A few quick bullet points

Hello. I haven't blogged lately because I've been having too much fun. I do have what I hope will be a tremendously exciting internet meme coming up very soon, but in the meantime, here are some squibs.

• Old School Unionism - In which an old school Fabian has Ms .45 punching the air and going "Fuck yeah!". It's about the continuing decline in union membership in Australia and the unions' frankly inadequate response, particularly in reference to young and casualised workers. I didn't know the stuff about recruiting shearers in the early days of Australian unionism, so this was a useful eye-opener.

• I've lost about 5kg since leaving uni in mid-2007, and have been utilising my workplace's small but SUBSIDISED gymnasium with inspiration by Stumptuous. Stumptuous provides a feminist view of health and weight training and is refreshingly free of faddism (if you don't count Krista's obsession with squatting). The recent Stumptuous Fitness Model competition was intended to reward women who have made improvements to their fitness in the face of difficulty, perhaps starting from a position of advanced age or obesity. Give it a shot, you're probably nearly as fat as I am anyway.
  

• Just in! Greg Wadley has recently had the opportunity to interview DC Root of ROOT! fame. It's a good interview - obviously done by email, giving both parties the chance to extemporise.

This is my terrible problem: if I sense everyone raving about a band, I'm out of there before you can say Thom Yorke. And I'll wait till about 5 years after they've had their day and disappeared off the face of the planet...and secretly love them! I must have rock-historian disease, or something. I have to enjoy everything retrospectively... I'm also still trying to catch up on artists I never knew during their day -- so last week I was listening to Dusty Springfield, Hunky Dory by Bowie, the Temptations. I had my experimental music phase a long time ago when I was hanging around black clad bookish girls in the vain hope that after a night of Jarry's Ubu trilogy performed by some avante garde troupe in a hell hole somewhere in Fitzroy we could cruise over to the Black Cat for a chinotto and light discussion about how becoming precedes being, and then maybe later she'd let me pop my Converses under her bed.

These days I prefer air guitaring at home to Thin Lizzy. I get about as much sex.

• NEW EYEZMAZE!!! Great idea, too - solve four separate mazes, you win when the family members are brought together. Not original as such, there are lots of games where you need to get multiple figures to the portal, but the fact that the mazes are in completely separate frames fucks up your shit just that little bit more.

Coming very soon - Rufus from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure...

Human Brain Cloud

Oh my god... I discovered Human Brain Cloud this morning via JayIsGames and I've been addicted all freakin' day. Basically, you load a word and type in whatever you associate with it. I got up to 1294 words on the leaderboard (look for Ms 45).

Math Mountain

Math Mountain is an addictive arithmetic game wherein you climb a mountain, competing against another person or the computer, by answering arithmetic questions correctly. It's only BODMAS (without any brackets - Happy Bodmas!), so you don't have to worry about remembering high school algebra, and the questions vary from very easy (1 / 1 = ...) to fairly hard (123 - 75 = ...). You as a geek may be able to answer the questions easily (see post below), but you are being timed and you also have to choose the correct answer from a multiple choice, which, believe it or not, makes it harder. (A few times I've worked out the correct answer quickly, but the mouse slipped and I selected the number next to the one I wanted.) In the meantime, you're racing the CPU to the top of the mountain and collecting powerups such as the ability to stop the opponent from moving or to remove all but two of the multiple choices. If you answer incorrectly or not at all, you'll slide backwards.

As you play through the levels, your side of the mountain will get longer and less steep, so that you have to answer more questions faster than the CPU. You'll have a larger number of multiple choices, making the chances of quickly clicking the wrong answer higher. However, if you do lose, you have a number of lives, so you can opt to "Continue" after the level has been lost. When you lose, you get to keep any powerups you haven't used, so I suggest you save powerups as much as you can.

This game is similar to a test administered by some recruitment companies where you have to quickly select the correct answer to a maths problem, so you may find it valuable to get a bit of practice on Math Mountain. If you're not very good at arithmetic, this is a fun way to practice.

(This review is intended for Jay Is Games, but I want it on my blog so I can get at it. I'm a math retard and need all the practice I can get!)