Lev Lafayette's journal

In an act of pure self-indulgence, I went to visit Louisa G., at Lu La Belle Studio next to Toorak Station (dahling). A haircut is not what would normally constitute an item for a journal entry, but yours truly has not been a professional hairdresser since 2002. Since then it's been a case of either having a ponytail, snipping off the tail, or having caseopaya apply her reasonable skills at snipping, all with the exception of the 2020 mohawk, which was self-created. Most visits to such establishments I suspect are at least partially an opportunity for banter, and I took the opportunity to make it a bit of a Friday night special as we shut the doors and enjoyed a fine bottle of old shiraz together. As it was Louisa decided to kinda-sorta keep the mohawk and give a more layered approach and tidied it up a bit. Something between punk and new romantic, I guess; We'll fade to grey in Vienna with the wild boys.

As another weekend journey that crosses the aesthetic and the natural, I caught up with a new friend, Natasha, for what became a very long walk from Northcote along Merri Creek and then the Yarra to Abbotsford, and back again. I think we must have put about 15km on that glorious riverside and forested trek that is possibly the best slice of nature in inner-urban Melbourne. Natasha is a Russian actress and linguist, has lived in St Petersburg (back when it was Leningrad), New York, Los Angeles, and speaks five languages; you know those European artist types. Anyway, we meandered some charming spots including Labyrinth and The Wishing Tree, Dight's Falls, and the Abbotsford Convent, which is a bit of a second home to me. The Wishing Tree was full of stories from children young and adults bearing what they want for a better world and a better life. Maybe I should leave a message there myself.

Today was the final session of Tim's Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, which started last year (again, those aesthetic reasons), running for about a year of fortnightly play. With the story title, "The Manifold Decomposition", there is stark suggestion of a breakdown and manipulation of perceived reality through malicious manipulation of information networks with biological agents. It was rather like Marshal McLuhan met Rudy Rucker, and David Cronenberg at a roadside picnic, and in any case, we see plenty of this sort of manipulation in our own world (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?). For me personally, the end of the campaign was also a nice sugue from cyberpunk to solarpunk, but also another moment of an ongoing fade-out of my own involvement in the hobby. Maybe I'll take it up again in earnest if and when I retire.

The Year of the Stainless Steel Rat cyberpunk convention has run, and I must say with a degree of success. All the speakers were absolutely great but I really want to point out Walter Jon Williams, Dan Smif Smith, Sarena Ulibarri, and Tod Foley's presentations. Anyway, the next step is to get the transcript of the conference together - six hours' worth - and then compile that with the gaming scenarios. All together this should make for a double-issue of RPG Review. There were things that didn't go together as well as I should have; I was so concerned with the transcript that I neglected to ensure that I had a recording. The gaming session registrations didn't go as planned, but we did get to Cyberpunk RED. As always with free events, there were a number of people who signed up and simply didn't attend without nary a whisper why. Still, with a couple of follow-up actions to complete it is certain that I'm going to rambling on about this a bit for a few more weeks.

Christmas day itself was largely spent with Brendan E., as is often the case, although I did get to spend the evening with lei_loo and her family, which was a real joy. The actual day itself has never one that has held much attachment to me, which I have written about in the past. Still, the opportunity to catch up with friends and loved ones is a good enough reason in itself and has been the case for many years the stalwart has provided fine company and this was no exception, as he plied me with various vodka slushies as I baked salmon and put together a meringue and chocolate ice-cream combination. Video entertainment was two very different films that still had an emphasis on partnership and teamwork; the animation-comedy, Ronal the Barbarian, and the action science-fiction, The Edge of Tomorrow (which would been vastly improved if they chopped the ending). Poor Brendan had to endure my recommendation of James Ricker's recent short (under ten minutes) version of The Little Match Girl, which follows the main themes of the traditional story, but with one great addition.

