: this is austin's blog :

Thisisjustatestposttoseeifmyfacebooknotesthingistillinkeduptothisblog.Ihopeitisnotso.

For some reason, nostalgia seems to be such a dominant drive for me.

My favourite games are the ones I used to play on my Super Nintendo. I still revisit old music that I've loved again and again. I probably one of the only people that has downloaded all 7 seasons of Muppet Babies. Reminiscing about the past, my past, reading old blogs, e-mails, journals, notebooks. God, I can't resist it. And it fills me with longing.

Such intense longing it's almost painful. And yet I can't resist looking back. It's not like I'm unhappy now and I'm thinking about a better time, not at all. I'm happier now than I ever have been in my entire life.

But the longing, and the pain. I don't really get it. Am I mourning something? Do I mourn the past lives, the past "me"s? Maybe. But I'm not really sure.

Memory is such a fragile thing. So many experiences of mine only exist in my memory... and maybe the memories of others who were a part of them. But once they leave, they vanish and are lost forever. Like they never existed at all.

On a Radiolab podcast, I heard a story called Metamorphosis about a waiting room. Once you die, you go to the waiting room, and however long you are remembered on earth, is how long you stay there. Famous people like Da Vinci, say, have never left the waiting room and probably never will. The only way you can leave is after you are never remembered again; after the last time your name is mentioned on earth, never to be spoken again. That is the instant that the "Callers" come for you in the waiting room and you move on. The moment you have truly vanished forever.

We're all gonna get there someday, unless you become incredibly famous for one reason or another. Otherwise, there's going to come a time when you are utterly and completely forgotten. Absolutely vanished from existence.

We run around and buy coffees, go to work, sweat, play golf, drive, eat cheerios, visit other countries, cry, have sex, pay bills, read books, everything. We do everything and one day far from now, you will utterly vanish.

It's both sad and strangely alluring. What awaits us when we have absolutely disappeared?



Man, this is not at all what I had imagined I'd blog about... but I guess I can save those blogs for another time.


Oh, the Radiolab podcast is called After Life, and you can get it here. The story is around 6:30 in the podcast, but the entire show is amazing.


"...Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become what they want us to be."

like butter spread over too much bread.


Man. This place is an empty tomb. It used to be so active, years ago, when blogging was the latest thing. I can practically hear the wind howling and the old stones straining every time this page loads.


Forgive me blog for I have sinned, it's been like 10 months? since my last posting. I've gone longer than that before, but whatever.


I feel so compelled to write, but I feel broken. I see so many writers flourishing around me and I feel left at the bottom of the well. I was something once, but time has moved on and I've been left behind, as it leaves everyone behind eventually.

I let the balloon go, but now I'm jumping at the cord. Too late.


Is there anything left? I can say I'll try, but will I? I'm so out of the habit, I probably won't post in here again until I amass another ball of longing that has to be exorcised in some cathartic spurt on this damn blog.

I've been inside for nearly two days now, just reading and writing for class. Maybe I've just broken my brain, temporarily?


I've never wanted to stretch time more than I do right now. I need more of it. I feel like I can only accomplish half of the things I desire to in any given day. As we get older, our perception of time changes. As a one year old child, one month is 1/12 of your entire life. One month is only 1/318th of my life. And the gap gets larger. A few hours to a child can seem like ages. A day to an old man is a sudden breeze, leaving just as you begin to realize it.

I'm only 26 and a half but I can already feel time compressing and I don't like it. In a few moments I'll look at the clock and I'll have lost more time than I wanted too. time, slipping through the cracks in my fingers, and it's pace is quickening.


I've heard that Leonardo Da Vinci would work 45 minutes and then sleep for 15, all day long. That sounds both insane and admirable.

I've decided I'm going to do it, if I can. For one day. I don't know when but I will; someday after school is over. It'll be Da Vinci day and it'll be glorious. Probably painful and intensely strange; but those really are the best times, right?

That's what I'm going to have to do. Get it straight from the source.

So many things are changing. I'm excited. I'm worried.

