Contiki Chronicles, Day 11: Machine Optional

Day 11 was a good day, if I may say so myself. I bought a belt.


Anyway, this was the day we got to explore Florence! We started outside some cathedral and/or church dedicated to some saint or something, and from there we walked down an alleyway (of which there are many in Florence) to this place:

Leonardo Leather Works. If the name doesn't give it away, they make leather and leather products. While inside, we got a brief talk on all things leather, before they sent us into the shop to buy some of their many many leather products.

Leather is pretty cool stuff, by the way. I mean, what is there to NOT like about dead cow skin, treated in chemicals until it's suitable to be worn as a jacket or belt?

...I might sound like I'm bitter or something, but in reality I don't actually care that much. But I did get some good tips on how to tell fake leather for real leather. Or at least, in Florence, anyway. Y'see, Florence is kind of famous for its leather, and where you get really good quality stuff of anything, you can also get really crappy knock-off stuff of the same thing. Hence the streets of Florence are filled with hawkers trying to sell fake leather goods to Tourists by claiming they're real leather. This is actually illegal (or at least I'm pretty sure it is), so it's kind of funny watching them all scatter when a cop shows up.

Anyway, the city of Florence has a number of laws in place to help deal with these people. For example, every leather product in the city has to be labelled (read: burnt into the leather itself) as such, and to label something as leather when it is, in fact, NOT leather is as crime. The hawkers get around this by getting strips of real leather, branding them, and slipping them inside the pockets of fake leather garments. Since the strip is technically a separate object, they can claim that it's real leather without (technically) breaking any laws.

Another thing the hawkers do in their pursuit of forcing fake leather goods upon hapless tourists is that they move around the city every single day, so that they're never in the same spot when your new leather jacket falls apart at the seams and you try to go back for a refund. In the same way, you can tell that if the shop you're buying stuff from has wheels, it's probably selling you fake merchandise. The only way to be sure you're getting real proper leather is if the store is, say, AN ACTUAL BUILDING, and preferably if the brand has some guarantee that they've been making leather for seventeen generations or something, so you can probably assume that they know their shit.

Two more things about fake leather: Suede (the underside of leather) is actually impossible to replicate, so if you can find any of that on your product, then it's most likely real. That's not as easy as it sounds, though, because most products have the Suede on the inside to protect it, and because the outside is the better part anyway. So if you cut open a leather jacket to find it and you find that it actually is real leather... well, you've just made a massive hole in a perfectly good leather jacket.

The other thing that they'll try to do when trying to get you to buy fake leather goods is they'll claim that real leather doesn't burn, pull out a lighter, and then demonstrate by trying to burn their apparently "real" jacket. Just so you know: THIS IS A MYTH. LEATHER IS MADE OUT OF DEAD COWS AND DEAD COWS ARE HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. Furthermore, fake leather burns as well. What they're doing when they pull out the lighter is that they never hold it over one spot on the leather for long enough that it will catch fire. If they ever try to scam you this way, ask if you can give it a try. Chances are they'll say no. Plus, if they say yes, then you can have fun burning fake leather.


Anyway, that's enough about leather. I left that shop with my brand new leather belt in tow, and then we headed over into one of the main-ish squares in Florence: Piazza della Signoria (thank you, Google maps). This is where we started our city walking tour of Florence (or Firenze, as it is called in Italian - although I'm pretty sure that's also the name of a centaur from Harry Potter). Anyway, he was telling us the history of the city, and I've mostly forgotten it by now. I do remember that the entire city, back in the day, was one of the more powerful city-states in Italy, because the people here kind of invented banking and were therefore really rich. That let them bring in a lot of artisans and whatnot from all over the place and the entire city prospered. There were also a bunch of really famous Florentines, and there's a square lined with statues of a whole heap of them, such as this guy:

Yeah, that's right. GALILEO GALILEI. YOU KNOW, THE FAMOUS GUY? YEAH, HIM.

Oh, and the only other one I got a photo of was Machiavelli, because I freakin' love the look of pure evil on his face in that statue:

Other famous Florentines include Dante (of Inferno fame), Da Vinci (you know, the guy with the code) and Michelangelo (Otherwise known as the dude with the really sore back from painting ceilings all day).

Anyway, I actually can't remember a lot of the history of Florence. Maybe it just wasn't interesting enough for me to remember. Well, whatever. We saw a bunch of really cool stuff, such as this one area which had been bombed in WW1, and was now almost completely rebuilt. And this one bridge which is completely covered with shops and pickpockets and tourists. And finally the Duomo of Florence, which is basically this one ridiculously massive (and I mean MASSIVE) cathedral in the middle of this huge square which as nothing but the Cathedral in it. 

