Freckles & Doubt

It transpires that there is actually a limit to the number of times one (or in this case, I) can play Stardew Valley over and over again without a break. It's a high, but real number. When I have, once again, tamed the farm, delved to the bottom of the dungeons, befriended the village and married my romance du jour, I can only immediately start a new game, oh, six goes out of seven. (I may, in fact, have a slightly unhealthy addiction to Stardew Valley, it prods with pinpoint accuracy at my personal button labelled "make systems work"). The seventh time, I start casting around for something new, slight and frivolous to play upon the Ipad of an evening when lounging in bed, cat-bestrewn and shutting down my brain for sleep. This has brought me Fallout Shelter (fun for two goes, now boring), occasional outbreaks of Solitaire or Plants vs Zombies, a number of unsuccessful forays into things that Simply Failed To Grip, and, most recently, Merge Dragons.

I am vaguely ashamed of Merge Dragons. It is the epitome of a casual game in the sense denigrated by "Real Gamers": cutesy, superficial, and in mechanical terms apparently simplistic (merge three or five of the same thing to get a fancier version of same! Rinse, repeat!). There is a strategic element to it, but only just. It is rife with Adorable, TM, Cartoon Dragons who float busily over the landscape, harvesting and building and being merged to make higher beings.

It is also fiendishly, machiavellianly, shamelessly, mercenarily manipulative.

Merge Dragons proliferates the possible types of dragons, the objects they can harvest (life orbs, coins, seeds, sprouts, etc), the objects they can harvest from (trees, flowers, mushrooms, hills, lakes, buildings, grasses, etc etc etc), and the flavour, configurations and environments in which said objects are located, to a quite ludicrous extent; it is always throwing off special events, new packages, fancier dragons. In terms of areas offering variations on gameplay, I can pursue merging random objects in my home camp; my dragon houses; puzzle levels; a dragon quest zone; Arcadia; the tower (sheer chance with randomised goblins, I hate it, I am whatever the exact opposite of a gambler is); or the annoying arena of the special event, with its new spanky dragon types and specialised tokens of some sort. Were I not a reclusive misanthrope, I could share (presumably) dragons with other real-world players in dragon dens. In the month or so I've been playing it has offered me Egyptian dragons, Viking dragons, dessert dragons (really, that's not a typo), aquatic dragons, gem settings, beach settings, zodiac settings, Unspecified-Oriental settings, and whatever the hell that mad clockwork thing is. In terms of iconage and nomenclature, I cannot acquit the game of unpleasant cultural appropriation and stereotyping at a number of points, but other than that it's generally not without its own slightly plastic charm.

However. Said slightly plastic charm is clearly and evidently also the product of a crack team of marketing primates, deterministic behaviourists, Dark Side statisticians (i.e. statisticians), and designers who have had key creative organs surgically removed and replaced with actual dollar signs. Because this is a free game app. You can download it freely, and can for a while freely and happily pursue the above dragon-wrangling, harvesting, coin-accumulating existence, merrily merging things for fun and profit, until you run to the carefully-judged edge of the easy bit, and into the game's entrapment zone. You are forced to face the fact that to proceed further you have to either grind mercilessly at a snail's pace, or speed things up by spending real world cash to acquire dragon gems, which will open treasure chests, buy fancier dragons or allow you to acquire key items to merge at strategic points so you can unlock further merge opportunities.

I can confidently attribute the fact that I have not spent thousands on this stupid game to the fortuitous (or possibly prescient) circumstance that I have set my Ipad to require me to re-enter my password every time I buy something from the app store, and I can never remember my password. Since I am generally playing in bed at night and am warm and comfortable enough that I won't drag myself out of bed to go and look it up, mostly I don't buy dragon gems. By such fragile bulwarks do we save ourselves.

