My Brain is Broke

Poor Steven Fry. Watching a TV show the other night, I learned he suffers from manic depression. To combat it he hit the drink and cocaine during his heyday of the 80s/90s. So all through Blackadder and that, he was boozing and snorting coke rather heavily. Strewth. I guess that's the thing; Fry is such a brilliant entertainer that you never would tell unless you knew him closely. It really does come as a surprise to know he was doing drugs. (As opposed to dirty pathetic wastes of space like Amy Vodkahouse, where it comes as no surprise at all.)

It also highlights that we really are in the Dark Ages concerning mental health. Whereas regular medicine classifies and treats diseases according to their root causes -- pathogens, tumours, burst plumbing, whatever -- psychiatry still classifies according to symptoms. So someone who is depressed suffers from "depression". Someone who is manic/depressive is "bi-polar". Someone who hears voices suffers from "schizophrenia", which is simply the definition of "hearing voices." Drawing an analogy with regular medicine, that's like saying a patient suffers from "lumpy neck", whether they have throat cancer or the mumps. And so logically mental illnesses are treated by covering their symptoms; like with depression, by taking drugs which block or enhance certain neurotransmitters. That's like trying to fix a broken leg by stuffing the patient with morphine, to cover the pain.

The Dark Ages, I tells ya. It's like taking someone who has a heart condition, and dealing with it by jamming a knitting-needle into their chest and jiggling it around. (Oh wait, they actually did that with the brain -- it was called a lobotomy.)

I swear, we really have a long way to go with mental health. One day they will reach the extraordinary conclusion that "depression", for example, is actually a single symptom of many different maladies; and it's not even that far of a cognitive leap, as we can already identify certain agents that cause depression. And so forth with the other psychiatric disorders.

Yeah well, in the meantime that doesn't stop them in the old USA, kingdom of the push-button quick-fix, from diagnosing every man and his dog with an "illness", and prescribing a cocktail of pills to deal with it. Especially with kids, and that's a bloody worry. The trouble with f***ing with developing minds and brains, aside from the obvious, is that when you tell a kid there is someone drastically wrong with him, he starts to believe it. Then it becomes a vicious cycle as he begins to consciously or subconsciously reinforce his parents' worries and health care workers' diagnosis, and display ever-worsening symptoms. And so it goes. But that's ok, there's more pills where the last lot came from.

(And then, we here in the backward colonies follow in the footsteps of the mighty USA, as with all things.)

Of course the parents are relieved that the pills have taken away their child's "troubling behaviours", and who can blame them. But one has to wonder where the line gets drawn between something pathological and the child just behaving like a regular little sh*t. I mean let's face it, parenting, like most things in life, is not meant to be easy. If it was easy it would be... well not parenting, anyway. See, God arranged it all this way, so when parents see their kids grow up and start families of their own they can take dim pleasure in seeing their grandkids behave like brats. "Just like when you were that age!" they chortle to their haggard offspring.

Anyway, granted some kids have genuine medical disorders, which benefit from proper treatment. But there is a trend these days to automatically label every child who does not quite conform to the bell curve with a disorder -- ADHD, depression, bi-polar, mild schizophrenia, Asperger's. That last one cracks me up no end: taking a child who is an intelligent and slightly odd loner, and "diagnosing" them with a "disease".

And so it goes. How long before they start diagnosing overweight kids, and let's face it they are in the majority nowadays, as all having some kind of mental condition, such as "depression", which compels them to stuff their faces. And then prescribing pills to fix it. Oh wait, they're doing that now. Rather than seeing that maybe their depression is a result of their overweight condition, and then doing something earth-shatteringly radical about it, such as improving the kids' diet and getting them off the couch. Shock bloody horror.

But these days it's a medicated upbringing society prefers. And so we're raising a generation of pasty, terrified, pill-popping hypochondriacs. The statement, "It's not my fault, there's something wrong with me!" will become the mantra of everyone, bleated as an excuse as they go about their daily lives screwing up and being lazy, rather than the apology of the legitimately sick. Good for the pharma industry, bad for our civilisation.

Now I gotta go take a couple of ibuprofen with scotch in it...

