The moving finger rants

For reference, here's how I introduced myself on kouredios' friending meme.

( Behind ye cut )

I don't think I've missed anything out, except possibly for the fact that I don't really do fandom, which would seem to be a prerequisite. Maybe I should have mentioned that.

Livejournal doesn't give a shit about you and Dreamwidth does. It's exactly the same except it works better, it's less ugly, and the people who run it give a damn.

And DW doesn't get DDOSed every time the Russians have an election.

If you have friends on LJ and you're considering switching, chances are that those friends aren't going to be on LJ for long, either. Someone has to be first.

The vast majority of paid features on LJ are available with the free Dreamwidth account. You can import your posts and cross-post to LJ and set up RSS feeds for other people's LJ posts. Commenters can use OpenID to leave comments with their LJ login if they must. Nothing has to change except that you'll be somewhere where people like you.

Join us. We have cookies.

It's come to my attention that I should probably make the following clear: I was not actually present at the demo/riot in Parliament Square on Thursday. Somehow in my blog post I managed to neglect any mention of the words BBC News live stream, which might have made the whole thing significantly more clear.

It might also have been more clear for those of you who read me on the Twitters, on which I made comments like

@gominokouhai I got no work done today and BBC News is burned-in to the company monitor. Thanks for the economic stimulus, fuckos.

However for those of you who only read the blog post I may have given the wrong impression.

I don't have the money to go down to That London for a demo. I went to That London for a holiday. I came back, and as soon as I'd done so, I watched the place burn on live TV. The content of the post is still 100% accurate: I saw all of those things happen, I just saw them happen through a browser window.

What's interesting, though, is the distinction between the live news stream and what was later shown, after editing, on the 8 o'clock news. I suppose that's why they call it a news story. The BBC have a duty to provide balanced coverage, but sometimes I wonder if they take that duty too seriously: there's a difference between balanced and insipid. It's blatantly obvious from the raw footage that the Met instigated the violence. The march was peaceful and good-natured, and was proceeding along the agreed route until the demonstrators saw a kettle being formed ahead. We've all seen what happens in kettles, and it's entirely understandable that they might want to avoid it.

@PennyRed To avoid kettling, bits of the march are splitting off down sidestreets then rejoining. Benny Hill again!

I read another blog post (can't find the link right now, will edit if I see it again) that suggested that the agreed route was cordoned off. The marchers had nowhere else to go, so kept walking, and found themselves in Parliament Square. They weren't supposed to be there, but they hadn't been given a choice. The Met subsequently used the fact that they'd deviated from the agreed route as the sole justification for everything that followed.

Once inside the kettle, the police continued to deny that it was a kettle. Protestors who wanted to get out were sent to the opposite side of the square, where they were told they could exit; once there, they were sent back to the other side again. I watched Chief Superintendent Julia Pendry claim that no containment was taking place. At the same time I could watch the crowd trapped in the Square and read their Twitter streams: it must have felt very different to the demonstrators on the ground.

When you get 20,000 people in a small space, there is inevitably going to be some pushing and shoving. I watched it on the live stream. It looks like nothing more than a quiet crowd of people confined in a small area. Certainly there was nothing going on that warranted this mounted charge.

A lot has been made of the fact that a police officer was pulled off his horse and injured. We've got the footage of that too. There are no protestors anywhere near him; it looks like the horse gets spooked and he falls off because he's a crap rider. The BBC report suggested that the horse bolted because of a firecracker; not a very good police horse either if it can't deal with loud noises (Note: see expert commentary below), and besides this is a world away from being dragged off police horses and beaten. Furthermore, behind the guy falling off his horse you can see two young women being whacked with a baton for no reason whatsoever. So the violence had already begun by this point, and it wasn't the students perpetrating it.

Newsnight last night was a fifteen-minute condemnation of the fact that some protestors brought snooker balls with them. The NUS spokeswoman, who hadn't brought snooker balls with her, spent the whole time being asked why she might have brought snooker balls with her. We have one single report of a snooker ball being thrown (and one of a golf ball), which rapidly snowballed into Chief Superintendent Julia Pendry announcing that her officers were under constant attack with snooker balls. I would expect a senior police officer to at least be able to count to three, let alone one; it's the number of 'ellos they're supposed to say.

While we're at it, let's look at Charlie Gilmour. The kid's a prick, no question. What's important is that there was one of him, and let's be generous and say ten idiots who'd brought snooker balls. That leaves 19,989 people in the kettle who were not utter tosspots and who had no reason to be contained.

In any gathering of 100 people I fully expect 90 or 95 of them to be fucking morons. That's simple statistical expectation. The fact that we can only talk about two or three idiots in a throng of twenty thousand says a great deal about the majority who were there for peaceful reasons and who remained peaceful throughout, even while the batons rained down indiscriminately. The police, on the other hand, went to Whitehall spoiling for a fight. Not finding one, they created one to suit their purposes. While they did so, Julia Pendry was lying on national TV about methods of last resort.

