Lev Lafayette

Slightly tangental to my work, I've been doing a bit of lobbying for Biogrid Australia. This is an amazing body which has actually managed to compile a variety of clinical patient records for research purposes in a manner that is dynamic and confidential. It started in Melbourne some five years ago, has slowly been taken up in other states and has some international contacts as well (especially through Vanderbilt). It has generated dozens of serious research papers on a variety of cancers, diabetes, neurological pathologies and disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Crohn's and so forth. The research tools have attracted some interest from major pharmecetical firms. They've done so on a shoe-string budget, and the money will run out under eighteen months. So it was with some sense of achievement that today there was a small meeting of people associated with the project (including myself) and the senior advisor to the Federal Minister for Innovation, Senator Kim Carr. The technology works; it has been proven to do and now it needs to scale up to be a truly national system. I am extremely pleased to be involved at a somewhat senior level in this incredibly worthwhile project.

Gaming-wise last week included some Cannibal Contagion, The Shadow of Yesterday, some D&D Fantasy Australia and Mythweaver along with the final episode of the Ainu Nezumi story, which concluded with a degree of regional autonomy for the Ainu following the saving of a daimyo's life from assasination by a competing clan. Next week is the continuation of the RuneQuest Prax and after that imajica_lj presents us the Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep. Apropos the former I really must mention that having picked up one last supplement I know have a a complete collection of RuneQuest (3rd edition) supplements. I also take this opportunity to mention that I've been deriving quite some amusement from recent episodes of Orcusville.

But yes, there's a plus on the gaming news. I've been working very closely with a certain Steve Perrin in recent weeks on actually finishing his almost forgotten game, SPQR. It's not unlike a synthesis of early edition RuneQuest and GURPS, both of which are games I like a great deal. Steve has been very appreciative of my remarks on design most of which he's implemented. On a somewhat related note, I received my playtester's copy of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying, which is certainly impressive in its own right; I am currently composing a review of it for rpg.net. Finally, initial chapter outline of the new edition of Campaign Law is underway. I seem to be doing a great deal of the driving in this project and I wonder I should simply start writing the new chapters now.

Inflation in Zimbabwe has hit 2.2m% and is running out of paper to print new currency. The communists in India flex their substantial political muscle, almost derailing the government over a nuclear deal with the US. Finally, whilst the capture of Radovan Karadzic after twelve years has brought relief to many, I wonder whether it will raise again the legitimate referedum of Bosnian Serbs who wanted to be part of Yugoslavia rather than an independent Bosnia. I still find the supposed national differences between Bosniak, Serb and Croatian entirely based on irrational religious suppositions; they really aren't separate nationalities in a meaningful sense of the word.

It's been a while since I've had a jolly good rant about politics and economics and related subjects and this is as good as time as any. So let me get stuck into three favourites; land and housing prices, religion and the NSW government, and finally, the environment and vested interests.

Firstly, let me draw your attention to the collapse of the UK housing market. A few days ago Barratt Development has announced cuts of 1200 jobs in attempt to crawl out the £1.66bn debt it's found itself in - and it's not an isolated incident. Housing prices have been falling for months now in the the UK, with expectations that a million homeowners could end up in negative equity. Why does this occur and why now? Because the value of land is hopelessly inflated, fuelled by speculation in what Winston Churchill accurately described as "the mother of all forms of monopoly", a fact well recognised by almost all economists. Many months ago, Alan Moran of the Institute of Public Affairs, commented correctly that "land based wealth is an illusion" and condemned government rationing of useful land as a restriction on supply. He's right of course, but regrettably typical of the IPA he lacks the intellectual and moral courage to point out that all landlords - public and private - reduce supply. Hence the need for a massive increase in land taxes with an equivalent reduction in taxes on productive goods and services. As that most heroic lawyer (yes, they do exist) Clarence Darrow deemed to say: "The 'single tax' is so simple, so fundamental and so easy to carry into effect that I have no doubt that it will be about the last land reform the world will ever get."

Sometimes Green Left gets it right, such as their article on Religion and Socialism. However these principles have not been embodied in the legislation by the NSW Labor government for World Youth Day 2008 which carries fines of up to $5500 for those causing "annoyance" and "inconvenience" to participants. Apropos, a student who smuggled out a Eucharist wafer has been receiving death threats. Back in NSW however, it is clear that with the decision to go ahead with electricity privatisation (contrary to public opinion) and this fundamental breach of civil liberties and the right to protest, that Premier Morris Iemma simply has to go. Fortunately, there seems to be some moves against him.


In recent weeks, the Garnaut Review has been released, an independent assesment of the effects of climate change to the Australian government and commissioned by the Australian Commonwealth government and the State and Territory governments. Following on with this is the aim of the G-8 nations to halve carbon emissions by 2050 (perhaps too little, too late). Whilst all this is happening, OnlineOpinion publishes an article entitled The UN climate change numbers hoax, where the authors cannot understand why review commentary on the IPCC working groups was, in their eyes, minimal (maybe they agreed with it?). I took the opportunity to show that one of the authors (Tom Harris) one held dual positions as the Executive Director of Natural Resources Stewardship Project whilst holding a position as Director of Operations for the registered energy-lobbying firm, the High Park Group. Further, Mr. Harris has been on the public record advocating a campaign to deliberately create chaos and confuse everyone about climate science. In response to this, the chief editor Graham Young has deleted these true and directly verifiable comments three times. If there was ever any doubt of OnlineOpinion being a highly-biased in favour of the AGW denial industry, it is certainly all over now - and others have noticed.

