Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What we have here is a classic case of very popular internet forum mindset – specifically, confusing the right to free speech with the right to act like a toolbag.

It’s trolling.

I’m serious – what else can you call it when a bunch of non-Muslims who live comfortable Western lives, and whose freedom of speech is not threatened in any way, deliberately and enthusiastically engage in an activity that they know will be offensive to others? Offensive to people who have never personally done anything to offend them?

It’s trolling of the highest order; textbook in execution, industrial in scale, and dripping with extra lashings of the misguided self-righteousness that only the greatest breed of troll – the unwitting – can summon.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. But let’s examine it in more detail.

Draw Muhammed Day has its roots in the Jyllands-Posten controversy of September 2005, during which the Danish newspaper of the same name printed twelve images of the prophet Muhammad. Some of these were deliberately offensive, depicting Muhammad as a terrorist and oppressor of women, and some were completely irrelevant. Needless to say a lot of Muslims found this offensive – as the newspaper knew and intended that they would – and a lot of protests followed. Some of these protests were completely outrageous, violent and disproportionate, which made it even easier for the “supporters of free speech” to convince themselves that they were doing the right thing and Muslims just “couldn’t take a joke”.

Then nothing much happened for a while, until April this year when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone received death threats through the Internet after they aired an episode depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. Complaints were submitted to Comedy Central and they pulled the episode from air.

Bad idea, Comedy Central. You upset the Internet.

Cartoonist Molly Norris created this cartoon espousing a “Draw Mohammad Day” as a joke and it caught on like wildfire, specifically across social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube. Norris was horrified the overtly racist overtones the “event” was quickly taking and immediately distanced herself from it, even going so far as to publicly condemn it, but it was too late. The Internet was angry, and there’s nobody who can take up a self-righteous cause and convince themselves that they’re making a difference like an anonymous man behind a computer screen.

So thousands and thousands of drawings began to flood in on May 20, the official “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day”. Some of them trying to be respectful. Some of them trying to be funny. Many, many of them trying and succeeding to be horrifically racist.

All of them offensive.

Doing something that you know will deliberately offend somebody else deeply proves nothing about free speech. If I went up to a man on the street and explained in great detail about how much of a syphilitic whore his wife was, I should expect that he should get angry about it. If I stroll through a funeral parlour during a moving service, farting wildly and shouting about how the deceased enjoyed carnal relations with donkeys, I should expect that those people at the service would get angry about it. And if I tried to say, as they advanced upon me with murderous rage, that I was just exercising my right to free speech and they should all get over it, I highly doubt that would carry any weight at all. They would be finding small pieces of my body clogging nearby drains.

Yet apparently, knowing that Muslims believe visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad to be deeply blasphemous and then doing it anyway, it is okay to act surprised and say “Woah Muslims, get over it, free speech lol”.

Having the right to free speech also comes with the responsibility of knowing when to exercise it meaningfully and respectfully. Yes, I have the right to put pen to paper and draw the prophet Muhammad. But I have the responsibility to realise the effect my actions will have on others who share this society with me, and I choose not to exercise that right. I’m willing to put money down, that nobody who took part in Draw Muhammad Day has a single Muslim friend in real life. It’s easy to deliberately upset people on the Internet, but it’s not so easy to have to look your friend in the eye the next time you meet, knowing that you’ve deeply offended them and their beliefs.

The only thing that Draw Muhammad Day has conclusively proved is that some people don’t deserve the right to free speech. And that it’s easy to drape yourself in moral righteousness and confrontational attitudes from behind the safety of a computer screen. I should know.

I’m not trying to upset anybody who took part in or supported Draw Muhammad Day. I’m just exercising my right to respectful and well-meaning free speech.

Oh, and before anybody jumps in with the well-worn line about “But we show pictures of Jesus all the time and Christians don’t get angry!”, stop for a moment and consider that it’s not actually blasphemous to depict Jesus under the tenets of the Christian religion. In fact it’s encouraged.

That said, I’d be interested to see how any Christians who took part in Draw Muhammad Day would react, if there was a “Draw Jesus Fucking A Dog” day. Free speech indeed.

But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so click here and enjoy.

Finally, after eight long months, our time here is finally coming to an end. And now, as is my wont, instad of focussing on coming home, I’ve started worrying about all the things I never got around to doing. And all the things that I want to do before I leave. Y’know, the ones I probably won’t do because of Christmas, and the fact that I’m sick AGAIN.

Like seeing Maddie. Man, I meant to call her and email her so many times, and I put it off and put it off. And seeing Greg! What was that all about, huh! At least he came to my surprise party, which was, you could say, a huge surprise. And Kate. Oh, Katie. Kate left for Africa about the time that I arrived, and came back about a week or two ago. So I haven’t had a lot of time to see her either. And Nidhi! She’s not even in the country, I believe, which is sad.

I am a bad person.

