Going Wild

For the last year or so, my brain has obviously been developing some new neural pathways or mutating for maximum efficiency of getting really excited about random stuff because every couple of weeks it seems to bail me up in the corner like a cheerful drunk at a party and go 'HEY, YOU REMEMBER WHEN-' and just won't shut up about whatever it is into at the moment.

One of the things it's been yammering about recently is camping.

My family hasn't been camping for years.

The last time I remember was... 2004, just before I had my wisdom teeth out and was consigned to the scrap heap with the rest of the unwise.

And I haven't got any friends who go camping regularly - if at all - so I haven't gone on any exciting non-family camping trips since then either.

But at the moment it is all I can think about.

I want to go camping.

I want to put a tent, an air mattress, a sleeping bag, a handful of clothes and a bucketful of bug spray into my car and piss off somewhere camping.

I know that there is a nostalgia factor.

That there are things about camping that are extra annoying in any setting and things that are extra annoying in specific settings*.

I like the simplicity of only having what you brought with you.

No paralysis of choice on what to do because you've only got what you brought with you and the location you're in as options.

I like waking up going 'Jesus Christ, it must be like 10am! I must have slept in like crazy because it is BAKING in here!' and getting out of your tent to find that it's actually 7:30am and pleasantly mild once you're not inside a synthetic chamber of temperature amplification.

I like not having electricity because you have to REALLY want to finish that chapter in the book to sit there holding a book in one hand and a torch in the other.
Or with a torch clamped between chin and neck.
Or with the torch stuck in your mouth like the world's most unsuccessful pacifier.

I like being able to sit around in a folding chair or flop around in a hammock and not having to think 'I should get up and do that housework/shopping/organising/mending' because you've left all that bullshit at home.

I like the food, even when you cock it up.

It's handy that this trek in Nepal is going to have a camping component so I can calm my jonesing body down and get it to focus on other things that its sudden resurgent camping addiction**.

And when I get back and it's all summer and lovely, I might somehow manage to fit in some camping.

Though I'll be fighting the rest of Australia to find room anywhere decent at that time of year...



*In specific settings this will either relate to the terrain, the weather, or your fellow campers (e.g. drunks staggering home loudly late at night or tiny children running about screaming ridiculously early in the morning. Though if the kids run screaming around the tents of those shitty drunks while they're getting over their hangovers... Heh heh.)

**In Nepal I'll probably be distracted from my camping addiction by how tired I am and how my feet don't love me no more.

Alien Concepts

It feels like we're in a unique point in history and it's both intriguing and a little bit melancholy.

We've watched huge leaps in technological advancement being built on the achievements of the previous generations, each leap a little closer in time to the last and yet taking us further in concept each time.

This means that we're a generation more used to large changes to our lifestyle and our ways of thinking.

We've seen more of the elements of our science fiction favourites being brought into everyday life and have a better ability to predict what may be possible and to strive for what is on the edge of that possibility.

And all this means that we are able to look at our lives and experiences and predict what things are going to fall by the wayside and how quickly.

I might be incorrect but I get the feeling that even though our parents and grandparents knew that change was inevitable they still were taken a bit by surprise when things that they'd grown up with or used their entire adult lives were rendered completely obsolete within a matter of months or a year by a new development.

I know even for people my age it was a bit startling at first watching VHS getting superseded by DVD (with a brief bit of competition from HD DVD format), but as DVD is nudged in the back by Blu-Ray there's more of a 'ho hum, another one bites the dust' feeling.

Even as something new comes out now we know that it has a finite lifespan and that the new thing will be not far behind.
Whether the new thing will last or not is unknown but we know it's coming.

Of course this reflective train of thought all started with the realisation that 'OH MY GOD, SCHOOL KIDS WILL NEVER AGAIN GIVE CLASS PRESENTATIONS USING OVERHEAD PROJECTORS! THEY PROBABLY HAVEN'T DONE THAT SINCE THE EARLY 2000s!'

So in honour of that, here is a brief list of little memories that the next generation won't get to experience.

THINGS THE NEXT GENERATION IS GOING TO MISS OUT ON

• Doing Presentations Using Overhead Projectors. I don't know about you but I used to love doing these. When you were younger you were set loose with some special textas that wrong on the plastic projector sheets and had to very carefully try to write or draw as much of your presentation as possible onto your sheet so that you didn't look like that one weenie whose last sentence had to turn sideways down the side of the page.
  In university I got to have one last play with an overhead projector and printed a colour photocopy of an Italian Renaissance painting onto a sheet of clear plastic for an Italian Art and History class presentation. I spent an embarrassing amount of time holding it up to the light and just gazing through it from either side. It was like having my own very detailed stained glass window.

Overhead Projectors: They Are Cool

• Get To Play With Cassette Tapes And All The Fiddling That Entailed. I mean really, think about all the experiences associated with cassettes.
  -Rewinding them and listening to that clunky 'click!' as they got to the end of the tape.
  -Winding them up with a pencil when they unspooled or if you were fiddling around.
  -Learning to listen to that moment of emptiness that signalled that it had got past the blank bit of tape at the start and you should start recording from this point onwards so that you didn't cut the start off your favourite songs.
  -Physically turning a cassette over unless you had a 'fancy' deck/walkman that did it for you.
  
