Captain Lychee - A Life

Mac Attack

2022-01-17T05:53:56Z

In 1990, I was helping out with the production of the second Visible Ink annual effort out of RMIT. When I say 'helping', I mean that I was slowly typing out a manuscript into some God-forsaken publishing software on an Apple Macintosh. Said Macintosh had a ten inch black and white screen, pretty good graphics for 1990, microscopic icons that made less sense than an emoji-filled text message and the keyboard from Hell. I swore then by all that was then holy—the World Trade Centre in New York, the colony of Hong Kong, and apartheid—that I would never use a Macintosh again.

Flash forward thirty-two years-odd to yesterday. I had, in November last year, made the case that a Macbook would be a form of visual aid to help me live a more or less normal life, and that therefore the NDIS could pay for it. They had allocated $10220 for me to spend on visual aid equipment, and I had spent around $640 on computer repairs between November 2019 and November 2021. I hadn't spent any more because I kept getting knocked back on computer expenses, and they wouldn't go for a large screen TV, either. So, I finally convinced them of the utility of a Macbook and got a quote from JB Hi Fi on November 13^th.

Then, by the time I'd forwarded the quote on to McCallum Financial Services so they could pay JB, my plan had expired and the new plan only had $5000 to spend. (Explaining these plans and why we need them I may do some other time.)

On January 7^th this year, McCallum ring to say they'd paid the quote but the money would take a few days to reach JB. I gave it four days, and trotted down to JB on the 11^th. After a bit of finagling with quote numbers and some ID on my part, they gave me this box:

There's no doubt about it. The unboxing process on Apple products is something of a delight, and I was sitting here with such expensive (or dollar-intensive) machinery that I felt like putting on a suit and tie.

After the delight of taking the thing out of its paper wrapping, I was even delighted to find that it even smelled nice. This was in stark contrast to the smell of my actual desk which had become a bit putrid over the previous week what with spilled tea and biscuit crumbs. In honour of this new machine, I cleaned off the desk using Windex and a Chux superwipe. Meanwhile, back at the box, I unpacked the charger and charging cable.

As you can see, the charger is about the size of an actual Dodge (or Valiant) Charger, so I had to unplug the Lenovo and the CZUR camera to plug this thing in. It was, as you would probably suspect if you've been following my journal for a few years, the work of a moment to plug the thing in. When I opened the lid it gave me a nice 'tada' sort of sound, the original 'tada' from the earliest days of the Mac if memory serves. Then the screen came on:

You can see the bottom of the monitor from an actual computer there. I was Googling like a mad thing to find answers to setting up a Mac.

After that there came a few hours of absolute Hell while I set the thing up. I won't go into that too much because the pain is still present and the wounds raw and bleeding, but fuck this thing was a pain where you simply don't expect pain to be, even at my age. snaky_poet once said that the good thing about Macs is that 'things just work'. I can now appreciate what an utter torture chamber the rest of her life must be. If she thinks things 'just work' on a Mac, she must turn on the lights by cramming coal into the loungeroom generator and strangling a kitten to propitiate the impedance gods. Nothing 'just worked'. The keyboard was easier to use then the one on the 14" Macbook that I had tried at JB, but not much easier. And I had to keep squinting at the dark screen to find the mouse cursor. It was tedious to follow the pointer across the screen until it was on the correct clickable bit, which I had to do because I was using the goddamned trackpad which, incidenntally, only works if you use one finger, but I kind of managed it. By 11:15 on Saturday night I was exhausted and resolved that everything I hated about Macs hadn't changed and that I w3as going to kick some obedience into the bloody thing on Sunday morning.

As gorgeous as the Macbook's packaging was, I had eschewed the very expensive Apple mouse in favour of a Logitech Pebble.

On Sunday I arose from the procrustean bed, if I may so call it, full of vim and vigour and, after tackling that morning's Wordle, cracked the old knuckles and…had a shower and got dressed, then had a cup of tea and, fortified by the morning's routine and the sustaining powers of tea, settled down to have another go at this stupid machine.

I got my darling Kelvatari on the ol' Skype because she had one of the damn things and could probably help. She got me through most of the process. At least to the point where I could fire up Safari, a browser I had previously only used on my phone, to try and install Microsoft Office on the Macbook. This process, very easy on a computer, is yet another arse-reaming on this thing. After five attempts to download the installer, each download taking approximately forty-five minutes before mysteriously halting, I finally got a complete file. I was able to install it just in time to head over to Write Club.

I still haven't been able to get the mouse to work. It's a Bluetooth mouse, so it should work without having to plug in the wireless receiver, which is impossible anyway because there're no plugs on the thing that the USB dongle from the mouse will fit into. I've got the thing connected to the network via WiFi, which is good because there's no Ethernet plug on it, either, and so far the only thing it's found is my Kindle Fire. It kept searching for the mouse for four hours before I was finally able to make it stop. But by 2:00PM on Sunday it was time to go over to Write Club. With a Macbook.

Now—even though I haven't written anything on it—I can say I'm a real writer.

Dream

2022-01-17T00:02:27Z

I have come into some government office to see a woman about a podcast that I think I'm going to be appearing on. The woman concerned is simultaneously of Indian descent and appearance, and she's sitting at a huge desk which is completely bare, with three chairs in front of it. She has the windows behind her, and I can't see her face clearly.
"I'm here for the podcast," I say.
"No."
"Can I sit in on the podcast?"
"No."
"I'll just leave my script and paper here, then," I say, putting said items into a desk return that is next to her desk.
I walk off, and when I look behind me, she's talking to another Indian woman and they're getting ready to start their podcast.

