My existence has been validated.

As you may know, every fortnight I visit my mother’s house because I’m in that lovely dandy state of parental separation. You may not know that while in the Fortress of Maternitude, I write e-mails home to father and sisters dearest.

This weekend, upon receiving one of these e-mails, Mary decided to congratulate me on the expert delivery and mastery of language, et cetera. In doing so, she deigned to award me the highest praise in all of text-based communication:

You’re a good writer. I’d even go so far as to say you’re a writer.

By the Great A’tuin’s back left leg, I’m a writer. Everything I’ve done, all the things I’ve been working towards, it’s all come to a head. I’m a writer.

I’m a writer. And it feels fantastic.

For the love of cake

Before I begin, I’d like to make one thing clear: I am currently and for the foreseeable future will be attending a school. At this school, there is no provided lunch unless it’s very well hidden. As such, I need to bring nourishing edible food to keep my brain from imploding under the mighty weight of such horrors as Index Laws and 500 word essays, just two takes from a timetable of terrible tasks. Of course, while healthy, life-lengthening foods are all very well, it’s good to have enjoyable foods to put up with less tangible fears, like being a left-hander in a right-handed man’s world.

As such, there is but one food under the category of ‘sweet’ making its way into my lunchbox – a thick, creamy, delectable slice of the cheapest, shittest, greatest chocolate sponge roll cake that our local supermarket has to offer. Every day, I take two whole minutes from my recess to treasure this sublime island of chocolate heaven in a sea of drudgery and sweat.

Unfortunately, many days it isn’t to be. For the land of Fridge on Kitchen Continent in the sea of Home is no land of law, oh no – it is nothing if not a warzone. A land of treachery and territorial dispute, where brother fights sister fights sister and nowhere is safe. In these lands, there is no true ruler. The cake crusaders enforce law and all cakes live in fear, although not for very long. And so I send this message for the love of cake:

Stop eating my cake. It’s not cool. Under my imminent eventual dictatorship, cake thieves and their kind will be put to death, forced to eat a poisoned (or worse, poisoned and poorly cooked) cake. I might make an exception for women genetically identical to myself (like sisters) – it’s a dictatorship, I can do that – but it’s the principle of the thing.

Lay off of the cake.

Dusk is real!

‘Sup homies, remember the Twilight Challenge? Yep, that’s the one; fame and riches to the intrepid adventurer willing to read and rewrite the Twilight “Saga”. This book, which up until recently existed only in potentia, was to be called Dusk.

You’ll be happy to know, however, that Dusk has in fact become a reality. The amazing Jennifer J. Randolph has taken my challenge to heart and actually begun to edit and rewrite Twilight into Dusk in a series of blog posts.

This shocks and impresses me. The power of the Internet: no matter what you propose, there’s someone, somewhere willing to do it. And that’s awesome.

In any case, I’m plugging this one until the end. You should read Chapter 1 right now.

http://jenniferjrandolph.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/twilight-challenge-the-beeginning/

http://jenniferjrandolph.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/twilight-challenge-the-beeginning/

http://jenniferjrandolph.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/twilight-challenge-the-beeginning/

http://jenniferjrandolph.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/twilight-challenge-the-beeginning/

On a more terrifying note, I remind you that the challenge is not over. If you think you could do better than Jennifer, then go ahead. The cash prize isn’t awarded for being the first one to get in, it’s awarded for being the most awesome.

That said, I think Jennifer’s got it down.

This post is dedicated to Jennifer J Randolph, the brave blogger reifying my desperate, sleep induced dream. May the force be with you.

