Isocracy, RPG Review, HPC
Aug. 11th, 2019 09:50 amThe 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.
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
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)