Burn the Bastards

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past few days, you will have heard about the terrible bushfires currently raging across Victoria, Australia. It is utterly bloody shocking, especially the death toll, which stands at over 170 at this time. The fires are so unusually huge and infernal that the sanctuaries people are told to seek in a bushfire -- i.e. hunkering down inside cars and houses -- are become death traps. I honestly have trouble envisaging that in this day and age, so many people can die in bushfires. Absolutely terrible.

But for me, and for most people I guess, the worst thing is that some of the fires were lit deliberately. That's right, some f***wit is directly responsible for destroying property and burning people to death.

Now that is not to say it was all done on purpose. When they say on the news that "fires were deliberately lit", it could have come by accidental means, such as sparks from an angle grinder. That is to say, through carelessness. Of course the fact that the perpetrator did not light the fire out of malice is no consolation to people who have lost all their possessions, or worse yet lost loved ones. Nor does it excuse the braindead morons who failed to take proper care. I can feel a bit of pity to these nimrods, because they did not honestly intend to kill people, and it is Aussie to just write it off and say, "no worries mate." But we must remain steadfast. These individuals should be held fully to account for the destruction and misery they have caused. And they must stand as a reminder to others that life is not cheaper than taking a few extra seconds to exercise due care.

Then there are the unthinking arseholes who fling cigarette butts out of car windows. Too lazy to even stub the thing out in the ashtray, or better yet in their own eye, it's out the window without a care. There have been campaigns and we have been reminded again and again and again about how discarded cigarettes can, surprise surprise, start bushfires. I have absolutely no sympathy for this species of uncaring f***wad, and as far as I'm concerned, throw the book at them. 25-to-life is a good start.

Of course by far the worst perpetrator, though, is the dirtbag arsonists who lights fires on purpose. Whether a bored teen or a deranged firebug, these buttwipes are the lowest form of bottom-feeding scum suckers. The charge against these criminals should be multiple counts of murder. They should only exit prison in a box, preferably after being arse raped by cell mate Bubba and his collection of barbed wire.

Now for better or worse we do not have capital punishment in this country; but speculation is soothing to the soul, and I had a quick whip-round with my friends and colleagues about appropriate punishments for these contemptible evildoers. They include:

- Burn the bastards;
- Hang 'em the slow way;
- Stab to the guts with a screwdriver and leave to bleed out;
- Smear with honey and stake out on a nest of meat ants;
- Five minutes with a bunch of people who lost their homes with baseball bats;
- Handcuff to a tree in the path of a raging bushfire;
- Legs chopped off and then dump in the path of same fire.

Like I said, soothing.

It just so happens they have nabbed two scumbags for deliberately lighting these latest fires; one of them a 15 year-old lad. If it were up to me, and a lot of other people, this little snot would be tried as an adult. And then he can spend the rest of his long days in the pokey in his orange skivvies, with the rest of the hardened crims for playmates. Little arsehole.

Oh yeah, but I can just imagine the reality... "I didn't mean to!" "I was just mucking around!" "It wasn't my fault!" And then come the limp-wristed apologists, "It's not his fault, don't be too hard on him, he's a troubled kid, he's got issues, his dad ran off, his mum beats him, he's got ADHD, blah blah f***ing blah..." So the judge will be all stern and send him off to juvey for a whopping 2 years. Then the kid will act all teary and remorseful, and so after six months all the bleeding-heart do-gooders will say he's learned his lesson. And so another murderous little turd will be back out on the streets, with an expunged record.

All that for 170 people burned to death.

Make it 171 and we'll call it even ;)

Merry New Year!

"It's gonna be a great year, Gilbert" --Revenge of the Nerds.

So I hope. Time to pull down the Chrissy lights, put the plastic tree to bed and finish off the bottle of Beam I bought myself as a pressy.

Alright, well I s'pose I should make a few resolutions now. First, updating this blog a bit more frequently instead of playing stupid computer games. (Just wasted 4 hours of Age of Empires... Jesus Christ, it's 11 years old now.) Second, buy an air conditioner. Third... ah that'll do.