Because, here's the thing, I can absolutely see exactly what they're doing. I am wholly aware of the careful build-up they've created, where you have just enough easy wins at first, and have earned some rewards, and can see potentially very nice perks and loot waiting just ahead, except that either you first have to spend several hours mind-numbingly making dragons harvest life orbs so you can get past the &^)(#%*(% dead plant zone into the area where you can merge again... or you can dump actual money into dragon gems and take a short cut. Or use them to buy the cute, fancy dragon eggs you can't buy with coins or find in any of the areas. Or make the dragon gem payout which will save your accumulated loot in the tower if a goblin gets you. And I know what they're doing, I can see exactly how I'm being manipulated, and it's still compelling enough that at times, when I have randomly remembered my password and really want that loot, I have to rugby-tackle my own fingers to prevent myself from pressing the button to buy. Sometimes I miss. I was never big on sport, anyway. I have paid less for this game overall to date than I would have for a premium large-scale RPG, but honestly I'm not sure if that's much of a recommendation given the pricing structures of AAA games.

So I think I find myself, primarily, bemused at all this: by all the precedents, this stupid game should not be keeping my attention, and I suspect it's only doing so because I'm tired and COVID-bludgeoned and post-lurgified and don't have the brain for much more. Further thesis: I play a lot during load shedding, when there isn't much else to do. So in fact I might actually be able to at least partially blame Eskom for the whole debacle. Eskom and the Merge Dragons marketing primates. Yup. All their fault.

But I also think that the siren call of Stardew Valley will reassert itself eventually, possibly when my irritation at the commodification of my gameplay has finally filled its gauge and I delete the whole bloody thing in a fit of pique. Because really, it's dangerously addictive candyfloss with a carcinogenic core.

Today's weird fact! abandoning the lockdown day count in my subject lines appears to have somewhat neutralised my posting avoidance, I think I was being actively repelled by the amount of counting I needed to do on my slightly mathematically-challenged fingers in order to work out what day we were in. Alternatively, it's just depressing to contemplate how many days there have been since this whole nasty mess started. (Bonus weird fact: I enjoyed maths at school, despite crashing spectacularly out of the A-level version, but the other day I realised I can no longer remember how to do the particularly elegant abstract origami of either calculus or simultaneous equations. This is sad. I should find a YouTube video or something).

Today's additional and completely unrelated weird fact: having a healthy videogaming habit can create some incredibly bizarre cross-universe identifications given the fact that Western video games appear to draw from a comparatively small pool of voice actors. I am very voice- and accent-conscious when playing, it's a huge component in my choices for videogame romances (mmmm Fenris), and I'm getting weirdly good at picking up familiar tones, even behind slightly different accents and in completely different contexts. (The fact that I obsessively replay favourite games is probably also implicated, to be honest). This tends to leave me with rather odd predispositions to like or dislike particular NPCs based on the roles played by their voice actors in completely different games.

I am still hacking happily through Kingdoms of Amalur, which is still pretty and fey and consoling, while allowing me to work out my frustrations by hitting Bad Things very hard with lightning attacks and a Big Sword. While it's not a companion-oriented RPG in the mode of Bioware, it has a huge NPC cast and seems to particularly use familiar voices. Viz.:

• OMG almost the entire cast of Critical Role is in here! Good grief! I don't even know their voices particularly well, given that I've never actually watched an episode of Critical Role and have imbibed what I know of it via clips on Tumblr, but it explained a lot about the niggling familiarities when I pulled up the cast list. (Also, Laura Bailey is Serena in Skyrim, I'd just played that DLC before Amaluring, who knew!)
  
• Some of the minor characters are played by that one dude who plays minor Dark Elf characters in Skyrim, the guy with the slightly nasal baritone. Given the tendency of IMDB to list voice actors with one or two main roles and then "additional voices", I don't know who it is, but every time I hear him I look wildly around for dragons. Oh, wait, I know who it is, it's Erandur, which makes it Keith Szarabajka, which I think is impressive on my part because it means I identified him playing characters like "Citizen" and "Soldier" in Amalur, and they don't have huge amounts of dialogue.
  
