April 28, 2008
Im in ur interweb, reeding it: Stupid fun edition
We all know that there is a lot of the internet that is purely designed for time wasting. I mean – isn’t that pretty much the point (except of this blog. Natch. Quality content here, folks!).
With that in mind, I thought I’d highlight some of the sites that help me start my morning every day. You really don’t want to talk to me before I’ve had a coffee and read a lolcat….
First of all, there is teh calssic lolcats: i can has cheeseburger always delivers.
There are other places to get your ungrammatical laughs, but the voting page on i can has cheeseburger means that most of the crud gets sorted out before it gets to you. There’s various spin offs – lolbots is my favourite, and of course, there is also i has a hotdog, which is same same but different – it’s only for dogs.
There’s also Fail dogs, and, in similar vein, fail blog. Funny, but I don’t know about you – a picture of a guy with his face on fire and the word ‘fail’ underneath doesn’t make me feel like a great person. Bit hit and miss, that one. Oh, and don’t read the comments.
Often, if I’m feeling stressed, I’ll pop over to cute overload and let the baby animals work their magic on my blood pressure. Aaaaaaaah. There’s daily puppy and adorablog etc, too, but one of these sites is enough for me. They all link to each other, so if it’s your bag, they’re easy to find.
Disapproving Rabbits, on the other hand, is twice the cute, with half to saccharine. So much disapproval in so many little furry bodies.
Back to the humans. Post Secret is great for making you feel better about humanity – or your own life. It’s certianly always interesting. Only updated on the weekend, and no archives, but I always start my Monday with it. Then there’s go fug yourself, for some fashion humour (plus, a stress-free way to keep up with celebrities enough to pretend like you know what’s going on). There’s graph jam, for a quick pop-culture reference and, in the same vein (but more old skool), indexed.
Bent objects is always good for a laugh, as is alpha mom.
I won’t bore you with all the comics I need, but you should definetely, definitely check out xkcd. That man is a genius. Penny Arcade is also essential reading for all internet people – and usually very funny (unless you have no idea what they’re talking about. But even then, at least it’s pretty)
I think that’s enough random linkage for now. Hope you’ve found something to enjoy!
April 24, 2008
Dear D… : Agony Aunt or just agony?
Dear Raging Homophobic,
I assume you’ve learned from the last discrimination suit brought against you that your brand of plain speaking does not go down well in the workplace. Fortunately, I am not a part of your workplace and am therefore entitled to do a bit of plain speaking myself.
Maybe you need to think about your own feelings in all this. What’s got you so het up about someone else’s sex life? What, is your wife holding out on you? Maybe she was so turned off by the time you said you wanted to fuck her UTAH (that’s right, kids, Up the A Hole) that she can’t look at you the same way anymore, because anal sex isn’t natural, and now she just isn’t that into you. And maybe you caught a look at the new fax boy as he was bending over to put paper in the copier and you got a little hot under your nice Armani collar, but you haven’t thought about that for a while, not since the last time you downloaded gay porn anyway, right?
Right.
This new employee does not want to bang you, dude. So why don’t you go home, pour yourself a drink, and jack off to that volleyball scene in Top Gun again? And when you go to work tomorrow, try to remember that he finds you a lot more unattractive than you find him.
Warm Regards,
D
April 23, 2008
The Misplaced Corpse : silk stockings and bloody murder
I was an English major at uni, so its hard for me to write about a book without lapsing into a 3000 word essay. Its sort of automatic. But I was an English major because I love books, which is why I am here, doing it again.
I’m not going to write about a specific genre; there are a lot of blogs about particular genres and I have no wish to compete with them. What I am going to do here is a mishmash of books I love, books I have loved for a long time, and books I am learning to love. And maybe a few books that are awful.
First ups, the book I’m doing today is a little known Australian crime classic called ‘The Misplaced Corpse’, by A. E Martin. First published in 1944, the book was recently reissued by the Wakefield Press. Introducing red-headed Rosie Bosanky, ‘alarming, disarming and altogether charming’, this book might have been written a modern audience in mind. Featuring Australia’s first female private eye (Phryne Fisher is cheating, guys!), this book might be considered pretty groundbreaking.
