Lev Lafayette's journal

In the past few days, I've spent my copious free time in getting two parliamentary submissions in before their deadlines. For Federal government and on behalf of the Victorian Secular Lobby I completed a submission on the second draft of religious freedom bills. These effectively enshrine the right of discrimination as long as it's religiously motivated. The second submission, for the State government on homelessness issues, was on behalf of the Isocracy Network. Just as I completed the latter the committee extended the deadline for submission; so perhaps my personal submission can wait until a later date; to be honest I have no yet consolidated in my own mind what to write about my own experiences as a homeless teenager finishing his high school graduation.

About a fortnight ago we at Research Computing Services moved to our new offices on Leicester Street; we're all settled in now and the general facilities are an improvement to what we had before. A welcome drinks and nibbles gathering was held yesterday and found myself one of the last to leave having engaged in some conversation with the people from Space Management who had come to visit. Also on a similar trajectory, the night previous visited the local Aldi to purchase eleven bottles of their Oliver Cromwell, which had finally made to Australia. This is of note as it has won a few serious awards in that category. I cannot say I'm a big consumer of gin by any stretch of the imagination (caseopaya has a greater interest in that direction), but this was opportune. So having a good stock of the stuff shouldn't go astray.

Due to function clashes, our fortnightly Megatraveller game was shifted to Wednesday evening, where we had to deal with a crazed crew-member (there's always one, right?). I was quite intrigued by the organochloride native sapient lifeform of the hell world planet, but alas the plot didn't deviate in that direction. Nevertheless, it does provide material for the next "Monsters" issue of RPG Review which I am working on, with a desperate need for articles. Tomorrow I'll be running a session of Eclipse Phase, where the mutated exsurgent ex-proxies are going toe-to-toe with insane killer robots. Actually, quite impressed with how well the PCs played their new obsessive-compulsive behaviour in the last session.

In preparation for Saturday's Isocracy annual general meeting on Saturday I've been working my way through Nicolò Bellanca's "Isocracy: The Institutions of Equality". It broadly has the same orientation (liberal, socialist, and anarchist) as the political group which I founded several years ago, and it's good the name at the very least is being raised when people start thinking of alternatives. Apropos, in preparation for the UK election on the morrow, I've written an fairly lengthy article the website entitle The United Kingdom is Falling Apart, which I posted simultaneously on talk.politics where the moderators were kind enough to give it a "highly recommended" status.

Workwise I've been spending a great deal of time on the final set of HPC workshops for the year. Today's Introduction to HPC and Linux course has a higher-than-registered turnout which made things a bit crowded and ever-so-slightly rushed, but we made our way all the content. Some pretty switched on people who asked the right questions that both indicated a certain naivety about how such systems work, but a good conceptual understanding of the environment - which meant that they understood the answers pretty much immediately. A rather perfect place for an educator to be, really. Most of my spare time in the past few days has been putting the finishing touches on the new regular expressions course; whilst I have been a moderate advocate for a while, it has really hit me how astoundingly useful Simple Regex Language (SRL) is as a teaching tool.

Whilst work and politics have pretty much taken up most of the past few days there have a few other diversions as well. On Sunday run a session of Eclipse Phase for the "psychic mutant sex-fiends on the moon" plot arc (EC can get pretty damn weird if you let it). Slowly returning the rest of the furnishings to their proper locations, with just a few bookcases and the dining table to go, and doing a bit of a cull as we go. In a house ("a small library") of some thirty bookcases or so it's never going to look spartan, but it certainly will be neater. Perhaps also of note, over the past few weeks, I've been in the "diamond league" of Duolingo, which I believe is those mad bastards who simply do too much language revision on a weekly basis. Actually I do it whilst traveling in public transport and am reserving the more serious learning for Russian. I'm still utterly terrible at it, but Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen.

