Hey all!

In the light of all the recent developments at Tumblr, I'd been thinking about coming back to Dreamwidth and making a genuine attempt to connect with the community that's active on here. Admittedly, I hadn't been really active either on Tumblr at the time when shit went down (it had long since ceased to be a fun place to geek out over TV and music for me!), but that's no reason to check out where all the other escapees of the sinking ship have run off to, right?

The thing is, though, that I've had this journal a long time and tbh I wanted a fresh start, away from all the entries dating back to my high school and uni days. It's true that all the cringiest ones are access-list-locked (at least… they'd better be), but the tags were still cluttering up my "top tags" list whenever I was logged in and ugh I just did not want to deal with that.

So, fresh start! I changed the username on this, as you can see, to jayeless_archive and I created a brand-new account to usurp the noble jayeless name. Over there, I intend to post a smattering of stuff, general musings and whatnot on a range of topics. These may include books, TV shows, linguistics, my cat, and even more! Feel free to follow me over if that sounds good to you.

Cut for spoilers, duh. Moffatt-sanctioned, thus probably-not-all-that-episode-ruining spoilers but nonetheless :p

Anyway now let's move on to MORE SPOILERS, i.e. the synopsis of the first episode:

Today I found out that a human being could survive ninety seconds in deep space and still get better.

Sooooo I guess I have to cancel my whinging about River Song's stupid plan about chucking herself out of an airlock in The Time of Angels. Technically she had 90 seconds. (Although after not many she'd have been quite sick so to some extent my point still holds. To some extent.)

You can consider this a Halloween treat if you like, provided you're decked out in costume! If not, well... consider it just another post. I don't know, seriously, consider it however you want.

Sooo I wrote this in August, and then never posted it. In case you don't remember the ~historical background~ to this product of August, there was a federal election here, and this federal election was preceded by an election campaign. One of the big issues of the campaign was refugees, and in particular, the two major parties were competing with each other to see who could produce the most disgusting policy with the most outrageous deprivations of human rights.

I think what I wrote reflects my frustration with this. It can also be considered a response to one of the February prompts at dailyprompt, "last night on earth" (where the title comes from).

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

With the grand final rematch set to take place tomorrow, it feels like a fitting day to write about something of great cultural significance to Australia: football. This is something so significant to people in this country that even people who reject the entire idea of “Australian culture” (like I don’t know… me) still take an interest in football.

The first thing to know about football, though, is that there is a cultural battle of sorts raging over which sport even gets the title of “football”. Our three main contenders for the position are:

• football
• soccer
• rugby

Based on this list, I’m sure you will see that I am not at all biased when I say that the true bearer of the name of “football” is, uh, football. That is, the kind of football they play in the Australian FOOTBALL league.

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

One of the downsides to studying linguistics, if you’re anything like me, is that you start listening very closely to the way other people speak. Of course, if you’re anything like me you wouldn’t consider this a downside, you’d consider this pure awesomeness. Just think, every time you get super-bored in international studies, you can just listen to your classmates and think, “Oh wow, did they just do the whole Melbourne Accent™ thing and pronounce an [e] like /æ/?” or, “Hey, so I’m not the only one who substitutes glottal stops for [t]s! Awesome!”

As you can see my classes are very exciting.

Anyway, someone I know said I should write a post about Australian accents, and since I adore accents, I thought I would. Actually what he said was I should talk about the homogeneity of Australian accents, but I feel like this is a bit unfair.

Of course Australian accents are far more homogeneous than, say, British accents, or even North American accents. There’s not really any such thing as a “New South Welsh accent”, for instance, although I was once reading a Lost fan wiki that claimed there was. That kind of misinformation should be on Mythbusters, man — there’s truly not. While there are multiple Australian accents, none of them are tied down to specific regions of the country (possibly excluding the country/city divide). That said, there are different accents, and (in General Australian anyway) further variations on top of those accents.

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

I was on a packed bus a few days ago, in the dark, in the rain, and for some reason a memory came to mind of a packed train in sunny Perth almost three years ago. We were on holiday, heading back to our hotel after a day in Fremantle, with a lot of other people who were heading back from a day at the Royal Perth Show. There were a group of three boys about my age chatting excitedly about their day and plotting mischief. One of their showbags had come with a laser light, so they were constructing a devious plan to blind policemen with the light while running away from whatever. Harmless stuff, as you can see.

But the grey-haired man next to them had a stern, grouchy look on his face, and this look only darkened as the boys got even further developing their plan. Finally, he burst: “Do that and you’ll get shot!”

