Published and Pending Writings

I have found myself buried in several writing projects over the past week. A work-related document was writing scoping for our HPC service support, which is fairly important to protect the time and resources of our relatively small team (and just in time for our short planned outage next week). For the Isocracy Network, I wrote "The Great Tory Loss" on the UK elections. I also have a similar piece in the works for the French legislative election which, with their two-round system, saw a tacit agreement between Nouveau Front populaire, the left-wing electoral alliance, and the centrist Ensemble, which denied victories to the far-right populist and nationalist Rassemblement National. The final results were 180 seats to the New Popular Front, 159 to Ensemble, and 142 for the National Rally. I have also almost completed a longer article for the Fabians on "Climate Change and International Relations in the Pacific", an article on "Public Nonsense" (inspired by Channel 7's decision to have an astrologer as part of their news programme, and, on a completely different matter, an article on Personal Boundaries (and why they apply to yourself and are not imposed on other people).

I have not been entirely averse to a couple of social occasions. Last week my dear old friend Des J., dragged me out to RRR's Neon Sunset's 10th Anniversary Special, a fine night of some good punk rock, and appropriately enough we ended up at The Retreat hotel afterward, one of my favourite haunts in the inner north. The following night I joined Julie A., and friends for her birthday dinner at Lucy Liu's, a restaurant that started with truly delicious dishes, but was trying too hard to be almost like a dining nightclub, somewhat spoiling the ambiance. I should also include the session of "Call of Cthulhu" that I ran on Thursday as a social event as well, where the interpid investigators had to deal with the joys of passenger flights of the 1920s but with the added bonus of supernatural horror. Overall, I'm taking my recovery from the weeks of bronchitis with some caution and care and as I should. It would ludicruous getting sick after being sick and, as can be expected, I do have many reasons to put finger to keyboard on a number of topics.