As I look around, I see that there are a dozen or so chairs in a circle, and I sit down in one of them. Then all these people come around and one guy announces that this is a 'collaborative editing meeting' and that everyone is welcome. They all sit down on the chairs and look at me expectantly. I say that I'm just here for the podcast, pointing to the two Indian women talking away (in English). Nobody in the circle has a clue who she is or what she's doing. Then they all get off their chairs and come over to me, and start to stroke my hair and pat me etc as if I was a panda they were getting to know.

There's too much money in the State Public Service. We Federal employees have always said that. Not only was I done out of my podcast appearance, but all these artsy types were treating me like some kind of furry omnivore—which is, to some extent, true—and doing it in work hours. Were they going to get any actual editing done during this collaborative session? Probably. These sort of committee things do get things done from time to time. Still, it isn't how I think of editing.

And what about the script and newspaper? It's been ages since I read a newspaper—and nearly as long since I wrote a script. Perhaps the script, podcast scenario and Indian women can be blamed on this week's episode of The Drunken Odyssey but is that really fair to the gang over there? The collaborative editing might come from my desire to produce a collaborative novel like Atlanta Nights with Laura, Turnip and Laura's friends. So we're reading through Atlanta Nights collaboratively to get a feel for it. At least, that's my plan. They may not want to waste time trying for a crap collaborative novel.

On to more interesting things in the next post.

Dream

2022-01-09T02:31:43Z

We're on a W-class tram, the old wooden ones with the nice seats that were comfortable in the heat and whose brakes didn't seize up - but let's not get into that. You could still get on these things and do a tour of the Melbourne CBD on them before COVID struck. Anyway, there's me and Mum and incredibleloon (whom we'll call 'SuperJase' for the time being) and a white German Shepherd that is gallivanting around on the empty seats.
"Don't touch that dog," says SuperJase. "It's very important."
So I just let the dog go about it's business until ti says; "The weather's getting worse."
Mum then collapses. I leap to her aid, and get her head up so I can hear what she's saying.
But it's only a whisper that I can't hear, and she dies in my arms.
SuperJase looks on in shock. The white dog is gone. The tram keeps rolling along.

Well, after that, I rang Mum to see if she was alright, which she is. I took it on faith that SuperJase is alright, he being younger and fitter than me, and the last time I saw a white German Shepherd in real life was in a past life, I assume. Therefore, I don't know whether it could talk or was a portent of anything, let alone death.

I can tell you that that dream was had under the influence of four pints of cider and a Murphys burger from Irish Murphy's, after watching the new Ghostbusters movie.

Said movie experience was had at the Regent Cinemas in Lydiard St Nth. The cinemas themselves were nice and convenient, and the staff very helpful to a blind guy who couldn't find his way around at all. They took me to the box office, I paid $15 for my ticket, then they took me up to the cinema and came to get me at the end of the picture. The start time for the movie was 2:50PM, so the 'feature presentation' proudly announced—through a very mediocre sound system by cinema standards—started at 3:07PM. I won't spoil any part of it if I say that it's a good tribute to Harold Ramis and has revived my interest in the first movie, but it's also good evidence that it's possible to parlay a fanfic piece into a real script. What evidence do I have that it started as a fanfic? None. It just felt that way. The important thing is that it isn't 'written by numbers' and the writing is far better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—but then, what isn't?

It was probably visually interesting, but the sound in the cinema wasn't great, and the screen is so dark compared to a TV that I could barely see what was going on. It also had the reverse of the bit that totally confused me in Jurassic Park 2. In that movie, white Jeff Goldblum had a black child; in this one, the black sheriff has a white daughter¹. Are we supposed to ignore this? But at least all the female characters were played by cisgendered woman, and the males by cisgendered men, so no annoying chunks of political correctness to distract you from the actual narrative.

Prior to going to the movies, I took the vacuum cleaner in to The Good Guys in Mair St to get it serviced under the warranty. Under the fucking warranty. The shop lady was very nice about, took it away to check whether it needed repairs and turned it on. You could hear it across the shop. She brings it back and says:
"OUr store manager and I agree that all it needs is a new filter and new bags."
"You think it's normal that the thing is so loud I could hear it over this half acre of floor space?"
"See, the filter needs replacing and the bag needs to be changed."
$88 later I haven't had the thing serviced and I've got a ne filter and bags. Why fucking argue with me? It's not your money that will be spent fixing the fucking thing!
You may ask why I put up with this shit. Because we're not armed is why. Why do they even go on with this shit? Because they can, because we cant' shoot them. And don't get me started on Qants…

This is hardly a new rant for me. But now, With fewer people on staff because of the COVID, more and more defenceless consumers have to put up with this crap. Avoidance may be the best strategy. Don't buy a Miele vaccumn cleaner, and don't buy from The Good Guys.

1. Or so it sounded to me. The picture of the actress on the IMNDB shows that she is black. Her non-blasck accent may be explained by her being born in Kenya.

Dreams

2022-01-04T11:57:21Z

Laura, Peach, Dave and I are floating around some medieval landscape in a hot air balloon. A man on a chestnut mare is on the ground watching us as we come in to land. He then rides up to us and tells us that 'King is in trouble'. There is then a series of disjointed images which might form a story one day.

What the hell does this mean? The four balloonists are people I know, though I don't know Peach or Dave well enough to know their web presence. For the moment, let us consider them to be persons of mystery in, respectively, New York and New Jersey. Laura is the pretty and famous Laurasauras, of whom I have spokne of elsewhere, and to on Discord and in the throes of face to face conversation in these infected and paranoid times.
Is there, for example, any significance to the man on the horse, the colour of the horse, where it falls on the equine gender spectrum, and most importantly the lack of an article in the man's report that 'King is in trouble'? Which King does he mean? A king in a medieval dreamscape seems reasonablr enough, des rigueur one might call it if one were more confident of their French, but why treat 'king' as a proper noun? John King? Some movie?

