The Thessaliad Redux

So somehow - and I'm not sure how I managed this, considering the timeline involved - I mastered the keyboard controls for Mass Effect. Seriously; I came home, thought that I would give the keyboard another shot rather than try to change the settings on my Xpadder profile for the 360 controller again, and I started right from the beginning of the Eden Prime mission as sort of a warm-up act. Surprisingly, I did really well, and got through it with a minimum of fuss, beyond the problem with Eden Prime blowing up with me on it. Yeah, Saren's a dick. And I eventually had to Google the location of the explosive charges because I couldn't find the last one. Now I'm in the Citadel, poking at things in a typical 'doing random shit for money' sort of way and trying to track down Garrus.

I also have a pre-game story in my head for my Earthborn street-rat-made-good war hero Shep. Because I'm like that.

I will probably at some point have a bit of a rant about how shit the wonderful world of the internet seems to be going at the moment - for instance, Google tracking its users universally across all its services and sharing data on user activity on all of them, which really is just turning the damn thing into Facebook and reducing the whole right to privacy thing given the hurdles they put on using a pseudonym on Google services. (Incidentally, I am now looking for another RSS feed reader, as that and searches are the only thing I use Google for now anyway.) But right now I am not in the mood. Partly this is because the coffee has not kicked in yet, I am fed up with the typing and on the whole, I want the weekend to be now, please.

I've been thinking on and off about SOPA lately. I think most of you are aware of the "Stop Online Piracy Act" by this point, though why I'm assuming that I'm not entirely sure. I still haven't seen a single f'ing mention of it in any major news outlet - not the BBC, not the Guardian, certainly not the Metro, and I don't think it's that different in the US than it is here.

And oddly? It's this silence that makes me as virulently anti-SOPA as I am.

Look, it's like this: SOPA gives the power to have entire sites shut down on just a suspicion of copyright infringement. No investigation, no innocent-until-proven, and certainly no time to take down that single bit of offending material. Whole site can just be shut down until it's sorted out whether the site owner is guilty of copyright infringement or not. That could take months.

Imagine doing that to LJ. "Oh, someone posted a screencap!" or something equally stupid. Or Tumblr. Or Twitter. Or any of the ways that we as information-loving folks have actually spread word about things like SOPA (and, prior to that, the NDAA) in the first place. Without those, most of us would have no idea about this sort of shit, because the big media franchises sure as hell aren't covering it, no matter how newsworthy it is.

We don't really need evidence of how far into each other's pockets the news media corporations and the politicians are at this point. While journalists were once proud of being the ones who broke Watergate wide open, the folks who get employed in Big News these days are generally the ones who accept and revel in the fact that a large percentage of the people seem to care more about a politician's genitalia and what they're doing with said genitalia than policy. The only ones who seem to actually care about the shit that matters, instead of just the shit that sells, are the ones who aren't being paid for it - or at least, not getting paid well. The internet is not just for porn, or for piracy - it's the only place freelancers have left to actually talk about actual substantial news ... well, at least that isn't the Podunk Times out of Nowhere, Middle America, anyway.

So the media corporations follow the spin of their pet politicians, who in turn pass legislation that serves the interests of their media corporation meal ticket, and it's this cronyistic cycle wherein we're all fed a bunch of crap that claims to be independent journalism but isn't and no one ever sees the Truth (a la Spider Jerusalem) ever again. There isn't even a hope of triangulating on the truth without bloggers poking their noses into every available bit of information out there and comparing stories. And you just know that blog host sites are going to end up going down the next time someone wants to pass some disgusting bit of legislation like the NDAA, if SOPA passes. And it'll take forever to get them back up and by that time, there'll be a nice shiny new violation of civil liberties reducing the Bill of Rights to toilet paper yet again with no hope of any input from ... y'know, the people. Because Fox News and CNN weren't going to talk about it and the independent blogging news folks couldn't, so no one would know.

Maybe this is paranoia talking, but ... seriously. When no newspaper or news site will mention SOPA at all but it's clearly everywhere online ... I am leery of a bill that will let people shut down entire websites on mere suspicion. I live in a world that looks more and more like Mira Grant's "Newsflesh" every day (just without the fun of zombies) - the bloggers are the rising stars of real journalism because they still seem to care about truth and freedom of expression, rather than just panem et circenses. And what happens to them when the internet is subject to such immediate, 'guilty until proven innocent' censorship as SOPA allows? It has unfortunate side effects.