The boys looked at him, shocked. “What? Why?”

“Police officers are trained to shoot first and think later, if they’re blinded,” the man snapped. “I shot a boy your age once!”

“Are you a police officer?” one of them asked, in a tone approaching guilt.

“No! No, I’m much worse than that. Look, I’m not saying you will get shot, but if you’re going to mess around doing things like that you’ll have to expect it.”

Another of the boys asked, defiantly, “What were you doing that meant you had to shoot a boy?”

“That is none of your business!”

“Are you proud of yourself? Are you glad you shot a kid?”

The man looked away, staring pointedly at the wall on the other side of the train as if he couldn’t hear them.

“I bet he was in the army,” said this boy. “Who else would shoot kids? He’s a soldier, I’m sure of it.”

“You’re probably right,” said another of the boys. “He was probably on patrol or something, and snapped and killed someone. That’s what soldiers do.”

“I bet he’s not even guilty,” continued this defiant boy, so loudly that the entire half of the carriage could hear him. “I bet he’s proud of himself. That’s what soldiers are like, aren’t they? Remorseless killers!”

The man pretended not to hear him, but his face became redder and redder as they made further declarations about the remorselessness of the military. Until finally, he got off the train, to the jeering of the boys.

Doctor Who Series Six To Be Split In Two

You know what this means?? TWO FINALES. Also, less of a wait between the halves of the season. But mostly TWO FINALES.

Excitement.

And while I'm talking about Doctor Who, have something FUCKING AWESOME: the opening lyrics to Children Collide's song "Asleep on my Feet":

I've been looking for a timelord
To take me back to when I was a god

Too bad I have nooooooo idea what the song is about, but I got that bit :D Chapel St also got a mention - Melbourne represent! ;D Actually if I post all the lyrics maybe someone can help me out :P

Seriously, this song is intense. I have no ideas, none at all.

If I magically gain one, I guess you can expect a slightly repetitive entry as I write about my amazing revelation... :P

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

I’m not really sure what to say about this song.

It and I don’t really have much of a history the way, say, “Armour for Liars” and I do… in fact I only got this album, Humbug, for the first time about a week ago. And it took a few listens before I really heard this song properly enough for me to understand its greatness, because it comes right after “Cornerstone”, which makes me crack up over how pathetic the main character of that song is¹, and there are other songs that are more obviously creepy earlier in the album (“Dangerous Animals”), overshadowing this one until maybe the third or fourth listen. The song’s name didn’t really help its case either, because “Dance Little Liar” sounded (to me) like the song was going to be about some slutty girl at a club, which is a theme that does recur in Arctic Monkeys’ music (“Still Take You Home”) and I don’t really like it and I was not enthusiastic for yet another song about that theme. However, it isn’t, and when I looked at the lyrics cursorily and realised the titular “little liar” was male², I gave the song a better listen.

And it is amazing.

The most amazing part of it isn’t even the words, or at least it’s not the words once you’ve read the words and understand the song’s meaning, but the music. The guitar! And drums! I was listening to this song on the train yesterday afternoon and I started crying when that part happened. To be fair, 90% of the reason I started crying was probably more a combination of having been awake for 28 straight hours and leaving the house to remain awake for at least another seven, and being utterly emotionally drained, but the fact that this song can be one-tenth of a reason to cry is pretty damn good, okay.

So listen:

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

There was an election today! Did you notice? It sucked. In short, the Coalition won, although it didn’t actually technically win and we technically have a hung parliament. This means shit though, because either side needs 76 seats to win. Current projections are that Labor will get 72 and the Coalition 73, although with one of the electorates on a knife-edge that could turn into Labor 71, Coalition 74. Then there’s the single Greens candidate and four independents — three stupid-ass conservative hacks, and some former spy who used to be a Young Liberal then defected to the Greens then defected to himself presumably and became an independent.

Basically, the stupid-ass conservative hacks are going to wrangle a deal with the Coalition and there’s our government — Tony Abbott and the stupid-ass conservative hack brigade. Basically the only good thing out of that entire mess is that Wilson Tuckey lost his seat, but that’s little good to the world because he lost it to the Nationals. I’ll still take it though, because Tuckey is that fucked.

If you know me at all you’ll know I loathed our Labor government and was CONSTANTLY, CONSTANTLY pissed off at the latest shit they tried to pull, but when it comes down to the line, when it comes down to red numbers v. blue, it’s going to be red every time.