In dream 2, my darling Kelvatari and I are at the Capitol in Washington DC. We're both following Senator Seager there. He is a Democrat from some state or other. Everyone is being scanned by wands for COVID. People are wearing various types of mask. I have forgotten mine, so Kelva runs back for it, and for my cane. Senator Seager says that no blind or vision handicapped person be scanned, so they refrain from scanning me. Seager walks into the main room of the building, while I wait for Kelva. Eventually, I walk out of the building and as I'm walked along I feel someone brush against me. I move away to give them space and they press against me. I keep moving until I hit the wall of the Capitol. I turn to see who this shoving arsehole is, and it's Kelva, with my mask and cane. She is very snarky.

Capitol? A Democrat senator? I prefer the Democrats tothe Republicans when I think about american politics at all, because Lincoln was a Republican, but what significance is al the mask and scanning etc. Perhaps it's a subconscious anxiety about travelling to, and getting into, the US in March, becauase, after 39 fucking minutes of clicking away on the goddamn Sodomite qantas website I was able to use my flight credit from 2020 that ScoMo so gladly first created and then fucked up the arse for me Alan Joyce style.

It is important to note that these dreams were had after seven cans of Jamesons, Lime and Dry during a six-hour marathon conversation which was to try and mediate a dispute occurring on the Larry Niven chat.

35 Years, If I'd Lived

2021-12-31T02:57:22Z

So, today, as it should appear to be whenever you’re actually reading this, marks what would have been the culmination of three and a half decades of service to the Commissioner and, more by tradition than fact, the Commonwealth. In real life, however, it’s December 31^st and it has taken me more than a month to sit down and write even this small paragraph.

Why?

It certainly isn’t the relentless grind of making fifteen excuses an hour for why people don’t have their money yet or explaining ad nauseam that just because we sent the money doesn’t mean your bank has to let you have it. Goodness knows, it isn’t that. Anyway, those two things are part of the ol’ durance vile.

The elephant in the room, which nobody can shut up about, is the COVID. We have now been at this prevention idea, with its ramifications for personal freedoms, or at least what were perceived to be personal freedoms, the gradual arrival of a combination nanny/police state as we have to identify ourselves everywhere we go, advise the government of when we do it, and can’t even flee the country even if we’re not citizens. That was all 2020’s thing. This year, now that vaccines are ‘available’, we’ve been handing executive powers to unelected officials, letting the State government call things pandemics without having to show any evidence for doing so, and realising just how dependent we are on tourism in Victoria. Hospitality is a fine way of generating GST for the Federal government, but if nobody’s working in it because everyone is under house arrest for fear of passing the disease on to an already highly-vaccinated population, there’re no wages or GST for the Feds to tax, and no payroll taxes for the State. When I was actually part of an inquisitorial system that could and did pry into people’s lives daily, I used to dread the approaching Orwellian state, but thought I wouldn’t live to see it. Now I’m not so sure, and my life expectancy is not what it once was, due to a bloodstream that’s 7% fairy floss and 3% alcohol most of the time.

It’s the rapid onset of the thing that’s scary. No anonymous purchases, house arrest on suspicion of having the virus, the use of the information gathered by the State government in administering Federal law (not to mention what commercial concerns might get it—remember how quickly the ‘No Call’ register details were sold to American Express?—and now the new ‘emergency‘ powers which allow the Premier to declare an emergency before it’s even arisen. The important thing is that people now know that what they thought were their freedoms actually aren’t, and in a plague, you can kiss any of your rights goodbye, provided you let the government know where you were when you did it.

People have often said that if we had a Bill of Rights, just like the Americans have, in our Constitution we could solve these problems, just like the Americans have. But that’s a Constitution their Supreme Court says can be waived at any time, such that your right to bear arms doesn’t include the right to carry them. Although, that appears to be changing.

But of course, a Fascist state wants to see human rights codified so that they can produce exceptions to them. When I was at the ol’ workplace I used to say that ‘it all goes out the window when there’s money involved’. That’s also true where there’s a virus involved.

Which is what the ‘rise of neo-Nazis’ is all about. The swastikas on the Shrine of Remembrance aren’t about the rise of neo-Nazis. Neither is this thing Richmond got all upset about. The conditions that allowed and promoted the rise of Nazism just aren’t around anymore. Fascism had such control in Italy in the 1940’s the Nazis had to invade the place to get a foothold. But here the State government, and the Federal for that matter, can create a similar Fascist state that would crush the neo-Nazis once it took them even slightly seriously. The Victorian Constitution guarantees our right of free association, but if there’s a virus on? Forget it. What the swastikas are about is warning us that we are perilously close to a Nazi state from the government we’ve elected. Don’t rely on the Federal government for help, either. Not once they realise the value of the jackboot economy.

But there are more interesting things going on than a medieval terror of a virus that is so far less effective at killing people than heart disease and breast cancer. On June 6^th I got an email from the good people at Mystery Weekly saying that they loved my story, ‘The Purloined Pachyderm’ and would like to publish it in their anthology Die Laughing. They paid me $AUD58.47 for it. My first ever sale! (The money came via PayPal, so as soon as I got it, I found that I couldn’t sequester it away, and thus immediately blew it on pizzas, but I did declare it as income and then deducted the cost of the software I used to write it.)