Seriously, this thing is huge. Like, it takes ten minutes to walk from one end to the other. I'm not even sure of the reason why it's so ridiculously massive. It just is. This is the FRONT side:

So, after the very enlightening and exciting walking tour of the city in which I learnt an immeasurable amount about the city and its history, we were given the rest of the day to explore. This one other guy and I made it our mission to hunt down the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum. Which we did, after much searching. It was down an alley at the ass end of the Duomo, and it was marked by a single sign that we missed the first time we saw it. Inside though, was pretty cool. We paid like €5 to get in, and then spent the next hour or two looking at wooden productions of a bunch of Da Vinci's sketches.

Here are some pictures:

...Okay, that's a lot of pictures. But, in order, they are (or at least, I'm pretty sure they are): Horse drawn plow/harvesting mechanism, Some kind of crank-powered boat, A FREAKIN TANK, attempt at a flying machine, some kind of wood-cutting thing, a ball-bearing thing (like the sorts they put in roller blade wheels, except bigger and made of wood), something I'm pretty sure was a crane of some description, A GODDAMN CANNON, Another attempt at a flying machine, wind powered boat (which may have also flown, who the fuck knows?), a frame for another flying machine (with bonus wooden man), and the coolest damn clock I've ever seen. Seriously, pictures don't do that clock justice. I'll see if I can dig out the video I took of it at some point.

So yeah, Da Vinci designed a lot of stuff. Like, a hell of a lot of stuff. And some of it actually worked.

After that productive hour or two, we headed back to the square where we started the walking tour - Piazza della Signoria. Why? Because there were a bunch of statues in that square, and I didn't get any photos of them. I still didn't actually, except for one. One of a very, VERY famous statue:

Michelangelo's David (WARNING: NUDITY BELOW).

So yeah. It's a statue by Michelangelo, and it is called David. Hence, Michelangelo's David.  As one would assume, it is in fact a statue of David, from the Bible.

Although... this isn't actually the real statue. The ACTUAL statue of David is in a museum with a ridiculous line that you have to pay to get in to and you're not allowed to take photos. So that's why I'm not complaining that this is in fact a fake statue.

Oh, and you know when I said I only took one photo?

I lied.

Because I'm secretly 12 years old like that.

(I actually really, REALLY want to just end this post there, like that. But alas, more things happened that day. It's almost over though. I swear.)

So after our day in Florence, there were three things: A photo shoot from a lookout point above the city, dinner, and then a trip to Space Electronic Discothèque, the biggest Nightclub in Florence. Dinner was alright, but the Nightclub was pretty crazy. I drank some unholy number of Long Island Ice Tea's, and also introduced myself to the B-52 shot - equal parts Bailey's, Kahlua and Grand Mariner. Goooood stuff. Also works well as a cocktail.

I got a bunch of photos from the night, but a rather disconcertingly large number of them are of one of my friends hooking up with this one chick (who he actually met the night before, and spent the night at her place). I think the one which sums up the night the most is this one here:

I don't know, but there's something about that photo which perfectly encapsulates everything there is about going to a nightclub.

I think I'll leave it there for tonight. I got home safely and slept fairly well. Day 12 should come along eventually.

Contiki Chronicles, Day 10: ITALY!

At long last, I finally decided to get off my ass and start writing these things again. Although by this point it's been almost 9 months since all the stuff happened, so my recollection may be a little... rusty.

Anyway.

Day 10 started with us leaving Antibes and heading south. After some amount of driving, we exited France, and crossed over into Italy. Our destination? Just a little city in the more northerly part of Italy, by the name of Florence.

But first, a stopover to gaze in amazement and awe at one specific tower.

A little note about Pisa: The place is famous for its Leaning Tower. But something that isn't as well known about the place is that there is LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE TO DO THERE. Seriously. You go in, check out the tower, take the obligatory photos with you in weird poses and then get the hell out because that place is hot as fuck.

Speaking of photos:

I don't know what you're talking about. Clearly that tower isn't leaning at all. It's just everything else is.

Okay seriously though, there's the tower. Now you don't need to go all the way over to Pisa to see it. When they built it, the city was basically doing it to show off their wealth. But what I gather happened is that they just so happened to build it on the worst possible place, and with improper foundations. Meaning that when they were three quarters of the way through building it, it started to lean. They kept building it though, and you can see that the upper floors are sort of angled in regards to the floors below them.

