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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Rory's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | | 3:12 pm |
Dignity does not exist
I haven't played TF2 - or updated LJ, for that matter - in months, but this made me nearly... well, you know. | | Friday, April 10th, 2009 | | 1:14 pm |
None more Blackmoor
Dave Arneson now permanently resides in module DA3: The City of the Gods. If only he could have hung on until today, he'd have been alive again on Sunday. yeah well that should be how it works | | Friday, March 20th, 2009 | | 2:56 pm |
The sort of in-depth knowledge you only get from walking down a street with your eyes open
That bastion of investigative journalism, the Metro - stealing stuff from the internet since 1999 - was wailing about Google Street-wossname and its implications for privacy. To illustrate what it meant, it showed that you could see that car's number plate and that woman in the cafe was facing the camera! Also you could see a picture of MI5 headquarters! What a boon for the potential terrorist! I'm trying to come up with an analogy to which I can compare their position. How about "so busy worrying about whether your bath-water has too many 'negative ions' that you haven't noticed that the bath is full of radioactive zombie paedophile cyber-pirahna suicide bombers." That about covers it. Based on the Metro's examples - presumably the most flagrant they could find given five minutes bumbling about and/or copying off some idiot's blog - Google Street View can be used to prove conclusively that a woman wearing sunglasses was in a cafe at some point in the last year or so. And that a single random car - not any car, just that one caught by chance - was driving down a street during daylight hours. Fucking Columbo would have a hard time making a case out of that. The information is useless without context. More to the point, Metro, this is a country where the police routinely capture and store number plate information for the entirety of your journey. So people looking at Google street view might be able to make out a car number plate, but they can't find out who you are, where you live and where you - or at least your vehicle - has been, and at what times. The police can and do. You want to talk about a surveillance society, start there. Then you can move on to the gummint's plans to force everyone to register their biometric details, to store them and share them for any purpose without notice or permission, and to have them mashed up into a huge database which will then be administered by exactly the kind of private company which the government has just demonstrated their total inability to regulate. In short there are a whole bunch of very worrying developments around the sphere of privacy and civil liberties happening in this country, but Google Motherfucking Street View - at least in its present form - is sufficiently innocuous that describing it as any sort of privacy issue is deeply inane. Oh, and as for MI5 headquarters? Go nuts. What sort of journalist imagines that a terrorist can build a bomb but can't use fucking image search? | | Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 | | 10:17 pm |
| | Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 | | 5:28 pm |
| | Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | | 4:23 pm |
Isn't spending on entertainment meant to go up during a recession?
For all those people who've sarkily asked me if I've managed to bring Electronic Arts to its knees yet - well yeah, apparently I have. Either that or I'm forcing them to close twelve of their costliest lavatories. How you manage to lose six hundred and forty-one million dollars when you own the rights to fucking Rock Band is beyond me. Who wants to bet that out of all the job losses and "facility" closures, not one of them will involve the guys who thought that "annoying" thousands of "paying customers" was a "good idea"? | | Monday, December 15th, 2008 | | 5:03 pm |
| | Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | | 9:36 am |
As above, so below
"There shall be votes for all," you tell us. "You, the people, shall decide what is to happen. You shall divide the sheep from the goats, the worthy from the unworthy, those who are to stay from those who are to go." Then we, the people, go ahead and decide what is to happen and you don't like it. Despite all your expert opinion, informed analysis and learned recommendations we choose differently to you. We've made our decision and it's clearly, fatuously wrong. Obviously this cannot stand. When we were offered the chance to make our own choice nobody expected that we'd choose the wrong option. That was never the deal! We must be guided by our superiors, by those who simply know better. We can still register a preference, of course, but we must be aware that our foolish whims and unreasonable opinions can - and must! - be over-ruled by men and women better and cleverer than we. Except. Except that from the beginning you have claimed your mandate, your right to rule, from the conceit that you were carrying out the collective will of those ruled. When you commanded, you did so only to obey. Not to mention that we were paying for the whole affair. Now that it is clear that your right to rule is recursive - you're in charge because you're in charge - how can you wonder if we, the people, choose not to engage with you? How can you expect us to believe that your obedience to what we say and how we vote is anything other than a polite fiction, a peeling veneer over your presumably well-meaning but deeply maddening despotism? Did you simply grow tired of the pretence that all this was something more than a straightforward popularity contest? Did you wish to show us, show the world, that your hard-won knowledge and expertise would lead to a more satisfying result than that chosen by the voters? Did you forget that maybe we're looking for different results and different satisfactions? | | Friday, November 7th, 2008 | | 2:59 pm |
