Lev Lafayette

I have written a short piece on the proposed bail-out of the American banking, deriving from the words of actual economic critics of the plan, which are indeed many: Socialise the land and banks, don't bail-out the monopolists. Interestingly, at least some of this is likely to be put into effect. The British bank Bradford & Bingley has been bought out by their governments and even in the United States, where socialisation of banking is just a little too red for the poor dears to handle, and we may see some of the more sensible (albeit symptomatic) solutions by Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman introduced. From crankynick a lolz version of recent events (pictures with humour, articles with insight). Just as well the bailout bill was passed as martial law was threatened if it was not.

Spent most of this week at the eResearch2008 conference which had quite a substantial agenda. Gave a presentation on Thursday morning on the use of collaborative tools within Drupal. The conference itself was very well attended, although the venue was one of those souless functional modern buildings that had piped sacchrin jazz everywhere you went (even in the toilet), and had a loud jazz band playing during the conference dinner. You really want to know what I think of jazz?

Registration to the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Post/Human Condition completed; off to New Zealand in December! The ABC is screening on Catalyst a study of poker machines, gambling and social environments of which I did some of the audio-visual work.

My review of D&D 4th edition (from RPG Review) has been republished on rpg.net (which one person has described as "the best review they've read all year"). On a related note, have been taking my pbem HeroQuest group through an abbreviated version of the Orlanth is Dead scenario, which is thematically strong, but rather rough in its structure and content. Sunday was spent playing RuneQuest, specifically scenario 2 of Shadows on the Borderlands. It plays a lot better than it reads, mainly because the cavern complex actually is designed and feels like such.

Caught up with recumbenteer and L., picnicing in Edinburgh Gardens on Saturday with their young Mormon friend; was a little surprised (and amused) to discover they did not know of the somewhat notorious the Fundamentalist Church of LDS. In rodent news, Scoundrel has a very bad cold; he's old, doesn't eat much and has always been prone to illness. So he's being looked after a great deal.

seanr give me a brain-breaker of the week, which is really quite special: The case against Obama.

I have released a sixty-four page gaming quarterly, RPG Review #1, with industry news, a review article of D&D 4th edition, a AD&D/D&D3.x high-level scenario, designer's notes from Mythweaver and Cannibal Contagian, a Call of Cthulhu article about the Tcho Tcho, a RuneQuest article on Demiurgy and related scenario, an interview and article by Steve Perrin, a Dragonquest retrospective review, scenario and interview with a NZ group that have been playing the same mutlt-GM campaign for 25 years, a moview review of Dark Knight, a game theory article on bad design, a review of Fatal Frame/Project Zero IV, an article by CAR-PGA and finally words of wisdom from Lord Orcus. Both the feedback and download of the journal over the past thirty-six hours give me cause for great optimism that a lot of people were actually looking for something like this. Also, the wonderful synabetic has added a feed for it rpgreview_rss

In other news, I'm off to New Zealand in December. The Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy is holding a conference in Auckland on "The Post-Human Condition". I have submitted an abstract entitled, "'Lying in Politics' Revisited in the Age of the Internet". This takes up Hannah Arendt's pithy essay on the subject with her equally blunt essay on civil disobedience and compares both the form and content of mass media at the time when these essays were written (during the Vietnam war) and the formation of public opinion via computer-mediated communication. There is, of course, more than a little bit of of Jürgen Habermas' consideration of the public sphere and legimation crisis in this comparison.

Whilst I was hoping to have RPG Review out this Monday, I fell sick late last week which knocked a couple of days off my planned schedule. Just as well it was advertised with the ambigious "late September". As it is I'm just finishing the final pages and layout and as opposed to the advertised 48 pages, it looks like the first issue will be a fairly massive 64 pages - and a fair bit of the second issue is already done! Perhaps, just perhaps, it is indeed well about time that something like RPG Review was released. Despite illness I managed to work in several story threads for Sunday's RuneQuest game for the second scenario of Shadows on the Borderland.

Not for the first time my workplace has indicated that they are more than pleased with my abilities. After receiving a "not insubstantial" pay rise recently, I have also been told that work will pay for the $2K+ tuition fees of a Certificate IV in Training and Assesment. VPAC does more than a fair bit of training and I've had a fair bit to do with writing the basic training manual and tutorials for the partnership. On another work related topic much of this coming week will be dedicated to preparing a presentation to the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference.

Everything you need to know about the US election in one comprehensive post. The United States and Pakistan on the edge of war against each other. No surprise to regular readers of this journal; cheap credit and land speculation runs riot - and then stops with an incredible crunch: Tectonic Shift on Wall Street as Lehman Fails, Merrill Sold. How long have I been ringing this warning bell?!

