Oh Please Let It Be Like It Was

Many years ago I was in a relationship that went sour. In the beginning it was great, it was what you might even call classic, all daring adventure and star crossed romance. I remember rushing home in anticipation to share our precious moments together and then sitting up late whistling our song.

But at some point things started to go wrong. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think it was around the time they moved into a new phase and changed their look, joined a new generation if you will. I never liked their new clothes even then but I overlooked it in the excitement of it all. Maybe it was me that changed or maybe it was the new people that they started hanging around with that ruined it. I knew it was going south when Rick and Brannon started exerting more and more control over them and referring to our relationship as “The Franchise” and in a way they were right, we had very little spark or creativity or originality left, it was just about mindless consumption and I began to wonder why I was still there.

And so I drifted way, although there was some good moments towards the end, especially when our mutual friend Ron Moore helped make that last arc of our relationship so deep. Once we went our separate ways I was happy doing my own thing and I heard the other half had gone off voyaging somewhere far way and I didn’t care.

But then one day they walked back into my life and promised me it could be like it had been in the beginning, that we could have a fresh start and it could be gritty and real and we could make it work. I should have known better but they were irresistible and I fell for them again. If only I’d been stronger I could have avoided the pain of that failed enterprise, which was more abysmal than I could ever have imagined.

When we broke up that time I swore it would be the last time I would ever go back with them. I’ve held to that promise, but today I got a video message from them and I can feel it happening all over again, the tingle in my skin, the warm flush, my mind fading into the night thinking “what is this thing you call love” and waking up in a haze to find myself putting my boots back on.

I know its wrong, I know it won’t work but… but.. you see there’s this new guy JJ on board and he’s really cool and he says it ‘ll be okay and he doesn’t say “franchise” every second, so maybe it will work, maybe we can be happy again. Oh please let us be happy again, I can’t go through this again, let it be like the old days before they started wearing lycra unitards, before the 80’s PC blandness and, and before they started dressing like they were characters rented from FHM. Let it be like our glorious technicolor youth when plots were cheesy and skirts were short, when… real.. men… spoke… dramatically… or had southern accents or pointy ears and real women had subspace antenna or were just simply green.

Oh please… let it be like I remember… let it be good… oh please…

Have A Merry Cheer-Us-The-F*@k-Up-Mas

It’s that time of year again when, if you’re like me, you are most likely bursting full of festive cheer and about to start humming some carols. It’s at this point when you can be guaranteed that some festively-challenged begrudger will try to spoil it for you.

These grinchy types come in many forms, such as the post-modern too cool for school “Too Commercials” who usually reckon Christmas is too tacky, uncool and generally beneath them. They tend to say “Oh Christmas has got too commercial it’s all about money and gifts drone blah moan….”. Yes I agree Christmas has become very commercial but do they have to keep moaning on about it, I wish they’d just ignore Christmas or make their own Christmas less commercial, you know don’t spend a fortune on presents or maybe get those charity voucher thingies instead, but whatever they do I wish they’d just shut the hell up and stop being such moaning bastards.

The most common form of these spiritless Christmas-phobes however are “The True Meanies”. These are the people who like to say in pious tones “Now, let us remember the true meaning of Christmas…” and proceed to drone on about baby Jeebus or human goodwill, or whatever their fascistic one true meaning happens to be.

Men are Idiotic Drunken Jealous Sex Beasts

I was reminded this week of a common stereotype about men in parenting circles which portrays fathers as mindless beasts that women need to learn how to handle correctly.

I was watching Bringing up Baby and a woman who was encouraging co-sleeping was attacked by the other “baby experts” on the grounds that the baby could be squished in the bed by parents rolling over them.

They claimed it was unsafe because “the man” might come home drunk and jump into bed oblivious to the little one. You see apparently men such as myself have no conscious control of own behaviour, I’m apparently just a gelatinous bag of beer and football who might spontaneously fall into a bar and roll home three sheets to the wind through no fault of my own.

The Geek Laugh

I’m going to an SF convention in a few weeks and I was recalling a discussion I had at a previous one about The Geek Laugh^TM, and I thought I’d recount it to those of you who are unaware of this fascinating social phenomenon.

You see there are plenty of well adjusted friendly geeks out there but for every one of them there’s also the competitive ego-driven low-self-esteem-so-must-continually-prove-how-cool-I-am geek and its these geeks that are masters of The Geek Laugh^TM. The laugh itself is basically a way that a Geek signals his equality or preferably superiority to others. It works like this:

• The geek makes a witticism about some obscure reference within their field be it SF, computers, or whatever.
• The geek begins an exaggerated and laboured laugh, just loud enough and long enough that it will bring all attention their way.
• The geek will now slowly scan around from left to right as they laugh, the purpose of which is both to ensure everybody sees them and acknowledges their prowess and also to categorise everyone in the room into one of three groups:

1. First are the people are not laughing and are therefore less geeky.
2. Secondly are those who are confidently reciprocating the Geek laugh and are therefore on the same level.
3. Thirdly are the people nervously laughing, these are the ones who dream of being just as as geeky but don’t understand the joke and are laughing so as not to lose face while they make a mental note to look it up on wikipedia later.

The Cthintin Mythos: Dreamers of The Deep

My coming to the computer had been a mistake that day; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of the web that twist endlessly from forgotten blogs and homepages and portals to blogs and homepages and portals equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean web 2.0 towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. I had found Ectoplasmosis.

Drawn by its dark mastery over my soul I sought foolishly to imitate its heathen misadventure and contribute to its vile meme… Cthulhu Cthursday and through this came upon the dread horror that is The Cthintin Mythos.

2012: Cthulhu’s In The House

Yeah baby … Cthulhu’s in the house and he’s gonna devour us all, or at least he will be come 2012, or more specifically the 21st to the 23rd of December 2012. Well it’ll be either him or one of a veritable cornucopia of evil gods or supernatural phenomenon predicted to strut their stuff on that date. You see 2012 is really shaping up to be one hell of a time for apocalypses, dimensional shifts and whatnot. There’s a host of reasons to look forward to 2012, so why not try choosing your favourite from this small selection of predictions: