I just published a game!

(And I'm telling everyone.  :-) Apologies to the people who've seen this in multiple places.)

The Bell is a science fiction suspense live roleplaying game inspired by The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky), Five-Twelfths of Heaven (Melissa Scott), Vacuum Flowers (Michael Swanwick) and the works of Cordwainer Smith. The Bell is intended to be an emotionally intense game that pushes moral dilemmas. It draws on a trope of science fiction which treats space travel as a spiritual journey. It doesn't make assertions about any particular religion, but it does examine metaphysical themes and ethical issues.

Dear Diary...

What did I do today?

- I hung all the soft toys I keep for sentimental reasons up on the line (it's supposed to help kill dust mites)

Also, Xi Shi, the lovely doll my sister made me, out for an airing:

- I sipped coffee while Repton and Repton's Dad (TM) did constructiony type things on the garden.  (I've had prior involvement in this bit helping to clear away the mountain of stones some clown put on our nice garden, and digging the drainage trench (now filled in with the same bally stones + compost mixed with clay and gypsum, and faintly visible on the left.)

  

- Possible casualties of war - two rose bushes which had their root balls trimmed like billy-o to fit them into their temporary holding pots.  (Not these ones, which we got hold of today, rather smaller ones.)  Well, they may survive.

And I'm shortly off to visit Cat.  Christmas holidays are great.

Please take the time to vote...

My Gran once told me about when her father was very old and sick and living in a rest home, the election came round, and when she went to visit he told her that he'd announced that morning that he wanted to vote, and the Matron had pooh poohed the idea.  But he insisted and made a fuss and after a bit some of the little old ladies that lived there also announced that they'd quite like to vote, too, so my Gran had to go out and arrange a special booth to be set up there so they could have a turn.  Later, after all the fuss was over, my Gran asked my Great Grandad who he'd voted for, and he said: "That's my business!" and went to sleep, and he died later that night. 

Please remember to vote!  It's important and you don't have to deal with an obnoxious Matron or anything - just go down to your local polling birth and take ten minutes out of your Saturday.

National Party promotes crime, prostitution

Here's another bit for the 'law and order' ticket: make it harder for people with problems to get benefits, specifically people with drug addictions and who are in trouble with the law.  I assume this is intended to be a big club that will magically make everyone who lives on the margin suddenly law abiding, fragrant smelling, and all round wonderful citizens, but I don't think that's how it's actually going to work.  I think people who fit in these categories are mostly going to slide away into the other ways to get money if you've got problems - and those are going to have worse societal effects.

But I'm going to give people who disagree with me a G. K. Chesterton quote, because G. K. Chesterton is cool:

"It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice.  It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them."
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Rockville, Maryland: Serenity Publishers, 2009.

And a happy election to you, too.

Politics 101

Y'know, I get that people care a lot about politics.  I also get that some of the rhetoric out there right now seems... rather less than honest.  But I'd like to put it out there, that if you live with someone who works for a political party, doing ethically dubious acts like defacing billboards isn't going to help your cause.  In particular, it's going to cause big problems for your loved one/flatmate (I'm including that Young Labour guy with the secret tapes from last election in the doofus category), and make the party you like look bad.  It's even worse when they're trying to build a reputation as being more ethical than the others.

Dude.  Don't do that stuff.  Even more - don't do that stuff and get caught.  The only thing worse than being unethical is being incompetent at it.

For the other bit of scandal that's in the news right now, I think it passes the sniff test of being an accident - no politician should seriously expect a conversation to be private in the middle of an election campaign, in the middle of a crowded cafe in which a large number of reporters were specifically invited to film him drinking a cup of tea.  And for all Our John is posturing about having suddenly acquired principles and making threats of police action, it just makes me more curious about what was actually said.  Just a thought.

Spring is here

And in spring, at least every three years, a young politician's fancy turns to thoughts of the election.

And some of the rhetoric is getting kinda ridiculous, particularly the automatic pooh poohing of any idea of another party's, even when you're pretty sure that the naysayer secretly thinks that it's a good idea.  Like, for instance, Labour wants to raise the retirement age and National claims that it's a bad idea.  Isn't this the wrong way around according to their core values?

