Also, the thing I've seen in news over and over about how Melbournians are experienced coffee drinkers who can see through Starbucks and prefer a higher quality cup of coffee: YOU"RE ALL FUCKEN IDIOTS. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU EVEN TASTE THE COFFEE WHEN YOU HAVE IT THAT BITTER AND THAT HOT?! It's like saying 'I like chilli' then sticking a blowtorch on your tongue. Fucken morons.

And how we danced

Okay. Here's a song. Listen to it. I got things to say and this is the music they go to.

See, I had a job. I hated the fucken thing but I loved it at the same time. The things I did, the things I could do, there was no one better than me. I loved that. I loved that everyone I worked with I either trained them or trained the person who trained them. I know they don't all love me and think I'm awesome, but the fuckers all respect me and they did what I told them, not because I was their boss but because they knew that when I told them to do something it was the best thing to do.

I worked at the same store for just under three years. I outlasted everything. I prided myself on my ability to take anything. Any shitty job I was asked to do, I did. Anything difficult I at least gave it a try, at most succeeded better than anyone could hope.

But it's not the job I'm fucked off about. I'm fucken awesome. I know what I'm doing. Two weeks from now I'll have someone else paying me. I'm not worried about that at all. Anyone who passes over my resume is losing one hell of an opportunity.

What's got me is that something I worked at for three years is gunna get torn down on Sunday and have its guts kicked out. When I landed at Starbucks I was desperate. They gave me a job, told me because I worked hard I'd go far, promoted me and taught me. They gave me a place and I made as much as I could of it. I didn't do every goddamn thing I was told, I'm not an idiot, but I did as much as I could. And now I'm a rain dog again.

This morning I went for my break and started going through my usual routine of checking figures and communications. I found we'd done a forty-eight cup half hour. That's a drink made every forty seconds? We'd had three people on, which is less than the standard amount for that volume, and it'd felt like nothing. The time'd just flowed smoothly, even with telling customers this was our last week. When I saw that, thought through how this would be the last time I'd ever see something like this, how I'd gone through so much to get to that point, I couldn't help it. I spent the next half hour in the back room and in the toilet wiping the tears off my face.

I'm not completely innocent. I've wanted to leave for as long as I've had the job. But I was getting to the point that once I'd moved on I'd always come back to my store and if I didn't see my people I'd see people trained by the people I'd trained. I'd get my drink, my double short latte, in my beaten up little store, and know that the person making it had been influenced by me. And now that's never gunna happen.

I've lost skin, sanity and sleep over this job. And now I've been told none of it matters. I've worked my guts out, and there was never any point to it. On Sunday we're going in and we'll tear it all down, pack it up and move on as if all I ever did was sit here typing. I'm a rain dog now. And how we danced...

You know it's time to go to bed when: you're sitting up watching videos of 'Hey' by the pixies over and over. Then it's definitely time to go to bed.

So uh, Matt Fraction's landed some movie deals. Good for him. But I wonder how they're gunna turn Casanova into a film. Everything that's good about it would probably be destroyed by putting it on film and dumbing down the free-flowing narrative. If they prove me wrong I'll be pretty damned happy, but it's not likely.

Being able to read webcomics makes the bitter pall of Portland easier to bear.

Here I am, blogging from Portland. Woo. It took a while to get all this set up because I'm basically a loud mouthed twit who doesn't actually know what he's doing, but now it's morning and I can see clearly enough to realise when I change my parents' password at their ISP I gotta change it on the modem as well. Seriously, that's why you never call support as your first option. Especially when you've had a beer or two.

I saw the Dark Knight the other day with Een. I only knew a little about it going in, the obvious things, but I hadn't really seen much about it, just because I live in my own danged world and not much gets in. I was aware there was a lot of hype surrounding it.

Hype's one of those things we're used to now. Between the Wachowski brothers and George Lucas everyone's a bit deadened towards it, distrustful of the million dollar marketing campaigns. But here, in the Dark Knight, is a movie that is everything it's been said to be. Heath Ledger's Joker is going to define the character in the comics for at least the next decade. The story is getting some criticism for being overly long with too many segues and false endings, but I think everything that's there is needed. Without the last half hour the Harvey Dent arc would have been meaningless. Without the trip to Hong Kong there would have been layers missing from the Joker's motives. It all fits together.

And I loved the dialogue. There's some bits that are flat, particularly where Alfred talks about how such and such needs this and that, that sounded out of place in a movie that holds so little back. But this is the first time I can remember seeing real irony in a 'big budget summer blockbuster'.

So yeah, to repeat what absolutely every danged sensible person who's seen it is saying right now, the Dark Knight is fucken awesome and go see it.

Sweet mother of Christ it's cold out there. I thought the sun rising would have removed the chill but I ended up walking along with my arms bunched up around me, swearing about just how fucking cold it is out there. And Smoke wants to go out there. She's crazy!

So the new Hellboy movie doesn't come out here until the end of August. How stupid is that? It's funny in a way. One of the things that deflated me over the first one was the six month delay on it being released in Australia. And then the go and do something similar on the sequel. Seriously, what year is it? Are they moving the prints here by boat? Do these people actually want to make money?