And now: linkdump! Here's just a selection of eyewitness reports.

• Laurie Penny's excellent piece: Inside the Parliament Square kettle
• This is what democracy smells like
• Jody McIntyre was dragged from his wheelchair and beaten; police later set about beating up the empty wheelchair
• Police claim they showed restraint at student demo
• Here is a photo of a police officer laughing while hitting a 15 year old girl
• Lies, damned lies, and crowd control

It's unlikely that we're all wrong.

While I'm here, this is an excellent summary of the reasons underlying the protests, and why it affects more than just students: What we're arguing against and what we're fighting for

I'm at work so I've not seen it yet. I shall be watching it through entirely legitimate, legal means when I get home tonight.

I do, however, notice that the most recent edit to the TV Tropes wiki at time of writing is to the Crowning Moment of Awesome page for Doctor Who. This implies that somebody has probably, just now, seen something on TV that constitutes a Crowning Moment.

It's fairly normal to look forward to home time, I know. But I suspect I'm going to enjoy this evening. No spoilers.

~

After last week I've decided that speculation on the series arc is going to have to wait until the series is done. There's not a lot of point in reviewing elements of the show if we don't get to see the payoff for another handful of weeks: I won't know what works and what doesn't until the end of June.

Other than that, is anyone still interested in these reviews?

The actual exodus to Dreamwidth seems to have begun. I've had a play around on the site, and it looks pretty reasonable; it already does several things significantly better than LJ. And it could be a lot worse. It could be DreamWidth.

spudtater's post here (which is the same as spudtater's post here, I think) contains some pretty good suggestions on how to handle the transition. If I'm doing this right, you should be able to read this post on LJ, just like we all did in the old days, when the internet was built out of tin cans and string, and before LJ sold us all to the Russian Mafia, or whatever it was that they did.

Dreamwidth posts from yr. corresp. are syndicated at gominokouhai_fd for those who want to continue reading me on LJ, although I'm not sure how well that will handle friends-locking. Let's find out.

I never really understood the Higgs Boson. It's supposed to give mass to other particles by dint of its very proximity, in the same manner, it was explained to me once, as you get a cluster of people surrounding Maggie Thatcher at a cocktail party^[0]. But if the Higgs Boson is a boson, then it's a particle with mass, and nobody could ever explain to me where it gets its mass.

(Another thing I never got was the Hubble Constant. Galaxies are expanding faster the farther away from us they are, it is true, but due to the distances involved we're seeing those galaxies farther back in the past. So all it shows you is that the rate of expansion of the Universe is slowing, as one might expect. If anything, it should be called the Hubble Variable.)

Nonetheless, reports are pouring in from all corners of the Empire about the weird alternate universe in which we now live. clanwilliam turned into a beard-toting evil mastermind, but perhaps fortunately, one who couldn't get out of bed; and verdandiweaves missed Christmas.

For myself, the landlord turned up today and actually fixed things. Apparently the long-running problem we'd been having with the plumbing was the result of cast-iron pipes, which had filled with a hundred years of rust. That's why I've had no hot water for the last year. Who has cast-iron pipes? What's the one material most likely to cause problems on contact with water?^[1]

In further news: after a shaky start, work is actually going well, I've fixed all the problems, and $BOSS_1 seems quite calm. I think this new universe and I are going to get on well.

That said, when I get home tonight I'm firing up Rome: Total War and crushing the Gauls under my iron sandal. They've earned it.

Right, so. Let me see if I've got this right.

It's not okay to touch people's boobs at a comic-con. This is fine, I can understand that.

But it is okay to express why it's not okay to touch boobs at a con by advocating face-punching and nut-kicking, not just directed at the one wanker who suggested the boob-touching, but at all men.

Dear Feminists: kindly fuck off.

I really thought that we were finally getting somewhere. I thought that some of us had penises and some of us had vaginas, but that we looked at each other and we saw people. The rest was details. But no, everything has to be Us vs. Them and everybody has to be categorized into tiny little exclusive boxes. And specifically, all men fall into one of the two categories of Threat or Menace.

This should be a better world, a friend of mine said. A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where [one could] say, Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts, and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.

Nice idea. Then they made the mistake of trying it, which was pretty stupid. Then they made the further mistake of writing about it on the Internet.

About three hundred comments later, it all went horribly wrong.

I was particularly amused by the handful of people who, after two hundred comments all saying brilliant and beautiful and I wish I'd been there, piped up to post this is completely reprehensible and under no circumstances could anyone ever think it was remotely appropriate. And then, when I had the gall to ask a simple question like what distinguishes this from other forms of social interaction, or what's so different about boobs, all I get—from otherwise highly intelligent people whose thoughts I am honoured and privileged to read—is argument by repeated assertion and a whole lot of well if you don't understand, then I'm certainly not going to tell you.

You ever wonder why we filthy men spent centuries thinking you were all stupider than we are? It's because of shit like this. You won't talk to us.