Recently returned from a solid four day's gaming and engaging in related seminars at Gencon Australia in Brisbane. Spent most of my time at various seminars and was impressed and amused by the various presentations by Tracy and Laura Hickman and the insightful comments by robin_d_laws. It was good to hear from other designers and their perspectives, including of course stephen_dedman along with quite a number of other Australian freelancers. Somewhere among all this managed to get a the opportunity to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition which now bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame. Also managed to spend some time playing Feng Shui, watching movies, and visiting stalls.

The Con was also particularly good for caseopaya as there was a "Living With Diabetes" convention next door for the third and fourth day. The first day was a little surreal with the XXII World Poultry Expo next door with various delegate wandering around with little faux chickens attached to ID cards. Also whilst in Queensland went along to aromameet on Friday eve and spent time with the ever delightful drjon, one_bat and many others including Emily, the six-fingered librarian from Melbourne with turbercolosis (no really, I'm not making this up). On Sunday also caught up with doomydoombear before she moves to the UK.

Returning from the Con, discovered that the first draft for Campaign Law had been rejected by ICE who have decided that the much of the basic outline was wrong and out-of-date and much of the writing and material was not of high enough quality. I could agree more, although it has hit some of the other designers quite hard with at least three indicating they don't want to work on the project anymore. To me the only really annoying part is the time that has elapsed between submission of the first draft and this response (but I feel fairly confident it wasn't my writing or material they were referring to). So far I am the only one who has indicated that they wish to continue with development. Finally, I must also mention that my review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe has been published on rpg.net and apparently I've won a prize of some sort at said site for my review of Legend of the Five Rings.

Had reviews for the two organisations I work for over the past week (VPAC and ARCS). Both went much better than expected; this is probably because I give myself a pretty average rating on my own abilities in systems administration. Evidently this view is not entirely shared by my managers. As an immediate side-effect I'll be taking up evening classes next semester in Training and Assessment which, due to my pre-existing honours degree, can be upgraded to a Graduate Certificate with relative ease. Also in work issues we discovered the minor bug in our parallel submit functions for MATLAB - the submit filter, instead of stripping out newlines, was stripping out the letter 'n'. A bit rough when you have a cluster called 'tango', eh? Still, a colleague at a different shop was telling me of early morning 'phone calls as their messenger service was falling over because it couldn't handle the ampersand in the surname field which was being used by companies (such as "Smith & Sons"). I referred him to a highly appropriate xkcd comic (after giving him some useful XML references). All of this however pales into insignificance with the problems faced this week by tau_iota_mu_c; falling telescopes!

Looking forward to visiting Brisbane at the end of this week and weekend, the Gencon programme is pretty busy and will see if I can arrange a meeting with all and sundry Brisvegas people whilst I'm there (drjon? Aromameet on Friday perhaps?). Apropos such things my review of Swordbearer was published on rpg.net and well received and Dr. Dennis Sustare, the original author (along with classics like Bunnies & Burrows), has also joined the mailing list I set up. Today I finished a lengthy review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe which will put up soon. In actual play last Sunday saw the completion of the River of Cradles campaign, which went very well.

Saturday was a brilliant boozy lunch, afternoon and dinner with caseopaya, recumbenteer and Louise. We downed a three bottles of wine, a bottle of mead, a bottle of green ginger wine, a round of cosmopolitans, and a round of mulled wine. Somewhere in that process I patched the missing shared libraries and perl modules for recum's tablet computer, played a game of Chez Geek (easily won by Louise) and watched some of Michael Moore's "The Awful Truth" (including the brilliant Merry Christmas episode). Sufficiently stretched out over a twelve hour period, it was a pretty good way to spend a lazy Saturday.

Gothcamp (it's not really a camp) in Walhalla, a very enjoyable experience. An excellent summary of events has been provided, including the enormous opening lunch, afternoon cemetery tour, evening ghost tour and 4WD tour the following day. I was particularly impressed by the unexpected presence of the Wolseley Car Club, which suited the town a great deal. I also took the opportunity to visit the monthly Anglican service, conducted by Reverend Neil Thompson on the theme of "Christianity and Sex". It was a far too theistic and conservative for my tastes, condemning pornography, homosexuality etc and the like as sins. In my youth I probably would have been quite angry at the presentation. Instead I felt a little sorry for the tiny congregation with their hopelessly out-of-date absolutist moral code.

It is rare moment that one can correlate gaming and politics; but an opportunity has arisen. Many months ago I started a story-game based based on a fantastic version of the Ainu in medieval Japan, with a great deal of the thematic content around the daimyo wars, Japanese imperialism and the conflicts within the indigenous Ainu. Back in the real world however I am very pleased to see that after over a hundreds years of official assimilationist policies ("there are no other ethnic groups in Japan") and cultural destruction (including invasion, suppression, acquisition of their lands, legal prohibition on the use of their language etc), the Ainu are now finally recognised as the indigenous people of the land, with a unique culture, language and religion. Much of this victory, no doubt, is at least partially based on the lifelong work of the now deceased Shigeru Kayano.

