Author: davebushe

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ has updated.

Go.

I’ve been thinking about a phrase Dave used “the culture I inhabit” and something just struck me and it’s maybe one of the things that I was trying to get across.

Back when, it was the culture that brought people together and the culture that mattered.

Now, the culture brings people together but it doesn’t matter at all, it’s the friends that matter.

And that is a big difference that I am disapointed not everyone has learnt.

At the end of the day, I think I’m just disapointed.

I expected better.

Queen Adreena in Islington Acadamey last night were excellent. Lots of fun, lots of thrashing, lots of loud music.

A good couple of pints before hand and still home by a reasonable hour.

It was all good 🙂

Ok cool.
Fly London to Glasgow on Monday the 20th
Fly Glasgow to Dublin on Thursday the 23rd
Fly Dublin to London on Tuesday the 28th.

All booked and the times I good and I am sorted for that.

Everything is sorted for Download and that’s all good.

Yay for an organisational morning!

Perhaps a litte cranky later in the evening’s at the moment…

Sometimes I laugh at my friend Mary. She has this thing about being an empath and various things along those lines. Often I laugh at her but every now and again something connects and I think she might be right.

Today has been one of those days. When I’m not feeling well and so not in work I do two things as standard. I leave my phone off and I block pretty much everyone on IM. I leave open family and a few close friends and that’s about it. It’s just so that I can get on with not working really so that if I want to just fuck around online for a while I don’t get bothered. Most people can’t tell that I’m not at my desk if I’m online and an annoying number of people use my home IM in work. (Note that doesn’t mean my friends, it’s just the people who assume it’s my work im…like those nice pro net people for example).

Anyway after that little aside its’ been one of those days because two people got in touch out of the blue. Both of whom had something related to them in that spiel last night and both of whom passed through (or sat rock steady in) my thoughts for a while.

Strange.

Family are starting to report in. I’ve heard from several of my cousins today and they are running through the photos. Hopefully I’ll have them all labeled soon. Some of them are excellent photographs in themselves. Others just astound me, the amount the world has changed since the middle of last century is just plain astounding.

Work tomorrow. Queen Adreena in the evening and then it’s Thursday and everything should settle back into it’s swing. Hurrah.

Fandom, god I hate fandoms. They really hack me off every now and again. Sometimes I just want to go somewhere and read something about a show I like. And I do, I use the very sane All TV alongside the V and it’s good stuff. The Buffy nerds go OTT every now and again but at the end of the day a) I’m one of them and b) they get slapped down. But in general, there is no fandom there, it’s just a few people hanging out talking about a show they like.

Every now and again I poke my head around LJ for stuff and it pisses me off every time. There is a time and a place for fandom, it’s your early teens. Every single other part of it needs to just grow the fuck up. None of it is worth it, none of it. It actually doesn’t take long to learn this. I don’t know what it was for me. I don’t know if it was just the time where I was seeing such a change in my life, moving to London being the big one there and striking out on my own as they say. I still like everything I liked, I still like Star Trek and I probably always will but my god no-one has to live with the trappings that seemed to come with it. There is nothing that I care about enough to go out and watch episodes at a con or a meeting or anything like that. If I can’t get them through current channels then I’ll just get them from a friend or wait and enjoy a DVD box set.

That has me thinking. I always thought, and it was a common viewpoint at the time…at least I thought it was but what did I really know back then…that the Dublin meetings all died off because of lack of advertising and so lack of new blood.

In hindsight that was wrong. There is no new blood. There was an artificial bump because of Buffy but that soon died. There is no killer app for it, there was somewhat of one within the social scene but that didn’t mean paying into a hall, that meant paying at the bar for a drink and ya know socialising.

I wonder if perhaps in the long run, those friends of mine did me a favour. I wonder if that was a start of some sort, a wake up call?

I don’t know. I know that I had fun and I never lost any money on it and I have some good memories and I still have some good friends. At the end of the day, you know I really can’t complain about that. What’s more I’ve gained some friends or perhaps regained but certainly built a real friendship with some people from back then in recent years and I’m very very grateful for that. It’s funny that whole thing still when I think about it. It’s not often, I’ll just see something or my I’ll pass by the cons section within my bookmarks and that’s that.

It’s all good as they say, it’s all good.

