MATERIALIST DOT NET

ok. background. old friend of mine (that I incidentally had an unreciprocated crush on for three tortuous years of adolescent secondary school...) has recently given up any pretense of human decency and joined a bank as an economist.

nothing wrong there, except the fact that her heart is so fully in this that she spams us, her oldest friends, with promotional publicity and website links for her bank's credit card scheme... which given that we don't really hear from her for years at a time, except for the bi-annual casual "oh-haven't-you-grown-since-I-saw-you-last-when-was-that-must-have-been-in-1995" catching-up conversations over summer or at Christmas... is quite annoying.

so, here is the link she keeps sending us. in Norwegian. sorry you monolingual anglophones out there.

and here is a website I concocted after work today. also in Norwegian.

admittedly it is funnier if you read Norwegian. perceptive readers may notice that the registration link [which in the revamped version reads more or less "yes, I want to mark my soul in the name of Satan"...] still works... [later: no it doesn't you fool. not any longer. hahahaha you're a clueless idiotsangreal's auto-subversive dark side.]

anyway. it is petty and silly and stupid. but also immensely satisfying.

going to bed now, a man well satisfied with his work.

I have the most bizarre dreams sometimes...

all I remember clearly from last night is standing in a medieval square surrounded by mindless alien-controlled rubber zombies and screaming "I fucked the witch of Narnia! and I fucked Aslan too!!!" at the top of my lungs...

less clearly there was also an open bay with clear blue skies above; boat races; strange weapons that vomited strings of wet multicoloured organic rubber; and buzz lightyear from toy story.

ok people. I know it sucks. and I'm not saying that in a bout of false hpyocritical modesty (I know I rock most of the time)... it really is crap. but here's the link to my very first ever computer animation.

check it out

regular readers will recognise the basic drama retold here. others should take a week off to read my diary. or click the user-friendly goldfish links on my front page.

so there.

and don't ask me why the fuck crank is a penguin. I don't have a clue. he came out like one.

perusing the Guardian job section today I found this particularly sublime job, which I reproduce here in its entirety...

"Research Officer (IA)"

INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

University of London

'Textuality in Video Games: Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play'

Research Officer (IA)

You will conduct textual analyses of video/computer games, interviews with games designers and analyses of material from specialist games magazines and websites. You must be an experienced player of video/computer games. You will need a higher degree in a relevant field and research experience including either qualitative textual analysis of games/related media texts or interviewing/observation of media audiences.

Salary will be on the Research Grade IA salary scale, in the range £16,775 - £18,731, plus £2,134 London Allowance. Appointment to 31 August 2003. Job share considered.

-

what can I say... I'm almost afraid to apply for it, as they might give it to me... and I'd be doomed...

...is me.

no doubt about it.

"he lived in a place where bad things happened".

my epitaph, courtesy of crank.

was struck momentarily with the desire to say something poignant and meaningful, crouching over laptop on messed-up bed in darkened room, surrounded by sweating breathing white walls and heaps of knocked-out clothes...

friends scattered through the living room, reclining on mattresses like pale urban greeks. geeks. witty chitchat drifts through the open door, almost but not completely drowned by my headphones... mp3-player keeps flicking between nine inch nails, italian cartoon music, early kraftwerk, dutch techno, vengaboys and allen ginsberg reding howl... [no wonder I'm a schizoid...]

we've got visitors, including brash's girlfriend Pale Mystical Being, and two newyork yanks I won't name for the moment, unless something happens to warrant their inclusion into the narrative...

rustpot and crank've goen to bed, I the only one working tomorrow still conscious, refusing to go to bed for obscure reasons having to do with the fact that I want to be the kind of person who sits up late in dark warehouse rooms and types obscure things on laptops... weird. satisfying my appetite for myself, in a deeply pretentious way. but hey, I enjoy it.

anyway.

spent the evening digesting a book on JavaScript... crank thinks I should go straight for proper sequential shell machine code programmming hardcoreness like PERL etc. ... quietly, I think he's mad. I leaf through a book on Perl and my brain starts humming to itself to drown out the static... lest the memetic virus infect my cranial harddisk.