Well it seems that the National Party have decided to support the Liberals in Western Australia. Alan Carpenter has resigned which is a shame as he was a very decent individual who had the very unusual ability (among politicians) to listen to others and to admit mistakes (although he certainly should not blame himself for the appalling Labor campaign). The incoming premier, Colin Barnett, does not have the competence of Carpenter making Dr. Nelson's commets that this represents an "outstanding result .. for good governance" a joke that will end in tragedy.

Which is just as well that the Federal Liberal caucus has seen fit to remove him from the leadership in favour of Malcom Turnbull. As a completely rarity, Turnball actually is a liberal Liberal. He's more than a bit of a toff (as Australia's richest parliamentarian) and there's a gulf of experience between him and working people. When it comes to matters like abortion, stem cell research, climate change, the apology to Aboriginal Australia, superannuation to gay couples and so forth, he's certainly progressive. His weakness is that when such issues collide with the lure of the dollar, he'll choose the dollar - such as the case with the approval of Gunn's Pulp Mill.

Weekend was very enjoyable. Had an evening of many drinks and trashy videos with severina_242, _zombiemonkey and caseopya, although the latter was a little worse for wear on the journey home. The following day imajica_lj was a little late to gaming (he did turn up), so I ran an impomptu Call of Cthulhu session of "I Want You To Kill The Ice Cream Man", which is an brilliantly simple story. Tonight will be spending dinner with arjen_lentz. At some stage I really should take him up on the excellent MySQL training he offers.

It seems that the West Australian Labor government has been re-elected by the skin of its teeth. A very cogent explanation of why the election was so close by crankynick basically blames a poor Labor campaign, although the Liberals were helped by astoundingly biased reporting from the West Australian newspaper. In a very sensible effort to shore up what has become a particularly unpopular government, the Labor Party in New South Wales has finally rid itself of the pro-privitisation treasurer and Premier; the former was sacked by the latter and then the latter was sacked by his parliamentary colleagues. I have hopes that Nathan Rees and Carmel Tebbutt will be able to 'do the right thing' and regain the trust of the NSW public.

Far to the north and east, the U.S. political landscape received a shockwave of sorts when Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain appointed Sarah Palin as the Vice-President nominee. This self-described "bulldog with lipstick" has come with a lot of attention, with her viewpoints on banning books, teaching Creationism in schools (but not comprehensive sex eduation), and opposing abortion in nearly all instances. What is remarkable about the choice is that (a) it shows how much the Republican Party is still under the influence of the fundamentalist religious lobby which seeks to impose their narrow worldview on the American public and (b) how irresponsible, divisive this choice is which, yet another sign of how completely unfit McCain is for the office of President.

In my own life everything is going very well. Ran a good game of RuneQuest on Sunday (Borderlands, Jezra's Rescue for those who know such things), and have received some excellent endorsements for RPG Review. Have been dealing productively with a number of work issues relating from everything from a particular Drupal module, HR and motivation issues for administrative staff (I've decided that our new administrative staff should at least do our Introduction to VPAC Computing course to give them a better sense of what we're on about), to dealing with some unprofessional behaviour from a software vendor.

Yesterday I gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Religious Freedom and National Self-Determination where I basically argued for both, as limited to universal moral rights. During the congregational talkback the final question raised the danger of religious freedom and indoctrination. This provided an opportunity to recount some comments on "real child abuse" by Dr. Richard Dawkins, a topic I have been recently debating. When I concluded that when the voice of an adult educator with authority is dealing with young minds that supernatural speculations can indeed be dangerous and harmful and that extreme caution is recommended, the congregation burst into spontaneous applause. I didn't expect that! A large number of members of the congregation also came up to me afterwards saying how highly they thought of the address. So I guess it was well received overall.

Afterwards we played the third session of imajica_lj's Call of Cthulhu campaign where, after a slow start, we've finally starting making some serious investigations in what will become a globe-trotting tale to stop evil cultists from well, something. In the other Sunday RuneQuest game, Gaumata's Vision from Shadows on the Borderland is possibly one of the creepiest scenarios I've had the pleasure to run. I'm still selling a fair quantity of AD&D stuff on ebay (and more coming). The upcoming roleplaying magazine, RPG Review is going well. I have received nearly all the articles now (including some excellent Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest articles from taavi and Steve Perrin has agreed to be interviewed for the first issue.

