Rethinking 13.

Last year, Black Sabbath did something that numerous people around the world, myself included, had been breathlessly hoping they would do since 1997 or 1998. That is, they released a whole album consisting of new compositions.

Relevance: how getting more of it can be tragic

Two years ago, if you told me that three fourths of the lineup that recorded eight albums and defined the musical style that would provide the soundtrack to my life would record and release a new album, I would have told you I would believe it only when I saw it.

How I spent the second half of February

(A note before I begin: This entry is going to talk a lot about the goings-on inside an acute-care ward within a mental health facility. For that reason, I am going to use aliases and flat-out mess-ups of names in order to protect anonymity and privacy. Please do not ask me who is who, because even if I do remember, I am not going to tell you. Similarly, if you recognise yourself in these writings and would like to be completely blanked out, feel free to comment.)

Semantics matter. Semantics can be exceptionally important.

It seems no matter how much I try to leave this subject alone, the issue of word choice and how it can impact in ways that the politically correct clearly never gave a stuff about keeps coming back to haunt me. Being so linguistically inclined that one can read at what you jokers call an adult level at age three has that sad effect, I suppose. But lately, the proclamations by defenders of so-called person-first language that it is merely a matter of semantics have me shaking my head.

The difference between “free speech” and speech without consequence.

Well, it is a new year in pretty much all of the world now, with even the Westernmost Americans bringing everything other than their political science into the year 2013.

Ah, Sydney, I have missed you so. But no matter how you try to push me away again, I am not leaving.

So, as I wrote that I would do in the last entry that I completed before I went quiet, I moved back to the place in Australia where I grew up. (This is a totally separate discussion, but do not ever call me Australian. I am autistic. If you do not understand the distinction, please go and read something else.) Western Sydney, or Central Western Sydney as the transit authority and its contractors are calling it nowadays, has always been a puzzle of contradictions. There are problems with it, some of them enormous, but the thing that has made me anxious to return to it since long before I began to experience serious respiration problems remains the same. As bad as it sometimes seems, it is often by a long road the best part of the “commonwealth” of Australia.

Cadaveria, the musician, the band, and their music

During my previous loss of rationality concerning how people can be inaccessible due to their stupidity and self-centrism, I quoted a song. This song is called Atypical Suggestions By A Dead Artist. And the band that performed it is named after the woman who performs its vocals: Cadaveria.