: this is austin's blog :

Mo'gull and The Ball on Myspace:

Holy shit, Blood Diamond was earth shattering. As a movie, it was incredibly well done. DiCaprio's accent was iffy (I know rhodesians), but the message was jaw dropping. I had no clue about blood diamonds or conflict diamonds. I know that our consumer practices here in "first world land" directly affect (in very violent ways) the lives of millions in "developing nations" but I've never had it shown with such honest brutality and humanity.

But do you know what the sickest thing was??? Oh it wasn't the villager's arms being chopped off (after having their families slaughtered) in the name of forcing support of the R.U.F., it wasn't the child soldiers or the slave miners or even the innocent people running from the R.U.F. in the city streets only to be shot at by the government militia because they were simply in the way of a direct line of fire to the Rebels...

No, it was the commentary from the loud mouthed girl beside us, providing us with such insightful observations like, "She totally likes him!" at an incredibly obvious plot point in the film or even better: "I would never want to live in Africa, who would ever want to live in Africa?" during the overview of the massive refugee camps.

These are the kind of people whom this type of movie really needs and hopes to reach, but they have eyes that can't see and ears that can't hear.

I'm sorry Africa and America, if we keep producing people like this, we're all fucked.

That’s how many I have in my mouth right now and it fucking sucks.

I’ve had recurrent canker sores basically my entire life and I hate them. They are so painful it’s unreal, and there’s basically nothing you can do about them. I have one on the inside section of my gums at the bottom left. I have two more on my inner lips at the bottom right and top right. Here’s a diagram:



To top it all off, I’ve also got the roof of my mouth burnt from the pizza I ate last night. Ah, oral agony…

In other news, I’ve been trying for the past few days to switch instructors for my intro to computer programming class. All three 3 instructors are appallingly terrible (according to ratemyproffesors.com), but given the choice, I’d rather be with a known evil (the same instructor from my computer literacy class) than an unknown one. Anyway, today I noticed one vacancy in the class I wanted and I managed the switch. I’m actually pretty happy about it.

So my Christmas post… I’ve had a pretty chill Christmas… Especially since I got back from Edmonton, worked two days, then my boss gave me Christmas week off… Can someone please tell me why I didn’t just stay in Edmonton? Man…. But practically speaking, it’s because my first flight round trip was about $280 and any individual flights later than when I did come back would have matched the round trip fare … yeouch.

So what have I been doing most of my Christmas break? Playing casual net games! Anyone else want some distractions? I beat Knytt and Within a Deep Forest which were both amazing. I also set some records on Double Wires, Nest of Moai and Winterbells. I challenge everyone to beat my scores! Here they are!

Double Wires
Moai
Winterbells

I guess that’s it... I hope everyone has a happy new years!

HEY ALL


I'm in Edmonton right now. I just wanted to post this awesome thing that some of you may recognise.

It's 2:04am now and I figure it’s a good time to start a blog entry. I’m trying to keep myself awake, at least for another hour or so, as a sort of crash-course-hope to teach my body to get used to being up late. Why you ask? Because Monday and Tuesday night I will be painting a YMCA in surrey overnight. Crazy times indeed. I think all it will really accomplish is fuck up my sleeping pattern a bit right before I head for Edmonton. That’s right, that’s what was in 15 days... now 4.

Once again, I was starving off a blog post because I wanted to post something insightful and deep but I should just take the hint and realize that I can’t be that all the time. Sometimes you just gotta be the surface.

Brock was over on Saturday and we made a stop-motion video (inspired by Vanessa’s hot dog video) of my cell phone climbing into a car and driving away. There’s lots of weird random stuff in the background; we didn’t care as it was mainly an experiment to see how well we could pull off a stop motion video. Anyway, without further ado, here it is. If you can think of some genius metaphorical explanation for all the seeming random elements in the video, I’m dying to hear it.





Ah... It’s only 2:16 now and I want to go to bed... why am I doing this to myself? I’m going to go and brush my teeth... oddly enough, that usually wakes me up pretty well. There now, done... and yeah I do feel much more awake.

Ok I don’t know what else to say... with this last spurt of energy, I’m going to go and do a massive Flickr upload and hopefully sort out what I want to submit to the next One Cool Word issue.

P.S. Tracy, that last entry title was a Weakterthans song, Pamphleteer. Close, but not Ben Gibbard. :)