American politics has been pretty interesting over the past couple of weeks. Denis Kucinich provided a bit of fire and spirit at the Democrat National Convention. Economist Alan Blinder points out that historically that it is the Democrats who preside over periods of greater economic growth and reduced income inequality. Choosing Dan Quayle in drag as his Vice-President nominee has already backfired for McCain, as this 'candidate of integrity' seems have lied about well, a few things, actually. Oops.

Thanatos has visited again, making it three posts in a row I've had to refer to his work. Last night I had a few post work drinks with Andrzej, an old friend whom I hadn't had much of for the better part of ten years. On the way to The King of Tonga we stopped over at my place and of course the opportunity arose to meet the rabbits and rats.

Except Ragamuffin seemed to be in a very deep sleep indeed.



Ragamuffin and Scoundrel were 'rescue rats' that caseopaya and I picked up over a year ago. Muffin was in a bit of a rough state; he had a mite infestation which had caused the loss of the tips of his ears, and his skin was quite scaly; he was also terribly nervous. We applied the necessary spray, brushed him regularly and after a while he started he turned quite friendly; and quite large - at one point he weighed in at over 600g, resulting in a fairly strict diet of fruit and vegetables.

He hadn't been terribly active recently with his strength declining somewhat and requiring some anti-arthritis injections, although I must say I thought he still had at least quite a few months in him; so it's all a bit of a surprise. I'll remember this little guy for his extremely gentle demeanor and socialbility. Sleep soundly my little friend.

Just before we were about to head off to the second session of our fortnightly Call of Cthulhu game (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Horror on the Orient Express), caseopaya received a 'phone call that her brother had died at home the night before at the rather young age of 49. Although the cause of death has not yet been determined, he suffered from type II diabetes and had a nasty foot infection; I am guessing blood poisoning and subsequent septic shock at this stage. I had only spent a few days with the 200cm, 120 kg ex-biker with a surly morning mood, but I found him quite likeable (after 9.30am). He was a genuine person of substance who appreciated the same and clearly cared a great deal for his little kid sister and the feeling was reciprocated; caseopaya is currently making arrangement to go to Perth for the funeral.

Twice in the past fortnight I've had to attend the three-day ARCS Video Collaboration Workshop twice, once in Adelaide and once in Melbourne. Both went well, and I will never cease to be amazed by the endurance of Access Grid advocate Jason Bell who can, quite literally, talk for the better part of three days on the subject. For my own part, slides and notes of the presentation I gave are available. I've also put in a application to present to Linux Conf Australia where I'll try to summarise the three-day experience into a single session!

I readily admit upfront that I care little for the elite of competitive sports; I consider the real "medal count" of a country is the general level of activity and health, rather than how well a highly specialised select group performs. Australia may do very well in the Olympics, but when the average member of the population has questionable levels of fitness I think we are a failure rather than a success as a "sporting nation". This aside however, the media spotlight on China has been at least successful in uncovering how frightened this totalitarian dictatorship is of even modest criticism; spending $100 million USD on the opening ceremony where a sixth of the population lives on less than $2 USD per day is an obscenity. Whilst China itself has lost the media battle, in "free and democratic" Australia Channel 7 censored a Tibet advertisement; they (and some of their advertisers) will be receiving some terse correspondence from yours truly.

Two weeks ago a gunman walked into a Unitarian-Universalist church in Tennessee during the performance of a children's play. With an shotgun and a belief that all liberals should be killed, he fired rounds into the congregation, killing two, before being wrestled to the ground. The Unitarian-Universalist community on livejournal is using this incident to explain, from our own individual and subjective opinions, who we are. The following is my personal attempt to explain the religion I adhere to.

Unitarian-Universalism is a living tradition which incorporates a heretical rationalism and moral universalism and as a result, a democratic and congregationalist approach to the management of our assets. Our historical origins are Judeo-Christian but our contemporary expression is far more diverse, recognising important contributions from all perspectives (including atheists). I have in the past described my own perspective as "an empirical atheist, a normative agnostic and an aesthetic pagan". But of course, that's not the only perspective and nor would any UU want it to be. The search and discovery of a sense of wonder at nature, personal reflection and the establishment of solidarity with others is considered far more important than the espousal of doctrinal loyalty to a supposedly infallible creed.

Historically, there is much that we can be proud of. The earliest known guarantee of religious freedom in Christian Europe is a direct result of the Unitarians. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, expressing equality and the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is a document both inspired and co-authored by unitarians along with the dedication to the separation of Church and State. During the horrors of Nazi persecution, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee was formed in 1940 to directly aid those fleeing that regime. The organisation continues to this day and is active in carrying out relief work in worn-torn Dafur.