There's also this big ass lawn out the front that you're not allowed to step on, meaning that the road becomes clogged with tourists, and every twenty minutes a Police Officer and/or Security Guard has to come and yell at people for being on the lawn and doing stupid shit like this:

Yeah, that's a human pyramid in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, because why the fuck not? I think making stupid poses in front of the tower is sort of like the unofficial pastime of the entire City, and all tourists are required by law to pick it up whilst in the city. Which is why I discovered a hobby of taking photos of people in stupid stances from a totally different angle, without the tower in the background. Kind of like this:

Because it cracks me up the amount of stupid shit people will do if they can get a photo of it.

Oh, and here's another photo of the tower, because why not.

It's seriously not leaning at all. I don't get this country.

After lunch, we cleared that hell hole of a city, and got back on the bus and after much more driving, arrived at our destination.

Now, Florence is a pretty cool city. But we'll get to that tomorrow, because that's when all the stuff we actually did in Florence happened. That night, we went to a karaoke bar, I drank a 2 litre jug of Long Island Ice Tea almost entirely by myself, and ended up not being as drunk as I'd expect, but still pretty drunk. That was a good night.

I'll try to update some time between now and three months from now with day 11. 

Duck Junk: A haiku

I saw a duck's junk.
What the everliving fuck?
That shit is messed up.

Stimulate me!

Totally not changing that post title.

Anyway, I'm making a post. On my blog.

Madness.

I often find myself struggling for things to put on this blog. I kind of know why, as well - I use writing as a means of organising my thoughts - putting them down somewhere so that they're on the page instead of running around inside my head. On top of that, the act of writing, of creating meaning through words, is what helps me to understand a lot of things. My brain is a messy and confused place, so it's not really the ideal workspace to try and sort through the various conundrums that constitute my life. The problem is that whenever I have something I want to say, I generally have other avenues to pursue in order to thrust those words out of my mind.

The other thing is that I think I may have left the purpose of this blog a bit too intentionally vague. Well, vague and/or non-existent. I don't really have any good reason for making a blog; anything that I want to say desperately enough, I have other places to put them. You'll notice I usually begin my posts with either "This has been on my mind for a while..." or "I guess I should probably write something, but I have no idea what." Or words to those effects. The thing is that I fail at spontaneously coming up with things. I need some sort of stimulus for me to get the ball rolling, and then only after that does the whole writing process happen. My thought processes are reactive, not proactive. And I'm not too sure if that's a problem or not.

So, I've decided that I need some sort of stimulus for my posts. I suppose I could pick a random word every day and write a post based off of it, like a certain other blog I know, but that just doesn't seem right to me. Instead, I'm turning to you guys - all 20 of my followers (although I'm fairly sure most of that 20 probably haven't checked the blog in months, if not longer). What I want you to do, is comment on this post with a sentence, or a word, or some other kind of stimulus, and if I feel up to it, I'll choose one and write something using that stimulus. It may be some kind of short story, or a bunch of random musings, or a haiku... basically whatever I feel like doing at the time. Please, though, don't ask for anything like "You should write about..." or "What are your thoughts on...". Nothing like that. The stimulus has to be able to stand by itself as an entirely separate entity to the fact that I'm going to write about it. That's the only condition I have, so get commenting!

An update or some shit, I guess

This is the post where I let everybody who cares know about what's happening.

The short answer is not much, really.

The not-as-short answer is that the short answer is more or less bullshit and that last week I started university. I also have a new laptop, and with any luck I WON'T spill coke all over this one. I've moved into college, met a bunch of cool people, and also done a fairly solid amount of drinking. Which, to be honest, is probably something I should tone back on. But... meh.

Oh, and since I now have an actual computer and decent (-ish) internet, I can once again start writing up the Contiki Chronicles! I might actually get it done before a year after I started...

So that's about everything I can think of at the moment. I'm kind of tired, so I might just go to bed.

Magic science: If I ever wrote a book...

I think that if you looked at the timestamps on the vast majority of my posts, pretty much all of them would have been posted well past midnight from wherever I was when I posted. So I've made the effort to post this one at the very least before 10pm.

So uh, yeah. Oh, laptop update: turns out the insurance company doesn't want to pay for the repairs, and the quote came back, saying that the entirety of the repairs would consist of getting a brand new laptop. Or at least that way would be cheaper than fixing it. So now I'm working for Dad to get enough money to buy a new one. I mean, while I have enough money for it as it is, it's only barely enough, and I'm not really that stoked to put a $1648 hole in my drinking money for when I start Uni in two weeks.