Tim threw me a surprise party the other day, which was the best thing ever. He was all “We’re gonna go out to dinner for your birthday!” And I’m all “Yay!” So he blindfolds me, and Sarah drives us to the place (our car was unavailable, long story). It took about forty-five minutes, and I got completely lost. I had a good idea where we were for a lot of the time, but then she started taking some turns that were totally weird and I lost track of where we were. Anyway, we got there, and they were leading me toward the place, and they take off my blindfold and we’re BACK HOME. Man, I was so weirded out! I thought it was a big joke, that Tim was going to be all “Just kidding, I forgot to bring something, NOW we leave” but then we went inside and all my friends were waiting for me!

It was the best thing.

In hind sight, I’d been pretty dumb about the whole thing. There were a lot of clues I could’ve picked up on that I didn’t until it was too late. Such as the fact that nobody had asked me if or when I was having a party, and the fact that Mum had started cleaning the house for grandma’s annual visit more than a week in advance. But oh well! Maybe I was just sub-conciously willing to go along with it. In any case, I have the most wonderful friends, and the most wonderful Tim.

Speaking of cleaning, the other day Tim and I were cleaning out the back room of all my stuff accumulated over the last 23 years. We found some pretty cool stuff, and gave a lot of things to charity, so we felt really good about it all at the end of the day. We finally organised all our boxes to ship home, which cost substantially more than last time, but we have like, twice the boxes to ship home now. One less computer though!

In fact, neither of the computers we shipped over are getting shipped back. Weird.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is, we found a lot of neat stuff, including some old journals and draft books from school. I would like to share some of the entries with you, ’cause they are weird and awesome. Debari, you love my stories, right? You are gonna LOVE these.

14/2/96

Last monday, Parent teacher night Anastasia came over to my house while my brother babysitted us. My mum and her mum were going to see our teacher. Anastasia brought over a game called Bean ball and a video called “Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and the seaworld mysteries

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen? What kind of satanic monster was I as a child! Also, my brother is not that much older than me, I find it weird that he would be allowed to babysit us on our own. We could’ve taken him.

1/3/96
Today is Clean up Australia day for our school. Year four cleaned up coral park and me and Georgia got to rake up leaves.

The exciting peak of a ten-year-old life.

16/4/96
In the holidays I went to Cannberra (sic), and there was a whale exhibition. And on April fools day a man said an Orca Whale has escaped through the sewer system and through to Lake Burley Griffen (sic) and everybody believed it INCULDING ME! (sic) So the day after we went to see it be cudent see it. And on the news that night we saw it was a joke.

I’m not going to bother putting (sic) in anymore. Just assume they aren’t my fault. Anyway, a whale. In the sewer. I can believe I fell for that, but everyone else? Weird.

The next one is one of my favourites! It is a story.

28/10/96
Every evening the young Fisherman went out upon the sea and threw his nets into the water. He would stay there for an hour then pull up his nets and go home. One night he was waiting while his nets were down catching the fish, when he heard a swooshing in the water. He looked into the black looking water and he saw movement. “Probably just a school of fish” he thought. Then a huge sea-monster came and ate the boat and everything else.

Good ending, little me! “Uhh, uhh, uhh, a sea monster! Ate everything! Yeah.”

The rest are from my draft book, so they mostly aren’t finished. Still good reads though!

The Three little wolves
Once upon a time there lived four wolves. One of course was their mum. One day the time came when the young wolves had to go out into the world. Their mother said “you can have a house made of anything you like, so what would you like?” The first wolf said “Bricks!” the second wolf said “Iron!” the third wolf (who was rather dopey) said “uh… fibrocement?” (As an adult, I don’t actually know what fibrocement is, assuming it exists. Mmm.)  So their mother payed someone to make three houses, Bricks, Iron, Fibrocement. (if only life were so simple) So the next day they moved into their new houses but before each wolf moved in their mum told them about a monstrous pig who ate wolves raw. But they still went in to their houses. The next day, the pig came to the fibrocement house “let me in little wolf, it just your mother.” The little wolf looked out the window and replied…

WHO KNOWS WHAT HE REPLIED!?!?! He probably just got et anyway. Honestly, fibrocement. I have no idea where I pulled that one from. But if you think THAT was weird, the following is a short excerpt of a story that I, unfortunately, never finished, because DAMN, I would’ve liked to see where it ended up.

The Iron Man – The Final Chapter
It was two years after the Iron Man had won against the space-bat-angel-dragon. He was thinking of jumping into the sea for a swim when suddenly Hogarth…

Space… bat… angel… dragon. Space-bat-angel-dragon. Spacebatangeldragon. Or perhaps its the space-bat, named Angel-Dragon. But I don’t think so.

Oh man, I missed this one, and it’s great!

My painting
My picture is a sunset. I decided to do a sunset because I thought it would look good. I proved myself wrong.

Oh man. Low self-esteem is an artform.

This last one (promise) is the only full story in here, and it’s dumber than hell. Man, I was a dumb kid.

Lost………
I’m 13 years old and my name is Peter Bruen and I’m on holidays with my family. We are at a clearing in the forest and we’ve set up camp. I am lieing in my tent dreaming………”Peter, hurry up and her out here, NOW!” My mum’s voice shatters my dreams. “What do you want” I yawned pretending I was asleep, “Can you please get some fire wood?” “Get Elizabeth to do it, I WAS asleep.” “You expect a three year old girl to do it?”

