starling

persiflage.

Legend of Zelda could have made the list, yeah. So many titles could. Shinobi, golden axe,baldurs gate, TES.,mario cart....it's almost impossible to whittle it down to ten. Responsible choice also has some titles I very nearly included, quake especially. I still game pretty heavily. I think the best game made in the last few years is final fantasy XIV A realm reborn. It's the best functioning mmorpg ever made, but isn't really my thing as graphically it's a bit too Asian for me. Best non-mmo I've played recently would be Alien Isolation. The only Alien franchise game I've ever enjoyed, and very suspenseful and terrifying generally. I have no idea how it tanked so badly in the reviews on gamespot etc, it's a fucking great game. I wish I'd had the money to buy shares in activision before they exploded, I would have in a heartbeat. It's kind of like when I was in primary school, I can remember my teacher talking to my old man about this thing called the internet and how he'd bought a whole bunch of shares in this little search engine company called 'Google'.... I wonder if he held on to them, and is living on a private island in fiji right now. I hope so. I was a right little fucker to deal with as was most of my class. I hope he found some happiness somehow.

“No man survives when freedom fails, the best men rot in filthy jails, And those who cry ‘appease, appease’ Are hanged by those they tried to please.” Hiram Mann

'I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky' virginia woolf.

I'm a long time gamer. A lifer. I had the kind of parents that said 'here you go, here's a nintendo, a bag of skittles and three litres of coke. Knock yourself out kiddo, we're going drinking'. Have played thousands of games over the years. Here's my top 10 (in no particular order) 1. World of warcraft, vanilla to burning crusade). Probably the best time gaming I've ever had. It was the kind of time that makes me feel sorry for gamers who weren't there for it, because I feel they'll never know how truly immersive, and personal gaming can truly be. This is before cross-server pvp; you had real friends, and real enemies in game back then. It was personal. I have never encountered another game with the level of community of early wow, and truthfully, I don't think we'll ever see the like again. If pushed, I would have to say that the original wow and burning crusade, are probably the best video games ever made. 2.Fallout franchise--what can I say? I fucking love the post-apocayptic tesla-powered alternate universe of fallout. The games themselves are as glitchy as hell, but my god, they are so inventive, so well thought out, creative, beautiful and funny. Massive fanboy. Fallout 4 is fucking great, too--the series hasn't gone the way of other big release titles and has kept its integrity. 3. Dark souls franchise--probably the most frustrating but rewarding game I've played after warcraft. Highly recommended. 4. Call of duty, modern warfares 2-3--I had a blast on these, before microtransactions and a failure to evolve made the series stagnate. I was top 3000 in the world for kills in mw2, had over 100 nukes, and nuked on the map rust several times (fans of the series will know how hard that was lol). 5.Half-life 2--an amazingly realized game that is criminally underrated, and is perhaps the best gaming sequel ever made. I have never been able to understand why the half life series isn't a huge deal the way fallout is. If you've never played half life, get it. 6. Doom 2--back in the days of pentiums, this game used to scare the shit out me. Peeling through those dark hallways listening to monsters breathe somewhere in the darkness, not knowing whether or not a minotaur with rocket launchers for fists lurked behind door number three--yeah. Good times. Battlefield series--great massive scale shooters, great pvp. 7. Kings bounty (sega megadrive 2) This game really kept me engrossed as a kid. The graphics were terrible, it was hard to navigate, but yeah--It really kept me plugged in. 8.Tony Hawk series--great fun. 9.silent hill series--very creepy. The gold standard in horror suspense gaming. 10.Halo--had hundreds of great splitscreen matches here.

yep, you were right. How I managed to do that via the touchpad accidentally I'll never know. Thanks!

and can barely read text. Does anyone know how to fix this? I did it with the touchpaqd somehow.

aye, true enough gtarman. Yesterday's weed is today's cash crop. That cactoblastus cactorum moth really did its job.