In a related topic my review of Legend of the Five Rings has been published. Appropriately, I've made a start on a Bushido review as well. In the meantime however, I have reviewed a rare gem, Swordbearer, which should be available next week and have started the only mailing list in existence for rules development and actual play threads for this old game. Perhaps not surprising, I am also going to Gencon Oz in Queensland in a couple of weeks which includes the official launch of D&D 4th edition.

Saturday was a journey to Knox with caseopaya for a work social function; ten-pin bowling no less. The train journey back from Boronia onwards reminded why I so dislike the outer suburbs; Boronia has all the architectural appeal of Dachau concentration camp, people stumbling around hammered out of their brain at Ringwood, a punch-up in progress as the train pulled in to Bayswater Station etc. Later in the evening we joined a collection of people for the Winter Solstice tour of the St. Kilda Cemetery, which has its share of famous Australians. The tour was of mixed quality; a group of 19th century-style actors were very good, but the group was too large and our tour guide did not speak to the crowd effectively. Audience contributions were invited however, and I gave a couple of additional facts which were well received. In the course of the proceedings I took the opportunity to escape the crowd and pay my respects to Alfred Deakin. It reminded me that I really should attend some of the Deakin Lectures next year.

I love my artist friends, I really do. Thus it was a great delight to recently join severina_242 with a small inner circle of friends at After The Tears. We were fed free vodkas all night as our table ensured that the entrance door remained closed. Knowing that said birthday girl is fond of such objects, I ponder whether she'd be able to create Homer's Snowglobe (hat-tip to talheres. Earlier this week also held a dinner with my dear artist friend of some twenty years, Khat Kerr who is a recent arrival from Perth and has just finished a long stint working as the stage manager for the Australian Opera. Also in attendence was comrade Jenne Perlstein, who has videos of her recent fiftieth birthday bash. Jenne is a doctor, social worker, a reform ger tzedek, practising witch and professional tarot reader (yes, they have a professional guild), an active member of ANTaR and has been President of the ALP's Aboriginal and Torres St. Islander Affairs policy committee, taking over from me at the end of 2002.

The bane of my working life over the past few days has been the installation of the parallel version of Matlab. It is only very recently that this proprietary software has even been allowed to be installed on clusters (pure licensing idiocy) and following a successful test early this year, work decided to purchase (at a very hefty fee) a distributed cluster server, 32 worker nodes and a parallel computing toolbox for a client. My esteemed systems manager (who incidentally has this excellent link to street photographers rights) and I battled our way through it to stupid o'clock yesterday and frankly it's (mentally) exhausting us. It's a damn shame, because the actual program itself is very useful for high end mathematics and engineering and, like many other examples of commercial software, its first incarnations were the results of public funding. After this experience I am tempted to become a GNU Octave evangelist as revenge.

In my last post I promised a major gaming announcement (no, not D&D 4th ed). I'm starting an free online rpg games journal, RPG Review. It'll be a modest publication aiming for 1,000 subscribers or so for its first issue, and has already found some interested parties including the delightful synabetic who is offering an "Ask Orcus" advice column. Most of the first issue has already been written. A extremely low-volume announce list for subscribers is also available; sign up! Tonight - most appropriately for Friday 13th - I'm doing a playtest of phasmaphobic's Cannibal Contagian and I've signed up to do the same with mtdesing's game Mythweaver. I must also take this opportunity to apologise to tzunder for the lateness of my comments on his labour of love, Gwenthia - they are coming, I swear!

Australia is leaving Iraq, after costing 2.3 billion in public funds. A legal brief has been sent to the International Criminal Court claiming John Howard committed war crimes in authorising the invasion. Kevin Rudd's comments lend credibility to the claim, saying that the invasion was conducted "without a full and proper assessment". I am glad we are washing our hands of this tawdry affair. The invasion was without ethical or legal justification and the only reason a similar writ hasn't been served on George W. Bush is because the United States is a rogue nation in its failiure to join the International Criminal Court. Getting Bush on trial is going to be a task for the American people alone.

On a related matter I have recently ended up in a bit of a debate with my religious colleagues concerning the self-determination of the Tibetan people. In the last two issues of the Beacon they have published an article by Michael Parenti who rejects a utopian potrayal of Tibet as an independent regime. My criticism of the article (last page, second issue) is that none of this deals with the basic principle of self-determination of nationalities. The lengthy response by the editors utterly fails to address this basic matter. As a result of their failure, I've joined the Australia-Tibet Council.