Anyway, that's not why I'm writing this. I was bored, so I thought I'd share this idea for an epic book or three that I've had kicking around in my head for like the last... couple of years.

So the idea is that generally, when one decides to write a sci-fi/fantasy novel, the choice is just that: Sci-Fi or Fantasy? I realise that that's more or less a massive generalisation, but the way I see it, is that in order to invoke the temporary suspension of disbelief, you need to start with something to disbelieve. Of course, the easiest ways to do that lie at the core of Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Science and Magic. My question is: why not have both? When I had that idea all those years ago, I thought it kind of strange that nobody had ever clued on to this before.

The story would go something like this then:

...

...

Okay, it just occurred to me that I have only the barest ideas of how this would work. Naturally there would be some kind of vast, sweeping war across the mighty Galactic Empire/Federation, and at the heart of the opposing sides would be the High Council of Magic on one side, and the Advanced Research Laboratory or whatever on the other side. The lines aren't that clear-cut though, as there is misuse of both powerful forces on either side of the conflict. Into this galactic battlefield enters our hero (or possibly heroes, and whose name(s) and occupation(s) I haven't decided yet). He/she/they are involved in the whole affair in some minor way, and are eventually led to discover the inevitable variety of grand conspiracy reaching all over the Federation/Empire, plotting to use the war for their own nefarious gains, as it must because this is a work of fiction, therefore most major plot devices have to be predictable. So it falls to our hero(es) to reveal the faces of the conspiracy and so bring peace to the Empire/Federation. But as his/her/their search uncovers more and more, he/she/they realise that the tendrils of corruption reach higher than they could ever imagine...

Yeah. So, it's a work in progress, but I think it has some real potential. Also, with careful use of detail, I'm pretty sure this can be spread out over at least a trilogy.

But the part that puzzled me most about this was: why have I never seen anybody attempt to do something like this before? Could it be that nobody had ever thought of putting Science and Magic together (not very likely)? Maybe they have, and it just never became popular enough for me to have heard of it (that's actually fairly likely). But then it occurred to me that I HAD seen it before.

For example, the Harry Potter novels are set in modern times, and magic still exists. But even then, magic is given pretty much all the spotlight, and technology takes a backseat. Also, it's more or less stated that magic beats technology any day (hence why no electronics work around Hogwarts). On top of that, there is a dearth of any noticeable amount of detail of the inner workings of magic in the Harry Potter universe. It's more or less, 'anything is possible, except making food appear out of thin air, because that's cheating'.

In the Wars of Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts (which I'm reading right now), there are a couple of bits that hint at the possibility that magic and technology can exist within the same universe, and it seems to be implied that they existed at the same time as well at some point in the past, and yet in the actual novels, technology is almost non-existent, set back to the roughly the same level as any other bunch of Fantasy novels, whilst magic is allowed free rein. Another example of this is the Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist, where Nakor attempts to explain magic in terms that sound suspiciously like trying to explain high school physics to a bunch of children, but still there is no evidence of advanced technology in any of the books.

In fact, the only novels I can think of in which magic and advanced technology actually exist together would be the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, where the fairy people wield both magic and advanced tech. But even here, we see the opposite effect in place: where the technology is practically boundless, the magic is extremely limited, restricted to only hypnosis, invisibility and healing for the most part. Even still, the plot is driven forwards by technology and magic in roughly equal parts.

So what is it about magic and technology that they can't seem to exist in the same universe? Perhaps it's that establishing two sets of rules governing how things work is too confusing, or complicated, or otherwise obstructive to enjoying the story. Or perhaps if we extrapolate the history of some of these novels, we discover that when one is allowed to grow, the necessity of the other lessens? We can see this in the novels I mentioned earlier: in each case, the expansion of one of these powers is only seen in the presence of the absence (or limit) of the other.

Either way, I don't see these as obstacles. Should I ever get around to writing this novel (which honestly isn't all that likely to happen, although I'm still staking my claim on the premise), these shouldn't pose too much of a problem. It seems like all you need to do is avoid going too in depth (after all, this is thousands of years in the future, when both schools have had time to grow and achieve the impossible, albeit in very different ways), and come up with some plausible back story as to how the two came to coexist. Kind of like the Harry Potter universe, except three thousand years in the future, where all the wizarding folk decided to move to a separate planet to escape the muggles or something. I dunno.

Laptop troubles

Did I mention that I spilled coke all over my laptop? I don't think I did.

Wait, did I even mention that I HAD a new laptop? No? Maybe? I can't remember, and I'm too lazy to go back and check. Well, anyway, Mum and Dad got me a new laptop for my birthday, I finally opened it on the 20th of January, and then I promptly spilled coke all over it the night before Australia Day and quite simply, it's fucked.