Don’t even get me started on fucking fanfic, at least when we throw ‘Mary Sue’ ism’s at Ellis or the like they are getting paid to write. The best thing ever about fanfic came from a discussion on the V where one of the regs was telling the story of a fic circle his wife ran in. There was an argument about someone having used a character someone else created within their permission and the following quote is attributed:

“It is not acceptable to use someone else’s character EVER. They don’t belong to you. It’s unprofessional and nobody who would call themselves a writer should EVER do steal someone else’s characters for their own stories.”

The mind fucking boggles, BOGGLES! And yet (watch me tar here) that is how I would see most fanfic writers. Ok it’s a very broad taring but ya know what fuck it. If you have a story to tell about two characters and it’s a *good enough* story, you should be able to write it around two original characters. Is that so hard? I’m sure there are talented writers out there doing fanfic, it’s just such a waste.

So, on that one, to sum up and in short; grow the fuck up children!

– That all started as a little bullet point…it carried on.

– Yet again, I was going to bed hours ago and I wanted to get the first couple of paragraphs down and it just carried on.

– Sometimes I have no idea where my head is at or what brings it there. It just seems to flow along wherever it wants to. I don’t know what strikes it off, or what makes the connections but all of a sudden boom, all of my thoughts are consumed and I don’t know how to get out of it.

– 24 is bag loads of awesome. So stupid, so much fun. I must go and write some fanfic now about the continuing adventures of Jack Bruce Bauer Banner!

– See how I worked a nerdy joke in there? It’s not mine, I stole it from All TV it was probably Dan, he’s funny like that.

– You know, I was actually thinking about going to a con earlier today. Nothing in specific and not to the actual con, but to the bar if some of the old crowd were going along. I must have been having a mad moment.

– And I hit a browser window for a break for a mo and the mood has just gone and died.

To sleep, perchance to dream…

My mind is all over the place today. I could blame it on not feeling so well but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know what it is tho.

Lets see:

– There are two people that I dread ending up like. I’m fairly sure I won’t but the idea scares me.

– Sometimes I do wonder about brutal honesty, would it make things easier? Would it even change anything? Is it worth it? Does anything need changing?

– Veronica Mars is fun. It’s not as good as it’s talked up but it’s quite witty and amusing and I like that.

– Today, the music has been the 22/20s. Good stuff, better live.

– I did the washing up, I did some washing and I cleaned up around my computer. I feel like I accomplished a lot and yet I did not.

– Episodes IV, V and VI are excellent. VI is under-rated. I did rewatch them over the weekend and enjoyed the hell out of them.

– I struggle to imagine being with someone for years, nevermind decades. Photos of my grandparents getting married in 1942 hit me, that’s such a long time. Also, they looked good, really good.

– Sometimes I do wish I was closer to my family, most of them are good people.

– I need to take more photos, I need to make an effort.

– Karaoke, I dread the very word but it may be unavoidable.

– This week gets stressey planning wise. I need to sort out lots and lots of things. Scotland and Dublin to start with. I may have to drop Edinburgh, I don’t know if I have the time.

– I need more space. If I had somewhere to put my crap, I’d do so much better. I really just need to buy shelves and more shelves.

– I really should get around to dumping some comics on eBay.

– I can’t find my copy of Pete Milligan’s Enigma, I think I may have lent it to someone, although I should ask my flatmate. I want to re-read it quite badly.

– Apparently there was a big Buddhist festival yesterday, I have been promised more quotes. Maybe one of them will answer everything with something that makes a little more sense than 42.

– Just talk. It’s really that simple. Unless you have come to a decision (and it’s possible) to give up and walk away from something or someone, then just talk. Don’t assume, ask. Ask and be patient. Strange a concept as it is (and it is), not everyone works in the same time as anyone else.

– Just talk, if only it were that simple.

– Ha, the song conspires with me. “Hold on, to the thing that you love, hold on”.

– Queen Adreena on Wednesday night out in Angel. Should be fun I think. A couple of solid tracks at the least. Ugh I have to get in early Wednesday morning to leave early. I really hope I’m feeling better for that, either way has to be bed early tomorrow night.

– Oh, yes. Welcome to the wonderful world of being a grown up. It’s not anything to know that someone finds someone physically attractive. Everyone is past the point where that’s worthy of oh, I don’t know, tattle I guess. That sorta thing ended in school.