It's raining mendacity*
People can't wait to have ID cards according to Jacqui Smith, well-known Home Secretary of the parish. Really? People can't wait to pay you money - sorry, more money, over and above what we're already paying you - for you to lose their data or sell it outright to unspecified third parties? Who are these people? Name them! Name one citizen - excluding your immediate circle and whichever IT firms plan to get paid billions for fucking it up - who thinks this is a good idea. On second thoughts, don't bother. Sign the fools up and I'll pay $3 for a full list off a Russian warez site in a couple of months. * Original title of post: "You goddamn fucking liar" | | Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | | 7:15 pm |
The only thing you have challenged is my patience
There was a time when the most annoying thing about buying a game published by Electronic Arts was a creepy, breathless child's voice whispering "Challenge Everything!" on the loading screen. It was pretty irritating, but I put up with it. It wasn't a deal-breaker. ( Read more... ) | | 4:56 pm |
Those headlines in full
PALIN LAUNCHES LAST-MINUTE ATTACK ON OBAMA
Election Day Speech Laden With Racial EpithetsWASHINGTON, D.C. - Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin launched a shocking attack on Barack Obama earlier today, using racial and religious slurs as well as levelling accusations of support for terrorists. Although the McCain-Palin campaign has alluded to these subjects previously, today's vituperative outburst was the first time they have been openly mentioned. "Barack Obama says he's as American as you or I," Mrs. Palin told a tens-strong crowd of supporters. "I don't think so, mister! Just look at the name - Barack Obama. O'Bama! That's not an American name - that's an Irish name!" "Barack O'Bama is a bog-trotter! A dang old leprechaun! A left-footed, potato-munching, mackerel-snapping, blarney-talking Tim with a green velvet coat and a black stovepipe hat with a gold buckle on the front, gosh darn it!" "He was born in Tralee, and spent the first few years of his life in a gaelscoileanna in Skibbereen, being indoctrinated with Celticofascist propaganda. He was born Barack Francis Xavier O'Bama, but changed his name to 'Hussein' to avoid suspicion." To the polite enthusiasm of her fans, Mrs. Palin went on. "So go ahead and 'vote for change' if you want to," she said. "You'll get more change than you expect, goldurn it y'all! When you're forced to become Catholic; when every other religion - Baptist, Methodist and yes, even Episcopalian - is made illegal; when every sports team has been replaced with the Glasgow Celtics... that's when you'll want to change!" "But you won't be able to. Because he will already have taken away all your guns." "Barack O'Bama pals around with terrorists," Governor Palin continued. "The Irish invented terrorism in 1987 and Barack O'Bama was close personal friends with the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six who caused so much suffering in the sports bars and steakhouses of... of those places in England where they set off their suicide bombs. And he's still friends with them today." "I'm not trying to scare you. But you should be scared. Sentator O'Bama does not see this country the way you and I do - he sees it as a place where he can emigrate to when there's a potato famine in 1847, and expects ordinary Americans to pick up the bill when he does so!" Veteran broadcaster Larry King later queried some of Mrs. Palin's remarks in an interview to be broadcast later tonight. "Governor, you described the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six as terrorists, but in fact they were framed by the British and imprisoned for many years before being exonerated and set free," he said. "Well, Larry, it's a case of once a terrorist, always a terrorist," Mrs. Palin replied. "But they weren't terrorists, ever, at all. The people who carried out the bombings were never caught." "It just goes to show how slippery the Irishman is, Larry, and why we need a strong leader like John McCain who will support our troops and Guantanamo Bay, it's like... we can't let these people walk all over us, with their shillelaghs and their shamrocks." Bernadette O'Shaughnessy, a spokesperson for the National Association for the Advancement of Irish People, said that Mrs. Palin's speech simply perpetuated the myth that all Irish people were terrorists. "There's no way Governor Palin would get away with making this sort of inflammatory comment about better-integrated ethnic groups - such as those Americans with Italian, Jewish or African heritage," she said. | | Friday, October 24th, 2008 | | 3:55 pm |
Those headlines in full
BST BANKRUPT