So I thought I'd make a post, and then use that post to explain exactly how fucked the laptop is/was. It worked fine just after the spill, and I'd cleaned up all the stuff off the keyboard. Being the idiot that I am, I didn't turn it straight off and leave it upside down and hope none of the coke got into the circuitry. As a result, well... Coke got into the circuitry. And promptly dried there. Also, it turns out coke is acidic, so there's a very good chance it has also partially corroded away part of the circuit board, meaning that it will need to be completely replaced. Anyway, the next day I wanted to use it, so I turned it on again, because we've already established that I'm not the most responsible and/or intelligent laptop owner, and now here's a list of everything that I could immediately see was wrong with it:

- The power button is jammed, or sticky, or so,etching. Either way, you need to press it several times before it turns on.
- The caps lock key is broken. It just doesn't do anything. But that's okay, because you can do the same thing by tapping the left and the down key at the same time, or the left and the right key, and the down and the tab key, or the tab and the function key or probably a bunch of other key combinations that I didn't waste my time trying to figure out.
- The return key doesn't work. Instead of doubling as the enter key and thus accepting my password at the login screen, it instead puts some kind of character into the password box. Unfortunately, I can't tell which character it is exactly because:
- The shift key seems to be permanently held down. Even if the actual key isn't pressed, it still acts as though it is, meaning I can't get past the login screen because every letter I put in is on capitals.

And that's about all I could see, given that I couldn't get past the login screen, still, those are all keyboard based issues, and there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the actual performance of the machine. So nothing major, right? Well, we'll see...

After that, I turned it off, decided to clean the keyboard, and that was when I realised that the problem was actually underneath the keyboard layer so I couldn't do anything without tearing the laptop apart. Because there was barely any coke underneath any of the keys, and the keys are sort of protected by the backlight of them, so I couldn't take that out. The coke must have gone down and around the edges of the machine.

So I then flipped it over, and decided that I'd have to take the laptop apart, bit by bit, and clean each individual part inside. Unfortunately, it turns out that none of the screwdrivers we have here at home are good enough to undo the screws that keep the bottom of the laptop in place. My plans thwarted, I then left the laptop upside down and hoped for the best.

But the story doesn't end there. You see, it occurred to me that I could get it fixed professionally, so I went to the one and only authorised Mac Service Providers in town. This was on Wednesday. So, about five days after the coke was spilled in the first place. At the store, I learned a couple of things:

1. The store technician was out of town so any repairs couldn't be done for two weeks.
2. Spill damages voids the warranty on the mac.
3. Due to the acidic nature of the liquid spilled, repairs would cost more than a new computer.
4. This basically meant my only option was, if we had home insurance, we could MAYBE claim it under accidental damages. They offered a quote, but I couldn't afford it at that moment, so I declined.

So, now that professional repairs were more or less out of the question, I went back to the home repair route. I went out and purchased a new set of screwdrivers, and then came home and got to work on the computer. I carefully took out each part and, using cotton swabs and a (carefully placed) cup of water, I painstakingly went over each part and cleaned any suspicious stains. I immediately encountered a problem. The battery was screwed in by two screws which were totally different than any of the other screws in the machine. In fact, I needed a totally different, specialised screwdriver for it, which I just didn't have. It was possible to open it using a flathead screwdriver (and in fact I did manage to remove one of he screws like that) but I had worn down the other screw so much that I couldn't do it. And without removing the battery, I couldn't access the top board of the laptop, where most of the spillage occurred. As such, I was left no recourse but to put every piece back where I'd found it. I lost a screw somewhere in the process, but I'm 99% sure it's not a majorly important screw. So, each piece back in it's rightful place, I flipped it over again, pressed the power button and...

Nothing. I pressed it a few more times to be sure.

Still nothing. I pressed it about fifty times, again, just to be sure.

Absolutely nothing happened.

Well, shit. Maybe the batteries just ran out. That's feasible. I haven't actually tested that idea yet, though.

Anyway, that brings us to more or less the present. It turns out that we don't have accidental damages cover, but we lodged a claim for special consideration. So I need to go back to the store and get a quote on repairing the laptop. And I'm pretty sure the quote was fairly expensive. In the meantime, we're also going to see about getting that specialised screwdriver so I can take the battery out. And tomorrow I'm going to ignore all of my problems and go and watch Django Unchained.

The other day, when I said my life was just one huge clusterfuck after another? This was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.