anyone read snowcrash? exactly.

it is hot. for once, it is hot here. there is moisture at the intersection between my outstretched fingers and the wall, whether that is because my fingers or the walls are sweating is ultimately irrelevant...

if I was in the jungle and had a presentable torso I'd strip, even if I was by myself. but I'm not, and I'm [virtually] embarassed by my loose, pallid, chunky frame. so there. no graphic descriptions of my sweating gleaming [imaginary] pectorals rippling in the glare of the streetlights outside...

on the topic of writing something meaningful... like a chimpanzee struck with the desire to write a textbook on molecular chemistry... I got over it. easily.

back to peeling my everyday bananas, methinks.

or going to bed. but it's too hot... argh.

whatever. good night. good night? yeah. suppose it is.

in the morning. tastes like napalm.

had a serious bubblegum crisis yesterday night at a busstop. eight (8) hubba bubbas at once. deployed in linear sequence, of course, not all at once... to maximise flavour and bubble potential. you know, you can't blow bubblegum bubbles til you've softened the material, and try softening 1.5 packets of hubba bubba bubblegum at once.

juices would [over]flow, seriously. in rivulets of rainbow-coloured drool down my chin. not desirable.

[interjection: to clarify. I chewed each individual piece thoroughly, then I added another one. the effect was cumulative, and in the end I had 8 pieces in my mouth.]

so the proportion of the materia prima was as follows: atomic apple (3, green), serious strawberry (1, reddish pink) kool cola (2, difficult to work out) and lively lime (2, toxic yellow)...

someone should shoot the brand manager for coming up with "lively", BTW. 'lively'? a polite way of saying annoying hyperactive idiot. "yes, he's very... lively".

anyway, following the divers antiks of yesterday, I'm munching a juicy fruit at the moment [10am]. telling myself it's my morning workout. jaw muscles. very important, yes.

I can also observe I have a cooling cup of coffee by my side, I'm wearing my delightful dark green and blue dressing-gown / bathrobe with a black shiva scarf wrapped around my head, and I'm playing to many computer games.

the latter I note because my dreams last night fell into two categories: one, random domestic dreams of the 'flutter marries crank' variety... two, first-person dreams where the protagonist fights endless varieties of mutants and beastie creatures in perfectly scrolling 3d-accelerated mazes...

both of which sound a bit too familiar...

"barely out of her sexual adolescence" ...         - 6/22/2001

the phrase just flicked through my endarkened mind just now. so much for even trying to pretend I'm enlightened. just because the 'chick' in question has small, pointy, underdeveloped mammaries [you know, the 13-year-old's type, that are less glands than just thin pointy foreshadowing echoes of breasts to come, sculpted in fat...] and brings them to prominence with a very tight t-shirt, I make entirely invalid inferences about her sexual maturity...

I piss myself off sometimes.

ok, I'm shallow. I notice women's breasts on the streets. my gaze lingers on strangers, and in the span of a few brief seconds an entire imaginary lifetime of sexual adventures plays itself out behind my brow... my hungry eyes can roam an entire carriage of the tube in seconds. I notice the breast sizes of friends I'd never dream of falling in love with, then wonder what they'd be like in bed.

sometimes.

I have been told I have a mammary fixation. I probably do. fvck. doesn't everyone. all males anyway. the warm firm moon-like rotundity of your mother's breast looming over you... mmmmmm...

besides the point. either way, I fvcking annoy myself sometimes. thick, torpid and undisciplined... ant in treacle. jelly. flat rock flitting across water in slow motion.

enough.

the object of commentary was one of the two eager little journalism graduates we've got here on a work placement... so desperate to get a foot in the door of the industry, they're willing to work for 3 weeks and 9 weeks respectively for free just as long as we let them put it on their cv...

incredible. I wonder if I was ever that enthusiastic? [or desperate...] It must be a harsh world out there...

maybe I still harbour the capacity to be. enthusiastic, that is. just need to find the right niche...

either way. have a good week-end ye all. be well, and I hope you end up doing something meaningful. I have a distinct feeling that I probably won't...

hell, not really on the edge... I'm as alive and well as ever; if there's any edge I inhabit, it's the twilight land bordering on tackiness, incomprehensiblity and obscurely bad taste.

as ever.

