All Out of Wit

I'm so lost without you, I know you were right believing for so long. I'm all out of love, what am I without you? I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong. Althought we've come, to the end of the road, still I can't let you go. It's unnatural, you belong to me, I belong to you. We've come, to the end of the road, still I can't let go. It's unnatural, you belong to me, I belong to you.

Yes I began to look up sad goodbye songs to signify the end of this blog. Trust me, it was more than the two up there ^. There are so many things I want to say, like how if you still think this blog only has lecture content  you need to alt+f4 your life for a while, take a holiday to Barbados and search for your soul - I left it in the bottle of a Whiskey bottle for you, you heartless bastard!

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm a hypocrite. All I know is that, for all it's flaws and shortcomings, leaving this blog will tear my heart to pieces, for at least 11 or 17 minutes. We've been through a lot, late-night coffees, early morning pain-killers and hours searching for stupid puns. I haven't gained anything, and neither have you, but we're all searching for a way to waste away our time. This blog in that regard, and I'd like to thank it, and thank you whoever you are. Congratulations. I don't have a firework or a witty sign off, so I guess this is goodbye.

Goodbye.

The Eleventh Hour of Lectures

It's really quite satisfying that the "eleventh" lecture will be my second last post, just as eleven is the second last hour, but I'm also writing this in the eleventh hour in terms of the time frame to hand this bad boy blog right on in.

I've become too excited however, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't want to look at more lectures slides. It's always been that slides are looked at twice, once being explained by the person who wrote them and once to cram them back in to your brain for an exam. This blog has messed up the way of things, and it is disturbing me. I don't want to revisit, review, reconstitute this crap. It's just not cricket, and it certainly isn't croquet. I've been curled up, coughing up phlegm (great word) from the depths of two scum-ridden lungs feeling sorry for myself, and telling everyone to get out of the way because I got sick and therefore have reason to be irate for at least 4 hours this morning.
I open my laptop and try to start this abysmally worthless time-wasting activity with a renewed sense of pleasantness and a fresh and pine-scented outlook on life but I open up the lecture notes and Mr Ross Coulthart starts tearing down my façade of calm. The more I stare at his lop-sided, varying-sized eyes the more his smile creeps me out. I swear I saw him tell me he wants me to fail at whatever I do for the rest of my life. Maybe I deserve it, I don't know. My mind isn't clear enough to tell right now, all I know is that he looks like an Orc from Lord of the Rings when you stare for long enough. Let me go have a shower, make a coffee and eat a Berocca. Then I'll get back to you.

That's better, I think. I still can't tell. Ross doesn't look so Orc-ish anymore, so maybe it worked.

Right.

Investigative Journalism. What amazing insight will you give me that I won't throw away with the garbage of my mind and that rotten apple I chose not to eat? Will you offer anything but a plethora of dime-a-dozen quotes and a handful of laughable definitions that may or may not be examined but are in no way other than that useful? Mayhaps you won't include a jazzy list of things that are alike, and haven't colour coded them so they're easier to remember. Let me check.

Alright so maybe I shouldn't have been so naive and hopeful. But still, I checked out all the slides, sifting for something I could write about or something I could use to build a nice little rant, but alas my search came up dry. The only thing is the Star Wars reference, and if you, avid and devout reader are a fan of Star Wars, check these out:

Pretty cool if you ask me.

If you want to learn about Investigative Journalism, don't come to read here. If you're interested in those photos, find the rest here: http://thechive.com/2012/04/23/a-few-rare-photos-on-the-set-of-the-only-star-wars-movies-that-matter-43-photos/

Jahasra, and goodnight.

The Adventures of Tenten

The title of this chapter is misleading, as there is no adventure here. The title of this chapter is also misleading, because there was no Lecture Ten, but in the name of fluidity and structure and stupid puns I'm going to assume that 11 is 10 and 11 is the name for 12. These topics are so tedious and lacklustre that whilst reading about them I think my brain is shrinking. The backwards thinking that is required to develop some of this garbage is beyond me, and twists my mind and tires my mental capacity just trying to fathom it's vast expanse. Why anyone would ever categorise this information as "important" I can't comprehend. It even hurts to type out my disgust with the subject, a task in which I ordinarily revel. A repetition of the same, silly facts that could have been covered in less than 10 slides, let alone a lecture if we lived without all these "experts" putting their 2 to 3 cents in, any way they can. I save more than that at BPs with a Woolies voucher.

The repetition of all this crap is reminiscent of blogging to me. A bunch of reposted information, with a small twist which the author thinks is witty. None of it is interesting and none of it makes me feel like I'm learning something. I don't want you to think that I am anti-everything however, and I have rummaged up two things that I find interesting.

The first is David Mitchell's Soapbox, and this is an example:

The second is this:

When I built my first tree house, this is what I expected it to turn out like.

But back to the biscuit... the most useful aspect of these lectures, I think are the quotes. Sure they repeat each other, but if you really dislike one, or really like one for that matter, you can go look up the person and infuriate yourself even more at the stupid things they say. It's a cathartic experience for me, I think. The award for best slide goes to: The Portrayal of an Issue. I've always been a strong believer that you can make anyone agree to anything if you paint it in the right light or atleast let them look in the window of No. 12, Different View Drive.

Politics is something I generally sometimes object to, the other times I'm indifferent. Therefore I played Solipskier during the lectures and skipped the slides upon online revision, so I can't tell you much about those.

Using my last fallback option, I opened my old notebook hoping to find something... anything. I flipped through the pages as I started speaking like Max Payne in my head - it was only a matter of time. I lit up another Corinthian Chocolate Cigar and sat in the vacant chair, careful not to get to comfortable. I knew the cleaners would be on my ass as soon as I relaxed, I ran of out Max lines and began to siphon through what I wrote in the lecture.

I really can't make sense of most of it... here's a taste:
Guest speaker from UniqueUQ: is she french?
wonderfully ironic old dude
regent's treat (what is Regent's Treat? Obviously it was mentioned but I've forgotten why)
salient (a pretty cool new word I learnt)
Adolf Hitler was such an excellent self-publicist
Noam Chomsky - why do all cool guys have cool names? (it's how I know that I will never be cool, my name is far too pedestrian.

I also wrote some Media and Agenda definitions, but they're boring. I tried to remind myself about a Mitch Hedberg quote that fittingly described the ideas of the lectures, but unfortunately I only wrote "-mitch hedberg quote-" so I'll leave you with a favourite (or two) and put them in psychedelic colours and maybe chuck in some Max Payne and/or Archer quotes (the three most influential men in my life).

"I bought a $7 pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring." - Mitch Hedberg


"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it." - Mitch Hedberg

Rip: Is this a ruse?
Archer: A ruse? Hi, it's the 1930s. Can we have our words and clothes and shitty airplane back?
Rip: Let's go, kid.
Archer: Call you back, 1930s. And, hey, watch out for that Adolf Hitler. He's a bad egg.


"I walked straight in, playing it Bogart, like I'd done a hundred times before. The trick in my situation was that there was no trick, no matter what the movies tell you. No rules, no secret mantra, no road map. It wasn't about how smart or how good you were. It was chaos and luck, and anyone who thought different was a fool. All you could do was to hang on madly, as long and hard as you could." - Max Payne

Hole 9

This is the lecture that I decided once and for all that I fully don't like the word newsworthy. It may be a little bit useful, but it just doesn't sound right. I didn't like visualness, 'sensationalisedation' (which was used) nor Judy McGregor. I did like celebrification though. Kind of like glorification, which is a good word.
I think it's hard to discern what people want to read and know versus what they should read and know. I know that Facebook is starting to show me everything it thinks I want to see, and same with Google. I don't think it's healthy to surround yourself with everything you like and not have a full scope of earthly happenings.
"News value is dictated by the prominence a story has been given" but its prominence is dictated by the new value. Something has to give. It's just one big ol' circle. Until someone in a big office decides he knows what I want to see. And there's one reason why I don't like the word newsworthy. People get the idea that it's how worthy something is to read about, but it's about how much a story is worth. Worth in the monetary sense. How many papers it will sell. Take, for example, #Kony. There are so many other happenings and interesting stories out there, but Kony became newsworthy. A mastermind homicidal child mass murderer, a cute kid talking to a camera and a drug rampage in San Diego. What more can you ask for to sell newspaper? I'd much rather read about anything else, however.


“News is what a chap
who doesn't care much
about anything wants to
read. And it's only news
until he's read it. After
that it's dead.”


Evelyn Waugh sounds like the type of bloke chap I'd like to meet. This one little quote struck such a deep chord in me that I was inspired to look him up on Wikipedia. A traveller, a writer, a schoolmaster and a reviewer. I want to read about this guy. Not only did he write Brideshead Revisited, but his great-great grandfather was called Lord Cockburn. There are two of the greatest claims to fame I have ever heard. His Wikipage made me think of a new word: prolificist. One who proliferates. It has its shortcomings but I quite enjoy the word.

