Finish Line In Sight

47,912 / 50,000 (95.8%)

Whoopee! I could have that finished in a couple of hours! Now if I only knew what my climax was...

I went shopping. I got shinies for a couple of the people on my "To Buy For" list (very vague and possibly abbreviated this year). I also got myself another iTunes card, so I now have new music. Then I walked along New Bond Street through Old Bond Street and over to Piccadilly that way. Long way around, true, but they'd shut down both streets to string up the Christmas lights and they had snow machines on alternate upper story windows, so it really did look like it was snowing. That really made it feel like Christmas shopping. I didn't approve of them keeping penned-up reindeer in the road, but I wasn't exactly going to start the Reindeer Liberation Front. I was far too knackered.

Oh, and more chaos on the Northern Line; signal failure that got me kicked off the High Barnet train at Camden Town. So I went to Edgeware instead and then got the 460 home. I'm telling you, the Northern Line hates me.

Tomorrow's Friday, yay! One more day and I'll have a weekend. I can finish the NaNo and design signs for Dragonmeet and all that good stuff. Yay!

December Deadlines

So dodgyhoodoo tells me that the books we ordered for Dragonmeet are already in Borehamwood. They will be arriving at the house today. This means dodgyhoodoo is going to scamper off home early to collect them. And that we have books already.

...We have books already! Agh! It's just over a week before Dragonmeet, you realise. One week to go and then I'm going to be running games and selling things and ... AGH! I shall go totally bugfuck. I may have to wait until after all the running and things to properly descend into bugfuckery, but it will happen. Just you wait and see.

Too many deadlines, too little time. So far what I have is:

Days until end of NaNoWriMo: 5
Days until Dragonmeet: 7
Days until my mother's birthday: 24
Days until Christmas: 30

There needs to be a plan. So far what I've got is "Finish NaNo, spend the remaining time working on Dragonmeet stuff, do Dragonmeet, have nervous breakdown, shop". It'll have to do. But at least I got niftiness for people. dodgyhoodo apparently envies my organisational skills. Which is odd, because I feel about as well organised as London public transport.

Speaking of, I was smart and checked the TfL website before I left the house. It said, "Minor delays on the Northern Line due to a signal failure at Finchley Central". Again. So, remembering the fact that yesterday they were taking "Minor delays" to mean "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!", I took the Piccadilly Line instead. Got to work on time, too, even taking into account the stop I made in Sainsburys' for instant coffee and a cinnamon danish. So it's not all bad.

What is bad is that, following up from my post yesterday about rape statistics and whether or not women who were considered to be dressing provocatively or flirting and then raped were in part responsible for what had happened to them, kixie makes mention of a recent Times article in which they talk about a recent rape case that made the papers. Apparently, women who are raped while drunk are losing the right to press charges -- something about how "drunken consent is still consent". One of the people commenting on kixie's comment asked if that applied to people whose drinks have been spiked, bringing up 'roofies' as an example. While rohypnol is a problem, I'd also bring up the possibility of simply spiking a woman's drink with more alcohol; things like vodka don't taste like much and it's fairly easy to keep ordering doubles for the lady instead of singles. In short, there are some serious holes in this argument.

I'm not sure I agree with the way this has been done, either. In this case, the suspected rapist was working as a security guard and had been charged with seeing the woman home safely because she'd had way too much to drink. It's fair to say that if the woman in the case was that drunk, she probably didn't initiate anything, though that was never called into question. No one ever really questioned her allegation that she was unconscious at the time, either, which is odd given that it's kind of hard to give consent when you're not aware of your surroundings. They just said, "Drunken consent is still consent", not taking it into account that the suspected rapist might have started to molest her and continued straight on to sex because she didn't say no. It may not have occurred that she didn't say no because she was too intoxicated to protest, which is a different thing than "consenting". It just strikes me as wrong, if easier for the courts to deal with, that a rapist is let free just because his victim made a mistake. Getting carried away can happen to anyone, and it seems wrong that a door has now been opened for men to take advantage.

The worst part about this, though? The judge ordered the jury to vote 'not guilty' even if they disagreed. Direct quote. And no one argued with him. What's the point of a trial by jury if the jury's being told what to do? It just strikes me as a fallacy of justice to have a judge say, "This is what I think; vote the way I think". Gah.

All kinds of finish lines...

I am feeling woefully underslept. Oh well. We have come to the end of the week now, and I can lie in tomorrow if need be. And I think there will be need, because I'm going to have to at least try to make a final push on the NaNo either tonight or tomorrow. Probably not tonight, though, as I've been on the verge of falling asleep at my desk all day.

However, one good thing is that we got the finalised floor plans etc for Dragonmeet. Lobby; yay! Actually, I think the demo table's about where cholten99 and I played Principia Malefax when I first went to DM two years ago. Same side of the hall, a little further away from the stage. Still, it's near friendly faces and my own stall and is in the same room as corone is running his Buffy / Dr Who crossover game, so at least I won't be nervous all by myself. Then again, there will be people there to notice me screwing up. I just can't win. :)

So the floor plan is with us, the books are here, and I know we have a wall upon which to stick a sign, should we so choose. Things really are getting organised, aren't they? Now all we have to do is hope that there's not such a huge delay in getting the T-shirts in as there was the first lot; I won't mind not getting the coffee mugs if we can just get the T-shirts in. Also hope that lot's not overly heavy; if it is, I hate to think of the cost of getting a taxi from here all the way to Kensington...