I just haven't felt like writing for a week. a whole week... in which I've completed two computer games, been rejected by Accenture [quelle surprise...], unwittingly inspired a RL friend to start his own diary [choochill, du vet hvem du er... og det gjoer jeg og... *flire*], spent perhaps too much time with gf, and fatally, most importantly, acquired a new game. the Sims...

for the uninitiated, this nifty little evolution of SimCity allows you to design a house, design a family complete with looks and personalities, and set the latter loose within the former... endless hours of fun as you watch the little artificially stupid ueber-morons trying to carve out a niche for themselves on your harddisk... they sleep, chat, kiss, watch tv, dance, make babies, shower, make kaka, pursue their careers and generally do anything you tell them to as long as it's family friendly and vaguely cuddly...

obviously, my first move was to recreate the flat, the desire to play G-d and recreate my posse of flatmates in all their at times dysfunctional glory [I hasten to admit that I am up there with the most dysfunctional ones, in case someone might read this and take needless offense...] was just too strong...

I think there may be some fundamental design flaws. Flutter keeps losing her job [as a test subject in a laboratory] because she never gets out of bed; crank has taken to painting[!] and refuses to make use of the workout machine I installed in the corridor... rustpot urinates prolifically all over the house, as though he were trying to stake out his territory. brash mopes around and plays loud music [quite realistic this ]... my simulacrum has taken to playing chess a lot...

the first couple of times I tried to run a simulation unsupervised to see what the little pixelite cutie-pies 'd get up to on their own... I'd check in half an hour later and the entire house would have burned down with all inhabitants... depressing. swiftly I remedied the problem by getting them all to study cookery so they wouldn't set fire to their food. has worked quite well so far...

but I digress in my fondness for the little things. the possible theological ramifications are staggering. I, the supramundane intelligence, creator yet not creator, function in relation to my creations as a being of an entirely different order of magnitude...

what if G-d, the prima causa, stands in relation to us in terms of intelligence, power and ethical responsibility as I stand to those little critters? not entirely implausible. consider the evidence:

made in g-ds image. check.

of a lower order of intelligence. check.

dependent in all things on the mercy of g-d. check.

and consider the problem of evil and why g-d allows it...

I don't exactly feel pangs of guilt and pain when the house burns down, or the little things starve to death in a room without walls [hehe. myn mei, you're next on my list. I know what you look like now...]. the strongest feeling I get is a sense of annoyance and thwarted curiosity that I won't see what the little ones get up to next... if they die, I mean...

hmmmm.

this might explain many things. many things indeed.

either way, I have now taken on the mantle of divinity. given time and inclination, I might post the designs for the house  [very accurately represented, I have to say] and character files for my flatmates, for those of you who possess the game... so you can run your own little sangreal households...

and it is a perfect if somewhat idealised version of the house... it even has a goldfish tank.

my accenture interview went reasonably well, all things considered, though there are half a dozen reasons why I'd be surprised if they took me. one is, I was too nervous [inevitably]. two, I was too honest, unused to the format, and I failed to maximise my 'achievements'. also, I had a tendency to ramble into unreceptive emptiness at a couple of points. three, I said some really stupid things, things that in retrsopective I'd kick myself in the head for saying...

but hey. it was a learning experience. very, very interesting. as a trial run, it left me with a head full of possible improvements on my performance. I suppose I tend to learn like that... empirically, from personal experience. burn your fingers on that flame to see what exactly it does feel like... then you can offer improvements. like keeping your hand out of the flame. once you've done something, it becomes yours, and you no longer fear it. now, I can go into my next interview knowing full well that I survived my first one, and that it's not such a big fuss...

so, I'd be surprised if I pass the interview. but, I've expanded my experiential horizon. I have one more situation on my record to consider when, at the end of my life, I assess whether I've lead a rich and fulfilling life.