• There are also multiple turns from the guy who does the vaguely Scandinavian accent for lots of the Nords in Skyrim, notably Vilkas, which IMDB says makes him Michael Gough. It was seriously dislocating to have the Vilkas personality - slow, serious, meathead - coming from high-ranking Fae lords in Amalur.
  
• Great tracts of Dragon Age. Seriously. Commander Cullen's voice actor (Greg Ellis) has played three different NPCs in the two days of Amalur gameplay, and I find the dissonance between Cullen's voice and the NPCs rather bewildering. Also, now I'm jonesing to replay Inquisition. I really liked Cullen. Can you tell I really liked Cullen?
  
• Simon Templeman, most notably Logain in Origins, but also a bunch of Mass Effect characters (Admiral Han'Gerrel, and Gavin Archer).
  
• That slightly dodgy Traveler who insists on calling me Dove all the time is the voice of Vicar Max from Outer Worlds, which explains why I never liked him, really. No offence to David B. Mitchell. He does a good sleaze.

I find it sad, in retrospect, but ultimately unsurprising that most of the voices I identify easily are male. The women tend to sound more similar to me, and I suspect that I am also being slightly ejected from identifying strongly with female characters because they tend to be written by male writers, and thus to conform more slavishly to stereotypes, particularly sexualised stereotypes. Ayln Shir has a lovely, throaty contralto, but the character wears such a ridiculous skimpy chain-mail bikini that I listen to her in a state of perpetual irritation.

But looking at the cast list of Amalur, there's something else going on here too: while there is quite a large female voice cast, there are comparatively few important female NPCs, most of the big roles with lots of dialogue are male. And, doing a random check on the female voice actors, they tend to skew a lot younger than the male. I don't recognise them because most of them don't have such a huge body of voice work: they not only have less access to plum roles, they have been at it for a lot shorter time.

This was supposed to be an amused survey of voice actor crossovers, it didn't set out to be a feminist rant, but apparently it ain't easy being a Gurrl in Kultcha, particularly Kultcha of the videogame persuasion. Systematic sexism is hell on female voices, in every sense of the word.

Warning: minor ideological rantage ensuing. If for no other reason than the first week of term, disorganised students are demanding my attention in all directions, Eskom is running random load shedding power cuts again, and I need distraction.

This is a very interesting article on the rise of TERF activism in the UK - TERFs being trans-exclusionist radical feminists. I'm familiar with what I find to be their deeply unpleasant ideologies from hanging out on Tumblr, where salvos in a TERF campaign occasionally come over my dash, in the ongoing TERF attempt to persuade (mostly young) feminists that "queer" is a slur and should not be used. (The above usually accompanied by deft rebuttals from the actual blogs I follow, who are more or less uniformly Sensible People). TERFs don't think that trans women are women, they insist on identifying them by their biologically male bodies, and have a series of frankly paranoid outrages about "male" bodies in female bathrooms and prisons, and the "erasure" of women by the inclusion of trans women in feminist debates. TERFs are, in fact, the Mrs Grundies of feminist thinking, and to my mind they personify a narrow-minded outrage that makes them horribly akin to the closed-minded frothings of the religious right.

I am a little blindsided by how angry and nauseous the whole TERF ideology makes me, it seems to prod me with pointy sticks deep in my personal organ of justice. I think TERFs are motivated by a horrible and toxic mix of rage and fear, and while rage and fear in themselves are probably a valid response to the damages enacted by patriarchal culture, what I can't forgive is the way in which TERFs choose to respond to their anger at and fear of male bodies and cultural identity by turning on the most marginal and already vulnerable people they can find who they see as being part of that male identity. They are, in fact, punching down, with considerable malice.

And their rage and fear comes with a side order of power-tripping and desire for artificially simplified discourse; they are punching down in the service of an attempt to render simple and clear-cut debates about identity and culture which are anything but. That's what the whole dog-whistling with "queer" is about: queer identity is necessarily complex, it demands recognition and celebration of identities and identifications which don't fit easily into the male/female/gay/lesbian boxes.

