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We've arrived at Aunty Debbie and Uncle Greg's place in Albury. The trip down was relatively painless, apart from the glare off the roads that made it bloody painful. Must get wrap-around sunglasses! The Boy Wonder slept for about half the trip, but the BatPup stayed awake and complained about being bored (silly monkey).

We've introduced the monkeys to their Graunts and Gruncles (Great Aunts and Great Uncles), plus some Grousins (ie first cousins once removed) and one Scousin (second cousin). Having a pleasant time, especially now that the monkeys are all asleep. It's bloody hot of course, because Albury is a very silly place. Looking forward to Tassie weather even more now.


Meanwhile, I've just heard the news from the SCA: the Kingdom of Lochac has officially jumped the shark. The peerage system, specifically the Order of the Pelican, no longer has any credibility, and anyone here who tries to stand up for them will be laughed at. Bitterly. And then I'll spit in their faces. The best I can hope is that they'll never offer me a peerage, because a punch in the face often offends...

Packing nearly done. I've printed off plenty of Car Bingo games to play with the BatPup, and the new bus/Carrier/TARDIS/Mildred/Myrtle/Millicent/Murgatroyd is groaning under the weight. I will probably get a chance to blog later, but just in case, there's this.

tangent_woman had a discussion about PMS and how some men use its mere possibility as an excuse to belittle women and ignore their legitimate concerns. I commented that, in many cases, men seem to react with surprise to a woman's emotionally-charged complaint because they're oblivious to the less emotional, more subtle complaints that preceded it. You can hint a dozen times that they should wash up before you go off the handle, but from their point of view the going-off came out of the blue with absolutely no warning.

tangent_woman made the point that one manifestation of male privilege may well be that men have the option to be ignorant of stuff that only affect women, whereas women don't have the matching option.

It's a bloody good point! It also extends to other forms of privilege.

For example, I don't know if most of the websites I design work really well in screen readers for the blind. Even when I was working for AGIMO, a quasi (or queasy) government organisation (run by clueless potplants, especially the useless incompetent coward who was my boss... but I digress) that had a strong emphasis on accessibility, it wasn't until I ran my designs past some actual experts that I found out just how many mistakes I'd made that would have made the sites all but unusable. I'm not blind or visually impaired, so I have the privilege of being ignorant about accessibility. In my defence, I did try to get it right, and over a few iterations I did better than every other worthless bastard in that place and most of the rest of the government, but I still had the advantage of sighted-person privilege to save me from needing to learn.

Similarly, I could go my entire life not understanding why some women get so hysterical (pun intended) every 28 days, more or less. Being male, I have the ability to remain ignorant. Now, as it happens, I've experienced hypoglycaemic moodswings myself, and discovered first-hand that getting all emotional is not, in fact, a sign of mental infirmity. (Gosh! Stone the crows!) It's not the same thing, but it's miles away from the default male assumption of female frailty. But without that more-or-less coincidental burst of enforced empathy, I could be ignorant forever, and not even know it.

There's more. I know very little of the truth about those brave refugees fleeing oppression and striving for a better life for their families queue-jumping people-smuggled terrorist so-called asylum seekers taking advantage of our nation's wealth... because I don't have to. I don't need to form an opinion about whether they're here for good reasons or ill. I can go ahead and vote for our boring and disappointing PM in the next election without stopping to consider the relative merits of his alleged policy vs the opposition's nearly-but-not-quite-identical policy. I don't need to know or care, and with so much else to do, I can generally avoid it. It might be that one or other party out there has a sane, compassionate and reasonable policy on "illegal" immigration, but I haven't really looked into it. I can afford to be ignorant, because I was born here and I'm white and I speak excellent English and I have a house to live in. White middle-class resident privilege = a license to remain ignorant.

It's a disturbing thought. How much privilege am I relying on without know it, simply because I don't know it? And along with that, how much should I know? Would a fuller appreciation of Tampa vs Oceanic Viking make me reconsider my vote? Should it? Is it as important as the other matters that strike closer to home? Should it be?

We all remain ignorantly privileged, I think, because the alternative is paralysis. Every action I perform, every thought I think, is informed by privilege: I walk because I'm not quadruplegic, I breathe easily because I'm not in a South American prison, I think clearly because I'm not clinically depressed. If I tried to stop and "consider those less fortunate", I'd never start again.

Which is not to say I can keep glorying in my ignorance. I'm not a member of terribly many minorities (odd that "female", at 50.1% of human population, still shows up as a minority in most ways that count, but then so does "poor", at 99.8%) but every time I try to understand someone, I improve my odds.

A couple thousand more steps, and I may get good enough.

From General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:


I prescribe the reading and memorising of this quote to anyone who may be called upon to appoint heralds, bardic guild coordinators, website administrators, OziBoD members, etc. Remember: just because someone is the only volunteer for a job doesn't make him qualified to do it!

We're driving down to Melbourne this weekend and staying overnight on Sunday with mrsbrown and mr_bassman (aka armourer) in Richmond. The Elder Daughter of DOOOOM, who has other obligations on that weekend, will be meeting us courtesy of her Nanny's Frequent Flyer points: she gets into Tullamarine at twenty past six on Sunday. We're planning to have a BBQ to catch up with (and in some cases meet) old friends. All of this means some juggling of time, but I think the following plan makes sense:

Come along to the barbie at 33 Smith Street, Richmond from about five-ish (time TBC with our hosts). BYO everything for a BBQ. I'll have to pop out at six-ish to get the EDoD, but I'm sure you can party on without me; gods willing and the creek don't rise I'll be back within the hour, but don't bet the farm on it.

Curse! I just sliced my right thumb while I was cleaning the kitchen. Tried to push the recycling bin's contents down so as to fit more in. That'll teach me to do housework! It's the couch for me from now on.

Hmmm... on second thoughts, maybe not. Divorce lawyers are $ersiou$ly co$tly. I shall grin and bear it. It's a clean cut, and doesn't hurt as bad as it looks.

Today was Canberra's "Piss Off The Catering Lobby By Making All The Public Servants Stay Home On Cup Day" holiday, invented by our by-now totally senile legislative assembly who really need to be sacked and voted into oblivion, if only there were some kind of opposition party available. Our plan was to spend the day preparing for our trip, but the heat and humidity have been feral so we didn't get much done. Still, I got the airbeds and tent packed, and bought some stuff from Bunnings, and this evening I did some serious decluttering of the kitchen/lunchroom area so we won't come home to a pit of chaos. Ah! And we booked places to stay for the time we're in Tassie. So really, not a bad day.

I finished Unseen Academicals last night. It was a mixed bag. On the one hand, we had tedious rehash characters like Andy (the psychopath, like Teatime or Carcer), Juliet (the ditz, like Christine) and Nutt (the naive newcomer with a dark secret who turns out to be amazingly clever, like Carrot or Otto). But on the other hand, we had Vetinari doing a couple of things one would not expect him to do, and although [SPOILER! SPOILER!] he remains superhumanly in-control as ever [WASN'T REALLY A SPOILER! WASN'T REALLY A SPOILER!] he still seemed to have a lot more character than in previous books, even ones that focused on him. My Beloved pointed out that Pratchett hasn't written many really excellent female characters; I countered that one Granny Weatherwax and one Nanny Ogg count for about a dozen of any other author's female characters; she counter-countered with a reminder of all the kick-arse male characters he's written, though I really think only Vimes, Death and perhaps now Vetinari count as true stand-outs. But yes, he's reading like he's tired and running low on ideas, which is a shame.

I really wish he'd written the book I imagined for him in the mid-1990s, when I posted a fake annotation thread on a Pratchett forum in the hopes that people would take the idea and run with it. It was called Strange Visitors, and was a mash-up of superhero stories (comics, movies, TV shows) in the manner of Soul Music or Moving Pictures. It could have fit his style back then, though he moved on from that sort of thing shortly after. A pity: the idea of the Librarian swinging through the night sky of Ankh-Morpork dressed as some kind of flying rodent would have been worth reading about... Ah well.

Dr Greg Ayers,
Director of Meteorology
Bureau of Meteorology
GPO Box 1289
Melbourne Vic 3001


Dear Dr Ayers,

As a long-time consumer of the Bureau's services, I would like to discuss with you an important matter that is at the top of everyone's agenda at this time.

I refer, of course, to the weather.

I realise you are a busy man, and your Bureau is doing its best to provide weather services to the entire nation, and indeed your record in this area is exemplary: I can scarcely remember a single day in recent years that has passed without some sort of weather. Your team are clearly on the ball and showing superb dedication.

However, I really must ask you to reconsider policy on the matter of the weather conditions in Canberra of late.

Canberra is, I am sure you're aware, a lovely little town. Perhaps it's not as well-endowed with restaurants as your home town of Melbourne, or as bustling and cosmopolitan (that is to say, crowded and chaotic) as Sydney. It also can't hope to match Darwin's yank-eating crocodile population or Adelaide's prodigious supply of burst water mains. But it does have one quality, which I have found most desirable and which I would not like to see eroded, which is this: it's quite possible to go outside for most of the year and not drop dead of heat exhaustion.

Lately, however, this has not been the case.

I realise, as I said, that your Bureau is engaged in important work, but surely you could take a moment to check the settings on your machinery? Dialing the humidity down to under the current 98.5% and dropping the temperature below 35° would not be difficult, and I'm sure the resulting savings in fuel would be of benefit to the entire nation.

Please consider this simple request. I remain,

Yours Faithfully,

E. T. F. Bat, Brigadier General (retired)

First of all, here's something I don't understand. The Crowded House song, Four Seasons In One Day, was allegedly written about Melbourne. But it means "black clouds over The Domain", and I happen to know that The Domain is in Sydney. So is there another Domain in Melbourne, or is it just a (rather odd) general term for the area in general, or what?

... Oh hang on. Wikipedia cross-reference. Is this the "Domain" in question? I guess it must be. Seems odd; like referring to the Harbour Bridge and just kind of assuming people know you mean the one in Corpus Christi, Texas...

Anyhow.

We're going to be in Melbourne this time next week - not in the Domain, but kind of up and to the right and on the other side of the MCG if Google Maps is to be believed. We're looking for a place to have a get-together of LJ/DW friends, including some I haven't met yet (and remember the adage: "a stranger is just a complete twerp you haven't met yet") and we have an offer, which is a BYO BBQ at the home of the lovely people we're staying overnight with.

Now, there's one tiny thing to be trepidatious about, which is this: when I was involved in Uni choir, we had a standing rule that the first few post-rehearsal coffees were always held at a local chorister-friendly pub, not at someone's house, because newcomers ("freshers") always felt a little uncomfortable visiting some stranger's house without getting a chance to meet them on neutral ground. Or so the wisdom went. I personally thought it was a load of dingo's kidneys, but it was how things worked and it was no great hardship (at least until the pub got less chorister-friendly and started playing The Pogues very loudly as soon as we turned up) so I went with it.

So the question becomes: if you are not already a Melbourne SCAdian and familiar with mrsbrown and mr_bassman (who are, I assure you, lovely people), how do you feel about meeting up with us at their place? Because I suppose it's possible that some of you are timid little wallflowers who would hate to put yourselves forward, but then I remember the contents of my f-list and I fear my guffaws at the very concept may wake the Boy Wonder sleeping next to me, so I have to think about something else.

All of which is a very roundabout way¹ of saying: we shall be taking up the lovely Mr & Mrs B's offer of a BBQ at their place, and I would like all our friends to pop by. Many of you I haven't seen in years, and a fair few my Beloved has never met, despite many long conversations on the intartubes. It would be a shame for timidity to stop you remedying this -- if any of you had any knack for timidity, which: naaah.

So the address will be published -- in a friend-locked post, I think, after due discussion with our hosts. Plans will also be firmed up vis-á-vis the matter of times and menus. If we still have any vegetarian friends (good grief! how??? haven't I insulted you away yet???) then plans will be seamlessly adapted to suit. And we shall show off our munchkins, so at the very least you can get a sneak preview of what the world will be like when they're ruling it.

More details to come when details exist.



¹ How Melbournian! Canberran too, I guess, though our roundabouts don't generally have traffic lights on them. Or trams. Or Melbournians.

For those of you unfamiliar with Australian idiom, the phrase "went off like a frog in a sock" may seem obscure. Suffice to say that, in the context of Operation: Orange Balloons, it means that the evening has been a resounding success.

To recap: a couple of weeks ago, we went around every house on our street and its tributaries and delivered a letter (follow the above link to get the text of it) and an orange balloon. We gave people a choice: chuck out the letter and ignore it to be spared the appalling Americanism of Halloween, or blow up the balloon and stick it on your letterbox to indicate willingness to participate. But how would it be received? Resounding silence, enthusiastic unanimity, or somewhere in between?

Tonight we got to find out. I estimate there were about twenty houses out of the hundred-odd with orange balloons, all of them happily sharing out lollies and marvelling at the costumes. While I took the munchkins around, thelancrewitch handed out lollies to at least twenty kids in costume during the course of the evening. A twenty percent uptake is sufficiently close to unanimity that I'd have to call this a goer.

I'll stick photos up on the OOB website and then get to work on the next plan: a street Christmas party. Operation: Red Balloons, perhaps?

Hey, Melbumites! What's there to do in your fine, variably-climated town on a Sunday evening? We're driving down next weekend, ready to catch the ferry to the Apple Isle on Monday evening. mrsbrown and mr_bassman have kindly offered us crash space on the Sunday night (I hope they haven't forgotten!) but we'd like to get together with as many friends and fans as we can. For this reason we need your advice: what's a good place, centralish but centred on Richmond area I guess, that will welcome assorted human beings, some of them of small stature and few years, on a Sunday evening? Answers on a postcardthe comments, and once we've got a good suggestion I'll do a Facebook event invitation...

I have no daughters!

Having no Elder Daughter of DOOOOM is a familiar feeling. She heads off to the farm for at least a couple of days every week, and we survive happily enough without her while she rides her horse and no doubt watches that television thing that the lower-class houses have. But having no BatPup is a very new phenomenon: this is the first time she's been away from both of us over night since she was born! The Beloved sent the two of them off with Nanny this arvo, because the Boy had some kind of gastric nastiness going on and she couldn't pay them any attention while it was happening. Surprisingly, the BatPup decided she was going to have a sleep-over at the farm instead of getting picked up again once I got home. We were expecting to hear that she'd changed her mind once the magnitude of non-Daddyness and non-Mummyness sunk in, but Nanny called me a little while ago to say that she went happily off to bed in the EDoD's room at about 8.30, and seems fine.

My little girl is growing up... it'll be strange hair and a sudden interest in borrowing the car keys before you know it, just watch.

Meanwhile, the Boy went off to sleep at about the same time, with Daddy cuddles and a very small amount of ravioli without any sauce. He seems to have recovered from his early pukery with no lasting ill effects. Here's hoping he doesn't have a relapse...

Two of the people I sent Dreamwidth invitations to didn't use them. Neither were on my f-list, so sod 'em. First two people to reply here and beg prettily enough enclosing photographs of themselves dressed as any of the characters from Fraggle Rock (never mind; I'll let you off that condition due to the very real possibility of permanent eye strain) will get their very own DreamWidth invite. Comments are screened and will be deleted after reading to save embarrassment.

Dreamwidth's paid account discount ends on the first of November so I decided it was time to pay up. USD$25 each and we're now members. Hint: you can go in to the Import Content link and import your icons once you're a member, and they will apply retroactively to the previously-imported LJ entries that use them. Good system design!

My Beloved bought a plastic train set for the Boy (and the BatPup, and very possibly herself, and definitely me) and I found myself thinking, as I have done before, what a shame it is that people don't build these things to be more extensible. There are curved pieces -- one eighth of a circumference, I think -- and some crossroads and switches and so on, but unless you connect them just the right way, they don't go together. They also have a polarity: the pieces connect together like jigsaw pieces, with a round extrusion fitting into a matching... intrusion? whatever. So they can only be used in the "approved" direction.

I remember the Habitrail mouse cage stuff had similar problems: you could do certain shapes, but that was it. No flexibility to it all.

What I want to do, but probably can't because I have no idea how I'd program it, is write something that would evolve train track pieces that can go together in the greatest possible number of ways. Loops, weird curves, bridges and subways, all sorts of connections and conglomerations. It must be possible! Some kind of evolutionary algorithm combined with a graphic display and... I don't know. I never did much with modelling of realworld structures in data. But imagine it: train track pieces that didn't demand unthinking obedience! Every piece perfectly suited to clicking in place and not getting in the way...

OK, I have to be honest. It's a Rick-Roll. You knew it would be, because, like, would I post "Hilarious Muppet Bloopers"? Really? Of course not. WAAAAAY too mainstream. Whereas a totally tapped-out meme that's so post-shark that it even got done in the Macy's parade? Perfect.

So you'll be thinking: standard Muppet scene, Rick Astley dubbed over the top, YouTube losers chuckle, everybody goes away and five seconds later it's forgotten. Except... look at the mouths. Look at the drums. This isn't some amateur overdubbing. This is the real thing: the actual Muppets, including Dr Teeth and the band, and they're playing that song. It's a Rick-Roll, but it's done by the goddamn Muppets themselves! It's not a fake!

Now, that is fresh.

---

Ah, sadly, it is fake (thanks for just trampling all over my dreams, tangent_woman!). A very well-done fake, but not in fact the real thing. What a shame...

Got a lot done today: the new car, as yet unnamed, is now insured and properly registered in our names. It also has a couple of spare keys for the next time I take my Beloved's keys to work by accident. Molly the Mazda is in at the mechanics next to my work, having a tune-up; I left it over night so they can diagnose its weird early-every-morning over-revving behaviour. I called the Spirit of Tasmania people and told them we'll be driving a nice spacious Mazda MPV instead of Nanny and Pa's Camry. I called my Aunt in Albury and asked if she minded being visited by grand nieces and grand nephews, and she was chuffed, especially since she'd completely forgotten she even had a grand nephew and so will be very excited to meet him!

Meanwhile, I put together a summary of what we know about medieval Orders, so we can come up with some better names than the official royal suggestion of the Orders of Diligence, Tenacity and Prowess (or as I call them, See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Thump No Evil Upside The Head). This collection of actual period Orders is a gold mine, laying out general patterns so we can decide what will work. Let's see if the heralds in Lochac could be bothered debating it; personally, I quite like massaria's suggestion of the Golden Fox (A&S), the Brock (service) and the Panther Combattant (for thumpy-thumpy). It's not symmetrical enough to be a bland little triad of Mercedes Zimmer-Jordan tweeness, but it has a theme (animals!) and it would work splendidly. Alternatively, there's the Cockatrice, the Pegasus and the Wyvern, which would suit Lochac very well (our A&S magazine for the A&S award, our kingdom newsletter for the service award, and the main charge on the device of the late and much-missed Sir Gawyne d'Ibelin, who died not longer after stepping down as our final prince, as the martial award).

But the piece de wossname for tonight is this: I finally activated the bug tracking site for Canon Lore. With that, anyone can now submit bugs, and the Mortar Board (my hypothetical team of assistants, the back-end equivalent of teffania's Canon Fodder, can get to work on them. Woohoo!

Brunch this morning. Small turnout again, but it included a couple of people who've not previously been, both of them with Small People for our Small People to play with, so it was definitely a win. Also, the food had variety, thanks mainly to the Beloved's careful planning. No more all-potato brunches for us, thank you! So 'twas nice.

Rob (Rodri) came with his three munchkins, and told me in passing about this: Five Second Movies. I think the five second version of 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably my favourite.



Right - Boy Wonder is safely asleep. Off to see if BatPup can be convinced to do the same.

Ugh, what a day. The BatPup kicked all her bedclothes off and so crawled into bed with us at about four this morning, and that was enough to wake the Boy up. I eventually chased her out when she couldn't lie still next to me, and even got the idiot Boy to go back to sleep for three hours, but that was it for me. Wake me up at a certain time in my sleep cycle and you erase the entire night's sleep credit and I turn into Phillip Ruddock for the rest of the day. The Beloved, meanwhile, didn't get back to sleep and so has been similarly wretched all the live-long day.

Upsides abound regardless. The bank did indeed get their shapeless arses into gear so we were able to draw out a bank cheque and buy our spiffy new car. We are unable as yet to agree on a name -- I suggested The Carrier or The Type Forty but these were not met with unanimity. The Beloved's suggestion of The Boob Bus was not, I think, befitting the dignity of such a respectable vehicle. It may end up being Myrtle the Mazda, which at least is moderately dignified and matches Molly the (other) Mazda.

Also, we got to have another couple of hours off, this time courtesy of the Beloved's parents who took our satanic hellbeasts off to the Botanical Gardens while we had lunch at Hudsons. Most pleasant, even if we spent a lot of the time talking about the aforementioned hellbeasts.

And we got the playroom sorted out -- It has a floor! Who knew? -- but we still have to make the living room tolerable in time for brunch tomorrow at ten, so we shan't be resting on our laurels...

Oh, and speaking of laurels: the New Zealanders are having another crack at ignoring all advice from the Heralds and trying to invent a new level of awards in our already overstuffed award system. What fun! If they ever locate clue, I'll be sure to mention the fact here.

I am inordinately pleased to announce that, as of 3.30pm today, we are now officially no longer members of the landed classes. EMOH RUO is now EMOH S'ESLE YDOBEMOS. I will be posting a screenshot of the bit in NetBank that lists our mortgage balance, just as soon as it percolates through and becomes zero.

Woohoo!

(Now we wait to see if the Which Bank will be permitting us access to some of the money they delayed paying us for a week and a half, so we can go buy our car tomorrow...)

Possible the best thread on Reddit ever.

Culture jamming is fun!