Namastay in bed

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“Namastay in bed” on the packaging! Seriously! It’s the small things when it comes to branding and this brand does it right. Love it.

gina_koala

koala

Balmain bed from Koala Furniture came in today and Gina and I got straight into setting up the guest bedroom.

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I lost my shit and sold everything a few years ago (my house, car, everything!). I practically gave my mate my GT-R but he’s let me buy the car back off him (he could easily have sold it for 3 times what I sold it to him for). Karma is a beautiful thing. I’m SO chuffed RB26 is mine once more!

Love the comments!

https://www.reddit.com/r/CarsAustralia/comments/1bgp04b/i_lost_my_shit_and_sold_everything_a_few_years/

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1984 vs Brave New World

“We were keeping our eye on .1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. the roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another–slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman

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RB26 – Refresh

jdmyard
Shop life!

itb
ITB’s on the JDMyard EG Civic.

namx5
Spotted inside an MX5.

gokart
Yonas’ new Go Kart.

brokenrice
The real deal. Broken rice at Com Tam Ngon in Canley Heights.

Drove out West today to catch up with Zi and the boys. Zi and I discussed plans for RB26 and happy to say that we’re both on the same page with where we want to take the car. We’re thinking “Club Spec”. Take half the cage out, put new carpet back in, air-conditioning back in and a whole lot of new OEM and Nismo parts both inside and out. The engine will need a refresh and I have the option of sending the body to Melbourne for a full rotisserie restoration or just organise a local inside/out respray.

Honestly, if I was living in my dream house with my dream garage I’d go the full body resto, but I’m not so for now I’ll settle for a full inside out respray. Either way the ball is rolling!

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Turning my art room into a guest bedroom

Frame_1__1_
Just ordered this Balmain bed frame from Koala. Not huge on the legs, but love everything else!

Gina’s renting an awesome space in Paddington for her ZEN Thai massage business so she’ll be coming into the city from the Blue Mountains a lot more often. At the moment she’s crashing out on my couch which isn’t ideal as I get up super early and usually hop on to play games, which I can’t do if someone’s sleeping on the couch so I’m making moves to turn my art room into a guest bedroom (probably what I should have done all along!).

I’m a little bummed I didn’t get the “art bug”, but I’ve got plenty of time, and I’m still hopeful that I will pick up drawing and painting again down the line.

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BFAM

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Great catch up last night with my Brother From Another Mother Eugene (who was also born in 1975). We grew up together as toddlers (my mum and his mum lived in the same flat in Randwick), and despite going to different schools, we hung out most weekends throughout early high school.

Gotta say, he’s looking a lot better for his age yeah? He’s a good boy though, pretty sure I look older because of all the drugs abuse!

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RB26 is mine, again!

rb26_memory
OK now this is fucking creepy. I just logged on to Facebook and this pops up!

Miraculous coincidences that used to blow my fucking socks off now just leave me with affirmation that the universe does what it does.

Zi reached out to me this morning to let me know that he’s buying a house, and might need to sell the GT-R. Of-course I was quick to let him know that the car is not mine anymore. It’s his, and he can do with it what he likes, but then it hit me like a 2 tonne heavy thing. I have the money. I have the space. Can I buy it back?!

Of-course Zi was reaching out to see if I would want the car back! I was just caught off guard. Happy (actually fucking pumped!) to say we’re sorting it out now and soon RB26 will be mine, again!

PS: I logged in to Facebook hours after Zi and I spoke and BAM! Look what Facebook was suggesting as a memory from 10 years ago!

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Roleplaying

I recently met a woman on reddit who reached out and introduced herself as a roleplayer.

She came across my boudoir subreddit and liked my photos so she reached out wanting to know more about how I do what I do, and ultimately she wanted to know about stories I might have with the models I shoot.

I chose not to get into those details, but we got pretty into some open conversation about roleplaying (I was curious), about gaming (ARPG’s RPG’s and how they relate to roleplaying), Dungeons and Dragons, sexting etc.

I dug a bit deeper (cause that’s what I do). Turns out she’s married and her husband doesn’t approve of her roleplaying (she left windows open on her computer once and he read it all).

Like a drug, she’s addicted (she’s been roleplaying since she was 15), and she’s always kept it a secret from her husband.

