Random Stuff

[griffin]

And the weird thing is, their posts are 1-3 minutes apart, which gets around the spam filter (which only prevents people from posting faster than a minute), so they were spamming us for about 90 minutes to rack up those 62 posts.

If one of the staff had been logged on at the time, we'd have been able to ban then within a few minutes/posts.

[CoRDS]

And the weird thing is, their posts are 1-3 minutes apart, which gets around the spam filter (which only prevents people from posting faster than a minute), so they were spamming us for about 90 minutes to rack up those 62 posts.

If one of the staff had been logged on at the time, we'd have been able to ban then within a few minutes/posts.

and weirder as far as i can tell they weren't trying to enlarge anything .....

[Jetfire in the sky]

Oh yeah, I know the 'Beal, some of my students come from there.

Great to know there is another Mallee Boy on the boards

Considering the sparse population now there wouldn't be many of us on here, in the last five years I sold a Transformer to a guy from Dimboola, and my brother has had contact with a collector from Donald. So it's rare TF air down there, but no less love

[Handsprime]

Can someone please explain the BTT for 2016 thing?

[Megatran]

On the long drive home from work yesterday from Gippsland area, I saw two cars on seperate occasions with the custom number plates:
GRIFF8
VRON89

[Megatran]

Good luck & best wishes to the Matildas (womens AUS soccer team) on the Olympic Soccer qualifying. Five matches over 10 days.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Having a look at some Aussie news and well, after not really paying attention for the past year or so, I can see very little has changed.

[Handsprime]

If anyone wants to hear something new from me, go ahead.

[GoktimusPrime]

Random thought: it seems that J.R.R. Tolkien may have viewed language hegemony - especially where a single dominant language replaces others (thus decimating linguistic diversity) as a bad thing. There are many different languages spoken across Middle Earth, with Tolkien himself constructing entire language families for his fantasy realm. However, among the servants of Mordor, Black Speech has come to dominate over the languages of those peoples, destroying their indigenous languages. e.g. by the Third Age, no Orc is able to speak any kind of Orkish. They speak either Westron (the lingua franca of Middle Earth which is represented by Modern English) or Black Speech (e.g. Azog the Defiler speaks exclusively in Black Speech, as do the Nazgûl (Ring Wraiths), and of course, the One Ring itself).

This contrasts with the other races on Middle Earth, where linguistic diversity and tolerance flourishes. e.g. we frequently see characters like Aragorn and the Elves speaking in Sindarin Elvish, or the humans from Rohan speaking Rohirrim (represented by Old English), Dwarves speaking in Dwarvish and even the Hobbits speak Hobbitish, a peculiar variation of Westron (e.g. Bilbo Baggins thanked all the Hobbits for coming to his "Eleventy-Oneth" (111th) birthday). So it seems that the heroic peoples of Middle Earth are openly tolerant of different languages, whereas the evil servants of Mordor have moved to smother their linguistic/cultural diversity and replace it all with the singular values and language of Mordor. Did Tolkien also intend this to be an allegoric criticism of hegemonic languages like English (and thus by extension, Anglophone cultures)?

One tongue to rule them all.

P.S.: It's worth noting that Azog only spoke Black Speech in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of the Hobbit; in the books he only ever spoke Westron. And he was dead long before the events of the Hobbit. And yes, I know that Legolas and Tauriel aren't meant to be in the Hobbit either (Tauriel is entirely an invention of Peter Jackson; of course, Jackson does prefer to have greater inclusion of females in his films, as he massively increased the role and appearance of Arwen in LotR (she's actually a rather obscure character in the books)).

[Megatran]

Is it just me or has the height of the platform for this year's Moomba Birdman Rally got a lot less high?