There are so many other ways to fight online piracy without this. Most of them involve the companies in question revising their business models to fit the 21st century. Universal release dates, no region-specific crap, and maybe letting us transfer the media we've paid for to whatever format we see fit without crippling our computers with crappy DRM code. I imagine that TV channels would make way more money letting people subscribe to an online on-demand viewing channel (with the added bonus of ad revenue) than they ever have from ad revenue from things aired on TV and subscription charges from the cable channels. But even if the folks at Warner or Disney or wherever else actually realised this (which they probably don't because the people making these decisions probably still blame the VCR for fucking everything up for their market share), I don't think it'd fly. Too many elements of government, US or otherwise, have too vested an interest in silencing mainstream media sources to let the ability to censor the internet without looking like they're doing so slide so easily.

Put it to you like this: David Seaman had his Twitter account suspended because of OWS and NDAA-related tweets - and while Twitter seems to have tried to explain that, he's not alone. Just because you're paranoid, and all that...

People can talk about "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" all they want. But the implications of all this, viewed in the light of things already happening, look pretty fucking scary to me.

Free schools and academies must promote marriage.

CENTURY OF THE FRUITBAT, PEOPLE!

Look, there's nothing wrong with a heteromonogamous marriage ... if it is a good, stable heteromonogamous marriage. Sometimes they aren't. When they aren't, they should end. Anyone who stays together in any relationship 'for the sake of the children' is, in my opinion, being either selfish or simplistic. It is not good for any child to grow up in a household where the two people upon whom they rely for stability and comfort end up fighting over the least little thing, contradicting each other at every turn or, at best, maintain an air of cool acquaintanship and little more around one another. Children pick up on that shit, and however hard it may be to field the questions like, "But why don't you and Daddy love each other any more?" or "Is it my fault that Mummy went away?", it's a lot less psychologically damaging to any kid to be honest with them. Otherwise, you get, "Mummy and Daddy are really unhappy and it's my fault because me being here doesn't let them do what they want!" And don't think your kids won't know. They hear more than you think, they pick up more than you think and overall, they're not stupid.

And then we have other forms of stable relationship. And I'm not just talking same-sex couples, either; I mean stable poly relationships as well. People who love each other, have lived together for years and years, and the only reason they haven't got the legal bits of paper saying "Booya! Married!" is because the government is narrow-minded. Maybe the child isn't blood-related to one or more people within the relationship, but in the end, I don't see anything wrong with that. I see, "Hey, here's this person, they're in love with my parent - who has to love me because, hey, they're my parent - and they love me too, even though they don't have to!" From a kid's perspective, here's an adult who has a perfect 'get out of jail free' card for all those chores they know are annoying - parent-teacher conferences, doctor's appointments, field trip chaperonage, school volunteer stuff, pick-up and drop-off for other-birth-parent visitation, homework help, 'eat your greens' lectures, Saturday morning cartoons, etc etc etc - but they don't use it. Yes, kids are savvy enough to pick that up as love, even if they never show it and it's mixed in with resentment. (Let's face it, kids will play the 'you're not my real parent!' card if they can ... and take it from me, they'll feel really bad about it if the step-or-something-parent-ish really loves them. I've pulled that one on a live-in lover of my mother's who really loved me, and I apologised. I did it with my current stepfather and I still don't feel bad about it. There's a big difference.)

On the whole, I don't see why the government can't get to grips with the fact that really, neither the adults nor the children in any given relationship give two shits about what bits of legal documentation say, beyond the fact that withholding those bits of paper from certain life-partnerships makes their lives unbearably difficult. They don't feel any more or less committed because of some quasi-religious ceremony and/or signing of documents; I think people generally just want that kind of thing so that they can share their happiness with their friends and family, announce their love for and commitment to one another to the entire world and not get shafted by a system that continuously robs non-heteromonogamous partnerships of their rights to, for example, be there for their partner(s) if they end up dying in hospital, or not have to deal with really shitty probate laws that discriminate against any relationshp lacking a marriage certificate.

