Apologies

... for not posting. I'm busy with stuff. Like getting ready to go self employed at the start of March - because if I have to keep signing on for much longer I'm gonna go spare, innit!

Business plans. Who'd a thought? Luckily I've already written one fantasy fiction so the BP isn't proving to be too much of a hurdle.

I'm also coming up with wizzo ideas of what services I can sell. I'm hoping to sell enough service to stave off bankruptcy for at least 3 months.

We'll see how it goes. I'll report back in due course.

Speech to text

I'm just mucking around with the windows speech to text software. It's a bit annoying at the moment because I haven't yet worked out how to delete things when things go wrong. But it's still great fun. Loving it!

I write like ...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Thank you both

Can I just take a moment to thank the 60-odd people who have downloaded To Posterity over the past 3 weeks? Seeing that number of downloads has totally made my month, as I write the poems so that they can be shared and enjoyed by others (I'm assuming you both enjoyed the poems as I haven't heard any complaints or received any death threats or suchlike).

And a very special thanks, with added hugs, to Heather - the first person ever to make a donation to Rik's Garret Redecoration Fund via the donation link on the RikVerse Website pages; you reduced me to tears, woman!

Wax - Building A Bridge To Your Heart

I forgot just how good this video is.

Should I be embarrassed to admit that I can still remember all the words to the song?

No. I have no shame.

Telik Bead Game

My lack of posts can be explained - honest, guv!

1. I'm out of work looking for a job. Jobhunting takes up a lot of my fret time.

2. I might be in the process of wasting a bit of time developing a new conlang. It's like a sickness or compulsion: I can't help myself.

But the main reason for not posting is my Open University work, wherein I'm learning to program in Java. Typically, not much was soaking in from the course books, so I did what i normally do in such situations: I started mucking around with code.

See, a long while back I had an idea for a mad conworld-related board game - a sort of bastard backgammon crossed with an African bead game of my own design. I've no idea if the rules of the game are viable, so I decided to make a playable version - just for the hell of it really. To turn my efforts legitimate I'm hand-coded the whole shebang and, because it's summer and the heat deranged me, I decided to try and make it an interactive online thingy (to cover the networking and threading stuff I was having difficulty with on the course).

It's nowhere near finished yet, but most of the basics are in - including all the fun game rules stuff and a tweet-like thingy for the social side of stuff. I'm sure the project will keep me off the streets for a few weeks more ...

Some screenshots of my baby:

Concerning comments

Just a quick note - if you leave comments in any script other than the latin script I'm likely to delete them on sight. If you leave a comment with spam links embedded in it, I will not only delete it on sight, I shall also take time out of my busy schedule to build a curse specially directed at you. In case you're wondering, I'm very good at building curses capable of tracking their targets through the aethers and internets.

You really don't want to waste my time moderating blog comments, 'kay?

Thank you for taking the time to read this note.

Rik's Voting Reform Suggestion

1. Every voter gets exactly 1 vote, marked as an X next to a single candidate's name

2. Divide the country into 300 constituencies, the largest having no more than double the no of voters of the smallest. Also, roughly 30 constituencies per region

3. Each constituency elects 2 MPs (senior and junior)

4. To be elected, a candidate must come first or second in the constituency vote

... so far, so boring. Now for the interesting stuff.

5. For every 4000 votes a successful candidate receives, they are awarded 1 parliamentary vote

6. Every party contesting more than 10 constituencies in a region can nominate a regional candidate. Each region shall elect 5 regional MPs

7. In each constituency, where a candidate belongs to a party with a regional candidate, the votes for those candidates not elected are transferred to their regional candidate

8. For successful candidates in each constituency, those votes not counted towards the award of their parliamentary vote are transferred to the regional candidate (eg votes transferred = votes cast - (parliamentary votes awarded * 4000)

9. The 5 regional candidates receiving the most transferred votes are elected.

10. For every 8000 transferred votes, a successful regional candidate receives 1 parliamentary votes.

Advantages:

a. 1 person, 1 (non-transferrable) vote. Simple, neat, clean. Also, the results will be known within hours of the polls closing, and there will still be a link between MPs and their constituencies

b. Few votes are wasted: those votes not used in the constituency are mopped up by the regional candidate

c. The number of MPs elected may not be very proportional, but the number of parliamentary votes allocated will be reasonably accurate: the parties with the highest % vote in a region will receive slightly more votes, and very small parties will not.

d. Independents - not likely to do well in the constituencies, but if they band together to put up a regional candidate they might just have a chance of getting a seat (and vote) in parliament

e. EVERY VOTE COUNTS - an end to this 'marginal seat' nonsense that deprives the rest of us of having a say in elections.

Twitter

Created by Oatmeal

Facebook

Created by Oatmeal

Akmal Shaikh

The news that the Chinese authorities have chosen to execute Akmal Shaikh is ... unsurprising. The condemnations by Government leaders and other politicians are welcome ... but not enough.

No nation state has the right to take a person's life against that person's will. No government should hold the right of life and death over its own citizens or visitors to its shores.

