Our living room, meanwhile, got relegated to the dark recesses of our house and is now tucked away in a cosy nook that stops the sound (and heat, which will become increasingly important in the coming weeks) from escaping.

Moving furniture is one of those things that I usually try not to do unless I’m being evicted. This morning my body aches, but it’s okay–it was worth it–because, as they say: “a change is as good as a holiday”.

I’m actually not 100% sure of that statement, but it serves a certain usefulness both to writers who are unafraid of embracing clichés (such as myself), as well as those in awkward social situations who don’t know what else to say.

What was interesting (at least to me) about the whole situation was the way that I began to uncover history when I started moving things around. We are intimately connected to our past—at every moment of our lives we are trapped in its causal (karmic) web. Life is a constant attempt to come to terms with history, to learn from it whilst keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the future ahead.

It’s funny to me (in a strange way, not in a “ha-ha” way) that I can be sat on a couch and only a few feet away, hidden in an old storage chest (that has a functional stereo sat on top of it, a far more effective deterrent than any number of keys or locks) is an old video game console that I wasted hours of my life playing.

But that’s not all. If you push aside the GameCube, you’ll find something else… a folded-up newspaper emblazoned with the word despair. This is the front page of the local newspaper (called The Advertiser here in Adelaide) from sometime after September 11^th, 2001. These neatly-folded pages are a relic of a time that Westerners are intimately connected to.

And yet, at the very same time as we remain connected to our past, we also seek to separate ourselves from it. We must find a way to distance ourselves, or else we will not progress. We will turn our backs on the future and stagnate; the past will rush up and overcome us and we will be swept away on a tide of memories, dreams and reflections.

But let’s go even deeper. Beyond the newspapers, there is another gaming console. A Nintendo 64. A NINTENDO 64. This is like archaeology. This is the excavation of one man’s life—my life. Not all of it, of course, but something of it. Life bundled away in a wooden chest, hidden amongst newspaper clippings of crumbling buildings.

And beneath the N64 there is a Super Nintendo. There are the controllers. There are cables neatly wrapped in blue plastic. There are game cartridges as well, among them—Secret of Mana, one of my most treasured possessions. And yet, there’s more to this than a collection of video game memorabilia. This is my life. And every new artifact that I dig up is a new memory… a cascade of them.

I find an old Gameboy with the purple buttons and just holding it is enough to make the Tetris theme music play in my head. I feel suddenly and unexpectedly Russian. I remember being picked on at school for having a GameBoy, because they weren’t as cool as Sega’s colour-capable GameGear.

And there, at the very bottom of the chest is a somewhat unremarkable grey box. It’s bigger than the laptop that I’m currently typing on. It’s a Nintendo Entertainment System. A real relic. To me the NES represents more than just the memories of playing Super Mario Bros. and attempting to jump to the top of the flagpoles at the end of each level. To me, the NES also represents a bizarre, almost pre-diluvian, period of my life before my parents were divorced.

To find this console now, at the bottom of a wooden chest on the other side of town to where I grew up, carries this whole weird feeling of passing time with it. It doesn’t feel strong enough to say that I am looking at something from another time, because it is as though I am seeing something from an entirely different world.

And it is a different world. No matter what has happened in my life since then, I have changed—my mind has changed. I have grown and evolved and yet that same part of me that once obsessively held down the b-button to make Mario run is still there, somewhere, inside my head. That same mind is typing these words. It’s a weird thing.

It’s bizarre to me that I once eagerly slotted cartridges into that specific games machine years before anyone ever flew aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre. And yet, now… looking back, I can tell that there’s no other way things could have turned out. Life, time, history… it expands with us at the centre of it. We are like stickmen born on unfolded origami.

Good morning, Monday.

#shrineofinsanity at irc.austnet.org

Feel free to drop in!

In case you don’t: Joseph Kony is the self-proclaimed leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militant group operating in Central Africa since 1987 that has been accused of thousands of war crimes including abductions, rapes, mutilations and reportedly, even cannibalism. Yesterday, a video produced by the American charity Invisible Children singled him out as the International Criminal Court’s most wanted man.

After the initial outpouring of support for the campaign, the tide of optimism quickly receeded. Like detrius washed up on the beach, the so-called “truth” about the organisation responsible for producing the video was laid bare for all to see.