O.K., thanks mum, I’m lost now, I’m going to kill her when I get home. What’s this? I’ve found a huge cave. My god, what’s that noise, A BEAR. My only escape is to go into the cave.

Deeper and deeper I go. Somebody definately been here before, because I just found a door. Opening door. Ahhhh… What a light! A crystal, it nearly blinded me, I’ve got to break that thing. Breaking.

A genie! “You have one wish” he said “I want to get back to my camp, with lots of twigs.” “You got it” he said.

I have twigs. I am home.

Yep. I don’t know if I wrote in present tense cause I was trying to be all clever, or  it was just ’cause I didn’t know what I was doing. But yep! That’s this episode of “Dumb Things I Wrote When I was 10″.

Bah-byeee

I was reading through the archives of my old blog the other night, and it left me with a desire to put finger to keyboard again. What’s more, I yearn for the days when I blogged about whatever popped into my head while I was writing as well. My fingernails are inconveniently long for typing on my lappy keyboard though, so I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it.

Also, Tim last post was a monstrosity of a comment magnet, and quite frankly, it’s time to get that beast offa the top of the page.  Seriously, he wrote that post like a month ago, and he’s been getting like a comment a day lately. From people in America. We’re not sure where its been linked, but it must’ve been linked somewhere, ’cause these are all people we’ve never heard of. At least, I’VE never heard of them. And Tim SAYS he’s never heard of them. So if I find some sort of secret other family on the other side of the world, I’m gonna be pretty pissed, lemme tell a whut.

Specially since whenever I ask “do you have a secret other family” or “are you gay” he specifically says no. So, y’know, its not one of these “well, you didn’t ASK if I had a secret other family!” cases. ‘Cause I asked!

We watched The Sound of Music last night. Another movie, along with Mary Poppins that I haven’t seen since I grew up and started to learn what things are. Things like Nazis, and the division between Nazi Germany and Austria, and y’know, hills. The hills are ALIVE. You’ll never catch me taking an innocent stroll up a hill again, no sir.

It has been an interesting trip down nostalgia road though. It’s surprising to learn how much you actually missed as a child, and yet you sort of thought you knew what was going on anyway?

Also, have you ever thought about that Max character? The one who puts them in the concert at the end? Might as well rename him Plot D. Vice. I guess they probably left him in there from the actual story, but still! He’s a giant deus ex machina from start to finish. “I’m here for no reason at all really, and here I am putting your children in a concert you didn’t want them in and oops, saved your lives did I? Two birds with one stone and all that.”

We’ve been watching a lot of movies since we came here. A lot. We basically ran out of movies that we were actually interested in a month or two after we got here, and just started renting things that looked vaguely interesting. Some worked, some not so much.

I convinced Tim to let me get out 2001: A Space Oddesey the other night. Man, what a great… not so much movie but… book companion? I don’t want to be one of those elitist jerks that’s all “Oh, the book was SO much better than the movie!” ‘Cause its really not true! Did you know the book and the movie were made at the same time? So I really like to think that the book is just sort of the film’s explanation, and the film is the book’s visual companion. You can’t really appreciate one without the other? Sort of?

Anyway, I love those books. The other day in Kinokuniya, Tim bought me the first one again, since the older copies we had have been, let’s say, lost to time? It is still totally great.

And we’ve been watching a LOT of NCIS. We’ve made it through just about 5 seasons now. I honestly thought I’d watched more when it was on TV, but apparently I watched less than a single season! Who knew, right? Now I’ve seen every episode on DVD! Wooo!

I have a personal fantasy now of having Gibbs as a father. I think that would’ve been pretty much have been the best thing in the world. He’s so infallible and protective and, sigh! I’m seriously considering inviting him to my wedding so he can give me away. But only if he comes in his marine duds. Yeeeeeah, that’d be pretty sweet alright. I bet he’d come too! For the novelty.

Maybe not.

Yeah, we’ve been pretty bored here. Not bored like we have nothing to DO. We have plenty of video games, and lots of my friends around and things, and lots of movies! But bored sort of like… what are we doing here? Why is our life on hold? Why even get out of bed today, I don’t have anything to do.

I’ve been managing to keep myself awake all day these days, and sleep really well at night, getting up at a reasonable hour, and no naps during the day and whatnot. But its becoming a struggle. I have all these hours to fill, no car, no money, no energy. It was okay the first couple of days, ’cause we would do things to keep me awake. We went into the city one day, another day, Tim set me tasks that I had to complete in a day. But I can’t rely on Tim to keep me awake every day. I need something that I can actually fill my time up with. But I just can’t get that here. I’m totally in limbo.

What really scares me is, I sort of blame it on being here, but then I think, well, what would I do differently in Perth? I tell myself that I could get a job in Perth, that when I get back I’ll be doing uni again, but I just don’t know. Maybe I’ve just become bored with myself.

Wow, that’s depressing.

You know what else is depressing? Heavy things! When they’re on you! Geddit!

I’m having an early birthday on Saturday. Not only did my beautiful friends back in Perth send me an incredible present, namely, two tickets to see Dream Theater, but Sarah has said she is taking me out birthday shopping! I’m not 100% sure what to expect of that, but she’s promised to spoil me, and I don’t know how to stop her. She wouldn’t take no as an answer! So I’m pretty excited! I’m having this great pre-birthday birthday! Then a week later it’s real birthday time!