Judicial execution must end. There is something we can do to help end it, here in the UK.

We need a new law. That law must make it explicit that the judicial execution of any Briton in any nation is an act of murder with malice aforethought, allowing the British courts to issue warrants for the arrest of those persons involved in the execution: prosecutors; judges; prison wardens and guards; oficials who have a legal capacity to directly intervene and offer clemency - but choose not to do so.

Of course, no nation state that practices judicial execution would be willing to arrest people named in the warrant, and it's doubtful that other nation states would be willing to upset the likes of China, the United States or Saudi Arabia by acting on the warrant when those people come within their juristiction.

But it will allow those people to be arrested and charged with murder should they ever attempt to enter the United Kingdom. Such as Rick Perry, Governor of Texas in 2003 when the Texans executed Jackie Elliot; Roy Barnes, Governor of Georgia in 2002 when the Georgians saw fit to murder Tracy Housel. And not forgetting those folks in Singapore who strung up that dog John Martin back in 1996.

Yes, Martin was a serial murderer, Elliot was a rapist-murderer and Housel also murdered an innocent woman. Nasty dogs. But a nation state that executes such deviants makes itself no better than them. A murder can never be fixed by further murders - not in anyone's name. Not even in God's name.

And nation states that execute people with mental disorders ... are no better than the Nazis in Germany with their ethnic cleansing and eugenics.

Akmal Shaik deserved better than the fate delivered to him this morning. In his memory, let us work to bring the perpetrators of his murder to justice!

Aspie quiz thingy

... so I have no excuse, then?



Online test here. I'm only posting this because it looks kinda pretty.

For those about to feast on Daffy ...

... some duck porn, courtesy of the ever-readable Carl Zimmer on his blog The Loom.

A video ...

To celebrate the end of this year's (brown and musty) 70s fashion revival, one of my favourite songs from that (otherwise dismal) decade:



Pussycat. Mississippi. Enjoy!


(I can't wait to find out what next year's fashion colour is going to be. Please, no more tan, no more brown, and no more men wearing sandals and socks!)

Spiders on drugs

... you know it's the truth!

Microbial Art

... 'kay, so I'm surfing instead of writing. I'm sure the NaNoWriMo Enforcement Squad will be knocking on my door with manacles to chain me to the ('net disabled) keyboard in due course.

Anyways, when I was a squib of a fellow, I used to work in a microbiology lab - part of a factory that made medical equipment. More than once I was told off for "mucking around" with agar plates and cultures instead of doing proper (ie extremely tedious) work.

But not even my best efforts could match some of these microbial art masterpieces! Jealous as heck, I am ...

Who says petitions don't work?

It's actually a decent apology - kudos to the person who drafted it. Only the bare minimum of political rhetoric, and a nod towards the many, many other gay men who lived in such fear of reprisal.

So petitions are useful, then, for stuff that don't cost a penny to change ...

Alan Turing petition

Taken from the 10 Downing Street website:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death.

"Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

"He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.

"The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man's life and career."

Bollox to the recession!

Are you bored of bad debt? Fed up with fiscal ineptitude? Is the thankless grudge of thrift getting you down?

What you need is a dose of quality poetry! Vim your vocabulary with a verse or two. Pep your pulse with a poem.

Yes, you too can say "Bollox to the recession!" by treating yourself to a book of poems courtesy of those quality merchants of muse No Tell Books. Immersed in a sea of wordscapes, these poets can wash away your worries at the flick of a page.

And don't forget to check out the No Tells Blog for the hottest news on offers and special promotions.

Say Bollox to the recession! with a No Tell tome. I just did, and I feel so good about myself I want to burst with pride!

Note: I have nothing to do with No Tell Books apart from having a lot of respect for the dedication and hard work that Reb and her mates have put into starting and developing their own micropress. The only time I submitted poems to No Tell Motel my work was rejected in a professional and businesslike manner.

If you love diversity in poetry and art, if you believe in freedom for little people to be able to start and build up their own businesses in the face of multinational corporate conglomerates who care only for the profit margin, then you owe it to those plucky risk-takers to at least check out their products - you never know: you might end up finding a book you'll love for the rest of your life!

Go on - there's no harm in checking out the links. You know you want to ...

Treason

1. Go read Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone - The Great American Bubble Machine.

2. Make sure you read the whole article.

3. Do some seething.

There used to be a time when coin clippers - because that is exactly what the senior executives of Goldman Sachs and their like are, what with their bubble profits and bonuses - could be charged with treason.

I'd also suggest that such a reckless, massive attack on the market economy is no different to terrorism - and people who engineer such profit-driven endeavours are no better than economic terrorists. If Goldman Sachs was a nation state, would we not now be at war with them?

See, I'm still seething about this whole mess. And so far the only people I see being punished for these crimes against society are the victims. And that is wrong.

Maybe we can't prosecute these bastards for treason. But that doesn't mean that we can't change the law to make sure that anyone who tries these scams against us again do have to face the full force of our rage.