27 October, 2007

All machines have been upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10, the garden is still looking great despite being hammered by wind one day and frost the next and I have found Oolite, a remake of Elite a game I played years ago on the Commodore 64. It’s the little things that keep me going.

Apparently we have a problem with violence in this country…in short people keep hitting each other. Now, I might be off the mark here but I have also noticed that as a nation we are very good at making verbal attacks, in particular those niggly, non-confrontational, personal attacks that crawl right up people’s noses and make them want to smack the crap out of something. When did we lose our perspective on the fact that if you push someone too far they will eventually push back and most likely in a violent, or at least aggressive way. Most guys know that if you stand next to a large bloke in the urinals, look across and say something like “Jeez mate, for a big lad you’ve got a small dick” you can expect one event to follow. You will be punched in the head. If the comment was worth it, cool, if it wasn’t don’t complain to the media and our justice system that life is unfair and this big guy just attacked you for no reason. We never seem to look at the whole picture around an event, just the results which limits our ability to actually do anything. As for our media’s almost perverse excitement for moral outrage and those patronising ads with otherwise intelligent people telling me it’s “not alright …” we need to seriously get real. Spend that money on people who are actually dealing with this stuff day-to-day and quit wasting it on guilt making propaganda.

I play computer games, I’m not addicted. I drink alcohol, I’m not addicted. I play poker, I’m not addicted. I can bake a cake and eat it too. See, life isn’t so bad.