Anyway, who does it hurt to legally recognise gay couples? Or committed poly relationships? All it hurts is a status quo that we haven't needed ... well, ever, but certainly not in this day and age. Heteromonogamous marriage is not necessarily a better environment for children than any other; what a child wants is stability. Or, if stability isn't possible, honesty about what's going on and reassurance that it's going to be okay. If my parents had stayed together for my benefit, I'd have been miserable, and I know it. Sure, I'd have preferred it if my mother hadn't had a lot of fly-by-night arsehole lovers when I was little and my dad hadn't ended up with a manic-depressive as a live-in lover before meeting Wife Number Four (I did not need to be abandoned in a car in the red-light district of Montreal at age nine while Mum's boyfriend went off to get stoned with his other sex partners, about whom Mum didn't know; I also did not need to be witness to Dad's girlfriend's hour-long episode that culminated with her putting her fist through the glass panel of our back door), but I survived, and it was still ultimately better than spending my formative years knowing I was the reason for my parents' misery.

Long story short: so long as it's a stable and functional relationship, I don't think it's particularly bad for kids, heteromonogamous or not. Can we all please stop putting roadblocks on the love, stability and openness that kids need under the banner of 'THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"? You're not fooling anyone; you're only thinking of your own outraged sense of propriety. FUCK OFF AND LET PEOPLE LIVE THEIR LIVES WITHOUT JUDGING THEM BY GOVERNMENT MANDATE. THEY ARE NOT HURTING YOU.

I have not done this in awhile, so ... Warcrack news.

So I hit level 60 the other day. This was huge. Seriously. Those of you who play know what I am talking about. Those of you who don't ... two words: flying mounts.

It goes like this. In your first twenty levels, you're pretty much reduced to walking around the place getting squished attacked by anything that happens to be passing. Well, technically you can rent a wind rider/griffon (depending on faction) but those only take you from point A to point B. Then you hit level twenty and you're allowed to have the riding skill, and you can buy a mount. Kind of like in FFXI, except without some of the really fuck-annoying quests you have to do to get a chocobo licence. And you're not necessarily stuck with a giant battle emu. (Well ... okay, since my main's a blood elf, I am stuck with a giant battle emu. But I also play Paladin so I get an actual horse too. One day I'm going to level my goblin alt and get a motor vehicle. Gnome? Well ... with gnome you're still kind of stuck with a giant battle emu. Except it's a giant robot battle emu. So ... your mileage may vary?) Anyway, it's not like nothing attacks you when you're riding your battle emu or your mini T-rex or whatever your particular race has as a mount, but you stand a chance of outrunning anything that aggroes you.

Anyway, then you hit level 40, at which point you unlock Journeyman riding and faster mounts. Which means I now have four mounts - one black battle emu, one faster purple battle emu and two chargers, one built for more speed than the other.) And then you hit level sixty, at which point you can buy a Flight Master's Licence, and a mount that flies. This is either a wind rider (MANTICORE WOO!) if you're Horde, or a griffon if you're Alliance. This is a big deal because it means no more shelling out for rides between cities on wind riders/griffons and getting to places one hell of a lot easier, plus exploration achievements up the tailfeathers.

Just one problem: THIS SHIT IS EXPENSIVE.

Not real-money expensive, oh no. Just it requires somewhere around the region of 250 gold for the licence alone (less depending on your reputation where you buy the licence), and 50 gold for the mount. When you're levelling jewelcrafting and have been known to blow 100 gold at a time at the auction house for materials, 300 gold is a Big Deal. So what's a belf pally to do? Well, frankly, sell everythiiiiiiiiiing. Seriously, I had a metric fucktonne of low-level gems and the like for jewelcrafting materials that I wasn't really going to need anymore so all of that went to the auction house. After that ... well, I got mercenary about my quests. Any quest that didn't give me a piece of armour that was better than what I was wearing, I picked the reward item that would net me the most coin when sold to a vendor. Thankfully, at my level most of the reward items are worth at least one gold, sometimes as much as three, not to mention an average of one gold per quest done. So I've been running around the Blasted Lands, doing quests and selling gear and generally making a killing. I've got my 300 gold now (I had about 160 when I hit level 60, so at least I didn't have far to go) but I want to get a decent buffer zone before I spend that much gold at once. Somehow spending it in dribs and drabs at the auction house is one thing but blowing a huge wad all at once on one thing just ... gah. To be fair, I'm a lot like that about real money, too. I guess it's just A Thing. But never mind, I'm getting there and soon - soooooon - I will have my very own manticore and it will be awesome.