I've just made the announcement for the Isocracy Annual General Meeting, which will be held on December 14 at the Kathleen Syme Centre. A key feature will be a discussion of Nicolò Bellanca's book "Isocracy. The Institutions of Equality", published this year Palgrave Macmillan. Bellanca is an economist at the University of Florence and his approach to Isocracy is very similar to mine, a left-socialist libertarian bent, a sort of "political anarchism", which is not anti-governance, but anti-state. Speaking of rules, the meeting itself is terribly late, in the very last month that we're legally allowed to hold it and remain registered, and really I should have held it prior to my trip to Europe. It would seem appropriate in that context that the defense industry minister, Melissa Price, recently charged the public $77000 for a one-week European trip for herself and three staff. I'm pretty sure that caseopaya and I spent about one-tenth of that combined for our one month trip. I also suspect if I was the defense industry minister, I would generate better outcomes. A gentle reminder of that old statement from Plato, But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

The other major event on the agenda is the RuneQuest Glorantha Down Under convention. I've finished my article on Musings of the Scholar Wyrm, and have a couple of review pieces to write-up for the special conference issue of RPG Review. In addition, there are the last touches of the scenario to finish, plus a playtest to run through this Sunday. Badges are in production, the international guest has arrived in the country, tote bags should be arriving soon, and I've put aside a small mountain of games from my own collection for the auction and second-hand stall. Numbers are a little down from last year, but there's still a week to, so hopefully, there will be a few more last-minute registrations. To be entirely honest, I think I'll need a break from running the Convention - this is the second year in a row that I've basically been responsible for it, and there is a lot of work involved with what is a relatively small event.

After the convention, I'll be making tracks down to the Glen Huntly for a catch-up with friends and family of David Brooks, who passed away a couple of days ago. Dave was a "crusty old rocker", as one of his daughters described him in the announcement, and to be honest, he had not been in the best of health for a number of years, and as such, I was very pleased to seem him at the gathering of my own 50th. He'd been the bassist in Kansas City Killers in the 1980s in Perth and as a young punk rocker I was quite fond of said band, however it wasn't until moving to Melbourne in the 90s that I actually met him in person (and heard his amazing work with a cover of "Be Brave", by The Comsat Angels with the Accelerated Men). We become good friends, a bond formed around our demeanor, a mutual love of philosophical thought, and the capacity to stay away through the night playing chess and chatting (we were clearly a danger to society). Dave was very influenced by Vedic thought; "All is illusion", he would remark, an explanation of how he would rarely feel anger. At the same time, his kindness and generosity were legendary, almost to the point of being competitive. The world is a lesser place without Dave, and we could do with more people like him; valedictions Brooksy.

The past couple of days have been busy times within the Isocracy Network. Firstly, there is the submission to the ALP's national executive reviewing the 2019 election. Isocracy has made a submission as an "interested party" with an orientation around statistical analysis of the results and an interpretation that stronger legislation to ensure honest election campaigning is required. Appropriately we're having a meeting (Facebook) in a fortnight on this very subject with Oliver Yates, the independent liberal candidate who is challenging the Treasurer on the basis of deceptive campaigning. Finally, we're just about to set up a branch in Indonesia, courtesy of an active contributor in that part of the world. On a related note, briefly attended (by accident, initially) a protest at the University of Melbourne against a meeting of the 'Victorian Women's Guild', a TERF group. Was in conservation with a young protestor about the event and she mentioned various TERF/SWERF essentialists who were behind the event and mentioned a certain UniMelb professor. I mentioned that I had crossed swords with them some twenty years prior on similar issues. It wasn't until well after that I realised that they were probably barely over twenty themselves.

Spent a good part of yesterday editing the increasingly late issue of RPG Review, based on cosmology and time-travel. I have several reviews in place for the upcoming issue. I think I would have had it close to finishing (still awaiting the magic of strangedave's article of Glorantha cosmology) but lost a few hours due to a migraine. Nevertheless, awoke in time to venture to The Astor to see Peter Strickland's comedy-horror-melancholy, In Fabric, part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, and which was introduced by the cinematographer, Ari Wegner. It was quite a clever film, somewhat in the style of the original Suspiria and probably with the same budget as well. In related RPG news, our regular Megatraveller game was canceled with a couple of people unavailable, so we played Hacker instead, a fun game with useful insights into hacker culture, although technologically placed in the pre-mass Internet days. It appropriately followed an amusing day at work where I installed FreePascal on the HPC on request from a user, and followed it up with GnuCOBOL, for aesthetic reasons (along with a multitude of sample short test scripts, based on a workshop-talk I gave at Linux Users of Victoria a few years back). Actually, GnuCOBOL may be very appropriate for experimentation as it's a transpiler, which means in theory one construct multi-threaded and message-passing applications with relative ease.