on another topic, I've got a laptop now. as of the week-end. a much belated / pre-emptive christmas birthday gift thing from my papa... the beast in question is a sleek funky little powerhouse mama with a 700MhZ Pentium III processor, 128 MB ram, 10GB harddisk, 8 MB video ram memory, 16-bit soundcard, 8x DVD-rom player, tv-jack and USB connection... all a guy needs in a long-term relationship.

it's having its first 'highlander' experience [you know the ones: crackling blue lightning, suspended 3 feet from the floor...] next to me, as it receives the full power and glory of 1.5 gigs of mp3s from my work machine... it sits there, humming contentedly and gobbling... it looks happy. I think I like it. I think it wants a hug. mmmmm....

next in line are dreamweaver, macromedia flash, maybe even java developement kit... all courtesy of the subversive techie-team cracked software database on the network... hey. the world is my oyster. maybe I should become a techie after all. or a web designer. bet I could do some interesting stuff... lots of midi files and annoying html kitsch... mmmmmm. just wait. the web is mine to conquer...

fell asleep in front of the tv with a half-eaten dixie chicken at about 4.30am. woken up by rustpot doing his little bleary-eyed victory shuffle in the kitchen before going to work.... [blissfully, I'm not going to work today. haha. joys of being paid pro-moF-ing-rata and working 4 days a week...].

collapsed way past the point where labour had passed the point of solid victory at 330 out of more than 600 seats, and the opposition [conservative, lib dem and 'the other parties': ukip, green, national party, monster raving loon etc.] had about a hundred put together... a massive landslide victory for labour achieved in 1997, then basically sustained for a second term pretty much undiminshed. not bad. kudos to rictus rhetorical tony.

and condolances to the family and friends of the mekon, whose political career imploded early this morning, with an announcement of his retirement.

whew.

don't know why.

might be sleeping five hours a night for too long, not eating enough, breathing such polluted atheyr streams that when I stretch in the mornings my lungs outline themselves to me as dull lineaments of ache in my chest... *streeeeeeetch* oouchhh *crumples up* *cough cough*...

brrrrrrrrr. *hack hack*...ouch.

gotta sort myself out...

checking mental processes, I conclude that yup. I definitely have something of the thick and somewhat stupid about me these days... earthbound + fleshy in an unalert manner. no bouts of razorsharp lucid reality for this boy at the moment, no. weary days of unabating cluelessness.

-

so anyway... at the office, trudging away. it's election day, and all or most of the little boys and girls [does that include you, flatlander?] are coming out to vote... landslide victory for labor predicted, though this prophecy might conceivably just neutralise itself. because everyone will be peeved at smug predictions and abstain, or vote radically different ["everyone else is voting labour, anyway... doesn't matter if I vote for the Monster Raving Loony Party..."]

most people I've spoken to seem inclined to vote lib dem, because they're seen as a feasible alternative to labour... which can't be bad.

what if libdems ousted the clueless conceited racist hypocrite bigots of the tory party as the main opposition party? would the world be better off? I think so. a rebalancing of the political spectrum would be at hand, where disagreeing with the ruling part would not imply aligning yourself with a bunch of dangerous power-starved grunting public-schoolboy clowns with overactive libidos, smug limp fat faces, babybald heads and booming rhetorical appeals to the lowest common denominator... 'detention camps for ALL refugees'? I mean seriously. that is fvcking sick...

so, as a viable political alternative, the closeminded, xenophobe, nationalist, selfish stupid-hick fvckers of the tory party might be crushed, or dissolved rather, by the prevailing political wind. crust of dirt and hypocrisy, lies and primitive caveman hatred trickling off into the gutter leaving a frail naked and hugely underdeveloped skeleton of real policies naked to the elements. hopefully, to be blasted to pieces by ...

this would not be such a bad thing... might make me more inclined to follow politics without feelings of acute nausea and ennui... and it might rekindle a spark of my old faith and hope in the world's future and the concept of enlightened intelligence...

we shall see, anyway. *crosses fingers*.

