sanemagazine: wonderful rubbish

also continued from last week as well again...

So things got worse.
Well, not so bad that people ignored Rasselas and his new skateboard completely. That, from a person who lives and works in this sort of thing, would have ben much much worse. From my perspective.
Rasselas, on the other hand, now that I think of it, probably would have preferred it. In fact, definitely. I got that feeling when I popped round his couple acre or so estate in Vermont and got the dogs set on me.
Not literally, of course. Actually, it was literally, I suppose. Sort of. It depends, really, whether or not you count these robotic sentry things he had guarding the perimeter as dogs or not. They didn't quite bark, but then I didn't really dive into full-on investigative mode for that one, because they hurtled pretty damn fast towards me, and it didn't look like they were built with brakes in mind.
So it made it difficult getting ahold of the inventor for a little while.
This didn't stop the press.
I had a brief thing with that intern whose arm I pinched at the event, which got me some access to the manufacturing plant, where things were kicking into action regardless of the way the press event went, but things went sour.
Sour in that she was propositioned by someone else in the audience that day, and she was off, and I think that was the guy that got the interview with most mysterious interview with Rasselas yet and the photos of the dogs that had attacked me. I was marginally flattered by the mention of my name in the interview's text, but you couldn't get much more out of it, as Rasselas seemed to have given the interview in the middle of shouting at the guy to get off his property. There were a number of suspicions that my name didn't actually come up in the 'interview' at all, the guy was just name-dropping, which is a pretty valid technique in web-reporting, even if it's not even wholly connected with the story at hand. I've used it myself. It's handy for those times when you need to fill more space and a tangent will do nicely.

Eventually, though, the days passed, and by the Thursday, there was barely any news about Rasselas or his invention any more.
The camera guy who was taking photographs for quite a few different reporters even decamped from the perimeter.

It all left a great big blank space in my life for a little while. All I had left was Linux and spam to cover. And a little later that week Intel or somebody published some benchmarks that I got distracted by a little bit, but the emptiness returned after a half-hearted paw at them. Some hacker was arrested for playing his Tool mp3s too loud and was sued by both his neighbours and the RIAA for different infractions, which lifted my spirits a little higher even still.
And, to be honest, by the time Saturday came around, and I was walking manfully into the mall to get myself a new pair of socks or three (all of mine had holes in them until i was wearing all mismatched socks, and I'd always been one for taking my shoes off and walking around the office), I'd almost completely forgotten about Rasselas. Ehm, until he boomed that horrific "WELLSMACK-MUH UP-SAYDE THABALLOH-KNEE AND CALL ME SLAPPY!" and lumbered off the edge of the jungle-in-a-box thing they have dotted around the mall. From which he'd been jumping, repeatedly, just moments earlier.
It all shot back to me in an instant, unfortunately, and I was afraid, for a moment, that he had been attempting to end his life in slow increments by taking little bits of it off at a time at a lower altitude than doing something more substantial from a greater height. Having spotted me, his tormentor, he was channeling his energy into righting the wrong by ending my life.
It turns out he wasn't, after all. I used my journalist's instinct and brought him upstairs to the food court, where I bought him a paper boat-full of Japanese-like cuisine. This proved a bit more successful than, and perhaps suggested by, my survivalist's instinct of running towards the escalators to escape from the mustachioed hulk of a man.

In the calmness that mall food and dining areas bring on we chatted about things -- his invention, the horrific response to the press event, the robotic dogs (his own invention, it turns out), and the fleeting fame. He seemed generally all right with things.
He was happy with the press away from his front door step and the door steps of numerous other places he had enjoyed visiting before the influx of press people. He was happy back out of the limelight, where he could work in peace. He was happy that he could come to the mall and leap off the jungle-in-a-box like things after balloons without too many people recognising him and coming up and pestering him.

I had to hand it to him, it seemed like he had found happiness, despite being ripped to ragged shreds by the media. Maybe there was a story in it, I told him. He just laughed, in a booming, semi-scary sort of way.
We parted then.

I headed back to my office that day for a little bit of surfing the web before I went home to fire up the old DSL and catch some online flicks before heading to bed.

In the dim lights and against the backdrop of tight shag carpeting lining my cubicle floor and walls, I hit a few of the old stand-bys, hoping to get some new idea for a story I had due the next day.

Somewhere, deep in a thread on SplashBert, there was a post that caught my eye.