The story itself came from an analysis of “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. After analysing that for a week or more as part of my never-ending course at Fed Uni, I vented my spleen and wrote a humorous (well, they bought it, right?) story with every Romantic reference I could cram into it. The actual anthology is not yet available on the Kindle, and I didn’t get a contributor’s copy, but I will patiently await its Kindlisation and get it then so I can read the competition. I can now say I’m a writer and at least have something to back that up. The next stop is a novel, which my darling Kelvatari and I are currently working on, and for which she has an in with a legitimate publisher. In the meantime, subscribe to Mystery Weekly and tell ‘em I sent you, so they will buy my next story.

Ballarat continues to be increasingly expensive, but it has had a pernicious but good effect on my social life. I went down to Melbourne for the Beakmeister’s birthday, and I realised then that most of my social circle consists of people from Ballarat Writers, that excellent Victorian incorporated association that seeks to and succeeds in promoting the interests of writers in the Central Highlands. Ah, well, for less social occasions with friends I have Facebook, but the main point of contact now is Discord, on which I can be found most days bitching about something or expressing the ennui that happens when people get near to being within a decade of the ol’ Biblical threescore years and ten.

Indeed, for those of you who’ve been following along, the threescore years is coming up. I hope to hell that I can get to Orlando in time to celebrate it with the aforementioned Kelva, and her birthday, too, but that all relies on the viral panic that COVID has not so much caused as justified.

And what for 2022? Well, it’s the 100^th anniversary of 1922, so that’s something. We have a Federal election somewhere between March and May, the possibility of yet another form of ID being brought out to keep those safe for the Gesundheitspolizei (Health Police) and the general public, and then a Victorian one in November if it can’t be shut down because of the Pi variant, or what4ver the fuck we’ll be up to by then.

captlychee @ 2021-07-30T22:27:00

2021-08-07T05:33:40Z

In front of an undisclosed number of people

CARLTON
18 4 (112)

def

ST KILDA
12 9 (81)

WE CAN STILL MAKE THE FINALS!

captlychee @ 2021-07-24T16:25:00

2021-07-24T06:31:08Z

In front of 0 people thanks to viral panic, against the bottom side,

NORTH MELBOURNE
18 8 (116)

def

CARLTON
11 11 (77)

WE COULD'VE MNADE THE FINALS

captlychee @ 2021-07-18T18:51:00

2021-07-18T23:00:32Z

In front of 0 people thanks to viral panic,

CARLTON
13 13 (91)

def

COLLINGWOOD
9 8 (62)

WE CAN STILL MAKE THE FINALS!

captlychee @ 2021-06-27T19:42:00

2021-07-04T11:50:44Z

In front of some people

CARLTON
12 11 (83)

def

HAWTHORN
10 13 (73)

BETTS IS THE BEST—AND HE'S BACK

captlychee @ 2021-07-03T22:39:00

2021-07-04T11:44:23Z

In front of 12000 people and 103 Freo fans

CARLTON
12 8 (80)

def

FREMANTLE
8 16 (64)

TWO IN A ROW, BLUES!

captlychee @ 2021-05-22T16:13:00

2021-05-22T06:22:18Z

In front of some people

CARLTON
13 8 (86)

def

HAWTHORN
9 9 (63)

THE FIRST TIME IN 16 YEARS

captlychee @ 2021-04-10T18:30:00

2021-05-02T08:38:08Z

In front of 11 618 live people

CARLTON
9 16 (70)

def

GOLD COAST
8 11 (59)

HERE COME THE BLUES

captlychee @ 2021-05-02T18:27:00

2021-05-02T08:30:46Z

In front of 57 447 live people

CARLTON
19 9 (123)

def

ESSENDON
16 11 (107)

HOW SWEET IT IS

captlychee @ 2021-04-04T18:07:00

2021-04-04T08:12:05Z

In front of 24 511 live people

CARLTON
16 13 (109)

def

FREMANTLE
9 10 (64)

THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

34 Years, If I'd Lived

2020-12-08T04:30:59Z

In the midst of all the kerfuffle over the mutated flu strain that’s come out of China like a boatload of fee paying students, and swept across the world with Indian speed, the travails of me and the ATO might seem trivial (and as I have to correct the spelling of both ‘travails’ and ‘trivial’ it seems the ‘v’ key on this laptop is a smidge sub par), but it’s important to think as you start reading this that coronavirus is temporary, whereas what I’m going to be crapping on about over the next few hundred words may end up being permanent. ‘May’ in the sense that whoever organises this shit has given it permission to.
(We now pause while I get fucking ropable at the fact that I wrote a further five hundred deathless words of prose here but for some reason it didn’t get saved. The upshot of this is that I’m now typing a 27 November entry on 2 December. With all the other bullshit going on in my life I haven’t been able to sit down long enough until now to actually type anything.)
If you’re reading this for something other than trying to tell me how fabulous your search engine optimisation is, and how you can drive traffic straight at me with the speed of whatever car actually hit me in 1982, then the above parenthesised bit of reflexive prose kind of ruins the illusion that I’m writing this on 27 November, but I have finished a semester of Experimental Writing and bits of it are still clinging to me like those kind of fleshy things you get on your back that I really wish I hadn’t even referred to now.
So as you may have realised, a viral scourge has been transmitted across the plant by the constant iteration that ‘freedom of movement’ is enshrined in Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Many other things are determined to be human rights, and people are always quoting the US Constitution in the TV-fostered belief that we’re part of a TV America. One thing that’s true about our rights of freedom of movement or freedom of speech is that both go out of the window when there’s a plague on, or where there’s money involved. Oh, yes. The ATO deals with money, which is why it can detain you without charge and enter your house without a search warrant. I never had exercise this power in my time at the ATO, but I do know people who had to, and sometimes required the assistance of Victoria Police to gain entry to the property and protect them from the assaults of the invaded public.
The Victorian Government’s response to this gallop by the third horseman of the Apocalypse was to clamp down on our freedom of movement, and remind everyone that the ‘right’ to free speech disappears instantly when you use it to advocate criminal activity. Actually spreading the disease is not as bad as inciting people to protest about house arrest to prevent its spread, as we found out when a Ballarat girl was arrested for inciting a protest march, while five Afghanis were exonerated after they deliberately spread the disease but caused the ‘unfair’ targeting of the rest of the Afghani ~~jihad~~ community.
Meanwhile, the Victorian lockdown brought a halt to manufacturing, most of construction, office-based office work and trade with the other States, which One Nation was going to challenge on the basis that a closed border violates free trade between the States under S92 of the Constitution. The problem was that even the constitution can be politely ignored if there’s a plague on, which may be the other aspect of the third horseman as we stroll towards the Apocalypse, apart from the actual deaths he causes.
In any case, Victoria is hardly the manufacturing centre it once was in the days before multiculturalism held back our technology to give wogs a job, and since we are a modern Western country we have eschewed manufacturing in lieu of technology and service, on the basis that everyone else on the planet is more productive in manufacturing because their wages are lower, or that making things is beneath our dignity somehow, even if we’ve moved here from a country with even less manufacturing than we have managed to retain in spite of ourselves. So, the lockdown didn’t affect our manufacturing that much.
But you can’t gear an economy to hospitality and lawyers without a lockdown totally fucking it, and wages, employment, leisure time and enjoyment have all gone downhill while we all sat in a kind of house arrest watching it all happen locally, interstate and overseas. One of the interesting stats they came out with while that was happening was that Victoria produces 25% of the country’s GDP. But we have 33% of the population! So, we are actually less productive per capita than the other States. Well, no, because the other States produce GDP per capita based on how much dirt they are digging up and flogging off to the Chinese at a competitively low rate. Another explanation might be that, even though we have a third of the country nestled between our borders, a lot of the people here just aren’t that productive. How can they be? They’re all doing low value added work or high-end service industries that consume a lot of money but don’t actually produce that much of value. Almost any kind of agent fits this latter category.
The upshot of this combination of low value and no prodcution has put the Federal government (a phrase I capitalise for no reason I can fathom right now, unless it’s due to editorial style, which I make myself, anyway, so you’d think I’d know it was that, wouldn’t you?) isn’t making any money off of our broad-based consumption tax (or GST) because nobody’s consuming anything. Savings rates are actually up, even though banks aren’t paying enough interest to even keep pace with inflation let alone generate any additional value. One solution to this problem, which has been threatened on and off since 2000, is to raise the GST to 15%. Then why not 20%? 25? 28? Going once, twice, duly enacted by a government who actually believed that a broad-based consumption tax was going to achieve anything. It’s too vulnerable to the winds of change to be a dependable source of revenue. Further, income tax is in trouble if wages don’t keep pace with inflation, but that ain’t gonna happen while there’s a government that has committed itself to treating he electorate as an infinite source of ~~corporate~~ small business welfare.
Well, apparently, the economy is back out of recession, so that was quick. But money has been lost…well, it has gone somewhere where the government can’t find it our touch it. After all, and let’s take the stock market as an example, if someone buys stock at a given price from someone who owns it, and then the price goes down, then that buyer sells the stock for a lower price, the buyer has lost money on the sale, but the first lot of money that has changed hands is with the original owner of the stock. Money can be created but rarely destroyed.
So, what does 2021 hold for us and, more germanely to this post, for my former employer? One thing that seems to be getting a lot of traction is that multinational companies, particularly the tech companies everyone is throwing money at nowadays because it seems like they’re stable for some reason,I don’t know what reason, because if I could think like a stockbroker I wouldn’t be any better at thinking than I am now, but I’d be making a ton of commission, is that these companies should be paying ‘their fare share of tax’. This seems to mean that these companies, who are making a lot of income from whatever, ought to be paying tax on the income and not on their profit.
But why doesn’t every company do that? Sure, companies have expenses like wages, rent, utilities that are costs necessary and peculiar to their business, but individuals pay tax on their income and then pay wages, rent and utilities. What’s ‘fair’ about that? This idiotic system has been around for about two hundred years, originating at different times in the Western world. It’s been held as semi-sacred that individuals are taxed on income and business is taxed on profit, but now they want to change that for these large tech companies. I don’t recall them ever wanting to do it for large car companies or large food chains, but here we are. Why shouldn’t one branch of a company be allowed to move income from one branch to bail out another branch? Banks do this all the time, even from suburb to suburb. Business can deduct pretty much any money they spend in order to reduce their taxable profit, whereas individuals are curtailed by various income tax rulings in what they can deduct.
Ultimately, the tech companies can’t withdraw their services from every country that wants to prosecute them in this way, but they can certainly withdraw their commerce from countries one at a time, forcing people who want to deal with them to deal with other countries, with consequences to the nations’ balance of payments (which is a disaster, apparently, which I don’t want to go into right now) or to miss out.
The solution to a fair tax system is to have one definition of income which is set in the constitution so it’s hard to change and which is universally applicable in every piece of legislation, and to tax either income or profit for both individuals and business.
I doubt we’ll see it happen. The important thing is, I won’t be there to enforce it.