Many of the criticisms that have been levelled at the organisation are warranted. There must be genuine concerns when charitable groups shy away from transparency, and there has always been questions about the legitimacy of “rock star” style advocacy popularised by events like Live Aid.

But getting caught up in such a discussion achieves little more than diluting the original message and trapping us in an endless series of debates not unlike the tangle of red tape that beaurocrats must incessantly negotiate before anything ever gets done.

That’s not to say that learning more about a cause before you support it is a bad thing. In fact, it should be common sense. I am regularly encouraging people to learn more about things that they don’t know much about, just as I continue doing in my ongoing quest for knowledge.

But instead of lambasting Invisible Children… instead of making them the centrepoint of our attention, perhaps we should pause to reflect not only on what the Kony 2012 campaign is (or who made it), but instead what it actually means.

Yesterday, I linked to the video on my twitter and quoted the first line:

“There are more people on Facebook right now than there were on earth 200 years ago.”

For me, this first sentence represented the underlying message of the entire film:

1) We are a connected people

2) Social media has made us more attuned to these connections than ever before

3) These connections can help to bring about change in the world

In time these are things that should (hopefully) even effect Invisible Children themselves. Since the public outcry began there have been reports that the organisation is already seeking to improve accountability. UPDATE: As I am writing this Invisible Children have posted an official response to their critics, including a breakdown of organisational expenditures.

The facts presented by the video are these: Joseph Kony is a bad man and that there still exists almost unfathomable suffering in Central Africa as a result of complex ongoing regional and ideological tensions. These validity of these facts are not disputed, even amongst Invisible Children’s critics.

And now millions of people worldwide have engaged with a topic that they didn’t even know about 24 hours ago.

The real challenge will be keeping people engaged–helping them feel like they can make a difference, encouraging people everywhere to read and learn and pass that knowledge on in whatever ways that they can so that others may be similarly inspired.

And we can only hope that one day Joseph Kony will be a long-forgotten relic of a time before the world was paying attention.

But then I realised that they simply don’t know where they end up. Spam bots, computer viruses, malware… these are the new epidemics. These “Vicarious Agents of Spam” exist only to replicate themselves, to spread out across the internet, to dribble down between the cracks, to swarm and spread and multiply.

Just like the gigantic amalgamated masses of waste that now linger in the world’s oceans, these little strings of code have become tangled. We may not always be able to see them; and yet, no matter where we go in cyberspace, they are there–scurrying just ahead of us, or lurking close behind.

Some time ago I read about an apocalyptic theory that suggested virulent nanobots may eventually become the downfall of all humanity. Called the Grey Goo hypothesis (not to be confused with the “Grey Goose” hypothesis of which it must be said that I am also a fan), the idea is that we might eventually invent self-replicating machines that swarm (and multiply) across the entire earth until there is nothing else left… kind of like human beings have been doing for the past few thousand years.

If such a thing is possible then perhaps it is not Skynet that we should be afraid of, but instead the brightly lit office cubicles of internet marketers, who drink too much coffee and sit around all day planning the Ultimate Demise of Everything™.

Eventually our planet might become one gigantic intergalactic billboard advertisement for pills that cure erectile dysfunction.

Or maybe it already has.

Everything from the Southern Cross, to Rudd’s meaningful stare and the methodical ticking of the clock seemed designed to build anticipation. And just as pop superstar, Britney Spears, once clambered her way back onto the music charts with the words: “It’s Britney, Bitch.” So too does Kevin Rudd’s expletive-laden communique seem designed to re-introduce him to the public eye.

But sometimes I like to take a break from all of that and write something just for the fun of it. I love pulp fiction because it’s quick and engaging. It doesn’t require a lot of brain power to read, which is an added bonus when it’s two-thousand degrees celsius outside and the most you are capable of concentrating on is lifting a glass of water to your lips one sip at a time.

This morning I wrote a story about vampires. It’s not a topic I visit as often as you might think, so I enjoyed doing it. And rather than let my words fester on some hard-drive, I thought that I may as well take the opportunity to share it here for your reading pleasure.

From Born To Die. More after the jump if your bandwidth can hande it.