Just a quick note to say I'll be starting up my blog over at Pawprints in the Sand again. Hopefully there'll be fairly regular updates.

Up the steps and out into the open, the stadium unfolding around me like a baby universe. It’s massive, open to the sky and yet enclosed, curled back on itself like space and time were contained within. A mess of contradictions. The pitch itself, so huge and empty on television, seems something from a Subbuteo set; close and cramped and intimate, the players huddled together on a postage stamp of lush grass. As I watch the ball rises high into the pre-twilight, and I can see the silver/black panels spinning back against the direction of its travel. The muted thump of the strike which sent it rising starlike reaches me a heartbeat later, as if the distance between me, in the stands, and the cherished turf on which dreams are birthed and broken was far greater than it appeared. The sound is coming from another world, impossibly distant from the one I inhabit. All it would take to cross over is to step past the advertising hoardings surrounding the field, to pass from the mundane to the fantastical. All it would take is to break unbreakable laws. All it would take is everything. Easier to rise unaided into the warm summer sky, or step from here to the surface of Mars.

There’s a man in the stands behind the away side’s goal, high up in the furthest rows of the ever-standing fans, who is turned away from the match as if disinterested. He raises his arms and beats out a rhythm against the Plexiglas, a rhythm which resounds within the soul of everyone who’s ever been a child: dum dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum…

“Go Saints!” comes back from every corner of the ground, even those where nobody sits or stands. Even from the narrow strip of blue-clad outsiders, huddled together against contagion, tricks of the stadium’s acoustics turning them traitor to the team they love. Again he beats the tune, hammering the unyielding plastic with the length of both arms, fingertip to elbow. Beating himself into a frenzy as the rhythm picks up speed, faster and faster. Dum dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum, “Go Saints!” More voices join the chant, caught up in the quickening current of elation. Faster and faster, faster than seems possible, plausible. His hands are a blur, arms must be bruised and sore along the length of them, but still the beat goes on, dragging the voices that rise in admiration and defiance towards the crescendo. Towards the whirlpool at the centre, and the end of all things, that drags him down and consumes whatever’s left of him. That fleet of voices that followed him is fractured, scattered, left reeling and dissolute as he sinks into his seat. For a minute the stadium is quiet, still, becalmed; there’s nothing but the background murmur of quiet conversation and the soft shouts of the players at their game.

In this time somebody from the other team scores. And I’m surrounded by angry men and women rising from their seats, hurling oaths and curses down upon the heads of the triumphant player. And on his team-mates, on the defenders who allowed his sacrilege, on the referee who didn’t stretch forth one hand, messiah-like, and prevent it. But nothing compares to the barrage of hatred reserved for the away supporters. The die-hard fans, the ones who have been standing since the game began, are all turned as one away from the pitch where their heroes struggle to turn back the tide. In military ranks, timed to the beat of Plexiglas percussion, their arms stretch out and back and out, hurling thunderbolts to strike their rivals dead. The howl that rises from their throats is a feral one, a challenge and an affirmation of tribal bonds, a howl learned in the dark days when flint axes and fire-hardened spears were civilisation’s greatest gifts.

“Red Army!” One voice, loud and defiant. The chant is picked up by two more, four more, ten more. “Red Army!” A thousand more. Each time it builds, swelling as more voices are added to the cry. “Red Army!” It doubles and redoubles, ringing from the seats and the goalposts and the foundations until the whole stadium resonates to the song. There’s something terrible about it, about the way it goes on and on and never dies. It rises and falls, rises and falls, a tide of devotion that surges from one end of creation to the other and returns, undiminished. It never grows tired but gnaws away at the soul, patient and enduring and eternal. “Red Army!” It falls away, retreating from the shore, leaving you battered in its wake, then swells again as great as before. There is no guiding voice, no figurehead to lead the chant, only the unconscious ties of loyalty and devotion that bind these thousand voices as one, and the inescapable rhythm of the tide. “Red Army!”

This city is my home, and these are my people. I have never before felt even the slightest care for the fortunes of Southampton FC but now, with that primeval chant in my ears and in my blood, I belong. I roll my eyes when others rise and swear; I offer mocking laughter in place of crude limerick; I deploy acid sarcasm rather than a rolling chant announcing the referee’s masturbatory habits; but the feelings that drive me are the same. Less keenly felt for being only fresh-awakened where others have bathed their souls in it for all their formative years, yet alike in direction and purpose.

When the match is over, a great roiling mass streams from the gates of the ground. Marching as one through underpass and over railway bridge, holding the same pose. Head bowed, hands thrust deep into trouser pockets in search of some miraculous reversal hidden there, offering up glimmerings of golden hope to tilt the balance of the game some small part back towards the centre. The conversation is of the referee’s failings, of players who exceeded expectations and offer promise for the future, of injuries feared and prophesised. Strangers share their insights and opinions, differences forgotten in the face of uniting disappointment. Even my ignorance is valued; I am unbiased, impartial, and my opinion of the team’s performance is taken not as the tentative offering of one who knows nothing of football but as a validation, as the irreproachable judgement of a neutral party. Acceptance is offered unconditionally, my presence alone enough to give me merit in the eyes of those whose worlds never collide with mine. I was there, and that’s enough. I was one of Us.