I don’t know what to expect of that either, ’cause I doubt my brother has remembered or has time to come over for dinner or anything, so when Mum says she wants to do a “family thing” I mean, just what the hell IS that? Frankly I think I’d be better off going out with Tim somewhere. It’s easier to organise, there’ll be less fighting, we’re likely to have more fun. But there’s this weird obligation thing with your parents. I mean, I’m sure it started out being like “Oh I want to be with my family for my birthday!” but then it sort of became “Please pretend like you want to spend your birthday with us to make us feel better about ourselves as a family” or something. I don’t even know. It’s not like I don’t want to spend a nice evening out with my family, it just never works out to BE a nice evening. Dad drinks too much, talks too much, Chris disagrees with something he says, Mum and I back him up, Dad takes offense, we all agree to be civil while in public, we get home and everyone’s angry, Chris and Hannah leave, Dad goes to bed, and Mum cries, probably. If there were just some way to… shut them all up. Yep. Good person, I know, right?

Fact is, Tim and I get along like a house on fire, there are never any awkward silences, we always have something to say that the other will find interesting and engaging and funny, and we enjoy the same things and all that. Y’know, everything that makes us a great couple. And I find that the time I spend with him, makes time I spend with my dysfunctional family all the more bitter. It’s like eating delicious bread and butter everyday of your life, and then discovering gourmet pizza or something. You still like the first one, but you’ve just had SO much of it, and here’s something so much MORE delicious.

Weirdest analogy ever. And tangent, really. You all know how much I like Tim, I don’t have to blog about it.

Long story short, I can’t wait to come back to Perth. I can’t expect everything to be the way I left it, but I hope it still welcomes me back.

Also, my brother is moving to Switzerland. Don’t get me started on this.

Little did I know, when we undertook this labour of love, that this would be the very thing that would cause me to lose my own job with Games Workshop.

You see, while we were waiting for the seller, I took the opportunity to converse with and get to know the manager and staff at the Newcastle Games Workshop store. We chatted about this and that, about how their store was doing, what it was like to work at my store up at Castle Towers. We got along. When they asked me what brought me down this way, I gleefully exclaimed – over the moon as I was – about how I was finally going to pick up these Ork books that had eluded me all these years, and that I had arranged to use their store as a meeting point with my eBay seller.

It turns out this was a huge mistake. Because you see, the first thing that the Newcastle manager did upon seeing my manager at last week’s manager’s conference, was to step over and inform him that one of his staff – he even remembered my name for the occasion – had used his store as a meeting point to purchase goods over eBay.

Apparently the fact that the item in question was an out of print supplement from eighteen years ago and that eBay is the only place it can be found was irrelevant: I, a Games Workshop staff member, had purchased Games Workshop goods from eBay and was publicly announcing it at a Games Workshop store.

The Newcastle manager also went on to add that I had “acted like a smartass” by discussing the Ten Commandments of Customer Service with him and his staff. Specifically, when I was first approached by him, I congratulated him on completing the First Commandment (“Acknowledge and approach everyone who enters the Hobby Centre”) and introduced myself as a fellow employee. Now I don’t know if Newcastle has some fucked-up personal definition of “smartass” but where I come from, that’s called breaking the fucking ice. Finding common ground. Starting a conversation.

At the time he laughed and we got along fine, as did the other staff member whom I had roughly the same conversation with. I was not to know that the hypnotic conditioning in his brain had kicked into overdrive, and that my name, rank and serial number were being filed away to be reported later.

After spending maybe ten or fifteen minutes in store, I realised the seller was late and decided to go stand outside to look for him. I made my excuses and left; not knowing that when this whole story would be reported to my manager, the ending would be completely fucking rewritten to the Newcastle manager asking me to leave the store.

I had no idea of any of this at the time; in fact I had no idea up until today, over two weeks later when Jess and I went into my store to do some painting. My manager had asked me to come in so he could speak to me personally before he drew up the roster for the week. I jokingly asked when I arrived if I was being fired. He looked at me sadly and said “Yes”.

After having the whole ridiculous farce of a situation (complete with bonus alternate ending courtesy of the Newcastle manager) explained to me, he went on further to add that in any case he didn’t think I was a very good “fit” with Games Workshop – primarily, because I was not loud and energetic enough. You see it’s very important, at Games Workshop, that you make the hobby fun and exciting – which according to the company policy, means shouting all the time, something I struggle with. And Games Workshop take their shouting their “fit” very seriously; through some contacts, I’ve actually had the chance to read the Little Red Book, which is the top-secret management handbook written by the CEO of Games Workshop himself, Tom Kirby.

At the time of my hiring, I mentioned to my manager that I possessed this illicit knowledge. Recalling this fact, he used it to illustrate why I was being fired.

You see that top left corner? That, he explained, was where I was. Talented, yes, but not a good fit. “You’ve read the book, Tim,” he said, “You know what Games Workshop policy is about this.” Oh yes, I do.