There are many occasions where I am quite pleased in my profession. A recent example is the cracking of the Zodiac cipher on Spartan, an announcement that has made quite an impact in the international news. I confess that I was aware of it a week ago, but for obvious reasons, I've waited for the official announcement by the FBI before commenting. Personally, I think medical and engineering research is more important, but this is something that attracts the public eye. Also on the work front on Friday, I hosted a staff meeting following an extensive and detailed survey on return-to-office arrangements for 2021. Not terribly surprising to me, most IT workers feel that their productivity improves when working-from-home which is borne out by most studies, especially due to a lack of interruptions. I understand that those workers (i.e., middle-management) who depend on visual supervision of a workforce and face-to-face conversations have found the circumstances difficult. Finally, I have spent a good portion of the past work-week testing, patching. and converting a rather impressive collection of bioinformatics tutorials from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences to HPC jobs. It's actually all been very rewarding, psychologically speaking.

As one could expect the next couple of weeks will comments about the Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention in each and every post. I was really happy to announce Jason Scott as a speaker. With two weeks to go, I am powering my way writing the second Papers & Paychecks supplement, "Emails & Direct Deposits", a biopunk-horror supplement that will be ready for the convention. The conference also gives the opportunity for two issues of RPG Review, one for the conference proceedings, and one for the RPG sessions and characters. In actual play, I'm about to engage in some Cyberpunk 2020 and RuneQuest today, following a face-to-face cardgame session on Thursday evening of Debunked and Guillotine. Further, my reviews of Star Trek (FASA edition) and Star Wars (WEG edition are both in rpg.net now.

Following the plastering of five-year-old holes in our ceiling and various chips in our stairwell, yesterday we had the same people over to sand and paint their work. Even with drop sheets and subsequent sweeping the place still has plaster dust everywhere generating some pretty horrible sinus headaches as a result. I suspect it's going to take me a good week or two to clean up. For her part, caseopaya is travelling to Western Australia on Tuesday for the Christmas break whilst I will remain here. Universities miss out on a lot of state public holidays doing a year and I have to take a couple of days annual leave meaning that I effectively have (with three days exception) a three-and-a-half week holiday coming up. Most of it, I suspect, I will be spending alone. However, despite my gregarious nature, I did discover some decades ago that I like my own company; "Si vous vous sentez seul quand vous êtes seul, vous êtes en mauvaise compagnie". Probably because I have so much that I still want to do.

Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention continues in its development. A massive success in the past few days was scoring major author Walter Jon Williams as a speaker. Hardwired is, of course, one of the earliest and most famous cyberpunk novels and was certainly one of the first that introduced me to the genre. Nevertheless, with no intention to stop, the quest is on to bring even more interested and interesting panelists along with the fans. Appropriately, played in a session of CyberDarkSpace on Thursday night. Still working on what was supposed to be the September release of RPG Review - only five more pages to go! In the past week I've managed to put together reviews of In Nomine, Little Fears, and LexOccultum. The latter was particularly appropriate with watching the series La Révolution, a very fine example of historical horror-fiction.

Earlier this week delivered two HPC workshops on successive days; Regular Expressions with Linux, followed by Mathematical Applications and Programming. The latter was the first time I'd run the course at UniMelb and I must confess it was quite difficult, mainly because there is so many relevant applications; from core Linux utilities, to giants like R, Octave, and Maxima, to impressive new upstarts like Julia. Bringing all those under a single umbrella in four hours is difficult and there will be future fine-tuning. In comparison, I attended an Australian BioCommons workshop today on what was supposed to be data management, but really it was a really basic showcase for CloudStore. As a related online meeting, managed to squeeze in an hour to see a live presentation by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz on "Regulating Big Tech", which was heavily orientated around media quality, fake news, and social media. In further academic matters, today I ventured out to Swinburne University to help give lei_loo more of a feel for the place. She's been a bit unlucky in finishing tertiary studies, but this time she has a superhero in such matters for support, and I know she'll make it.

"Life is for the living"; a saying which was strongly affirmed recently when I attended a funeral procession and celebratory wake in a local park and gardens. It did not know the deceased (it was a friend of lei_loo's) but I can determine from their friends that being driven down a major road in an old Cadillac with cheering support from the procession behind and from the kerbside was just what they would have wanted (and probably planned). It also served as yet another reminder of our temporal state. To be a passive consumer of the arts, to be a mere subject of laws, to be neglectfully ignorant of science, is about a close to being mentally dead as far as I'm concerned, and I despair when I see it happen. The purpose of consumption is to inspire critique and from critique we prepare ourselves to make a better world; whether through the expressions of art, the justice of laws, or the discoveries of science. It is not even success in those fields that makes us truly human, but the very struggle itself to improve; that is living.