Football has a hold over this country more secure and more lasting than any religion could dream of, and now I understand a little part of why. It’s something tangible, something real; your colours are plain, worn openly without fear or shame. When you gather in stadium, in pub, in living room, you are bound to each other who wears the same shirt as you. It’s simple, it’s tribal, it’s a challenge of physical prowess where greys are banished in favour of black or white. Religion offers only abstracts, promises, doubts.

Small bloody wonder, eh?

( Beware: epic hiking post lurks within! )

For use here.

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So... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Team Geek!
On the 18th of July 2009, myself, tellivision, wanderesque and masterofwalri will be risking heart and sole to trek one hundred back-breaking kilometres across the treacherous South Downs Way in thirty hours or under, hiking non-stop through the night. Come rain or snow or glom of nit, nothing shall stand between us and the finish line.

Why, you ask, would we put ourselves through this terrible ordeal? I'll tell you. To raise money for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust! And for the respect of our peers, of course.

So if you could find it in your hearts to donate a paltry pittance towards this very good cause, we would be most eternally grateful. Please use the widget below to head on over to the donation page we've set up - that way you can reclaim tax, increase your donation and thumb your nose at the Government. Take that, Westminster!

Current Mood: lazy

So. How're you all doing?

The reason for this unusual breaking of radio silence is simple: I need bodies. Specifically, three bodies who would be willing, nay, eager, to hike 100 kilometres across the South Downs in 30 hours or less. (tellivision, masterofwalri, as kindred sporadic fitness buffs I'm looking at you - what do you reckon?)

Needless to say, some kind of training programme would be in order. But I don't see you lot often enough as it is, so it'd be a good excuse to get together on a fairly regular basis.

It's raising money for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust, incidentally - we'd have to raise £2000 between us, but that's not so hard. Easily done, especially since we're all so spread out and our acquaintance circles won't overlap too badly.

The dates are the 18/19 July - if you're up for it, let me know as soon as possible so we can get booked in. The amount of money you need to raise goes up and up the later you book, so time is quite figuratively money.

Link: www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/fundraise/trailwalker/index.html

Cheers,
Martin.

Current Mood: energetic

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
 - Andre Gide

In a way, this is masterofwalri's fault. A few months ago he expressed regret at the disappearance of my ranting blog posts in a moment of weakness I'm sure he'll regret by the end of this post.

Because I've found something to rev the chainsaw about, and that thing is Twitter.

What purpose does it serve? If you want to tell people about the mundane details of your ongoing tedium, there are about a million better ways of doing so. Try the phone. Or texting. IRC, perhaps, if you're a thirty stone anime fan with the personal hygiene of a downmarket hillbilly and skin which catches fire on exposure to direct sunlight. Or if that's no good, god forbid, there's always the social vacuum that is Facebook. But no. Instead, people choose to scribe bizarre half sentences that only make sense if you're a Mensa member with an honours degree in Advanced Cryptography from the thirty-eighth century, when telepathy's still being beta tested and every other word comes out in lorum ipsum.

Who do they think is reading it? Are there really that many people, and I use the term loosely, out there in the monkey+typewriter crapshoot that is the blogosphere who are going to care that you had a hotdog for elevenses and it needed more mustard? Is telling the world about your issues finding matching socks this morning going to appreciably increase the sum of human understanding, or drown those few nuggets of slightly less cretinous communication our species has somehow managed to produce in an unspeakable flood of inane drivel?

Yes, before you all break out the technopitchforks and fire my house, waving placards, possibly placards on fire, I'm aware of the hypocrisy of criticising twittering from the platform of LiveJournal. It's rather like a pacifist swearing blood vengeance on someone who stood on his toe. And true, the vast majority of blogs serve about as much purpose as nipples on the batsuit, without half the aesthetic sensibility. It's a medium for communication, as is Twitter, after all - it doesn't really matter what format it's in, so much as what's being said.

The problem with that argument, of course, is that the medium itself dictates the content. To say Twitter is a legitimate soapbox for profundity is like announcing your plan to write a groundbreaking radio play discussing the finer points of the human condition  without any dialogue whatsoever, or to sculpt David from spaghetti hoops and bat guano. There's nothing to recommend the medium as anything more than up-to-the-minute stream of consciousness, only with the consciousness replaced by the sort of mind-numbing tedium that makes anyone within a four mile radius want to carve their own eyes out with a cheesegrater. It's the high-tech equivalent of verbal diarrhoea, a 'think=speak' reflex arc where the brain stands on the sideline with its hands in its pockets, scuffing its feet and whistling Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

I understand there have been Twitter short story competitions, and Twitter poetry competitions, to see who can cram the best prose and passion into 150 characters or less. It's like holding the Guinness World Record for the most boiled eggs inserted into your rectum, or eating rice with chopsticks. Impressive certainly, worthy of a certain bemused respect perhaps, but for the love of Bagpuss why? Why the flying fuckmonkey wouldn't you just write a real poem, or use a fork? Perhaps the concept of a multiple flat tines on which food could be balanced was beyond a culture that produced gunpowder and Confucius - that's fair enough. But there are an infinite number of media, genres and forms out there, and even the literary scorched earth policy that is txtspk has something more useful to offer than fucking Twitter.

