The older I get, the less idea I have about what I’m doing. This blog may or may not be a manifestation of that.
“Inanimate Carbon God” is obviously (I hope) a Simpsons reference from the days when that show was still worth watching. I’ve been using it since about 2017. I’ve been blogging in some form or other since I started the legendary (?) Hot Buttered Death in 2002. (Don’t bother looking for it, it’s mostly gone.) For a number of years I also maintained a film review blog called The Camerman’s Revenge, which unfortunately suffered over those years from my increasingly waning inclination to actually watch films, which is a slight problem when your blog revolves around them; similarly my lapsed Youtube channel was going to be mostly about books, and was kind of hindered by me being in a reading slump at the time. (Trying to pull myself out of both of those.)
In any case, this blog will be rather more all-purpose than those. Films and books! And music, too, and other stuff. Even some original creative writing.
So…
James. Product of 1974; resident of Matraville, Australia, ever since. Educationally I am a product variously of Matraville Public School (1980-86), Sydney Boys High School (1987-92), the University of New South Wales (1993-97) and Sydney Institute of Technology (2002-2003).
Healthwise: hypertensive since 1998, diabetic since 2004, stroke survivor (with concomitant ongoing disability) since 2009. Not the greatest picture of mental health either, for that matter. Being me is fucking DELIGHTFUL, I commend it to all of you. Really. Try it some time.
Politically I generally lean leftwards more than otherwise (probably some flavour of social democrat) while remaining sceptical of doctrinaire -isms. Religiously I consider myself an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I have no real issue with other people’s religiosity if it helps them and they don’t try to enforce their beliefs upon others. I have no use for organised religious institutions and I firmly believe in taxing the lot of them. This blog is OK with Black Lives Matter, trans rights, antifascism and so forth. If this bothers you for some reason, the option to fuck off and die rather than complain to me about it is always available. Basically my beliefs boil down to “try not to be shit to anyone if they haven’t done anything to deserve it”.
Aesthetically, well, I suppose you’ll work that out eventually from the stuff I post about.
Here’s a photo of me, taken on Feb. 17 2023, that I find more amusing than I probably should:
