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You wait hours in the rain for a bus. And then three arrive at once.

Three really great video game art/design pieces that I just saw in the past few weeks:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-incredibly-detailed-beautifully-illustrated-insanely-intricate-birth-of

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104415

Last year I managed to get Ubuntu 10.10 running on my 13" Macbook Pro so that I could boot into it natively, AND have it accessible as a virtual machine via Virtualbox. When I did that, I wrote a guide. It has been hanging around on my desktop for too long, so I am just going to paste it here, and be done with it.

These instructions are slightly out of date, but they should work, more or less.

Well, the Glyf Blog has been updated with an exciting announcement! You'll have to go take a look for the full details, but the long and short of it is that RocketHands will be at Supanova 2012, and we will be demoing (among other things!) our new game, Glyf!

So like many others (about a million others, apparently) I listened to the Mike Daisey piece 'The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs' when it appeared on This American Life a few months ago.

A moving story.

But you hear something like that, presented as it was (a stand up delivery by Daisey to a live audience), and you know it is a performance. You know it is practised, words agonised over, delivery at the microphone nuanced for maximum impact. You can hear that much - and it pays off, because it's very effective.

But you don't expect lies. I am not talking about embellishment, which you do expect. Or a bit of wiggle room on exact facts, which is common in the art of verbal storytelling. I am talking about boldfaced lies.

Bits of it he just...made up..you know, for effect. The really sad thing is that there are some terrible conditions for workers in China (oh sure, they are lawful under Chinese law, but they would be illegal in any 'western' nation), but because Daisey went too far with this piece, he has hurt his cause. I hope this event become some kind of precedent for downplaying working conditions at Foxconn or any other factory in China, or as some kind of absolution from guilt. Not culpability exactly, just the guilt of knowing that your iPhone or MacBook was made in the place with the right laws and culture that provides the biggest profit margin. It's all about the shareholders.

The double-whammy of course, is that Daisey's monologue was itself a product - a paid for 'play'. A theatre performance. And the more intriguing and horrifying the story, the more people get interested, and the more money he makes. It is obvious he had a cause here, a message to get out. But the irony of being dishonest in your retelling of events in a paid-for performance about the horrible effects of greed and capitalism aren't lost on me. I doubt they will be lost on anyone.

Full credit to This American Life to have to break the news and issue the retraction. A professional job indeed, in a journalistic environment almost entirely devoid of professionalism.

A friend sent me a link regarding the Draft Mental Health Bill 2011, in which proposed legislation would allow procedures such as psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy, and sterilisation to be carried out on children requiring their consent alone, and not the consent of an adult parent or guardian.

Sterilisation. Yes. Meaning they won't be able to have children. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I heard about it on March 7, and comments close 5pm March 9. Today.

So I wrote a letter, and sent it to both the mental health commission, and the minister for Mental Health and Disability Services, Hon Margaret Morton, MLC. 

Below is a copy of the email I sent to the minister.

Honourable Minister,

As the minister for Mental Health you will no doubt be aware of the Mental Health Bill 2011[*]. I am writing to express my opposition to the contents of the draft bill, specifically the sections which permit children to consent to sterilisation, psychosurgery, and electroconvulsive therapy, without requiring the consent of a parent or guardian.

That bill itself outlines the penalties for misuse of these forms of treatment: fines of between $5,000 and $15,000, and prison terms of two years. Current legislation is evidence that these procedures are serious, and that their misuse constitutes a grave offence.

Why then is the bill seeking to erode the current checks and balances we have in place regarding these procedures? How is current legislation impeding the application of these procedures where children are involved? What is the justification for soliciting the consent of a child mental health patient for such serious procedures, rather than a fully informed, rational adult?

I would further enquire, what does a child's consent mean? Particularly a child who is already being treated for a mental illness. Are they equipped to make decisions about the nature of the treatments they should receive? Even once explained, can they truly understand the ramifications? 

I understand an assessment of patient "maturity" is taken into account, but I assert that this means very little. Please imagine a hypothetical situation: a group of several hundred primary and high-school aged children, with no diagnosed mental health condition, who have been judged to be 'mature', are educated about the sterilisation procedure and its effects. A free sterilisation is then offered for any student that will consent, no questions asked. If you were a parent of one of these children, would you be anxious? 

Now consider the bill - it is recommending that children diagnosed with a mental illness, undergoing treatment for a mental illness, be able to consent to these procedures without the consent of their parents.

I urge you not to allow this bill to pass in its current form. I can only hope common sense and humane sanity will prevail.

Yours Sincerely,

My NAME

My ADDRESS

[*] A link to the bill: http://www.mentalhealth.wa.gov.au/Libraries/pdf_docs/Discussion_Draft_for_Mental_Health_Bill_2011_v3.sflb.ashx

There's about two hours left for 'Public Comment', although I am sure you could still email various ministers after today.

[email protected]

[email protected]

When I first started playing BF3 just before Christmas, we had about three pages of servers in Australia. I got disconnected more than I would like, but there were always games available and the ping was good.

In January, all the servers disappeared. In their place were 3-6 DICE controlled 'Australian' servers, although I strongly doubt they were in Australia (no Australian accents on teamchat, but plenty of entertaining Brits, Yanks, and Frenchies!). If they were located here they were being served via 56k dialup, because we were down to one bar of ping, and frequent disconnection. Plus, the games were almost always full, so you had to queue to play on a rubber-banding server.

If you wanted to play, you really had to join a server in the US or Asia. I might add, each of these regions had 20-30 pages of servers available, and the ping was better than the 'Australian' region servers.

I am saying all this in the past tense because it (hopefully) looks like the situation is about to change, after a Battlelog Blog posting from Daniel Matros, the global DICE community manager.

Here's a pertinent chunk: 

I want to let you know that our team over here has been working very hard in order to solve these issues for you. We´ve done numerous improvements and of course, one of them being ramping up our server capacity in Australia. These short-term changes will be rolling out over the comings weeks and some players may notice improvements sooner than others as we work towards our goal.

As someone who has tweeted at the Battlefield support account and has almost stopped playing due to these issues, I am really hoping DICE deliver the goods.

Considering the instability of US currency and their financial profile, the question for a long time has been: When will foreign nations begin to pull away from the $USD?

This week:

Iran, Russia Replace Dollar With Rial, Ruble in Trade, Fars Says

Japan & China to Support Direct Trading of Currencies of Both Nations

India and Japan sign new $15bn currency swap agreement

Is this the beginning?

So Bye, bye Miss American Pie Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey in Rye Singin' this'll be the day that I die This'll be the day that I die