It's ugly and predatory, to identify an already vulnerable target and go after it with single-minded determination, but it's also blindly hypocritical. Because if women/feminists are damaged and victimised by patriarchy, how much more damaged and victimised are those women who are born into biologically male bodies, and into cultural assumptions about male identity, which make them, whether they like it or not, a part of it? If TERFs are rejecting maleness with such frothing hatred, how much stronger and more difficult is the response of a trans woman whose rejection of that "maleness" entails so much more active and instrumental a resistance of cultural labelling? Trans women deny the male body a thousand times more fiercely than any TERF with a bathroom fixation, and they go through seven colours of hell to enact that denial. Quite apart from the costs of physical transition, our culture is getting better at gender identity only very slowly, and it still encodes gender stereotypically in ways which make it difficult and painful to resist.

I like the linked article's comments about British feminism and its comparative privilege, lack of intersectionality, and links with colonialsim; it surmises that Irish and American feminists have in many ways grown beyond this absolutism because they have been forced to accommodate experiences of subject positions based on race or colonial experiences as well as gender. TERF ideology is possibly so maddening to me because it is so obliviously privileged, but that's an insight into its workings, not an excuse; above all, I find it inherently, unforgivably cruel.

Class of 16 third-year students, and only two have seen the new Star Wars. The fuck? what's with the youth of today? the movie was huge and mainstream and seen by bazillions of people, but apparently senior Humanities students are not among them. I despair. Genre-shamed by my own students. Particularly because I'm trying to teach fanfic, and it transpires that I no longer have mainstream popular texts in common with my class. They grudgingly admit enough of a passing familiarity with Avengers or Sherlock that my burbling wasn't entirely opaque. I suppose it's not technically genre-shaming because they all watch Game of Thrones, but I refuse, basically on aesthetic grounds. I am unable to admire nasty people.

I am Disgruntled. Fortunately this amazing Tumblr conversation has just made me giggle outrageously for ten minutes, because Science! in the service of Dodginess is a lovesome thing, god wot. "I have no deeper explanation for why human females can dissolve rocks with our genitals. It simply is."

I am also in a horrible fatigue slump, and am perpetually exhausted, which is achieving new heights of horrible because I'm also insomniac like whoa and dammit, which means I stagger into bed, largely incapacitated with tired, at about 9pm and then stare at the ceiling for two hours. And when I sleep, apparently I hallucinate very small stained-glass knights with lances coming through the walls. Vividly. Contemplating firing my subconscious. Apart from anything else, it's giving rise, at extremely infrequent intervals, to particularly disjointed flow-of-consciousness blog posts.

(My subject line is Bowie's "Blackstar", from his last album, which is amazing and rapidly becoming one of my favourites. It is relevant only in the most lateral and tenuous of sleep-deprived fashions).

Last night was deeply annoying, because (a) lights, none, and (b) so many legs! As well as (c), residual Age of Ultron grumps.

I am narked with the City of Cape Town because they confirm a load-shedding session so much at the last minute. I checked the loadshedding page four times yesterday, and every time it was "load shedding suspended until further notice." Then they cut us off at 8pm, at the point where I'd assumed we were safe for the day, right in the middle of the first episode of Daredevil, which is a new Netflix series which is doing a slow build thing that definitely doesn't need to be arbitrarily suspended. Although, in retrospect, having to feel my way across the living room in the pitch dark was at least thematically appropriate. (I'm reserving judgement on Daredevil for the nonce, I kinda like what they're doing, it's gritty and real and Charlie Cox is marvellous, but it's currently moving very slowly and I hope they sort the pace out a tad).

"So many legs!" is a quote from Cole in Inquisition upon meeting the giant albino spider which lives under the Crestwood keep. There was a sudden, huge and inexplicable spider in the corner of the bathroom last night, just above the shower. Arachnids are clearly evil because they choose to manifest (a) in the moment when the room is illuminated by flickering candlelight which most efficiently conceals them in shadows until you're really close, and (b) in the room in which you are most likely to be wandering around naked, and thus unprotected from arachnid multi-hairy-legged scuttling by any form of civilised armour. Bastards. Having stripped completely and wandered towards the shower, I spotted the spider, thought, "Hell, no", backed away slowly and went to bed unwashed, shutting the bathroom door behind me so the wretched thing couldn't infiltrate the house. It was gone this morning, hopefully out the window rather than into a dark bathroom corner from whence it can more unexpectedly pounce. I am a wimp, but somehow it all seems more horrible when you're trying to eject spiders without the benefit of electricity.