Went to see the latest Indianna Jones film on Saturday. It's a significant step down from the eighties classics; not a disaster, but if I'd known beforehand what it was like I wouldn't have bothered to see it at the cinema. Gaming has been good with an excellent session of RuneQuest: River of Cradles (example story in lin) last Sunday (and with a new player, Sam) and with good developments in the two PBeM games that I'm running. I also have another RPG-related annoucement to make, but that's going to have to wait until the next post ;-)

Last week was pretty standard workwise. It included supercomputer installations of a molecular dynamics simulator, a collection of molecular mechanical force fields for the simulation of biomolecules and, in terms of sounding quite awesome, the package for performing ab-initio quantum-mechanical molecular dynamics using pseudopotentials and a plane wave basis set. I will readily acknowledge that my knowledge of the science behind such things is quite modest. But I do have some clue on how to hack through the configuration and make files to get them on a cluster so others can use them. This week however started a little more modestly, but just as important with OHS training at VECCI, as our workplace is sensible enough to require one trained OHS and/or First Aid person per floor.

Out-of-hours and weekend activities have also been quite intensive. As is usual every fortnight, I played on Thursday evening "fantasy Australia" D&D session, and on Friday ran Swordbearer (including new player Fabrice, a recent French immigrant); calisi brought along a her new kitten which managed to distract and entertain. On Sunday, I ran Bushido where the famous historical conflict between the daiymos has been interrupted by the Ikko-Ikki rebellion. Saturday included a farewell party for a_carnal_mink and kits_the_dm, followed by an utterly wonderful dinner party at the house of txxxpxx. Spent some good time speaking to dcrisp and severina_242 at the latter (among many others at both!). All bookings to attend gothcamp and Walhalla have been made.

On Sunday at the Unitarian Philosophy Forum, I gave my presentation on The Philosophy of Justice. This completes a series I have given in recent months which also included "The Philosophy of Science" (link coming) and The Philosophy of Art. On topic where art and justice meet there's been a recent discussion in Australia concerning the works of one of our most famous photographers, Bill Henson. His work is held at the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian High Court, the Guggenheim in New York, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Although he has presented nude adolescents many times before, last week the NSW police closed down one of his exhibitions. The Age has decided to publish the image was used in the print and email invitation (probably NSFW). Apropos censorship, there are Livejournal Advisory Board Elections. I voted for rm. I urge you do so as well.

Somehow I neglected to mention in my last post two excellent events which I recently attended. First was John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies. I shouted dukeofmelbourne to the event as it was he who introduced me to early Ultravox some twenty years ago. It was excellent, an arthouse-style archive of movie fragments from disparate sources, combined with the Foxx providing backing music. The second was a more intimate affair, but one by a person who has probably affected more people indirectly; dinner with arjen_lentz who regularly visits Melbourne to provide MySQL training and do more work for OpenQuery. As usual it was excellent technical and friendly conversation and I quite enjoyed the contributions by laptop006.

Free and Open Source software is one of the areas where, it seems to me, the morally right policy is also the best technical approach. Widely reported, for example, has been a serious OpenSSL exploit which has affected Debian and Debian-derived systems (e.g., Ubuntu), which of course was widely discussed on Slashdot. Now despite the seriousness of the problem, it was found and patched remarkably quickly. Would this even have been discovered in a closed source model? Would the company holding the patents and copyrights admit the problem? Would they release a patch? With those questions in mind - and given the general usability of FOSS desktop UNIX-like systems, it never ceases to surprise me that people, every day, are still using MS-Windows and other closed-source solutions. It's morally wrong, and it's technically dangerous.

Over the years, I have realised the people who are attracted to roleplaying games are an interesting bunch. Many are people with either an incredibly systematic knowledge (it seems that every second sysadmin is a RPGer). Many (such as patchworkkid, artbroken, drzero for example) are people of significant literary merit and talent. But some however are special and not in a good way. For example, one has to be a "very special individual", to start an abusive tirade because an observer comments that a regular gaming schedule might work better than an inconsistent one. Such a "special individual" would include Ian Bouch (yeah, top-posting, start from the bottom *sigh*). Congratulations Ian; I don't often condemn people on my journal for their personal behaviour but you sir, are an arsehole.

Recently had the opportunity at Splodge with caseopaya, severina_242, _zombiemonkey, and cvisors to see the classic Hammer film Horror of Dracula (with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee). A good bit of cheesy horror (the working class Londoner accent complete with Gordon's gin at a Kluj inn would horrify Transylvanians). Later in the week watched the classic Vincent Price flick House on Haunted Hill which was quite clever and finally, wonder of wonders, found the memory card for the Playstation 2 which had been missing for several months and contained four hours of a saved game for Project Zero, certainly one of the best horror games that has ever been produced.

In real world horrors, there has been both the earthquake in Chengdu and a rising death toll (approximately 10,000 mostly in Mianyang) and the effects of Cyclone Nargis in Burma, where the number of dead or missing is over 100,000. The military junta that rules Burma deserves a special award for disgusting behaviour for not only blocking aid workers, but for also holding a particularly rigged constitutional referendum days after the event. An interesting comparison can be drawn between how the contemporary Chinese government is reacting to the disaster compared to their government during the Tangshan earthquake which killed approximately a quarter of a million. Communications technology is a bedrock of an open society.