When it comes right down to it, I still don’t know why I was fired. I can see why I might have been told it wasn’t working out a few months from now and perhaps asked gently to leave, or just quietly given less and less shifts until I quit of my own accord. But fired?

If enjoying the Games Workshop universe enough to collect all their sourcebooks is a crime, if trying to find common ground with other Games Workshop staff through entirely reasonable conversation is a crime, if being loyal veteran of fourteen goddamn years is a crime, then lock me the fuck up, you guys. Because I will re-offend.

–

UPDATE: Holy shit that’s a lot of comments. If you’re reading this, could you please leave me a comment showing me where this is being linked from? I’m dying to know. Thanks!

But this extended period, I feel, has put me in a unique position to champion the rights and protest the injustices that are done to these poor L-platers, myself included.

Since we came to Sydney, my parents have given Tim and I use of my Mum’s car, as long as she isn’t working. This is very kind of her! It’s given Tim and I a lot of freedom, such as it is, to be able to get out of the house when we’re developing some nasty cabin fever. Until recently, I was doing all of the driving in these situations, as Tim has his full license, so can be my supervisor, and it was thought that he was unable to drive our tiny car. So, as you can imagine, I’ve had even more time lately to come to realise just what a large percentage of full-licensed, and -gasp!- P-platers hate and overtly look down on these poor people who are, for the most part, teenagers, who are just beginning to learn the ropes of being in a very serious, and sometimes difficult situation.

I can think of numerous occasions in which I feel I was being looked down on as a learner-driver. I have been tailgated, as we all have. But I can guarantee you, not in the frequency that I have been recently. People will push behind you, no matter what speed you are doing, simply because, as they see it, if I’m an L-plater, I can’t POSSIBLY be going the speed limit, so without checking their speedometers just speed up to what they feel is the correct speed. In suburban streets this can potentially be VERY dangerous. On a one-lane road, where the speed limit is 50, I’m doing 60, and you’re pushing me to do 70 behind me, if a kid ran out in front of me, I might not be able to stop in time, and quite frankly, I’m so distracted by you that I might not even SEE them in time. And let me tell you, that sort of shit is NOT going to hold up in court OR my conscience. “Please, your Honour, I only killed that kid because the person behind me was pressuring me to go faster! I thought it would be okay!” Lemme tell ya, buddy. It’s not.

But as soon as I follow this mental path to its horrible conclusions and slow down, they start getting MORE aggressive. More aggressive? Where the hell are you going in such a hurry that you can’t get down this road 10 seconds slower?

The same sort of attitude is proven on three-lane highways and such as well. We have a very busy, very arterial road quite close to our house, that we find ourselves travelling along on a regular basis. I’ll be a- cruisin’, perhaps or perhaps not for a-bruisin’, at about 70, which is the speed limit, or because, as I admitted before, I do go a little too fast sometimes, MAYBE 75-80. Please don’t trace this blog and arrest me, officers! But lo-and-behold! The same bullshit attitude from before! Only this time, they have the room to do something about it. So, after tailgating me for a minute or so, they’ll over take me, right, and get this, right, right, this is the good bit, they’ll check their speedo and then SLOW DOWN.

Maybe I’m a little over sensitive, but seemed to me you just overtook me BECAUSE I AM AN L-PLATER. I am doing the same speed as everyone else. I am doing the same speed as YOU. But no, no, I’m probably a crappy driver, right, so you just GOTTA get in front. To be fair, aren’t I more likely to misjudge the distance when braking and hit you from behind, than slow suddenly and have you do the same? It just doesn’t make sense. And yet, people do it. It’s pure aggression. This has happened to me on many occasions.

What finally drove me to write this rant was an event that occurred last Saturday, as I drove Tim up to Newcastle, some 2 hours drive, to pick up an eBay item. It was cool, we both wanted to go, thought we’d make a day of it. Now, going back a few weeks there was some, uh, trouble, with a federal police officer, in which I recieved a speeding ticket while hurrying down to Canberra to see my renal- and heart-failing grandmother. I don’t wanna make excuses, honestly, I felt like the ticket was justified, even if Tim and my Mum didn’t. I just felt the dude could’ve been a little more lenient considering the circumstances. Which were, in particular, apart from my hospital bound grandma, that I was doing under 110 in a 110 zone, I’ve had my license for something like 4 or 5 years, AND everyone around me was going much faster. This was what annoyed me the most. I had been flashed at, tailgated, all kinds of things, by people who were really speeding. 120, 130, I don’t even know. But because I was an L-plater, and thus, MY speedlimit was supposedto be limited to 80, I got pulled over, I got the ticket. If I’d just removed my L-plates, like so many others I know who would’ve, no-one would’ve ever known.