OMG, Jimmy, Get a Better Picture

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is a legend. I cannot understate that fact. He has created a phenomenon which actually makes the Internet useful. Every second, all over the world, thousands of people turn to Wikipedia for every informational need imaginable -- from the simple to the scientific, from the inane to the sublime. It's all there in one place. And the best part is, thanks to the "bazaar" principle (and that's "bazaar" as in "communal marketplace", not "bizarre"... although...) Anyway thanks to the "bizarre bazaar" principle, the stuff in Wikipedia is mostly accurate. Because if it is not, if someone punches in some incorrect or unsubstantiated info, then some weaner who has a special interest in the Folk Songs of Madagascar 1900-1949 will hop right in and correct it.

Oh and did I menation WP is in dozens of different languages?

So in spite of what detractors bleated when Wales started the Wikipedia project, and what they continue to bleat today, Wikipedia works. Don't ask me how... just accept it.

"Jimbo" Wales will surely go down as one of the most influential people this century, young as the 21st is.

Now the Wikipedia Foundation is having its annual money drive. Because, as if Mr. Wales were not legend enough for creating the Wikipedia phenomenon, he made it all free of advertising. That's right, you can browse the length and breadth of WP without having you eyes assaulted and your bandwidth choked down by flashy, bloated, rubbishy "come buy me" banners. But of course giant computer systems don't run themselves, and money doesn't grow on trees, so WP can only survive on donations from the very people who benefit from it. Fair enough.



Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut....... I refer you to a personal letter of appeal from Wales himself, here. Specifically, near the top of the page, to the picture. Oh dear God! Surely that isn't... no I'm afraid it is. That is Jimmy Wales' personal mugshot. Not his idiot half-brother, the one they keep locked in the attic and feed a bucket of fish heads each day; nope, it is a portrayt of the can't-be-understated legend man himself. (In case the link is dead, take it from me, the piccy was atrocious.)

Jimmy Wales, for the love of God, please get a better picture of yourself!

Computer Games are Still Evil

Bastard things. This time round, I got myself hooked into writing a game. That's marginally better then playing, I told myself, since it actually requires four or more brain cells. And a healthy dose of frustration.

ICYAAAI (In Case You Are At All Interested), I wrote a poker machine game for the Vic-20. WTF is a Vic-20? It's a 27-year-old system which also happened to be the first computer I ever got. It is one of those ancient "home microcomputer" jobs that old timers like me rave about -- shaped like a shoebox, plugged into a TV set, "booted up" immediately, and saved its programs onto audio cassette (unless you were lucky enough to own a floppy disk drive.)

So anyway, the game I wrote was to run on a computer system which has not been in the marketplace since the 1980s. It was nothing more than a pitiful stagger down nostalgia's muddy track, a sad attempt at snatching a tiny gleaming wisp of my happy childhood.

That's not to denigrate the technical challenge I set myself: It takes brains to write a workable game in machine language, with funky (chunky) graphics and heaps of features, all in 3.5k of memory (that's "k" as in "kilobyte", not megs or gigs). I mean, the young-uns coming out of University these days with a so-called computer engineering degree are clueless. It's all virtualized-this and automatic-garbage-collection-that. They have no idea what goes on at the machine level. "Need an application? Ah just drag and drop the bits-n-pieces in your favourite IDE, and there ya go! What, it's a piece of elephantine bloatware with the performance of an oil tanker? Ah just throw another couple of gigs in the machine!"

Of course the funniest part is, I don't even own a Vic-20 computer. What I have is an emulator which runs on my PC, which does everything the old Vic used to do in perfect faithfulness. Heh.

Computer Games Are Evil

That's right, you heard me. Computer games are the incarnation of evil. They are the tools of the devil.

Now hold on a second. When I say "computer games are evil", I don't mean like they cause sweet little boys to turn into murderous psychopaths and go shoot up a school. That's what the knee-jerk pencil-necks would have you believe. "Computer games made them do it!" Rather than seeing it as the opposite situation, i.e. that murderous psychopaths are naturally drawn to games which involve killing things.

No, the real evil of computer games is their addictiveness.

Ever since some backyard junkmeister soldered together some contraption that plugged into a TV set and featured a square ball ping-ponging between two bats, the world has never been the same. Over the intervening 35-odd years literally millions of man-years that could have spent on frivolous activities such as curing world hunger or beating cancer, instead has been flushed down the humungus slime-encrusted time sink which is computer games. All that wasted effort sacrificed to the wanton and jealous Great God of Pew-pew.

