Do Not Read This Title

Virtual Reality & Bleak Cities

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:37:41 GMT

So I finally went to see Game On 2.0 and it was thought provoking, in ways the developers probably never intended. Two things in particular.

First the background: It's a touring exhibition about the development of video/computer games that consists of 130+ playable games. As in, you walk up to them, pick up the controls and play them. Game On 2.0 is the upgraded version of the original Game On exhibition. For some unknown reason, 2.0 had its world premiere at QVMAG in Launceston, and after being here since July, it's heading off to Greece next week. If/where it comes back to Australia, I have no idea.

So there's Pong and there's various games from 2010, and all sorts of stuff in the middle. Like the Atari console tank game and an early Tetris and Tomb Raider. And some of those hand-held games from the 1980s, like Donkey Kong. I had actually forgotten about them, for all the time we devoted to the things. All of which was rather cool, and it also gave me a chance to check out some games I've heard about but never seen, like the Sims.

But that's not the point of this post.

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World Heritage Listing

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:33:40 GMT

I thought I might make some comments on Australia's latest addition to the
World Heritage List, which is interesting because I've been to some of those place. My previous total for World Heritage Sites visited was 2, or 3 if I can count the Opera House.

There are eleven sites included in the listing, and I've been to four. I won't ask you to guess which four, because you'd most likely be wrong.

Kingston and Arthur's Vale Historic Area
Old Government House and Domain
Hyde Park Barracks
Brickendon and Woolmers Estates
Darlington Probation Station
Old Great North Road
Cascades Female Factory
Port Arthur Historic Site
Coal Mines Historic Site
Cockatoo Island Convict Site
Fremantle Prison

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Don't read this subject

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:23:45 GMT

I have a bit of a problem. WIP is set about 150 (+-50) years in the future, but their communications technology isn't much difference to ours. This bugs me muchly but my brain won't get around it.

9 / 77
(11.69%)

That looks like I'm getting somewhere.

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Comment on electioning

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:11:37 GMT

After careful consideration of the campaign material presented by local candidates (that being signs in yards, stuff in my mailbox and similar materials), I have determined that there is a Liberal candidate standing for the Houses of Reps and 2 Green candidates for the Senate. Well, that will make voting easy. There's no choice to make.

Is this dearth of campaign materials wide spread or some weird local lethargy? Bass is supposedly a marginal seat (at the last election there was about 1300 votes/2% difference) and any other time, there's posters every where, stuff in the mailbox (currently I have a leaflet telling me a vote for Labor is a vote for the Greens (Uh?) and that's been sitting there by itself for the past week) and all the associated stuff.

Not that I'm complaining. It's just weird.

From 2007

*I do recall seeing a mobile billboard for a Labor candidate a few weeks back, possibly it is spending a couple of days in each suburb/town so as to get maximum coverage from their single sign

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Clunk, clunk

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:32:01 GMT

*notes lack of posts*
*notes lack of photos too*

Must rectify that. Although I have been busy. I wanted to finish the novel I was working on before the end of the month, and preferably before school started back (tomorrow!). And I did that on the weekend. So my reward for doing that is... to start work on the another one. Yay. Specifically the final edit for my WIP with no title. No title at all. Usually I have at least a one word working title that I use for the folder, backup files and whatever else that tells what it is e.g. Boys for the one just finished, Treasure, Falcon (I used that twice); but this one lives in a folder called "New Folder". So I have called it my WIPWOT.

Now mentally switching between projects is of course tricky. You've spent months thinking about a set of characters, and their story, and what is important to them, so it can take a while to stop about that and start thinking about a new bunch. When I started on the one just done, it took weeks before "they" became the story that dominated my thoughts. So come Sunday afternoon, I started tidying files ready to start a new project and sat down to read what I'd done before, in the expectation that it would take at least days before I started properly thinking about the "new" characters. A couple of hours later...

Oh, he's back. My anti-social, foul-mouthed, opinionated wretch of a MC, and his friends, family and the fucking sandys* too. (And he doesn't like my music, especially *that* song, but all the others too.)

Oh well, I shall have different things to grumble about now :) Also, need some new music.

*Police

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Random songs, or not

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:09:28 GMT

I don't understand how my mp3 player works. It generally picks a bunch of songs and plays them over and over again, like a radio station but more portable. Then sometimes it'll grab something else that I haven't heard in so long that I wasn't aware I had a copy of it. Or as it's doing this weekend, a whole bunch of things I wasn't aware I had a copy of or hadn't heard in a long time.

Possibly it "favours" songs that I've manually selected to play and then does it random shuffle around them. I pulled out Grease the other day, when I was at my mother's, which I hadn't heard in a while, so that might now be the 'seed' that to jump to others from.

I wonder if it's worth tracking down the manual to see is there some deliberate logic behind it.

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Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:11:05 GMT

Come all you sons of Freedom, a chorus join with me
I'll sing a song of heroes and glorious liberty

Not the usual start to an Australian song. After all, Australian history doesn't have all the exciting stuff that other countries have, with fights, and daring escapes, and bold outlaws, and ships being seized and sailed off to freedom on a distant shore. Oh wait, yes it does. But there does seem to be a still prevailing attitude that because it's Australian it's not as good.

