D J Rout

In the midst of all the kerfuffle over the mutated flu strain that’s come out of China like a boatload of fee paying students, and swept across the world with Indian speed, the travails of me and the ATO might seem trivial (and as I have to correct the spelling of both ‘travails’ and ‘trivial’ it seems the ‘v’ key on this laptop is a smidge sub par), but it’s important to think as you start reading this that coronavirus is temporary, whereas what I’m going to be crapping on about over the next few hundred words may end up being permanent. ‘May’ in the sense that whoever organises this shit has given it permission to.
(We now pause while I get fucking ropable at the fact that I wrote a further five hundred deathless words of prose here but for some reason it didn’t get saved. The upshot of this is that I’m now typing a 27 November entry on 2 December. With all the other bullshit going on in my life I haven’t been able to sit down long enough until now to actually type anything.)
If you’re reading this for something other than trying to tell me how fabulous your search engine optimisation is, and how you can drive traffic straight at me with the speed of whatever car actually hit me in 1982, then the above parenthesised bit of reflexive prose kind of ruins the illusion that I’m writing this on 27 November, but I have finished a semester of Experimental Writing and bits of it are still clinging to me like those kind of fleshy things you get on your back that I really wish I hadn’t even referred to now.
So as you may have realised, a viral scourge has been transmitted across the plant by the constant iteration that ‘freedom of movement’ is enshrined in Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Many other things are determined to be human rights, and people are always quoting the US Constitution in the TV-fostered belief that we’re part of a TV America. One thing that’s true about our rights of freedom of movement or freedom of speech is that both go out of the window when there’s a plague on, or where there’s money involved. Oh, yes. The ATO deals with money, which is why it can detain you without charge and enter your house without a search warrant. I never had exercise this power in my time at the ATO, but I do know people who had to, and sometimes required the assistance of Victoria Police to gain entry to the property and protect them from the assaults of the invaded public.
The Victorian Government’s response to this gallop by the third horseman of the Apocalypse was to clamp down on our freedom of movement, and remind everyone that the ‘right’ to free speech disappears instantly when you use it to advocate criminal activity. Actually spreading the disease is not as bad as inciting people to protest about house arrest to prevent its spread, as we found out when a Ballarat girl was arrested for inciting a protest march, while five Afghanis were exonerated after they deliberately spread the disease but caused the ‘unfair’ targeting of the rest of the Afghani jihad community.
Meanwhile, the Victorian lockdown brought a halt to manufacturing, most of construction, office-based office work and trade with the other States, which One Nation was going to challenge on the basis that a closed border violates free trade between the States under S92 of the Constitution. The problem was that even the constitution can be politely ignored if there’s a plague on, which may be the other aspect of the third horseman as we stroll towards the Apocalypse, apart from the actual deaths he causes.
In any case, Victoria is hardly the manufacturing centre it once was in the days before multiculturalism held back our technology to give wogs a job, and since we are a modern Western country we have eschewed manufacturing in lieu of technology and service, on the basis that everyone else on the planet is more productive in manufacturing because their wages are lower, or that making things is beneath our dignity somehow, even if we’ve moved here from a country with even less manufacturing than we have managed to retain in spite of ourselves. So, the lockdown didn’t affect our manufacturing that much.
But you can’t gear an economy to hospitality and lawyers without a lockdown totally fucking it, and wages, employment, leisure time and enjoyment have all gone downhill while we all sat in a kind of house arrest watching it all happen locally, interstate and overseas. One of the interesting stats they came out with while that was happening was that Victoria produces 25% of the country’s GDP. But we have 33% of the population! So, we are actually less productive per capita than the other States. Well, no, because the other States produce GDP per capita based on how much dirt they are digging up and flogging off to the Chinese at a competitively low rate. Another explanation might be that, even though we have a third of the country nestled between our borders, a lot of the people here just aren’t that productive. How can they be? They’re all doing low value added work or high-end service industries that consume a lot of money but don’t actually produce that much of value. Almost any kind of agent fits this latter category.
The upshot of this combination of low value and no prodcution has put the Federal government (a phrase I capitalise for no reason I can fathom right now, unless it’s due to editorial style, which I make myself, anyway, so you’d think I’d know it was that, wouldn’t you?) isn’t making any money off of our broad-based consumption tax (or GST) because nobody’s consuming anything. Savings rates are actually up, even though banks aren’t paying enough interest to even keep pace with inflation let alone generate any additional value. One solution to this problem, which has been threatened on and off since 2000, is to raise the GST to 15%. Then why not 20%? 25? 28? Going once, twice, duly enacted by a government who actually believed that a broad-based consumption tax was going to achieve anything. It’s too vulnerable to the winds of change to be a dependable source of revenue. Further, income tax is in trouble if wages don’t keep pace with inflation, but that ain’t gonna happen while there’s a government that has committed itself to treating he electorate as an infinite source of corporate small business welfare.
Well, apparently, the economy is back out of recession, so that was quick. But money has been lost…well, it has gone somewhere where the government can’t find it our touch it. After all, and let’s take the stock market as an example, if someone buys stock at a given price from someone who owns it, and then the price goes down, then that buyer sells the stock for a lower price, the buyer has lost money on the sale, but the first lot of money that has changed hands is with the original owner of the stock. Money can be created but rarely destroyed.
So, what does 2021 hold for us and, more germanely to this post, for my former employer? One thing that seems to be getting a lot of traction is that multinational companies, particularly the tech companies everyone is throwing money at nowadays because it seems like they’re stable for some reason,I don’t know what reason, because if I could think like a stockbroker I wouldn’t be any better at thinking than I am now, but I’d be making a ton of commission, is that these companies should be paying ‘their fare share of tax’. This seems to mean that these companies, who are making a lot of income from whatever, ought to be paying tax on the income and not on their profit.
But why doesn’t every company do that? Sure, companies have expenses like wages, rent, utilities that are costs necessary and peculiar to their business, but individuals pay tax on their income and then pay wages, rent and utilities. What’s ‘fair’ about that? This idiotic system has been around for about two hundred years, originating at different times in the Western world. It’s been held as semi-sacred that individuals are taxed on income and business is taxed on profit, but now they want to change that for these large tech companies. I don’t recall them ever wanting to do it for large car companies or large food chains, but here we are. Why shouldn’t one branch of a company be allowed to move income from one branch to bail out another branch? Banks do this all the time, even from suburb to suburb. Business can deduct pretty much any money they spend in order to reduce their taxable profit, whereas individuals are curtailed by various income tax rulings in what they can deduct.
Ultimately, the tech companies can’t withdraw their services from every country that wants to prosecute them in this way, but they can certainly withdraw their commerce from countries one at a time, forcing people who want to deal with them to deal with other countries, with consequences to the nations’ balance of payments (which is a disaster, apparently, which I don’t want to go into right now) or to miss out.
The solution to a fair tax system is to have one definition of income which is set in the constitution so it’s hard to change and which is universally applicable in every piece of legislation, and to tax either income or profit for both individuals and business.
I doubt we’ll see it happen. The important thing is, I won’t be there to enforce it.