I don't have boobs. I don't know what it's like. This is the Internet. We are having a discussion.

TALK TO US.

The Internet[...] work[s] how [it's] supposed to, crow the militant third-wavers at feministsf. How's that exactly? By stifling debate and restoring the status quo? By screeching the loudest until everyone else backs down?

Now we're back to the 1970s again—in which I'm scared to approach anybody in case they turn into a spitting harpy who tears my groin off when I offer them a compliment; in which men are from Mars and women are from Venus and this is apparently okay because acting like we are members of the same species is apparently beyond people; in which I can't have sex with anyone at all because even if they say yes they're probably just a brainwashed agent of the Patriarchy.

Now we live in a world where no-one is allowed to even think about questioning ingrained social mores, in case people shout at them on the Internet.

Thanks, feminists. I expect you think you've made progress.

ObWondermark.

~

Comments are disabled because when I say talk to us I mean us in general. Don't talk to me. I am tired of dealing with this bullshit and you've all depressed the hell out of me. I'll come back and play when you're capable of treating people as people.

Yesterday I managed to put my finger on the reason behind my psychological compunction to fix everything. Naturally, it's Doctor Who.

There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on Ace, we've got work to do.

Perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, I am absolutely fine with this, because my father-figure can talk a Dalek to death.

~

On the subject of Doctor Who: linkspam!

Quite interesting argument about the deficiencies in the new series. Contains spoilers for, well, pretty much everything really, but specifically for Last of the Time Lords, so Jehane's not allowed to watch it. Also: it's ten minutes long, but worth it. (Thanks to bibliophile1887 via snapesbabe.)

Some people say that Ghost Light is difficult to understand. These people, clearly, are errant fools. For their benefit, however, the demigodlike ionlylurkhere has produced Ghost Light in the form of lolcats, which is all kinds of awesome. Contains spoilers for Ghost Light obviously, and more incredibly obscure references than you'll find in a week's worth of posts by me.

Okay people, Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day was the 13th June. You can all stop now.

I didn't participate, and for this reason: when the real Zombie Apocalypse comes, we're all going to waste the first half hour Googling to find out if it's all some sort of hilarious meme. When the mushroom clouds light up the midnight sky, even as our eyeballs turn to ashes we'll be wondering if it's a new form of advertising. And Rage-infested monkeys are just viral marketing with the dial turned up to 11, right?

(Rage-infested Monkeys wbaenfarb.)

A million years from now, when alien prospectors land on our planet and survey the ruined wastelands of our once-great civilization, they'll find six billion charred skeletons all sat in front of Windows Messenger. Coda to Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Amis, the last words ever inscribed by humanity will be HEY YOU GUYZ IS THIS 4 REAL?!!?

You can all stop pretending to be Bruce Campbell now. Some of us did this when we were eight.

Oh, all right then. You can continue saying Groovy for the next couple of days.

And the cricket bats are okay too.

~

ION: The Shuttle Atlantis delivers a package of new solar panels to the International Space Station. While it's there, a computer systems crash knocks out the guidance and navigation systems. Presumably the solar panels needed Service Pack 1 or something. In any case, Atlantis is required to stay docked to provide the Station with attitude control.

Meanwhile, they have to perform a spacewalk to repair the Shuttle's thermal blankie with a medical stapler borrowed from the first-aid kit and some surgical-steel fishhooks. NASA officials have as yet remained silent on the inclusion of duct tape and string on the Shuttle's standard equipment list, or whether Richard Dean Anderson has been conscripted into astronaut training.

Meanwhile, a woman in Palatine, Illinois, picks up NASA transmissions on her son's baby monitor. Real Life apparently isn't just a bad sitcom, it's a bad sitcom IN SPACE. We've already got nappy-wearing astronauts on improbable road trips to resolve bizarre love triangles. All we need now is for somebody to step on a rake and for two guy astronauts to leave someone's baby on a passing flying saucer, and I think we have a ratings winner.

There were two major incredibly obscure references in my last post. Of the two, people caught the reference based on a somewhat little-known 1991 children's television drama written by Rusty, but not, apparently, the one based on Omar Khayyam.

B Minus, f-list, Must Try Harder.

~

I got the gig (as I believe the kids are saying these days): I go down tomorrow to do some preliminary recording. Fortunately the guy lives just down the road from me. Since this is now officially Work (my first paying gig at that, woo), any subsequent posts on the subject will go under a friends-lock and a dooce tag.

May it suffice to say that I'm currently listening to Tom Baker Commercial Outtakes and the Orson Welles Frozen Pea Ad on a loop, for moral support.

(There's a little Tom Bakaraoke in there as well, for variety.)

~

I no longer have the Watch! theme tune in my head, and this is the reason why not: the bridge bit that comes after the cheery piccolo bit—done on another one of those 1970s acoustic guitars, as you will recall—was directly ripped off by The Proclaimers for the chorus of `Letter From America'.

And they thought we wouldn't notice.