With the Australian Federal Election called some ten days ago I've been putting together a couple of paragraphs per day on the most news-worthy items. The governing LNP has had a very rocky start with various signs of political nepotism, corruption, and dumping four candidates; it's somewhat amazing that they can still scrape together c47.5%TPP under the circumstances. Meanwhile, drawing heavily upon my studies in public economics, I've published a piece on the Isocracy Network on The Idea Size of Governments, which will be followed up with a piece of voting methods and social choice theory (a recent discussion with the Proportional Representation Society suggests that they are currently insufficiently bold to get out of their demographic decline).

Livejournal has turned twenty! I first started making use of it a few years later, in 2003, as a means to stay in touch with people whilst I was in Timor-Leste. Apparently, I've made over a thousand posts in that time. Of course, like many people, various reasons (e.g., changes in policy) these days I typically cross-post to Livejournal via Dreamwidth. It's pretty much the same technology but I do wonder whether the forking will lead to the technological decline of the former over the latter (consider what has happened to OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, or even older, Mambo vs Joomla). Still, whatever the fate of LJ there can be no doubt of its extremely important role in social media technology, many features are still not replicated by Facebook, for example. Also, on-point, LJ continues to survive whilst others like Google Plus did not.

Apart from this, I've had my nose heavily in the books (virtual and literal) as I revise for my economics exams. Not just economics of course; some higher education study and my test to be a Software Carpentry instructor was held this week as well (I passed, natch). I've had a couple of social events, including a Megatraveller game on Thursday night, and Brendan E. and Dan T., visiting today (we were also supposed to have Asher Wolf as well - next time!). Work and social events mixed well this week with Dan and I having both breakfast and lunch on Lygon St with Ann B from the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, discussing the possibility of an HPC Educator's conference. Breakfast was French, lunch was Italian, and it does remind me of a gorgonzola-stuffed mushroom dish I made earlier this week; it called for breadcrumbs in the stuffing and it just so happened that a couple of days prior I had made a bread loaf with tomato and basil; You know what that would be like two days later as the flavours seep through. One day I'll do my "pauvre mais élégant" cookbook.

Main feature of the weekend was the Isocracy Annual General Meeting at the Kathleen Syme Centre with Professor Clinton Fernandes from UNSW speaking on Australia's foreign relations with East Timor and especially the Australia-East Timor spying scandal (the meeting also had a second NSW visitor, John August, a key figure in the Pirate Party of Australia). Clinton was erudite and incredibly sharp as usual and I believe left a good number of those present thoroughly impressed with his knowledge and perception of the supposedly arcane worlds of foreign affairs and spying. From the former the main takeaway message is that democratic governments are much less powerful than private corporations, and as a result to the latter the need to encourage public representatives to protect individuals such as "Witness K" who have pointed out that a conservative government (with corporate bidding) has engaged in activities contrary to international law. The meeting also raised a few hundred dollars for our Syrian correspondent, Om Amran, to help them through the winter months. Prior to the meeting had lunch with Holly C., and Luke M., which is always a pleasure, and afterward we continued discussion a local Syrian cafe.

Whilst the meeting was going on, interstate with the Wentworth by-election, which seems to have been one by independent Kerryn Phelps. I have just written a lengthy (700 word) blog post on the subject, pointing out that the gaffe-prone conservative government of Australia is managing to be annoying everybody they come into contact and were particularly on the nose in Wentworth which is a wealthy, small-l liberal electorate - and one which the party (in its various guises) has won since Federation. The fact that the Liberal Party has lost this is not to be underestimated (it sufficiently impressive that someone has even pulled out an old meme and produced Downfall variant. As a great moment of synchronicity, the Liberal candidate, Dave Sharma, was a legal adviser to former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer - whilst Australia was conducting the illegal spying operation on Timor-Leste. One can but hope and work towards the possibility that October 20 marks the day of the beginning of the end of Australian conservatives, and likewise the beginning of the end of persecution of those who have pointed out the country's illegal activities against a developing neighbour.