Those of you on the keen cutting five or so micron thick cutting edge of 21<sup>st century zeitgeist will be aware that Update 25.1.1 of The Lord of the Rings Online rolled out of the Boston-based programming pits around 2:00PM (1900 UTC) on the 17th of December.

Those of you on the trailing edge of the aforementioned supernatural metaphor may be wondering whether a ghost or spirit could have a cutting edge. You may be thinking that that is a kind of exotic ghost that R. Chetwynd-Hayes could've come up. A ghost that could cut things. The more literary or literarily inclined of you will be wondering, I don't doubt, where the fuck I got that metaphor from and what the fuck I was doing using it here, which is supposed to be a safe space. "Wouldn't 'coal face' have been better?" you may be asking. Or might be. Whatever. You can do a million writing courses and still not know everything.

I just couldn't think of a better way to describe someone who's absolutely informed about the dernier cris these days. Although saying that they knew and could pronounce dernier cris might be another way of describing them. And why use French when I could say 'focail dheireach' if that's the Irish phrase? I'm not sure it is. I'm not going to look it up.

The secondary thing to take away from those paragraphs is that it's a pleasure to write in a meandering way for a change.

The main thing is that the LOTRO update was released. I tried to install it. I kept getting an error message saying something like 'Cannot confirm username. Absent data at lines [1] and [32]'. I didn't know what this was, but it certainly wasn't doing my updates. In the end, I thought the answer was to uninstall the game and give it a fresh go at doing an install. This would mean a 29GB download, but what the hell, I had plenty of data left.

