, I couldn't. Instead, I'd tell you to read Permutation City, Quarantine, and Diaspora in that order. They're not like in a series or anything, but they are all equally awesome. However, the one that I consider my favourite is Diaspora; the one normal people (ie., not me) will most likely be able to handle is Quarantine; and Permutation City is the one with the coolest and most incredibly mind-spattering premises and concepts and stuffs.
[/rant]

Now that we've got that over and done with, we can get to the subject of school. The librarian is going to be a bit pissed off at me, for various reasons; if I may explain one or two in a typically m!dwørthesque and tangential manner: my school has a whole bunch of staff who seem to devote their every moment to several anti-student causes, such as making all the Macs more crap than they were when we bought them, or filling the Windows machines we do have with so many anti-everything crap that you can't do anything with them, or even replacing some of our precious few Windows boxes with new, shitty, Dell ones that a) boot from the LAN, b) have even more pieces of badly-written software designed to stop us from doing ANYTHING, and (this is the worst bit) c) have had their HARD DRIVES TAKEN OUT AND "REPLACED" WITH A TEN-FUCKING-MEGABYTE RAMDRIVE, which makes them slower than... something that's really fucking slow. I hate ramdrives. My friend Axel showed me a computer he owned that didn't have a HDD anymore, and he was running Windows 3.1 off a ramdrive. Now that... that is just scary. Really, really scary. For those of you who don't know, a ramdrive is a virtual hard disk drive that uses the RAM for it's actual physical data storage. So if Axel turned this computer off, it would lose its operating system. Twitch, indeed. That's all for now.

End communication.

As I mentioned before, I recently went to a Frenzal Rhomb concert in Sydney. It was very cool. Actually, it Frenzal came on at like 11 pm, and they had another couple of bands before them. Huntsman and Unpaid Debt. I think it's debt singular. Maybe not. Anyway, Hunstman were OK, but not that good; Unpaid Debt(s?) were much better. I might get some of their songs, they were much better than I expected. Sadly, as I was attending with my brother who is much younger than myself, I had to leave early. Which fucking sucks, 'cos I only got to hear 6 Frenzal songs. But in the 6 were two of my favourites: "Let's Drink A Beer" and "Johnny Ramone Was In A Fucking Good Band, But He Was A C**t (Gabba Gabba You Suck)". The latter title was printed on t-shirts. I wanted to get one, but despite racking my brain for several minutes, I couldn't think of a single occasion when I could actually wear it without adverse repercussions (it was happily devoid of asterisks).

I leave you with a quote from Use of Weapons:

'Scream?' he said.

Doubtfully, the sky looked down.

It was blue.

End communication.

I just found in my garage a copy of Ian M. Banks' Culture novel Use of Weapons, which is cool, for many reasons. Such as the fact that it's a Culture novel, and the fact that it's mine. Woot.

However, my newfound realisation of how wonderful life could be was quickly dampened by the thought that I have to go to school in like a few days. At least this year I won't have the evil Ms. ß to torment me and make my life hell.

Non sequitur klaxxon: I also found a copy of Plato's Republic, which is a very interesting read. However, it is somewhat lacking in humour.