More about that bloody verdict.

Yeah, I know. I have been wanting to focus-shift this journal for an amazingly long time, from things that bother me to things that have been keeping me going in spite of how much the rest bothers me. Unfortunately, with the way things have been both in the outside world and on a personal level, this has not proven quite possible.

The verdict (no, not that one).

Before we begin, let me tell you something. I am not going to pretty up what I have to say with political correctness or blanks. This is because I want to properly express my impression of the mindset behind the violent criminal act I am speculating about. If this bothers you, go elsewhere, please.

Publicised trials are a funny thing. In spits and spats, the public are doused in grim, puzzling, or even stupid details from the trial’s progress. And after months or even years, a verdict is handed down that is pored over for years afterwards, with people speculating on what led to the result.

Suprise of the week: militant gun owners are still morons.

Well, after all of my writings about the hurtful nature of stereotypes and why people use them, I suppose I had to come to this topic eventually. Recently, an individual went to a screening of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, and shot dead a number of people. Terrible title aside, I do not know what could have possibly motivated this act. I could sit here and make jokes about how Christopher Nolan‘s godawful photographic style (shaking the camera about like an epileptic on meth, to quote Chris Bauer) being the cause, but that would be wrong and in poor taste.

The new Internet “meme”… no, I mean trend… no… I am not sure what I mean (it is that fukking stupid).

I have hinted in the past that I used to write on LiveJournal, but stopped after I found the interface and certain aspects thereof difficult to tweak to my liking. There are also things I seriously dislike about LiveJournal’s management. But I came across a link to a journal that uses LiveJournal as a host, with its own domain prefix. The story in that link, well, I will link it here before I forget.

Well, two things I feel a need to speak about now

Before I say anything else, I want to make something clear to the reading public out there. Whilst most, if not all, of my posts have been written with the offline journal writing program called Qumana, I have started to find it a most unsatisfactory editor for my purposes. This is not to say that I do not recommend it to people who are looking for a cheap (ie free) editor for their posts, but several problems with the interface have made me decide to look elsewhere. Even for a solution that I must pay money for. Probably the straw that broke my proverbial camel’s back is that on the iMac that I use for all my computing needs, the almost-universal keyboard combination to move back and forth in text on a word by word basis is to hold down the Alt/Option key and press the left or right arrow keys. But for reasons best known to its programmers, Qumana seems to feel that users should hold down the Command key and use the left and right arrow keys to achieve the same effect. This inconsistency with the standard (and yes, I know how that sounds coming from me) has caused me confusion not only when attempting to use Qumana, but also when trying to carry out tasks in other programs. The Command key usually has all of the most powerful and important keyboard commands of the OS X user interface associated with it. Save, Load, Cut, Copy, Paste, and most importantly of all, the Quit command. In OS X, quitting most programs involves holding down Command and pressing Q. When migrating over from Windoze, this can present some confusion at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I have to say that it is a far better system for closing programs. Qumana threatened to create confusion in that, so I am going to phase it out.

Rambo Syndrome, a discourse

If you are as old as you feel, then I am one of those things that archaeologists write about at great length. But rather than get into that, I want to talk about something that was briefly talked about during a prolonged conversation in my youth. I believe I was somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen at this time. I do not remember exactly what segment of the year it was, but some people that I met during one trip into central Sydney came with me on the ride back. In order to understand the nature of conversation, you have to understand a bit about the Sydney to Parramatta (and beyond) route.

Sydney is easily the biggest place in the country called Australia. Although it stretches out from a “central” business district on the coast in Northern, Southern, and especially Western directions, the West is by far the longest arm, with growing branches so long that traveling from the Westmost point of Sydney to the central district by private car can take upwards of three hours. A journey by express route train from Sydney to Parramatta is approximately thirty minutes. Depending on conditions such as passenger pick-up times, a train that stops at more stations in order to pick up passengers along the lesser-visited areas generally doubles that time. So conversations along the Sydney to Pendle Hill route tend to go on for a while. Now, this was back in the days when bulletin board systems (BBSes) were just beginning to lose users to the Internet as it existed then. Companies like CompuServe and America Online (or Assholes Online as I liked to call them then) were being hailed as the next big thing in investment terms. Given that I do not believe I had even turned eighteen or nineteen when Assholes Online folded and declared bankruptcy, you can imagine how laughable that all looks to me now. But at some point in the conversation, talk turned to certain users of the BBS we knew one another from, and the tendency of certain users to issue verbal threats on forums or in real-time chat like they were going out of fashion. Now, one of the participants in this conversation was a bit older than the rest of us, and I did not have any problem believing his claim that he worked as a bouncer or security guard. He, not surprisingly, was the one that used the words that we are going to talk about here today: Rambo Syndrome.