I am a plum
and a knife,
gliding along,
it's careful
And carefully
Opening my surface.

An ocean is swelling
My feet are wet
Surrounded in that milk
from my mind
I'm gulping right now.

Woot, my friends. It's time for bed. Rage, rage against the dying of
the light!

Man, when all the old blogging crowd is gone, it's really hard to keep this up.

It's been too long, again. What have I done since? Who knows!

Well I do know. I've been off work for what will be over 2 weeks now. My boss decided to go to a friend's wedding in South Africa for about that length of time and didn't arrange for any work for me or my co-workers so it's temporary unemployment for me I guess.

I guess the break has been nice? Actually, I feel god-awful. My wife and I are saving up to move out of my parents basement and into our own place and this time off is a big setback to that. I really don't like feeling this inactive. I feel so incredibly guilty. I've tried to get some other jobs painting in the mean time but nothing has panned out. The only thing I've done in that respect has been a tiny one-day job for "free" (a tax-free receipt).

At least I haven't been totally inactive. Actually I've been teaching myself Objective-C. That's right, I'm programming an iPhone app. I'd talk about the details of it on here, but it's not done yet and I don't want to give anything away. :) It's almost done though... once I try and make my tiny head through all the legal-ese of selling something on the App Store...

I've also listed my website, as in, www.austincooper.com for sale on e-bay. I just did that about an hour ago. Why? Why now? Well, like I said before, Jo and I need a place of our own to live in. Here's the link to it. Too low? Too high? Hey man, it's MY NAME. Maybe I'll try e-mailing the people at Mini...

Well, that's that I guess. Tomorrow I'm going to fill out an EI application. Why not? I am unemployed. I pay into that every pay-cheque for a reason.

see ya all latez.

Yikes! It's been a while ye olde intertubes! Well I'll get right into
it then...

Geocaching!!! The sport I've always wanted to get Into!! And now
thanks to my iPhone, it has become possible for me!!!! Take one iPhone
and one geocaching app and voilà! The fun can begin!!

In the past few weeks I've taken my wife and her siblings along on
various geocaching adventures in Richmond and it's been awesome. Want
to go geocaching? Let me know! I'm austinofdoom on the geocaching.com
site.

Now I really need a good gps. The iPhone has been awesome for the
Internet while out caching, but it's gps ability is rather weak. At
some point I'll have to Invest in a fancy gps device and cache with
glorious ease! Or at least as easily as the difficulty of the cache I
choose to seek out. Perhaps for my future caches I'll take some pics
and put them online.

AWESOME!!

So I originally tried to post this at lunch time... But I sent it to the wrong e-mail address so it never actually went up. I just figured this all out a little while ago and am now correcting the situation. AKA I am explaining this all to you now and am just throwing my original post out on the bottom of this disclaimer. Enjoy!


So here's the first real iPhone post! Oh yeah, I'm posting this on my lunch break at work from a subway (no free wifi, but doesn't matter.) How am I doing this you ask? Well apparently you can e-mail posts to blogger and they will post them automatically for you and since e-mailing for me now is a snap, this is the method of choice when I'm not in front of a real computer. I haven't found any good blogposting apps So this is how you take matters into your own hands.

I can't add tags, or labels as blogger seems to want to call them via e-mail posting, but I can just add those later. I'm actually thinking I might do all the hard work of going back through all my old posts and tagging them all. I know I have lots od broken links now, esspecially with images and such but oh well, I don't care THAT much to fix all those. I don't even remember what a lot of those pictures were supposed to be of anymore. Anyway, tagged, shall be all my old entries. Eventually.

Anyway, this seems about enough for my first iPhone post. I don't want to set unrealistic precidents for all of no-one who reads this. Maybe I should unlink this blog from my facebook page so no-one really will read this... Thoughts, thoughts...

http://underscorei.tumblr.com/post/148453266/i-awakemyfriendandwelcomespring

I heard this on CBC radio's Spark program. I think it might change my life. If anyone knows anything more about _i or _scorei or underscorei, please let me know.

