Job Well Done

Today was very rewarding.

Today, I took my daughter, my elder son, and one of my other ju-jitsu students to an open Tae Kwon Do competition in Launceston.

Ju-jitsu -- traditional style ju-jitsu, notable for eye-gouging, groin-kicking, biting, and the creative use of just about anything as an improvised weapon -- falls into the Does Not Play Well With Others category. Oh, sure: the Brazilian ju-jitsu folks are nice chaps who can compete rather handily by virtue of their concentration on the ground game, but those of us who study the art for its defensive qualities are... ummm... notoriously not popular in competitive circles.

Nor should we be. I've always argued that training to compete under most rules systems is the same as training to get your ass handed to you in a street situation. But I understand that sparring, grappling, randori and all the other competitive elements have considerable value as training tools, and it has long bothered me that in my isolated little corner of Tassie, it's hard for me to offer the students a chance to tangle with other styles and other rules. Thus, when I found out about this open competition, I made sure that the kids (for it was aimed at youngsters) were told.

It was a fairly light rule-set. They wore headgear and body-plates, and only the body was allowed as a target for strikes. I figured that would be okay for most of my students. In the end, only the three I mentioned above actually took part. But that's okay too. Competition is far from mandatory.

I expected my three players to get tagged out on points fairly early. After all, the ruleset actually precluded about eighty percent of what they know how to do: no grappling, no locks, no throws, no ground-fighting, no strangling, no knees, no elbows, etc. In the Scottsdale dojo, I break it up for them, of course. Sometimes they practice judo-style, trying to throw. Other times they wrestle on the ground. Sometimes they practice the standing/striking stuff. And there are games: with padded foam "swords"; games where they try to push one another out of a designated square. Learning games. And sometimes, for the fun of it, I ask them to put it all together: stand and strike until someone grapples. Then struggle for the throw. Then keep going on the ground for a submission of some sort.

That's what they think of when someone talks about "fighting" on the mat.

In other words, they went into this competition at something of a disadvantage. Not only were they barred from most of what they know, but they were competing with kids for whom the standing/striking stuff was all they did.

So as I said, I expected them to get tagged out on points quite early. But I wanted them to see how it was done, and I wanted them to watch, and learn. In particular, I wanted the boys to think about how to fight disruptively while remaining within the rules. Quite obviously, if they played the stand-and-kick game that the Tae Kwon Do people are justly famous for, they'd get their arses handed to them. So I said they needed to watch, and think of ways to change the situation to their advantage.

And it is at this point that the grin begins to spread across my face.

My daffy daughter the Mau-Mau was initially under the impression she was only allowed to kick. For the first couple of rounds, she played the game, exchanging kicks, and losing on points even though she was setting the pace and pursuing her opponent. But then in one of the breaks, young Dylan Double-Banger found out she didn't know she could punch, and he told her to change her game.

Bingo. Next two rounds she wins on points, chasing her partners around the mat, and even telling one boy to stop moving away. According to her, he needed to get closer to score points... but the subtext was basically stop running away so I can punch you!

I couldn't have been prouder.

The boys did even better. Dylan gave away considerable height and reach in both his matches. His response was to come out fast, and go straight up the centre with a flurry of open-hand strikes. Of course, that was when we found out that open-hand strikes didn't count, but that's okay. By then he'd figured out that he could stay inside the reach of his tall opponent's powerful kicks, and swap punches on a very effective basis. He was actually told that he was "too aggressive".

Cool.

Jake did better still. He fought five or six times. He managed a draw or a win for each, and quickly learned to adapt on the fly. Discovering that back-fist strikes didn't count, he swapped to straight up punches. And when the floor judge failed to notice two or three punches in succession, he changed up and scored with a kick. Meanwhile, he kept moving into his opponents, and refusing to be drawn into the kick/counterkick rhythm that they tended to use on each other. He too was told that he was a bit too aggressive.

Very cool.

Neither of the boys threw any foul strikes: nothing to face, groin, or any other illegal target. And yes, they did use open-hand and back-fist stuff, but they got no points for it, and as soon as they were informed of that, they shifted to more acceptable tactics.

Too aggressive? I disagree. What was going on there was a fundamental test of the philosophy of ju-jitsu. The boys had to play within a strict ruleset laid down to someone else's advantage. In ju-jitsu, we aim to control the situation. If we are at a disadvantage, it is axiomatic -- absolutely basic -- to effect changes to our advantage.