She then admitted she wanted to roleplay with me, but I said whilst curious I wasn’t interested as A) I have no idea how to roleplay, so when I do it I’ll be shit at it (IE: it takes time to ‘get good’ at anything, right?!) and B) Just because I now ‘know’ her more than her husband doesn’t mean her husband doesn’t exist, so I’d rather not put my energy into something that would potentially upset someone (IE: I don’t really want to have fun at the expense of others).

The last few hours of our convo has been me suggesting (that if it was me) I’d prefer to talk about it openly with my partner rather than keep going with a dark and dirty secret.

Now she’s thinking of telling her husband about our conversations in hopes she can start talking to him about her passion for roleplaying (I suggested she simply show our entire chat history to him!). Not my place to push though, it’s 100% on her and I’m just happy she let me be open in my thoughts.

IMHO if he’s negative in any way about what makes her happy it screams a lack of confidence. IMHO: “Happy Wife, Happy Life” and “Behind every good man is a great woman”.

Fuck, this would make good content for a Monday Morning Rant hey?

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Once you find out that this world is a circle, you can never get lost

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Last Epoch

A couple of years ago I bought an ARPG called Last Epoch (which was in early access). 4hrs in I decided it wasn’t really my thing. The graphics were a bit too colourful and cartoony for my liking and at that time I was really just looking forward to Diablo IV launching.

Fast forward and the game is set to officially launch in 2 days from now.

Last weekend I bought another game called Helldivers 2 and sadly, even though the game was 11 days into launch, their servers melted and the majority of players who bought the game can’t get on to play. Seeing the frustration (understatement as some people are VERY angry) on the Helldivers 2 subreddit, and seeing the game review bombed on Steam I thought I’d hop on the Last Epoch subreddit to ask if we should expect the servers to melt on launch. Amazingly I got this response from Judd, the game director for Last Epoch and founder of Eleventh Hour Games:

We’ve scale tested for months with third parties, consultants, the help of infra providers, and our own backend team. We have the ability to scale servers quickly, have reserved a large amount of bare metal machines, and do not have a maximum spend for cloud overflow- it’s all elastic. From the extensive testing we’ve done, unless we do have a really crazy turnout, we should be stable. It’s not lost on us that many much larger companies than us have had issues at launch though… We’re optimistic and if there are issues it certainly won’t be for lack of effort, spend, or ignorance to the importance of launch day.

If we do have issues I promise that we’ll stay very communicative and you can be 100% certain we’ll be all hands on deck working to resolve anything that comes up. We understand what’s on the line.

I will say that this is probably the most stressing thing to team as we’ve seen games be review bombed and eviscerated when there are launch issues. I remember being frustrated when games I was excited for had launch issues in the past, but now being on the other side of it I’ve seen how much of an emotional toll it can take on a team to face hatred for something that people have tried hard to prepare for but it not be received/gone well despite best efforts. Just in general I think it’s a good thing for the gaming community to understand the impact those types of things have on development teams. That’s not me asking for leniency for our team, just rather an insight I feel worth sharing for gamers in general.

Another thing I’ll share because it’s interesting and something I didn’t understand before being in game development before LE – it’s nearly never the game servers that have issues at launch as those are easy to scale as long as you have the funds and willingness to pay the server providers (typically Google or Amazon), it’s more often an issue with services like login/authentication/database rate limiting. We use Steam and other services that are battle tested at scale for these things.

But, in summary, we’ve prepared heavily and have every reason to suspect we’ll be in good shape come launch day. If there are issues we’ll be communicative and working to address anything that comes up immediately.

Thanks all, sorry for the long post here.

Screenshot (10)

Now that’s how you do community! What a response. If you watch the video above you’ll note that this game started as a post on reddit. I’m pretty excited to play the game now knowing that the devs have clearly been working with the community to develop this game.

EDIT: Launch day was today (4am Sydney time) and the game was down for 6hrs (though you could play it in offline mode if you chose to). I managed to log in at 11am or so and have played for most of the day without any issues at all! Awesome work by the devs. Here’s a day 1 recap from Judd the game director/founder: https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/1awz34h/launch_day_recap_from_game_directorfounder/


EDIT 2. My reddit post made the news!

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