The Cabbage Patch

Yesterday, some lucky web-traveller got to this site by searching for “ricky gervais’s sexual identity”.  Brilliant!

Welcome to the long-awaited second part of my series of pointless Photoshop tutorials! This is the part in which I commit horrible acts against the self-esteem of young women everywhere as I instruct you how to digitally alter any person’s appearance.

In reality, this technique is most useful for boring touch-ups - getting rid of “love handles” or “lunch-lady arms”, emphasising muscles or otherwise giving a photo that magazine look.

However, as is my tradition, I’m going to demonstrate this technique using an attractive female celebrity.  In an effort to cash in on the Internet’s obsession with boobs, I will be giving the lovely Ms. Jennifer Garner some imaginary breast implants.  Please save any comments about my misogyny until the end of class.

Let’s get to it!

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A long time ago, in computers far, far away, people used small plastic squares to run their computers (aww… how quaint). Apparently, these “floppy discs” only serve one purpose now - they are being used as truly hideous musical instruments.

The song, of course, is The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme) from Star Wars. The instrument is a 3.5″ floppy drive. Why? Because there apparently isn’t enough nerdity on the Internet.

– [via Neatorama]

An update of the theme I use for this here website has included Gravatars. Despite the name, Gravatars are not in fact something from bad Sci-Fi, but are actually small images (or “avatars”) that will appear next to the name of a commenter in the comments of each post. You can check the comments of this post to see an example.

If you’d like your own Gravatar, you can enter your email address at gravatar.com and upload a picture. Whenever you comment using that email address here (or at any site that supports Gravatars), the picture will automatically appear.

World (or at least, the three of you who haven’t seen this yet), let me introduce you to the trailer for the upcoming TV show, Dollhouse:

Sorry, can’t embed. Click picture to see video.

For those of you not as rabid a TV fan as I, let me explain. Dollhouse is the next TV project from Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly) and stars Eliza Dushku (who is also executive producer) and Tahmoh Penikett (of Battlestar Galactica).

As is perhaps apparent, I’m a huge fan of everything Whedon, and am immensely excited for this show. Unfortunately, it won’t begin airing until early 2009 on Fox in the US, and who-knows-when here on Channel Ten (who have apparently picked it up).

Regardless of the wait (and the near-inevitable Internet piracy that will have to occur to actually see it), the trailer and this short “sneak peek” of the pilot have me embarrassingly excited.

…but somehow, Dave’s last post has struck a chord with me.

MySpace is a disgrace. To make matters worse, all of the 13 year olds have begun the emo-diaspora and are making their way over to Facebook which was once the exclusive play-pen of the Undergraduate classes of society. Bringing with them, not just teen angst and, like, shit grammar. Like. But (see, I started the sentence improperly. Like, totally ROFL-copter) also the same flashy, gaudy on-screen shit that MySpace became so notorious for. It’s almost like all of the programmers and developers eking out a living in Estonia or some other newly established country in Eastern Europe have realised there is an as-yet undervalued market for all things flashy and gaudy amongst users of Facebook and have focussed their attention on giving everyone virtual kittens and virtual emoticons. Indeed! Virtual emoticons… apparently because they aren’t used in real-time, they’re not real, and thus, are virtual.

Now, I do use Facebook. First of all, for poker. I’m bloody crap at it, but I can’t just can’t stop. Plus, seeing as it’s betting the online equivalent of matchsticks, there’s no harm in it. Secondly, I use Facebook as a diary and let people dictate to me when and where I should turn up with a bottle of grog and say “Happy birthday!” or “I’m sorry for your loss!”. It is also amusing to see just how small a social circle we, the bourgeoisie, move around in. For example, Courtney Tight, a friend of mine from Uni, went to a 21st birthday party at the weekend which was also attended by Rowan Spitt Witt, a boy I went to school with. That interested me for all of 8 seconds, however, it was a welcome distraction from my overdue essay and the tepid Butter Chicken I had bought for lunch.

While, following enough peer pressure, I will succumb to the latest juvenile fancy (at the moment, Facebook), I like to maintain an air of dignified, out-of-touch superiority over the plebs. It’s kind of like how Bentleys don’t have Satellite Navigation yet. If your chauffeur doesn’t know where he is going then you need a new chauffeur. To this end, I refuse to use emoticons, I haven’t exchanged money for a video game since Doom 2 came out, I long for the simplicity of Windows 98 and I couldn’t be bothered to work out the difference between Windows Vista Ultimate and the other version… is it Penultimate?

That’s not to say I don’t understand it all. Back in the days of yore (as in, before your time sonny) I sent an sms to myself just to see what happened. It was 1997 and nobody knew what it was, or why you’d use it. “Sounds alot like a pager to me” or “25c? Just to say hello?” were common reactions. Now, everyone’s on the bandwagon. They’re even having sex on it. Back in my day, sex was something you coerced from someone with statements such as “I love you” or questions like “Will you marry me?”. At worst you negotiated a cash price with her boyfriend on a corner in Kings Cross. Now you just text ’slunt’ to 19 55 11 for a bevy of beautiful babes on your mobile now! ‘Now’ is invariably 2:30am and the ‘beautiful babes’ seem to look a lot like that guy from Big Brother. Or is it just because in the drunken haze you mistook ‘Up Late with HotDogs’ for ‘Girls Gone Wild’ ?

