They have been sourcing funds through IndieGoGo. They recently achieved their initial funding goal, but that does not mean that you miss out on pre-ordering a copy for yourself and/or gaining an additional perk with enough support.

These people have heaps of talent and I’m waiting out to see what they have in store for us. There site is here The books won’t be released until March 2012. So I guess, I’ve got to be patient.

(Art by Sam Cavanagh (twitter))

This weekend was my first time back in Tuggeranong, to see the Roller Derby Season, I’ve been missing out on. I think I was in Melbourne for one of them. Anyway, I really enjoyed this match, between the Surly Griffins and the Red-Bellied Black Hearts, for one major reason. It was fast. It was the kind of derby that I fell in love with when I first saw it. It moved at a break-neck speed for most the hour, which just simply proved the stamina of most of these women.

This is waaaay better than the current trend of slowing the entire pack (and the game down). A strategy that was used heavily in a game I posted about earlier. I understand its use, but seriously it puts a dent in the spirit of the game. And that spirit is all about speed.

There were tumbles-a-plenty in this match, and while this what everyone expects at the derby, its still pretty dangerous, when you think about. I still sit in the suicide seating, remembering that private health form still sitting on my desk. At least I have dental I suppose.

Ve, once again, was nice enough to take photos of the match and not take other people’s souls for a change.

Anyway, this happened a couple of weeks ago. At the AIS, the Canberra Vice City Rollers got trounced by the SunState RollerGirls. The introductions for the VCRs was good, but unfortunately its the final score on the board that counts. Going through my tweets from a fortnight ago, it was something like this:

That’s it. Game Over. #CRDL 48 #SSRG 181

So, yeah. Trounced.

Ve, The-Thing-That-Lives-Upstairs, sent me these photos sometime ago of the action.

With the entrance and introductions out of the way, the game begins. From the beginning the All Stars pretty much controlled the circuit, effectively blocking the Rollers’ jammers at every available opportunity, while let their jammer through. At halftime the score was 17 for Canberra and 105 for Victoria. The Vice City Rollers stepped up their strategy in the second half, the pivots becoming more aggressive to breakup the tight-knit wall of All Star defenses. This was not enough to close the margin. The final score when time ran out: CRDL 67 VRDL 166. The crushing defeat for the locals.

Not as many photos this time around. The battery was fairly low.

Night

And here’s the write-up:

The Carillon is ringing out tunes, like the Cell Block Tango and Coin-Operated Boy. This is roughly how the Amanda Palmer Ninja Gig began. All the while Mr Fibby and band plead and beg and curse towards the concrete bell tower. They need her to stop so that they may begin. And just as all of the bells stop, a thunderhead rolls across the sky, blotting it out.

Kaelee and I rode our bikes to the Rat Patrol headquarters (or perhaps just one of them) where this entire adventure began. The Rat Patrol is DIY bicycle club, a motley crew that cruise around town on junkers, clunkers, choppers, tandems, all of which are Frankensteins, welded and bolted together from the corpses of dead bikes. I managed to meet and briefly chat a few members, before Ms Palmer rocked up and then it was on to get down to the Carillon on Aspen Island. There would have easily been sixty, seventy, maybe even eighty people, all pedaling towards the city centre.

This mob swarmed the bike paths and cluttered up suburban rodes as it made its way down to Garema for a brief break and photo-op, before setting off again towards Commonwealth Park. Then through the park and around the lake towards the bell tower, where more people were waiting to hear the performance.

A piano showed up, Mr Fibby and Band produced instruments and were about to play when suddenly the Carillon piped up, its bells chiming away, until a tune began to form. Amanda Palmer was up there knocking out Coin-Operated Boy on an old-looking pedal keyboard. CCTV at a nearby kiosk showed her playing away. Then the Carillionist wanted to show her a thing or two and what song she could knock out of the bells. At this point Mr Fibby who were waiting to open began screaming at the tower and then the CCTV monitor for her to stop so that they could start.

Behind them , clouds came steamrolling over the sky, blackened with storm that wanted to flatten anything in the way. And when the lightening made a crease across the night and the first drops began to fall, it was then that everyone ran for the nearest shelter under the bell-tower. For a short while there was some relief. But the wind made sure that no one would be left dry, as it seemed to blow in from all directions. As people made makeshift shelters, someone had the forethought of bringing a big enough tarp for Mr Fibby to continue playing under.

After a short while, Amanda Palmer stepped out, asked for a ukulele and began playing a few tunes, including Map of Tasmania and Creep. People sang along and cheered despite the seemingly apocalyptic storm. Then things were handing things back to Mr Fibby and band to tell one final tale about Koschei the Deathless.

At this point most people had left, the cold and the wet finally making Kaelee and I leave. We rode through the night back to the bunker to get somewhat dry and dredge up some food and to drive her home. An excellent and tiring night all round.

Here are some photos. Most have a resolution of 1200 x 900 pixels. Right-click them to see there full resolution, unless your monitor is huge.

The following photos are by Kaelee

We were late-ish, but we still found decent seats in the suicide lane to enjoy front row carnage that would spill around the hard turn. I thought that Sydney were a shoe-in to win and I based this on the facts that: a) Sydney had more experienced players, b) they possibly has better refined tactics and; c) they would cheat. Plus they had a history of beating this town, despite the narrowing margin.

