Happy Easter, all!

Doomed # 6 is up. Read it.

Any particularly avid followers of the burdgeoning series may be wondering why this is the only update in the daily series for the last three days. The answer; a peculiar mutation in the writers block, wherein I couldn’t write a three hundred word passage BUT I could sit down during the first intended session and spend four hours writing background exposition for a new idea, and in the following session write something completely off the freakin’ wall based on one of those idiotic recurring images.

Read the weird interpretation of something I keep envisioning here.

Stay sexy.

Ian.

In case anyone’s reading these, Doomed #5 is up.  Considering this is a daily thing, this post is a little redundant.

Some notes;
I have no plot for this worked out. Essentially the updates are just centred around a decision by the protagonist, followed by a revelation or developement and a new course of action. Things will progress, but for now it’s all very up in the air.

Interestingly, each section seems to be rounding out to be between 200 and 300 words in length. Does this say something about my writing speed? Do I clock twenty words per minute? Truth be told, I’ve never checked. I couldn’t say.

Firstly, Doomed #3 is up. I may or may not have missed updating it on Sunday. There are vicious rumours of hangovers and a resultant lack of the caffiene induced vibe that is required to power these little flash-fics. It may indeed be the case that the author was barely levelled out by a quantity of caffiene that regularly causes kidney failure in lesser breeds. An ongoing investigation is getting details as to whether the author was, in fact, drunk enough to attempt to dance on a Roulette table at the casino on Saturday night. It’s all a mystery, really.

Today’s ‘Doomed’ actually went into overtime, since we’re circumspectly admitting to flaws and mistakes in our works. My timing method for the ‘10 minutes writing time’ endeavour is to create an on-the-go playlist in itunes using the insanely cool music I spot first when going through the complete library, adding up to 10 minutes (more or less). I unfortunately chose ‘This Is Sparta!’ techno remix by Andrew Keaton for one of the tracks,  which led to me bobbing my head spasmodically and flailing wildly, as if equipped with fresh prosthesis and holding glowsticks - for two and a bit minutes. Combine this with the minute or two I spent staring at a mispelt word (my copy of OpenOffice is a ludite piece of software, refusing to use the techno-magical Spell Checker function) and I was left with a half finished flash fic and no more time. So I went into overtime.

Lastly, in 10 Per Day related shit, I am instituting a system of ‘No Prizes!’ (a custom made .jpg file sent to your email address, depicting my mental image of you with your no-prize doing something cool) if you so happen to spot a spelling mistake and correct me in the comment fields of a blog-post. For example, in this post you could add ‘BTW in Doomed #3 today you spelt bucket with no ‘c’. Gimme a no-prize!’ and I’ll send you a .jpg.
Since I lack a spell-checker and I’m hyped up on caffiene/working with a clock I’m missing a few spelling mistakes and typos. I could, in theory, go over each section after the clock has run down but FUCK YOU I’M A DRAGON.

Moving on.

Customer attitudes;
It’s always puzzled me that many people who wander into a shop have some sort of sense of entitlement. They’re the customer; the customer is always right; ergo, the customer can act like a prick and treat staff as sub-human scum? Similarly, any disrespect the customer gives to employees cannot be reciprocated, since the customer is Right?

I personally think the ‘Customer is always Right’ rule has become a little twisted and over-used. Sure if the customer brings in a block of cheese they bought and it’s moldy, they get a refund and you aren’t allowed to argue. Similarly if the customer’s item scans incorrectly then they are right in demanding it should be the right price. Also if a whole shelf is mis-labelled and the customer is led to believe the item is cheaper then it actually is, they should get it for the mis-labelled price.

What this doesn’t mean is that the customer can completely mis-understand a situation, abandon reality and kick common sense in the teeth. Customers have an eery habit of picking up random pieces of stock and then  placing it somewhere else in the store arbitrarily; another customer then picks it up, seeing a 3 litre bottle of milk resting amongst items labelled at 99c and honestly expects that to be the price (even though the label doesn’t even SAY ‘milk’). Or they’ll take a good long look at the ‘8 items or less’ sign, gaze at the fort or so things in their trolley before blithely wandering up to the checkout - they then insist the customer is always Right when informed they have too many items.

The list goes on. The gripes of the supermarket worker are many, that’s for sure. A lot of people I’ve talked to often wonder at the rage they see in their friends who are involved in the retail industry when it comes to customers and think it’s unreasonable - the short answer to that one is to understand, you have to have lived it.

