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Hey guys. The pogs craze kind of passed me by when I was young. I'm in a weird position where I can see the effect of pogs and the reaction to pogs but not the pogs themselves. The McDonald's, the Krokodil, the odd Happy Days rerun. Its not like I can livestream pogs, so what was it like for the people who lived through it? Do you still have the battle scars? What are your memories of pogs?



What does it mean?!

This seems much needed at the moment, in these bleak, terrible times.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/08/millionaire-who-rescues-migrants-at-sea

Catrambone was determined to start rescuing people in 2014 and had set a hectic repair schedule. "It cost a crazy amount of money," said Cauchi. The boat was bought and repaired, for a total of $5.2m, by the Tangiers Group (and still sits on the company's books) but would be operated by a foundation Catrambone named Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas). He hired Martin Xuereb as director in February 2014, after cold calling to invite him for coffee. "I am not in the habit of meeting for coffee with someone I don't know," Xuereb, now 47, told me, but he and Catrambone ended up talking for five hours. "I wasn't expecting him to be so young. What hits you straight away is his vision, his perseverance and his determination." No volunteers had done anything similar since 1979, when a group of Germans chartered a freighter named Cap Anamur to rescue migrants fleeing Vietnam. An attempt by the same group to rescue 37 people off Italy in 2003 ended with crew members put on trial for facilitating illegal entry into the country; they were found not guilty, and the migrants were deported.

...

The first call came through after four days, on 30 August. The Moas team quickly found itself involved in the simultaneous rescue of two migrant boats, including a wooden fishing vessel with 350 people – many of them families from Syria – that was slowly sinking. By the end of the rescue, water was flooding onto the main deck of the fishing boat, and many of the migrants were in the sea. So many small children were rescued that the Phoenix almost ran out of baby formula. "That was a shock for most of the crew," Catrambone recalled. "We were a bit overwhelmed with the thought that this was really happening. These children and mothers were at the hands of the sea, at the hands of death."

The Phoenix rescued 1,462 people in 10 weeks and helped a further 1,500 onto Italian navy vessels. (There were also lulls when the crew fished for bluefin tuna.) The Phoenix operates in international waters that start just 12 nautical miles from the shores of Libya – now one of the world's most violent places, where two separate governments have only tenuous control over their territories. An American consultant hired to advise on security fretted that the ship's unarmed crew was too close to Libyan waters, but Catrambone decided he was overreacting – after long periods working in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a narrow brush with death during a missile strike in Israel), Catrambone felt he knew how to calibrate risk; the success of his own business, he says, is based in part on the tendency of others to exaggerate danger. "We are not afraid to go where others are [afraid]," he told me. "We don't need a military convoy to take us."

Yes, this is a man who is a millionaire - who has profited from warzones, even. But he's invested millions of his own money and much of his own time into saving the lives of the desperate and unfortunate because ...

"If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you don't even belong in our community. If you allow your neighbour to die in your backyard, then you are responsible for that death."

And that's heartening, isn't it?

The Cold War is often characterized as a struggle between two great ideas: Communism and Capitalism. The accepted narrative is that Capitalism - with its love of freedom, apple pie and Mom - was inevitably going to triumph, and now we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Isn't that depressing? That THIS is the best we can muster?

The triumph of Capitalism has definitely been reaffirmed time and time again over the past thirty years or so. The Left has become a withered husk, horrified at the thought of being labelled 'Socialist'. The Right has become eager to become ever more extreme, so long as 'extreme' means slashing all barriers to the accumulation of wealth.

Societies are defined by what they stand for. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the credit was given to those hard-working industrial capitalists whose Free Market Spirit crushed the Reds and their authoritarian regime. In the aftermath of that, it became downright irresponsible to stop these paragons of virtue from doing whatever they wanted with their hard-won capital.

The main virtue in our world isn't freedom; it is profit.

In some parts of the world, profit is pursued under democracies. In other parts of the world, dictatorships. If you're on the international stage, though, you're really on the international marketplace. We've allowed them to convince us that, in the post-war world, politics is really economics. We've even allowed them to get away with the claim that this is somehow indicative of human nature; that greed is what motivates us all.

Do you believe that? Really?

Most people know that money isn't everything; that the accumulation of wealth isn't a good enough reason to live your life. Most people know that the value of a life has nothing at all to do with how much stuff that person managed to get hold of.

Profit is what drives us to feel helpless in the face of environmental catastrophes (it isn't 'realistic' to expect companies to become environmentally friendly; think of their profit margins!) and it is profit that sees us stand silent in the face of brutal dictatorships and religious extremism (seriously - Saudi Arabia has far more to do with the spread of islamic fundamentalism than any of the countries we've bombed since 9/11).

Our drive for profit is selling the human race down the river.

Shouldn't we pick a better reason to live?

[Are all religions misogynistic?]

I just read this interview] with Mona Eltahawy about her new book. Full disclosure - I haven't read the book, but there were some interesting quotes in there which got me thinking. The one which stood out was:

Are all religions misogynistic?
Absolutely, to some degree. All religions, if you shrink them down, are all about controlling women's sexuality... They're obsessed with my vagina. I tell them: stay outside my vagina unless I want you in there.

I don't think this goes far enough.

Whilst it is true that many religions (all? Not sure I'm willing to make that claim because there's probably some which don't - Wicca maybe?) place more restrictions on women than men - especially Islam which is where she's largely coming from - religious dogma exists to tell people how to live their lives. That is literally the point of the exercise, and sexuality is a part of that, so both women and men are told how they should act to be a good (whatever).

It feels like this is a fundamental part of looking to someone else to tell you how to live your life. If you're looking to religion for rules and guidance, do you really have the right to get offended when they start telling you things you don't want to hear?

It just felt particularly odd to me to make the claim that religion is fundamentally misogynistic when, by that logic, it'd in fact be more misanthropic. I'm sure that the implementation of islamic dogma in countries like Saudi Arabia - which she highlights as being part of what formed this opinion - absolutely is misogynistic, but it isn't exactly a picnic for many men, either.

Doesn't it just boil down to the principle that it is fine to make a case for how you 'should' live morally, but the moment it starts to be enforced and inflicted on the unwilling - especially with regards to your body and sexuality - that's when it becomes a problem?

I'm currently taking a screenwriting course on alternate Saturdays. This week will mark the 4th session - and when we're finally supposed to have the tools we need to start developing a script rather than working on the preliminary stuff.

Another guy on the course is also unable to make it this week and he's asked me to type up my notes. I figure I'll spend sunday typing up all of my notes so I have an electronic record too. Would anyone here be interested in them if I cross-posted? If not I'll only bother to make this week's useful to someone else, but if so I might as well go along and do it all at once!

Martin Sheen has come out with a few big hitters lately. After a blistering documentary about the Chartist movement which hit back against modern politicians he has stepped up and delivered an attack on both the right and left wing in a speech at a St. David's Day March:

"No one says they want to get rid of the NHS, everyone praises it ... But for decades now there has been a systematic undermining of it [the NHS's] core values. This is beyond party politics. The Labour government arguably did as much damage to the NHS, as any Tory or coalition led one. In today's political climate, where politicians are careful, tentative, scared of saying what they feel for fear ... all political parties drift into a morass of bland neutrality and the real values we suspect are kept behind closed doors. Is it any wonder that people feel there is little to choose between?

Do we want to be a society that is exploitative, that sees people as commodities, as numbers, and mere instruments of profit? Or do we want to be a society where each person is recognised, where all are equal in worth and value – where that value is not purely a monetary one?"

With this and Russell Brand - who, although I dislike for a lot of reasons, has also been throwing his weight around in the political sphere... it seems like celebrities are becoming more commonplace in political discourse, speaking directly about the system rather than their traditional role - shining a light on particular issues or becoming politicians aligned with one of the major parties directly themselves.

I suspect that this is because celebrities are - despite all appearances - people too, and they are in a unique position to capture media attention with a single coherent message where other organized attempts to do so (looking at you, Occupy) have utterly failed to do so. As dissatisfaction grows, and the traditional opposition fail to articulate an alternative narrative, the media looks elsewhere for one - and celebrities are a friendly, familiar face who also have the benefit of already knowing the ropes when it comes to press coverage.

This just seemed interesting to me. I really can't stand Russell Brand personally, but it seems like this isn't going away any time soon. I suppose it makes sense - the media demands that politicians play the part of actors to a greater degree than ever before (with soundbites, photo ops, and staged debates) - it shouldn't be too surprising that the professionals step up when they feel the urge.

So this story is pretty interesting.

Basically the vice president of google has said that, as programs to read files become obsolete, future historians will no longer be able to access documents we are storing electronically.

I lived with a historian at university and this seems fantastically naive to me. If the records still exist digitally somewhere, I imagine that future historians would learn to code new programs to access the old information rather than just let it sit there. People have rediscovered dead languages to interpret old records and such, so why wouldn't they go to similar lengths to access this information?

Especially since people are already thinking about this, I'm not sure the concern is worthwhile... but it is funny to think that in two or three hundred year's time we could have absolutely no idea how we got to where we are because the world seems to go 'stone tablets > paper records > ??? ??? ??? > Apple iBrain'. 

Please forgive the haste of this note, only it is becoming quite difficult to keep the paper dry, I am sure you understand.

It finally happened you see. In the end, it was surprisingly gentle - in the way these things so often are. There was no great explosion, there was no time to panic - in one instant we were wandering around, going about the Business of the Day, and then, after a quiet bloop, we were underwater.

I think it actually took some people a few hours to notice that they had drowned. The clever ones worked quickly to evolve gills (the really clever ones already had them, naturally). Oh, there was some fuss at first of course - some people just aren't very good at adapting, you know? But once the water gets in, one way or another, it all calms down.

Now, the sun is a very long way away, and it doesn't seem worth the hassle to try and get back up to the surface - and anyway, if we did, then we'd just have to remember how lungs work, and that's a recipe for screaming if I ever heard one.

No, better that we stay down here. It is quiet without all that air getting in the way. It was cold at first, but the funny thing is, the longer it goes on, the warmer it feels. The sharks down here at least have the decency to look like sharks, and if you stumble across the odd unexploded mine... well, you know me. I've always enjoyed that kind of thing.

Now, if I could only talk the silly bastards out of trying to make tea with seawater, we'd all be fine. Well, I guess there's no such thing as paradise.

Yours,

Mr. D. Squid.

P.S - I don't want to be 'that guy' but I have enclosed a snap of the neighbourhood. I think you'll agree it is a great improvement!



(If undelivered, please return to Mr. D. Squid, 14 Big Ben Reef, New Atlantis, UO8 B12)

Something I've come across in the Elite: Dangerous community which is pretty fun as a writing exercise is the Drabble. 100 word stories (not including title).

So... here's my first attempt at one. Because Elite: Dangerous has a massive amount of different governments and factional alliances but ... the impact they have on your gameplay is literally just 'they sometimes ban different goods and might have more security'. I thought it might be a fun thing to have a thread for (although... obviously, I don't expect Discordian drabbles to stick to the space theme  )

The Great Bureaucracy

The Demolition Squid had been a great ship, but a lifetime of military service took its toll. Then they'd stripped out as much space as possible for cargo. Now, it was more like an old frying pan. Beaten, blackened and chipped.

The Commander drummed their fingers, waiting for the scans to complete. Today, it was communists. Tomorrow, capitalists. The day after, monarchists. Give humanity infinite space, and they'd divide it up and start bickering about who was best.

But the docking procedure was always the same. The universe was run by traffic wardens.

"No contraband found. Hail Comrade!"

"Hail Comrade."

This is a really interesting clip from Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe. Adam Curtis has discussed the idea before, but this hypothesizes that the reaction most people have to the media ('oh dear' because they feel it is something they can do nothing about) is now being deliberately invoked by politicians and media elites as a form of control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

What particularly stood out was this quote about the war in Ukraine, from one of Putin's advisors.

The underlying aim, Serkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.

By continually throwing contradictory information into the mainstream, and flooding us with a stream of information with little context (or deliberately misleading context) we are kept in a state of uncertainty where we do not have the tools necessary to form a coherent alternative to the decisions that are being made on our behalf. They - the politicians and decision makers - deliberately want to make people throw up their hands and say 'oh dear' because merely recognizing that a thing is bad does not threaten them. Especially when they are ostensibly agreeing with you that the situation is bad and they would like to change it, whilst simultaneously working to perpetuate it.

This kind of thinking seems like it'd be quite familiar to Discordians - and it plays into some of the behaviours we talk about with people taking the opinions of their 'group' and seeing it as an attack on their identities when those opinions and assumptions are attacked. It is more sinister than we often ascribe to - I don't know about anyone else, but I assumed that the politicians were as much a victim of confirmation bias as anyone else, and tended to just be blind to the inherent contradictions in what they were saying.

But the quotes from the Russian advisor seem like a convincing argument that this isn't the case.

It also feels like I've been falling for this myself. Looking back over the year - longer, really - the news has just been a constant stream of horrible situations with the end result generally being a sense of powerlessness.

The question is, knowing this, what do you do about it? It is almost the opposite of 1984's Ministry of Truth. Where the Ministry of Truth wanted to reinvent the past and make people believe in their version of events, this strategy relies on nobody knowing the present and casting doubt on the past so that the status quo can just continue. If you can't pin down what's happening, you can't respond to it. There's been massive anger and outcry over all sorts of issues over the past few years - MP's expenses, child abuse, banker's bonuses, the financial crisis and the Occupy movement - but this anger has failed to result in any actual changes or serious action (aside from some arrested celebrities) and eventually the news cycle just moves on with no resolution.

It seems like a strong and independent press to confront politicians when they lie and mislead, and hold them to account, should be the answer. In practice, any more voices will just add to the cacophony, because having many conflicting messages is itself part of the strategy. This problem is likely exacerbated in the UK by the fact the BBC has taken impartiality to mean 'give equal voice to the two most polarized individuals we can find on any issue'.

Step 1 is probably 'refuse to accept that things can't get better'. I'm just not sure how to translate 'media is probably being manipulated in order to provide confusion' into useful actions.

So far:

Noobs = Ninja Boobs.

More as the evening develops

"There's a lot of talk in pop music right now about people saying, 'Oh, this person's a member of the Illuminati,' or they're Illuminati, or you're Illuminati, and people's idea that there's a group of entertainers or very wealthy people, they're referred to as the Illuminati, and they work behind the scenes and they control things and they're very powerful, and there's possibly a reference to something dark, or black magic, or something like that. And I have to say I laugh at all of those things.

"I think there are some people who don't mind being referred to as that, but I know who the real Illuminati are, and where that word came from. The root of the word is "illuminate", and that means "The enlightened ones", and it came from the Age of Enlightenment, when a lot of arts and creativity flourished, from Shakespeare to Isaac Newton, to Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo: the philosophers, artists, scientists were all engaged in a kind of high level of consciousness through their work, and they were enlightening and inspiring people around the world. And those are the true Illuminati.".

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/21/madonna-album-hack-living-state-terror

I'm fairly sure that the answers to these questions are... obvious, but an hour or so of inept googling last night has left me none the wiser so I thought I'd throw them out there.

1) Ice Caps = Ocean Level Rising: On an old episode of Mock the Week, Dara O'Brien made the claim that ocean levels won't rise as the ice caps melt for the same reason that a melting ice cube won't raise the level of a glass of water. Archimedes principle says that there should be no effect. Now, I'm guessing that the reason this isn't true is because the oceans do not flow underneath the ice caps as such (so the mass of the ice caps is not currently influencing the oceans one way or another) but... I don't know. Is that right?

2) If the problem with global warming is that more energy is being released than before, does it matter how that energy is generated? My dad was talking about his concern that bringing in energy from space - although a potential alternative to fossil fuels - would still be disrupting the Earth's 'closed system'. I tried to explain that the earth isn't actually a closed system at all (which I am pretty sure is true?) But the fundamental problem seems to be that energy that was locked up in oil, rocks and so on is now being used, with various by-products inevitably including heat. Even if we switch to wind, solar, nuclear and similar forms of alternative energy... surely we'll still be producing more heat than there was previously, and that will still raise the temperature (and lead to the problems we're seeing?)

I'm sure there'll be more some time but... these are the two that come to mind right now.

So, the main project I've completed this year was a spec script and series pitch for a drama called the Entropy Resident in the System (which I think is a phrase that was coined here ages back). Its got a lot of discordian themes and I was (am?) pretty proud of it.

Unfortunately, the BBC rejected it without feedback (not entirely unexpected - they get a lot of scripts). It is currently entered into the Channel 4 competition - but as we're fast approaching the deadline for feedback there (20th) and I still haven't heard anything from them, I'm not too hopeful.

I'm probably going to enrol in a scriptwriting course next year, because most of the feedback I've been able to get hasn't been terribly helpful (mostly its just been 'yeah this is good' - but whilst I appreciate that, it doesn't help me improve as a writer). I was wondering if anyone here might like to have a look with a view towards areas of improvement?

If you are interested, shoot me a PM with an email address and I'll send it over.

Do you ever get the feeling that other people view the world as though it were a photo negative?

'We don't provide enough for our poor or disabled, but THOSE PEOPLE let them starve to death in the gutter'
'We don't try to find common ground with our neighbours, but THOSE PEOPLE are actively attacking theirs'
'We aren't really offering you any choice, but THOSE PEOPLE don't get to vote at all.'
'We have sexism, racism, homophobia, but THOSE PEOPLE legislate to enshrine those things!'
'We commit torture, but THOSE PEOPLE bury their victims alive by the thousand.'

But you can't build a positive image out of negatives.

Telling people what you aren't says very little about what you are. The subtext is the most telling thing; it could be worse, so shut up. Idealism has become a dirty word, because who can afford to be idealistic in a world with so much horror?

People fall short of ideals, yes. That doesn't mean they aren't worth having, or that they should be ignored because it is hard to live up to them. The correct response to falling short of those ideals is not to shrug your shoulders and say 'well we tried but oh well', it is to strive to overcome those failings. Really work at it, not just say you will and then carry on exactly as before.

If the future is going to be better than the present, by definition, you have to believe that the present isn't as good as things are going to get. And that is, overwhelmingly, the sense I get sometimes. In fact, most people I talk to believe things are going to get worse.

Then, things DO get worse.

And nobody does much of anything.

Why would they?

That kind of negativity fits very nicely with their worldview.

Since I foresee many, many more of these in the future, and none of our existing threads quite fit...

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/10/peru-press-charges-greenpeace-nazca-lines-stunt

The activists had entered a strictly prohibited area beside the figure of a hummingbird among the lines, the culture ministry said, and they had laid down big yellow cloth letters reading "Time for Change! The Future is Renewable" as the UN climate talks began in Peru's capital.

"This has been done without any respect for our laws. It was done in the middle of the night. They went ahead and stepped on our hummingbird, and looking at the pictures we can see there's very severe damage," Castillo said. "Nobody can go on these lines without permission – not even the president of Peru!"

Greenpeace want to protest climate change, do so by causing irreparable damage to an ancient national monument, which makes sure the last thing anyone will be talking about regarding it is any point they might have had.

At work, I've been listening to the Free Thinking festival lectures. About half of them are just horribly depressing or ill-informed, but there's some gems. I particularly enjoyed this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mq8m1 (if you are not in the UK, you should be able to access it via Hola)

It is fairly long, and Karen isn't a naturally gifted speaker, but some of her ideas are really fantastic. There were a lot of great points so I'll just pull out some of the ones that stood out most to me:

People aren't using words the right way. People talk about dialogue a lot, but one of the fundamental principles of a dialogue as Socrates meant it was a calm, reasonable exchange of ideas. If you aren't willing to have your mind changed (which does not mean making that change easy) then you are not engaged in a dialogue. Most 'public dialogue' fails this test. She also touches on how our opinions have become a core part of identity, and we ought to get rid of that.

Love is also used far too easily, and this has caused people to misinterpret love as it was meant in the Bible. Love meant giving practical support and aid to others, respecting them and tolerating them. It did not even necessarily mean liking them. Love was not understood as a temporary emotional element, but as something that should be a foundation of human relationships - continuous regardless of how one feels. Unlike dialogue (where I feel the original meaning has more use than the modern), I think it could be useful to use a different word here. Love in this context seems more like respect than 'love'. Maybe the Bible's lessons would make more sense if it was 'Respect your neighbour' rather than love them.

She also challenges religion's reputation for causing war, pointing out that historians of war always point to multiple reasons for conflict - of which religion is often a small part. This seemed really brave given recent ISIS activities, but then she went on to point out that ISIS's members know roughly nothing about Islam, by and large, and that their appeal likely has more to do with the disenfranchisement and depression endemic to being part of a minority. This made a lot of sense to me; she's not justifying their atrocities, she's saying that if you don't actually listen to and examine the root causes for these people's actions, you'll never stop them. And religion is often only a small part of those reasons.

I'm going to listen to this at least another time or two to tease out more thoughts, because there are a lot of ideas around religion here that I've just never encountered before, but I thought you guys might like it too.

For about six months I wound up working in the NHS. One of the many Commissioning Support Units, in fact. Whilst there, I was linked to this video as an explanation to help me understand where I fell in the NHS structure.

I wasn't there long, but I saw enough. Its one thing to know in theory that bureaucracy is massively wasteful. Having glimpsed into The Machine, I was horrified by it. But what was even more horrifying to me was the attitude taken by these people. Most of them had worked in the NHS for decades, and all of them had been fired from roles doing the exact same thing in the structure that came before - then rehired with a 40% or higher pay increase when the government realized that they hadn't actually accounted for the work they were doing before. Everyone knew that the bill to the NHS had increased hugely, that the majority of their time was spent trying to navigate authority that nobody really understood, and that the actual, fundamental and important work was the least part of their time.

More hilarious was when important work simply couldn't be done because nobody had the resources to see it through. I can't name names, obviously, but when a doctor's surgery lost all their records due to a server fault and it was found the backup systems they had in place weren't working, everyone at the table laughed at my suggestion we ought to try and send someone out to make sure backups were being taken elsewhere. Maintenance was supposed to be the responsibility of the surgery; emergencies were ours. So we couldn't take steps to prevent emergencies, we could only try and pick up the pieces when they happened.

Not a single person at the CSU believes that the current setup will stay in place past the next election. Basic systems - like project methodology, sharing data, and authorizing payments - are not standardized, all of them are handled differently by different teams within the organization, and the effort to try and get one common way of working had seen three heads (with three different approaches) before I joined. After three months, a new head of service was announced and she brought in an external consultancy to deal with it. They had not made much headway.

At first I thought all of this was just down to incompetence. The fact is, though, that the NHS delivers some of the best value for money of any national health service in Europe. We pay a comparatively small percentage of GDP (9.8%) for one of the top services. There's a massive amount of waste, definitely, but mostly because people are scrabbling to play catchup and maintain continuity of projects which have run for years after the government came in and threw it all up in the air.

Why would they do that?

Well, this blog gives a little insight.

225 parliamentarians have recent or present financial private healthcare connections
145 Lords have recent or present financial connections to companies or individuals involved in healthcare
124 Peers benefit from the financial services sector
1 in 4 Conservative Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies or individuals involved in healthcare
1 in 6 Labour Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies or individuals involved in healthcare
1 in 6 Crossbench Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies or individuals involved in healthcare
1 in 10 Liberal Democrat Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies or individuals involved in healthcare
75 MPs have recent or present financial links to companies or individuals involved in private healthcare

Fairly soon, The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will be coming to a head. This will probably open the NHS up to even more privatization - it is worth noting that the NHS already has to go through a rigorous open tender process - which is part of the reason the CSU exists in the first place. It is also worth noting that the people I spoke to about this were convinced that when the NHS just had it all in-house, it saved them a lot of money, because the process of ensuring that the tender for new medical treatment is fair and open to all private companies is itself a huge drain on resources.

But by throwing everything up in the air, slashing funding, and throwing in a whole raft of new areas where the NHS suddenly has to work with local government and community support agencies (where none of these organizations were used to working with anyone else before) the possible points of weakness multiply many times over. You are far more likely to get people losing patient information when it is suddenly being shared with many more people, only some of whom are used to dealing with sensitive information like that at all. You've muddied the waters of authority so much that decisions don't get made, so services have to work with older machines and resources because they can't get the approval needed to buy the new ones. In short, you rig the system so that over the next few years, as everyone struggles to find their footing, the architecture of the NHS begins to look very outdated and in need of modernisation.

Just in time for the private investment to swoop in and save the day.

It isn't about corruption, exactly. Nobody needs to be bribed or to have the explicit goal of forcing the NHS to fail - although I genuinely believe that many of those MPs with financial interests in private healthcare do have the explicit goal of seeing more of it sold off on ideological grounds. Instead, they just demand that it transforms itself into something totally new and - when it doesn't - they sell it off to people who say they can make it 'fit for purpose'.

If you really want the belly laugh, though, here's the kicker. I had lunch with a guy whose job is to make sure that there's acceptable coverage for all the major illnesses and injuries and so forth in the county. He explained that private hospitals LOVE the NHS, because it lets them have a safety net for their patients. They don't bother to provide all the equipment and training to their low-level staff that the NHS does - they can only handle things that go entirely according to routine. If something goes wrong, or it turns out you need care that the private company aren't set up to deal with... they just dump you on the NHS and leave you to it. Emergency surgery to patch up the mistakes or situations that arise from private surgeons who aren't equipped to deal with them are increasing across the board, and play hell with the schedules.

I can't wait to see that kind of cost-saving approach applied across the board. 

Tropes are something I find fascinating. I love them because browsing tvtropes.org is an easy way to spark off new ideas. You can see the recurring themes and devices used in all forms of media and stories. You can usually also find great examples of these common elements being subverted, inverted or averted, and even if you're not familiar with the examples themselves, there's more often than not enough context that you can imagine how these things played out in those instances.

Knowing your audience and their expectations is really important when you're creating anything, and tropes are an awesome tool for helping point out recurring elements you might have missed. They aren't a substitute for a wide experience of the media you're interested in, of course, but as a supplementary tool they help distil down and make explicit a lot of things that might otherwise not be entirely obvious.

But at the same time, I find it interesting that tropes have become so popular now. These tricks and elements aren't new, but as far as I know there wasn't a real attempt to codify so many of them before now. Writers often worry about coming across as cliche, and it is an old old maxim that there's only 7-8 stories. I wonder if tropes are a symptom of the increasing desire to categorize and pigeonhole everything, attempting to have a label in order to understand every aspect of storytelling not unlike we try to categorize the material world.

And then I started wondering about how this greater push to understand - or at least codify - the tools we use to build narratives in our fiction might have influence on the way we use narratives in the rest of our life. The fact that the news works hard to build a coherent and easy to understand narrative (even - or especially - when the reality is far more complicated) is quite well understood, and everyone tends to have a story about themselves, where they came from, what sort of person they are and where they are going... we use labels of all sorts a lot. I'm wondering if a deeper understanding of how we construct our fiction might help us understand the fictions we build unconsciously as well as those we design intentionally.

Honestly, I almost feel like just that image is enough. There's so much I want to say just inspired by that flag.

I love it dearly. It sums up so much about what a flag is, when other flags just leave it implicit. This flag says: We are bound together by blood and violence. Without the AK-47 assault rifle, this flag would not exist. The country would not exist. We accept that, we glorify it. We are proud of it.

Countries are built on people trying to convince you that you've got more in common with them than Those People. Those other people, with their different flags and different leaders. You don't associate with THOSE people; they've got different colors. They think different things are important. People have fought and died for these colors and these beliefs. Your flag says you are on this team.

There aren't many countries which so completely embrace being born in the modern age. A shared history lends legitimacy to the nation, and people like to call back hundreds of years or more if they can. It helps us feel like the nation is a 'real' thing. Because if a lot of people have believed the same thing for a long time, it feels more acceptable than it would otherwise.

This is also at least part of the reason, as the Soviet Union collapsed, old grudges which had been suppressed when everyone was part of the USSR (or would be shot for being different) came back full force. When we are all wearing the same flag, its fine. When you're wearing the flag your great-great-great-great-great grandfather was wearing when he stabbed mine, I'm going to stab you.

But this flag wears its story openly, and to eyes used to seeing flags that try not to wear violence out there for everyone to see, it looks ridiculous. Most people look at it and assume it is some sort of sick joke. Actually, I think it is one of the most honest flags I've ever seen, and one which might accurately represent a true struggle of a people, with a true shared history, in a way that older countries have forgotten.

Maybe every generation should redesign its nation's flag, put together something that they feel really says something about them, rather than just trying to continue on with the old one because that's what it was a hundred years ago. We're asked to respect the flag because it says something about us... but does it? How many flags were designed in countries that now resemble anything like the state they were in when they were first made?

I suspect not very many.

[always knew]

We're held prisoner by our past.

At some point or another, I think everyone has said something stupid. What I'm noticing more and more, though, is that if you are a public figure, you're expected to stand by everything you've ever said. The chances that you've never expressed a stupid view or made a mistake in public are vanishingly small (and really, if you're the sort of politician who has managed to engineer that, you're probably one of the sleazier sorts who wanted to be President/Prime Minister since the age of 12).

But this is starting to spread out of the world of politics and into our general culture. People get fired or arrested for shit they say on facebook, employers google applicants before making their decision, and a motivated person will have little trouble tracking down embarrassing facts to use to undermine the person rather than address what they are saying. The ad hominem has become the new standard; it is easier than ever to discredit the person speaking.

And there seems to be a general fear of backing down. If you own it and admit you were wrong but you've changed your mind, or you regret saying what you said and wish you hadn't... you're either weak, a liar, or both. People don't want to hear an explanation, they want an excuse to work themselves into a froth of indignant outrage and declare, triumphantly, that they always knew deep down that person was scum.

Its an easy point. One misguided statement or embarrassing photo, and you're going to carry that label forever. No wonder politicians seem so frightened of saying things definitively, they have to constantly worry about whether what they say today - even in private or intimate moments - will be used to attack them tomorrow.

Okay, I'm probably going to ramble even more than I usually do here, so please try and bear with me. I almost stopped myself posting it at several points as I put it together because of... well, I think that'll become apparent.

:discordia:

'Aw they got their fee-fees hurt'.

'Man up.'

'Fuck em if they can't take a joke'.

All these things are basically shorthand. They communicate something really simple: it isn't my fault you got offended, it is your fault for being so sensitive.

Now, I'm not going to lobby for censorship. If you want a community where all comments are strictly monitored to ensure there's no possibility of offence or upset, there's plenty of those around. PD.com has always been fairly rough-and-tumble in its approach, but the fact is that this risks becoming its own form of censorship.

'If I speak up, I will be attacked'.

People feel this way, so they don't talk up. Maybe the only thing at risk is social capital, but you know what? The only thing to gain in a community like this is also social capital. If you're here, it is usually because you like the people here. You want them to like you. That's just how human beings work. Going against the pack is difficult, even when that pack is all about thinking for yourself.

When things devolve into attacks, it is because discussion has failed. I don't care about any 'schools' of thought which say it is alright to attack if you don't 'really' mean it. People use attacks to try and shut down the opponent. Joking around is great! But it is also often difficult to determine when there's only words on a screen to go by.

'Who I am' is not a construct entirely under your own control. It is also made up of how you think others see you. This is why, when a friend comes at you, it is so much more painful than when someone who you don't know does the same thing. Suddenly realizing that the people you think of as friends don't see you that way is a direct attack on who you think you are. In person, joking around and being insulting is a lot easier to deal with than over the internet. So many of the cues we rely on to tell when someone is 'really' attacking us compared to when it only looks that way are removed.

And that's why politeness is important in text-based communication. 

This isn't about protecting 'weak' people so much as it is about making a space in which discussion can actually occur. If you feel like you're under attack - and doubly so if you feel like you're under attack by people you actually care about - discussion isn't going to happen. It produces stress, confusion, upset and triggers a fight-or-flight response. We're not emotionless robots, and we can't respond to all things in a calm and dispassionate manner. Nor should we try to.

These aren't concepts you can make rules for, its just something to bear in mind when you post something. How will this look? What is the least charitable way it can be taken? Does what I have to say need to be said in this way, to have the conversation I want to have?

All we have to go on when you're talking here, are the words you choose to use. I think that there'd be a lot more worthwhile discussion if people were polite about their disagreement, rather than jumping to the offensive because 'that's what Discordia is all about'. It isn't. Its about all sorts of things, and the one thing those elements share is that people need to feel comfortable talking. When that's no longer true, conversation becomes an echo chamber, and the very thing that makes Discordia special, to me at least, goes away.

So this is a situation I doubt many of you guys (excluding those in the UK) will have heard much about.

For years, farmers have been petitioning to conduct a cull of the badger population under the belief that it will curb cases of bovine TB. Bovine TB numbers have been rising year on year, and on a radio programme recently, a member of the National Farmers Union was saying that if something isn't done, by 2020 we could have caused irrepairable damage to our cattle.

Animal protection groups have responded with various claims over the years. First they started with 'there is no link between badgers and bovine TB'. That has recently been replaced with claims that a cull could worsen the problem by causing badgers to flood into uninfected areas, or that it'll cost too much to sort out.

The reason they've changed tack is because in Ireland and Germany, a cull was conducted, and their bovine TB problem has been brought under control.

What irritated me about the radio programme was that the scientist they had on said he couldn't support a badger cull because - in the sciences - they work so very hard to keep down the number of lab animals killed in testing and this seemed to be a large double standard.

He didn't deny it was an issue. He didn't deny that the badger cull would sort out the problem (as it seems to have done so in other countries). He was purely interested in the double standard. Others have been desperate to link the calls for a cull to fox hunting - which is a whole other issue, and would not be carried out in a ruthlessly methodical fashion even if it were still legal. Because fox hunting is a sport, and an organized cull is most definitely not.

I live in a fairly rural area, so I admit this kind of conflation is close to my heart. Throughout the programme, the scientist kept continually implying that the farmer wouldn't want to discuss 'complicated science issues', despite the fact the farmer was going 'actually, we use a hell of a lot of tech on the farm, and in maintaining our equipment. I really love science. You can't be a modern farmer without knowing about this stuff too'.

But the necessity for a cull has become an entirely political issue, and the government have tried to appease both sides by limiting the cull to a trial in such a way that it won't have an appreciable effect. They are afraid of being seen as the heartless monsters who shot a million badgers, because the media will rip into them on the grounds that a primarily Conservative government are all fox-hating toffs, and the farmers get written off as animal haters. Which is such a baffling misconception when I compare it to the farmers I actually know I don't even know where to begin.

In the end, the evidence gets ignored, badgers continue to propagate at an unhealthy rate (spreading the TB further into the population as they go), and we continue to lose 40,000+ cattle per year. A number which will increase rapidly, and could stop almost completely if a simple plan were put into action in the past few months. And so it goes.

Just look at this place.

Rain sluices constantly down the buildings, stained yellow-green by pollution so deeply engrained that it simply can't be erased. People die here, ten years or more before they would otherwise, on average. Their lungs are the color of cigarette ash and coffee, and it is no secret. The children grow up different. Stunted, many of them will exit this life never having taken a really full breath. Still. I suppose it makes it easier not to listen to them.

There was a brief moment, a flare of indignation and anger which almost burned through the complacency. Then there was another, and another, but each was weaker than the last. Outrage needs fuel. Apathy smothers it, and so does resignation. How can you get worked up when you've seen that nothing ever changes? They don't even bother cracking skulls these days. They withdraw to a safe distance, let the crowd vent their anger, and then round everyone up later from photos taken during the chaos. The terrified single mother dragging her shopping away in one hand and her daughter in the other, as much a looter as the balaclava-clad youth raiding the cash register. Justice. One size fits all.

They promised that the world would end in 2012, and wouldn't that have been a mercy? Instead we get this shambling imitation. Fascists with mealy-mouths who can't quite bring themselves to outright say what they are implying. Passive-aggressive racists who'd rather stick up a poster than stand up and screech. At least if they were honest about it, they'd let us have the discussion. As though racism and sexism are no longer a problem, because they are so commonplace they've faded into the background. Shouting about the problem, now, is far worse than the problem itself, because damnit, we know this stuff is bad. We just don't want you to make a scene. And its not like we've reached socially unacceptable levels of bigotry yet.

No, those old barriers aren't being eroded, they're being given a lick of paint and shored up as the only alternative we have to poverty. Just like the environment. Because really, ensuring that you can breathe the air and drink the water are luxuries we can't afford. Making sure that the food you purchase isn't toxic, well, its more important that you keep purchasing instead. Don't you know there's a recession on? Or, there was. We might be out of it now. But don't talk about it too loudly, because if you do, the house of cards will come tumbling down and people will remember that they haven't got any money.

We need things to return to business as usual. So they will. Fear worked for a long time, then rage set in, now its time for apathy. People aren't even sure what the alternative to all this would look like. Even I'm not sure. Will we ever return to a time when the idea of principles and rights are more than just hollow buzzwords? It doesn't seem likely. It is just so much easier to be cynical. All of these people seem to be wearing masks, and they're all paper-mache thin.

I wouldn't mind so much, but they're just bad at it. Can't they at least tell me what I want to hear? Where's my comforting lie? These ones they spew at me are all just so depressing. Yesterday's lies repackaged and rebranded, but the same bad product underneath. Come on. I demand a better class of liar. Tell me that everything will be alright, tell me you've got the way out of this mess, but just please, don't tell me that it's one of the many ways we've already tried and failed. Give me something new to be swindled by. Is that so much to ask?

So I forget if I raved about this when it first appeared on the TV earlier this year, but my DVD arrived today and I'm rewatching the series so I thought I'd post up about it.

Utopia was a Channel 4 thriller released in 2013. It starts off with some grotesque murders, by people seeming to be after a comic book. The comic book is called 'The Utopia Xperiments', and is the work of a paranoid schizophrenic which has attracted a cult underground following.

As the plot unfolds, it becomes obvious there is a lot more to the book than there first seems. A shadowy para-governmental organization is working hard to recover the lost manuscript for the second part of it, and nobody knows why (at first). They are using and abusing the surveillance tech endemic to Britain to find it. They have infiltrated the government, and this is all somehow related to the purchase and distribution of a Russian flu vaccine...

Utopia showcases the potential abuses of power, including a truly hard-to-watch torture scene. It shows what it would be like to be an ordinary person unfairly accused of terrorism, what sort of measures could be used if a small faction within the state were determined to put a plan into action...

And most brilliantly of all, as the series unfolds and the reason why all of this madness has been unleashed becomes clear, it isn't just because 'government is evil' or 'authority is bad'. It isn't obvious, and I don't want to spoil the fantastic twists and turns (right up to the last episode) for people who haven't seen it... but every character has a reason for doing what they do, and that motivation is entirely believable within the broader context of the show.

I really can't recommend this series enough. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available in the United States, but if you have a region-free DVD player, the UK DVD is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utopia-DVD-Alexandra-Roach/dp/B00APGRPBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382613419&sr=8-1&keywords=utopia

Your new avatar gives me the heebie jeebies.

That is all.

I had this weird flash of inspiration when I was at work yesterday. I've spent most of today scribbling notes for it... I'm not sure if it is actually going to go anywhere, and I'm not sure I'm happy with this as the first part of it... but I AM sure I could spend weeks poking at it and I still wouldn't be entirely happy or entirely sure (and I probably will, at that). I thought I'd put it up and see what y'all make of it.

A Pack of Cards

The Queen's footsteps sounded somehow hollow. The marble felt cold under foot. She supposed, in a detached kind of way, that it had always been a very old place, this palace, and yet, it was only recently that she had begun to feel old. How long had it been since they had someone fun in to visit? Well, there was that annoying little giant, but, that was a very long time ago, and now...

The poor King was so sick these days, so weak. She felt it too, of course. They weren't necessary any more. Who is afraid of the Queen, eh? No, there were new shapes in the kingdom now. Gleaming metal and menace on silent wings. Unthinking automata who had no time for riddles and games, men who spoke only in truthful lies, and the terrifying Hungers, which ate the forests and gnawed on the hills and the mountains, drank rivers dry and turned farms into desert. The Court grew quieter every year. Even the cheerier subjects seemed to make less sense to her. She swore she'd seen the cat playing with a box full of lights and noise, beaming words through the air to all his catty friends. What a horrible age. Why, even the visitors were less fun. She already knew what to expect from these lost souls. Not excitement, or terror, or delirium, but instead a hateful indignation as scornful as her own.

The trumpets heralded her arrival with the same, tired, salute that they are obliged to give, and as she settled down on her throne, her face was thunder. In the old days, her husband would try to talk her out of it, or give a cheeky pardon on the sly. Well, aside from that business with the Duchess, but she was a child abuser anyhow, and the evidence really was overwhelming, even if they'd made up their mind before they saw it. These visitors were too stupid to think they could really be in any danger, even if they had to sail through the Dead Accountant's Sea to get here. It made her blood boil.

"Off with their heads."

But even that brought her no pleasure, and there was no zeal in it. They instead started bleating, again, about overdue council tax. "We're representatives of Her Majesty's Government!" One cried, and that brings a smile to her withered lips.

"No no, you WILL be." She corrected the absurd man in his oversized suit. "If governance isn't worth losing your head over, then what is? Right now, you represent nothing at all!"

The burst of vicious laughter that follows makes her courtiers look momentarily nervous. A shadow of the old days, and she sighs, sitting heavily back into the throne. She did KNOW it was all a joke, back then, of course. She was mad, not stupid. She knew that her silly old husband would curb her excesses, and that nobody ever actually really died for speaking out of turn... but it made her feel better to keep up the pretence, and now? Now nobody ever really stopped her, but nobody ever said anything to provoke her, either. She'd gotten everything she'd ever wanted.

It was a fate worse than – well, no. This afternoon she'd go out to watch the axeman at work, and that, at least, would help her reflect on the fact that things most certainly could be worse. For now, she'd just let her eyes close and...

"Your majesty! Your majesty! Oh, your majesty! I'm so dreadfully sorry I'm late! But I have magnificent news! Terrific news, may I even say, wonderful news!"

The Queen's eyes opened, and there was the Rabbit. Her brow knit slowly, and curiosity, for a moment, doused her raising irritation. She'd known the Rabbit to be many things, but rarely ever a liar. "Mmm? Well, spit it out, then, or you'll chew it up to nothing at all."

"We found the way out! To the Angle Land!"

And just like that, the day became interesting. The Queen's eyes lit up, and she sprang to her feet. Her guards, immediately, at attention themselves.
"Well then!" She declared, clapping her hands together, "Lead on, dear Rabbit, lead on! We've punishments to fit for crimes, and tarts to collect! We've lost so much time... but what other use do we have for it? The clock will tick on whether we notice or not."

And so the Queen of Hearts, and much of her Court, followed the White Rabbit back up out of the rabbit hole, and stepped blinking into the real madhouse.

I'd be surprised if this hasn't been discussed here before, but it is an issue (well, series of issues) that I've been doing a lot of thinking about lately.

Here on PD.com we've got a community which is aggressively accepting. By that, I mean racism, sexism, classism and all manner of other 'isms' are usually drawn out, and the people who hold those views mocked and berated. The community has managed to do this without overbearing moderation, authoritarian rules or arduous barriers to entry. I could well be wrong, but I think that this might make PD.com unique amongst internet communities. We also tend to celebrate creativity, even if the product isn't something we personally like.

The internet in general is a hostile environment. If you aren't a white, middle class, english-speaking male, then it suddenly becomes a lot more hostile still. This isn't anything new. Laurie Penny wrote some [link=http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/laurie-penny-a-womans-opinion-is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html]interesting words[/link] about this problem back in 2011, as a female political voice. You don't have to go far to find evidence that female commentators receive many times the amount of hatemail - and much of it in far more... visceral colors - than their male counterparts.

Creatives in general find themselves subjected to massive amounts of criticism and flak. People latch on to those who produce things they dislike, and wait for the moment to strike. The PA Report was what initially got me thinking about all this, when Phil Fish announced he wasn't going to be continuing work on his latest game because [link=http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/swimming-in-a-sea-of-shit-the-internets-war-against-creatives]fuck it enough is enough.[/link] Whether or not Fish 'deserved' it (he had a reputation for trolling right back), the journalist recounted:

I was somewhere outside the United States having a conversation with another critic about our respective jobs. The subject of whether we had ever thought of quitting came up, and he told me a story about sharing the death of a family member on social media, a loss that had affected him greatly.

Someone sent him the following message: "Good." He told me that was the first time he had seriously thought about quitting, that the job just wasn't worth the nearly constant stream of abuse you're forced to endure online.

These are the stories we rarely tell.

Its easy to say 'just ignore it', but we all know that it isn't quite that easy. Like Jonathan Blow says, after you've read the words, they've had their emotional impact.

And sometimes that impact can be devastating. Type the words 'Cyberbullying Suicide' into google, and you'll find dozens of different cases where vulnerable people committed suicide after being hounded on the internet. I'm not saying that in all (or even most) of these cases, simply saying mean things online was the root issue... but that's the trouble. 'Saying mean things online' sounds very trivial. But in fact, there are people who - because they are professionals, or because they got caught saying something rude, or because they are just plain unlucky - are subjected to unending torrents of abuse. This is even more difficult to escape now that there is some expectation that you'll use social networking sites attached to your real life. It is possible to do without them (I do!) But... should the price for entry be to risk this kind of speech?

Throw into the mix that the internet also discourages 'white knighting', expecting everyone to stand alone as an unfeeling automaton - and seizing on any reaction to feed the flames...

I feel like I've made my case that the problem is real. What I'm less sure on is how to do anything about it. Popularly, the received wisdom has been that not feeding the trolls will make them go away ... that is demonstrably not the case for those who have to live in the public eye. Just plain ignoring people doesn't really help, either. Its a passive action, and not one people can actively work to assist.

One idea I've seen is to just post in solidarity with the person being attacked, if it is somewhere public. A genuine Internet White Knights group could be amusing, sallying forth into the wild and thorny wasteland to shame and belittle idiots. But, we know that attacking people more often than not entrenches their views. The question then becomes whether it is still worth doing. Much of a big troll feeding frenzy is me-tooers leaping on the bandwagon and trying to get kudos for backing up the ringleaders. Could the general atmosphere of discussion be lightened by trying to take the PD approach of pointing out idiocy, out there? It seems like a daunting task, and there's probably not enough of us even if everyone on the board went with it. On the other hand, the hope would be that by making it acceptable to speak up, other people would too.

It occurs to me even as I type that, that what I'm describing is essentially a recipe to an even more epic flamewar...

But I'd be curious if anyone else has any ideas. I'd also like to point out I think there's a major difference between PD.com style trolling, and the death threats, misogyny and racism which I'd particularly like to see an end to. Most trolling I've seen from this forum has been based in humor, and pointing out the absurdity in other communities. Not trying to strong-arm people out of debate or their chosen profession.

Its that time again, so drink up your cocoa, get all tucked in warm and tight, and DemoSquid will tell you the story of the Princess' New Clothes. Which may be considered Not Entirely Safe For Work because hot damn they were some clothes, y'all.

Once upon a time, there was a pretty Princess. The prettiest Princess in all the land. So pretty, she ran for four seasons with 98 episodes, two movies, and had 6.2 million viewers. Survey says, "That's pretty!"



But all was not well in the land. The King's Jester, Curly, had gone missing years before the Princess was even born, and no matter how hard she tried, the Princess couldn't put a smile on their faces the same way he could.



The Princess decided she was going to help. But how?



Not being a dumb Princess, she studied and studied and studied, and finally, she thought she found her answer. She'd throw a huge show, and remind them what Curly always said.



The night of the big party came, and everyone was there. The Princess made sure she was dressed just right, and got out on stage.



The King was shocked.



The people were stunned.



And yet, none of them were laughing! The Princess wasn't disappointed, though. She knew she just had to dance harder.



And HARDER.



AND TAKE IT TOTALLY TO THE WALL.



If the people were shocked before, now there were riots in the stands. The dance hall was full of blood, someone set fire to the roof, and the King was forced to call out his Royal Drones to restore the proper levels of Peace™.



The Princess, though, didn't care at all. She skipped off the stage with her hammer to uh, wash her hair.



The People talked about her for days and days.



"Does she KNOW what she was wearing?" They wondered aloud, "Does she KNOW what we're saying about her? Just look at her over there, SMILING!"



But of course, the Princess did know, she just didn't care. Only Emperors are allowed to parade around in whatever they liked, but she knew Curly never had any truck with that.



And so, she wasn't going to let it bother her, either. But as the days wore on, the unrest grew even greater. People were even saying that the Princess was being UNAMERICAN, and we can't have that in our monarchy, now can we?



No, we can't. So, with a heavy heart, the Princess set out on the road to find Curly for herself. After all, if anyone could settle the kingdom down, it'd be him. But she'd barely set foot on the road when she met a strange man.



"Why do you look so upset?" He asked, "You're walking AWAY from the stupid! Breadstick?"



The Princess lit up her breadstick, and as she exhaled, she realized. "Hey. You're right. And I've got this bag stuffed full of gold, too. Screw those guys! Lets go find Curly, I bet he'd get a chuckle out of this."



So they walked off into the sunset, and the Kingdom burned happily ever after.



The End.

I didn't see anything about this, so I thought I'd put it together because I find it interesting.

The MPs Expenses row caused huge outrage at the time. MPs resigned in disgrace, some were charged with criminal action. It was, perhaps, the biggest political scandal that the UK has seen in a decade.

A few weeks ago I saw a headline claiming that MPs had 'record breaking' expenses this year. Nobody really seemed to care, there weren't hours upon hours dedicated to it this time.

In fact, MP expenses directly labelled as 'expenses' have fallen from £34m in 2010 to £23m this year, and no longer include things like moat cleaning services and porn. However, staffing costs have increased, and in total the bill, taking both sources of expense, has risen by 7% on last year, to £98m. This brings the total cost of each MP (excluding - I think - the wage for the MPs themselves, but including the cost of staff for their offices) to £150,769 each. Adding in the salary of the average MP (not including extra wages for select committee chairs etc) we come to a final cost of £217,165 before factoring in extra revenue sources (select committee chairs, etc).

Now that the fury has faded away, the total cost has risen rather than fallen. 'Expenses' aren't where they are fiddling any more - it seems that paying family members £25-£50k each instead is how MPs are bilking the public. All of this information is now available publicly... but hey, it isn't for duck houses any more, so there's no point getting upset.

(All of these figures taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24063954)

So hay PD.com.

Last time I touched base, I was being hunted by trams in Amsterdam. I then disappeared for a long time. I thought I'd pop my head back in to see what was going on with you spags, and let you guys know what was up with me. Be warned that this is incredibly spammy and self-indulgent, all about my life and woes... but hey, it felt good to write it all down, anyway. Maybe some of you will get a kick out of it!

Amsterdam was horrible. I went over for a conference, and it was nothing at all like I was hoping for. I wanted to discuss the subjects and engage with the material... almost nobody else there was interested in talking about anything other than their own research and sometimes not even that. Highlights included the woman who loudly and repeatedly asserted that all issues and subjects were fundamentally expressions of the repression of communist urges in western society since the collapse of the USSR, to the fact that the panel I was invited to speak on was originally billed to have four speakers. I was the only one there on time, one more turned up ten minutes late, and another forty minutes into the one hour talk. The fourth never appeared. Greatly disappointed, I skipped back home a day early.

When I got back, I was informed I no longer had a job. As I was working on a 'freelance' basis, I wasn't entitled to any notice period. I'd spent all my savings getting to and back from Amsterdam, and so, without any other options, I moved back in with my parents. I hoped at the time that I'd be able to jump back into work pretty quickly. The last time I was out of work, I didn't have any experience. This time, I'd worked for 13 months, I had a great letter of recommendation (my immediate boss thought I was awesome, and was actually in tears when she said she had to let me go... which was weird. Despite how shit it was for me, she took it harder than I did!) I didn't think it was going to take long to find another position.

Six months later, and I'm seriously depressed. I managed to have four interviews. The first literally never told me why they didn't want to hire me, never responded to my email or phone message inquiring why - I can only presume I did something so traumatically horrible in the interview they repressed all memory of me. The second said they felt I was overqualified. The third asked me to dance, and I refused - they said they were hiring another person who had demonstrated more 'commitment' to the company. I didn't realize that the funky chicken dance was such an important part of the modern office environment.

The most depressing one was when I decided to start going back for internships. I felt worthless, and I was willing to do anything by this stage just to get out of the house. I interviewed for an internship position with a major London marketing firm. I knocked it out of the fucking park at interview. It was less than minimum wage to start, but with a quick boost to generous levels that would let me move back out of home. The interviewers were both impressed with me, I was even introduced to the COO and head of human resources before I left. We talked for three hours, when it was supposed to be an hour long interview - I felt pretty confident I was going to get it.

Weeks passed with no response. I emailed them back, and they apologized for taking so long to get back to me. There was a far more experienced candidate, who had actually done the full time, fully paid role that the internship would progress to after a year, for six years. He was happy to start at the bottom and work his way up again. They complimented my intelligence, said that I clearly had a head that would be great in the marketing space, and wished me luck.

I was crushed. Honestly, I didn't want to do marketing anyway; it seemed like a horrible way to use my talents, but I did want to get paid and be my own person. It was the nicest possible rejection they could have given me... but how the hell can I compete for entry level jobs against people like that?

In the background on this, I'd been vastly increasing the amount of time I spent playing online roleplaying games. I was a huge fan of text-based roleplaying, where players essentially do collaborative writing to tell stories. I have been in these communities for about eight years, and when I was at university or working, that wasn't a problem. Without something else in my life, though, I began dedicating twelve, fourteen hours a day to the games. One of my closest friends IRL suffered a mental breakdown after being hit by a car (and reversed over, shattering his leg). Another couple had a baby. Another moved across the country. Days would pass where the only contact I had with another human being was through the game... and I began to prioritize my 'game' friends over my real life. The game had never let me down, it was always there to distract me. Its disturbing looking back on it, but at the same time, I am thankful I had something. I honestly don't know what I would have done, stuck in a tiny village with no money (jobseekers allowance was being used to pay off the various debts I'd managed to accrue), and nobody to talk to.

About four months ago, though, I heard about a seminar. 'How to Write for the BBC' or words to that effect. It was free, and my dad offered to take me there. I went, and it was genuinely inspiring. Not just because the man who gave the talk was great, but because of how much what he said I already knew. I've always dabbled in writing, and with the amount of roleplaying I'd done, I already 'got' everything he was talking about in story structure, dialogue use, and tone. What I didn't know about was the format used and how to break into that world. I've always dreamed of being a 'real' writer, but until I heard this guy talk, I never believed it was a realistic goal to set for myself.

On the way back from the seminar, I ranted and raved about everything we'd discussed. I'd taken pages of notes. My dad said it was the first time he'd ever really seen me really passionate about something that wasn't political. I'm not a very excitable person, really, but I was excited. Really, truly. It felt as though someone had given me permission to do what I wanted with my life.

I never wanted to be one of those people who is perpetually 'writing a screenplay' or 'working on a novel'. I was so terrified of being labelled a social dropout that, ironically, I became a social dropout. My self esteem had taken such a huge beating over the long period of unemployment and my consistent inability to find anything to apply my degree to that I was leaning hard on this game community (where I was considered awesome for my ability to string two sentences together), and refusing to do anything else.

We talked a lot about where to go from here. My parents wanted to support me (and I am hugely grateful to them for that), and I managed to get part time work at a supermarket cafe. There are weeks where I earn less money now than I would if I was doing literally nothing and continuing to claim jobseekers allowance, but it feels fantastic to be working again, even if it is only part time. In the four months since I decided to try and make a go of it as a writer, I've finished three short pieces, almost finished two longer pieces, and sent sketches in to the BBC. There's a surprising amount of opportunities out there, and even though the feedback has largely been 'this is good but not quite good enough' so far, I feel like I'm on the right track. Another competition comes up in two weeks, and I've got a piece read for that, too. The BBC accepts submissions three times per year through their 'writers room' project, which should hopefully be opening again soon. That's what I'm working on at the moment, trying to finish up my first piece longer than 20-30 minutes so I can submit it. I've no illusions that I'm going to get selected first time, or even get feedback; they estimate they give a proper critique to 1/1000 entrants, and then take forward 1/10 of those who respond to the critique. But I feel like I've got direction, and I'm enjoying what I'm doing.

Last week, I also finally stepped away from the world of online gaming for good. It hasn't been easy; being a part of that community has felt like a major part of my identity since before I was really an adult. But, I realized that it no longer felt like fun. It felt like an obligation, and it was cutting into time I would rather spend with my friends IRL or working on my writing projects. My buddy has recovered from his breakdown, and is back out and about. My two friends with the baby now want to try and get together once every week-two weeks to help them stay sane (and the baby is freaking adorable. She's called Eris, by the way. That made me laugh). I've started doing face to face tabletop roleplaying once a week with these guys and a few other friends I haven't given enough time to over the past year... and I don't feel like I need to supplement that with even more distractions.

But PD.com has also been a large part of my life, and I don't consider you guys distractions. The truth is, after moving back in with my parents, it felt embarrassing to admit that I'd taken a step backwards in my life. No job, no girlfriend, no home, no prospects ... and maybe it is still a little embarrassing that I have to rely on my family right now. But I feel hopeful about the future, and even if it doesn't work out, at least I feel like I'm making positive progress, now. I'm not just stagnating, and I'm not relying on someone else to give me work; I'm producing what I want to produce, and that's a great feeling.