probably, this is so much poppycock to the yanks and others among you. to put it simply: tony blair is a {somewhat} more charismatic and 'real' al gore. competent but annoyingly slick and coated in a thick layer of 'spin'. william hague is a more intelligent bush with an obsessive simpleminded sense of history, but lacking the full redneck hillbilly psycho rabid nationalist monkey agenda: a 'man of the people' who appeals to simple, guttural keywords and the 'glorious past' of the days of the empire. haw haw. without the power and the vision.

the brits out there reading are probably either mortally offended by now or too apathetic to care....

so, everyone is voting. everyone but me, that is. because I'm an alien... hang on. I am! I'm an alien!! YES!!! *'non-participation-in-the-rioting-mongrel-foreign-nation-that-is-britain-today'-dance on the desk*. [not unlike William Hague himself. check out his head!

in fact, sorry to draw a crass and respectless but mildly humorous [to me] analogy, but william hague ranting about aliens is like hitler ranting about the 'short, dark, squat, malformed' non-aryan races...

sorry. it had to be said. it's true in more senses than one, I think. the conservatives are themselves becoming the aliens. they alienate their voters, and desperately reach for the 'pulse of the nation', well aware that they have been ousted from the warm hearth of political consciousness and into the cold and grinding of teeth, where they desperately scavenge for shreds of warmth and political meat, flying around in ridiculous battlebuses and commonsense helicopters and whatthefvcknot...

but yeah. me and william hague are aliens. I claim no blood relation to him. in fact, I shall disintegrate you with my magic zapper wand if you even suggest it... but I am an alien.

...so I observe to report back to my homeplanet... at the pace intelligent life on this planet is (d)evolving, I figure with a good advertising campaign and the backing of elvis and tupak shakur [you know they're watching you...] we can come in, buy what's left of the planet and sell it as radioactive fertilizer once you people have finished with it...

so be warned. make the most of it earthlings. soon you will be manure in our fields. given what I see in this election campaign and others, some of your more public figures seem to have reached that stage of evolution already... well, their brains have, anyway. radical lack of subtlety... cfr. earlier in entry...

and that is all for the time being. this is me, captain of the nostromo, logging off.

ouf.

the latest instalment in my never-ending twisting saga of complications concerns the potential annihilation of 'my' warehouse, in either of two severely unpleasant ways...

a few days ago we had an incident where great crowds assembled outside, there were flashing blue lights and the long unnerving shadow of the police falling across the scene, a sight rarely rarely seen in our lawless parts of the world. we huddled like little mice in our illicit den and pretended desperately not to exist. yet, we were curious as to the whys and wherefores of the occasion...

then, over a sleepy semi-dinner yesterday, it was confirmed that flutter has spoken with 'the man in the garage', who works behind the blue doors next to our entrance... and it has transpired:

that there is probably a gas haemorrhage in our building [very curious, given that we have no central heating precisely because we have no gas...]; the incident was occasioned by a leak, brought to the attention of the public...

that this is why we had the parking lot full of whining fire engines and policecars over the week-end;...

that shadowy powers allegedly concerned with our health may be aiming to condemn the entire site and destroy our native habitat...

hmmm. not good.

so far it is only the rumour of a possibility [or two. homelessness or death by conflagration...].

it's probably the goldfish.

can ethereal presences nibble through gas pipes? I'm sure they can. given enough time.

very simple.

to perform fellatio on myself.

I never managed it in the end. and I think my bad back can be traced back to those lonely days in that German youth hostel.

I am booked for an interview. at accenture.

monday, june 11. 11 am. a date marked in red.

they'll be sending me a CD with information about the company... and they'll expect me to have prepared myself quite thoroughly, from the sounds of it... I need to know the company very, very well. and I need to be able to respond to and justify anything I've put in the 12-page online application. which includes my 'achievements' section... 'basic mastery of a pre-colombian language' and 'proficient african drummer and didjeridu player'...