Late last week spent two days giving workshops; Parallel Programming (CPU-based), and GPGPU Programming (GPU based). Both classes, at least in my opinion, went smoother and were better structured than the last time I delivered them. Whilst teaching is slowing down for the year, I suspect I have probably four more day-workshops to give before the end of the year. As it is I have satisfied was required for more for the year; the rest is over and above my work requirements. Whilst on similar topics, a draft of the proposed book chapter on HPC throughput for large datasets has been submitted (I know it needs revision), a presentation was given to the Melbourne Agnostics on the continuum from needs and wants to virtue. Finally, decided to smash my way through the remaining parts of my Macroeconomics MOOC tomorrow, completing the last quiz (developing economies), the test exam, and then the final exam; 93% overall, I can live with that.

Planning for the end-of-December Cyberpunk conference is going quite well, with a more thorough agenda developed. Tod Foley (Cyberspace, Day Trippers, UbiquiCity) will be presenting as a guest of honour. I also have several GMs lined up for evening RPG sessions of Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and Eclipse Phase, with more coming. There's now an interesting set of speaker's panels, as per tradition there will be an auction. The conference, upon consideration, has a vaguely "Australian" theme to it, appropriate not only due to locale, but also because of some interesting future speculations that Australia can contribute to (solar energy and aquaculture immediately come to mind)

Last night attended a Diwali dinner; a rather well-known Vedic religion celebration of the "victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance" (Vasudha Narayanan; Deborah Heiligman, 2008), which are certainly principles I can agree with. It is not a celebration that I am particularly familiar with but, to be fair, it was a pretty secular gathering. Which meant that in, in accord to the universal tradition of the giving of food; prawn biryani, fried anchovies in chili, dhal, roti, mango sticky rice &, etc. The tradition (or at least from what I've read) suggests the provision of desserts, and so I decided to engage in some cross-cultural mixing and made a heavily amaretto infused sabayon with mixed fruit and meringue which seemed to have some appeal. Whilst it is great to partake in such culinary delights and a joy to be around people who enjoy the skill and art of the cuisine, it is the quality company that really made the night.

Went to Electron Workshop on the weekend to watch William Gibson's No Maps for These Territories, followed by Johnny Mnemonic. The former was good phenomenology of technology in radical smash cut style, the latter was disappointing hack of the Gibson short story but tolerable. The Workshop is an excellent venue of the more professional warehouse cooperative style, and I hope they do well. On a somewhat related tangent, convened the Linux Users of Victoria meeting on Tuesday where two very different talks were provided; Bianca Gibson on preventing volunteer burnout and Russell Coker on the current status of BTRFS.

The two related political organisations that I'm primarily responsible for have had actions this week; the Victorian Secular Lobby has a media release on maintaining the Australian Charities and Non-Profits Commission, which is being suspiciously dumped after some intense lobbying by both the Catholic Church and Financial Services Council; I smell a Sinodinos. The other for the Isocracy Network, organising a meeting on North Korea: Human Rights and International Relations (FB) with a scholarly and eye-witness account being presented. Somewhat related is The Philosophy Forum meeting that I'm convening this Sunday; Bill Hall speaking on the social and technical evolution of the species.

Most of RPG Review issue 23 is ready with the theme of "Different Worlds" (like the old magazine), which includes Victorian versions of Mars (Savage Worlds), Gulliver's Trading Company, a post-cyberpunk Titan (Eclipse Phase), GURPS Middle-Earth and much more. In actual gaming activities, recent sessions of Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and GURPS Middle Earth have all gone well. Unfortunately, after almost ten years of play, my HeroQuest Glorantha game has fallen into a small hiatus, even though the plot is at the point just preceeding "the big reveal". Hopefully it will get a shot in the arm soon - I suspect it is the longest running HQ game in existence.