But I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details. As I said, I felt like I deserved it, but the dude could maybe have been less of a dick about it. But the point was, I got a speeding ticket. Now, again, going back to the weekend of the Newcastle roadtrip, the speedlimit was 110. “Screw that!” thought Jess, “I’m not getting another ticket!” So I dutifully remained at 80, maaaaaybe 90 when I got really frustrated, for the entire trip. So, there I was, being a good, law-abiding L-plater, when some BITCH comes up behind me. I’m going sooooooo slowly, she thinks, so what can I do about it? The bitch starts flashing her headlights at me, and making hand gestures behind me. Not flipping me off or anything, just frustrated. I speed up to 95. “What do you want me to do, lady?” I think to myself, “I’m already speeding!” Finally this FIRST-CLASS BITCH gets the message that, no, I’m not going any faster for you, and overtakes me, speeding past me at what I can only assume is LIGHT-SPEED. I promptly flip her off, and begin grumbling to myself. Does she REALLY have to get to the beach in that kind of hurry? It took millions of years to form, lady, I think it’ll still be there if you take an extra twenty minutes.

Of course, I apologise if she really did have some emergency to get to. But consider her actions against mine in the previous scenario. Going to Canberra, we DID have an emergency to get to. We had no idea what condition my grandmother was going to be in when we arrived. If she’d even still be alive. And so, I was speeding as well, according to my plates. Not even going over everyone else’s limit! But never once did I harass any of the learners who were slowing me down by sticking to 80. Or the older cars and vans that just couldn’t go that fast. I overtook them if I had an opportunity, and I waited behind them if I didn’t.

And who gets the penalty? Me. Cause I didn’t lie, and take off my L- plates.

What really shits me, though, right, is the red P-platers. For those playing in Perth, we have two P-plates here. Red and green. Haha, yep, green Ps, gets funnier everytime. So you do your multiple choice test to get your Ls, do a ridiculous amount of hours, and six months to get your red Ps, a hazard perception test and another year to get your green Ps, and then some… other test? Or something? And another 2 years to get your full license.

So, let me remind you that I’ve been driving pretty steadily for what I’m going to call… 4 years? 4 years. At least. Four. Years. Let’s do the maths here, shall we? Assuming they all advanced as soon as the time limit was up, that takes 3 and a half years to get your full license. What I’m getting at here is that, I don’t really count the green Ps, ’cause that could be close time-wise, but almost ANY time I see a red P-plater tailgaiting me, or giving me guff for not going as fast or as… I don’t even know, as THEY want… chances are, I’VE BEEN DRIVING LONGER THAN THEM. I have MORE experience on the road than them. Going back to my introduction, it’s not like I can’t pass these tests. I just haven’t. But they assume, incorrectly, that I can’t drive just because I have my Ls. I have been driving since you were a tweenie, whippersnapper!

At this point, to Tim’s dismay, and others, I suspect, I’d like to use a Ctrl-Alt-Delete reference to illustrate my point. I won’t actually link it, mind, but I’ll give you the gist. Try to keep up.

It essentially described the difference, in online gaming, between ‘n00bs’ and ‘newbies’, ‘n00bs’ basically being gamers who are just, well, tools, and should be taught NOT to be tools, in whatever ways are most effective, mostly harassment; while ‘newbies’ are potentially valuable members of the gaming community who are simply trying to learn the rules and flow, structurally and socially, of a particular game, and should be encouraged and taught, that they might benefit the community once they get the hang of it.

Now, let’s apply this analogy to the world of learning to drive, shall we?

Harrassing L-platers is just WRONG. They aren’t doing anything, for the most part, I assume, to actively hurt you, or inconvenience you in any way. Just the opposite, in fact. If you see an L-plater going a little slow it’s not because they’re using their L-plates as an excuse just to piss you off. They are doing it because they just don’t feel SAFE driving that fast yet. If you tailgate, if you flash your lights, you are sending entirely the wrong message to a person who is new to this driving thing. People take driving for granted. It is NOT a videogame. If you hit someone, if you hit something else and injure or kill yourself or a passenger, you CANNOT just reload and try again. Next time you feel like a learner just isn’t going fast enough for you, imagine your son or daughter, or little cousin Beckie or that adorable little kid nextdoor that you always wanted to play with but never had a chance, imagine them running out in front of an L-plater, imagine them being killed, and imagine them turning to you and saying “I was being tailgated, what could I do?”

That is NOT the correct answer. And it is NOT setting a good example for these newbies. What goes around comes around. It isn’t karma, it’s just a fact. You give these learners shit now, when they’re the full licence holder, how many do you think will say to themselves “I’ll just relax and take it easy, I remember what it was like being a learner.” Not too goddamn many. They will relish the chance to get back some of what they took when they were teenagers. And maybe that’s why we’re in the position we are now. Someone’s gotta break the cycle, and just goddamn RELAX. Driving is serious, but it’s also fun. Just chill, listen to the radio, think of all you’re going to do today, or what you’re coming home to, and just relax.

I think I’ve been a little all over the place, I was basically just writing as it was coming. But I hope you all don’t mind my ranting. It’s just something that’s been getting to me a lot lately. Oh man, and I totally forgot the time I accidentally left the L-plates off, and before realising I’d done so, mentioned to Tim how “reasonable” and “patient” everyone was being today. True story. Coincidence? I think not.

So, at the risk of sounding a little preachy, next time you see a learner driver, just relax and remember, they’re only newbies.

Well, these people don’t know shit. Let me tell you a story about yesterday, Thursday 1st October 2009. The 100% official, swear-to-god, worst day, ever.