What Easter means to me

I wrote this in a personal reflection essay about what Easter is. This, specifically, is the second paragraph, in which I was beleaguered into writing why Easter is important to me. I enjoyed writing this so much I thought I should share it with you:

In my family, Easter is an eminently important day; it symbolises the beginning of the modern era of the Thomas family. 258 years ago, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Semple Thomas’son (1738-1802), conceived my great-great-great-grandfather, Fröde Thomas’son (1795-1838) with my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Claudine Francine (1747-1832). This marked the end of their pirate war, which had been raging for 23 years in the North Atlantic Sea between Greenland and Denmark. It was only after both of their crews had been decimated that they realised they loved each other, and built up a thriving empire of piracy that lasted for seven prosperous years until 1802, when Semple was murdered in a duel with Carl Gustav, Prince of Sweden. As such, Easter marks the beginning of the family’s still active pirate empire.

I forgot to mention that we eat cod pie. Oops.

A Whole New World

[Note: Before I start, I'm pretty sure I've already written a blog post with that title, but this is MUCH more relevant.]

Yesterday, because Adelaide is currently in the midst of a celebration of arts called Fringe, I found myself accompanying my school to a day out at the Fringe Writers’ Week festival. At this festival I got to meet some writers and they talked about writing, foremost among them being Robert Shearman, the writer of the 2005 Doctor Who episode Dalek, and D.M. Cornish, the author of the Monster Blood Tattoo series. While Mister Shearman was most entertaining and informative, it is Mister Cornish about whom I now wish to speak.

The set of books written by D.M. Cornish, Monster Blood Tattoo, takes place in a fictional land called the Half Continent. This fictional land occupies about 6 square inches on a map on Mister Cornish’s wall that’s about 1000x800mm. The entire world, including the Half Continent, has a detailed history with its own dialect, its own quirks and its own traditions and it exists only within this series and 36 journals in which he writes about them.

Walking away from his talk, every single person from Blackfriars was vocally resolving to read his books. Why? Because that’s fucking amazing, that’s why. When I first read Terry Pratchett, I was amazed by the entire culture he’d created in his own head. Why? Because that’s fucking amazing, that’s why. When I read Harry Potter, I was most interested in all the effort J.K. Rowling had put into giving the Wizarding World a history, instead of just a present. Why? Because that’s fucking amazing, that’s why.

The amount of detail someone’s willing to put into their work is the difference between a great writer and a good writer. How real and immersive your would can be is how good your story will be.

As such, an unnamed friend of mine paralleled me in departing with a motive greater than just reading his books: we’re each going to create a world.

The coolest thing about a world is that it’s four dimensional. Imagine a conventional story: there can only be so many places to go and so many characters, and you can’t focus on all of them. It gets a little disappointing if you’d like to put something in and can’t because it wouldn’t fit. With a world like this, it’s different; because it has a past and a future as well, you can have every character you want. Not only that, you can put them in any period and have them affect the current story any way you like simply through what they did in their own time. You could even put them in a different country and give them a whole different cultural perception, change every single thing about them.

That’s the best thing about creating your own world: you can get lost in it. You can create a world so brilliantlyreal that you can do things there. What’s that you say, I sound insane? Well, there’s a solution to that, and that solution is go fuck yourself. To reiterate one of my greatest beliefs:

And so I will.

This post is dedicated to Terry Pratchett. As should be everything.

Addiction Addiction

The word ‘addiction’ is one that gets tossed around a lot these days. This is probably because addictions happen a lot these days. With the wide world of the internet out there, it’s not hard to get hooked on any old service. There’s Facebook and Twitter and WordPress and millions and millions of addictive games out there without even getting started on (you knew this had to come up) the porn.

People get addicted to any old thing. Mainly games and, for some stupid reason, social networking (seriously? An addiction to other people?), but they’ll just get addicted to some random spot on the internet and there it is.

Personally, I don’t get addicted to things as such. I only have two addictions that I can’t break, and the second one doesn’t count. The first one is the one I’m here to talk about today, because it’s apparently kind of odd:

I’m addicted to being addicted.

The phrase ‘addiction addiction’ may be becoming more clear to you by now. I assumed people would think it would be like a song line, and picture me singing ‘Addiction, addiction!’, with the ICOTS being ‘Free me from the fiction!’ or something else that makes more sense. But no, it’s an addiction to addiction.

