Trysting Fields

Stuff I Did This Year

In a nutshell: systematically climbed the fuck out of hell. Again. (See previously: 2005; 2007; 2009.)

And it's good! Can't complain.

:)

"Friends - you know who you are; you know we're grateful." - Blur, 1993. (Seriously. If ever a year was about Who Your Real Friends Are, it was 2011.)

Similarly, those who have fucked me up and fucked me over this year most likely know who they are also, and possibly how I feel about this (hint: angry, bewildered and sad) - with the possible exception of the Rt Hon Lord Mayor of Melbourne Robert Doyle (note contact details), who I strongly suspect does not have any idea who I am.

(I also doubt he reads this blog. But since it just can't be said often enough I might as well take this opportunity to (re)state, for the record: Robert Doyle, you're a fucking cunt. You really are.)

The bulk of this year's SIDTY post I rendered in audio format at the coast a few nights ago. It goes into a bit more detail (although, to be honest, not all that much). Enjoy:

Vale 2011. Viva 2012.

Happy new year!

Night At Twyllan's

Monday 22nd March.

Chez Hagakure Vodka, Juice & Soda Water Low-Key Dinner Party

With AG.

Chez Hagakure Tea & Pizza Shapes Meet

Starring this chick.

(Previously; previously; previously; previously; previously; elsewhere.)

Chez Hagakure Bong Summit

Attending; presiding.

Chez Hagakure Vodka Conference

Attending: Em; Gab; me (obvs).

(Prevs.)

If You're Happy And You Know It

Or alternately, if you're miserable and you know it - and it's just no good at all...

CLAP. YOUR. HANDS.

CLAP! CLAP!

If you're happy and you know it,
And you really wanna show it,
If you're happy and you know it... clap your hands!

CLAP! CLAP!

I feel better already.

Despite - he said, by way of explanation - the depressing fact that I have failed.

I am A Failure; one who has failed. That is What I Am.

CLAP! CLAP!

It's the last day of November. And despite my best intentions, I have failed to write a 50,000-word novel.

I gave it a good old Aussie go, though. Really, truly did!

But I didn't write 50,000 words - and I didn't finish it. And it's dead now. It doesn't want to be worked on any more. It has become a stinky moribund dead project that pains me and makes me annoyed at myself. And it's bad when you annoy yourself.

Winces, girds loins, drives a stake through its beloved heart.

It's dead. RIP, first attempt at writing a novel.

The silver lining is, I'm actually well pleased with the 37,566 words I did write. They came out great.

CLAP! CLAP!

Which was really the problem. They were too good. Consequently, somewhere along the line, I forgot to not take myself seriously. Which is the whole big-thing point of NaNoWriMo. You can write a stupid 50,000 word novel in a month. But unless you are a bona fide literary genius, you can't write a good one. Forget about it.

I'm tempted to quote Alanis Morrisette at this juncture. But for everyone's sake, I shall abstain.

The point is: I'm, like, trying to be philosophical and shit. I feel pain now, but I know the venture was far from a dead loss. In the end, I got more out of it than I would have if I hadn't undertaken it. And in any case, I've lost nothing. Just a ride. Etcetera.

CLAP! CLAP!

In other shittiness news, nobody but a handful of stalwarts - it seems - can come to our party.

Again, I don't feel too bad about it. It's getting towards That Time Of Year; everybody has lots of prior engagements. A bunch of people came to the last one - and most if not all appeared to genuinely have a good time. So it's not like this is a sign that all our friends secretly hate our guts, or think our parties suck.

CLAP! CLAP!

Finally, congratulations are in order to Mr Tripto Deluxe, who jumped on board my NaNo bandwagon and then kicked my ass right off the damn thing by actually finishing his book.

Kudos to you, my friend. Kudos to you. No, I wouldn't come to my party either. You have better things to do. Course you do. We're not really going to kill you. That was totally, like, an empty threat. Course it was.

Love your work.

CLAP! CLAP!

Oh, man - that's the shit, right there.

CLAP! CLAP!

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

CLAP! CLAP!

Excuse me, I have to be alone with my hands for a while.

Grant Morrison Explains Everything

at Disinfo.con in February 2000. (Grant Morrison is a writer, iconoclast and man who Knows. He basically invented The Matrix, amongst other things. He is also funny as hell.)

Semi linked this a while back but having just re-viewed it, I'ma pimp it again because it's fucking brilliant and everybody with at least half a functioning brain and any clue at all should watch it now.

No, I don't care what else you think you're doing or have to do. Watch it now.

Watch it now.

That is all.

Remember, As You Stare Into The Lettuce..

...the lettuce stares also into you.

"The Nietzschean diet has its critics. Detractors say the diet's actual nutritional requirements are vague, that it provides no concrete plan for progression toward weight-loss targets, and that the book consists mostly of unclear and unusually harsh sets of inspirational logical lacunae."

(via Technoccult.)

Charlie Says

We have domain!

Do we have domain mapping? Well, no.

But who cares?

DOMAIN!

So happy right now. (And I'm not on even on drugs. For once.)

UPDATE - But I'm about to be. Braincells? Who needs 'em etc

Four Quintessentially Nietzschian Words That I Have Found Very Useful

• Will
• Power
• Abyss
• Destroy

Thanks, Friedrich!

Reading your prose gives me headaches and nosebleeds. But you were, without a doubt, the man.

Tremendous News

I have solved the riddle of existence, and it's like this: life is, in the most literal sense imaginable, what you make it. There is only a ghost in a machine and it is us; there is no other.

Everything is inherently completely hollow. Everything is made of information, which does not really exist. Nothing is real. We're all just making this up as we go along. I shit you not. Things aquire energy according to the energy which is afforded to them by the perceiver(s).

Voila, the world is over.

Whether this constitutes a tragic or a happy ending - or just the 'meh' to end all 'meh's - is, most appropriately, left as an exercise for the reader.

Good afternoon.

What Is The Disumbrationist Movement?

I'm glad you asked.

Not that I'm a part of it or anything, you understand.

Doomed Notes Towards A Theory Of Everything

I've always been an atheist, although it used to depress me. Then, in my late teens, I was introduced to Richard Dawkins by my then-best friend-slash-bete-noir, the extraordinary Ms Catherine T. Coote, and became a committed secular humanist. "The Blind Watchmaker" was my bible for a while. I liked Dawkins' style and his no-nonsense philosophical position.

It served me well for a time.

Although I remain a fan of the scientific method, Dawkins' attitude makes me want to puke these days. He is a smug git, and in many ways every bit as bigoted and dogmatic as the religious types he so witheringly scorns.

We're all hypocrites to some extent. But he is a hypocrite who seems aggressively blind to his own hypocrisy, and these irritate.

These days, I suppose I could be described as a profound skeptic, or possibly, with certain qualifications, a nihilist.

I have many theories, some of which I rely on to function, but I don't fundamentally believe in anything at all. I believe in the power of belief. That's about it.

I'm still figuring out how to exist comfortably and stably within such a framework. It's more than likely I never will.

Here is a quote from Robert Anton Wilson, who is a very interesting fellow. One of the leading lights of Discordianism, his is a philosophy I can get behind:

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

I strongly suspect that a world "external to," or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like [the] Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology.

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback.

I more-than-half suspect that all "good" writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of "alteration in consciousness," i.e. a kind of controlled schizophrenia. (Don't become alarmed -- I think good acting comes from the same place.)

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by "angels" and "gods" states it an even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I'll arrive at firmer conclusions.