The boys were not too aggressive. To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing at all in the rules about how many strikes you're supposed to throw. What they did was assess the situation, and show that they understood it. They didn't stand at kick-distance and trade kicks with people who were prepared for that, and who were better at kicking. Instead, they moved in, moved out, threw unexpected punches, changed the distance, changed the rhythm and the pattern -- and thank you very much, they did just fine.

True: they didn't "fence". They didn't "read" their partners, and engage in tricky games of feint and counterfeint. But to be fair, neither did most of the TKD folks. Mostly, they just danced in and out, and swapped kicks. So no, the boys didn't try to outplay their partners at the game, but that's because they knew perfectly well there was no percentage in it. Why would you try to outdo someone in an area where they're much better practiced and much more confident?

That's just silly. What the boys did was throw the system out of kilter, refusing to be drawn into the comfort zone of their opponents. Too aggressive? No. I'm sorry. That's just a way of saying that the TKD lads were too comfortable with the game as they knew it, and they weren't prepared to handle opponents who set out to change things.

Both of Dylan's partners came up to him afterwards, wide-eyed, to say how surprised they were. They were very nice about it, and I'd say all three boys had respect for each other.  And Jake's mob? Well, let's just say that they probably felt a bit embarrassed about warning him beforehand that he was "going to be hammered".  (Okay. Yes. I admit it. I sniggered. Quietly, though. I don't think anybody noticed.)

And me?

What can I say? I took three students into a foreign system. Eighty percent of their technique was forbidden them. It was the first time that any of the three had ever fought competitively. The people they were fighting were age-matched, and of similar training level, but they specialised in this kind of work, and most if not all had competed often.

No. My three students did not "kick butt". But they fought hard, and they fought well, and they surprised the hell out of their competitors, and they enjoyed themselves tremendously, and they gave a very good account of their abilities. Most of all, they demonstrated their ability to adapt to a difficult situation, and change it to their advantage: the essential heart of ju-jitsu.

I am very pleased with them, and yes, with myself too.

And who knows? Maybe sometime we can set up a friendly match that includes grappling, throwing, ground-fighting, strangling, and all those other nice little added extras. That could be fun!

Business As Usual -- Ka-Boom!

So yesterday in the car, Genghis asked me if I thought this Texas fertiliser-plant explosion was some kind of terrorist action. Seeing as how we've been throwing chemistry at young Genghis lately, I took the opportunity to point out that some fertilisers were quite high-energy molecules, and prone to explosion. I also explained the basic principle of Occam's Razor, and said pretty much this: "No. I doubt it's terrorism. It could be, but that would involve dragging a new entity into the existing equation where the situation can already be explained by the entities currently in place. Personally, I expect that as this plant is situated in the USA, and particularly in the deep South, it's probably had absolutely minimal safety built into it. I'm afraid that's how American capitalism works."

One might suggest that's a cynical attitude, but today I ran across this article:

Fertilizer Firm Cited Minimal Risks in Regulatory Filings

Hmm. That link looks weird. Never mind. It hooks back to a Wall Street Journal streaming report. Given that the WSJ has a certain investment in American capitalism, I'm prepared to accept their word for this particular item.

Folks, this is the "hidden hand" of the free market at work. The various people who've been devastated by this event -- and their families, etc -- can have a crack at suing the company involved. And who knows? Maybe one day they'll get some compensation. (Wouldn't bet on it, though. I think there's still a bunch of people around Bhopal waiting to hear from Union Carbide...) And maybe it will do enough damage to the company's bottom line that it will pay more attention to safety procedures in the future.

Or more likely, the company lawyers will tie the whole thing up in knots until people are desperate enough to accept a pittance, and meanwhile, it will all be business as usual.

I'm always disturbed by the conflation of "democracy" and "capitalism". They're two different things, and I'm increasingly certain that they are actually incompatible. The US of A has pretty clearly chosen the latter over the former. We're coming up to an election here in Oz, and unfortunately, I suspect we're going to be chasing after the American system even more closely, once it's all done and dusted.

I think I'm tired of this.

EDITED TO ADD: It gets better. Today, Reuters reports that the plant was storing 1350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate which should trigger a safety oversight/inspection from the US Department of Homeland Security. 270 tons!

