Everybo-dengue fevers bad neighbours

Just a quick update to my chronicle of neighbourhood perils, I just found out that dengue fever's a thing too. Not in an abstract 'fatalities rising by 147% year-on-year' way, more an 'our neighbour is in hospital' kind of way.

I only knew dengue fever as something I'd see mentioned in travel warnings back when I'd be considering visiting an uninhabited jungle region of Borneo or somewhere before deciding against it. But as the saying goes, if the timid tourist won't go to the deadly virus-carrying mosquitoes, the deadly virus-carrying mosquitoes will come to him.

(The Department of Tourism has announced it's going to change this slogan soon.

Presumably to something more honest and less ripe for the piss-taking).

Bleak tale

Image: NASA Space Place

I've been contemplating mortality recently. Can't imagine why. And I've spotted a flaw (add it to the pile) in the way people traditionally think about souls, spirits and the like, which they sometimes decide are bound by the laws of physics (those who mistake Nigel Kneale's classic drama The Stone Tape for a serious documentary), but other times decide are exempt. Where do you draw the line?

It's the same fundamental flaw I spotted in time travel a while ago. I could have gone with either time travel or death for this fictionalised demonstration, but since the former would have turned into the latter pretty sharpish anyway, I plumped for the macabre option.

I hope this unsettles you as much as it does me. Winking out of existence is surely preferable to this horrific eternity you've created.

Or I could just be blown up, I suppose

But staying indoors with only venomous snakes and psycho neighbours to worry about, that's not likely to happen.

It could have happened to my wife though, if she'd headed back from her niece's birthday celebration last night about 30 minutes earlier and been caught up in the explosion that you won't have heard about because this isn't an important place.

I can't pretend this is another example of life being more "fun" in the Philippines. Sometimes it's only equally as "fun" as where you are, except our terrorists have less clear motives to the point that we're not sure if someone just left the gas on.

Still, nice to see this local tragedy hasn't discouraged the neighbours from pumping their inappropriate dawn chorus bass vibrations all over the neighbourhood. Or me from writing bitchy blogs and focusing on my unimportant frustrations when people have died and civilisation is collapsing. I'm only thinking about myself and the imagined consequences for my immediate family, I guess that means I'm going native after all.

Substantialreads: Augasms

I'd over-optimistically decided to work through Neal Stephenson's eight-volume Baroque Cycle this month, but I only made it an hour into the first audiobook when the prospect of sitting through another 113 interminable hours where that came from became too much to bear.

In need of a hasty replacement, I committed to the first August-based pun I could come up with and embarked on a perilous voyage through "classic" erotica. Enjoy. Not like that.

Everybody needs Banakon neighbours

Then again, it might just have been one of those friendly neighbourhood king cobras that the builders have seen knocking about in our garden from time to time.

Everybody needs (Breaking) Bad neighbours

In case I suddenly become terminally non-communicative (you know, more than normal), to save time on the investigation, it was probably the neighbourhood's unhinged, adult-baby shabu (meth) addict following through on his threat to cut my head off because I had the nerve to ask him to turn down the blaring music that wakes me and everyone else up at 06:00am several times a week.

Damnant quod non intellegunt

Pretty devastated at my blog getting a bad review from Patrick K. Phillips of Patrick's Place.

Painstakingly planning pretend paperbacks for Sonic the Comic even though it's 2016, I'm 30, and these won't ever exist

Sonic the Comic was my favourite comic as a child. Some people had American superheroes, others had mischievous 1950s British children, I had the licensed adventures of a console mascot.

Sure, when I picked my first issue off the shelf at Dillons (#21, 5th March 1994), it was because I loved playing those Sega games where you hold down right and occasionally press a jump button to move the hedgehog sprite from one edge of a themed landscape to the other. But I stayed for Nigel Kitching's thrilling stories and Richard Elson's captivating art.

A few years ago, when I was spending a week by myself in a wooden hut overlooking the sea in a secluded corner of a Thaisland, I downloaded some STC scans for nostalgia kicks and ended up wasting the next few days puzzling over how these various overlapping yet diverse stories might be best represented in trade paperback collections, should that situation ever arise. After much redrafting and frustration I gave up and had to settle for going on boat trips and enjoying my time in paradise instead.

Fortunately, I've now managed to make my life so unexciting that the prospect of returning to this problem and finally nailing it doesn't even seem that much like a waste of my precious, dwindling time any more. So without futher ado, here's the unofficial, definitive guide to how you can fit every single story* from Sonic the Comic into 13 x 200-ish-page paperbacks that won't ever exist for multiple reasons.

Illegally download the digital hatchet jobs here to share the fruits of my pointless labour (or just download the original comics here like I did, occasional bad scans and all). It's not like the creators get any royalties when these are sold on eBay (you'll need a .cbr reader too).

Substantialreads: Insubstantialreads

At least I made it to the second half of the year before falling back on comics. And at least it's another comic writer being a smart-arse, weaving a dense interdimensional web that he apparently genuinely believes was dictated to him by beings from another realm during a magickal trance, so it shouldn't be so much light reading as perplexing and off-putting. We can only hope.

Penelope: A confessional memoir

The following is a true story that I have to get off my chest.

It's up to you whether you think it's an actual experience from my life or the authentic transcript of a dream I just had, fuelled by reading some messed-up horror stories, listening to a radio discussion about dreams and an undigested bit of beef fajita.