I have worked out why Age of Ultron annoyed me so much. It's not actually because of the final, headcanon-ruining upshot of the story. It's because absolutely none of the narrative and character arcs which led to that outcome felt earned, deserved or properly explored. I could adjust my headcanons if the film gave me any bloody grist whatsoever to my imaginative mill. But it doesn't: the romance isn't substantiated, the death isn't justified in any thematic sense, the departures are glossed over, the whole thing feels like random events cobbled together randomly, rather than an actual plot. Joss can do so much better, and I tend to agree with this article, which argues that the Marvel meta-marketing drive has constrained the director to the point where he is completely hamstrung in trying to give the story any sort of satisfying shape.

Also, while Joss Whedon is definitely still my master now, I can't help thinking that his particular brand of feminism, which resides mostly in strong female characters, is in a weird sort of way slightly out of date. He was groundbreaking at the time with Buffy and Firefly, but levels of feminist awareness have overtaken him - simple strong female characters simply don't cut it any more, we need a more pervasive critique which the Marvel straitjacket certainly doesn't permit. (See: leaked CEO email giving a demonstration of beautifully spurious logic: bad female-led superhero movies bombed, therefore all female-led superhero movies are bad and will bomb. To which we answer, succinctly and pointedly, "Ben Afflek's Daredevil". Because really.)

In other news, my mutant foot has died down to its usual shape and is only rather red and mottled. Antibiotics and two days with my feet up have settled its hash onetime quick. Now all I have to deal with is the nausea occasioned by the antibiotics...

So, remember the Chris Evans version of 2048 I posted? a few days back? The one which caused certain of my lady friends to go "That game you posted? It's evil! there went Tuesday!", causing me to say, "Well, I did warn you" with some complacence? Celeb versions of 2048 are a Thing right now - I also recommend the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and otters. But absolutely my favourite development in this is the following sequence:

1. Copperbadge, prominent Tumblerite who I follow because he writes good fanfic, invents the Robert Downey Jr 2048 version, which starts with ickle baby RJDs and progressively ages them as you meld them. Which is probably an obscure metaphor for something, I'm not sure what.
   
2. The internet happily melds RDJs for a while.
   
3. Robert Downey Jr posts the Copperbadge version on his Facebook page with a comment to the effect of "Damn you, Copperbadge!"
   
4. Copperbadge posts a "Holy shit he namedropped me!" comment to Tumblr.
   
5. Tumblr melts down.

I love the internet. But its ability to create the illusion that the illusion of the celebrity/fan reciprocal relationship is an actual celebrity/fan relationship, while enormously entertaining to the onlooker, is bloody dangerous. Contemplating the nested and reciprocal validations in that little exchange above is making me slightly dizzy as well as hugely amused.

Things Which Feel Odd:

1. Climbing back into your driver's seat after picking the car up from the car wash. Someone else has driven it. The seat and the rear-view mirror are in the wrong place, and it inevitably takes me about three traffic lights to adjust them so they feel right. But the whole car has a strange air of the indefinably alien. Something's different, but you can't tell what it is. It isn't your space any more. (Although it's certainly cleaner).
   
2. Spending a happy half hour noodling around on the piano (currently I'm trying to play Arcade Fire, a project doomed to failure owing to their texture fetish, which means you actually need six hands, twelve people and a violin to have any stab at reproducing the sound) and then trying to type. I both type and play with some facility, fast, and without looking at my hands, and apparently cross-wiring happens. My fingers keep trying to do arpeggios instead of QWERTY. I have to consciously rein them in for a bit before all the right circuits click in. Very odd feeling.
   