The whole match was filled with an exciting atmosphere of a huge crowd and two very serious teams. Each jammer would take her turns, pushing harder and faster around the track. Blockers were bouncing out, over and into the jammers and each other. Coaches screaming from the pit stop attempting to guide their teams to victory, while referees kept an eagle eye on the whole match.

The halftime show was a band called Cellblock 69, they were dressed like they were wearing the skins of the B52’s and played out a number of 80’s hits, which irked me more than anything. I would have preferred something harder that day considering the girl-on-girl violence whirling around the track.

Canberra had managed a decent lead at the start of the match, briefly lost it and then regained it, holding it until the end. The Sydney captain was sent off due to a long line of major penalties. This only further solidified the victory by Canberra of 153 points to Sydney’s 95. A really stunning win.

Now for some stunning pictures from Ve. His photostream is here.

Anyway last weekend I spent the day meeting up with the housemate’s uncle, who was a pretty cool guy with a keen sense of taste for beer, wine and fucking excellent food. The housemate, Phil and his uncle, Paul , share an obsession: cooking. And they are both brilliant at it. I ate Sardines stuffed with parsley and roasted pine nuts, steamed pipis in red bean paste sauce, marinated ling and, the coup de grace, Sri Lankan snake bean curry. Seriously, I felt overwhelmed eating this entire meal, but in a really good way, so much flavour and so little time to really, heavily, appreciate it. I managed to impress people with my choice in expensive imported beers from Flying Dog, Innis & Gunn and the Orkney Island Breweries.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, I met up with Jo from work and while catching up, spent the day taking photos through the remaining moments of Floriade, the spring festival that graces this city every year. After Jo had to split, I spent sometime in a café, just chilling, drinking caps and drawing. This I have not done in more than a year. And in the moments after, I felt that I was in control of my life for the first time in ages. I came home and the Phil and Paul, drummed up a pile of spring roll of pork mince, carrot, vermicelli and created a dish of fish sauce, curry leaves and chilli flakes.

Monday, I just chilled and recovered, but on Tuesday, I unleashed a monster. Several in fact. I wear headphones at work. I play music loud. When I am in the zone, no one and no thing – short of a total catastrophe – can reach me while I have the headphones on. One person at my job, Luke, would throw stuff at my desk to get my attention. I then exclaimed last week that I would buy a couple of Nerf weapons just so he could shoot at me to get my attention. Only cause it would be safer than the things he was throwing around.

So I bought a couple of midrange items along with some extra bullets and snuck them into work. I did this because the security guards are bored and want to hang shit on you at every available opportunity.

Of course I successfully snuck them by the front door and unpacked the toys upstairs, leaving one on Luke’s desk. Of course, after about 3 days of bullets being passed between desks, has resulted in an escalating arms race that will not only consume our team, but the entire section. Maybe in a month the entire floor will be at war, disparate factions eager to resolve age-old bureaucratic disputes and rivalries. But this is how IT proles duke it out, with foam weapons and vinyl trophies. It’s like Valhalla played out in that pool of coloured balls at a MacDonalds.

So nowadays, I spend half my day learning difficult things, normally beyond my immediate understanding and dodging fire. Those sucker darts really pinch when they hit you between the eyes. Too many people around looking for headshots as opposed to just shooting at the general body mass. I think we need to set up some kind of firing range.

Anyway, I gotta get back to things. Probably sleep. More photos to come too soon. And more news so stay tuned.

Some things are not meant to be. Yet. My birthday was on Friday. All went fairly well. Spent a day with a friend, Em, taking photos of graffiti as per the weird tradition I do every birthday now. I did take a lot of photos, but a great chunk of them were long murals. So I needed to stitch them together, sadly, I no longer possess a copy of Photoshop since Adobe last screwed me over.

So during the weekend I was at a friend’s place and I used his computer to start sewing pictures together into fished-eyed panos. All this went well, I even decided to run batch on all of the photos to convert all of my raw photos into jpegs. Then we decided to play some Call of Duty for a while. When I felt that the processing was done, I decided to switch back to the computer to see how things went.

I was greeted by a blue screen. All of my work for the evening is lost in the steel confines of a dead harddrive. So there will be no photos yet.

I have more zine reviews in the works among other things, but the day at work was busy and I feel a bit out of sorts at the moment.

The plane lands, I collect my luggage and catch a train into the city. More video games. I still have no phone so I cannot tell people that I am alive, well and somewhat sane. The person to help me and put up with me for most of the week is Jeremy, who was trying to arrange photos for a gallery at Bleeding Hearts. I dropped a mention of it sometime earlier. It’s related to zine when he took a trip to the U S of A last year. The photos, along with postcards had to be arranged in some kind of order to fit neatly on three panels. For my part I managed to help in deft peeling of double sides adhesive to paste picture to temporary wall. The owners/managers (not sure if they were which or both) told us that we had to go around five. And Jeremy and I managed to snap the last photos to the wall a little after closing time.

Evening came and went. After a vegan-style meal of “chicken” and “oyster”, Jeremy brought me back to his place to show me some of the crazy crap he brought back from Japan, along with cracking open an expensive looking bottle of shochu that is equally smooth when drunk straight or mixed with tropical breakfast juice.

I have pictures, but they will come later. Right now I’m ready to pass out. Odin bless that fine shochu. I pray that they have some in Valhalla. Jeremy also gave up his bed for me. He’s sleeping on the floor.