But in the meantime ... MOAR QUESTS. Currently resurrecting a druid in the Blasted Lands. I have no idea sometimes, when these quests are concerned. Seriously, I went running around looking for body parts so I could sew this Frankenstein-druid together and now I'm going up to the Altar of Storms to resurrect him with blood magic. (My inner Dragon Age characters are having fits, kthnx.) And prior to that, I was sneaking around a mine Metal Gear Solid style, in a huge crate, so I could kill a mining foreman. This game, she is on crack. I'm pretty sure I killed a demon in a cowboy hat an hour ago.

In other news, I am strongly considering starting up my own old WoD RP online. Chicago went the way of the dodo bird entirely suddenly and it's very sad. I'm just so tired of these things suddenly ending when I was just getting into it. It's not even as though the game was entirely dead, either - sure, it was slow because of the summer and a few people having some computer issues, but two people were in the middle of storylines and play was available if you were willing to tap people on the shoulder and ask, at least via IM. Unfortunately, the head admin got bored (there were rumours about Werewolf drama, but I try not to pay too much attention to rumours, particularly not about systems I don't play) and without so much as a word of warning, she shut down the entire site. Thankfully, she gave someone else access for about a week so we all got to ask her for our character sheets and journals, but ... still, it's frustrating. London, at least, had had its run and The End was discussed. Charleston ... well, that one was just unfortunate, with drama and server crashes and a whoooooole lot of mess. And the less said about San Francisco and the other Chicago, the better (those didn't close down while I was there; I just bailed because they drove me bugfuck). Anyway, I figure that I can probably manage admin well enough, so all I really need to do is get a decent ISP, talk to lithium_doll about getting hold of Jove and decide on things like where it's going to be set. Part of me is strongly considering Montreal; my home city doesn't get enough love. But that's thoughts for later, while I comparison shop for web space (and frankly find out if anyone I know is actually up for staffing or even just playing).

Why, yes, I am looking for distractions from people like Ann Coulter saying some truly appalling shit about the London riots, from people like Theresa May saying "the only cause for criminal behaviour is criminals" (which ... is not a cause, exactly, and makes no sense), from the bloody Prime Minister talking about "ignoring phoney 'human rights'" and closing down social media during 'times of crisis', from the idea of collective punishment for the riots as two boroughs vow to evict any convicted of taking part in the riots and their entire families from council housing if they're living in said council housing. I'm not ignoring it in the hopes that it will go away. I am taking occasional breaks from it because if I don't, I'm going to stress myself into the kind of migraine attack that doesn't stop at pain and photophobia but goes into visual disturbances/hallucinations, cognitive dissonance and worse. Yes, it happens when the stress is bad enough. And I do not need that right now, kthnx. So ... moderation. I'll rant and stress and rage about it in controlled bursts so I don't die of government stupid.

I did not get much sleep last night, but I must have dozed off because I woke up with my alarm. And then woke up again five minutes after I was supposed to be out the door. I swear, I just closed my eyes for a second... Anyway, it became clear, between the exhaustion and the brewing headache (which is still there, but a little less nasty than it was at 8ish this morning), there was no way I was making it into work today.

Finally checking the news, I see why there were all the sirens last night. Maybe why there are still sirens today, for all I know (because believe you me, there are still sirens). And the helicopters, which are still buzzing my neighbourhood. You have to sort of aggregate the pictures from the Telegraph, the Guardian and the BBC to get a clear picture, but my end of Southeast London was not exactly a safe place last night. I don't like seeing pictures of places I go shopping sometimes destroyed by looters.

At the end of the day, I don't condone their actions. How can I, who hasn't slept well in two nights because of being kept up by sirens and low-flying helicopters? What I would say, though, is that there is still more to this than mindless thugs. Fine, teenagers are not very articulate (and let's be fair, most of them do appear to be teenagers) but one thing's abundantly clear - they're pissed off. Teenagers act out when they're pissed off. Their future's been taken away a piece at a time. What do they really think they've got to lose? They may not be able to articulate it, but the feeling is certainly there. Keep in mind that I am still blaming them. But I am also blaming the forces that shaped them - parents, society, government - and I don't see why the two directions of blame ought to be mutually exclusive. If we just slap these rioters down without changing anything, all we'll end up with is martial law and yet more people pissed off and ready to explode. If that happens, the vicious cycle continues.