Read It Here.

News From Captain Obvious: Frequent Texters Likely To Be Airheads!

Honestly. They've bothered to research this, apparently. The article in question: Frequent Texters comes from Winnipeg University.


A lot of it is fluff, full of buzzwords. But the meat of it concerns college-age students who are texting two and three hundred times per day. According to the article, they "tend to be significantly less reflective than those who text less often."

Somehow, I don't think they're using the term 'reflective' to mean 'shiny'.

Underneath the academic-speak and the utterly obvious observations (what sane individual can find time to text two hundred times a day? If that figure is distributed over, say, a sixteen-hour waking period, you're still looking at one text every five minutes.) you do get a glimpse of an interesting phenomenon. Questions arise.

Who are these people? Why are they more interested in commenting than in actually taking part or observing? How does a culture of people like this sustain itself? If you're constantly engaged in sending texts, who is receiving them, and what value are those texts providing?

I think I may have mentioned before that I don't much like mobile phones. They have their uses. I'm glad to have mine when I go away to conventions and the like, because it allows me to make use of the very limited time at such events. I can catch up with people I get to see very rarely, and make good use of the opportunity to be together.

Beyond that? The things are appalling.

I'm fascinated by people's increasing dependence on smartphones. Oh, they're awfully good at looking information up via the Internet, but when it comes to recalling it, and then actually fitting it into a pattern and making use of it, I see less and less. And there's a thing: you can call up information to answer a question, yes. But figuring out uses for that information, ways to put answers into action -- that takes concentration, time, and imagination.

We've been down this path before, culturally. When we began printing and distributing books -- paying information into a shared cultural database -- we abandoned the practise of memorising long pieces of narrative. These days, the idea of somebody memorising the Iliad and the Odyssey for performance purposes seems... heroic, really. Impossible!

It wasn't, though. At one time, feats of memorisation of that sort were relatively commonplace.

How many of you still remember phone numbers? How many of you can go the to the supermarket for more than ten items without logging it into your handy memory adjunct. (We used to use lists on paper. I'm not in favour, I admit. Paper is messy, while digital files are easily dealt with. There are definitely useful things about these critters.)

So we're outsourcing our memories. And we're de-emphasising face-to-face contact, choosing to stay in touch through digital means -- which changes our capacity to 'read' people, and changes the way we express our own emotions, and so forth. And all of this is the tip of an iceberg. For every stupid study like the one I've cited from Winnipeg U Department of the Fucking Obvious, I would guess there are a hundred much more subtle effects nobody has yet considered.

The more of our capacities and our qualities we hand over to the shared cultural cloud, the fewer we are required to maintain as individuals. It's amusing at the moment, watching the next generation grow up with a whole range of digital communications skills that my generation lacked -- while simultaneously lacking an array of abilities and qualities that defined my generation, and previous generations. Change is always interesting.

I just wonder what's going to happen when we drop some seriously important individual qualities or abilities into the cultural cloud.

Is it possible that one day, the very definition of "human" will require connection to the cultural cloud? Will people lose enough individual capacity that they become dependent on their interface with a databank that has more 'humanity' than they do?

Has it happened already?

Canterbury 2100 Goes Digital

Yep. You can catch Canterbury 2100 for the Kindle now:

http://www.amazon.com/Canterbury-2100-pilgrimages-world-ebook/dp/B00C65J3XM/


Those of you who have been around for a while may recall this:

It's an anthology I put together a few years back. Bunch of really good Australian SF writers, extremely unusual idea and format. Essentially, the idea was to examine a future history by looking at the fiction of the society created by that future history. Something like, say, trying to figure out the 20th century by watching a bunch of TV episodes from the 1990s... if you see what I mean. Except that here, the stories are meant to be told by a bunch of pilgrims on train to Canterbury in 2108 or so; a train delayed by fierce storms and other things.

It was a real challenge, and it worked out pretty well in the end. There are some individually excellent stories, and by situating them in a larger context, the stories gain an added significance. I was delighted by the concept when I first tried to get it all together, and years down the track, I haven't changed my opinion in the slightest. In fact, for me the biggest problem with this anthology is that I put it together, so I don't get to read it "cold". I will never have the fun that everybody else gets from trying to piece it all into a single tapestry, to guess at the future that might yet be.

