Although I wouldn’t call myself Pagan, as I feel that I’ve not studied enough of it to call myself one, I’d say that per capita, Pagans are more sensible than those who follow christian-based dogma. But I would say that.
So today is Samhain, the Pagan New year! And this year’s Samhain marks a vaguely special occasion for me, as I will no longer be spelling words in that ‘pseudo-Genesis P-Orridge’ fashion anymore. Yes, from now on, I’m spelling like a *gasp* normal person. No more ‘ov’ for ‘of’, no more.. gods, well, that’s about it, really, now that I think of it.

First of (man, that’s gonna take some getting used to) all, since this Blog is still relatively new, you’ve never really experienced the full horror of What Used To Be My Spelling Style. I began my alternate spelling back around 1991 as a tribute to one of my favourite bands of all time, Throbbing gristle. Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Chistopherson, and their ostensible front-man, Genesis P-Orridge, were four art-terrorists from Manchester back in the mid-to-late Seventies, who could well be held responsible for starting the whole Industrial music & culture scenes. They were practical philosphers, they were influential trendsetters, they were artists & musicians, they were perverted deviants. They were, and still are, entirely ace.
One of their main goals was to ‘subvert from within’; meaning, transmitting non-mainstream thoughts, ideas, and concepts to the masses using mainstream methods. They maintained that just because you were brought up to think and behave in a certain way, that you didn’t have to stick with it for your entire life, especially if it wasn’t producing the desired results for you. One of Genesis’ early experiments was to transform his spelling style into something entirely ‘other’; and, being the big slobbering TG fanboy that I was at the time, I thought it would be a good idea to follow suit. Allow me to run thru some of my past writings and lay some examples on you:

Referring again to the above statement made by Mr LaVey, he says, ‘Artificiality is more than completely honest; it forestalls disappointment at things not being what they appear to be.’ W/ Artifice, wot you see is truly wot you get. However, knowing beforehand that you’ve aquired something Synthetik, it also becomes the best possible excuse for stretching yr imagination to its fullest extent, because if yr’e anything like me, yr dream/phantasy life is much more preferable to yr waking life.

Heh. I had hoped to cite more examples by pulling from some of my older fiction, but as I still don’t have a copy of MS Word 2000, I can’t open any of my files, which were saved on the screechingly obsolete MS Works 98. Goddamn you, Micro$quish, and your stupid .wps extensions. :-\
Needless to say, my writing was a lot more impenetrable back then; the above example is when I was just beginning to curtail my unusual spelling. In my ‘heyday’, the pronoun ‘I’ would be spelt as ‘E’; a ‘y’ at the end of a word would be swapped out with ‘ie’; an extra ‘e’ was added at the end of ‘the’; most all words containing a hard ‘c’ had it spelt with a ‘k’ instead — but not if the ‘c’ was the first letter in said word, so I’d spell ‘contact’ as ‘contakt’; if the word ended in ‘ve’, I’d drop the ‘e’, etc etc. As you suspect, this was a lot of work to keep up with! It was interesting, and definitely distinctive — people on the various BBSes and Forums that I’d populate would instantly know it was me whenever I posted — but after doing this for around a decade, I think I’ve pretty much had enough. Not to mention the fact that I am a rather high-ranking spelling & grammar Nazi, so even though I knew that my alternate spelling was incorrect (and I still justify it by saying that only when you know what the rules are, then you can break them), but I’m sure to many people it seemed hypocritical.

Happy Hallowe’en! Normal spelling from Davecat, for now, and forever! Not counting when I spell like a person from the UK, ov course…
Whoops! Mea culpa!

[10.31.PM] aneamo: LOL, funny. Oh you see this? http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/
[10.32.PM] aneamo: Oh, 3rd story down, Zeta delayed again.
[10.33.PM] Davecat: THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS HAVE DELAYED ZETA AGAIN??!! i SWEAR TO ALMIGHTY CHRIST, IF THEY DON’T SHIP THAT SHIT TO MY FUCKING HOUSE BEFORE THE END OV 2004, I WILL SKULLFUCK EVERYONE AT BANDAI AMERICA.
[10.33.PM] aneamo: O_O LOL
[10.33.PM] Davecat: GODDAMN IT ALREADY.
[10.33.PM] aneamo: Yeah, it’s crazy, more delays.
[10.34.PM] Davecat: I mean, wtf?? They’d better be adding more extras, to justify this new new new new delay. The damn thing’s done! It’s ready to go! FUCK ALREADY!
[10.35.PM] Davecat: It’s bad enough that we’re probably not getting the Zeta PS2 game this year (if ever), and now this??
[10.35.PM] aneamo: There was some kind of flood at the warehouse. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10484
[10.36.PM] Davecat: A FLOOD at the fucking WAREHOUSE.
*seething furiously*
[10.36.PM] aneamo: Nuts.
[10.36.PM] Davecat: FUCK.

Well, I’m off to watch Mezzo! Cheer!