On topic, there was the kerfuffle over a local Liberal Party 'blog, managed and operated by insiders, criticising leader Ted Baillieu. Although now closed it has been mirrored with history all the way to December. Not only is it amazing to think that it took that long to go through the IP logs, but in the fall-out the conservative's hatred of Jews is once again exposed. An isolated incident? Perhaps not - consider just prior Republican Congress hopefull Tony Zirkle (who, not surprisingly campaigns primarily against pornography and prostitution) decided to attend an Adolph Hitler birthday celebration sponsored by the American Nazi Party. If one was to give a broad summary it would seem that "the left" has a problem with Israel, whereas the "the right" has a problem with Jews.

Apropos there recently has been "some discussion" over an online Harry Potter RPG which called itself "Kristallnacht", which has since changed its name. Personally, I thought it was a great name for the story with enormous potential for thematic references and an oppurtunity to teach people some history via analogy (which is one of fantasy's better uses). In my own gaming worlds, I am pleased to see that a DragonQuest PBeM I am involved in has just restarted, had a good session of Bushido last Sunday and most recently I've started a Powers & Perils PBeM which has developed very quickly. Finally, one of the players in my HeroQuest PBeM has culled the archives into a story representation; it currently runs at 185 pages.

Gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Sunday on Reverend Stephen Fritchman, a radical liberal in the U.S. who caused a great deal of trouble for the political establishment during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On a vaguely related topic I found myself debating on convert_me last week with astrologers, of all people. Intrigued to discover that some of that ilk now claim (or rather, admit as the statistics and science is beyond reasonable doubt) that it has no predictive value whatsoever, but rather can only be used as a metaphorical and instrospective approach. So, after all those centuries it is finally acknowledged to be fiction.

Last Saturday the deco-apartment of Das Hoehnhauss/Casa di Lafayette held a champagne breakfast with various teas, Timorese coffee, lots of pancakes, almond shortbread, silverware and fine china. In attendence were caseopaya's new workmate and partner along with imajica_lj. We're hoping to turn this into a semi-regular event as it's a delightful way to waste away a Saturday morning and most of an afternoon and catch up with a small group of people as well. We're gradually building a list of people to come along, but if anyone is particularly keen to attend in the next couple, please drop a line below.

Work-related matters have been quite busy of late and we've been somewhat short-staffed. Upgrading the dual-core Opteron systems to quad-cores on Tango is a necessity if we wish to reach at least somewhere close to the c7 Teraflop peak but (as one would expect) it hasn't entirely been smooth sailing. On a completely different tangent, I've been investigating the relative competitive benefits of Drupal vs Plone CMSs for ARCS. Having some experience with both does lead me towards the former for the sake of simplicity, but I'm interested to hear contrary views.

I've just received the 25th anniversary re-release (with t-shirt of course) of Script of the Bridge and it has lost none of its magic. If you like modern music and you don't have a copy of this album I can safely say there is a serious gap in your collection. The work on the remastered album is flawless, the bonus disc (unreleased and live in Bremman, 1983) is likewise of excellent quality. On a related note, I have booked tickets to see the new movie fragments ("Tiny Colours") of the highly skilled musician and multimedia artist John Foxx.

Gaming-wise, the last two Sundays I've had the opportunity to convert my existing Legend of the Five Rings game to something that does a fantastic version of feudal Japan much better; Bushido. I was surprised by how smoothly the first session run, even though we were using a modified AD&D module, Blood of the Yakuza. Last Sunday I finally started what I hope to be a long term "classic RuneQuest" campaign, based on RuneQuest (3rd ed) starting with Sun County. Finally, in a typically heroic fashion, in my HeroQuest Glorantha game one of the PCs has managed to have his character coronated and married on the same day; but with a Lancelot-Guinevere subplot also occuring.

Although I am not Jewish, and indeed, I abhor the patriarchial nonsense and violence implicit in the story of Makot Mitzrayim, this year I did carry out the Ma Nishtana; which did cause me to raise an interesting question on the eating of Matzoh. The edict in Exodus (Chapter 13 v3 and v6) is that unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days. However, as indicated prior (Chapter 12, v34) the bread was not made to be unleavened, but rather it was taken from the ovens before it could rise. Now surely replicating that method would be a more accurate implementation of the edict? I put the question out to the Jews on my flist answer. Apropos to this, last Sunday at the Unitarians was an excellent presentation on the relative facticity (i.e., very little) and social conditions that gave rise to the New Testament by Chris Gaffney, who apart from Biblical scholarship is more well known as an editor of the Labor College Review (which oddly does not have a website).

Wednesday night went to the Astor Cinema with caseopaya and imajica_lj to see Interstella 5555 an animated musical of the Daft Punk album "Discovery", doubled with Akira. The first film was quite cute, with a bit of self-referential humour, even if their music isn't entirely my style. As for Akira, it mostly has a great story and some very forward-thinking motifs, but I had forgotten how boring the Tetsuo and Kaneda fight scene was. If it had been 1/3 as long, it would have three times as good.

On the way back from the cinema hidden under the bridge of Windsor station we spotted a small terrier, a stray that seemed to have had hurt its back legs. The poor thing was very scruffy with some incredibly matted hair and spending a night under the blaring light and cold concrete of the train station just didn't seem appropriate. So we took the old girl home, snipped some of the worst dreadlocks, gave her some cooked 'roo mince and provided a warmer, softer place to sleep that night. The following morning caseopaya contacted the RSPCA who took her away. I rather suspect if she'd stayed another 24 hours I would have insisted on keeping her. She seemed very grateful for our actions. Anyway, I present you "Digger".



Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend two seminars by one of the pathbreakers in computer science, Gordon Bell. The first was on MyLifeBits an attempt to provide a complete digital record of a person's life, based on the 1940's Memex vision. The second was on the history and operations of the massive Computer History Museum. Chatting over coffee I got him to sign my copy of a PDP-11 core memory maintenance manual (he was responsible for the unibus and general registers architecture). He was so fascinated by the book for a moment I thought he didn't want to give it back!

Afterwards I attended a meeting of the Sea of Faith to hear Rick Barker speak on "The Godly Delusions of Richard Dawkins: The Darwina Codes". The somewhat harsh title contrasted with rather convivial in content and discussed the differenced between "Darwinism" and "scientism" as an ideology versus the actual scientific contributions of Darwin and the facts and theories of the evolution. During the question time after the presentation a woman made the claims that there have been no observed instances of speciation and that there are no intermediate fossils. I suggested to the questioner that this was not the case and that references could be provided, the person got up from their chair, put their hands over their ears and started to make for the door saying 'No, I don't want to hear it! I don't want to know!. How the hell are you supposed to reason with such people?

Well, I've finished my three chapters for the new edition of Campaign Law. Specifically they are concerned with using the literary model (narrative, characterisation, setting, theme/motif and style) in roleplaying games, generation of cosmology and 'realistic' physical worlds and the same for societies and cultures. I am very pleased with the work I've done not only in the scope (as it crosses social, physical and aesthetic pragmatics), the quality of the content, but also the blunt, formal yet highly readable writing style. Damn it's going to good when that book comes out. In other gaming news, finally got around to running a session of Swordbearer on Friday which was a real blast, especially when it was based in The Hidden Shrine of Tamochan. On Sunday converted all the characters in the fantasy Japan/Ainu game to far more sensible Bushido which, despite obviously coming from the day clear writing in system rules, is far more evocative and substantial. Lastly, on Saturday the AD&D1e Norman Britain game came to an end after almost 15 months with a victory for the noble venturers over Arachne's plans to unravel the threads of space and time. Thus ends (AD&D speak here) UAGDQ...

For fans of industrial music squidb0i reports an amazing new Skinny Puppy song. ( Read more... ). In other music-related news, I snapped up a copy of the 25th anniversary edition of The Chameleons' Scipt of the Bridge. Go on, tell me another CD which receives 5/5 from 43 reviews and sells for a minimum of $52USD? Yes, The Chameleons and Script of the Bridge in particular are that good. Naturally enough I picked up a t-shirt to go with the re-issue as well. Go get some. Thanks to hbdeath, I've also been alerted that John Foxx, the original lyricist and singer from Ultravox! is touring Australia with music and a new movie. I am so there.

Many of my friends get annoyed at the workplace, by bosses, cow-orkers and so forth including my dear caseopaya. She's changing jobs at the moment and is being struck by a rather immature workplace that feels that she's deserting them for a better place. Whilst that aspect is true, it doesn't excuse their childish and snide attitude. But such behaviour does occur in so many workplaces, and often in business that are about to go down the tubes. So to all my friends who experience this sort of thing - and it happens with alarming regularity - follow the tcpip law of work which states: "It is never important enough to let them upset you". In other words, take a seriously phlegmatic approach. Meanwhile at my work, apart from a praised scripting hack, I have also taken on the role of being OHS officer for the floor and completed First Aid training. OK, so it's pretty minor but as a kid I wanted to be a doctor (no, not of philosophy). This is probably as close as I'll get.

I was originally asked to write one chapter (World Building) of the upcoming new edition of Campaign Law for Rolemaster Classic, I am now significantly contributing to two other chapters (Peoples and Campaigns). Appropriately, the Rolemaster Companion I wrote some sixteen years ago, with a cover price of $14, now sells for $100 USD. I recently finished playing a Rolemaster PBeM run by Luther Martin set in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age (I played a Dafarian mentalist named Xanana). Now he wants to start a PBeM set in Middle-Earth after the Hobbit, but before the Lord of the Rings. I shall have to revive my lovesick Halfling, Paul McGann. Iron Crown also had a 'remembrance contest' in honour of Gary Gygax. I submitted "A Tale of Two (Rolemaster) Paladins", which I am sure grailchaser could correct me on some of the finer details.

This is quite a big week for me in hanging out with friends in the shared imaginary space of roleplaying games. Thursday evening (D&D 3.5, Fantasy Australia), Friday evening (Swordbearer Castofan), Saturday day (AD&D1e, Norman Britain) and Sunday day (L5R, Ainu Nezumi) is all going to be taken up with ham improvised acting and dice rolling. This is on top of recent events such as an increasingly notorious Easter Sunday GURPS Bunnies & Burrows game (complete with players in rabbit ears). Although without amusing images, I must say the last two retro-AD&D Norman Britian games has been enormous fun (visiting hell, stopping Arachne's revenge against the Gods). In the HeroQuest Glorantha game I narrate, the players have been doing some crazy things, such as winning wars, playing cupid and planning seductions; improvised storytelling at its best - all's fair in love and war.