First, I went to Apps and Features to uninstall the game. That was fairly straightforward and, it's a pleasure to note, the process hadn't changed much since XP. While that was happening, I fired up the Windows 7 machine (hereinafter MAINPC) because that had LOTRO on it, too. I had better update that, I thought, in case my darling Kelvatari got a bit of time to play and this new installation on the Win10 machine took a while.

I got the same error message. A lengthy bit of pawing through the written detritus of trhe Internet finally found me an explanation: the servers were down for an emergency patch. I assumed this meant as well as the update, and this seemed to be the case.

A few hours later I noticed that the message advising the servers would be taken down from 8AM to 12PM (1300 to 1700) now said that they were back up. Good. I could now reinstall on the Win10 machine (hereinfafter RIOMHAIRE). I downloaded lotroclient.exe from LOTRO.COM and set it to work.

While that was beavering asway, I updated the game on MAINPC, too. This provcess took about six minutes. I came back to RIOMHAIRE to see that the install process had stopped and the LOTROC client had closed down. I fired it up again, went through the rigmarole of telling it where the game files were and to repair them, and walked away to make a cup of tea or something—whatever it is I do.

I came back to find the lotroclient thing had shut down again. Now, it's not unusual for Win10 to just shut things down for no reason that we poor money-paying bastards aren't allowed to know, and my days of being able to understand a technicla article are way behind me, not to mention the piles of crap out there posing as informative articles (not unlike this one, you m(ay)ight be thinking), so I just shrugged and fired up the process again. Then I wandered off to do whatever.

The fifth time I started up lotroclient.exe, it stayed up, so I wandered off to watch the news, some other programs, take a phone call and whatever and around 10:30PM (1130 UTC) I came back to see how it was in stalling. It was incredibly slow. Glacially slow. If I hdn't known better I would've thought the NBN had slowed to... 256K/ps? That could't be right. A quick trip to speedtest.net confired this. A very slow check of the email confirmed that Internode had throttled me. Throttled? Moi???

Apparently all my installing of LOTRO had used up 120GB in a few hours.

I chcked lotroclient.exe again. Holy crap. The installer was installing the same file over and over again for some reason. The LOTRO folder on RIOMHAIRE had multiple copies of the same file, CLIENT_CELL_3.DAT in numbered 'parts'. Numbered from 1 to 144, at whuich point prsumably it just overwrote the low-numberd files. The 360MB file must have been downloaded and not 'finalized' (as they spell it) more than 300 times. Fucking hell.

I had to buy an extra 100GB of data from Internose to cover the 49GB I had overused by this rigmarole and to leave myself with sensible Internet speeds until the plan rolls over on January 6th next year. Then I had a fitful night's sleep non-CPAP compromised sleep.

Despite all this crap I still dragged my sorry arse off the Sealy this morning and preapared to have another go at installing a game which, to be honest, gives me less grief on installing than Windows does. A quick start of lotroclient.exe showed me that it was up to its old tricks, so I cut that short before my usage exploded again. Then it occurred to me that I had a working copy of LOTRO on MAINPC. I could just could just copy those files over to RIOMHAIRE and that would work, right?

Now, there's an immediate flaw in this plan: it makes sense. And nothing that makes sense will work with Windows. Things like file permissions and compatibility issues and whatever else make the simple act of copying someting you own into a Sisyphean assignment straight from the minds and morals of whatever Lovecraftian horrors out of Redmond buld Windows the way they do.

However, it should be realtively easy to copy files across from MAINPC to RIOMHAIRE over the network, right? Yeah, right...

I could see MAINPC on the network as a media device, but I couldn't get to an files on it. From MAINPC I could see RIOMHAIRE, but I couldn't even connect to it. It asked for my username and passw2ord. Username? Password? How could I find those? When had I even set up a ussername and password?

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Why is it that Windows, which emphasis connectivity over the Internet, even though back in the day Bill Gates ignored it, makes it increasingly difficult to move files from one PC to another over the same fucking network? Or is it that I don't know what I'm doing? I choose the former, because even if I didn't know what I was doing, there was no way I could fucking find out!

So, in a step back to the 14th century, probably accompanied by bubonic plague but I don't know yet, I got a fucking gflash drive out, copied the files off MAINPC and then put them on RIOMHAIRE.

I was stunned to discover that, when I fired up lotrolauncher.exe off the shortcut, the damn thing fired up!

LOTRO 1; fuck you Windows.