Venerable Daylight Savings Institution Latest To FoldLONDON, ENGLAND - British Summer Time became the latest casualty of the current financial crisis today, following an announcement that BST no longer had sufficient time to cover its obligations. "The Chairman, staff and board of trustees of BST deeply regret that we do not have the time to continue operations beyond twelve noon today," said a spokesman. "No further withdrawals will be honoured, and all offices will cease trading with immediate effect." "We recommend that no clocks should be put back, pending a review by auditors." The news comes just days before tens of millions of Britons were due to withdraw time from their accounts for the traditional autumn "Having An Extra Hour In Bed" festival. Prime Minister Gordon Brown had reiterated earlier this week his pledge to guarantee "at least" twenty-seven minutes of each hour deposited in a savings scheme which later failed. He has not so far responded to calls for the complete or partial nationalisation of BST. British Summer Time was first established during World War I to store the surplus hours from a generation of doomed youth. The hours were then reinvested in "time and a half" or even "double time" for workers in important industrial and military projects, including the "Land-Ship" project that would give rise to the first tanks and the building of the battlecruiser HMS Hood. After the war BST was opened up to the public and the popular daylight savings scheme has run annually or semi-annually ever since, with billions of hours deposited. It was privatised in 1994, along with everything else. The exact cause of BST's collapse is not yet known, but the organisation is known to have had heavy exposure to a defunct daylight savings scheme from Iceland. Though initially providing a high return on daylight investment due to the "midnight sun" effect, the scheme later collapsed following the unforseen arrival of polar night. Dr. Larry Cowhorner, professor of Chrononomics at the University of Seiko Quartz, said that regulatory failure lay at the root of the current crisis. "Regardless of wild claims made by some stricken institutions about organised gangs of procrastinators stealing time, the danger signs have been evident for a while now," he said. "Lending of so-called 'sub-prime' hours to people with no lives and thus no way to make repayments is typical of the short-termist, growth-obsessed time management industry." Shadow Prime Minister David Cameron criticised Gordon Brown's handling of the crisis in a speech to the House of Commons earlier today. "When my distinguished colleague said that there was 'no time to lose' in responding to the financial crisis his party has created," he said. "I had not realised that he spoke so literally." In other news, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne rejected criticism over his hanging around on a Russian billionaire's super-yacht discussing illegal donations on the grounds that no such donation had, in the end, been made. He went on to issue a statement of support for the legal appeals launched by Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, who in September of this year were all found guilty of hanging around a flat discussing illegal acts of terrorism but who did not, in the end, commit any such acts. | | Monday, October 20th, 2008 | | 4:28 pm |
| | Monday, October 13th, 2008 | | 4:02 pm |
| | Friday, October 3rd, 2008 | | 3:32 pm |
| | Monday, September 29th, 2008 | | 10:22 pm |
Brewfest
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) edy_ and I plan to attend the Sheffield CAMRA Beer Festival this Friday evening. This should allow you to meet up with or avoid us as you see fit. | | Saturday, September 20th, 2008 | | 4:24 pm |
You heard it here first
Margaret Thatcher re-launches herself into the political arena, with a controversial road-safety campaign as a key plank in her platform. ( clicky ) | | 3:18 pm |
Spam Update
I have half-completed drafts of things everywhere, but this is easier than finishing them. There were 2,800 pieces of spam waiting for me when I got back. You'd think some of them would be funny, wouldn't you? No." win a money" - Only one money? I think I'd want at least three moneys. " Your new rod will taste different to her" - I've got to tell you, man, that really isn't a selling point. " Life of an ordinary loser is not for you" - You're right! I need to be a spectacular, amazing, world-famous loser! " If you need a recipe no need to go to a doctor." - Well, yeah. I usually go to a cookbook. " Р-А-С-С-Ы-Л-К-И" - Find out what it means to me! " from Bennie Blanco" - Bennie Blanco from the Bronx? You shot Carlito Brigante, you little fuck! " poop yarn" - So there I am in the Emir's solid gold bathroom, thirteen hours after winning the International Chilli-Eating Championship, when suddenly there's a knock at the door... " i don't know rory" - Then why the fuck are you emailing him? " 10 WWE Wrestlers Suspended Over Steroids" - Hanging from the ROOF of a STEEL CAGE, the winner of this 10-MAN FREE-FOR-ALL ELIMINATION BUNGIE MATCH will take home not just the steroids, but the WWE SUPREME CHAMPION BELT! " Did you forget to take your meds rory?" - No, I'm always this cranky. " Delete your problems!" - I'm trying, but there are 2,800 of the fuckers and you're not helping. | | Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | | 5:49 pm |
| | Thursday, June 26th, 2008 | | 5:11 pm |
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