Rosie rocks! She knows exactly how good her figure is and how to dress it, and has no compunction about using it to get her own ends; she knows how to read fingerprints and handle a gun; she can take an approximate time of death with no instruments but her eyes and her hands and she knows exactly how far to lead on a man so that he may be useful without getting too close.
She was taught most of his by her policeman Pappy, in a manner that might raise eyebrows today. I imagine it would have raised a few eyebrows then: Rosie was raised on a huge collection of murder stories, learns exactly which big crime bosses are banging who, and when she got older, had dad takes her for visits to the local morgue.
Rosie has had her office open only one day when a plum client falls into her lap; Roy Stockforth Adams, a clueless and very well heeled gentleman whose wife has cleared out on him. It looks to everyone like Roy has been made a fool of, but things take a dfferent turn when Rosie and Roy find a corpse in his wife’s room. Roy, of course, becomes chief suspect, but with Rosie believing in him (and keen to keep the bank cheques coming) the mystery deepens.
The mystery is certainly interesting, but the real entertainment comes from Rosie herself. Her conversational tone is highly engaging, and is peppered with a mix of mispelled franglais (rendezvooz, for example), Shakespearean references, and charming confidences. But I will let her speak for herself:
‘I would be the last one in the world to lead you up the garden path and I wanta say now, if you got in your mind this is a war book, you had best go and fight the bookseller for your money back because its a book about my first case which occurred when the war was a pup and which I gave the name The Misplaced Corpse, because, if ever a corpse was misplaced it was this one.’
Without quoting the entire book it is hard to give a sense of just how fun Rosie’s story is to read, and I would advise you to investigate a copy to flick through, so that I can prove my point in something less than 3000 words. Let is just be said that Rosie Bosanky is hot stuff, and in this book she will solve the mystery, meet a few charmers (including fancy Clancy), give a few friend’s specials (wouldn’t you like to know what they are?) and finally get her hands on that seventeen guinea hat from Mlle Fifine’s.
Craft – the alt version
People keep telling me that there’s a crafting resurgence. There’s certainly a lot of it online. I’ve heard several times that it’s because of September 11. I’m not sure how I feel about that. As a non-American, that doesn’t particularly resonate with me, international influences aside. Personally I think the internet has more to do with it.
I knit. I’ve known how to knit since I was a kid. It never really occurred to me that I could knit anything person-shaped, until I stumbled across a million and one craft blogs. I picked up a magazine, decided I’d knit a sock, and Bob’s your mother’s brother! I have a craft blog of my own, although it’s been languishing a bit lately. The crafting community online is just fantastic. I think it’s that we all have something in common – we use our hands, and we make things. It doesn’t matter much what. Scarves, jumpers, quilts, jewelry, chairs, anything! Just the act of creating something out of simple materials transforms the way you see the world.
I’m hoping, in future issues, to go over some online-craft finds, especially things we’ve tried ourselves. The other thing that online crafting gives us that nothing else can do quite as well, is alt craft. It’s kind of hard to explain, but if it gives you that anarchist buzz, it’s probably alt.
Crafster, Threadbanger and Cut out and keep are three good examples of places you can find alt crafters doing there thing. Of course a lot of stuff is spread out through teh interwebs. Hopefully, when we find something, we’ll be able to tell you about it. Somewhere that already does this well is craftzine, or makezine, if you’re more into metal and wood than fabric and fibre. They put out hard copy issues (you can get them mailed over, or I saw one in Borders the other day… for $35. Scandal) and also have great blogs, where they aggregate a whole bunch of cool finds.
Even knitty.com is pretty alt. They have things that you could never ever find in a traditional, paper magazine – nautili toys and space-invader socks. Binary scarves and fake boobs. And of course, there’s the anti-craft, chock full of knitting, baking, crafting goodness, with a decidedly dark feel.
If you know of a great alt-craft site or have done something cool yourself, let us know! In the meantime, happy surfing!
C
Disgusted as we are with Cosmo’s list? Think about these, instead:
Spend time with yourself. Work out who you are and what you like doing, and spend as much time as possible doing it.