And another bit of weird logic - John Key has been saying for a while that NZ really needs to sell off half our core infrastructure assets, in order to "pay off debt faster".  Today, we get told that, hey, really it's to build up other assets, like schools and stuff!  Really?  Future spend on school buildings is either:

• business as usual spend that was going to happen anyway - in which case the Future Investment Fund is a meaningless gesture, or
• it's building up new assets, in which case the government debt problem isn't nearly so bad as the National Party is making it out to be.

So which is it?

Another thing that came up on Saturday was political chitchat at Fright Night, after our game finished a bit early and people were hanging out.  One of the guys running the D&D for MMP campaign in and offered to take requests (I totally bought a couple of politician zombies to afflict the party with.  Yay!), but we also had several people there who are either in the Green party, or sympathetic to its ideals, and we got talking about their decision making model.  The thing is, a friend had told me a while ago that policy has got to be set by consensus - everyone has to agree before it goes ahead, and I was curious about how that actually worked in practice.  (Everyone's had an experience of a committee that goes around and around a subject for ever, or That One Particular Guy who always argues, just for the sake of arguing, right?)  So the party member talked about some of the checks and balances that they've got - you can choose to disagree but not block consensus, perhaps for something that you don't like but don't feel like dying in a ditch over; or you can choose to block consensus, and if it's a really important issue, then and only then will the caucus move to a conscience vote.  So it sounds like it could be a slow system on a contentious issue, but also that the group has to at least consider everyone's views before it makes a decision.  And if a group of people have got liberal views, well, there tends to be a lot of diversity of opinion.

So how are the Greens doing, given that their natural constituency is inclined to have many different opinions, and they want everyone to agree?  Well, you've got to admit that for a small party they've got staying power - their first MP was elected in 1999.  In that time, the Alliance unallied, Winston Peter's personality party got knocked out (but possibly back for another round this election), and ACT, the party for argumentative people, can't manage to keep any of its line up of MPs in the first election since they officially became part of the government.  And the Greens are polling at 10%.  So that's worth thinking about.  The other thing - they seem to have a really good knack at getting their policy into law.  The anti-smacking law, the weatherproofing fund, and making youth rates identical to minimum wage are the three things that come to mind immediately, but there are others, and the now-in-Mana Sue Bradford holds the record for private member's bills by a backbencher to be passed.

Maybe it's worth thinking about consensus more often.

Halloween

Repton and I now live in a nursery suburb - I've lost count of the parks, playgrounds and, above all, childcare centres.  It didn't occur to me before Repton mentioned it, but kids do that trick or treating thing now, so we stopped at the supermarket on the way home, not even really sure if anyone was going to turn up. (But hey, we could always eat the lollies ourselves, right.)

But hark!  10 minutes ago there was a tromping on our doorstep, and Spiderman, a fairy, and something or other turned up asking for sweets.  Yep.  Nursery suburb.

The Dark Underbelly of the Internet

There's this project I've been doing some research on, which basically involves setting up a database to take writing content, then spit it out in prettified nicely designed PDFs (with various constraints and design patterns and required features involved - I haven't seen anything that will do what I want straight out of the box yet). I have a technically knowledgeable friend who's been giving me advice on what's possible, but nonetheless, I've spent a lot of time trawling around the 'other' internet. Not Warez sites, or anything skeevy like that, but the bit that doesn't care so much about nice graphic design, where the links may not be unbroken, and the technical specifications are detailed and confusing, and have comments like 'last stable release' and a date from two years ago. I haven't spent this much time reading this kind of content in years, and, in fact, I guess I must have subliminally figured that everybody had been carried by the rising tide of increasing prettification and tools intended for non-internet literate idiots. But no, it's always been there, I just wasn't looking in the right places.

I'm doing it old style, baby.

A brief plug

For my brother's website, TrailHunger. It's basically a website that takes uploads from GPS watches of its members, then spits them out as routes for other people to use. Because it's getting 'real' info, it shows all the little side trails that may not get on official maps. Ed's really into trail running in the Vancouver area, so that's where most of the maps are, but it's configurable for anywhere, I think.