*chuckles*. can't believe they invited me even...

earlier today I stood at the window in the corridor and gazed across the dull industrial world outside. I had a sudden thought. one of those that come without preamble and crystallise many things at once:

the image was simply that of a series of dawdlings on the surface of an orange. [not sure why the orange, but there it was]. a rambling shallow broken pencil streak without purpose.

the orange was also a balloon. the basic notion was a spherical 3D object with a surface and an inside, or depth. though a balloon implies that you'd pop the ballon if you ventured beyond the surface. maybe there's a Zennie moral about ego annihilation there...

at the time, the image worked on several levels of interpretation. one, it seemed to represent my life, in all its disconnected rambling... a series of events without underlying cohesion.

second, it represents how I conceptualise my mind, quite often... shallow. ranging on the surface without any perspective of its own depths. not illuminated by a sense of context. a blind badger ambling about in the cellar.

third, maybe my writings here. lacking in a coherent thread. superficial time-filling doodles written in my 'spare' time, without a clear perspective... written often off the top of my head, in all laziness, lacking the synthetic effort needed to alchemise them into something valuable and meaningful [to me]...

physically, the image was accompanied by a weird headrush, a strong bursting tingling pressure at the bottom of my spine, a rising spacious feeling in my chest, and a mild shift in mental perspective. [true]. as though I was changing position in my head, to a more central viewpoint...

my mystical side wants to link this to my pranayamic [yogic breath control] exercise routine, and the stirring of my latent primordial electric potential force-thing [yeah, just nod and smile]. a few days ago I was feeling immensely sexed up... function which in the yogic anatomy is represented by the second chakra in the spine, swadhistana... the third chakra, above this, is manipura, linked to mechanisms of psychic control, will and purpose. the psychoanatomic 'magnetic centre', if you will.

so heck, maybe the serpent power sending little shivers up my spine to the brain... one can hope. though if it does awaken, according to the literature, I'll be going through literal hells... most mystics who dabble with it die, apparently. from strange diseases and physical affliction... and they lose their hair. because of excess psychic heat in the head. suppose I don't really have much to fear on that front...

I'm not claiming any great depth or genuine complexity for the poor thought. but interestingly, half an hour after I'd sat down at my desk, flutter rang to say that a woman from accenture had call the flat yesterday to arrange a first interview...

a sign maybe? or maybe I'm just weird and superstitious, prone to reading meaning into accidental events...

either way, if anyone has any suggestions as to how I should handle the interview, I'd be happy to take them.

yeah. thought I'd update those of you who were exposed to my narrative attention-seeking yesterday... and those poor souls among you who witnessed the bizarre, temporary collapse of my sense of confidence and dignity...

her synoptic closing comment was, in the end, that she was glad I was just human after all... case closed, I think.

...and so is the rest of his family. the second king, the successor, is dead too. he probably killed the first one. the third and present king is the original king's brother, a 'firm and no-nonsense man'. also, presumably, an incarnation of a powerful ancient god [like the two first ones].

this carnage be because [so the rumourmill speaks] the second king, the crown prince, desired to marry a woman from the rivalling political dynasty. the two families had knifed and competed for political power for centuries. [perhaps a reconciliation was at hand?] either way the second king's mother, the queen, herself originally from the other family[!] refused to allow the wedding.

the dispute was resolved in a burst of automatic fire. an end to disagreement. and an end to the wedding.

the crown prince survived. and since the law of the land prohibited criminal cases from being filed against His Majesty, a question of timing arose. the second king was in place and reigning before a case could, or would, be filed against him. and once he was in place, he was beyond the reach of the Law.

the second king died somewhat mysteriously only few days after the incident. by then, the armed forces had imposed their own brand of rulership, a curfew. 'do not go out on the streets or you may be shot'. the cremation took place quietly, presided over by the representatives of the armed forces.

meanwhile, the insurgent maoist guerillas waited, patiently, in the hills...

stranger than fiction.

we live the aftermath of a classical tragedy, following the mass death of the principal actors. following it from off-stage, in the periphery. mentioned perhaps in speeches ["the Western powers..."] but never seen on stage.

this, then, is the reign of fortinbras, as it might have appeared to the shepherds in galilee at the time. if they'd had access to the BBC.