This particular song I have become rather fond of. Oh, I didn't care much for it the first time I heard it, it's rather long, it's a song you have to listen too, and my attention tends to wander. But then I started to notice the voices, and the harmonies and the glorious liberty of the words. The liner notes of the CD say it was banned as a "treason song".

It's the Seizure of the Brig Cyprus. There's various versions of it, of course, but the words for the one I have are here, the Mitchell Library manuscript version. Reading that you don't have the advantage of 'hearing' it but it gives an idea of the tone of the piece--freedom from tyranny, and glorious liberty.

But have you heard of the capture of the Cyprus? Other than in the comments I wrote on Goodreads a few weeks back. Clune's Pirates of the Brig Cyprus (and that link may not work) is one of very few detailed accounts of the events. Published in 1962, the preface starts with:

This is the first true and detailed story of the piratical seizure of the Cyprus brig. Many other writers have told the outline of the story briefly, and usually inaccurately, adding fiction to fact, and substituting imagination for solid research; but this is the first book-length narrative of the events.

Not much has been done on it since either. It's pretty much forgotten as far as cultural memory goes.

So what are the events? 1829: the Cyprus was taking a load of prisoners to Macquarie Harbour. They were sitting in Recherche Bay waiting for favourable weather (Sailing west into westerly winds? Fun, I'm sure) when eighteen of the prisoners took control of the ship. They dropped their crew, passengers, military guard and less enthusiastic comrades on the shore, and took off to Freedom, wherever that might be. Quite an adventure for a crew of inexperienced sailors, especially once reality hit. Some of them eventually made it to China, and from there, some headed for the Americas, to fates unknown, but five returned to London. Of them, two, according to Clune, "were the last men executed in England for piracy. They were unsuccessful pirates--neither bloodthirsty nor rapacious--the meekest and mildest and most harmless pirates ever to swing in Execution Dock."

So rebellion, piracy, adventures on the high seas, betrayal, what more does a good story need? And yet, it's been mostly forgotten.

Then sound your golden trumpets,
Play on your tuneful notes,
The Cyprus Brig is sailing,
How proudly now she floats.

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One little white square, one coloured week

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:32:02 GMT

I just plain forgot to do a post yesterday, and now there shall be a little white square on my "July". For LJ at least, DW doesn't seem to give me months.

But I did do a whole weeks of posts, which was my target so I'm happy about that. Maybe I'll just do it week by week for now.

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Scramble.

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:20:19 GMT

So I'm in the library today, looking through an almanac (1838, Hobart Town) and at the bottom page is the heading The Royal Family. The first entry is "Queen Victoria" so I'm sitting there wondering who she is and how she fits into the rest of royal family.

I knew this was frying my brain.

As I think I've mentioned somewhere in passing, I'm trying my hand at an historical fantasy, apparently to show myself why this is a bad idea. Of course, by historical I mean 1840 and the fantasy element is a selkie boy. So it's more on the urban fantasy end of the fantasy spectrum, but not as such because it's not in the present or urban. Well, it wasn't.

When I first started, the boundaries of their world were narrow, well defined and I was able to read most of the relevant material, both primary and secondary source, that's available. Which mostly satisfied my obsession with getting details right, so I was able to write the story.

But about 2/3 of the way through, my little protag ups and sends himself to town. (Hobart Town*, that is, although it never gets named. No where has names & neither do most of the adults but that's a different grumble.) All of a sudden the potential for "fact checking" blows out. Mostly it is just fact checking (confirming assumptions, getting the little details) but there's a lot of it. It didn't matter in the first draft. I just skipped it all to deal with "later", but now, it is later.

I didn't want to do this having to look up everything all the time sort of things. Combined with the plot mess I'm trying (haha) to sort out, I'm feeling not very happy at all with the whole project.

Plus it is frying my brain.

And it makes my listen to folk music all time.

But I shall finish eventually and go back to my futuristic city setting where I can MAKE IT ALL UP.

*Became a city in 1842, so it counts as urban

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Brisbane St

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:24:14 GMT

I don't seem to post many photos of Launceston, so a few photos of Brisbane St, the central city street, that I took a few months back on a Friday. Just before noon, actually. The town clock was striking 11.45 :)

Starting at Brisbane Mall

( See more, that'd be three more )

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Bah

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:52:24 GMT

My aim this week was to post something every day, but I forget until late at night. At which point, I'm too tired to think of anything interesting. Also my topics of interest lately are rather narrow. (I blame the WIP for that.) I shall have to find some Inspiration, or I might have to start asking for suggestions! Or question? Or I could sing...

"You can sing of Johnny Gilbert, Dan Morgan and Ben Hall,
But the bold and reckless Gardiner, he's the boy to beat them all."

Hmm, maybe not :)

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Writing. Hae. Really.

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:42:07 GMT

I wrote myself a headache.