Anyway. It's on Kindle now. If you missed it the first time through, now's your chance to pick up a cheap digital copy, and take a look at that rare thing: a truly original piece of SF work.

Some Valuable Advice To England, On Her Loss...

Cut off the head. Fill the mouth with salt. Drive an iron stake through the heart. Bury the head and the body separately, each under a crossroads. Destroy all records of the burial.

Some things have to be done properly.

Games

That was a good weekend. I'm late on the write-up, coming into another already, but what's new? And then there's Justin Bieber's monkey. I was in a place the other day, waiting for a sandwich. There  was a television on the wall. A video-clip channel. It had a news-crawl underneath, and there was a headline. Justin Bieber has one month to reclaim his monkey, or it will be given to a shelter.

Why? What did the monkey do? Doesn't Justin like it any more? Why does he have a monkey? What kind of monkey is it? How did he get separated from his monkey? Is this some kind of... post-modernist Michael Jackson homage? Will Bieber slowly turn himself black?

Great Cthulhu! How did it come to this? Some feckless, talentless Canadian kid with bad hair and a fixed grin, and his relationship with his monkey is somehow newsworthy at an international level. Have we nothing better to be doing as a species?

I certainly do. There's no question of that. I spent last weekend in Melbourne, helping my old and dear friend  Barnes celebrate the birthday of his offspring, the Weapon. Mister Barnes and I, at one time, did a lot of gaming together, and he suggested I might like to cross the water with my own eldest, and perhaps spend a few hours teaching the new generation a thing or two. When he mentioned that Guru Bob and Fancy Jack Strugnell would be there as well, it was a done deal. No hesitation.

You know, I think people underrate the skill that goes into role-playing. Seriously. I still do a bit with my kids and a few other hereabouts, and it's fun, but they're at the bottom of the learning curve. They haven't figured out how to kick back, put on a character, and jump into the story for the sheer fun of it. They're still in the early days: trying to figure out how to be faster, better, stronger -- how to win, goddammit. Guru Bob, Struggers, Barnes, me -- we've been at it long enough that we know how to win. And it's simple: jump in. Be somebody else. Let the story happen. Have fun.

Watching Bob and Fancy Jack drop straight into their characters was a treat. Not a pause, not a moment of hesitation. They were straight up, and confident, and they did their part to get the ball rolling, leaving plenty of space to encourage the boys to play their parts. The end result was about eight hours of slightly ludicrous action and adventure, interspersed with absolute hilarity. I don't think either of the boys will ever look at pea soup the same way again...

What's better than sitting down with old friends, and being able to slide straight back into the groove? Nothing I can think of. Time passes. Faces change, bodies alter, but the people inside are who they always were; maybe more refined and more certain than they were twenty-five years ago, but not in any important way. They have become what they promised to be: good men, strong men, with easy laughter and honour and a world of trust.

It's good to be able to be proud of your friends.

Easter happened too, didn't it? But I wasn't paying a lot of attention. There were eggs, of course. Oh, and there were the assholes at the Melbourne airport who impounded my toenail cutters. I mean, for fuck's sake.

I threw a few things into my computer bag for the trip when we took off for Melbourne. Some notes, some dice, a shirt, a change of underpants. We were only over there for a day or so. Naturally, I didn't bother emptying out my bag and going through it point by point. I keep a lot of random shit in that bag, but it's all harmless. I'm not stupid. So I put it on the X-ray at Launceston. It went through. It came out the other side. They gave it back to me. I got on the plane. I went to Melbourne. Job done.

At no point did I use the toenail clippers -- which I had long forgotten, buried in the bottom of the bag -- to either hijack the craft, or commit sabotage. I'd like this noted for the defense, Your Honour: the accused already flew with the fucking things, and nobody died.

So. None the wiser, after a fine day or so in Melbourne, Barnes and the Weapon took Jake and me to Melbourne airport, where we checked in. And I duly put my computer bag on the X-ray, and walked through and collected... no. Wait. That's where it went wrong.

I didn't collect it. Instead, I was called back through the metal detector, and asked whether there were toenail clippers in my bag. I had no fucking idea, of course, and I said as much, albeit more politely. And so I was invited to empty my bag, which I did, and lo: there they were. Down the bottom. Amongst half-chewed packets of gum, old tissues, random receipts, pens, odd socks, USB memory sticks, and so forth. Detritus.