Have made several preparations for the Isocracy Annual General Meeting (FB link) with Professor Clinton Fernandes on Timor-Leste issues, along with the relase of the monthly newsletter, released the same day I have a few words to say about Invasion Day and Captain Cook. I've also put my hand up to be a correspondent for LabourStart, which will mean a bit of digging around on various matters of industrial action in this country. For what it's worth, a new enterprise agreement is being voted on at work which is a result of the "mostly successful" action of the NTEU. It is still perplexing how some people express disdain for unions, let alone never join, but are quite willing to take the wages and benefits that union members campaign for and deliver. I guess they think that negotiations for wages and conditions is between equals or something.

With a month to go before the end of ticket sales, RuneQuest Glorantha Con III is moving along reasonably well. Mark Morrison has stepped up to announce he'll run a session of 13th Age Glorantha which is very nice of him. Today I officially launched the auction submission and auction bidding pages which includes some of old favourites from my personal collection. In actual play having an off-week as our regular GM is away on holidays, however still planning on our regular RuneQuest game on Sunday. In addition it looks like I'll be going to PopCon in Ballarat tomorrow, a one-day popular culture event, which will provide an ideal opportunity to promote RQ Con.

Yesterday a good portion of the day was spent cleaning out Rick's apartment. It was truly impressive how much he managed to squeeze into that tiny one-bedroom apartment, although a good portion of it was folders stuffed full of print out of journal articles and the like scanning a dizzying array of subjects. Denny of Red Rabbit Rubbish Removal was hired to help out with the job and he brought along a couple of francophone youngsters to help out. In three hours they'd emptied the place with the exception of a small amount of books and various personal effects that I saved. It's a rather amazing and sobering experience to see ninety percent of a person's life go into the back of a truck, yet as Denny pointed out (a) I'll see a lot more of this as I get older and (b) somebody will have to do it to me one day.

That evening managed to drag my somewhat weary carcass off to see The The who are on the final leg of their "comback tour". I have mixed feelings about this band (well Matt Johnson and friends). When I like them, I really like them, and they have a string of great hits all of which are quite worthy. However a lot of their other material comes across quite flat to me, as aural filler. It was an enthusiastic concert for the fans who haven't seen them play for decades, although they came out a little rough on the edges despite obvious competencies. Over the course of the concert caught up with a few people I know, including neighbour Adam, The Dwarf, Gwaine Mc., and at least caught sight of Glenn K., and Robbie C., who I was supposed to see before the show started. Naturally enough will give a more complete review on Rocknerd and, as a reminder to self, must do my increasingly out-of-date review of Blue Man Group.

Visited the doctor on Monday to discuss my bronchitis and they were of the opinion that it's on its way to clear up. Now back at work, although being careful not to overdo it, and still prone to some coughing (and keeping a good arm's length form workmates). I am far from operating at 100%, and I suspect it will be several days before I am completely in the clear. Will be going in for blood tests as part of a general checkup and chest x-rays as part of the hemoptysis, although this is almost certainly part of the bronchitis rather than anything more serious. There are now four days of my life which were pretty much spent on the couch wrapped in a blanket and sipping tea with a rapidly emptying box of tissues next to me, whilst playing Supertuxkart and Torcs.

Among all this I have managed to step outside into the world for brief periods of time. On Sunday I presented at The Philosophy Forum on The Philosophy of Technology, which is a subject that I have had a long standing interest in. Take away message; technology has ontological and empirical priority over science which provides epistemological abstraction and rational predictions. On Tuesday night presented at Linux Users of Victoria on New Developments in Supercomputing, deriving from material from ISC and the HPC Advisory Council conferences. Of particular interest to me is the number of issues and challenges that Intel, that most mighty of chip manufacturers, has faced over the past year - and how competitors are positioning themselves. Also last week wrote a whimsically entitled piece for Isocracy on Killing and Eating Your Prime Minister following the circus that has been Australian politics recently.

