Lev Lafayette's journal

Dropped in to the Unitarians on Sunday to hear Paul Dahan give his presentation on Land Price a Cause of Poverty and Source of Unearned Income. It was a good topic, and Paul does get his points in a storyteller's style. Rick B., was meant to be taking the service, but his train of thought was a little askew, so I took the opportunity to task if he wanted me to take over. It was a fairly seemless process. Afterwards Rohan McL. presented to The Philosophy Forum on Ontology and Violence, also held at the Unitarians..

Afterwards that was another session of Eclipse Phase, as the Sentinels finished off their Vurt-inspired hallucinatory scenario (part one, The Vurt in the Mind's Eye, part two, Of Fictions Imitating Reality). In a very closely related science fiction trajectory went to the Astor the following night with caseopaya, funontheupfield and Maria to watch the Tarkovsky psychodramatic film, Stalker. I appreciate the rumours that this is where the KGB poisoned him, but they seemed to do well enough in finding the most polluted place on earth to do the set.

Other major event of the past days was a presentation I gave just a few hours ago at Linux Users of Victoria, on Open Stack and the Barcelona Summit. I tried to give a conceptual overview of cloud technology in general, and OpenStack in particular with summary detail of the core and optional services, as well as the governance process, the techical changes in the Newton release, and the future of OpenStack's development. The well-attended LUV meeting also was addressed by Jacinta R., who spoke on various types of algorithms including some very recent developments by László Babai on Graph Isomorphism.

Took the opportunity to see One More Time With Feeling, the latest Nick Cave movie based on the production of his latest album The Skeleton Tree. Overall it was an excellent piece of work, and I really enjoyed the screen time given to Warren Ellis and Suzy Cave. But as the movie wore on the grief that Nick and Suzy share with the death of their son, Arthur came out in a particularly raw fashion.

Afterwards attended usekh's birthday party, a most remarkable, clever, and stylish individual who has shown the he's prepared to give Thanatos the finger and then poke the fucker in the eye socket. Spent a good portion of the evening chatting with the aforementioned host, txxxpxx, strang_er, damien_wise, and patchworkkid, among several others. It was from the conversation with the latter two I now am now making use of a Bulletjournal, because obviously I'm not doing enough nor at optimal efficiency. Quickly diverging from the norm however, I'm using a digital text-file version of the journal and have changed some of the core signifiers. It seems to work very well so far.

The other Thanatos-themed event was the sad departure of Scamper rat last night. The middle-sized and aged rodent of our trio (Tramper, Scamper, and Rover), Scamper was always extremely shy, and suffered from particularly having ongoing cases of mycoplasma infection. Late, far too late in his short life, he decided that these humans weren't so bad after all and became a lot more friendly. In the past few days his breathing had become particularly laboured and despite an aggressive course of antibiotics, his lungs gave out on him. I do appreciate the company of my haustiere, but I must confess the 18-36 month life span of rattus norvegicus seems a little dispropotionate to their personality.

It was an extremely busy weekend, starting with a late Friday night session of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Patria Quinn and Nell Campbell (Magenta and Columbia) introducing the event. It was, as always, a raucous event of costume and audience participation. On Saturday ventured to deepest Dandenong to see ser_pounce and hathhalla and their stunning new home (Edwardian period, Victorian style) for another day of cheesequest (the white stilton with ginger and mango was brilliant) and games; Cthulhu 500 was a impressive surprise of two genres that one normally doesn't associate together. On Sunday attended the Unitarian bi-annual concert; among some various impressive musical talents (Marg C's flautist and soprano grand-daughters were particularly great!), I was assigned on the programme to encourage people to open their wallets for the Fred Hollow's Foundation. Although there was less than 100 people in attendance, over $1500 was raised. Afterwards Bill Hall from the Koroit Institute spoke at the Philosophy Forum on knowledge vs belief especially Popper's approach to scientific evidence.

RPG Review 20 has been released; new contributions from myself (which will be posted to RPG.net) include reviews of Monsters! Monsters!, the AD&D 2e Monstrous Compendium, Hunter: The Reckoning, Anaxial's Roster, and Malleus Monstrorum. The next issue of said 'zine will look at the influence of computing on the RPG industry (including from MUDs to MMORPGs), design and with various support applications and so forth. In a very real sense it is looking at the future of tabletop roleplaying, which should have a few surprises at the very least. Other gaming in the past week (in addition to the aforementioned Cthulhu 500), included the beginning of another Eclipse Phase scenario run by Martin. By this stage of the development we're really beginning to get a much better sense of the various factional conflicts and are increasingly forced to make substantive choices of where we line up. On Sunday afternoon I ran a game of Twilight 2000, which witnessed a conclusive victory for the forces of the Free Republic of Warsaw over the Barony of Warsaw, which means there's a string of independent townships along the Visla River, with the superpowers on either side. Wonder how that will work out?