Rats, Croydon SysAdmin, The Great Delete, Gaming

[tcpip]

Firstly, thank you most sincerely for all the kind comments concerning the dearly departed Vagabond. It is appreciated enormously; we've started looking around for a new companion for Rogue and have a couple of very good leads.

First solid week of sysadmin working in Croydon was exhausting but useful. Managed to narrow down the public transport to journey to 1.5h each way, which means I'm getting a lot of reading done. Building an OpenLDAP server is proving to be interesting. Getting up to speed on Asterisk has also been a challenge; finally understand why it is considered such a revolution in telecommunications. Apart from that it's pretty standard stuff, but a great work environment.

Everyone is now undoubtably aware of the botched actions of Six Apart to delete journals suspected of promoting pedophilia etc., on livejournal. The errors are, to my mind, mainly structural; Six Apart consider livejournal their property, and in a sense it is. But in another sense what they don't understand it is the people here that build the communities; the less they listen to us, the more likely they are to fail. Excellent summary of events by stewardess, a weak, almost pathetic apology by Six Apart's Barak Berkowitz.

Recently reviewed the classic AD&D module, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Unbelievably we're still stuck there mainly because our DM loves combat so much. On alternate Sundays I've been running the Stormbringer campaign pack Rogue Mistress which is proving much more interesting. Have also managed to get through a couple of scenes in HeroQuest Glorantha.

Comments

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if the whole 'adult dressing as a child for sex' thing is illegal in the US, but it is in Australia

I'm pretty sure it's not in the U. S., at least in an online milieu--but it's always been a concern of course, since sexual predators misrepresent their age. That, usually, is against the TOS of most social networks and grounds for account termination, but in role-playing games it seems silly to make it illegal. The thing is (and I haven't tried Second Life so I could be speculating wildly here), SL kind of represents a hybrid--it's a social network with some role-playing aspects.

That Australian law is interesting though. Is virtual child porn illegal as well? "Virtual" in this case typically means animated porn with child-like characters. It's nominally legal in the U. S., although it took a Supreme Court ruling to make it so.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it is. One can't buy porn here with an adult dressed as a child, so I would assume animated porn would come under this as well.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

One can't buy porn here with an adult dressed as a child

True, but I haven't heard of any prosecutions (not that I've been looking). How does one define "dressed a child" anyway? Don't adults play dress-ups or something?

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

the most common example of this that I have heard of is 'schoolgirl' porn.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Gee, Angus Young better look out!

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

He will, if he ever gives up the music industry and goes into Porn.