The way a customer can dehumanize an employee and feel entitled to behave in ways that would be un-imaginable anywhere else is incredible. I can never fathom it - whenever I go into a shop where I don’t work or some other place of business as a customer, I generally will endeavour to be as respectful as possible to the premises and the rules within (as well as staff, unless they are being unreasonable pricks - being bitchy to staff is fair game if they aren’t treating the customer with respect, incidentally) . Basic things like, I don’t know, not walking into ‘employee only’ sections of the premises.

It floors me every time a customer wanders out the back of our store and starts poking around in the storeroom. I have fond memories (not really) from my time at Woolworths, years ago, when I walked out of the staff bathroom into the men’s lockers and found an old man rifling through one of the lockers which didn’t close properly. Being the anal-retentive weirdo I am, I’d taken note many times of the safety signs that tell staff to challenge anyone they don’t recognize in the staff only sections. So I challenged him, he told me (in a baffled kind of way) that no, he didn’t work here, what was the problem? I told him to get out of the locker room, followed him as he complied and called over the first manager I saw as we progressed through the back area of the store. We removed him from the premises after that, whilst all the while he continued protesting that he was ‘just looking for something to blow my nose with’.

That’s an extreme case, but mypoint stands. Customers have no respect for staff or the rules. The thing with rules is that they’re there for a reason. I check the signatures on credit purchases because that’s the security requirement - signature doesn’t match? I refuse to put the transaction through. I also refuse to sell cigarettes at counters other then the one we’re licensed to sell them from and will not sell smokes to anyone who can’t provide me with I.D. when I request it. The world wouldn’t stop turning if I ignored these rules, but at the end of the day - them’s the rules.

There’s very little substance to this post…it’s a vent, mostly, but since I refuse to rant on the subject it’s just a couple of complaints, bullshit and chips. Oh well.

Read Doomed, if you aren’t already!

Ian.

I was gonna just throw the new page/section of The Blocked Pipe onto the internet without an explanation. Just have this new thing called ‘10 Per Day’ all up in your faces and see if anyone caught on.

Then I thought ‘I’m hungry!’ and made pancakes. Later, I considered the compatability between the technology found in Xbox’s and cyborg bear cavalry. I then contemplated the oddity surrounding an event where I spent the last four days trying to beat an end game boss, and when I finally nailed the fucker a little thing popped up telling me I had an achievement because I beat him in under twenty minutes. Clearly, time distortion is afoot.

The ending to Killzone 2 is so…classic sci-fi. A depressing turn of events where you’ve won!…but you didn’t. Now I know how the Alpha Legion felt during the Heresy.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS THAT. DON’T PRETEND.
Maybe in Killzone 3 the Helghast will fucking lie down and die. Moreso then usual that is.

Where was I? Right, 10 Per Day. It’s a new section, wherein I get buzzed on caffiene once per day and hammer out a section of a ludicrous story for ten minutes per day, keeping each section short and sharp and self-contained. It’s an episodical story presented as quasi-flash fiction. Click ‘10 Per Day’ on the sidebar, then click ‘Doomed #1′ for the first one. When the second follows, click ‘Doomed #2′ or the ‘Next’ link that will appear in ‘Doomed #1.’

Incidently anyone who knows anything about coding who could hack together an archive system for me that runs independant of Wordpress’ normal post archive would be well rewarded for contacting me and helping me. At the moment I intent to hack it all together manually with my limited understanding of Wordpress, so it’ll be messy and time consuming but ultimately the exact same as if a pro had done it cleanly. Like a bunch of guys ambushing the target outside the men’s room and beating him to death with dildos where a professional assassin would have shot him from 2 kilometres away.

What is ‘Doomed’? Doomed is a modified re-working of a story/parody idea I had a while back. As explained it is presented in this format as episodical flash-fiction, linking together in a larger story arc. Theoretically when I finish ‘Doomed’ I’ll move onto a different story, which will replace ‘Doomed’ as the daily updating thing whilst Doomed will become one coherent text that I’ll make available for purchase and print-on-demand. Wish me luck.

HAH.

I’m deliriously hyper.

Ian.

The subject of the paranormal and extra-realistic aspects of the material universe is a tricky one (and happily goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories, coincidently). On one side you’ve got the people who rely on evidence, facts and scientific method to form their opinions, referring to their theory beforehand as exactly that; a theory. After the research it’s upgraded to a hypothesis, which by definition can be proven wrong, since it’s something that relies upon all available evidence with an opening for contradictory evidence to be presented. Then on the otherside are the people who take make wild assumptions, take circumstantial proof as hard evidence and discount anything that contradicts their theories, but hold an almost (sometimes literally) religious conviction that what they’ve decided is true and real is in fact both those things.

Similar to conspiracy theorists, you’ll find advocates of the paranormal to be the mundane version of ‘not normal’; that is, abnormal…weird and strange, usualyl smelling bad. They’ll be abrasive in presenting their thoughts or opinions. They’ll also cling to their original veiwpoint like stink to shit and hurl abuse at you when you doggedly continue to insist that there’s a logical explanation for everything.
(It should be noted here that my comparisons between the paranormal enthusiasts and the conspiracy nutters begins to diverge significantly. Conspiracy theorists apply a twisted kind of logic to things and whilst they take a leave of reality for the formation of their theory it’s usually more to do with common sense (for example, the government’s got better things to do then watch Joe Bloggs mow his fucking lawn) then the laws of reality, although not exclusively - ref. 9/11 hoax theorists making up numbers and figures to back their claim that a 747 wouldn’t have exploded that way when rammed into a building, when the simple fact stands that until the event nobody actually had done any solid research into how 747’s react when rammed into buildings)

So with that in mind I’m always tentative when delving into the paranormal debate or making note of weird shit going on. As a Christian it can’t fairly be said by me that I completely hold no truck with the concept of stuff beyond the feasible grasp of human science - having said that though the foundation of modern (maybe classic) science is that it’s there to be proven wrong if at all possible. Religion stands as a matter of faith, in this case that faith being in the ability of Christianity to eventually be proven to have been right all along when our understanding of science changes for the final time and we all ascend into Mormon-esque ownership of individual planet. However the other aspects of ’stuff beyond our ken’ continue to remain unsubstantiated within my own mind - ghosts, aliens, burmuda triangle, etcetera, etcetera.

But I do love a good science-fictional alien race theory. Or a horror movie with unfeasible logic behind why there’s a monster chasing people*. One of my favourite things, in fact, is reading the tiny snippets of horror story that one finds on the internet in certain places…quasi-lovecraftian ‘friend of a friend’ tales which will give you certain instructions or tell you about a quiet little motel off the interstate. These little paranormal stories always have a twisted logic or rules behind them; performing certain tasks causes certain effects, like saying a phrase in front of a mirror at the summer solstice does something pretty cool.

Moreover, I love that feeling you get when something completey surreal occurs and your current level of knowledge in no way explains how this thing could have come to be. It could be really basic, like a ball rolling down your street in the middle of the night and there’s no one in shouting distance. Or complicated as all hell, like you emerge from somewhere into a room that was just that second fully occuppied, and everyone’s missing. Or you find yourself with a temporary kind of prescience akin to deja vu. None of it is so crass as traditionally creepy horror, like the stuff in The Ring or The Grudge - creepy little girl, washed out film quality and unnatural ways for the people to move. Just little flaws in reality that stop you for a second. The really subtle twighlight zone stuff.

What brought all this on was a particularly vivid surreal experiance I had a while back. I was staying over my friend Sean’s place after a fairly heavy night of drinking. I crashed on the spare bed in the front room, passed out until middle of the morning. When I got up, hungover and bleary eyed, I walked out into the kitchen to find the four or five other occupants on the house all standing silently regarding me as I walked in, with no readable expressions. Sean solemnly walked up to me and handed me a sheet of paper, with all the information I needed to know written neatly on it; what time it was, where they were going, when they were getting back, where food was, what was happening later. And not a word was spoken…until I blinked and said ‘what the fuck?’ and everyone started laughing.

The moment ended and my brain caught up. They were all about to head out; not wishing to disturb me, they’d written a note explaining everything. But for that brief moment, it was a surreal moment of uncertainty. Reality wasn’t working properly. And it was so damn cool!

Either tomorrow (my time, so within 24 hours of this post appearing on the internetz) I’ll be starting something spontaneous on the site. A release valve as part of an idea triggered by my deliberations on the ideas and concurrent problems/solutions raised in A Welcome Visit From Aunt Flow and Insubstantial.

Till then; cha-chacha!

Ian.