The officious little man who called me back through evidenced tremendous satisfaction upon the discovery of the cutters. He'd called it, hadn't he? He'd exercised his duly appointed authority, assessed the situation, and responded to the danger with all due alertness. He was the man. He was protecting the state.

He'd said there were toenail cutters... and yes, despite my doubts, there were indeed toenail cutters. I'd been nailed, publicly revealed as dangerous, toenail-cutter-carrying scum, and he'd saved the day.

It's a strange thing. Apparently, flights from Launceston to Melbourne are safe from toenail clippers. However, it appears that flights from Melbourne to Launceston are at terrible risk from toenail clippers.

Why? I don't know. I asked the officious little man as he confiscated my toenail cutterss. He said that they qualified as a tool, and that no tools were permitted on any flight. I did not mention that they had flown with me from Launceston. Nor did I mention that he, apparently, was allowed to fly, alongside a great many other tools. Instead I smiled, and said that I hoped he had a nice home for my erstwhile toenail clippers.

He said they would go into a bin.

Fuck, eh? When is this bullshit going to finish? Just think: all those years we flew with toenail clippers in our bags, never knowing the hideous dangers we faced. What were we thinking? How did we ever survive?

As I get older, the guiding hands on the reins of this society seem to grow ever more petty, ever more churlish, ever more blatantly moronic. They'll pursue us across the country for failing to wear our seat belts, but rising oceans and dying forests and bleaching reefs aren't even news headlines. No, instead we get Delphic utterances about Justin Bieber's monkey.

I wonder how much money is being spent on this nonsensical security theatre at the airports. It must be millions every year, without a doubt. That's millions nobody is spending on housing, education, health, renewable energy...

I am so over this shit. When I was a kid, the adult world kept telling me to grow up. Well, I've done that now, thanks: so what the fuck is the excuse of that same world? Hey, you fuckers! Here I am! I'm being responsible! I pay taxes. I raise my children well. I have taken my place as a stakeholder, and I'm doing my fucking part, just the way you asked me.

So when are you cretins going to stop dicking around with toenail clippers, and maybe pay some attention to the grown-up problems out there? When are you going to stop picking each others lice and throwing feces at each other in Parliament, puffing out your cheek pouches and hooting at each other across the borders, competing to see who can be first at swill time in the zoo your corporate masters have built for us all?

Never, I suppose.

And me? I don't even know where to start.

I guess I'll just keep raising my kids, looking after the people around me and the place where I live -- oh, and I'll keep flying without toenail clippers too, most likely.

Babes In Tights And Weirdoes In Onesies

That was my weekend, in a nutshell.

I agreed some time back to attend Aicon in Hobart this weekend. Of course, when I agreed I didn't know I'd be behind the eightball on the exegesis, and desperately entangled in projects and problems. But sometimes you gotta do these things. I'm a writer, and I promised to be a writer for a panel thereof at the Hobart Anime Convention. I also promised to be a martial arts demonstrator, since the organisers of said convention have a thing for all matters Japanesy and cultural. However, there was a considerable dose of rain on the day, and as they'd scheduled the chop-socky demo for an outside venue... yeah, didn't happen.

Can't say I mind, really. I did bring two students down with me -- no, three if you count young Jake -- but it was largely by way of coincidence. The redoubtable Baggins sisters are huge anime and comic fans, and both of them were all set to costume up and dive into the anime con anyhow, so it made sense to car-pool, and they were kind enough to accept the possibility of double-duty: not just fans, but demonstrators, etc.

But any demonstration of which they were part would have been... problematic. Elder sister Amy was done up as Harley Quin from the DC comics. Yep: the whole skin-tight spandex jester suit and hat, whiteface make-up, booties, the lot. Also a gigantic comedy mallet for threatening people. Ms Baggins -- also our mighty perky model for the Mighty Perky Nana Bar day -- is pretty dedicated to her costumery, and she went after the look with... well, everything. Not to put too fine a point on it, the lass in question is constructed rather like a comic-book heroine in her own right, and once she was in that second-skin... let's just say I'm pretty sure there are a lot of anime fans in Hobart today nursing wrenched neck muscles.

Meanwhile, younger sister April Baggins is also costume-prone, and landed herself a very fine Black Widow outfit, of the sort wrapped around Scarlett Johansson in the recent Avengers flick. April's a natural redhead, so the costume was a no-brainer for her.

