Matters Concerning Games, Carrots, and Economics etc.

The past few days I've had the opportunity to get stuck into my preferred pastime of RPGs; much of this afternoon, which should have been a session of RuneQuest but our GM was under the weather, was spent editing the Cow Orkers supplement for Papers & Paychecks - the word count is over 90% complete but that last few percent is slow-going as I'm taking out one word for every two I put in. Thursday night was our regular Megatraveller game where we not-pirates investigated the ruins of the old Sindal empire - and were set up on a cliff-hanger situation with psychic forces against us. Yesterday was our irregular cheesequest-lunch-gaming with ser_pounce and hathhalla, which provided the opportunity to play my reconstructed version of the old D&D scenario The Lost City, with a summary write-up of the session available. We also took the opportunity to watch two "lost" episodes of Moral Orel, a rather twisted WASP adult animation comedy; curiously did better apparently in Australia than it did in the United States. Maybe something to do with the irreverent Australian culture. The lunch also provided the opportunity to crack open my previously unused Oneida cutlery set which, (in a Morel Orel related tangent) is what remains of a 19th century Christian free-love commune that became a silverware manufacturer.

As part of the luncheon I made a carrot cake. One of our guests isn't great with wheat, so I made up some oat flour and used that instead. One could say it was a "carroat cake". It was pretty tasty, but I was surprised when I was told by hathhalla (who admitted being very fond of carrot cakes in general) that it was best thing they had ever tasted. For something that takes about ten minutes of preparation time that's quite a call. Anyway, this provides a nice segue to the wonder that was International Carrot Day! which is to be taken with good humour. I couldn't help but notice that their translation links for Spanish and French weren't operative, so I fired off an email to the owner of the site and shortly afterwards provided translations for the aforementioned along with Esperanto and German. So that's my double-carrot contribution to the international day.

Apart from this the usual requirements of work and study take up my time. I've had a few positive developments with the International HPC Certification forum, but will leave that until things are more set in stone. Tomorrow and the day after I have training courses to run - this time they were booked out in 42 minutes, which gives an indication of demand. I've been doing a lot of study on economics, specifically Public Economics and Macroeconomics, and mainly tax and fiscal policy respectively. The fact that the current government is defending thoroughly uneconomic subsidies (negative gearing, capital gains, franking credits etc) serves as a good example of the problems in public policy and class-based partisan capture. I still rather wish that I had the extra few months to complete this course which I feel is owed to me. Insofar that isn't going to happen it is fortunate that are holidays available later this month which I will take advantage of. I am not really optimistic I can make up the ground, but will do the best I can under the circumstances.