3. Christmas in July. Particularly when we're even more disorganised than usual, and it was actually Christmas in July in August in September in October. That is, last night. Roast chicken and ham and all the trimmings and Jo did barszcz and uszka for starters (garlicky Polish beet soup with mushroom dumplings, for both of which I have an unholy passion) and I made chocolate berry trifle (because Christmas pudding is of the divvil), and we ate and drank too much and pulled crackers and exchanged ridiculous presents in large quantities, and listened to Annie Lennox sing English Christmas carols. It feels odd and wrong, though, because it's all the good bits of Christmas, and none of its socially-mandated unpleasant ones. No enormous awkward obligatory extended family jamborees with added fighting and guilt trips, or expensive present expectations which entail battling the consumerist hordes through acres of tinsel and product-pushing. Although I did go forth and buy myself an actual Blu-Ray home theatre system this morning, to replace our almost-defunct hi-fi, which was a conscious decision to spend my November bonus early and thus was almost Christmas-shoppy. Except for me, not other people. Feels odd.

Subject line from Arcade Fire's "Wasted Hours", which is for the most part not actually thematically appropriate at all but was on my mind and is a gentle, wistful, beautiful thing. Also, I think googling how to spell "barszcz" has infected me, I keep trying to blockquote this paragraph by typing "blokqvote".

I blush to admit my slight obsession with the TomKat meltdown, which is really no more than the continuation of my obsession with TomKat, and before that with Tom Cruise himself. This is not, I hasten to clarify, any sort of fangirl he's-so-attractive sort of thing: I can't stand the man, and my interest is more of a sort of horrified fascination with the spectacle he presents. Twiddling my thumbs in traffic this morning, I came to an interesting realisation: like really quite ridiculous amounts of things in my life, this particular urge is also a manifestation of purely academic interests. (Case in point, David Bowie, who's about self-conscious genre play. At least partially. Shut up.)

I do a lot of work with metafiction. Metafiction is characterised, in the words of highly useful critic Patricia Waugh, as fiction "which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality." It's one of the favoured techniques of postmodernists, that sort of "ha ha this is a book not the real world" with which they step outside their own text to comment on it. Tom Cruise doesn't quite do that, but the fervour and intensity with which he constructs himself as an icon at any given moment borders on parody, creating an artefact - a "star" - whose self-evident falsity is intrinsic to its function. That is - he doesn't present "star" and try to naturalise the identity, he tries to naturalise the performance. Tom Cruise is never not performing Tom Cruise, and the non-existence of a genuine Tom Cruise is so taken for granted that its absence permeates the performance. And the performativity of Tom Cruise takes for granted that we acquiesce in the performance - we relate to it as performance, a text, not as a reality. He's also a simulacrum: he is a performance of a self which goes beyond simply obscuring or replacing a reality to the point where it is not related to a reality at all. Dear Baudrillard, how we miss him.

At any rate, the gossip-column coverage of the TomKat breakdown has been affording me much innocent joy: Katie Holmes seems to have blindsided him utterly with the divorce, leaving him groping for an appropriate response to perform. Even better, it's been such a kick in the teeth to the whole Scientology schtick - she has escaped! because she fears your weird cult! because of what it'll do to her daughter! and she's being superbly tactical about the whole thing. Scientology evokes in me a sort of combination of fear and derision, so it's nice to see the creepy-control-freak-omniscience undercut.

The whole thing has also given me absolutely my favourite quote about Scientology of all time ever:

This is what I find hilarious about Scientology even though it’s obviously scary as sh-t: the entire operation sounds like a game you would have invented in your parents’ basement playing with friends back in grade school where the object - to get to Level Supremeness of The Power Destiny - was to hop up the stairs on one foot, blindfolded, with one hand doing the Spock sign and the other holding an egg, while reciting Twas The Night Before Christmas because Miss Green made us memorise it for the holiday revue.
Courtesy of Lainey Gossip.

Hee.

