Pressies!

Well, the parcel was not from Missouri. I still have sweeties, though, and a pretty silver caduceus pendant courtesy navytron89. I don't have Junior Mints, though. Junior Mints were sent, don't get me wrong, but it turns out that vacuum-sealing two boxes of Junior Mints in a bag with some other stuff and then shipping it across the Atlantic results in two misshapen blocks of chocolate mint concoction wrapped in sticky cardboard. This would not have deterred me - I would have cut the blocks into slices and had Junior Mint Loaf or something - but I couldn't get the cardboard off the concoction blocks, so I'll have to settle (if you want to call it that; I'm really too squeeful about it to praise it with such faint damnation) for Hershey's Kisses, Sour Patch Kids and Pixy Stix. Thank you, thank you, navytron89.

Yesterday was fun. I haven't done the pub lunch thing in ages, haven't seen nadriel in ages, and certainly haven't run an off-the-cuff plot in ages. Still, it seems to have gone well, everyone enjoyed themselves (which, leaving aside the whole thing where this was supposed to be my 'just sit back and enjoy the game' style Christmas present, is the real point of such events) and weaselbitch has quotes. Oh, and weaselbitch blew up half of Barnet in-game. The perils of having a Battle Psychic PBT.

I'm currently trying to work out if I can be arsed to go and return those boots today. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night and don't really want to trek anywhere. Plus I suppose I could technically do it tomorrow, Sunday shopping and all. So I'll go and check on my deathgnome and think on it a bit, and see how I feel after the caffeine has kicked in.

Stuff and Nonsense

Poor dodgyhoodoo has a cold. We are a house of invalids, hooray.

On the other hand ... I have Pixy Stix! Now all I need is a plot worthy of the sugar-crack. Or someone to RP with. Whichever works.

In the meantime, however, I am going to go and generate some gil in FFXI. I'm finding that having my cooking skill cranked is a good thing. See, if you're high level and are trying to make stuff that's capped below your skill level, you can make High Quality versions of the stuff you were trying to make. The HQ versions are sold for higher prices, which is nice. I'll have to try making some lower level stuff and see what happens - if I occasionally get HQ versions of stuff that's capped one level below my skill level, maybe if I try making stuff that's 10 levels below my skill level, I'll get more HQ items. You never know. Anyway, my garden's about exhausted of vegetable seeds, and when everything's harvested, I'll go to Kazham and level up to 30. Yay.

Media Bondage and the Ministry of Truth

...sonuvabitch!

Labour's flagship freedom of information laws are being blocked by ministers who are increasingly refusing to answer routine inquiries about government policy, new figures show.

So the government puts in this Freedom of Information act - the "right to know" laws. Of course, they don't always give full and frank answers and couch everything in political doublespeak as often as they can get away with, but now they're just not answering at all. Except even that's apparently not good enough. Oh no. Because, of course, while many people are getting disheartened and just not asking anymore, others are asking awkward questions and getting the media involved. So of course they can't get away with Newspeak forever. They had to find another way of dealing with the naughty public who actually wants to know what their government is considering doing to them.

So now the government is going to court to try to get the public to stop using the Freedom of Information Act. Now it says, "for even innocuous information about 'the formulation' of policy", but that's pretty well redundant. Because, of course, by the time it's been formulated, it's become policy and there's not a whole lot we can do about it because what weak protests the current body public would muster would inevitably be met with, "Well, it's policy now; it would be costly to undo this and do you want to pay more taxes? No? Then shut up". Apparently, the government of what, when last I checked, was a fucking democracy should not have the formulation of its policy 'harmed' by ... I dunno, the people that this government is supposed to serve. Last I checked, public say into government policy wasn't harm - it was democracy. How many times am I going to have to shout "BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE!" before someone listens?

And you know what? That's not even all of it. If the legal case mentioned above goes well, the next step is to introduce regulations that will stop the media from making full use of the FoI Act. Not only will they reduce the number of requests for information that the media is allowed to make, but they're going to take the time it takes for the government bods to decide whether the media should have this information into account when considering whether to charge the media for the information it's getting. So now the media is looking like being reduced to buying information from a government who put all these regulations into place to make government 'more transparent' and are now snatching all those regulations away and/or ignoring them.

The last chunk of the article linked to above is particularly interesting - it outlines the requests for information that have been denied by the relevant offices. They run quite the gamut, these requests, and while some of them seemed to be someone trying it on, a lot of this stuff was stuff that should be a matter of public record. The cost of guarding Charles and Camilla, for example. What, the public doesn't have a right to know where its tax dollars are going? The report on the impact that the government's plans for compulsory ID cards will have - um ... excuse me, that's us you're talking about. Apparently, we can't see all of the correspondence and documentation supporting the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war in Iraq, despite the fact that it's our citizens and our tax dollars going to fight the fucking war. They won't disclose any information about the future funding of Britain's schools, the detention of UK residents in Guantanamo Bay, the decision to reclassify cannabis ... and of course, they certainly won't discuss the upcoming court case to get the Freedom of Information Act pretty well shredded or the 'clearing house' to which all 'difficult' public queries go. But they're happy to release all information that might embarrass the Opposition.

I don't think there are enough swear words. I want out of this country. Hell, I want off this planet. This government makes laws that are supposed to make you look frank and open and then, once again, proves that it is run by somebody who really just seems to want power for the sake of it. They speak Newspeak. They expect Doublethink from us. And for the most part, they get it. There is no part of this that does not make me sick.

Ganked from darkdanc3r

Leave a list of 10 fictional characters in your journal that you would love to get a message from. It is your friend-list's mission, should they choose to accept it, to write you an in-character "letter" from a character on that list. Then they post their own list in their journal and the process continues!

( The List )

I couldn't do any of the ones on darkdanc3r's list because I really don't know her fandom. At all. I'm not sure how many mine'll get either, but one never knows until one asks.