Author: David

Today is the day that every year always gives me the same uneasy feel­ing. The “Oh fuck, its Sep­tem­ber already!” feel­ing.

After years (well I’ve been on the net since ’95 so I can say years) or search­ing I have final­ly found a sub­ject about which the Inter­net knows noth­ing. I thought I was close two years back when I jok­ing­ly said to a friend “There’s prob­a­bly even web­sites ded­i­cat­ed to ‘Hey Dad’!”. Turns out there are web­sites about ‘Hey Dad!’, thought strange­ly their most­ly in Ger­man, go fig­ure.
But I think I’ve final­ly found a hole in the vast sum of triv­ial that is the Inter­net. I can’t find any­thing more than a pass­ing ref­er­ence in the occa­sion­al web log to *The Rock­et Clock* from ‘Playschool’. I mean the search did­n’t even turn up any decent porn sites!

It’s been a strange sort of year, and Mar­di Gras seems so long ago. But fear not, here comes queer­Doc, so I bought myself a Pink Pass and am plan­ning to spend the week­end inside the Chau­v­el cin­e­ma.

but the fact is that the uni­verse works, against all the odds.

While sit­ting at a table in a fast food restau­rant that one of the oth­er patrons might at any minute pull out a semi-auto­mat­ic machine gun and paint the room red.
That you’ve walked into a musi­cal, but your the only one that does­n’t know the words, the dance moves and you can’t hear the music.
The wait­ress is com­plete­ly unable to see you despite wav­ing your hands in an ‘I’m drown­ing over here’ way.

Sea­son Five of Buffy has just recent­ly end­ed, Sea­sons One and Two are now of DVD and now part of my col­lec­tion, Sea­sons One, Two and Three were played on Fox­tel over the East­er long­week­end. And to top it all off I’ve just spent the last few days re-watch­ing Sea­son Four.
So now I’m in the weird posi­tion of hav­ing all of Buffy fresh in my mind. I’ve nev­er had any­thing close to this expe­ri­ence with Doc­tor Who. The sheer vol­ume of Doc­tor Who makes that more dif­fi­cult, even ignor­ing the miss­ing episodes. And then on top of that there is the long list of unread Doc­tor Who books.
Yet I call myself a Doc­tor Who fan (proud­ly, but with­out the need to be obvi­ous) and do not call myself a Buffy fan. I enjoy Buffy, I enjoy talk­ing about it with fel­low view­ers, I enjoy the get togeth­ers to watch it, but Buffy is not a reflec­tion of who I am or what I believe.
Com­plex.
Doc­tor Who did not always hit the mark, but the over-all non-vio­lent hero-teacher real­ly res­onates with me.
Buffy on the oth­er hand deals with some very impor­tant con­tem­po­rary issues, but when it comes down to it she pokes things with a pointy stick.

Work on my OpenGL screen saver pro­gress­es slow­ly, most­ly due to lack of expe­ri­ence with pro­gram­ming Objec­tive C and OpenGL (steep learn­ing curve).
The above pic­ture is just a proof of con­cept shoot, and the code needs huge amounts of work. Due to a stu­pid mis­take the cur­rent build crash­es the screen saver pro­gram… back to the draw­ing board.
Any­one want­i­ng to help out is more than wel­come to offer.

Back in the late 80’s there was this idea to send all the peo­ple that had AIDS to an island so they could live togeth­er in per­fect har­mo­ny (can we say “Lep­er Colony”?). I remem­ber think­ing that it was­n’t such a bad idea at the time, remem­ber think­ing that all the infect­ed peo­ple would have a good time and not wor­ry the rest of the world. I’m glad my feel­ings on this have changed.
It is clear to me that I had nev­er real­ly thought what such seg­re­ga­tion and iso­la­tion might mean, and had some­one roma­tisied the idea of an island par­adise on which to die. It seems that I’m not the only one to have changed, some­where along the way the idea was sim­ply dropped, nev­er to be men­tioned again. Kind of a glob­al social faux pas. Best for­got­ten.
Strange that I should think about this now, there is no obvi­ous rea­son for these thought to sur­face. Some­where over the years my thoughts and feel­ings changed in a big way, but there was no big cat­a­clysmic event to cause the change, its a sub­tle process.
The fear and uncer­tain­ty that was the publics ini­tial reac­tion to the AIDS threat has gone, replaced not with under­stand­ing and accep­tance but instead replaced with ambiva­lence and uncar­ing. This is a bad thing. The knee-jerk reac­tion of “It could nev­er hap­pen to me because I’m not gay!” has been replaced with the sim­pler yet more insid­i­ous “It could nev­er hap­pen to me!”.
Peo­ple have grown too accus­tomed to this dan­ger, and have dropped their guard.
Per­haps we have a need for extreme right-wing rhetoric after all?

Last night as I arrived home I looked sky­ward and noticed The Sour­th­ern Cross promi­nat­ly on dis­play.
When­ev­er I look upon it I’m remind­ed of a great many things, a strange sort of mix of the impor­tance of life and yet how small and mean­ing­less it all is. Makes me feel hap­py.

I think that schools should teach the local abo­rig­i­nal lan­guage of the area, and not just a light treat­ment like they do with Ital­ian and French, but rather to a flu­ent lev­el.