Lest We Forget Part XXVI

2020-04-29T04:01:07Z

What's overriding everyone's life at the moment, what's controlling our social life, what's affecting the way we work, rest, play and even think, is the Pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic. The 'Kung Flu' pandemic. The pandemic that Connie Willis wrote about in her 'Oxford Time Travel' series. Well, that last one is not quite true. She mentions 'The Pandemic' but it killed twenty-three million people. There is no way the Chinese (in the sense that it comes from China, like Chinese art, cuisine, languages, ways of thought) virus is going to kill that many. And even if it did, twenty-three million is trivial. Trivial, but dramatic. Ideally you don't want anyone to die except as a consequence of a legal process. But if a disease comes up and starts killing people, and rapid travel enhances its contagiousness, well, twenty-three million out of nine billion (which is the future population that Willis mentions) is trivial. Well, if I were one of them I might not think that, but somebody else would think like I'm thinking now.

So, what has this got to do with South Africa and the change in government they experienced twenty-six years ago? Not much, I grant you, but this virus is damn near everywhere and I hung around a while before our incredibly parochial news got around to saying anything about what was happening in Africa.

What was happening in Africa was that South Africa had closed its borders. Many countries are doing this, much to the detriment of countries who have foreign nationals in them who can't go back to their own countries because the borders are closed. There ought to be a UN resolution that no country can close its borders to its own citizens.

Shovelling responsiblity for your citiziens onto the country they're in is a custom that has been out-evolved, or rendered stupid, in an era of so much easy international travel. New Zealand wishes to offload it criminal element onto Australia by not accepting that Australia will deport criminal Kiwis after they've served their sentence or paid their fine. if no country could do this, and was obliged to accept its repatriated citizens, life would be better for citizens already in their country.

Anyway, the South African government seems to have acted responsibly in this situation. Amazingly, so has the government of Kenya. I had expected the coronavirus to sweep through these camps in northern Kenya like a combination of smallpox and ebola, but it hasn't happened for some reason. Probably because no-one with the disease has been able to cross the borders to get there. But if border control was that easy in Africa, how would all these Sudanese get to Kenya in the first place?

Anyway, I don't have much time to write these days, due to a degree in Creative Writing I'm doing. so this has been short. But then, people prefer brevity, it seems. The main tning is that South Africa has done a lot better in this 'crisis' than I thought it would. I don't know why.

The Curse of the Summer Solstice

2019-12-19T09:52:21Z

Those of you on the keen cutting five or so micron thick cutting edge of 21^{st</sp> century zeitgeist will be aware that Update 25.1.1 of The Lord of the Rings Online rolled out of the Boston-based programming pits around 2:00PM (1900 UTC) on the 17^th of December.

Those of you on the trailing edge of the aforementioned supernatural metaphor may be wondering whether a ghost or spirit could have a cutting edge. You may be thinking that that is a kind of exotic ghost that R. Chetwynd-Hayes could've come up. A ghost that could cut things. The more literary or literarily inclined of you will be wondering, I don't doubt, where the fuck I got that metaphor from and what the fuck I was doing using it here, which is supposed to be a safe space. "Wouldn't 'coal face' have been better?" you may be asking. Or might be. Whatever. You can do a million writing courses and still not know everything.

I just couldn't think of a better way to describe someone who's absolutely informed about the dernier cris these days. Although saying that they knew and could pronounce dernier cris might be another way of describing them. And why use French when I could say 'focail dheireach' if that's the Irish phrase? I'm not sure it is. I'm not going to look it up.

The secondary thing to take away from those paragraphs is that it's a pleasure to write in a meandering way for a change.

The main thing is that the LOTRO update was released. I tried to install it. I kept getting an error message saying something like 'Cannot confirm username. Absent data at lines [1] and [32]'. I didn't know what this was, but it certainly wasn't doing my updates. In the end, I thought the answer was to uninstall the game and give it a fresh go at doing an install. This would mean a 29GB download, but what the hell, I had plenty of data left.

First, I went to Apps and Features to uninstall the game. That was fairly straightforward and, it's a pleasure to note, the process hadn't changed much since XP. While that was happening, I fired up the Windows 7 machine (hereinafter MAINPC) because that had LOTRO on it, too. I had better update that, I thought, in case my darling Kelvatari got a bit of time to play and this new installation on the Win10 machine took a while.

I got the same error message. A lengthy bit of pawing through the written detritus of trhe Internet finally found me an explanation: the servers were down for an emergency patch. I assumed this meant as well as the update, and this seemed to be the case.

A few hours later I noticed that the message advising the servers would be taken down from 8AM to 12PM (1300 to 1700) now said that they were back up. Good. I could now reinstall on the Win10 machine (hereinfafter RIOMHAIRE). I downloaded lotroclient.exe from LOTRO.COM and set it to work.

While that was beavering asway, I updated the game on MAINPC, too. This provcess took about six minutes. I came back to RIOMHAIRE to see that the install process had stopped and the LOTROC client had closed down. I fired it up again, went through the rigmarole of telling it where the game files were and to repair them, and walked away to make a cup of tea or something—whatever it is I do.

I came back to find the lotroclient thing had shut down again. Now, it's not unusual for Win10 to just shut things down for no reason that we poor money-paying bastards aren't allowed to know, and my days of being able to understand a technicla article are way behind me, not to mention the piles of crap out there posing as informative articles (not unlike this one, you m(ay)ight be thinking), so I just shrugged and fired up the process again. Then I wandered off to do whatever.

The fifth time I started up lotroclient.exe, it stayed up, so I wandered off to watch the news, some other programs, take a phone call and whatever and around 10:30PM (1130 UTC) I came back to see how it was in stalling. It was incredibly slow. Glacially slow. If I hdn't known better I would've thought the NBN had slowed to... 256K/ps? That could't be right. A quick trip to speedtest.net confired this. A very slow check of the email confirmed that Internode had throttled me. Throttled? Moi???

Apparently all my installing of LOTRO had used up 120GB in a few hours.

