Seb's Inferno

***MISSION LOG BEGINS***

Hey Twitters!

Today, we'll be returning to some of the sights, sounds and smells of Maitland and "Surrounds", possibly in the style of Dante's Inferno. The general atmosphere required for reading this can be achieved by activating "Left 4 Dead" cinematics, thus giving us our view of the town (taken from the old hill where they used to hang people. No, I'm not joking.).

So, as we proceed into town, we come to a Willow'd Glade. At least it could be called that if it wasn't full of Cow Manure and, ahem, Literature.

The closer we proceed into the town, the more obvious our decent into hell has truely begun. We're no longer in Penthouse Limbo, but are now in the realm of Signpost Punishment, as we observe below:


"But Seb, these Signs have merely been poorly maintained! Where's the REAL MEAT?"
Here it is:


Proceeding past our Signpost Hell, we move into a more disturbing world. Maitland's Premier Petrol Station. Not simply content with being open Mon-Fri 9-4, and no other times (And shut on Wednesdays once a month), they've gone up a whole other level of Inconvenience, and have traded in Petroleum Based Fuels for the "Traditional" fuels, the fools:



Do you remember "The Magic"? Did you wonder of the beast contained within? One that I dared not capture, for fear of my sanity and soul? Well, turns out I was feeling lucky, punk. Here it is, in all of it's unholy glory:

Don't think getting this picture was easy, either. Because nothing works in this town, the sign on the Hovel housing this beast had the following warning strung on it's automatic doors:


I felt a deep urge in my stomach to run, to escape the terror, to get out of this hell, and sprinted across the Styx-ian river to the "Upper Class" side of town. What I saw there was not particularly reassuring.

It had to be a trick! The town seemed "Posh", but there was something wrong, it had to be a deception. Maitland is like Cancer. You can dress it up as "Mutant Powers" all you want, but that doesn't change the true effect it has on you. Rounding a corner, I saw all the evidence I'd ever need.

You can run away to Lorn, but you can't run away from Maitland. Rich people just leave nicer things out on the street for the rain to get into.
There was nothing to see beyond Lorn. It was a desert. I sighed, and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to return to Maitland.
In there, the deception continued. I stumbled upon an apparently family friendly locale

I walked into the door, the first item I saw was a Pinata in the shape of a Phallus. I Left.
Further Evidence of poor signage lurked around, but this was not that outer circle of Hell I had passed, it was just the idiocy seeping down into a deeper layer

The deeper I went, The more terrible things became. It was as if Nature itself had begun to mock me, creating pale imitations of the real world, dashing my hopes for Deus Ex Machina.


However, in this pit of Hopelessness, I came across a small becon of hope. A sign directing me to an Ecological Walk. Perhaps there is hope for us all, I thought

I began the trail, seeing what beautiful sights I could gaze upon...


Hmm, maybe it's around the corner...

NO! BETRAYED! BETRAYED BY THE SIGNAGE! I know that the nature lies beyond here, somewhere. It must. IT PROMISED ME NATURE! IT DELIVERED ME "Go Away or I'll Shoot You In The Face With My 12 Gauge". Defeated, I turned to leave.
Then I saw it.

This is the nature I was promised. This was the Redemption! It was my "Get out of Gaol Free" card for Soul Redemption. It was the oldest Cockatoo I've ever seen.
I cheered! Surely I must no longer be in Maitland! I have escaped! I drove down the road a little bit, but was then confounded by a sign I had never seen the likes of before...

I panicked! I was still in Maitland, somehow! I ran back towards the Cockatoo, only to come face to face with (I'm not joking about this one)


***MISSION LOG UNEXPECTEDLY TERMINATED***
***SYSTEM SHUTTING DOWN***

Post Mortem:

"Seb, was that seriously a Murder House?"
Apparently! Since I can't afford the fact-checking skills of my bitter website rivals at Christianity Today, I tend to rely on either old fashion "Street Smarts", or, if I couldn't be bothered routing electrical energy to certain parts of my brain, that Bastion of Truth, Wikipedia. Yeah, Wiki. The same people who bought you such classics as "Steve Irwin is dead LOLLOL" "STEVE IRWIN WAS KILLED BY FLYIND DICKS. MAY HE RIP. BEWARE OF FLYING DICKS", "LOL STEVE IRWIN WAS PWNED BY A FUCKING FISH!!! STUPID FUCKING CHAV!!!", and "JIMBO WALES USED MIND RAYS TO KILL STEVE IRWIN!!! FUCK YOU, WIKIPEDIA!!!"
Of course, at one stage the only thing that Wiki knew about Maitland was that it had "The Worst Roads in Australia", but we can forgive it for that. OR CAN WE? Bah, it gives me the Shinolas.

