The Jaegers of Pacific Rim. I can’t wait for this movie to come out.
Australia has a giant robot. I’ll let that sink in.
AUSTRALIA HAS THEIR OWN GIANT ROBOT.
And it’s gonna tear our cultural cringe limb from limb!
(via memewhore)
Hero of Hikikomori - Saint of Shut Ins. Jacob Martin's unexpectedly poignant rambles about geeky or nerdy things that are usually written at 3am are posted herein.
April 5, 2013
March 24, 2013
Tony Abbott is Thulsa Doom
Think about it, when it comes to Australian politics, Tony Abbott is totally Thulsa Doom.
He’ll burn down your village to prove he is your master, and sell your children into slavery on the Wheel of Pain until the day they die in the name of economic bean counting. Our generation’s story will be a tale of sorrow if he’s elected.
And like Thulsa Doom, Tony Abbott should be decapitated by a muscled Austrian man and his head thrown down the stairs in front of everyone to show them their freedom. Yeah I said it.
March 21, 2013
Julia Gillard is still the Labor leader, which means everyone fed up with her is going to vote in Abbott. The problem is that Abbott is going to take the government backwards by at least 35 years. He’s a sexist, misogynistic, homophobic piece of crap who doesn’t give half a crap about respect to the original custodians of Australia. I’d rather drink half a litre of bleach than see this asshole rule the country.
Also, budgie smugglers. Eeeeeww.
Tony Abbott may be awful, but let’s not forget that he’s also incompetent. Julia Gillard may *seem* unpopular, but compared to Tony Abbott’s devoid sense of political savvy she’s the Queen Of Dragons from Game Of Thrones.
KRudd was just Tintin compared to her, and as we all know, Tintin is knocked out easily by cloroform. Julia is *unpopular* to the mainstream media, but as long as Australian voters don’t live in a police state we’re still the only factor that matters.
Even if Abbott does get elected, the toxic political climate he created will get him knifed perhaps almost immediately. Also Australia has survived the likes of John Howard. As a continent that somehow has human cities on it despite hell spawned wildlife and an unforgiving desert, I think the Australian people are gonna hold out. Starbucks couldn’t survive in Australia.
Fucking Starbucks, the scourge of independent coffee drinking America, couldn’t hold out. You honestly believe given the outright brutal philosophy of a knife Tony Abbott created in Australian politics he’ll last more than a week in power without some other dude stabbing him and grabbing leadership?
Surely you jest. A little diabolical optimism wouldn’t go amiss.
March 18, 2013
My theory classes at art school are now so crowded there are students sitting on the floor where the teacher can’t be seen or heard properly.
This is what Australian youth apathy looks like. I did my bit, raised awareness. Our way of life will be destroyed by Tony Abbott unless the young people in my classes realise we can hopefully vote against him. If he wins my respect for this country will be in the toilet.
Part of the reason I’ve been losing interest in visual art right now is how utterly irrelevant postmodernism, beauty in contemporary art, and conceptual bullshit is in the face of utter societal destruction of the safety net and trust in the system is soon to evaporate too.
Me, I shouldn’t worry too much cause I’ve been in this fight long enough to figure out that novelists/writers/bloggers will never be destroyed by such turbulent times cause we were raised in a world where we’re poor by default. We’re like a 1990s Steven Seagal movie about a man out for revenge, Hard To Kill. The rest of the arts suffers from underfunding, but given a laptop and Internet access, the average writer and blogger’s gonna be just fine. Film production and theatre funding will be slashed, but haterade is a renewable resource, and a writer raised on the internet’s never gonna run out of that in a hurry. We’ll run out of oil before us writers run out of haterade. We’re friends of the gutter cause society puts us there to begin with.
And we got your back, rest of the arts. Our hatred is working to serve you better.
Sincerely, the writers and bloggers of web culture.
March 17, 2013
Sometimes I wonder if the posts I make about Australian issues matter at all, since Tumblr seems very US-Canada centric, but it warms my heart that the Ameri-Canadians on Tumblr are nipping a whole bunch of problems like SOPA/CISPA in the bud before they become a problem here.
I have this sense of doom where I feel I have to watch over affairs in America like a hawk so the bullshit policies that could harm the future don’t trickle their way down here. Because Australians suck at protesting this shit.
March 11, 2013
I AM A DUCK: A positive thing about my childhood was definitely staying up late and...
A positive thing about my childhood was definitely staying up late and watching foreign movies on SBS.
Here in Aus, we have a channel named SBS, which handles a lot of independent and foreign shows, news, movies etc. and every single night they show at least 1 foreign movie. As a primary…
You know how in Welcome To The NHK the NHK station had initials that revealed a sinister meaning? Later I started wondering if SBS actually stood for Smut Broadcasting Service given the sexy documentaries and foreign films played on Friday nights.