Local stories really don't interest me. Apparently "If it's local it leads!" but I just don't see it. Maybe you have to be a certain age, or have to own more than 2 toothbrushes or spend more than $40 dollars when you go grocery shopping. I don't know. Do you owe more than 2 toothbrushes? If yes, do you care about local stories?
Maybe if there is a flood in my suburb, or rent of the area is going up because of the offshore price of coal-seam oil spills in the Stradbroke Nature reserve is going to deflate the price of lamb and XXXX at the IGA across the road, then yeah I might be interested. But Bligh opens school gate or Boy found after getting lost at school? Hey I just read that, and this is crazy, call me insensitive but I don't really care.
Now if it bleeds it leads - I can beleed that. The problem with that is, everything bleeds. There is so much bleeding going on that there's a bleed over load. The Red Cross is going crazy, blood is being spilled everywhere and what they would give to be able to scrape some of that off the streets. There's no use crying over spilt blood however.

It's strange how spilled and spilt have no determinable difference, apparently we can use them interchangeably.

Did you know that 1 in 3 people will need to receive foreign blood in their lifetime? But only 1 in 30 people will donate? If you, Barack and I all met up for toast and coffee one day - one of us will definitely need blood. Hopefully not at that particular moment, because that would be quite an interesting moment. A life-threatening interruption could threaten what could be an in-depth and worldly conversation.

Why do humans have an obsession with death? We go on and on about it to no end. Shakespeare had to be one of the worst. Or best, depending upon how you're looking at it. We've invented cults to satisfy our desire to know what is after death. Why is that? Do we feel a need to always be occupied? I like the idea of a good hard rest. Now I'm sounding like a whingy teen with nothing better to do than blather on about 'existentialism' because I just learnt about the word in some crappy magazine and I've named a album of photos on my indie instagram 'existentialia' because I edit all my photos through the indie settings on Picasa and wear stupid clothes and ride stupid bikes.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd like to see the newspaper around for a long time yet. Not only a cheap lining for a rat cage and a fuel to light the fireplace, it's a fuel for thought as well. Online journalism seems to be a cheap whore-out version of print media and it is making it easier for the corporate world to control what we see, in effect changing history...

... I've been watching "Illuminati" videos all day.

I'll leave you with this: How do you titillate an ocelot?

...

Oscillate it's tits a lot.

To Huit concerns...

The Lecture of Week 8 was by far the most interesting to date - aside from the fact I mucked up my paper almost straight away. I was just TOO KEEN to fill out those neat little boxes! Who can resist a clean, crisp piece of paper, especially when it is so ready to be ticked or crossed or filled out or sniffed? It's like putting on a shirt from the dryer or that you've just ironed when the temperature is not hot, but not heaps cold either. The temperature of one of those days where a pack of TimTams, 4 Instant Coffees and 100GB of musicals and rock operas would not go ashtray... I mean: astray.

I think that grammar and punctuation is marked far too harshly these days. At uni, at school, resumés, the list doesn't really go on that far but it sounds better if  I say 'the list goes on'. I think that we should be teaching children the basics of grammar and punctuation, all the rules and stipulations and hyphens and dashes and colons and such and then let them figure it out for themselves. Writing scripts, I tend to find myself speaking what I write before I write it. This then leads to me putting a large amount of commas in my texts and makes it hard for anyone else to read. But that is how I say therefore my brain thinks that is how it should read. A sentence, using a forced application of this trait, will end up, almost invariably, like this. Of course, that may be overexaggerated, but the point still, remains. (Just kidding). But I've had to tone down my comma usage, against my better judgement, and let the reader figure out where the natural breaks are themselves. It seems an alien idea, but therein lies the betterment of multiple interpretations of the same texts. I respect how grammar and punctuation change how a script reads, and sometimes what a sentence means. I think it's a real shame the internet is allowing all these people without the proper care or instruction to write willy-nilly, and forego the rules that their Grade 4 teachers spent so long attempting to instil. 

There has to be some happy medium between the two. A mix between the overzealousness of 'seasoned' teachers smacking knuckles of those students who risk a interrobang, or jot an extra comma or two and the lawlessness that Facebook, Twitter and this shitty site compliment and encourage.

And that shall be called justice, and like Judge Judy it will be served hot and ruthlessly. In a manner without ruth. Ruth always seems to get left out of a lot of cool things.

Apart from "ethics is subjectice" which we all of course knew already, not a lot of stuff was said or learnt in this lecture. A lot of talking happened but not much was actually said. 

I don't like Deontology or Teleology but rather, I think Virtue is a good means of determining ethics. I think that virtue is something that can't actually be taught, which this lecture so amply proved. I like virtue however, it has a sort of compromise system that appeals to me. Like I elucidated with my round about grammar tangent. And although I DID say this was the most interesting lecture yet, it was also the most infuriating. I can't stand the fact Australia is such a bureaucratic nanny state.

The only one I had a problem with is Outdoor 5. I mean I don't even know what is being advertised. Being overtly sexual for no overt reason is fairly stupid, and surely should be called into question. The rest, seem fine to me.

Like a bullet lodged in the upper spine but too close to the brain to operate, I'll have to leave it there.