I should really join the current blogging society and the "symantic" web by tagging my posts. Maybe I'll start with this one.

This blog is quickly becoming a repository of my own personal thoughts once again, since no-one reads this anymore...

...Well that's not entirely true, I do have this linked to my facebook, so those people are reading it at least. It's not the same though. I miss 2004 for that.

Well this WAS supposed to be my first post from my new iPhone... but I have yet to find a half-decent blog writing/posting app for it. If anyone out there knows of one, let me know; BlogPress and BlogWriter both blow in my opinion...

Anyway, My lovely wife and I both indeed have iPhones now and they are incredible. I already can't see how I lived without a smartphone, they are just too damn useful!! I love the basic maps application, I know it's a stupid thing to write about, but I do. I love maps and a program like the iPhone one makes all my nerd lights fire off like I just one the big stuffie at some rigged carnival game. It's awesome. We've already used our iPhones to find the Kent farm from Smallville.

Ok well I don't want this whole post to just be an iPhone love fest so maybe I'll end it there... or maybe I won't just yet because I don't want nearly my entire post to be just about me gushing about the google maps app like I'm some kind of troglodyte. I've also been using my phone as my new mp3 player, and as a portable gaming system. I've been rather enjoying this old-school console style rpg called Dungeon & Hero. At least I think that is what it was called. It's kinda Engrishy... I love it.

ok well boring post but this is how you re-awaken the prolific spirit. HEY THERE WORLD, AUSTIN'S COMING BACK!!!!

The blog returns.

More than a year since my last post. I've tried posting something new several times over that past year but in the end I never end up actually posting anything.

I think this will be my last post about my lack of posting/trying to revive my blog. I've done that too many times and it's going to be annoying to read. So much has changed in my life since I've last written here.

I'm married now. MARRIED. It's absolutely amazing, but what a change since my last post.

I'm going to get an iphone on the weekend. I'm super stoked but a part of me thinks back to an incarnation of a former self where I used to say, "I'm never getting an ipod or anything like that, mp3 players are all the same and this one just has the biggest marketing push behind it. It is selling 'Cool' to you in the best way." And now look at me, the epitome (say it: Epp-ee-tome. Haha!) of 'Cool thing to own', I'm getting an iphone.

And do you know what? I don't care, I'm so stoked to get an iphone. I know no-one read this at all anymore and posting here is just like sending my thoughts out into the inter-ether...the ether-webs... something like that. But for anyone whose shores this message does happen to wash upon (I've been using pirate facebook for too long it would seem.) can anyone tell me if it's worth jail-breaking your iphone? what's the advantage of doing so? I love to hack my own tech gear and an iphone seems like a perfect candidate, but I'm having trouble trying to find out what the specific advantages of doing it are.

And now, an unrelated reflection: a while back I lost a an external harddrive. I didn't actually lose it per se, but it did fall off a bed just after I had plugged it in to my lappy. It doesn't work at all any more, I think my only option is going to be an hd-recovery service, which I've actually gotten a quote on, and it is most likely going to be over $1000. I'd love to be able to just say F-it, but I can't. I could lose everything I've got on there, photos, movies, games, old school projects... But I can't lose my poems. They are on there too and it destroys my soul to think they may be gone, but 1000+ is a lot of money to me, especially now in my life, and the question is are my poems worth that much to me? of course they are I say, but I have yet to get it recovered. I want to so badly, but for now, that hard drive must stay and wait, locking away something extremely precious to me.

What is making this extra hard I guess is recently I've really been wanting to go through and read them, but I can't. I haven't been very prolific in a long time and historically, an easy way for me to reignite that flame in me is to read things that I have written in the past, but there is no way for me to do that anymore.

I guess maybe this is a call out again to anyone who reads this: if you have any of my poems in some kind of file, if you could e-mail whatever you have to me, it would really make my day.

alright, I've got to go to work now. Maybe if I find some time I can rummage through an old drawer of random school stuff and see if any loose poems have ended up in there.

this is post 300 for me. And all I got to say is:


All you horse birdy things.