– Struggling to find something to read prose and comic wise. I know what I want…kinda but I don’t have anything to deliver it.

– Why can I not survive without coke in the office but I barely touch the stuff at home?

– I guess the answer to my email was a short and sharp “no”.

– Can anything just stop? Short of death, is there a stop?

– Disassociation. It’s a good word.

– I have had a life recently as my flatmate but it. I need to continue with this.

– The theatre is calling. When I get paid later in the week, I should do a ticket roundup.

– No music, no life. Everything sounds better live.

– I should sleep, it might help settle my stomach.

– I really don’t like seeing doctors. I don’t know why. I’ve never had a particularly bad experience with them (they may have had with me…) and it’s generally been good news but it just seems like it’s always bad. I hate it. But on the other hand it’s always nice to get good news from them, sometimes it’s really really fucking nice.

– Live fast, die young. When does the living fast begin?

– Oh man oh man. If I had the money I would like nothing more than to just walk out the door tomorrow and go somewhere and keep going. A note and an email to say I’m away for a while and then the wide open road. I’d need my camera and someway of blogging and posting photos but man I would be gone like a shot. I don’t care for how long, just a few months of me and the world. That would rock so much, maybe someday…

– It’s my current mood but it’s scary how much someone can mean so quickly.

– I need a proper monitor stand at home. I really should have some wrist rests too, I’m really getting to fear RSI greatly.

– Dublin’s calling but it’s a siren song.

– Something that has always and continues to astound me; languages. I get the general idea and I can speak 3 enough to get by but what I can’t even understand is thinking in another language. I know that’s meant to be the definition of fluency but it astounds me to think that someone can think of something and form words or ideas or anything like that in anything but English.

– Which reminds me. I don’t care what the language of the internet is. I think that some aspects of localisation and internationalisation are a waste of time. I, as someone whose first language is not their own especially don’t feel it is worth fighting for in many cases. For anyone whose language is not English (any countries version), absolutely. L10n and i18n should be done 110% but for any English language, fuck that, it’s a waste of time and resources. I don’t wait, I gain nothing by waiting for an EN_GB or EN_IE version. I get my software as and when and I get using.

– Love Movies, Hate Piracy. Sure, no problem but only when you get it into your think skulls that in order to combat piracy you need to play in the global market. Don’t delay something by 2 months (Sin fucking City) outside of the US, it just encourages piracy and rightly so. Why should I wait? What do I gain? Love Movies sure, now show some love back.

– Ugh so about that sleeping…

– It has been a while since I typed like this and it’s taken me about 40 minutes. I like it and I miss it.

– Now to really sleep.

Family are fun. I like mine being in another country, right now I like it a whole lot. I’ve been working on the photos and the inviting various family members to Flickr to make sure they can have a look at them.

This is all well and good and my dad is feeding me addresses and then all of a sudden boom.

An email address appears in a line with lots of others and my stomach didn’t quite turn but it thought about it.

I have no idea how to open up a conversation with my dad about it, he’s left as one of the few go-betweens and does mention his name every now and again. Depends on the company.

But if I were to invite that person I’d have to go through everything and ensure that everything I had marked as family went to either private or friends only. And so I said nothing and just didn’t send the invite. The cowards way out? Maybe.

It’s not a conversation for IM, when I put everything onto CD, my dad can do with it as he wishes but that does not mean I have to do any associating.

Fuck, now I’m in a mood.

When I was back in Dublin a few weeks ago, my dad asked me to have a look at a CD his brother had given him. On it were a whole lot of photos of his family some possibly from as early as the 1920’s.

They were done up in some strange format, I think that whichever company had done the work had locked them into some proprietary software and I couldn’t open them. I made a copy of the CD to take home so I could look at it again and perhaps look for the software from less reputable channels.

Well this afternoon I came across the CD and after a little looking around I found that not only would a nice photo app. that I’ve used for a good while now, IrfnView, open the photos, but it would batch convert them to usable images.

I have 147 surprisingly good quality images of what seem to go right back to my great-grandparents. I think there is a single one of my grandfather as a child with his family. It’s not in good shape at all but that’s my guess. It also seems to include my grandparents wedding day and covers at least 20 years of their kids growing up.

That’s very cool, my dad is going to spend tonight adding names and time frames as best he can. It seems to have kicked my mother into going off and getting some of her old family photos too. It would be very cool if I could get them all together.