If you don’t understand what that means, I’ll put it like this: I always need to be obsessed with exactly one thing. Anything to keep me occupied – but my addictions are fickle. I dump things and fly from one thing to another and then back. If the things I sequentially got addicted to were partners, I would be considered manipulative and probably not particularly good at it. That said, I don’t know how this particular personality trait of mine is going to affect any relationship I may one day have, because it’s a pretty fucky little thing.

If you don’t understand what I mean, I’ll explain chronologically with the things I’ve been addicted to since last Christmas:

1. Battlefield Heroes – I understandably got bored of this game because the definite majority of its players are shit-slurping douche-bags.
2. Hyperbole and a Half – I found this blog, I read everything this blog had ever posted, and then I slapped myself.
3. Doctor Cat MD – Having just finished the above blog, I was sent here by it. Same thing – find, read, ditch. It’s a little sad.
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – I was going swimmingly reading one of these a night, until I reached one I’d already read. Knowing that Hugh Boone and Neville St. Clair would be the same man was the start of the burnout on this one.
5. Minecraft – I’m way too good at this game to like it.
6. Game Maker – I’m doing a class on game creation at school, and I’m getting into it.
7. DOS – I found an emulator for DOS. Frankly, I have no idea why anyone ever felt the need to ditch it.
8. SMBC – Find, read, ditch.

What you may have understood is that I do something until I get bored of it, then desperately search for something else to do. Oddly enough, I can only do one at a time. I find it difficult to even listen to more than one band. The whole ‘one-track mind’ thing might be the cause of my lack of a social life.

But there’s one addiction, one obsession, that never goes away. The one that always comes back to bite me, the one that will invariably force me into action. Can you guess what it is?

No?

It’s writing.

And that bastard will never, ever leave me alone.

A letter to my computer

[Note: Check out my font, bitches: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/613853. I made it just for you.]

Baby, I’m Back!

If you give any minor amount of shits about my existence, you may have noticed that I’ve been largely silent recently. This is for two reasons:

1. I’m in one of those self-destructive, “everything I write is shit” moods.
2. I went back to school
   

   Basically.

The first one is pointless to fight; it’ll hang around me for the next few weeks until some part of me says, “Man up and write something, idiot.”

The second one is different. For the past two months or so I’ve been in the land of the heathen, a.k.a my lovely home. Now, everything’s different. I’m going to be in the sun, and there will be other people around me, and I’ll have to learn things. Don’t get me wrong, I love school. I love learning. Learning is the shit! If more people did that, we wouldn’t be in the herpes-infused shitstorm in which we are trapped at a worldwide level. Also, sentences wouldn’t be tautological (and needlessly repetitive) so very often and frequently. What I really don’t like about school (apart from, as previously said, the aforementioned tautology) is the people.

You know what I mean. Students. School students. Aren’t they all so irritating? It’s all, “I don’t need to know this shit,” and, “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to play Grand Theft Auto on our school laptops? Fuck this shit!” And you’re just tempted to say, “No, you shit-licker. We are here to learn. Now shut your overly fed mouth and listen.”

Unfortunately, you just have to get over that. It’s so common, you have to assume a sort of Zen thing about it. Don’t just learn… be learning.

This was the second Google result for Zen Learning, and is so completely relevant to both that I thought it merited place in this writing.

What this really means, though, is that I’ll probably write less. While such irritating people are great writing inspiration (you should see the emails I send home from my mum’s place), they aren’t conducive to a helpful writing environment. Mainly because they have this habit of reading over your shoulder.

So for the first time ever, I’m going to recommend the amazing: don’t expect me to say things.

Yeah, I’m unsettled too.

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This post is dedicated to schoolteachers. You poor, unfortunate, undeniably masochistic educators fight the good fight. Sort of.

We can never be together.