. Box includes every opuntia I have listed in my original post, including the mother cow's tongue opuntia, burbanks, and two forms of robusta/gigantea.which is quite large. Price is 150$ plus 20$ postage owing to the weight and size of the package. Already bubblewrapped and boxed ready to ship out. PM if interested.

Sold, thanks. s

Two of my favorite kurt vonnegut quotes: “Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”[Kilgore Trout had written a novel call the Big Board.] It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212. These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth. The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms. The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl. It worked. Olive oil went up.

It's not really an issue of contention that Indigenous did indeed live nomadically. They did do some things which might be considered farming. For example, if you read the reports of early explorers. they describe areas that reminded them of british parks--cleared areas. The Aboriginal people did this to create hunting grounds; they'd burn off areas, which created grass pastures which attracted roos and other small game. They'd also plant yams etcalso--but they wouldn't sit on them like a british carrot farmer. They'd spread them by division, wander off to take advantage of whatever was ins season then come back for them when they were themselves ready to be harvested. It was a beautiful system that ran like clockwork. Toowoomba is a good example--most of Towoomba was cleared before white people ever got there, believe it or not. This was actually one of the primary reasons for early conflict between the tribes and settlers. The difference between this and European farming is great however; they didn't occupy these cleared spaces year round the way a European farmer might fence of a paddock and run cattle on it. They'd move about and return to it. This is actually a much, much more intelligent way of developing food sources because areas were constantly being rested and allowed to renew. Most of the ecological problems we have in Australia are owing to the opposite process, which is to farm or run the shit out of an area until the ground is ruined. In fact , cloven hoofed animals like cattle, sheep etc actually destroy Australian soil, whereas because of the different structure of soil in Europe, they do not ruin the soil there. Things like wallabies and kangaroos are actually good for the Australian soil, because as they run they tear it up a little which creates aeration. Cattle and sheep crush our soil until it becomes dead and lifeless. Anyway,to get back on topic, the last thing an aboriginal person could have understood would have been the concept of a fence. This is because they did not have a concept of private ownership in relation to food animals. It just didn't exist for them, because they never had any need for such a thing. Whereas Europeans had perimeters and private ownership of food animals, the Aboriginal people had shared common ground that was basically open season.The idea that someone could own the land itself would have seemed not only completely bizarre, but absolutely ridiculous from a practical perspective. Why would anyone want to stay in one spot all year round when the seasons are changing, the animals are moving around following the flowering and fruiting plants of different regions? For a indigenous person, staying in one spot would have meant starvation, struggle and strife. They followed the food cycle. There were tribal barriers, but these were negotiated by ceremonies, because all the tribes knew that they had to make exceptions because in order to eat, they had to follow the seasons, which meant transgressing barriers. This is actually what 'welcome to country' stems from. Hundreds of different tribes would converge in certain areas of QLD to celebrate bunya nut season, for example. These were important events which served both to provide sustenance but more importantly, to strengthen diplomatic bonds. There was not any precedent in the history of Indigenous civilization where a tribe said 'All this land, it's ours, and all the animals and plants that are on it are ours too, and if you kill a kangaroo on it at any point for any reason, we'll kill you'. So when an aboriginal person saw a sheep in a paddock, they had no understanding that this was a someone's personal property. They saw an animal on land that wasn't owned by anyone, because nobody could own the land,and they speared and ate it. And when reprimanded they would have thought 'Why does the white man get to hunt on the shared commons but I don't' Why are they trying to starve me? Fuck these people'. What you have to understand is that Europeans and the Indigenous just had totally polar opposite epistemologies relating to absolutely every single aspect of existence. It was always going to be a complete disaster. True indigenous culture was destroyed not when settlers began exterminating the indigenous, but when they handed them tins of bullied beef and bags of flour. Every single aspect of Indigenous society was related in some way to the gathering of food. When that lynchpin was removed, an entire civilization was irreparably eroded. There's actually some early accounts of trade. The fleets would try and swap bolts of silk cloth for artifacts from local tribes, and they couldn't understand why the tribespeople refused them. The answer of course, is if you hand an indigenous person a bolt of heavy cloth, they're probably going to think 'Ok, thanks, but the fuck am I going to do with this? It weighs a tonne, and I have to carry around this useless thing for at least 15km per day, because that's how much area I have to cover to feed myself and my family. Oh--you want me to make clothes out of it? No thanks. It's 40 degrees. I'll stick to near total nudity, thanks. I do not want this'.