It all began with the arrival of a package from back home. Jess and I have a wedding to attend here in Sydney, you see, and I cleverly left all of my formal clothes back in Perth. My parents were good enough to attend to my needs and send them over, but in my infinite wisdom I left it until the last minute, and indeed told them to send the wrong trousers.

With the wedding on Saturday, there was no time to get them to send over the correct ones. We decide to quickly run out to Target and get some new trousers, foregoing showers in our rush to do so. It is quickly warming up to be a stinking hot day, and my nose responds appropriately by deciding it is going to drip relentlessly throughout all of it. We are tired, sniffly, unwashed, sweaty, hot, and probably coming down with a cold. And we’re only just getting started.

We have organised to meet up with Sarah, Saturday’s bride-to-be, at her house. She is going to hang out with Jess and keep her company while I go into work three hours early (to what is only a three hour shift in the first place) to organise my cash-register login details and learn how to use the thing to actually sell products to customers. I am led to believe this is an important part of retail work. I am told this will only take about half an hour.

Thanks to Target, we are able to pick up pants quickly and easily, and then pick up Sarah. We are late and stressed, but that’s okay. A quick tour of her house follows and then we are off to the shopping centre in which I work. I leave the two lovely ladies in the food court and saunter off to work, arriving on time and expecting to jump straight in to training and learning.

Instead, I find that the assistant manager who organised the whole thing is off sick. The actual manager is on the phone, just back from holidays, and continues to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes while I kill time in the store. When I am actually able to speak to him, he professes confusion and says he is trying to organise my login details now, but it needs to be done synchronously with an IT Guy in head office and that said IT Guy may not be free to do it for up to an hour.

Enraged, I ask what “it” actually involves. It turns out I am just going to have to speak to the Guy to provide a password for my cash-register logon. I say that this is crazy: if I just need to talk to the Guy on the phone, he can call me on my mobile anytime, and exit the store saying that I will be back when my shift starts. By this time it has been forty-five minutes and absolutely nothing has been done, though I have taken a peek at my upcoming hours for October – which were promised to be “pretty intense” due to the school holidays, only to discover that October sees me working a whole six extra hours, in total.

Sarah needs to get back to her house, so we take her home. Once we get there, I receive a frantic call saying that I need to be back in the store because the policy is that I need to speak to the IT Guy on the store phone, while being physically located in the store. Jess and I swear violently and leave Sarah’s house to go back to the shopping centre. On the way back, I flip through the Myer gift registry for the Saturday wedding (something else we left until the last minute). Once we get to the centre, I toss the registry on the dashboard in the car and forget about it. This is important.

I head into work, still with over half an hour until my shift is to start, and begin to finally learn the things I need to learn. Jess waits around in the store for a while, and then decides to go down to Myer and grab some gifts for the wedding from the gift registry. The layout of the shopping centre means that Myer is about a ten minute walk away. She makes this journey only to realise that I have left the gift registry in the car, and hikes back again to accurately inform me that I am a cocksucker and she is going to go read in the car, and get gifts later.

When she gets to the car, the growing heat of the day has made it fairly uncomfortable to be in, even in the covered carpark. She reads for a while and then decides to use her laptop, which uses its blast-furnace like heat output to turn the inside of the car into a tiny sauna. Sweating in rage, she flees the car and decides to head down to Myer again. When she finally gets there, she discovers that Myer’s catalogue is mind-fuckingly insane and the products on the gift registry either do not exist, are wildly more expensive than listed, or are available, but only in damaged boxes.

Meanwhile, at work, I have actually sneezed so hard I split my lip open along some sort of geostructural fault line. It bleeds profusely and continues to bleed for about two hours, or almost all the remainder of my shift. Combined with my running nose, I am being slowly driven insane. My shift ends and I flee the premises towards Myer. It is 8:30 PM and the shopping centre is closing up. I trundle towards Jess at top speed.

We meet up and she regales me with tales of shittiness, while I continue to apologise profusely for leaving the gift registry in the car. We realise we are both hungry, and decide to get some corn-in-a-cup (it’s delicious, and nutritious!) from the nearby corn store, only to be informed that the corn store is out of corn – in fact the last corn-in-a-cup was just sold to the customer before us. We turn to the bubble tea place a few metres away, and desperately ask to order bubble tea. Unfortunately, they are out of pearls and in fact, they only just sold their last bubble tea.

By this point every second word coming out of our mouths is a furious expletive. We rage over to the food court and get in line at KFC for some “Mashies”, because we both want to try them. Unfortunately it appears that KFC was staffed exclusively by vacuous morons that night, as we were left in line for ten minutes and completely, blatantly ignored by no less than four counter staff before being served. In fact we were ignored to the point that the lady who queued up behind us was pulled out of the queue up to the front counter and served ahead of us.

In keeping with the pattern established today, the woman orders Mashies. In fact she wants a large one. And it just so happens that there was only enough left in the warmer to fill a large box. Jess ragequits the queue. I stand there out of spite, forcing them to serve me and make up an entire fresh batch for me. This takes another ten minutes.

We finally get our Mashies and head back to the car. They’re not even very good. In fact they sort of taste funny, but I am fucking ravenous as I have not eaten since 2:00 PM and scarf down all of them. On the way home, we remember that we need to get petrol, and pull into a service station.

Jess goes to fill up the car, only to realise the pump has malfunctioned and backfired, soaking the side of the car, the ground and her skirt with petrol. A lot of petrol. Things just keep getting better. I go inside to pay, while she heads off to the service station toilet to try and dilute the petrol with water and wash as much of it off as possible. I pay and head back out to the car, only to receive a surprise phonecall from Jess: “You know how this is the worst day ever,” she says. “Well, I’m locked in the fucking toilet.”

Locked in the fucking toilet.

I run inside to the counter and explain the situation to the clerk, who throws me a key and says something about “they’ve been having trouble with that door”. Taking the key, I run over to the toilet and try to open it. The key doesn’t fit in the lock as it has been damaged. The handle won’t turn, and the door barely gives. Jess and I have to shout to hear each other as trucks are barreling by on the road ten metres away. Eventually we are able to communicate that there is no fucking way to unlock this door, and I just begin repeatedly yanking at it, trying to force it open. Empowered perhaps by adrenaline, or a dreadful resentment at the universe, I wrench the door open, mangling the lock beyond repair and freeing Jess.

Taking the key back inside, I try and explain what happened to the clerk again, who only shrugs and says “Yeah, that door is pretty broken”, explaining that they reported it to head office weeks and weeks ago but nothing has been done about it. This does not exactly placate us but there isn’t really anything we can do, so we storm out, to finally go home.

Once we get home, we finally sit down and relax for a few hours, thinking that the day is finally over. But the fates have one last surprise in store for us: when I go to return Jess’s mum’s bank keycard to her, I can’t find it. Anywhere. We search the room, the car, the driveway, the garage. It is nowhere to be found. Up until now were starting to come to terms with the day, as all the shitty things that had happened had only affected us. But now, on top of all this, we had lost the keycard.

We pile into the car and drive out to the service station, thinking it must, surely, have come out of my pocket during my frenzied wrenching of the toilet door to free Jess. The clerk we talked to before has gone home and the new guy doesn’t know of any cards that have been handed in, and we can’t find it anywhere searching around the grounds of the station.

Desolate, and truly fucking infuriated, we return home, only to find the keycard lying on the floor under a pile of clothes.

Worst.

“Wow! That’s incredible! It looks like something straight off a, uh. Hrm.”

“You were going to say desktop, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Goddammit.”

Hello, Tim!

Actually, I have a number of problems. For example, my facial muscles tend to operate on a ten-minute time delay, which causes me to sometimes be unable to properly communicate emotions to people important to me. In the same manner one can look up at the sky and see the stars as they were hundreds of years ago, my face is a delightful mirror of the emotions I was feeling ten minutes prior.

Working in combination with my expressionless voice I often, to my great chagrin, give people the impression of being either utterly disinterested, monstrously sarcastic, or having actually passed away several minutes ago and now operating entirely on volatile corpse gas and twitching nerve reflexes. My thanks to all those who have frantically, and mistakenly, dialled for an ambulance. I appreciate it.

But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today I would like to talk about my unnerving tendency to not so much blur as demolish the line between the internet and real life. I have, at various times in the past done, and probably will do again in the future, the following things.

1. Picked up envelopes addressed to me, fresh out of the mailbox, and gleefully exclaimed “Oooh! Email!”
2. Mused aloud on the possibility of “bookmarking” delightful staff at restaurants so that we could come back to the in the future.
3. While sketching from a reference book, reached out to flip the pages of the reference book so that it would not go into screensaver.

Yes, I have done all of these things. I am not proud of these things, but they are my things, and I have done them. I will probably do more of them in the future even, until the time comes when I am found curled up in the foetal position on the floor, sucking binaric dregs from a blue CAT-5 cable and cackling quietly to myself.

Still, at least when I am asked in job interviews whether I “eat, sleep and breathe the internet”, I can hold my head high and say proudly: “Yes. Yes I do”. And then I can break down in a series of embarrassed, choking sobs.

I’ll always have that.

Twimage is a PHP script I wrote that grabs your Twitter account’s RSS feed, reads it, strips it down, and then prints the latest tweet from it to a 648 x 40 pixel PNG image. You can then display this image anywhere you would normally be able to put a regular PNG image file – including your forum signature! The final result looks a lot like this (resized for width, see full size here):

Because Twitter’s RSS feeds are painfully unstable – often returning HTTP 400 errors for no fucking reason whatsoever – I’ve also included a Twimage Feedchecker (see it in action here). This is nothing more than a simple PHP file which tries to print your RSS feed in plaintext, and will helpfully tell you any errors it encounters so you can accurately troubleshoot. I’ve also included the source file for the background image, if the colours I’ve chosen don’t take your fancy.

I’m not going to lie: this script is basically a complete and total hackjob and is very, very rudimentary in nature. RSS2HTML does most of the heavy lifting, and I just polish it, clean it up and print it into a PNG. It’s nothing that somebody else couldn’t write for themselves in about ten seconds, and indeed if anybody out there wishes to improve on it (which shouldn’t be hard!) I welcome them. I’d love to see what you do with it. Enjoy.

Download: Twimage 1.1.1 (260 KB ZIP)