I have been wanting to write about Religion for a long time, but I never got around to it simply because it’s one of those things where you go ‘I don’t need all the bullshit that I’m going to get for this.’ Recently, however, the aforementioned Lovely Lizzie wrote about Religion and I thought, “Shit. If other people have the time and effort to put their thoughts about Religion on a page, what the hell am I waiting for?”

Please oh please can this go viral?

Because I don’t like Religion, oh no I don’t. I’ve been an atheist since I was about 7, although I didn’t know what an atheist was at the time. I just didn’t like the idea of having to give praise to someone I couldn’t see, hear, touch, feel or (no-God forbid) taste when I could be doing other things. Like, you know, growing into a child prodigy.

No, seven year old me did not have a fez, but I do now, and that's what counts.

I was not a modest child.

I didn’t have time to bother putting thought into my prayers. I could just sit there and consider the brainwashing as I was forced to repeat the same lines, over and over again. In fact, to show how far they got on me, let me show you some of these, that I remember by heart:

Those are quotes from Mass which were repeated in sync with 1,000 other people. Creepy? Yes.

The thing is, Religion always seemed so controlling. To be Religious, you must pray, you must go to Church, you must give praise to the Lord. They stick their noses into when, why and how you can have sex. You’re not even allowed to work on Sundays. Can you imagine how much more shit poverty would be if you couldn’t work on Sundays?

Beyond that, we have the Ten Commandments. Not guidelines, commandments. If you were telling someone about things they shouldn’t do, you might say something like this:

The Ten Commandments say this:

Little known Bible by-law: You are also prohibited from taking any action to get it. Including legal transaction. This means if you see something you want and buy it (including food, since it is unspecified and therefore ambiguous), God hates you and you will go to hell.

The Decalogue doesn’t say ‘look at the stuff, but don’t steal it’, it says ‘you are not allowed to think about it.’ Not only that, you can’t think about getting it or take action to get it. Religion controls your thoughts.

I would like this to go viral, too.

Religion, probably by design, makes people dependent. Needlessly so. I don’t hate Justin Bieber or Twilight that much, but it bothers me that people can become so obsessively dependent on something with no merits. The same goes for Religion. (And yes, I did just equate Beliebers and Twi-hards to Religion.) Only Religion is worse, because it’s a rich organisation with political power instead of millions of teenage girls.

I didn't make Cullenism up. I suspect it's like Mormonism, but a bit more fucked up.

But all of that is nothing in comparison to the thing that really pisses me off about Religion. The most irritating argument that Religious people make. You may have heard it. It goes like this:

So I’m here today to end that argument. Sorry, Religion, but science and you can’t be friends. If God invented science, he invented a logical system whose first act is to prove his non-existence (something I can’t help but relate to Davros and the Daleks). If God did this, then he’s trying to commit suicide.

Come on, this DESERVES to go viral. Also, apparently some people don't get it: That's Isaac Newton.

This only leaves one option which, if anything, is worse:

Religion won’t accept science. Religion will accept revised science.

I always imagined Newton's hair as thick and luscious. It had 50 times the average mercury concentration, did you know that?

It’s the only way they could let science into their brotherhood without tearing it apart at the same time. The only science going into Religion is one that has been slightly edited, and that’s worse than anything, because that’s how science stops being worth anything. Science is the search for truth, and if it has even one lie in it, then it is worth nothing.

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This post is dedicated to the Scientists tirelessly dedicating their lives to finding out the truth. Unlike Religion.

[Note: You may have at this point noticed that I have recently taken to drawing pictures. Thank you for your support in this difficult time. And yes, they're supposed to be that shit.]

The invincibility of mortality.

I’m here today to talk about something that I swear to God prevented me from sleeping for a full 45 minutes last night. Granted, most of that 45 minutes was a self-righteously imagined scenario of my funeral flooding with tears, but to the point:

What would you do if you were condemned to death?