And the solstice hasn't even got here yet.</sup>

Many of you will know that, of a Sunday afternoon, I wander, or sometimes trot, over to the Racer's Café on Webster St to join some of the Ballarat Writers in an afternoon of Write Club. Now, the first rule of Write Club is to tell other people about it, so here we are. Anyway, for three hours we write, but I mostly talk about whatever has seized my attention on the day.

Anyway, some of the people have their projects that they work on, but I usually just write whatever comes into my head, since it's difficult to write anytung coherent when you can't see the screen well enough to read back what you're writing. Plus, one could argue stupidly, a bottle of vino doesn't improve matters. Be that as it may, I have lots of 800-1000-word fragments on the drive from these sessions.

Every so often, one of the members of the Club, whom we'll call Stephen Brown, comes up with a good writing prompt, which I then work on over the next week and email off for his and others' critique or dismissal. One of these prompts came from a friend of his saying "i will eat my own mouth". The resultant story, "Stomophage", is too putrid and repellent a piece to see the light of day—but stay tuned anyway, because I may have a change of heart. In the story, the protagonist—a word I use here only because, while it's technically correct, it overinflates the importance of the character hugely—sets out to carve up and eat his own mouth. In preparation he has all his scalpels, pliers, painkillers etc and a bowl to catch his ejaculate.

On reading the story, Stephen had a question: "Is he getting off on it?"
"No, " I replied, "he's just preapring in case he does."

Now, I don't actually think anyone cutting up their own lips, tongue, gums etc and pulling out their own teeth to eat them would get off on it. But people do get off on the weirdest things, so it's possible, and a conscientious and psychotically determined person might well prepare for it with a bowl or something to catch it. In practical terms, a condom would be more useful, but this was only a first draft of the story. (Parenthetically, I doubt there'll be a second.)

Anyway, we were talking about something or other and I proposed that, in the future, the two other people who regularly attend will control the world, and that I've been sent back from 2060 to ensure that that doesn't happen. So it was suggested that I had to write that one.

The resultant tale, which has some stupid title I'm not going to bother to look up, but the filename Brown Town.docx, took me about eight hours to write, then another three to check for typos, spelling errors, brain farts and whatnot, before I could get it into a fit state to email to to the other members.

The story is about a man coming back from a sexually-repressed future dystopia. The first thing he sees is women walking around with their faces bare but their legs covered. He is used to women in miniskirts and false beards. So, of course as it seems to me, he finds these women instantly arousing and expresses his embarrassment about the visible signs of arousal that gentlemen suffer.

The other members' conclusion about this? 'He really needs to get laid.'

I'm certainly in agreement with that. More agreement now than, say, a couple of decades ago. Call it a mid-life crisis. But, is this lack of occupation with sex causing a pre-occupation with sex that is reflected in, or by, my writing?

I'm not buying it. As I aid to the President of Ballarat Writers after she had left comments on 'Brown Town' to the effect that the sex is far too visible, I was creating a dystopia. Somewhere, either on the comments in the documents, or on Facebook Messenger, I said: 'the equation goes something like 'sex=good, therefore no sex=bad, therefore somewhere that's bad because of no sex is a dystopia'. I phrased it much better than that, but I can't find it. Once you have the 'no sex' part of the dystopia, you can just add things to it, and in most of this story I was borrowing from Nineteen Eighty-Four because that's a good model for a dystopia. Everyone recognises it even if they can't quote the source, and how much creative effort was I going to put into what essentially was a one-off joke with limited appeal?

Not much.

But, why is it that people in their twenties, and a woman in her thirties, object to sex, or at least sexy things even if not intercourse, appearing in fiction? Is it part of what Barry Humphries calls 'the new Puritanism'? Or is it that, with questions of sex, sexuality, gender, gender awareness, sexual fluids and fluidity, hashtagging all human behaviour and sexually-transmitted climate change and such, that they are so inundated with sex in its general sense that the last place they want to see any of it is in the one place they can go to escape from it&mdahs;into fiction?

I can only promise that in whatever fiction I may write in the future, there'll be no sex. I can promise there'll be no sex in these posts in the future. Not a single articulate sound referring to sex in any of its multifarious forms will pass the ol' lips—I won't even say 'lips'. This Bowdlerisation of my entire social milieu will take time, with a lot of mistakes and a lot of promises.

I only hope I can keep them.