  (I know these all sound like the things that old people go on about much to their grandchildren's chagrin but this is the point! We're getting to the nostalgia part of life about 30 or 40 years ahead of schedule!)
• Going To The Video Store To Rent Movies. If video stores last another 5 to 10 years I will actually be a bit surprised. What with downloadable movie/TV series rental services already up and running, purchasing your own movies and so forth cheaper than it used to be and the high incidence of movie piracy that goes on amongst the social bracket that used to do all the renting because they couldn't afford to buy*, the profit margins must be getting pretty slim these days.
  But not having that experience of being given a time limit for picking movies, a SET number of movies that was NOT up for negotiation due to the deals the store was offering, and all the bargaining and arguing that went on with your siblings... Well where is the drama and the excitement with doing that from home?
  If you're sitting in front of the family computer with your Mum saying 'I'm only clicking one more item, which one is it going to be?', where's the fun in that?
• Being Excited About Songs On The Radio. You can still get excited about your favourite songs coming on the radio but now that you can just go straight to Youtube or another online service and listen to any song you like on demand at any time, it just isn't the same thing.
  Waiting by your radio with your finger hovering over the record button to catch a song on cassette helped you develop lightning fast reflexes.

There are tonnes of other examples but these are the ones that have popped into my head which I felt met the criteria without straying too far into 'They won't remember telephones with cords' which is a different kind of deal.

It makes you wonder whether as we become more used to change going into the future whether our growing adaptability will be our biggest asset or whether it will lead us to be so flighty in our attentions and loyalties that we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot as a species.

I guess we'll see.



*This is definitely a big generalisation but the more bogan-y a person is the more likely it is that they're pirating movies.

Urge To Kill Rising

For her birthday my siblings and I bought my mother three seasons of Get Smart* and whilst I still love the exciting retro spy gadgets and the humour and what not I've discovered that I can't watch more than about two episodes in a row before I start to want to kill 99.
With a brick.

Apart from the fact the come-hither eyes and pouting started to bug me, what really had me twitching was the incompetence! Oh the incompetence!

Example: In one scene 99 and Max are both walking around a darkened building with their guns drawn looking for the villain. The unarmed villain gets the drop on Max, TV-comedy-fu chops him in the arm and disarms him.
99 still has her gun.
And yet in the next scene they are both tied up and awaiting their terrible fate.
Because the man was so scary she forgot she was armed or something.
I don't know.
But there she is tied to a chair yelling 'do something Max!' whilst he waits, much more securely restrained, to have his head cut off.

Just one in a long string of many instances of her being tied to something yelling 'do something Max!' whilst he is in a lot more danger and she has a much better chance of being able to move and save them both.
Despite the fact Max is a bumbling simpleton (not that there's anything wrong with that) and 99 is clearly more rational and observant she continually defers to his 'experience', asks him what to do and takes the backseat.

When, as she was dragged off-scene in one episode crying 'No!' in a tone of voice that resembled nothing more than a toddler throwing a tanty, I found myself yelling at the TV 'Oh if only you were a highly trained secret agent! Oh wait, you are!' I knew it was time to take a time-out.

And that's not even taking into account the episode where she's suddenly quitting CONTROL to marry some guy who proposed to her whilst she was on holidays 'because a girl's got to think of her future'** and keeps asking Max if there's any reason why he might want her to stay.
No, by all means, honey, you try and force him into a relationship by threatening to marry someone else and when he doesn't bite go ahead and almost marry the other guy because you already said you were going to and it's too late now.... Fstfgvr!

I know the show was light entertainment and it was all part of the formula that they crap up all the time and despite his bumbling Max gets to rescue the girl, I just wish that it wasn't also so heavily dependent on her bumbling.
The fact that the show gives the strong impression that her ineptitude was feigned so as to not challenge his masculinity or muddy the waters of her femininity somehow makes me more rather than less angry.
I know that 1965 was a vastly different time to 2008.
Possibly even implying her intelligence existed even if she didn't fully utilise it was progressive and exciting at the time.
But still! Fstfgvr!

Now here's a Don Adams related spy partnership I can get alongside!


Penny may not take credit for saving Inspector Gadget's ass all the time but his ass, she saves it.
All. The. Time.
Also when I was a kid I would have killed someone for a computer book. That thing was bad ass.


Ah, who am I kidding. I'd kill someone now for that computer book.



*Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeey! I've just realised my bastard siblings haven't payed me back yet! Son of a bitch! Crap, sorry Mum, not you! I love you!

**What, and being an awesome spy isn't a future?! Pfft!

Back In My Day...

The world is changing at such a rate that we've become old fogies decades ahead of schedule.

You start talking about something with someone else anywhere near their mid twenties and at some point or another you might accidentally use that type of phrase. You know the one.

• You can remember when petrol cost 60 cents a litre (or your local equivalent).
• You can remember when the milkman used to deliver glass bottles of milk to the door.
• You can remember when the internet was empty and boring.
• When you were a kid there were no mobile phones, handsets were still shackled to the wall and when someone couldn't contact you by phone they assumed you were just out instead of dead.
• When you did assignments at school we had to look in books and encyclopedias, there were very few electronic journals/books and no such thing as Wikipedia*.

You see!?

I can honestly remember saying to a friend something like "Pfft, these DVD things are never going to take off. What is everybody going to do? Get rid of all their VHS?"

*coff coff* Yes, well we all make mistakes. Nostradamus I am not.

I expect to be completely confused by the changing technology years before my 82-year old grandmother was and to have to ask younger relatives to give me a hand with my visual medium recorder** well before my mother had to.

See how advanced we are?
We're moving so fast my knowledge has become obsolete before I've even gotten to my midlife crisis!
And by the time I do I probably won't know how to operate my shiny new car!

*That bastion of reliability and truth
**I'm not going to date myself by naming the recording medium