The Melbourne Unitarian Church was established in 1852, chaired by Victoria's first chief justice Sir William a'Beckett. In 1873 the congregation elected Martha Turner to ministership, being the first woman in what was then the British Empire to achieve such as position. She joins fellow Unitarian and suffragist Catherine Spence as one of the great Australia women of her generation. The Melbourne Church was also famous for its heavy involvement in the peace movement during the Vietnam war.

It is not as if expressing the opinions of unitarian rationalism and moral univeraslism haven't resulted in violence in the past, from 1533 Michael Servetus was burned at the stake on the advice of Calvin for his heresy to 1965 when Unitarian minister and civil rights advocate Rev. James Reeb was beaten to death by racial segregationists.

The words of Peter Gabriel's "Biko" seem most appropriate here to remember those at Tennessee.


You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher

Just about to take the silver bird a short distance to Adelaide, where I'll be attending and presenting at the ARCS Video Collaboration Workshop. If you're a fan of Big Science then it doesn't get bigger than this (hat-tip, csamuel). Microsoft believes that six degrees of separation is true - after checking 30 billion emails. MIT researchers developing solar-powered fuel cells to save the world energy problems? (from mundens

I have a stack of old D&D material for sale on ebay and with more coming soon. My review of Chaosium's Basic Role Playing has been published on rpg.net. In general I think they've done a good job applying a 'thin glue' to a suite of games whose core system hasn't changed that much since 1978 (which is a credit to the original design). Last Sunday imajica_lj ran the first session of the classic Call of Cthulhu 'Masks of Nyarlathotep' which will incorporated with the equally classic 'Horror on the Orient Express'. On other nerdcore related activity on Saturday myself, _zombiemonkey, caseopaya and severina_242 went to see the The Dark Knight. I rated it average-good (and I simply don't 'get' claims of brilliance); Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker was excellent as was (and much understated) Gary Oldman's as Commissioner Gordon.

In other local political news, the federal Liberals have been really struggling over whether climate change is a reality and whether emissions trading is the proper solution to deal with the problem. The Liberals are tearing themselves apart and although the deniers have been defeated, the party is yet have made no policy development on the matter. Kerry O'Brien takes Nelson to task on the issue.

Internationally, any claims that the upcoming US Presidential election may be even remotely close are completely wrong. John McCain promoting his very own neverending war - a brilliant expose of his total warmongring dishonesty; via usekh). Longest serving Republican, Senator Ted Stevens indicated for felony of $250K worth of gifts from an oil company. Meanwhile the Chinese continue to show why even in a worst case scenario I'd prefer Pax Americana to Pax Sino; sending a teacher to a labour camp who took photos of the Sichuan earthquake and banning worship at Tibetan monastries deemed to be promoting national self-determination.

Some years ago I was quite involved in asylum seeker advocacy. I travelled to the Woomera Detention facility in mid-2001 and raised a modest sum of money from state Labor MPs for the Refugee Action Collective following the screening of The Inside Story on Four Corners. In August 2001, the Merchant Vessel Tampa, entered Australian waters full of asylum seekers. The Australian government sent SAS troops to board the increasingly unseaworthy ship which some noted at the time could be considered an act of war against Norway. The Howard government introduced a retroactive Border Protection Bill, which sought to legislate powers that the government could use force to remove any ship from Australian territorial waters, regardless of international obligations. It was in this environment I started the group, "Labor for Refugees", which grew to become an interstate, non-factional organisation which lobbied within the Party (and outside) for the abolition of mandatory detention and temporary protection visas.

Labor lost the 2001 election as the former Prime Minister John Howard knowingly lied to the Australian population claiming that the asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard in attempt to gain admission to Australia. 'Pragmatists' within the party refused to take the issue up against the lying rodent or admit the Party's culpability in introducing mandatory detention in the first place. Nevertheless the organisation persisted, through the successive leaderships of Beazley, Crean, Beazley again, Latham and Rudd, generated its share of media attention with a sea of prominent gold an black t-shirts at Labor Party national conferences and even publically supporting a federal Liberal MP for his humane stance on asylum seeker rights.

At the 2006 AGM I ended most of involvement with Labor for Refugees. The new Labor spokesperson on immigration, Tony Burke, made it clear that temporary protection visas were going to become a thing of the past. In May this year Temporary Protection Visas were abolished. Two days ago it was announced that mandatory detention would be ended.

It took over six years. But our objectives have been achieved, because we took a principled stand, we argued from the facts, and didn't give up. And that's politics for you.

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 now 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.