You see Davie, the protag of my WIP, came to town. He didn't want to, but there he is, and it seems he can't do anything without me having to fact check, whether this is looking at people walking past, being accosted by a stranger, hiding in an alley, watching the scenery from the carriage (it's a carriage, it's doesn't f/ing matter what sort), being taken to a new house (if I check what that'll look like, I'm giving up now) and now he's about to go inside the bloody house, into a room which has furniture and valuable things he'll notice, and then he'll be given a meal. *sigh* Then he'll have a bath (...) and probably get his hair combed (?) and get taken to his room (which is ???).

If I he survives all then, he gets to go to beach. Yay. All I have to do there is work out where the beaches were. (And what the girl on the beach is doing there, and wearing.)

Oh well. When I'm done with this, I can go back to my little SF story where I can make it all up.

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Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:59:19 GMT

I lack inspiration for a post today. I'm sure this has nothing to do with my spending most of the evening curled up beside heater half-asleep watching a file download. Or maybe it is.

I did get done everything I said I'd do today, but it still feels like an unproductive day. Oh well. It was warm :)

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Seen in passing

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:45:26 GMT

This is from a couple of years ago. I was walking one of the dogs through a park in Evandale when I noticed there was something odd about this house on the other side of the road. It has reflective glass in the windows?

Um, no.

( I'm sure the 'oddity' is obvious with a photo to look at )

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Eaglehawk Neck - Officers Quarters

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:57:48 GMT

To finish off on yesterday's subject... This little place lays claim to being the oldest military timber building in the country.

The sign says "Officers Quarters Museum 1832". As I said in an earlier post, this site is managed by Parks & Wildlife. An interesting feature of this property is it hasn't been "restored". I've mentioned before my aversion to the nice and neat, furnished in an Appropriate Manner presentation of most old house museum. This is not that. I like it.

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Eaglehawk Neck

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:28:54 GMT

Eaglehawk Neck is the isthmus between Tasman Peninsula and Forestier Peninsula, or perhaps more relevant, it's the narrow strip of land that connects the Tasman Peninsula to the rest of the island and freedom. Because for the prisoners at Port Arthur, the only way to successfully escape was to get off the peninsula. Otherwise you'd be recaptured, or starve to death, or get killed by devils or tigers or sharks or savages.

Unfortunately, the neck was protected by a line of savage dogs, backed up by a military detachment. This is the usual image used to illustrate the dogline, depicting IIRC the Franklins' visit. Escape was believed impossible.

Failure did not deter others. Such was the case of Logan, Smith and Brown who were notorious because they managed the almost impossible and escaped across to Eagle Hawk Neck. In the morning of their escape their absence from morning muster was quickly semaphored by 'telegraph' to Hobart Town from Point Puer. This escape greatly puzzled Booth at the time, but it was evident that the boys had waded along the shelving beach a little below Eagle Hawk Neck, taken a deep breath and walked along over their depth for some distance until out of the guards' sight, when they made for shore again. One guard reported that he heard rustling in the scrub but had searched without success. The three boys were eventually captured by Hobley, an assigned servant who was rewarded by having his sentence reduced. (From "Prison Boys of Port Arthur" by F.C. Hooper)

I managed to not get any worthwhile photos on the way down, so I offer a link to a coloured postcard c. 1910 or a B&W photo from the other direction (or the Google Maps link at the start of this post). The building on the postcard is the military barracks, since demolished.

( Continue on! )

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Found while moving stuff from my USB stick to the hard drive

Sat, 29 May 2010 03:15:17 GMT

LAYING THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THE JEWISH SYNAGOGUE.

(From the Hobart Town Advertiser, August 11.)
THE first stone of the Synagogue, about to be erected in Argyle-street, in this City, for the worship of Jehovah by the descendants of the people of Israel, was laid on Wednesday. The event attracted a large attendance of citizens, including nearly every Jew resident in this part of the colony. At two o'clock, the appointed hour, the Committee of Management assembled at the residence of Judah Solomon, Esq., and soon after proceeded to the ground, headed by Louis Nathan, Esq., President, and attended by Phineas Moss, Esq., Secretary, Samuel Moses, Esq., D. R. Furtado, Esq., Mr. D. Moses, James Thompson, Esq., Architect, and other gentlemen, with plans of the intended building, a silver trowel, a square, plumb, mallet, &c, to be used in the ceremony, and a sealed bottle, in which was inclosed a record, on parchment, in the Hebrew language, with an English translation, also the names of the subscribers to the fund, and other particulars of the building.

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Fri, 14 May 2010 13:13:46 GMT

It hasn't even been a year since my last/first post. I thought it'd been longer.

It does occur to me that I could do posts from here and have them automatically crosspost to LJ. That might make more sense, but I think it's the same two people reading in both places so that makes less sense.

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Yay, a post

Tue, 26 May 2009 07:00:44 GMT

Am thinking I should put a post here so it doesn't look so red.

Also a photo.

Old IXL jam factory in Hobart, on Evans St. One of those little edge of city streets that tend to get overlooked.

I have the other side of the building somewhere.

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