What worries me most is the fact that it's not going to stop unless something big happens. If it was just teens being thugs, they'd probably have got bored by now. But now they're tasting something they never have before - power, of a sort - and they don't want to give it up. The police can't cope and the next step is probably military, because I don't see this stopping on its own. After that ... well, I don't know what happens after that. I do know that it'd be irresponsible to let this run its course because I have no idea where it'd end, but I have no wish to see the army on the streets.

So, the rundown:

- The people who say that these rioters are just mindlessly criminal thugs have a point.
- The people who say that these rioters are politically motivated also have a point.
- Things need to change on both sides to prevent a recurrence.
- Government needs to pay attention to people before the brickbats and firebombs come out.
- People need to stick to kettle-dodging and making the police look stupid in ways that don't destroy their communities.
- I want to go home to Canada.

Ugh. I'd go get more sleep if it wouldn't screw over my sleep patterns entirely...

Twice in one day for posting. Gorgeous. And this time, it is to rant.

NHS services to be open to competition.

Essentially what this means is that parts of the NHS are going to be opened up to bids from private companies and charities. There is so much wrong with this that I cannot even begin to describe it. Okay, sometimes the NHS sucks rocks. I grant you that. But having worked in it for as long as I have, I can tell you why the NHS sucks rocks: because there is more and more emphasis put on a bottom-line, spend-as-little-as-possible running of the whole thing by officials who don't actually use the service because they can afford top-of-the-line private health insurance. They're cutting admin staff, which slows things up on the basic level, and what admin staff remain are overworked, underpaid, overstressed and underappreciated, badgered into doing more work for less money, not taking overtime and generally being blamed for every piece of shit that goes down ever. A great many doctors have private practices in other hospitals or clinics, which tend to take priority because that's where the money is. Everyone's getting pressurised into targets that they never have the time or money to meet because middle managers are eating the time and the funding by setting these unrealistic targets in the first place.

The NHS does not need to be privatised piece by piece, thank you. We tried that with the railways. There used to be British Rail. Now there are a conglomeration of different companies using the exact same sets of railway lines as there were under British Rail, and while I don't entirely know what it was like when there was a British Rail, I do know that the current way of doing things is confusing and at the very least not any better than it seems to have been at that time, railway commutes. Same tracks, same basic trains ... and so many different companies who're more concerned about their bottom lines than anything else so things like signal maintenance just don't happen, even if a train journey is delayed three days out of five every week for six months because of a signal failure at the same damn point on the lines every day. If it doesn't work for rail services, what makes people think it's going to work for healthcare?

Not to mention the fact that when this plan initially came under discussion, everyone disagreed with it. The current coalition nightmare of a government agreed to step back and we breathed a sigh of relief. Now, right in the middle of the Murdoch-blame media circus (which, let's face it, is important too), they announce this all quiet-like, likely because they know full well that the art of prestidigitation is to palm the object that you want to make vanish in your left hand while everyone's watching your right. The News of the World scandal must have been like winning the damn lottery for this lot.

This should not be ignored or forgotten or pushed by the wayside. This is too important. This is stealth privatisation that everyone from the British Medical Association to the general public disagreed with, privatisation that Cameron promised would never happen, and now he's doing it. And the plans for 2013 are even worse. 'Chemo at Home'? Cardiac diagnoses over the phone? Privatising children's wheelchair services? And they're sure as hell not talking about who exactly starts paying for all this. Will there be co-pay? Will we just get a bill? What exactly happens with this? No one is saying. They're just talking about 'competition', which always seems to be 'bottom line uber alles' - they can say 'quality over price' until they're blue in the face, but they're not saying who pays that price, and how will it be paid? Through taxes? Up-front in cash? What?

...And, on a somewhat personal note (as if it wasn't personal enough, given at least three chronic conditions that I suffer to levels that are debilitating, even if only occasionally and for shortish periods of time) ... what does this mean for my job?

In short, this is a mess and a travesty and we're being lied to and betrayed again and again by a PM who didn't even win by a clear majority. All manner of shit that wasn't in the coalition manifesto is being shoved down our collective throat and I think at this point the only thing that's going to stop it is outright riots. And even then...

*sigh* I want to go back to Canada. People are relatively sane there.