Now, SplashBert was this notorious website for geekboys and girls where the editors would link to stories they figured would interest geeks of similar interests to their own. The site got a tremendous amount of traffic by those people who'd found it early on in its' life-cycle, who usually came back to complain and post how much better it was before all these people started reading it and posting to it, as well. Because it did also get a fair amount of traffic from people who found it after it had become popular and enjoyed it for various reasons. Or didn't enjoy it at all, but read it because everyone else was talking about it at lunch and they had nothing to say on the matter without visiting it every few minutes.
Anyway, so there were all these people, a veritable witches' brew of opinions and, well, other things that people make when they whack at a keyboard with any suitable implement for a concerted period of time.
SplashBert was a very big factor in the whole Rasselas Affair, as I was beginning to think of it in those days.
And I got to thinking about the last thread on the matter; the one that discussed what it was, exactly, that was unveiled that day in the conference room as Rasselas teetered on a plank of stuff with wheels.
Most of the posts were pretty far off-topic, discussing the sexual preference of Canadians, butterflies in China, and, in more on-topic posts, the sexual proclivities of the skateboards. And there were a damn lot of them. Over 10,000 comments on this particular story.

But, about halfway down the page, with a lot of the comments relegated to only one line excerpts from the subject of the post, one in particular caught my eye, I have no idea why. The subject read: "The 'Real' deal!-!." Someone, posting anonymously, had posted a link to the US Patent website and the theory that the 'Spicy Cheese' skateboard was just a cover, that Rasselas, basedon evidence in this patent, probably hadn't intended the 'Spicy Cheese' to be the world-changing invention -- that was just an invention he happened to have worked on. No, the post hinted at, the history-changing invention was something different, something that he possibly was still sitting on back in his lab somewhere.

I felt tingles all up and down my arm, as if someone had thrown a bucket of very cold and very light rice down my shoulders.

What was he doing in the mall, jumping off those planters? Especially a man of his size? And where had the balloon gone? In the drizzly light from the fluorescents I was alone with Rasselas' last grin at me as I dumped my tray in the rubbish and spun out and back to the parking lot, having forgotten to buy the socks I'd originally come in for in the first place.

And I was off, digging.

disclaimer:
That's it, kids, the end of the series, we hope you enjoyed it.

We apologise for the late hour of this release, but we did attend a developers' conference last week with our tech geeky guys, and some of that software person mentality must have rubbed off on us. See you next week, when we do something else! Woo!