En route home thru Royal oak this afternoon, I pulled up to a red light at the corner ov Main, and.. some other smegging street, and I’d noticed that, to my right, was a police officer, standing behind a large neon yellow construction-style sign that read ‘SAFETY BELT ENFORCEMENT ZONE’. Eh?? It’s true; he was just standing on the corner, about fifteen to twenty feet away from his cruiser, which was idling with the passenger door open and its hazard lights blinking, and he was.. enforcing safety belts, I suppose. I dunno. I daresay he wasn’t doing a very good job ov it, as I was stopped behind like four other cars, and he didn’t even seem to be peering into any vehicles to make sure that people had their seatbelts on. Perhaps there was a hidden camera somewhere; again, I don’t know.
Great; this is our tax dollars at work, I thought. Some cop standing on a street corner, ‘enforcing’ safety belt usage. Fecking brilliant. What is this apropos ov, exactly? I mean, if he had happened to see someone not wearing their seatbelt, what was he gonna do, yell an ineffectual ‘hey you, stop’, and leap onto the perp’s hood like T.J Hooker? Hanging on for dear life with one hand, and using the other to radio for backup ‘WE’VE GOT A SB-854 ON THE RUN SET UP THE TYRE SPIKES’? I mean, what??

Now, I understand that one ov the purposes ov police is to protect people from their own stupidity, but as far as I see it, if you don’t have the presence ov mind or simply the common goddamn sense to strap yourself into moving machinery, then quite frankly, if you get into a wreck and go rocketing thru your windscreen, you deserve what you get, as you’re the exact sort ov person that needs to be removed from the gene pool, anyway. Ultimately, if you don’t wear your seatbelt, it only harms you. Unless, ov course, you launch out ov your car, and your stupid lacerated body strikes another vehicle; well then, yeah, that’s a bit ov a problem.
But honestly, I’d have to say that it’s nice to see that police are spending their time & manpower doing something really important. Good show, sirs, and Well done

Just had an idea for an article; in the style ov the editorials on The Onion, it would be called, ‘I Should Stop Wasting So Much Time Pursuing Older Women Who Have No Interest In Me, And Start Pursuing Younger Women Who Have No Interest In Me’. Heh.

Just so you know, I will be working on the rest ov ‘I am not making this up‘, but as I have to do a bit ov cross-checking — I have to scan thru Emails & ICQ logs and whatnot, cos believe me, my time with that hateful individual was one big messy fucking blur — that’s kinda on hold, cos at this moment, I’m literally racing against the clock to get into courses for this Fall, and describing what I have to do for that is far too involved for me to get into right now. I’m remaining hopeful, but I’m sure I know what the outcome will be. :-\ But I’ll be getting onto the rest ov that saga soon, as I’m sure that’s the only thing that’s drawn a lot ov people to this blog in the first place..

In the meantime, let me throw some links at you, in lieu ov actually writing something. Here’s the Gynoid cutie known as Actroid, from Kokoro co., Ltd ov Japan: Link one, her movie at Link two, more at Link three, which features additional movies, and a direct link to another movie at Link four

Someone please remind me what Geoshitties is good for, apart from open mockery. I copied & saved the pics for the ‘Crash babies’ silkscreen & the Punitive Guillottina figure, and uploaded them onto one ov my Yahoo/Geoshitties File managers, so I could host the pics there, instead ov sapping bandwidth from the baby art & Merlin Enterprises sites. I upload the files, and they appear to work soundly. Then, when I go to edit the pertaining posts, redirecting the pic links to my File manager, do the pics appear on my Blog? Hell no. And I don’t want to dump them onto kuroneko-chan.com, as it’s kind ov a waste ov space.

Fucking Yahoo/Geoshitties wankers. ‘By and large, our sites are crap, and our service is laughable, if not non-existent.’ Unfortunately, looks like I’m back to bandwidth sapping for now, until I can find a cheap (read: Free) picture hosting space specifically for small .gif & .jpgs like that. Anyone have any ideas?

Here’s one for the Philosophers: Why do people feel the need to bluff their way thru a language that they don’t fluently speak? Typical scene at work:

ME: Hi, Mrs Vallejo?
CLUELESS: Sí?
ME: I’m calling from [company name]. How are ya this afternoon?
CLUELESS (nervous laughter): Wha?
ME (louder, slower): HOOWWW AAARE YOOUUUUU.
CLUELESS: Uh… I not… I…
ME (near my limit): Se habla Englis?
CLUELESS: Poquito.

Little tip: if the first sentence you hear from this strange gringo on the phone is in a language that you don’t understand, the first thing out ov your mouth should be ‘Sorry, I speak no English’. Don’t try to be clever and bluff your way thru a conversation, cos despite your sudden thirst for linguistic knowledge, it’s just not gonna work. Simply come clean, and admit that you haven’t a clue as to what I’m saying; that way, both ov us save time, and can move on with our lives.

I consider myself a thinking individual. If I were staying at a friend’s place in, say, Germany, and I was the only one in the house when the phone rang, would I answer it? No. Why not? Because for one, I don’t answer other peoples’ phones unless they specifically ask me to do so, and most importantly, I don’t know enough German to hold a conversation.
Now it could be argued that most ov the calls that non-English speakers make & receive are conducted in their native tongue, and the last thing they expect is someone phoning up and talking at them in English. Valid point, I grant you, but I can’t stand it when the person I’m calling feels the need to drag it out. Don’t keep asking me questions if you can’t understand my answers; it’s just that simple

(BTW, this is in no way railing against the Hispanic community, Spanish-speakers, or anyone who speaks English as a second language. I’m just railing against stupidity. If I had been brought up in Spain, spoke Spanish as my primary language, and was doing the exact same job I am now and getting the occasional English speaker, it’d be the same damn situation)