The Lost Realm

You can't have double standards — you're not a woman!

(as said by my wife while eight months pregnant)

Once again, we're all going to die. I mean, look at the size of that asteroid; it's just huge! The article says it could wipe out a whole continent (since there's no chance it could land in the water that covers two-thirds of the planet).

If you read something a little more scientific, you might notice that the asteroid is only 2km in diameter, and that the risk of it even hitting Earth is slight. The BBC article does mention — right at the bottom — that the calculations still need a little work, and “[t]he error in our knowledge of where NT7 will be on 1 February 2019 is large, several tens of millions of kms”.

So what have we learned from all of this? We're learned that a 2km asteroid may be several tens of millions of kilometres of Earth in about 16 years time, that people panic at the drop of a hat, and that graphic artists have no concept of just how big 2km really is.

Just incase you weren't sure that I'm a geek, I've applied for and recieved an ISSN for The Lost Realm. I've put it on the website with a barcode, so you won't have to worry about being awake at all hours of the night wondering when you'll finally get to use your barcode scanner on your monitor.

For those that understand the ISSN/EAN-13 barcode format, please do note that the price of The Lost Realm is still free.

A long and healthy life is one of the few things that almost everyone on this planet wants. Some people go about this entirely the wrong way, while the rest of us sit around reading article after article that tells us how we can make ourselves healthier, fitter and live forever. Just looking at today's news, we're told that if we want to avoid dementia, we should drink coffee and start a blog.

We spend so much time wondering how to live longer, but we spend very little time thinking about what we want to do with all the time we're supposedly going to gain. If you could live to a thousand years, what would you do with yourself? Even if you're only going to a normal lifespan, what do you expect to be remembered for? What is it you want to do with the time you're given?

Life is an interesting sort of journey in that we don't choose when or where we start, and we don't really have a lot of choice over when or where we finish. The only thing we can really control is how we make the journey and what we do along the way. We can choose what we create; we can choose what we destroy; we can choose how we treat other people.

When it all comes to an end and those that survive you are choosing what to write on your tombstone, what is it that they'll write? What is it that will summarise your existence?

It seems that America has finally snapped. George W. Bush has set up a organisation for volunteer spies to report suspicious citizens. It's a little like Neighbourhood Watch, except you dob in people for being “suspicious”, and then the authorities lock them up and torture them until they admit to being terrorists (or something like that).

America: land of the free and the home of the paranoid (coming soon to an Australia near you).

I had a lovely weekend; my favourite part was being kicked in the face by The Bean.

You might think that the previous statement was sarcastic (particularly if you know me in person), but it wasn't. I really enjoyed getting kicked in the face by my child-to-be.

I'm sure this will all come back to haunt me in the future.