So ... yeah, I got dragged into another instance today. And y'know what? It didn't suck. I still kept kind of flailing, or I felt like I was, but it didn't suck.

Look, I was blundering out and about in Arathi, trying to get this one quest done (at least until I realised it was a liiiiiittle bit above my level. But I did figure out that I can be mobbed by two guys three levels up from me and still survive, which is ... good) and as I was trying to take down these two individuals, the person who invited me to the last instance invited me to another one. I tried to turn them down, I really did - explained that I didn't want to go through the same kind of fiasco I did the last time - but their response to that was to tell me that it was better to learn at lower levels than later. I considered telling them that hey, not if I plan to get through entirely on soloing? But I decided that I was better off explaining the problem, which was that no one ever tells me what the hell we're supposed to be doing in these dungeons. They explained (basically, kill everything until you hit the boss at the end) and with all due trepidation, I agreed. So next thing I know, I'm in the middle of the Scarlet Monastary, trying to hold hate as we hacked our way through I dunno what and there were NPCs with exclamation points that I never had time to click on and ... well ... it didn't entirely suck. At least I mostly held hate and held my own. I died once, but hey, it happens, and the one who invited me was a shammie so I got rezzed and we went on. Most of all? Everyone just kind of shut up and got on with it and there was no running commentary about how much I sucked. Which is good. So ... yeah. Dungeon that did not suck. There was supposed to be a second but people bailed and the most it taught me was how to disband from a party. Which no, I did not know how to do. Now I know. Woo.

I also ditched Blacksmithing. Well, it was freakin' dull. I picked up Jewelcrafting instead, because I've been having fun with that with my Draenei shammie. My mining's been coming along nicely, too - going after ogres in Arathi netted me a fair ol' bit of iron ore. I don't think that's going to be useful in Jewelcrafting but it'll sell at the auction house, I'd imagine. I made the unpleasant discovery that you cannot send bits and pieces between your alts if they're not both with the same faction, though, which blows. I'm going to need faction mules or something.

So ... yeah. To tyrell, I can only say that yes, you were right about the Prot spec, not to mention Seal of Insight - woo, that is one useful little thing to have. And to wingedkami ... thanks for the mining tips and I blame you for the enabling. So there. Ha. *g*

The weekends are way, way too short. I see uncertainty on the rise tomorrow as Schrodinger's Admin comes back from her two weeks' 'sick leave for stress' or whatever the hell. I dunno what's going on, I dunno where I'm going to end up sitting tomorrow and all I know for sure is that I'm going to end up camped in front of my office manager's door until she gets in sometime after quarter past nine so that I can find out the answers to these questions. Woo. *sigh* I'd like my job a lot better if it wasn't for shit like this.

Oooh! But Rebekah Brooks got arrested! *squeak* There is at least some justice in the world. Though there was this one guy in the second-hand bookstore I went to yesterday ranting about how it was all going to just be smoothed over and Murdoch playing a long game and will be allowed to buy the rest of BskyB next year and yadda yadda. It's probably true, but it's got a level of pessimism that even I can't manage. I'm just glad that there seems to be something going in the general direction of "someone's getting what's coming to them" in this whole thing.

Also, while wandering yesterday, I happened to drop into this shop that does incense and candles and a lot of hoodoo stuff ... and fragrance oils. The kinds I thought I could only get online. Didn't have the cash to do anything with it then, but by the end of the month ... booya! *g* It was just happenstance that I wandered in at all; I thought it might be something that might be useful, but I didn't know how useful. Sometimes I have luck. It's a thing.

Right. I suppose there should be vegging with what veg-time I have left before I need to consider stupid things like bed and work in the morning. Bleh. This is why it's easier to talk about things like Warcrack than it is about my actual life.

Ah, socio-political ranting at its potentially finest.

Look. It's one thing to listen in on people's mobile phone conversations and voicemail messages via hacking. It's a shitty and illegal thing, but it is one thing. It is an entirely different thing to hack somebody's voicemail, delete messages meant for someone else just for more heartstring-tugging fodder and thus not only screw around with a police investigation, but falsely raise the hopes of parents who are still just praying that their daughter's not dead.

So someone please tell me why the fuck this News of the World phone-hacking scandal is focusing on listening in on celebrities? Seriously. What the fuck.