Various gaming plans have been put on hold over the past few days, which I really need to get my teeth into. Final confirmations with Kryal Castle are being put in place for RuneQuest Con Down Under III, a LARP scenario has been received, Chaosium are providing prizes and an organised play scenario and so forth. Tickets will be on sale very soon, just as the final budget it put together. Plus there is the RuneQuest special of RPG Review coming up, plus I am hoping to hold some sort of dinner to celebrate ten years of the publication, and perhaps this can coincide with a new online RPG Review store. This is, of course, in addition to the usual actual play and various writings.

Yesterday presented at the Isocracy Network on The Future of Europe: Brexit, the EU, and More, which I've put up in non-verbatim form on the website. Whilst the bigger issue of the EU as a whole is at stake, the madness and proximity of Brexit is fast approaching and a hard-Brexit is a truly bad option, yet has a high degree of popularity. I also finally put on the website a shorter 'blog post concerning the behaviour of Ron Paul a few weeks ago (backdated); it's curious that anyone could seriously call him a "libertarian", as his interest in freedom is very slim indeed.

I've had a couple of gaming events this week which had been enjoyable after a month's absence. Thursday night's Megatraveller game went well, with not our first case of investigating an abandoned space-ship which is inhabited by unpleasant lifeforms. I must give a strong hat-tip to our GM, Andrew D., who is running a very crunchy game-system quite notorious for having a book of errata, with great competence. Today played in our regular RuneQuest-Questworld-Elderaad campaign, where we continue to extend our control over the chaotic city with various measures of civic improvement. In the coming week, I have two games to run, neither of which I have prepared myself for - Exalted Journey to the Far West and Eclipse Phase.

Yesterday I also received the sad news that an old university friend Emily L., had passed away. She was a colourful and fun character back on those days, more than two decades ago, to the point she'd be nicknamed by Bruce T., as "the happy little anarchist", and it suited her quite well, even if the finer points of said political theory weren't really something she had a deep interest in. A few years ago I remember looking at to Majorca where she lived in whilst I was in Barcelona sent a message suggesting that we should catch up somehow. It didn't happen of course; we probably both assumed that we each at least had a few decades left. But humans are fragile creatures, and the laws of averages have unexpected tails. Although our physical company had been separated for many years, we stayed in touch on social media. Her final message was: In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Valedictions Emily.

Work has been curiously positive over the past few days with the enlarged team making good progress on outstanding support tickets, and with some new positive results on HPL tests on the GPGPU partition. Apropos, an interesting experience this day that led to one of my websites being offline for a few hours led me to compose a few notes on receiving a Drupal "Access denied" Message. On a completely different matter (but also at the same location) Professor Geoff Scollary gave a good presentation on Friday afternoon of 'Sparkling Wines of the World'; a dozen glasses later, I could but conclude the Arras Grand Vintage 2008 was pretty delicious.

Three of my old Perth friends had separate birthday dinners over the weekend and, for good reasons, two of them had to cancel. The third, Brendan E., had a few people over where gin was the drink of choice appropriately for the hatred scale. I was introduced to a new genre of film to me, the zombie-stripper film, with Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, which was pure schlock in production, acting etc, but it was clear the script-writer was having a great time. On related social activities, in the gaming side of my life I've finished revies Exalted, which ended up being over three thousand words. My review of Pantheon is somewhat less. Actual play experiences this week consisted of an Eclipse Phase game on Friday night, followed by a 90 minute midnight walk home, and RuneQuest on Sunday.

Also, some political matters. I've recently delved into the fascinating debate of gun control with the United States especially in mind and have composed a short piece on Isocracy on the topic, Ending Homicide and the Right to Arms. One of the interesting facts about the topic is the strongest correlation with homicide is economic inequality, followed by gender inequality. The statistical reality is gun controls do reduce homicides and at a greater rate than the general fall experienced in OECD countries. People do tend to have opinions first and react to facts second, alas. Finally, and perversely appropriate, this Sunday I'll be presenting at the Unitarian Church on Remembering Martin Luther King, Jnr.