Anyway, I’m going to go and put a blanket in the dryer for 20 minutes so I’ve got something to warm myself with when I sit down to watch Lateline on the ABC.

You Know it Makes Sense.

I’m TomHB.

So, I’ve come to the realisation that I hate the parts of the Internet that everyone else loves.

Take “social networking”, for example. I absolutely hate MySpace, but not for the reasons everyone else does. Others cite its hideous controls and mid-nineties-style flashing, squealing profile pages as reasons to exorcise the website from the social-consciousness. Me? I just hate the people who use it. And the inane comments they leave. And fact that one can’t possibly use it to liaise with one’s peers in private and are instead forced to broadcast to the entire world all the pointless drivel that takes place.

And don’t get me started on Facebook. No, I don’t want to spread your stupid vampire/zombie/whingeing harpy crap. And no, I don’t want to install the fucking Super Wall.

I think I’m genetically designed to not understand sites like MySpace or Facebook. I don’t want to broadcast everything I’m doing and everyone I’m associating with (that sounds… saucy) to the whole planet. I don’t like having conversations that take days to happen. I don’t like the implication that everyone I’ve ever met, however briefly, is my “friend”.

Of course these networks have their uses. Facebook has an awesome Poker game on it. MySpace provided an outlet for the awesome Sugarshock. And, if ever I decide to leave this little cave of mine and interact with others, I know where to find them. I just don’t get all the rest of it.

All that being said, I’ve found a “social network” I actually don’t mind using. This thing called Twitter is everywhere you look on the Internet, so I recently checked it out. It’s been variously described as “micro-blogging” or a kind of broadcast SMS. To put it in a way the rest of the world seems to understand - it’s like the status line under your name on Facebook, without the rest of Facebook. It’s a whole site dedicated to that single-line statement. This appeals to me.

I don’t know about everyone else (and I am fully prepared to admit that I am not like everybody else), but things often happen to me or occur to me that I wish to acknowledge in some ironic, witty or simply noteworthy way. If you’re a friend of mine, you’ve probably received an SMS or two from me along the lines of “I’ve just seen…” or “Did you know…?” or “Ever wonder…?”. You know, those things that happen in daily life that you really feel like sharing with, well anyone.

That is, in part, why I started this site those years ago. I wanted a place where I could say or show anything that occurred to me. However, in reality, these little types of thoughts usually don’t warrant an entire blog post to themselves. That’s why Twitter is useful. It is designed for little thoughts. In fact, it is exclusively for such a use, as each posting can only be 140 characters long.

Now, having used the site for a couple of days, I have noticed that this is another example of me not quite getting it the way everyone else does. A large part of the Twitter user base uses it in two other ways that I don’t think I ever will. The first, is to broadcast not the thoughts and opinions of the author, but the detailed minutiae of their lives. “I’m going to work now”, “I just ate lunch” - that kind of thing.

The other common use is to have those MySpace-style conversations where the reader can only see one side of any exchange. This just shits me to no end. “@ThoughtlessDrone Yes, I agree completely! HAHA!” means nothing to me, and I shouldn’t have to read it.

Nevertheless, I’m going to try using this Twitter thing and see how it works out. Knowing me, I’ll probably have abandoned it by next Tuesday.

You can see my most recent “tweets” (why does everything on the Internet have to have such a stupid name? But that’s a rant for another time) over on the newly-reinstated side-bar.

Or here.

As some of you noticed, I kinda stuffed-up my latest photo project thing. This time it was just a case of bad timing. A few days into it, I fell rather ill - like, stay-in-bed-eating-only-soup ill - and therefore missed a few days worth of photos. Then, I got busy preparing for and then going back to uni. By the time everything settled back down I was so far behind on the photos I just gave up.

At least, that’s my excuse.

The thing is, I’m still very interested in taking as many photos as I can. The problem is that I hate my camera and I don’t always have the time (or I’m just lazy). So, I may very well try to reboot the project (again), or I might try some other approach in the future. I’m not sure yet, so stay tuned.

This ad turned up on my recent post about the vampire killer in Melbourne:

I can just see the late-night television commercial now:

Are you lonely and hypervolemic? We’ve got hot, horny vampires waiting for your call! At just $2.99 per minute, these saucy demons are just longing to SUCK YOUR BLOOD!

Really, what has the world come to?

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Melbourne, and while I didn’t get many photos of the city, I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a newspaper headline:

I don’t know much about the story, and to be honest I don’t really care. What I love about it though is that the headline could be about a vampire who was killing people and is now in prison, or it could be about a person who kills vampires (aka, a “slayer”) and is now in prison. Either way, that’s fantastic.