		archives horoscopes accessories contacts theatre fables home Search Sane: [A Note on My.Netscape.Com]		beerness-feet-sticky also continued from last week as well again... So things got worse. Well, not so bad that people ignored Rasselas and his new skateboard completely. That, from a person who lives and works in this sort of thing, would have ben much much worse. From my perspective. Rasselas, on the other hand, now that I think of it, probably would have preferred it. In fact, definitely. I got that feeling when I popped round his couple acre or so estate in Vermont and got the dogs set on me. Not literally, of course. Actually, it was literally, I suppose. Sort of. It depends, really, whether or not you count these robotic sentry things he had guarding the perimeter as dogs or not. They didn't quite bark, but then I didn't really dive into full-on investigative mode for that one, because they hurtled pretty damn fast towards me, and it didn't look like they were built with brakes in mind. So it made it difficult getting ahold of the inventor for a little while. This didn't stop the press. I had a brief thing with that intern whose arm I pinched at the event, which got me some access to the manufacturing plant, where things were kicking into action regardless of the way the press event went, but things went sour. Sour in that she was propositioned by someone else in the audience that day, and she was off, and I think that was the guy that got the interview with most mysterious interview with Rasselas yet and the photos of the dogs that had attacked me. I was marginally flattered by the mention of my name in the interview's text, but you couldn't get much more out of it, as Rasselas seemed to have given the interview in the middle of shouting at the guy to get off his property. There were a number of suspicions that my name didn't actually come up in the 'interview' at all, the guy was just name-dropping, which is a pretty valid technique in web-reporting, even if it's not even wholly connected with the story at hand. I've used it myself. It's handy for those times when you need to fill more space and a tangent will do nicely. Eventually, though, the days passed, and by the Thursday, there was barely any news about Rasselas or his invention any more. The camera guy who was taking photographs for quite a few different reporters even decamped from the perimeter. It all left a great big blank space in my life for a little while. All I had left was Linux and spam to cover. And a little later that week Intel or somebody published some benchmarks that I got distracted by a little bit, but the emptiness returned after a half-hearted paw at them. Some hacker was arrested for playing his Tool mp3s too loud and was sued by both his neighbours and the RIAA for different infractions, which lifted my spirits a little higher even still. And, to be honest, by the time Saturday came around, and I was walking manfully into the mall to get myself a new pair of socks or three (all of mine had holes in them until i was wearing all mismatched socks, and I'd always been one for taking my shoes off and walking around the office), I'd almost completely forgotten about Rasselas. Ehm, until he boomed that horrific "WELLSMACK-MUH UP-SAYDE THABALLOH-KNEE AND CALL ME SLAPPY!" and lumbered off the edge of the jungle-in-a-box thing they have dotted around the mall. From which he'd been jumping, repeatedly, just moments earlier. It all shot back to me in an instant, unfortunately, and I was afraid, for a moment, that he had been attempting to end his life in slow increments by taking little bits of it off at a time at a lower altitude than doing something more substantial from a greater height. Having spotted me, his tormentor, he was channeling his energy into righting the wrong by ending my life. It turns out he wasn't, after all. I used my journalist's instinct and brought him upstairs to the food court, where I bought him a paper boat-full of Japanese-like cuisine. This proved a bit more successful than, and perhaps suggested by, my survivalist's instinct of running towards the escalators to escape from the mustachioed hulk of a man. In the calmness that mall food and dining areas bring on we chatted about things -- his invention, the horrific response to the press event, the robotic dogs (his own invention, it turns out), and the fleeting fame. He seemed generally all right with things. He was happy with the press away from his front door step and the door steps of numerous other places he had enjoyed visiting before the influx of press people. He was happy back out of the limelight, where he could work in peace. He was happy that he could come to the mall and leap off the jungle-in-a-box like things after balloons without too many people recognising him and coming up and pestering him. I had to hand it to him, it seemed like he had found happiness, despite being ripped to ragged shreds by the media. Maybe there was a story in it, I told him. He just laughed, in a booming, semi-scary sort of way. We parted then. I headed back to my office that day for a little bit of surfing the web before I went home to fire up the old DSL and catch some online flicks before heading to bed. In the dim lights and against the backdrop of tight shag carpeting lining my cubicle floor and walls, I hit a few of the old stand-bys, hoping to get some new idea for a story I had due the next day. Somewhere, deep in a thread on SplashBert, there was a post that caught my eye. Now, SplashBert was this notorious website for geekboys and girls where the editors would link to stories they figured would interest geeks of similar interests to their own. The site got a tremendous amount of traffic by those people who'd found it early on in its' life-cycle, who usually came back to complain and post how much better it was before all these people started reading it and posting to it, as well. Because it did also get a fair amount of traffic from people who found it after it had become popular and enjoyed it for various reasons. Or didn't enjoy it at all, but read it because everyone else was talking about it at lunch and they had nothing to say on the matter without visiting it every few minutes. Anyway, so there were all these people, a veritable witches' brew of opinions and, well, other things that people make when they whack at a keyboard with any suitable implement for a concerted period of time. SplashBert was a very big factor in the whole Rasselas Affair, as I was beginning to think of it in those days. And I got to thinking about the last thread on the matter; the one that discussed what it was, exactly, that was unveiled that day in the conference room as Rasselas teetered on a plank of stuff with wheels. Most of the posts were pretty far off-topic, discussing the sexual preference of Canadians, butterflies in China, and, in more on-topic posts, the sexual proclivities of the skateboards. And there were a damn lot of them. Over 10,000 comments on this particular story. But, about halfway down the page, with a lot of the comments relegated to only one line excerpts from the subject of the post, one in particular caught my eye, I have no idea why. The subject read: "The 'Real' deal!-!." Someone, posting anonymously, had posted a link to the US Patent website and the theory that the 'Spicy Cheese' skateboard was just a cover, that Rasselas, basedon evidence in this patent, probably hadn't intended the 'Spicy Cheese' to be the world-changing invention -- that was just an invention he happened to have worked on. No, the post hinted at, the history-changing invention was something different, something that he possibly was still sitting on back in his lab somewhere. I felt tingles all up and down my arm, as if someone had thrown a bucket of very cold and very light rice down my shoulders. What was he doing in the mall, jumping off those planters? Especially a man of his size? And where had the balloon gone? In the drizzly light from the fluorescents I was alone with Rasselas' last grin at me as I dumped my tray in the rubbish and spun out and back to the parking lot, having forgotten to buy the socks I'd originally come in for in the first place. And I was off, digging. disclaimer: That's it, kids, the end of the series, we hope you enjoyed it. We apologise for the late hour of this release, but we did attend a developers' conference last week with our tech geeky guys, and some of that software person mentality must have rubbed off on us. See you next week, when we do something else! Woo!


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