What also appears to get my "Goat" are people whom do not change their little "Personal Messages" on Micro$haft Live? Messenger. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Linz. You've had this message for about 4 months. And before that, you had "I have new shoes!" for a WHOLE GODDAMN YEAR.

By that token, I could also say "Hey Everyone! I HAVE A NEW BLOG". It's not new. It's not important. It leaves a smokey half-swallowed lump in my throat. The lump is either disgust, or the result of eating an entire block of white chocolate last night. Don't ask me which it actually is, as they're both as likely as each other.
Well, having gotten that Skellington out of my closet, I think we can move on to the Wardrobe in the Garage


OH NOES FAILED AGAIN.

GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVA (Ovum?)

Hey Funk Junkies!

We're back for a reason that no sane mind can fathom (For it is not I who am Crazy.. It is I who am MAD!), perhaps it's another bit of insane justification that sounds good in your head but sounds completely retarded when you say it out loud (such as Summerland"Summerland". Yeah, that's right Hip Hoppers, it's a stupid name, and sounds like you thought it up to have a stupid music festival in Adelade about yourselves yourselves yourselves yourselves yourselves yourselves yourselves (Sorry about that, but If I can't tell the freaking difference between any of them, what hope do you have?)).


Hmm, perhaps it's an insane desire in my mind to keep writing out this terrible thing, but then again, once upon a time, someone thought that making a game called "KISS Psycho Circus" was a good idea. It wasn't. We should be thankful for modern thinking and intelligent reasoning. Although, a modicum of caution is advised, as it appears to be all too easy to go off on a completely random and irrelevent tangent where the author has spent the last 4 minutes staring out the window looking for butterflies. Ah, there's one now.

"Seb, this appears to be one of the most insubstantial posts I've ever seen" I can hear you mutter to yourself.
Well, talking to yourself makes you crazy.
OR DOES IT? I wouldn't know, because I seem to do it alot. Mostly because there's nothing else to do. An excellent example of this occured the other day, when my brother and I were reloacating all of my sister's school books and things she'd actually need to a small shed filled with car parts and dominoes car tops(We'll come to their reason in a minute, but first, THIS?)


I walked over to this scene, not far from the shed, and gazed at it.

I asked my brother what he thought when he too looked upon it, and our answers were the same.

Finding this an excellent reason to get the hell out of Dodge Maitland, we discussed an appropriate "leaving present", and formulated a plan, as follows:

1. Borrow someones shitty old Commadore or Falcon, and attach a Dominos Car Top to it
2. Dig out old uniforms and fake name tags ("Hi, My name is Tyler Durden/Manuel Calavera/Darth Nihilus")
3. Find an old Pizza box and fill it with a hub cap
4. Drive up to a random person's house, scream some abuse, throw the "Pizza" on the ground
5. Wait until job is threatened, then tell them to "Try it, fatty"
6. Run like hell and drive away.
7. Come back 5 hours later under the cover of darkness and fill their letterbox with Free Coke & Garlic Bread vouchers until nothing else will fit in


The alternative plan was to attach the Car tops to the side of the car and drive at high speeds close to power poles.

Hmm, well, my Sanity Meter has begun to refill, so it's off to Project Mayham for me. Ciao!

I'm gonna go down to the shops and get myself a big jar of...

PING!

(Press W to) Step Forward, Baby, Into the Light

Welcome to the last bastion of stupid in a wide world of enlightenment. Yeah, that's right inebriates & flagellation enthusiasts, it's time for IDIOCY! This time, however, it's of the Virtual Form...

