Climate Action, RPG Activities, Spring Cleaning

Over the years I've written a few pieces (e.g., Australia's Carbon Price Legislation: Climate Responsibility with Social Justice (2011)) and given a few public presentations (e.g., The Future of Planet Earth (2007), The End Is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth (2018)). It is therefore unsurprising that I am pleased to see so many young people a few days ago take to the streets in some 2993 locations and 162 countries the world in support of action on climate change, the largest climate rally in history. It was very reminiscent of my own youth in the 1980s marching against the threat of nuclear war; we won that battle, we can win this one, too. Because we can assign a narrative to reality, it was also the date where I left the so-called "Australian Political Debate" Facebook group, which is basically a moderation-free wasteland for climate-change deniers to neo-Nazis and even flat-earthers. Essentially people who think that their ignorant opinions are at least as good as considered facts. As increasingly this distinction becomes politically partisan, we see a breakdown of non-partisan political discussion, which cannot bode well for the world.

I've had a few opportunities for my RPG hobby recently, too. Obviously the RuneQuest Glorantha Down Under Con has a certain priority, but have also been engaging in some actual play. Today was a session of RuneQuest Glorantha which was a bit of a dungeon-crawl dealing with Lunar bandits and chaos cultists (those cosmopolitan Lunars are always getting themselves into trouble). Yesterday was our irregular CheeseQuest session where I ran a session of D&D Charlemagne's Paladins as they ventured deeper in The Lost City of Cyrenaica. Apropos this, there was an oversupply of milk at work last week, so I took the opportunity to make some homemade farmer's cheese with thyme. It wasn't anything special, but at least I used up the milk (and used the whey for pottage stock). On Thursday night we skipped a session of our usual game and played DungeonQuest instead, with two characters getting out in a game that's meant to have a 15% survival rate.

Thursday and Friday last week I worked from home whilst tradies ripped up the 30-year old carpet upstairs, which had been pretty trashed by our old pets. The laminate replacement is pretty gorgeous I have to say, and was quite inexpensive. Anyway, the opportunity has been taken to do a bit of spring clean at the same time and work out we don't need in our somewhat excessive book collection; caseopaya does have a lot of adolescent fiction and urban fantasy, and there's quite a few rather marginal politcal and technology texts, and a lot of science fiction that I don't need either. So that's reduced the upstairs collection by close to 50%. That which we're not donating to the local Willsmere library will find its way to charity etc. We'll still have at least 28 bookcases along with a similar number of of storage containers for such items. I also took the opportunity to turf a bunch of old computer technology to hard rubbish that was well-passed it's use-by date - even if I still have more several desktop systems to deal with. Nevertheless, it's a pretty solid start for a pair of near-hoarders.