Update: All my opuntia cuttings have sold. I will not have more for at least another 6 months. Thanks s

I only partially agree with this. From an energy in energy out perspective, native edibles just cannot compete with exotics as they tend to be low energy (but often of high nutrient vale, such as the billygoat plum/kakadu plum). They also tend to yield less apart from things like szygiums which will will give you a stomach upset if you eat too many, and you do have to eat quite a few of them to make a meal of them. There are two types of davidson plum, one is more tropical than the other and is a smaller tree. They're seasonal. All native Australian edibles are. Traditional aboriginal people lived nomadic lifestyles and followed the food cycle; they also relied heavily on game, because again, native bush foods were and are scarce and have low energy values. There are some exceptions like the bunya nut (which I've had roasted, actually very very good and a criminally underrated native nut) that played a large role in the migratory behavior of certain Tribes, but they'd eat the larvae of a moth attracted to he nut, not just the nut itself. Also, bunya nut takes a long time to bear, and is a pretty dangerous tree to have around. I've heard of a horse being killed by a falling nut from some ancient tree. On The point on feeding native animals, believe me--they'll eat your exotics too. Possums eat the leaves of my wax jambus, and the fruit of everything. King parrots eat my jaboticaba. Bandicoots will eat my yams. A dozen or so different birds (but mostly fig birds) descend on my acerola cherry every year--which isn't a problem because I have 5 of them and they produce thousands of fruit every season. Bats eat my papaya and mangoes. Various papillon butterflies utilize my hybrid fingerlimes, rollinia and surprisingly even soursop, and natve bees do most of the pollinating at my patch. Really the only things that don't have a crack are the koalas. On the point of pests, native birds will go where the insects are, which is around my exotics. Butcher birds, wagtails, and magpies mainly. I have one resident butchy that is virtually tame and will take food out of my hand and sit on my shoulder, when he's in the mood. If your goal is to grow enough food to self-sustain, aussie natives just aren't a good choice and again, you will inevitably be better served by exotics. That's really just the reality of it, unfortunately. If you were homesteading or getting serious about it, the last thing you would plant out would be a native edible garden. You just couldn 't survive on on it. If you're going to grow natives, do it because they're beautiful, hardy and of this land.

If you haven't tried a selected purple dragonfruit, you haven't tried a dragonfruit. Absolutely no comparison to the whites and reds you by at the store.

Not much I can do about WA qarantine protocols. I'm happy to post things to you at your own risk though.

especially epiphyllums, but also columnar types including peruvianus with good fruit. PM.

Claire de lune played on floor harp, flawlessly. I could live a thousand years and never be this good on my instrument.

I've never tried them, but one of my friends swears that the roots of kurrajong trees are absolutrely delicious and taste like coconut.

It's ok. It's just across between an acid mandarin and a fingerlime. The selected finger limes are better, crimson tide and red champagne are the best.

ok,well here's the problem: Firstly, you are too much of a doughnut to differentiate between race and culture. At no point have I used the word 'Arabs', and at no point have I made racial attacks against anybody or any group whatsoever. If you can tell me what race Islam is, I'll quit the forum. And you're right--extremism is oppression. And nothing does extremism like Islam. Mate, you really need to stop stalking me on the boards, It's weird, creepy, and dirty. I cannot believe you would stoop to trying to derail my thread in plant sales and trade. What a germ. So pretty please, with sugar on top--fuck off. Just leave me alone.

Oh, cool--I'm a Neo-Fascist also. Anything else? I've got to say, it's been a while since I've been forum-stalked. It's no less creepy this time around. But funnier, at least.

I've grown a few different types of yams, they're a great crop and a must-have for those into self sufficiency. The best I tried was a chinese white variety bought from gumtree, creamy and sweet.