I recently revisited an ancient game called BioMenace. The introduction had a mulleted, mustachioed man in a fruity lime green tank top surrounded by overbaked potatoes and what I assumed was "Spacecat". Remember, kids, this was back in the day when there was nothing cooler than a 16 colour man and his quest for shooting things in the face for a reason that alluded each and every one of us.
I didn't like the controls, so I changed jump to Spacebar. of course, it neglected to tell me that spacebar brought up the menu, and after jamming down the spacebar in a feeble attempt to make it work, I managed to crash not only the game, but DOSbox (Because I was running it in FANTASTIC VOYAGE MODE from The Future! (It's Bright, but not Orange. They went down harder than a triple cheeseburger into your guttocks)).

So, after resigning to this particular brown nugget failing horribly, I moved on to the next thing I could claw my way onto.
Next, I turned my attention to a game which sits in something of a rare, but shameful, category - Things that I couldn't be arsed finishing. I tend to make it a general point of these things to at least attempt to get to the end. Call of C'thulhu however, was not one of these. Booting it up, it suddenly all came flashing back. The brown. The grey. The fact that everyone kept dying after I'd done their stupid fetch quests. Also the fact that I had the combination to a safe but it wouldn't open because I'd put in the wrong number on the first try. Why did I put in the wrong number? Because freaking Americans put their dates in the wrong order, that's why. It's DD/MM/YYYY, not MM/DD/YYYY. I can put up with YYYY/MM/DD, because that's actually useful for finding things chronologically, but months first? HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING KIPPERS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Anyway, failing to open said safe meant that the story wouldn't progress, and the flabby grey fishy looking men kept snarling at me. So I whimpered and ran off to do something else. Like play Frisbee with the game disc.

Another game which falls into the category of "Didn't finish it because of strangeness" is S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which sends you into that cheery little place known as Chernobyl, where you are tasked with looking for things to jab into your small intestine to give you 10% resistance to flea bites, while making your anorexic or dyslexic or just itchy as a side effect. The first time I stopped playing this was when I was very close to the end, and it was for a very good reason. You see, this game is buggy. I don't mean in the occasional mistake where suddenly everyone in the level decides to shoot all their ammo at a single brick, I mean the "If I'm goin' down, I'm takin' ya all with me" kinda buggy. As in it would bluescreen the computer if I had the audacity to attempt to finish the game. The nerve of me! How DARE I even attempt that?
Second time around, when things had been fixed, (and it wouldn't drag down everything in the computer with it in a fiery blaze of "glory" when I attempted to open a door to steal someones dog) there was a NEW and EXCITING issue. Sure, playing was fine, it was just that everyone had developed a fascinating new skill! I liked to call it "Sudden Ragdoll Syndrome", but to the uninitiated, the basic gist of this was that people would just drop dead for no reason. At all. It was like "Hey guy, I found all these cans of meat in your tent, and now I'm gonna sell them to you so we can go through this farce of an economic charade", and he would be all "Awesome! TINS!" then as soon as he was finished, he would keel over and do the death rattle & roll, which usually involved his legs spazzing randomly as his corpse had somehow become lodged in the ground. What caused this death? No one knows. Perhaps he became aware of the fact that he was in a computer game, and the thought just BLEW. HIS. MIND. (up).
Maybe it was the deep and terrible shame that he felt, knowing that his in-game life had been reduced to buying cans of "meat" he would never use, and so he went all mental Hari-Kari on us. I can't tell, and alas, it will have to remain a mystery for the ages.

I've seen many terrible things in my time. I've seen AI-free bots in Battlefield 1942 lie down and to the doggie bounce with their heads. I've seen the Quantum Suicide Mario experiment. But nothing is as terrifying as... Well I think I'll leave it to this guy to explain.

Because I Have A Duty to Tear Apart Major Events

Today's major event: The Melbourne Cup. Or, if you prefer, the Hat Parade that stops the nation. Or, if you prefer, what not to wear to a muddy field. Or, if you prefer, what the papers will run on the front page instead of preliminary U.S. presidential election results on Wednesday.


Some Stats (No, Not Those Stats)

We all know that the sum of money we waste on this race is fast becoming more than what the banks have lost in the global financial crisis. So instead of focusing on that minor piece of exaggeration (a single state was only capable of gambling away $34 million on the cup last year, let alone what the rest of the country threw at it), we should first examine where this whole race went wrong. Some would argue that it was when they decided that if parliament is sitting, that they would stop yelling at each other and not run the country for a few minutes. Some, however, may argue with equal credibility that such a thing is not so bad after all.