So: yes. I recognised the humour of the situation -- setting up to do a martial arts demo in which the two assistants were both comic-book Queens of Biffo and Oomph. I assure you it wasn't planned on those grounds, but sometimes these things happen. And that's why I'm not sure whether I'm glad or disappointed the rain came over. It did save me from being hurled about the place by my wrists... but I think I would have enjoyed watching a bunch of anime people goggling at the martial antics of Harley Quinn and the Black Widow, while themselves being twisted, bent and brutalised. (Yes. I planned a very hands-on demo. Sod all that standing around smashing boards. Get the audience involved. Make them hurt. That way they know they had fun!)

The Con itself was interesting. I definitely prefer the SF cons, I must say.  Completely different vibe. This one was all about costumes and play-acting, about celebrating the consumption of pop culture. I like the SF cons more, with their very strong strand of creating and interpreting the material at the centre of the whole phenomenon. I like the proactive nature of SF fandom, I guess, and the community of content-creator types that rock up to the conventions. The Aicon had a lot of shopping, but only a few venues, and the events were by and large about posing and playing, not about thinking and recreating.

But to each their own. I believe the Aicon people were predicting something like 2000 people over the weekend. I'm not sure if they got it, but I know that's the kind of numbers we get at a full WorldCon event in Melbourne, so if the pockymuncher movement (thank you Jake for that term. "Pockymuncher" is now the generic term for die-hard wannabe otaku anime fan types. You gotta love the creativity of a cynical kid, eh?) can generate that kind of outcome in Hobart for a yearly event -- yep. Lot of energy there. Clearly, people are getting something enjoyable out of it.

The writers' panel went very well. What with not having a glut of writers and panels to choose from, we got a very respectable audience -- myself, Tansy, Bob and two others whose names currently elude me, because I am shit at names. (Apologies!) Nominally, the panel was supposed to be about the importance of research in creating SF, fantasy, whatever, but by mutual consent, we threw it open and handled questions from the audience. And the audience were interested, and engaged, so we did our best to be just as interested and engaged in response. It was definitely one of the very best panel-efforts I've seen, and from what I heard and saw, the audience thought likewise. Jake said he wasn't bored anyhow, which is pretty good. When you get through an hour of QnA with five writers without boring the twelve-year-old, something has definitely gone right.

We finished up our day at the con by skipping out on the late afternoon stuff. We'd got into Hobart the night before, and I made the Baggins sisters visit an Indian restaurant with Jake and I. They'd not had experience with Indian food before, so they were delighted by the joys of Madras and Vindaloo, Tikka Masala and Biryani. I also made sure they both got a mango lhassi into them, and to the credit of the restaurant -- Dolphin Indian, on Sandy Bay Road in Sandy Bay -- it was one of the best lhassi I've ever had. Lots of ripe, fresh mango, good yoghurt, subtle spices.

Anyway, since we'd already done the going-out-eating-weird-food thing, I made a concession to Jake and the Bagginses. We were all accommodated in Wrest Point, in adjoining rooms, so I got some pointers from the girls, bought some anime DVDs and we executed Plan Veg. That is: we got lots of cheeses, biscuits, snacks, fruit, munchies and drinks, grabbed a DVD unit from the hotel, and spent about six hours watching Japanese cartoons.

Yeah. I know. That sounds kinda slothful. But it was a lot of fun. The Baggins lasses are good company, and young Jake is old enough to have a decent wit on him too. We didn't exactly trash the hotel room, but I'm going to guess they'll be finding stray Maltesers in odd places for quite a while.

It was a good weekend. I was forced to look away from the exegesis for a while, and I was stripped of the usual kid-handling responsibilities. Taking a bit of time to watch weird cartoons and eat exotic snacks with friends is a good thing. There's not enough 'fun' programmed into the whole 'being-an-adult' situation, you know? Sometimes you have to let go, and just play -- or what's the point? What are you doing all the work for if there's nothing left of you afterwards to enjoy things?

Anyway. I'm back now. Exegesis. Dinners. Lunches. Laundry. Commuting with the kids. Finding school uniforms. Routines, schedules, plans.

Never mind. End of the month, and Jake and I are off to Melbourne to see Mr Barnes and his Weapon Against Society. There will be food, drinks, and gaming galore.

I can't wait.