Man, I had no idea that I was this close to post 300. You'd think that would have, at the very least, inspired me to add at least a few more posts to bring it to 300. Oh well, here I am now.

I did a little bit of maintenance to my list of linked blogs. It's much smaller now, reflecting the fad nature of personal blogs. I cut about 2/3 of the names. I feel like by coming back to my blog after so long, I've come back to like a long abandoned town where once many people used to live. Maybe I'm being too generous.

I thought I had more to say, but I can't think of it. it's enough to make me not want to post at all but the habit I'm trying to re-establish here is blogging again. So I should just do it.

I should change my blog layout. update it. I can use this opportunity to re-shape my blog. I wonder what I should do.

I'll save all that for a future post. For now this will be it. I can't focus anymore.

In light of tamlin's re-starting of her blog, this is yet another attempt of my own to revive my long dead blog. I was also going to similarly comment on how no-one is going to read this post but then I remembered that I linked my blog to post as facebook notes and so others may actually read this, since the internet basically is facebook to many people these days.

Well let's say facebook - wikipedia - google - itunes. I wonder how much traffic those 4 services generate in comparison to all the rest of the internet traffic combined? Probably less than I'm thinking but still a sizable amount I'm sure.

I'm sitting in the mac lab on the last day of my new media fine arts class. In 10 days the hard drive of every computer here is going to be wiped. Now I know I already have all of my crap on my laptop, I've checked many times; however I still can't shake the feeling that in 10 days, I'm going to loose something important.

in a week is going to be the art show that hopefully some of my photos and not just my video will be on display. When I have time to post a link to more art show information I will, just so that no-one will be able to see it here on my rigormortized blog.

Ok, so here's the link: http://www.kwantlen.ca/humanities/visualarts/art_gallery.html

P.S. I just heard this girl beside me in the lounge say: "So 'elder' is slang for an old person?" OMG.

P.P.S In the time it took me to write that I also heard her say "receipt is so hard to spell because of the silent 'p'." I hope she's taking remedial English.

What’s this? A BLOG post after months of total silence? Why yes, that’s exactly what it is! It’s been 4 months since my last post, give or take a few days (in blog time, that’s like 6 eternities.) I wonder if anyone is even going to read this. I notice that I hit over 10,000 unique views during my absence. That's a shame, it definitely should have been a celebration post.

What could possibly have ripped me out of my zero-internet-presence-funk? A Flickr comment I left on one of my recently posted pictures has produced anger in me. (Well, really it’s a combination of the previous point and procrastinating studying for a final exam 6 hours away.)

So yeah, here’s the comment in question.

Basically everything I would put in my post, I’ve already said there, and I’m too lazy to block quote it or re-state it here, so just hit the link and read it there. As for here, I’m just going to rant a bit about how money = justice.

See, if we had money we wouldn’t be renting and thus not have this problem. But this is not the way it is thus, we rent. We rent because we don’t have a lot of expendable income. Because of that, obviously, we can’t afford legal representation, especially not during an upheaval like suddenly having to move in a month in a half. We actually only had a month but we managed to negotiate an extra 2 weeks (JOY!) and get our damage deposit.

Optimistic Response: Maybe some shred of a soul still existed in the heart of the owners and they saw this as help (since they were screwing us with the “re-zoning” compensation anyway).

Pessimistic Response: Through careful evaluation of the costs of arbitration hearings vs. kicking us out promptly so they could demolish the house on schedule with the buffer of the legal compensation they should have given us, they decided that they would save the most money by giving us a break.

(Note: If the contractors are kicking holes in walls before we’ve left, they’ve obviously already been through the whole quoting process and a game plan has already been set up. They definitely had been planning the destruction for quite some time.)

Back to the rant: Self-representation in an arbitration hearing is common, but who has the time and resources to organize a case when you have to find a house and pack and organize a move in a month and a half? Add the large budget burden of the cost of moving and there’s not a whole lot of human resources left to fight.

And so it goes. Money buys justice, The economically secure get to shit on the less-secure and the commerce machine marches on. Isn’t capitalism wonderful?