I chcked lotroclient.exe again. Holy crap. The installer was installing the same file over and over again for some reason. The LOTRO folder on RIOMHAIRE had multiple copies of the same file, CLIENT_CELL_3.DAT in numbered 'parts'. Numbered from 1 to 144, at whuich point prsumably it just overwrote the low-numberd files. The 360MB file must have been downloaded and not 'finalized' (as they spell it) more than 300 times. Fucking hell.

I had to buy an extra 100GB of data from Internose to cover the 49GB I had overused by this rigmarole and to leave myself with sensible Internet speeds until the plan rolls over on January 6^th next year. Then I had a fitful night's sleep non-CPAP compromised sleep.

Despite all this crap I still dragged my sorry arse off the Sealy this morning and preapared to have another go at installing a game which, to be honest, gives me less grief on installing than Windows does. A quick start of lotroclient.exe showed me that it was up to its old tricks, so I cut that short before my usage exploded again. Then it occurred to me that I had a working copy of LOTRO on MAINPC. I could just could just copy those files over to RIOMHAIRE and that would work, right?

Now, there's an immediate flaw in this plan: it makes sense. And nothing that makes sense will work with Windows. Things like file permissions and compatibility issues and whatever else make the simple act of copying someting you own into a Sisyphean assignment straight from the minds and morals of whatever Lovecraftian horrors out of Redmond buld Windows the way they do.

However, it should be realtively easy to copy files across from MAINPC to RIOMHAIRE over the network, right? Yeah, right...

I could see MAINPC on the network as a media device, but I couldn't get to an files on it. From MAINPC I could see RIOMHAIRE, but I couldn't even connect to it. It asked for my username and passw2ord. Username? Password? How could I find those? When had I even set up a ussername and password?

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Why is it that Windows, which emphasis connectivity over the Internet, even though back in the day Bill Gates ignored it, makes it increasingly difficult to move files from one PC to another over the same fucking network? Or is it that I don't know what I'm doing? I choose the former, because even if I didn't know what I was doing, there was no way I could fucking find out!

So, in a step back to the 14^th century, probably accompanied by bubonic plague but I don't know yet, I got a fucking gflash drive out, copied the files off MAINPC and then put them on RIOMHAIRE.

I was stunned to discover that, when I fired up lotrolauncher.exe off the shortcut, the damn thing fired up!

LOTRO 1; fuck you Windows.

And the solstice hasn't even got here yet.}

33 Years, If I'd Lived

2019-12-02T00:30:56Z

It’s rolled around to this time of year again, as it does roughly every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds or so.and it’s November 27^th again, and by now you should know what that means. It means I’m going to have a review of how the ol’ ATO is going and what it’s doing to the few people I know who still work for, at, with, through, on and within it.

So, at least two, but maybe more, of my mates are still in durance vile to the forces of revenue collection and they’re not having a good time of it. Increased emphasis on sexual harassment has increased the non-sexual harassment, and in any case the sexual harassment of women by men is much less common than it was. Sexual harassment of men by women is still regarded, possibly even deemed, to be impossible. Same sex harassment is unknown.

An, or perhaps another, impact of the Internet is that many of the Indians hired by the ATO for public contact purposes can no longer do those jobs and, far from being dismissed by an employer that is supposed to reduce its costs, have been promoted to the point where they don’t have public contact, or any contact at all, even with other ATO drudges.

The reason for this is that, when members of the public are called by persons with an Indian accent saying they’re from the ATO, rspnsible citizines (which I will introduce as a replacement word for 'citizen' because, even though it started out as a typo, it describes the idea of a person and their associated data being the entity under discussion. People are sort of like magazines filled with details) hang up. In theory, you would dismiss someone who couldn’t do their job, but you can’t really sack someone for having an untrustworethy accent. You shouldn’t hire them in the first place. But to promote them for it? And, wasn’t there a condition of the Public Service Act (1997) as amended that required people to be Australian citizens? Now they’re hiring Indians for the job? It’s not as if Hindi were the Spanish of Australia—yet.

So, so much for the ATO. Still a crap place to work, and I wouldn’t last too long there these days. On to more pleasant stuff.

Last year, we celebrated mine and Kelva’s 10^th anniversary on the 21^st of November. This year we celebrated it on the 28^th because I’m a fuckwit (who is writing this on December 1^st but will be backdating the post). The real date is the 21^st. So there’s that.

My studies continue. I say to people now that I’m in my nth year at the course, because they don’t offer the compulsory subjects every semester, and I can’t handle a full time load anyway because I’m so slow, and it’s hard to even find an elective subject to do. My writing isn’t any better now than it was in 2018, but I now think that I only think that because I’m a better critic now than I have been in the past. Other students seem to like my feedback, anyway. So I press on. 2020 will see me having a go at poetry, which won’t be much fun for anyone, and digital writing, which is a very high-tech, IT sort of thing which I disdained in the 90’s because it didn’t seem like writing, but which may give me the skills to do better websites in the future—or, let’s be honest, which I might fail.

This is turning into a ‘year in review’ sort of thing. Ah, well.

‘Write Club’, the weekly meeting of Ballarat’s literati, continues. A year ago, when ai first got there, there were a dozen people all working on their respective opera. Now, there’s usually the core three people; me, Tilly and Stephen, and Tilly and Stephen have been friends since high school (ie, ten years or so). You have to feel a little slighted…well, if you’re egotistical enough to think the root cause of all things is yourself. That’s a heatlhy ego, right?

captlychee @ 2019-08-17T16:37:00

2019-08-22T10:45:48Z

In front of 51786 people at the MCG

CARLTON
11 12 (78)

def

ST KILDA
10 8 (68)

THE BOYS ARE FURTHER BACK IN TOWN!

captlychee @ 2019-07-27T21:23:00

2019-07-27T11:30:16Z

In front of 38000 people and 369 Crows supporters at the MCG

CARLTON
13 9 (87)

def

ADELAIDE
9 6 (60)

THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN!

Achievement

2019-07-21T02:01:32Z

50^th ANNIVERSARY
OF THE
MOON LANDING

THE BEAUTY OF SCIENCE APPLIED

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/AP11_FINAL_APPROACH.ogv

captlychee @ 2019-07-20T23:39:00

2019-07-21T01:46:30Z

In front of 31766 people at the Docklands stadium, now named after some comic publisher

CARLTON
15 9 (99)

def

GOLD COAST
11 9 (75)

WE ARE THE NAVY BLUES!

captlychee @ 2019-07-13T16:20:00

2019-07-13T06:27:23Z

In front of 32500 people in Sydney

CARLTON
9 15 (69)

def

SYDNEY
8 14 (62)

WE'RE THE TEAM THAT NEVER LETS YOU DOWN

captlychee @ 2019-06-30T20:51:00

2019-07-01T00:57:12Z

n front of 37293 people in Western Australia

CARLTON
11 13 (79)

def

FREMANTLE
11 9 (75)

OFF THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER!

No Sex, Please, We're Ballaratish

2019-05-09T06:04:06Z

Many of you will know that, of a Sunday afternoon, I wander, or sometimes trot, over to the Racer's Café on Webster St to join some of the Ballarat Writers in an afternoon of Write Club. Now, the first rule of Write Club is to tell other people about it, so here we are. Anyway, for three hours we write, but I mostly talk about whatever has seized my attention on the day.

Anyway, some of the people have their projects that they work on, but I usually just write whatever comes into my head, since it's difficult to write anytung coherent when you can't see the screen well enough to read back what you're writing. Plus, one could argue stupidly, a bottle of vino doesn't improve matters. Be that as it may, I have lots of 800-1000-word fragments on the drive from these sessions.

Every so often, one of the members of the Club, whom we'll call Stephen Brown, comes up with a good writing prompt, which I then work on over the next week and email off for his and others' critique or dismissal. One of these prompts came from a friend of his saying "i will eat my own mouth". The resultant story, "Stomophage", is too putrid and repellent a piece to see the light of day—but stay tuned anyway, because I may have a change of heart. In the story, the protagonist—a word I use here only because, while it's technically correct, it overinflates the importance of the character hugely—sets out to carve up and eat his own mouth. In preparation he has all his scalpels, pliers, painkillers etc and a bowl to catch his ejaculate.

On reading the story, Stephen had a question: "Is he getting off on it?"
"No, " I replied, "he's just preapring in case he does."

Now, I don't actually think anyone cutting up their own lips, tongue, gums etc and pulling out their own teeth to eat them would get off on it. But people do get off on the weirdest things, so it's possible, and a conscientious and psychotically determined person might well prepare for it with a bowl or something to catch it. In practical terms, a condom would be more useful, but this was only a first draft of the story. (Parenthetically, I doubt there'll be a second.)

Anyway, we were talking about something or other and I proposed that, in the future, the two other people who regularly attend will control the world, and that I've been sent back from 2060 to ensure that that doesn't happen. So it was suggested that I had to write that one.

The resultant tale, which has some stupid title I'm not going to bother to look up, but the filename Brown Town.docx, took me about eight hours to write, then another three to check for typos, spelling errors, brain farts and whatnot, before I could get it into a fit state to email to to the other members.

The story is about a man coming back from a sexually-repressed future dystopia. The first thing he sees is women walking around with their faces bare but their legs covered. He is used to women in miniskirts and false beards. So, of course as it seems to me, he finds these women instantly arousing and expresses his embarrassment about the visible signs of arousal that gentlemen suffer.

The other members' conclusion about this? 'He really needs to get laid.'

I'm certainly in agreement with that. More agreement now than, say, a couple of decades ago. Call it a mid-life crisis. But, is this lack of occupation with sex causing a pre-occupation with sex that is reflected in, or by, my writing?

I'm not buying it. As I aid to the President of Ballarat Writers after she had left comments on 'Brown Town' to the effect that the sex is far too visible, I was creating a dystopia. Somewhere, either on the comments in the documents, or on Facebook Messenger, I said: 'the equation goes something like 'sex=good, therefore no sex=bad, therefore somewhere that's bad because of no sex is a dystopia'. I phrased it much better than that, but I can't find it. Once you have the 'no sex' part of the dystopia, you can just add things to it, and in most of this story I was borrowing from Nineteen Eighty-Four because that's a good model for a dystopia. Everyone recognises it even if they can't quote the source, and how much creative effort was I going to put into what essentially was a one-off joke with limited appeal?

Not much.

But, why is it that people in their twenties, and a woman in her thirties, object to sex, or at least sexy things even if not intercourse, appearing in fiction? Is it part of what Barry Humphries calls 'the new Puritanism'? Or is it that, with questions of sex, sexuality, gender, gender awareness, sexual fluids and fluidity, hashtagging all human behaviour and sexually-transmitted climate change and such, that they are so inundated with sex in its general sense that the last place they want to see any of it is in the one place they can go to escape from it&mdahs;into fiction?

I can only promise that in whatever fiction I may write in the future, there'll be no sex. I can promise there'll be no sex in these posts in the future. Not a single articulate sound referring to sex in any of its multifarious forms will pass the ol' lips—I won't even say 'lips'. This Bowdlerisation of my entire social milieu will take time, with a lot of mistakes and a lot of promises.

I only hope I can keep them.