No, the sole culprit responsible for ruining the Melbourne Cup is one horse: Makaybe Diva. When this horse won the Melbourne Cup for the third time in a row it was the dullest race I ever witnessed. The favourite winning by a lot doesn't make a great race to watch. For a good indication of how a horse race should go down, find any race where the lead changes a few times, and then someone only wins by the tiniest of margins. That's actually exciting to watch. Watching the favourite trounce everyone else is painfully boring, no matter what sport you're watching.

For no good reason than possibly to annoy me further, people thought it (the horse) was nothing less than a living god. The arrogance was astounding. The track was manipulated to suit Makaybe Diva for her 3rd win, and the horse was immediately put into retirement afterwards. That's like giving a kid huge clues on how to answer an IQ test, calling them the next Einstein, and then leaving them to test their smarts on B-Grade quiz shows later on in life when no one remembers who they are anymore. The worst part was when, despite not having even been alive during the reign of Phar Lap, the trainer of the horse said "I don't want to put Phar Lap down but I never saw him win three Melbourne Cups."

Well, I don't want to put Makaybe Diva down (okay, maybe I do), but I never saw her win 72% of all the races she ever entered. Phar Lap did. In fact, Phar Lap won more races than Makaybe Diva ever ran at all. That's what makes a horse great. So what if 3 of Makaybe Diva's piddly 15 wins were the same race? That doesn't make you great. You don't become a great F1 racer by winning the Australian F1 Grand Prix 3 times and then bombing out on the rest of the series. A staggering 37 of Phar Lap's 51 races were wins.

But wait, it gets better. Both horses only raced for about four years. So not only did Phar Lap run more races and win more of them, he did it over roughly the same time period. So really, who's the better horse? My money's on the horse with the gigantic heart, not the one with the gigantic ego.


16% Racing, 84% Filler

What's the one thing worse than an arrogant horse trainer? Channel 7's coverage of sport. We all saw how deplorable the Olympic coverage was. The coverage of the Melbourne Cup is no better. In fact, it's probably worse. When the Olympics aired you still actually saw some sport, which is more than you can say for the Melbourne Cup.

Let's do the calculations. Not including stuff like "Sunrise: Live 3 Centimetres From The Side of the Track" or "Today Tonight: Live From the Stables", Channel 7's coverage usually goes for about 7.5 hours (assuming it runs on time, which I don't dare to check given the trash that's likely to follow), and let's assume that each race gets about 7 minutes coverage (not including that pointless parade they do or the interview-on-the-back-of-a-horse afterwards). Believe it or not, there are actually 10 races on Cup day, including the race that everyone supposedly cares about. It makes you wonder how people in the races run after the Cup must feel.

Back to the calculation:

10 races * 7 mins each = 70 mins of racing.
7.5 hours = 450 minutes of total coverage.
70 / 450 = 0.1556, or 0.16 if I'm kind enough to round up.

Over 6 hours (84%) of Channel 7's coverage is filler, and just 16% is actual racing.

There is one highlight that can be gathered from the endless hours of footage, and that's people saying stupid things. Perhaps a jockey will say "I think I landed on my head," or maybe it's an overly excited winner getting a bit confused about how a horses legs make it move when they say "Lastly, we have a big team of people who make these horses run." (Both are actual quotes from last year's coverage.)


Why Don't The Other races Stop the Nation Too?

Did you know that there are more horse races run each year than just the Melbourne Cup? Ever heard of the Caulfield Cup, for example? Or what about the Cox Plate? That's a race that is arguably as prestigious as the Melbourne Cup. According to Wiki, the Cox Plate is part of an international "grand prix" for horses. So why doesn't anyone care about that race? Why not stop for the Sydney Cup as well?

Here's an idea. We've got a plate and a few cups already. We might as well change a few of the race names, and stop the nation for the whole dinner set.

Be Prepared, Kiddiles!

In case of McCain, Break Glass

Oh, and if I don't turn up for the next few weeks, it's probably because I've been eaten by Zombies

(Just kidding, punks, I'll have something truly gold for you after I finish writing a little essay)