It’s a conspiracy! A pervy, kinky conspiracy!
February 27, 2013
End the OFLC’s stranglehold of censorship on the Australian arts and LGBT content
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/End_the_OFLCs_stranglehold_on_the_Australian_Arts/?crkzicb
This right here, libertines and LGBTQ men and women, Social Justice Warriors, artists and enfant terribles alike, we must unite against the OFLC’s continued practice of banning/censoring LGBT content along with other, less political things like Mortal Kombat games and films like Caligula.
Here are the facts:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4540102.html
The Melbourne Queer Film Festival was due to exhibit the film I Want Your Love at its screenings, which is an LGBTQ film regarded as “pornographic” by the OFLC due to a five minute sequence. In Australia, the most extreme rating that can be offered to legally sold and screened films is R18+. Pornography is effectively banned in Australia under the X18+ and Refused Classification ratings (RC) which not only ban pornography for legal sale in Australia, but apparently certain works of art also fall under this “pornographic” category.
This effects all kinds of content, some of which isn’t even that violent, sexual or graphic to individual eyes and ears. It doesn’t make any sense and it makes Australia the laughing stock of the Pacific. I’m not saying that the banning of this film is the only reason why I wish to end the OFLC’s iron fist over Australian arts and film, video game content etc, but if ever a time Tumblr deserved to get angry about how LGBTQ/LGBT content is treated by government agencies that decide what you’re allowed to watch in your own home, it’s now.
Please sign this petition and make sure the dinosaur of censorship never gets the Jurassic Park treatment and stay extinct forever.
February 6, 2013
No Country For Literate Men
http://marisa.com.au/real-men-do-read-they-just-dont-let-the-sexy-geek-goddesses-know/
So I just read this consoling and yet, depressing blog post, which is one of the more thought provoking I’ve come across in a while.
I have read non-fiction books due to my art school degree for some time, and the few fiction books I do read have no hope of becoming mainstream enough that literary jokes emerge from them.
Welcome To The NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto has been out of print for years. The only hope or enticement I have for my most beloved novel to read, number one of all time, is to give people with iPads or eReaders the pirated eBook of this masterpiece that the Japanese publishers in their technophobic mindset over ePublishing just don’t see the value of rereleasing to the West. And I don’t know enough people with Kindles who I have a prayer of convincing this is worth their time. Even the ones with iPads would sneer at the idea of reading something on it to begin with.
Train Man by Hitori Nakano, which I consider the greatest romance novel for men of our times, nay, composed by human hands, escaped the Out Of Print death knell but I dunno how most people would find a copy of it in a mainstream bookshop, and if they can’t, the raw Online Archive of the story in a public domain translation is tempting but I’m not convinced people bothered following the link I posted to it on my blog over the years, and I don’t think my generation’s idea of a reading commitment consists of reading an online archive on a screen. The world just isn’t ready, and like with Welcome To The NHK the shortsightedness of Japanese publishers means there’s probably no hope in hell for an eBook version.
What I’m saying is, I seem to be cursed with utterly adoring works of fiction damned never to be mainstream through no fault of their own, tragic fate just withholds them from the general public. And thus as a fan of these works I feel utterly alone.
And even if I did read a novel people have actually heard of, this town and the people my age I’m forced to deal with or I won’t have any friends at all won’t read things I recommend to them or read at all, and I’ve found no adequate forum message board surrogate for this level of book discussion I need to thrive. Where I’m from the book loving types get starved of conversation opportunities and have to put up with talking about movies, even bad ones with admittedly very nice people who sadly don’t read.
I’m an autistic man with very few social opportunities. Compromises have to be made so I can fit in with my own generation. I suck at video games. The only cultural capital other young people are mainly interested in is my DVD library/knowledge of weird movies which I have to use to communicate with people like my film school graduate brother I have to find new ways to bond with.
As a writer this breaks my heart. I’d read the classics, I really would. But who would I discuss them with, or make jokes about them in my own novels? I have to make film humour jokes if I have any hope of appealing to an audience of my age bracket. It’s brutal, crippling and sad that I have to do this but this is what young people culture has devolved to if you’re under 25. I could be wrong, and I just live in an illiterate hell hole that keeps following me around to every town I move to. But I’m afraid what the above blog post I linked is saying reveals terrifying things about why men don’t read as much as they should in Australia, and why it’s only gonna get worse as the years go on.
The starvation of the book people by our isolating and non-mainstream hating culture is agonising and it’s killing me and people like me very slowly. We’re looking for a hand out to pull us up from the abyss.
February 2, 2013
Recently I’ve been grappling with the reality that there exists very newly licensed anime worth giving a hoot about rather than clinging to the old, forgotten past.