I've just run an ongoing orientation workshop, which entailed being in the venue early to set up data projectors and what have you. (We insert the usual ritual cursing aimed at my Cherished Institution's classroom "facilities" unit, which mostly facilitates frustration and despair). While I was waiting for the start of the session students were doing the usual student thing, which is to trickle in gradually (this process takes place from about ten minutes before the start of the lecture until about ten minutes after it's under way). I was struck, though, by the ongoing silence in the venue even as the numbers built. Surely students should be chatting to each other while they wait? They certainly have no problem chatting during the lecture itself.

And, of course, the answer is because almost every student is sitting in their seat in the modern attitude of techno-prayer, hands folded, head bowed, thumbs working busily as they send SMSes or read their email or whatever. It's visually quite a striking trend, looking up at the raked seats. Also, almost every student walks into the venue with their phone in their hand, presumably because they've been texting as they walk. Cellphones and their ilk have become communication and identity prosthetics, an integral part of both daily function and of self-construction. I am, because I text. Existence is only proven and affirmed in virtual space. And they say cyberspace isn't real. Hah.

I seem to have missed the cellphone thing, it's an occasionally handy tool rather than an integral part of my functioning, but I think the internet is absolutely a prosthetic self to me. I suspect I've never acquired the cellphone habit because both my work and my home paradigms are fairly sedentary - if I had the kind of job where I was more than ten metres away from my computer at any given time, I'd probably be giving my thumbs repetitive strain injury with the best of them. I become very, very twitchy if internet-deprived for more than a few hours.

But I mourn what we've lost, which is time. Time in the sense of extended focus, communication in anything other than bite-sized chunks. My students write increasingly terrible essays as the years go by, because you don't learn the skills of sustained argument and marshalling the logical flow of a large chunk of text by reading instant messages. And this is why they argue that blogging is dying, and maybe it is. No time, no attention to spare. TL;DR. All those words.

I like words, and I think they're happier in stupendous, horizon-filling herds.

Sydney has a very egalitarian attitude to opera. Far from being a bastion of snooty elitism, the Sydney Opera House seems to be a rocking local/tourist hangout, filled to the brim, of a fine winter's evening, with chattering crowds hanging out at the harbourside bars just under the iconic sails. The slightly more formally dressed opera crowd mingle quite cheerfully with the beer-swilling, jeans-wearing tourists. It's all pleasingly eclectic, its air of good-humoured relaxation exemplified neatly by our waiter, who had about seven inverted wineglasses slung through the belt on the back of his waistcoat.

When you approach the opera house by ferry the silhouette, by now the stuff of cliché, looks all ethereal and floaty, like the pictures. One puff of wind and you expect to see the whole thing up sticks and drift out to sea with a stately grace, like a Spanish galleon. Up close, and particularly inside, though, the thing has a sort of a brutal feel, all giant soaring concrete arches and stone, solidly rooted to its peninsula. It's an amazing space, and an amazing history of construction, rife with visions, personalities, cost overruns and hair-tearing moments of "this thing can't be built!" The act of faith to keep going was something extraordinary. The internal theatre and concert spaces are also extraordinary - beautifully designed, and very neatly finangled to give the necessary wing and set storage space under rather than next to them, as dictated by the strange shapes of the external shell. (We took the guided tour, it was fascinating).

The opera itself was a bit weird as an experience; it transpires that I was the only serious opera buff in the group of colleagues who went, and half of them got bored and left at intermission. Cappriccio is a bit of an unfortunate introduction to opera, being an extremely cerebral and meta-level exploration of whether words or music are more important as art forms, but it's frequently witty and the music, while a bit vague and formless at times, has moments of enormous beauty. However, the colleague who booked managed to get us into cheap seats where we couldn't actually see the surtitle strip, which means that we only really had access to half of the words/music debate, rendering it one-sided and curiously moot. It was beautifully staged and sung, though, and I'm utterly glad I went.





In other news, this lurgi is at the well-known "almost accidentally faint while looking at dugong" stage. I need to stay off my feet for a few days. On the upside, I also met a platypus.