Learn to be selfish. There is going to be a lot of compromise in your life once you’re in a committed relationship, so enjoy the times when you don’t have to compromise at all to the full.
Practise being forgiving of people’s faults. Its a good habit regardless, and it will make being in a relationship much more worthwhile. Especially since he will be forgiving yours faults, too.
Learn to make friends with boys. They are fun, interesting, and hilarious. This will have two effects: it will make it much easier to meet your partner, and it will make it much easier to get on with all his mates once you do.
Make lots of friends, generally. No one person will never be able to give you everything you need, (just like he will never be able to give you everything you need) so make sure you’re getting the rest from your friends.
Forget about having the perfect boyfriend. He does not exist.
If you think getting married will solve your relationship issues, think again. If getting married would make big changes to the way you and your partner interact together, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Learn to be happy on your own. Marriage may give you companionship and passion and good times and love, but in the end you are on your own. So learn to love yourself and your own company. Don’t be that girlfriend who can’t go to a party without her partner.
Stop putting pressure on yourself. Your life doesn’t have to be perfect now. Relax and enjoy what you’re doing right now. This is your life, and it doesn’t belong to anyone else. You don’t need to get married to be a complete person, you are a complete person already.
Editorial
Well, this is the first post for our new blogzine (I totally made that word up; I’m hoping it’s not already a word, because I’m trying to be ironic). Technically this should be exciting. However, neither D nor I is really sure what O, RLY? Is, or what it might become.
Our tagline is ‘snarky and sweet’. This is for two reasons. One, I’m snarky. D is sweet. (Although we both reserve the rights to switch.)
Two, what is it that is so sickening about women’s magazines? For me, it’s the lack of snark. This might just be me, but there’s nothing I find funnier than self-referential humour, and there’s nothing better than a serious subject treated with humour and self-deprecation. And, on the flip side, what’s more tragic than a trivial subject treated with dead sincerity.
I mean, I know that there are plenty of things that I take seriously that I probably shouldn’t. You know: the state of my hair, other people’s grammatical mistakes, Joss Weldon, myself. But c’mon! A bit of perspective, people. I hereby promise you that O, RLY? will attempt to walk that tricky line in the middle of sincerity and depreciation. If we are feeling really Zen, we might even manage them both at the same time.
We know what we would like O, RLY? to be: a magazine-style look at the world, without the stupidity. I know, I know. Once you take that out, there’s not much left. But I think there is something here, otherwise, of course, I wouldn’t be writing this.
When this idea started, I remember telling D how alienated I had felt as a kid, reading all those shiny girls’ and women’s magazines. All the quizzes were for people with totally different lives (‘Will he marry you?’ ‘What kind of office worker are you?’ ‘How should you decorate your apartment?’ ‘What cocktail are you?’). I always thought that maybe, when I got older, there’d be more in there for me. Turns out, just the opposite. I can’t open a women’s magazine without cringing, or having an upchuck reflex, or yelling at the page. Not only do they not have much at all to do with the life I have, they have nothing to do with the life I want.
Tomorrow’s feature will show you what I mean. It’s a list that we found online. It was originally published in Cosmo magazine, and it makes me want to hurt someone (sidenote: kids, violence is not the answer. Usually. I mean, almost always. Seriously. Very rarely.). What century do these people think we’re living in? What millennium?
I’ll keep my rant for a later date, but the point of all this is this: where is MY magazine? Sure, there are niche publications out there, plenty of them. Some of them overlap what we’re trying to be. The trouble with niches is – well, they’re niche. There’s not one that I’ve found that is just right. Just call me Goldilocks, but I’m interested enough in that magazine, that one I can’t find, to have a crack at it myself – ourselves.
And by ourselves, I don’t just mean D and I. I mean you, too. All you currently non-existent readers. Anyone and everyone. I’m not expecting to find you soon, but eventually I hope there will be an actual audience. Maybe *gasp* even a community. How web 2.0! Just call me Kevin Rose. When we find you – or you find us, that will change what O, RLY? becomes. I’m looking forward to finding out what that is. Hopefully you are, too.
C