I don't need to hear Boris Johnson going on about how everyone's doing it, even though it sucks, with pictures of celebs at the top of the page. I sure as hell don't need to hear comments from people who consider the lives of celebrities fair game going, "So what's the big deal? If anyone listened in on my phone conversations, they'd be bored to death! Just don't talk about private stuff on a mobile and you're fine!" While I get that it's really horrific that News of the World, likely amongst others, are hacking into people's private voicemail ... still they're all. Missing. The point. The point being, in case we forgot, that this whole thing went from ugly to truly evil when someone actively erased messages meant for others, just because they wanted to hear more messages for tabloid fodder. That's on par with shredding someone else's post, just because you got access to their mailbox. And when the person whose voicemail box is getting cleared happens to be missing and presumed dead ... well. Think of the implications when that voicemail box, which should have been full and thus bouncing back any new voicemail messages, suddenly gets emptied.

I think the problem with making this about celebrities' phone calls is that people honestly believe that celebrities' lives are fair game. They're not allowed privacy! They're not allowed lives! Oh, hell no! They're our property, and everything they do may now come under the microscope. WRONG. Celebs are allowed privacy just like everyone else, and the answer isn't "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" - particularly when we're talking about red-top tabloid arseholes who see it as a far more convenient way of digging up a scandal than anything else on offer at the moment. Since when did 'privacy' become a concept that we just sort of ignore in the face of ... I don't even know what they're thinking right now.

I honestly don't know what to do about this, beyond stopping newspapers from hacking people's voicemail. I get that you need to scoop the other guy however you can, but this snark about celebs being jealous that they're not on the list? That shit needs to go. So does the quasi-joking about how all politicians ought to have their phones and email accounts routinely tapped, preferably with the addition of an ASBO-style ankle-tag to monitor their movements. I wish people would focus on the fact that this bunch of morons from News of the World destroyed correspondence that was not theirs to destroy, potentially interfered with a police investigation and unwittingly (and without so much as caring about the implications) twisted the knife counter-clockwise on a family that just misses their daughter.

Fucktards.

So I've had the flu, and still have the flu, and now want to bludgeon people. With be-condomed cucumbers, or something.

Nadine Dorries says that teenage girls alone need lessons in saying no.

...Look, I felt queasy enough before this. And yes, I admit that girls are being sexualised too young - padded bras for seven-year-olds, sweatpants for preteens with 'Juicy' written in glitter across the butt, stuff like that. However, that's the fashion industry, not to mention the music industry. What people don't get is that generally with pop bands, the age of the average fan is around 7 years younger than the age of the star in question. So yes, you get your younger (or younger-looking) teeny-bopper girlie star and her fans are, like, ten. So they will emulate how she dresses, or want to. The fashion industry cashes in on that fact, and the fans will either hoard their allowance or beg and badger their parents (who, rather unfortunately, tend to be so disinterested that they will give in rather than having to do anything difficult like parenting) and will buy these kinds of clothes. That's a problem.

However, I don't care how old you are - how you dress does not in any way constitute an invitation to sex. What you say? Is. And if girls are being taught to 'just say no', so should boys. What lessons apply to one gender should apply to both, and frankly, both genders need to be taught that applying pressure on someone for something they aren't ready for is wrong. End of statement, none of this gender segregation bullcrap, and no implying that you can solve the teenage pregnancy problem by getting teenage girls to say no and not teaching boys any kind of responsibility at all.

(And apparently, teaching girls to apply condoms to their boyfriends is unnecessary, where I personally think that it's a good way of turning a thing that some guys complain about ["But I can't feel anything through a condom; it's not as nice!" blah blah blah shut up"] into foreplay. So that can bite me.)

Y'know the lessons I really think should be taught in sex ed? It goes a little something like this:

"Wanting sex is not wrong. Not wanting sex is likewise not wrong. Sex is not a bad thing. Just keep in mind that sex leads to consequences, not only for you but for your partner as well, and might have consequences with others, depending on circumstances. Be sure it's what you want. Be sure that it's what your partner wants. Say no if you don't want it, and respect it when your partner likewise says no, at any point in the proceedings. Sex is good, but it is best in an atmosphere of openness, honesty, respect and mutual enjoyment. Here is how to protect yourself from disease. Here is how to protect yourself or your partner from pregnancy. And here is how to stop vilifying yourself for wanting sex, or for not wanting it. Take control of your sexual destiny. Have a nice day."