Wolf Parade - Bang Your Drum

I dunno what the hell's up with me. I think I got two hours sleep last night? Less? I worked a five hour shift and I'm still awake. And I feel sorta tired but not wrecked. I could stay up longer if I felt like it. But I don't so I'm going to bed soon. Dance dance dance.

Gah. New keyboard time. Smoke spilled a drink all over the old one and thus I've stolen the one that's been sitting next to the case in the lounge for three years. This is why I can't have good things.

Oh gosh. I'm sitting up sipping a mug of warm milk while Smoke circles about and I'm reading early Hellboy reviews. Everyone seems to like it, which makes me happy. But what makes me happier is reading that it opens with Bruttenholm reading young Hellboy a story. I'm glad they've gotten a young Hellboy in the movie, he's damned cute. But Bruttenholm is played by John Hurt, who also starred as the title role in that series from the eighties that I loved so much, The Storyteller.

trolling the fucken news

• Now I really can't be arsed finding a quote or anything, you know, evidence, but it turns out it's possible The Corby's late Dad was a sex offender. I mean drug dealer. You can't defame the dead, fuck off. This is a guy who went on television to claim his daughter, without any possible doubt, was innocent. One of the first lessons of language is that it's used to lie. I can say I'm the god of cake, but is it true? Not yet, anyway. Why is this news instead of whatever Rudd's got jammed up his arse at the moment?
• Speaking or Rudd's arse, carbon trading is suddenly news again. Petrol prices, carbon trading. Tell you what. Lets reduce the speed limit by ten kilometres throughout Australia. Every place there's a speed limit, knock ten off it. Right there, we've made a massive contribution to carbon reduction. We've also reduced petrol demand and therefore petrol prices. Let's put our money where our fucking mouths are and stop expecting our mommies and our politicians to fix everything and make it better.
• How is Sarkozy's presence bad when the atheletes are already committed to 'spitting on human rights'? And just how many generations does it take to atone for French colonialism?
• And just what is cheating at sport, anyway? Sure, they can ban a shirt that helps you adjust your swing at actual competition, but how do you seperate between people who've had the training advantage of a teaching shirt and those that haven't?
• Oil is more expensive. Que sera, sera. Seriously. What the fuck happened to make Mad Max the 'most likely to succeed' in the post-apocalyptic year book?

If I was opening the store I'd be getting up about now. Turns out I'm just going to bed. You wish you were this awesome.

Tax time

Oh yeah. I'm getting five and half thousand dollars back on my tax. And I'm gonna spend it all on comics. I've got a comics shelf now. I took my mantle-piece, took everything off it, turned a mortar-and-pestle into one bookend and a guitar amp into another bookend and suddenly my comics collection isn't just a wincing reminder of my inability to save, but a damn fine looking feature to my room.

the shadow boys are breaking all the laws

So I'm reading Light by M John Harrison at the moment. There's a lot of authors I read and I think they're great. There's a smaller group, a few with such a grip on the language they can make it dance grimly, that I wish I could emulate. Peter Goldsworthy is one of them, so's China Miéville. And there's Michael John Harrison. He's knows exactly what the reader wants to know about each time, place and scene and ekes the details carefully without a hint of exposition. It's a difficult but rewarding read. Then Tom Waits appears. In an earlier book by the author, Signs of Life, the main character loved the Tom Waits album Rain Dogs. So when a few Waits references turned up in this book I wasn't surprised but intrigued. For a start a race of supposed aliens are called 'Shadow Boys'. They live inside circuitry, any kind, claiming to be able to run of valves at one point, taking to the world in specially grown bodies they abuse and discard once the day's over. There's three stories in the book. That of Kearney, a haunted, serial killing physicist; that of Ed Chianese, a junky in the future on the run for who knows why; and Seria Mau Genlicher, the pilot of a ship that can bend physics through mathematics. And each story is bleak as hell. The name of the novel, Light, has to be irony. There's been at least two handfuls of murders by the main characters, a race of aliens that can't do anything but ape humankind, and a spirit or delusion that follows Kearney in the form of a horse's skull, echoing Harrison's earlier Viriconim works. At one point Kearney's ex-wife gleefully remarks they're in a Tom Waits song when smoke's pouring from underground. In Ed Chianese's drug dream he notices his enemy's shot sixteen shells from a thirty-ought-six and should be out of bullets soon. Kearney listens to the radio and 'Downtown Train' comes on and he thinks of how much he hates that damned song. I dunno if there's any point to it all, but it does make an interesting texture.

The Death of a Troll

So I'm not trolling the news anymore. That started out with me reading the news and bitching to Cat about things I'd read. I decided, what the hell, I could be writing this on my blog and there you go. And then some kids got neglected and I tried to write about the obvious hypocrisy of politicians using that to gain popularity. And I felt like shit doing that. Here I was talking about crap I really have no idea about with groundless, assumed authority. And it wasn't crap like the Olympics or petrol prices, but children being put through as bad a situation as kids can go through. I decided that I couldn't in good conscience do that I had no place trolling the news and so ain't gonna happen anymore. I dunno what I'm gunna write about instead. I'm sure I'll find something.