The past weeks haven't all been fun and games however.. I've spent a fair bit of time working through the implementation of subdomains on DNS and Apache with a PHP/MySQL site; not for the first time Debian Administration has come to my aid. National PornographicGeographic informs us that apparently sex was invented in Australia. Finally, ctudball alerts us to the disaster that is the refusual to separate church and state in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I take the opportunity to, once again, break Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act; and I incite others to do.

Padriac Murphy, one of the more conservative reporters at The Australian, had a go at Jenny Macklin. Is it because she's a member of the Socialist Left of the ALP? Is it because she's a woman? Or is it because she was visiting an aboriginal community? In any case, they were caught out lying. A little further down the scale of importance, The Age had the good sense to publish yet another of my letters; this time on the Palestine/Israel question. In full:

( Read more... )

In recent weeks the University of Melbourne/QUT journal Online Opinion has had a flurry of "porn is evil" type articles, such as "Common Misconceptions", "Rape in Brisbane" and The Digital Dark Age. The only dissenting article has been Romancing The Ban, itself somewhat problematic and Porn is no one religion. As is my want, I often find myself wading into such debates, trying to educate people on the difference between content expressions and consensual participation, or the lack thereof. I am sorely tempted to compose something that will put of common sense into the discussion.

Next Sunday at the Unitarian Church is an forum on housing afforability; the speakers include Tony Nicholson, the Executive Director of Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Keenan, Chief Executive Officer, of Hanover House and Geoff Forster of Prosper Australia. I note that the Adam Smith Club is also discussing the topic. Our event is cheaper, with better speakers and will probably offer better solutions as well :-) In a few weeks after that (May 4) I will be speaking on "A heretic of clarity: the Unitarianism of Stephen Fritchman".

Finished my draft chapter for Campaign Law on time. Now helping out on the societies and cultures section. Have moved the five hundred member RuneQuest rules list to one of my domains. Will need do a bit more work on my Polymancer article on advice of the editor. Played Legend of the Five Rings last Sunday, using the AD&D module Blood of the Yakuza. Found the material within that module a bit thin, so used the Random Fantasy Adventure Generator. The Portuguese have arrived in Japan with guns, and that's made things quite interesting.

So whilst everyone else was out having fun at Conquest, I was at home doing gaming-related activities of a different kind. As forewarned, I am now an official co-author for the latest edition of Rolemaster's Campaign Law. I'm currently writing the chapter on world building which includes the nature of the divine, magic, cosmology and the earth sciences (oh, you didn't know I had an interest in the earth sciences as well, did you?). I'm also hoping to contribute (for obvious reasons) on the section on societies and cultures. I'm about half-way finished on what is required of me already. OK, so I can write like a demon.

I do confess to taking the Sunday off writing and playing GURPS Bunnies & Burrows, as is an Easter Sunday tradition (photo from 2005). This years story included the setting from the original author, Druid's Valley, published way back in 1979 in Different Worlds Issue #2 with the additions of a Celtic religious site, and a rabbit buried on the first day of spring - which then rose from the dead. Much fun had by all present. I notice that the original game was reviewed this week. Dennis Sustare is truly one of gaming industries lesser known heroes; this Friday I'll be running a game of Swordbearer the other major work he wrote. Not to mention some absolutely brilliant pieces for Paranoia.

I have mostly finished Medieval Total War. Quite liked until the game AI started to cheat by generating utterly implausible oppositions (like hundreds of armored rebel knights in provinces that have been controlled for generations). It is awful when games do this, it breaks the sense of immersion (and Medieval Total War did have a good historical immersive quality). I seem to recall first reading in Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming that having the AI cheat helps keep a game challenging. Personally, I think it's a game destroyer. Because as with interactive gaming, the shared-world immersion comes first and the challenge (or system) comes after that. Destroying the sense of wonder turns the game from an phenomenal experience to an obstinate thing that's just annoying.

Last two services at the Melbourne Unitarian Church were former Senator Janet Powell speaking for International Women's Day and Stephen Stuart, President of the Humanist Society of Victoria, on the separation of religion and state. Powell's speech was not to my liking; too much obsessing over the proportion of women in parliament. Stuart's presentation was dry, formal, with impeccable dress, and cautiously explained how the State has become a defacto funder of religious organisations. Tomorrow night I'll be attending the Sea of Faith to hear David Miller talk on the resurrection-denying ancient Christian Church of Marcion

Global politics has become very interesting; Foreign media has been expelled as the troops seal off Tibet. The Dalai Lama is criticised for adopting a non-violent path. China is concerned with ensuring that its policies are supported at home (after all, if the Tibets can overthrow the dictators so can the Chinese). A popular petition on the matter (130K signatures so far) is available. Dr. John Powers of ANU argues the Tibetan cause - and notes how this would benefit China.

In virtual politics, apparently there is going to be a Livejournal Strike! Local times are available



What's this about?