And I don’t mean “I murdered thirteen newborns for the saviour of my soul and so I plead innocent” condemned to death, I mean “There’s a little bastard of a tumour creeping around on my body and at some indeterminate point in the future, it’s going to whip out its little tumour-gun and tumour-shoot me in the brain. Then it’s going to tumour-crap on my corpse.” Yeah, that kind of condemned to death.

The thing is, I read a short story last night (no, not the Sherlock Holmes stories that I’ve been reading… Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle isn’t this shoddy) in which someone was condemned in this very sense. They weren’t a major story point, which I see as a failing, but anyway, they said words to the effect of (this is paraphrasing) these ones:

Now that he was about to die, he felt his mortality more than ever. He felt more human than ever.

Blah, blah, mopey blah.

And that got me thinking. Well, most things get me thinking but this one, this one, really got to me in my heart. I mean, people always think it’s some death sentence, being sentenced to death, and that you have to be mopey, spend nine months in bed, and lose all sense of fun. Fuck that!

If I was going to die, I wouldn’t feel mortal – I’d feel invincible! I can do whatever the fuck I want! Remember those things, consequences? They’ve always been there, haven’t they. I can’t do this because I might get fired. I can’t do that because people would hate me. I can’t do the other because my sexuality would be heavily questioned. I can’t do the fourth because I’d get the shit knocked out of me. But you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore! Nothing you do can affect your future! It’s like moving house, only you won’t get angry e-mails once you’re gone. If I was condemned, I would do everything I wanted.

I could tell ‘the man’ what I thought of him…

The man is instantly identifiable by his old combover brown hair and 'compensator 9000' tie. Usually red.

Tell that special girl what I thought of her…

The woman is identifiable by a pink dress. It's always pink.

Say comforting things to my friends that could be misconstrued otherwise…

Friend is not wearing pants. This makes the misconstruition even easier.

And say to your bully things that would normally get you beaten up, but can’t because you’re dying…

Bully swears that Bully didn't do a THING to Bully's hair this morning.

Or maybe you can just dye your hair like you’ve always wanted to.

Like a lime on acid. Citric acid.

And in fact, you can even accidentally leave a crotch bulge in blog pictures you make and no one will give a shit.

But apart from all of that, apart from the complete removal of consequences from your life in the long term, people will just give you shit. To the limits of reason and a teensy bit further, you will be given whatever you ask for because people are fairly sure they’ll get it back after you die, or else you should just have it because you won’t ask for it again. This includes but is not limited to food, virginities, movies, services (non-sexual and other), dedications, meetings, money (less likely), pity, hugs and of course travel. You can go wherever the fuck you want, because Christ knows that you won’t go there again.

And, last of all, you’d get famous. Seriously famous. Everyone would want to know about the kid who, having been sentenced to death, lives like a rockstar. You’d be on the news and everyone would know you.

Really, it’s nothing like being given a year to live; it’s like being given a year to be immortal.

And I would like to finish with a quote from my dear mother.

Mum: [Talking about if I got asbestosis] 20 years away might seem like a long time now, but you’d regret it then.

Me: I don’t think I would.

Mum: That’s a very 14-year-old-boy thing to say.

And from this, we can infer three things:

1. Mum underestimates my ability to think about my own future.
2. Mum thinks I think like a 14 year old boy. (All sex jokes aside.)
3. Mum has no idea how I think.

And mum, like so many people diagnosed with death or thinking about people diagnosed with death, fails to realise that a year of immortality can hold so, so very much more living than a year of life.

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This post is dedicated to the brave citizens sentenced to death by disease every day. I hope that you can live like you’re immortal or, failing that, to not feel like you’re condemned. I also hope this wasn’t offensive, because it really wasn’t meant to be. I’m just annoyingly optimistic.

[Note: I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Lizzie, who can be found here, as she described the Mush Room as "Witty observations, self important rants, and just a little bit of pure genius from William." Lovely Lizzie also described me as her 'love interest'. It's totally reciprocal, and with good reason.]

[Second Note: No, I haven't been told I'm going to die, but thanks for the interest.]