Yes I’m a Tezuka fanboy, but I’m mostly an anime, not a manga guy. The majority of Japanese cartoons I’ve enjoyed are in anime form. Case in point, Speed Racer the anime is superior in every way to the manga, a thought that never occurred to me until I read the manga after enjoying a portion of the anime I’ve not yet finished due to academic commitments.
There really is anime worth watching that was made after 2000. I promise you this. Kaiba and The Tatami Galaxy renewed my passion for anime I thought long lost, and Welcome To The NHK, while not as well animated is based on one of my favourite books ever and in my opinion serves as a decent “Fight Club movie mass market” version of that story I can’t share with others because the novel is out of print.
Fractale is a new one I’ve been dying to see, and Thermae Romae looks quite the treat. Princess Jellyfish and Dennou Coil are shows I’ve been looking forward too, and from the DVDs I’ve already tried, I’ve enjoyed the presentation and subtitle options on titles like Kaiba, Tatami Galaxy and Welcome To The NHK I’ve already bought and watched. They do great deluxe editions of certain live action films too, the Alejandro Jodorowsky box set they did has CD soundtracks to The Holy Mountain and El Topo, which is included with fabulous feature laden discs of the movies themselves. They also put out the infamous Cannibal Holocaust on DVD in Australia uncut, and considering how much I mention that movie on Tumblr and Twitter you can tell it left an impression on me.
Siren Visual keeps licensing fresh anime I consistently keep enjoying even when all hope for the anime licensing market in the West seems lost. And in Australia we get a few DVDs the Americans are jealous we have rather than the other way round.
I think I am yet to be done with anime fandom, as it is clearly not done startling me with the shock of the new.
January 19, 2013
This is the entirety of the Australia Live: Celebration Of A Nation broadcast. My good mate FlemishDog found this off his own mate’s VHS donation, and he uploaded it, and since Australia Day is on the horizon once again it’s time to talk about cultural cringe and the general embarrassment people claim to have of Australian cultural product compared to American stuff which is viewed as “funnier” or “superior”.
Humour is very subjective, and so is quality, but I can say without a doubt I’m far more embarrassed as an Australian by this footage meant to represent us as a country than say, BMX Bandits, or Mad Max or even the comedy sketches of The Late Show. There’s some sense of an anti-Australian content subtext to what I get from people like my brother, who hated the Goddess trailer when he first saw it in the cinema this week.
He’s a film graduate who claims not to be against Australian film, but instead against this film. I’m not so sure, because I’ve heard him make comments against Ozspolitation cinema at some point as well. There’s an undercurrent of “Australians don’t make good comedy or good films” in the air, and from what I understand from what my brother’s told me about how Australia neuters homegrown children’s programming compared to America that gave us Batman: The Animated Series that might be true. I don’t know, I’m not a filmmaker, I’m a book writer and street photographer at best.
But there’s definitely a sense of impotence to change how we’re perceived through our media, because from what I understand there’s severe limitations both financial and through censorship that Australians have to tackle when making Australian content.
If it were up to me I’d burn the OFLC to the ground so that Australia would be liberated to make the art we want, but that would mean I’d potentially burn all those confiscated copies of the Caligula deluxe DVDs that rightfully belong in the hands of Aussie perverts, not locked up in some puritanical dungeon of the nanny state.
We’ve only just gotten an R18+ rating for “Adult Games” but I don’t trust that the government won’t water down the R18+ rating just to pretend they did something about what video gamers were rabid and angry over. I trust the Australian people and their artists better than I trust the systems set in place to outlaw free expression.
The internet and indie DIY projects seem to be Australia’s last hope for content that actually says something about us with our own voices. The bastards in charge of ACMA and the OFLC have tried to censor the internet in the past too. Don’t pretend they didn’t try to pull the wool over that one.
I’m tired of Australian creative people feeling defeated and ashamed of whatever shred of culture we can claim for ourselves to be a force of good in this world. The old systems where you couldn’t make a video game for grown ups or a film that actually says something about us have to go.
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geekphilosopher asked: My twin brother is a film school grad and I am an art school student/novelist who reads a lot but he doesn't, often I have to familiarise myself with movies a lot more than I otherwise would as a sort of second language apart from literature/books so I can bond with him in a way he understands. Do you think people who work in less mainstream mediums often take a peek at other mediums to communicate better with others, artists or not? I feel this helps me befriend non-book people, find new ideas.
I think it’s healthy for artists to have a wide breadth of knowledge across mediums - it gives them more tools in their toolbox. So yes, keep doing...
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Like what you see? Free high quality galleries are here —> Click!
Have fun brother!
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“You speak of justice, yet you are cruel to those most in need of your help.”—
Esmeralda, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
I think this applies to most of...
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