...Is that somehow wrong? Is this somehow a bad message? Tell me, because I honestly want to know.

I am made of HATE.

Apparently, the NHS wants to have unpaid volunteers do the work of ward clerks in the midwifery service. This includes breastfeeding advice, filling out paperwork and taking blood pressure. The latter two disturb the almighty hell out of me. Look, I get that a person can take their own blood pressure. I get that ... most people ... can more or less fill out paperwork. However, I have been working in the NHS for a very. Long. Time. I can see how good people are at filling out their own paperwork, never mind somebody else's. They don't check spelling of names. There is every chance of screwing up. And paperwork errors can be fucking fatal. So please, someone, tell me what this bullshit is?

I am a rarity in the NHS. I am an admin who cares about her job as more than just a source of a paycheque. I understand that every letter I get out in a timely fashion, every patient I help move into an earlier free appointment slot, every charge through the hospital I do to nail some fucking registrar to the floor to get them to book a patient in for necessary and sometimes life-saving therapy? That is, in its own small way, saving a life or at least helping make somebody's life better. I get verbally abused by patients on a regular basis. I get overworked, underpaid and desperately underappreciated. But I have worked in the private sector, both in healthcare and not, and at the end of the day, I have discovered that I would still prefer to be in NHS work than anywhere else. I get the warm fuzzies, okay? Sue me. If I'm going to earn my living largely doing tasks a well-trained monkey could do, I'd rather do it and know I'm doing good, rather than just being some damn donkey following the carrot dangled by her corporate masters, mmkay?

But this? This Big Society bullshit? This isn't going to work. I am a rarity! Most people don't give a shit, and the ones who do still need to work for a living! The kind of work they're talking about is not the sort of thing you can pop into for a couple of hours on weekends! It requires a regular eight-hour day at least, and how the hell are people supposed to do that, even if they want to, and still have a job? Either they're volunteering during working hours because they're unemployed, in which case it would be in their best interests to actually get a job (because the benefits upon which Big Society is hinging their volunteer service? That's not enough to live on), or they've already got a job and would have to volunteer nights, when they've had a hard day at work and don't have the energy or mental capacity to do the kind of job I'd want to see in a healthcare professional. Because make no mistake: hospital admins are trained healthcare professionals.

This is where society at large should quote a certain RP character who I sometimes still miss to this day: "I don't want some little oik like me having access to my medical records!"

There's also a murmur about the current coalition government not demanding checks in some cases when a job involves contact with vulnerable adults or children? And yet they want volunteer workers to come into hospitals and deal with pregnant, childbearing women and infants? Normally I would say that no one is sick enough to interfere with a newborn, but I've read newspaper articles about some guy raping a three-year-old and I now no longer put anything past humanity.

The point of all this is that the NHS doesn't need the kind of cuts the coalition is trying to make. It sure as hell doesn't need outsourcing the blood donation service to a private company (because WTalmightyF?!?). What it needs is to re-evaluate the money it is already spending and put that money to better use. The management structure is shit. Let's start with that. There are too many managers - and half of those managers don't do a gods-damned thing (my technical line manager is never in the office because she is wandering the grounds with a cigarette half the day, or so goes scuttlebutt, and tends to vanish on half- or full-day leave without so much as a word to anyone). There are too many white-collar bozos running around the place trying to figure out where all the money goes, and they must see that the money that should be spent on front-line admin is going to their unnecessary salaries, but because they don't want to lose their jobs, they blame front-line admin and ensure their job security as they try to 'shape up the service'. There's a process at the hospital I'm in now that they're calling 'natural wasteage', which means that if anyone quits or retires? They're not hiring anyone to fill that vacant position anymore. They're just going to pile the work on the remaining admin staff and cause more money and time to be wasted as people get stressed to the point of ill-health and end up going on long-term sick leave, which leads to more 'natural wasteage' and a vicious cycle of the service falling apart. The NHS needs to pare down its middle management and use the salaries of the useless mid-line managers who do jack fucking squat to hire more front-line admin who could actually keep the service running smoothly. It's not that hard!

I repeat: I am made of HATE. And now I have to go grocery shopping. And then I am going to go slaughter the hell out of some darkspawn just to vent the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!