To close, I'll quote a rather more eloquent and less long-winded description of the problem: "Twitter is the death of good, well thought out writing. If the point of blogging is to found an outlet for random, eloquently put commentary, Twitter the complete opposite. It's a way for people to narrate and compare their pointless lives to their pointless friends' lives."

Discuss. Please, discuss, and put all those idle braincells to good use.

Current Mood: rejuvenated

White House Airlines would like to apologise for the extended duration of this flight. We would also like to extend our sympathies to those passengers transferred to less scrupulous airlines in the interests of protecting our image of moral integrity - it must have been torture.

Those who were denied in-flight entertainment or schooling due to an unexpected outbreak of segregation, or were locked in the toilets just in case their vaguely foreign name tried to blow up the plane, or abandoned in the economy class section when stewardess Katrina accidentally flooded the galley, or any other innocent passengers whose liberties were infringed upon, we are deeply and sincerely sorry.

In addition, we would like to extend the hand of friendship to the passengers aboard Middle East Airways flights 1R4Q and 4FGH4N - sorry if we scared you! Thankfully we have now located a passenger capable of flying the plane in a more rational way, and as soon as we've burned through the cockpit door we'll have the old captain placed in First Class where he can never more do any damage.

In the meantime we've managed to get the aircon working again, so sit back, relax, and take a breath of fresh air.

Current Mood: jubilant

Exhibit A:
COMMENT HERE AND I WILL:

a) Tell you why I friended you.
b) Associate you with something -- a fandom, song, color, photo, etc.
c) Tell you something I like about you.
d) Tell you a memory I have of you.
e) Ask you something I've wanted to know about you
f) Tell you my favorite userpic from your list
g) In return, you need to post this on your own livejournal



Exhibit B:
For my sins, I've been tagged by tellivision for the 6 quirky things meme!

The rules:
1) Link to the person who tagged me
2) Mention the rules
3) Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself
4) Tag 6 other bloggers by linking to them
5) Go to each person’s blog and leave a comment that lets them know they’ve been tagged


So six quirky things:
1. I was the biggest, most thuggish kid at my primary school, and therefore outside the headmaster's office rather a lot. Then I got to secondary school and everyone else rapidly outgrew me; I learned to substitute sarcasm for punches, as the riposte tended to hurt a lot less.

2. I pluck my eyebrows.

3. I'm a compulsive liar, and have been known to manufacture events in my backstory in a desperate attempt to appear more interesting. If something sounds implausible, that's probably because it isn't true.

4. My grandfather was Lord Mayor of Sandwich.

5. At primary school I wanted to be black. All of the pictures I drew of myself at the time appear somewhat sunburned, and I have a rather childish scrawl lying around the place somewhere in which I exclaimed 'I am a very brown boy'. Make of that what you will, Doctor Freud.

6. I'm afraid of the dark. I think it's the product of a hyperactive imagination and reading too much fantasy as a child.

I'm tagging masterofwalri, psyfira spin_guy , re_horekhte, acetoorion and My Imaginary Friend Bob, because it would seem that I don't have enough friends for even this paltry meme's demands. Well isn't that just depressing? Oh, and I'm not doing step 5, because I have to go and cry myself to sleep.

Current Mood: blah

So. (Yes LiveJournal, I'm not dead. Try to restrain your anguish.)

Start again. So. There's this show on one of the various Discovery Channels, and it's called Weapon Masters. It takes a look at a particular weapon from the past, and while one presenter discusses the weapon's history, development, use, and eventual obselescence, the other - who is an engineer, and crazy as a barnyard full of barnacles - looks at how it might be improved upon using modern tech. And it's just... astonishing. Also occasionally hilarious.

With the atlatl (which is effectively just a stick with a niche for arrows and javelins, extending the throwing arm and thus increasing the distance and power of a throw), he tried a variety of modern materials to make the missles more effective, but couldn't penetrate spanish conquistador armour... so he built a javelin where the tip was hollow and could hold anything from .22 ammo to .45 ammo to a 12-gauge shotgun shell... needless to say, the spanish breastplate looked like a sieve by the end of it.

But that's not the best. Last week was the chariot bow - basically just a chariot with an archer in the back. But by the time this engineering loon had finished with it he'd built a gyro-stabilised semi-automatic crossbow, mounted on the edge of the chariot via an adapted steadicam arm. Effectively weightless, insulated from any shocks or vibrations from the motion of the chariot... you just swing it around and pull the trigger until the magazine's empty.

It's grand inspiration for Exalted technology, let me tell you. Don't be surprised...

Current Mood: tired