* It's about free and ad-free LiveJournal accounts being abolished for new members, ignoring the advice from the newly-formed Advisory Board.
* It's about LJ staff trying to sneak this decision in under the radar, and when people found out, telling the users it was done 'to make the signup process less confusing'.
* It's about LJ staff failing to apologize for trying to hide the facts from view and for lying about the actual reasons for their actions.
* And finally, it's about the latest decision to hide certain user interests from the list of Most Popular Interests, some of them being fanfiction, bisexuality, sex and depression. This decision was not announced or explained in any way. Users found out for themselves.

As caseopaya reported, Rogue the rat died today. It was an incredibly tranquil demise; he spent his final hours resting on her lap, his breathing increasingly shallow and with greater intervals until, at 2.21pm, they simply stopped. There was no pain, no struggle, no fighting for precious moments. It was like he wasn't even aware of his own death; he simply faded away slowly and peacefully, receiving scritches as he went. He'd been taken to the vet the day before who trimmed his teeth a little, gave him a shot of steriods and provided some high protein food, but informed us that basically it was old age and not much could be done. He'd lived to an excellent 3 years 3 weeks (92 on the rat-years scale) and in the most recent months had given every indication that he was more than content with his long and very active life.

I remember collecting him as a youngster all those years ago. This tiny runt of pink-eyed white rodent scampered into view with the cheekiest countenance. The first night at home he lived up to his name escaping behind a bookcase. It would be the first on many head-shaking and sometimes worrying acts of mischief the little guy would get up to, as his sense of adventure far outweighed his otherwise quite acceptable intelligence. Getting into a knot-hole of tree and entering a (thankfully unused) hornet's nest; scampering up a palm tree until he suddenly realised he'd reached a height that he couldn't get safely down from (and later, doing the same on the tallest bookcase in the house); dashing under an 8 foot high wood and wire fence to end up face-to-face with a big ginger cat; getting drunk on champagne and falling off the mantle piece; and, perhaps most notoriously, splitting his head open whilst in a scuffle with our other rats.

Whilst not always as sociable as his brother Vagabond (his poor eyesight caused him to be a little scared of too many feet), he certainly had his charms, such as delighting locals in St Kilda on our evening walks as he insited on sitting on top of my beret like a pom-pom. He also had this most amusing trait of rolling on to his back to have his belly scritched, which from all accounts requires an incredible degree of trust from small animals. He was an affectionate, content and happy bundle of trouble to his very last.

Well, time for the burial. Nothing else to be done. Valedictions, Rogue.

As (nearly) everyone knows, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, died this week. I cannot honestly say I was particularly a fan of any of the game systems he developed (Dungeons & Dragons, Cybog Commando, Mythus, Lejendary Adventures), nor most of the scenarios he developed, not to mention his ethical reasoning in rpgs. Nevertheless the contribution of D&D to the gaming world is underestimated; with hundreds of "copycat" games after D&D (many of them significant improvements) and almost the entire fantasy computer game industry, Gygax will certainly be remembered. The comic The Order of the Stick, provides its own excellent tribute.

Apropros to this I suppose I should announce that I've been asked to write for Polymancer, a rather good Canadian print RPG magazine. My initial article is on "Bad Game Design", which inspired me to conduct a couple of straw-polls on livejournal and RPG.net on what constitutes the worst roleplaying game of all time. RPG.net has put up my review of HeroQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and there's a more than outside chance that I'll be heavily involved in the next edition of Rolemaster's Campaign Law.

Every so often I go on a bit of splurge on music purchases. Most recent haul includes the following: Monty Python - Best Of, Public Image Ltd - Greatest Hits So Far, ELO - Time, Blancmange - Living on the Ceiling, Asia - Alpha, Orbital - Halcyon Best Of, Psychedelic Furs - Pretty In Pink - Best Of, Pop Will Eat Itself - Now For A Feast, Chapterhouse Very Best Of, China Crisis - Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms Some People Think It's Fun to Entertain, Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome To Pleasure Dome CD, Jacques Brel - Here's Jacques Brel Best Of, Jean-Michel Jarre - Zoolook, Ultravox! - The Island Years, Ultravox! - Ha! Ha! Ha!, Ultravox! - Systems of Romance. The latter two I picked up purely by luck by visiting Dixons prior to going to Polly's for Brendan E's, birthday drinks. Whilst the list does read a little like "important but relatively unknown music from the eighties", a major exception to this is the late 70's LPs from Ultravox! (with exclamation mark) which, for music aficiandos, should be distinguished from Ultravox. Whilst I don't mind the Midge Ure led latter band or its string of commercial hits, the earlier incarnation with John Foxx was well ahead of its time, with some brilliant poetic lyrics (see in particular Hiroshima Mon Amour, Just for A Moment, I Want To Be A Machine, My Sex and The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned).

Rogue Rat is not in the best state. Whilst clearly a content he's spending much of his time asleep with a sloppy grin on his rodent face, his movement these days is quite shaky and he's given up eating solids (although he's been coaxed into eating baby food, soy milk, cheesecake and the like). Over the past few weeks he's lost about 20% of his total body mass. Unfortunately I don't think they little guy's going to make it to 100 rat-years. Still, he's had an excellent life and is clearly appreciative of the attention he's getting in his twilight days.