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Political Circus, Various Events
Australia has had an absolute political circus of a week with the bourgeois-liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeing off an attempted party-coup lead by hard-right minister Peter Dutton on August 21st, only to experience a second leadership spill two days later. This time Turnbull stepped down and surprisingly Scott Morrison has now taken up the role of Prime Minister of Australia; a more thorough account is provided by the good folk at Wikipedia. Turnbull had always been too willing to compromise with the crazy right-wingers of the Liberal Party and was so ignorant of the economic pain of ordinary people to ensure public support. It was, briefly, impressive to see how he fought back in the last days but it was all too late. As for the contenders, Peter Dutton is an obvious extreme-right dullard who is widely loathed, and Scott Morrison whilst slightly more pragmatic but has no public appeal, and also comes from the far-right of the party and comes with the same economic baggage. So whilst the liberal and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are at open war with each other (and the latter winning), the public are increasingly annoyed at a party that has no concern with their increasing levels of inequality, increases in the cost-of-living, wage stagnation, and their virilent anti-unionism. People are furious as their behaviour and the Tories are going to get smacked for six when the Federal election is finally called.
Whilst the circus was unavoidable, there were other events to participate in over the past few days. Notably delivered a training day on Parallel Programming on Wednesday which was well attended by an interested class. The evening beforehand I went wrote a couple more code debugging examples for Valgrind and the GNU Debugger which are appropriate for the class and will fine-tune those even further for the next classes - four have been set up for the coming month of September. Thursday started with yet another hearing at VCAT where an application was made to sell Rick B's house; given that there is no argument about the need and no opposition, it surprises me that this requires a court case rather than simply being an administrative procedure. Later that day participated in a session of Megatraveller where the PCs finally caught up with a nanite distributing scientist-gone-wrong only to discover that they were doing the right thing. The GM added in some major player-created plot elements as part of the chase which worked quite well. Finally, today attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria today with Wen Len presenting on Dual-Booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu, which was appropriately sub-titled "the fun, the pain, the joy". As he pointed out that actual process itself is reasonably easy - it's the planning that's painful. It's quite a busy few days, and next week in Perth will be busy as well. Still, perhaps one of the happiest moments of it all is that I received confirmation a short time ago that Kyral Castle will be available to host RuneQuest Con DownUnder on November 11th - so that's official. And guess who will be leading the organisation of that event?
Whilst the circus was unavoidable, there were other events to participate in over the past few days. Notably delivered a training day on Parallel Programming on Wednesday which was well attended by an interested class. The evening beforehand I went wrote a couple more code debugging examples for Valgrind and the GNU Debugger which are appropriate for the class and will fine-tune those even further for the next classes - four have been set up for the coming month of September. Thursday started with yet another hearing at VCAT where an application was made to sell Rick B's house; given that there is no argument about the need and no opposition, it surprises me that this requires a court case rather than simply being an administrative procedure. Later that day participated in a session of Megatraveller where the PCs finally caught up with a nanite distributing scientist-gone-wrong only to discover that they were doing the right thing. The GM added in some major player-created plot elements as part of the chase which worked quite well. Finally, today attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria today with Wen Len presenting on Dual-Booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu, which was appropriately sub-titled "the fun, the pain, the joy". As he pointed out that actual process itself is reasonably easy - it's the planning that's painful. It's quite a busy few days, and next week in Perth will be busy as well. Still, perhaps one of the happiest moments of it all is that I received confirmation a short time ago that Kyral Castle will be available to host RuneQuest Con DownUnder on November 11th - so that's official. And guess who will be leading the organisation of that event?