Children who could be making something of themselves... learning a real skill, becoming a genius at something, creating footholds into successful careers... instead sit unblinking and slack-jawed in the mind-numbing wash of a flickering display, their opposable digits rapidly punching buttons like lab rats at a feeding tube.

Hey look, I understand. After all, I grew up in the feed-the-20-cent-monster era, which was followed closely by the "Dad can I plug in the TV game" era. I can well understand after a crap-filled day dealing with moronic dickheads at school or work, one just wants to zone out in a fantasy world or blow a bunch of things away. We all know it is make-believe (except for a tenured retard few), and it would only be time spent drooling in front of the TV anyway. What's the harm in a little escapism?

Nothing at all... when it's in moderation. But there is nothing "moderation" about computer games. Just ask some parent who has to drag their pasty child away from the console by the ear, or the person with a partner who would rather tool around with a bunch of teens across the world than talk with their own lover.

And things have taken a turn laughably for the worse. Now they have computer games which mirror reality. You sit at your gaming console and control a little feller or chick who gets out of bed, takes the bus to work, goes shopping at the mall, eats, craps, sits in front of the TV (!), and finally goes to bed.

I sh*t you not. Yessiree, that's just how some people spend their time escaping from daily life for a while... by playing another daily life. Oh my f*cking god how lame.

Then you get the online games, MMORPGs like WoW and Everquest and whatnot. I thought there was a glimmer of hope for a while, since it at least these games involve interaction with other human beings (or gamers anyway). But these evil things turned out combining the worst of all possible worlds: The human relationships are twisted mockeries of their real-world counterparts, with no one knowing where the avatar ends and the real person begins, if anywhere; no one really caring about the well being of their mates except to fulfill their obligations in the context of the game; gameplay reduced to a repetitive drudgery of endless mouse-clicking and NPC farming, for ever-reducing returns.

In short, life in a MMORPG devolves into an unpaid second job, toiling with a bunch of people who don't really care about you, and who you probably would not even like if you met them in the street. Thence it spirals into an obsession, precluding all real world relationships, jobs, commitments, even personal hygiene. In the extreme case you get some idiot who drops dead in front of the monitor, spouse long left with the kids, found only when the police break the door down after neighbours complain about the smell, his cockroach-ridden corpse wallowing among chips packets and coke cans and his own filth. Urgh.

Now where was I... ah yes, in my case I've thrown many thousands of hours of my life down the toilet, time which I'll never get back. It always seems gaming takes precedence over doing other cool stuff like building Lego sets and updating this blog. Games are an addiction, and when you get home in the arvo it's just too easy to plonk down and start playing, engaging in hours of useless activity which require neither brain nor physical effort.

There's one game in particular which has had me hooked over the past few weeks. It's a plinky-plunky little thing called "Master of Magic". Like all good games "MoM" is pretty, easily mastered, infinitely replayable, and doles out rewards often enough to keep you hooked. Although released in 1993, before many slack-jawed gamers were even born, it has not outlived its playability. MoM is a turn-based strategy; gameplay involves building your small settlement on a Tolkien-esque fantasy world into a thriving empire, expanding your magic and military power until you are force to be reckoned with. Your ultimately goal is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Then after you do that, you start another round with another world and different enemies, and do it all over again.

So it is MoM, that evil little homunculus, and its remorseless brethren, which has been the waster of my free time of late. I can hear it calling now... "Play me! Play me!"... Arrrrgh that's it I'm off bbxbcbjdfsjdfhiwfhdskjnd

Back

Rightio. I'm not one of these slackers who starts something and then doesn't see it through. One of those plonkers who reserves a perfectly good Blogspot title, makes a couple of posts, and then forgets about it so no one else can use that title ever again.

Nope. My absence is explained as follows.

The fact is I've been on a whirlwind trip of Europe, UK and Thailand for the past six weeks. And a mighty fine holiday it was, too. Especially Thailand. Of course I didn't want to make this public knowledge beforehand, lest some thieving little scumbag take advantage of my absence and rob my house.

Now for the good news. An extended hiatus such as the one I just had, which included several flight and bus trips, as well as interactions with mean locals, insufferable fellow tourists, and other tossers, has provided ample fertile ground for the weeds of crankiness to grow and bloom.

Stay tuned......