Dark Liquid

When commenting in a rough drawing of a map of a river during a roleplay…

“It looks like a blue rectum lined with sequins and daffodils!”

The honeymoon is booked. We’re going to Seattle, baby!

Before we saw The Dark Knight on Sunday, we also popped down to the Poole Park Fest to see Lady Winwoods Maggot, who are awesome my the way.  What made the morning particularly of note was that I bumped into Alex while I was there. Yes, that Alex. The one who disappeared after some ‘incidents’ and completely sut himself off from the rest of us, refusing to respond to any emails, phone calls, etc.

I don’t have any particularly bad feelings towards him, I wasn’t involved in what happened and so it’s none of my business and I’ll leave recriminations and judgements to those actually involved. Anyway, a mildly awkward conversation ensued after which we went our separate ways. Whether or not we ever see each other again or he decides to make contact is up to him really, since he has done quite a good job of cutting all lines of communications with him.

I saw The Dark Knight yesterday. It was enjoyable but I didn’t like it as much as Batman Begins. Maybe all the hype around it built up my expectations too much. The Joker was excellent though and was a really brilliant and convincing performance.

We were offered so called Premier seats at the Odeon. They suck. For me, they were quite comfortable, no not much more than the normal seats. The main problem was that unless you are at least 6 feet tall, you can’t see over the head rest of the Premier seat in front of you. This was obviously an issue for Dru. It was an issue for several people in the cinema it seems as throughout the trailers I could here several complaints from other customers.

Cinema, it’s all about the experience, right?

Protagonize - Featured Story

Wow, I got a story I’ve been writing on protagonize featured! Go me! What I nice thing to wake up to on a Tuesday morning!

Well, we got our new passports today, our first official pieces of documentation with our new, married identities on. Hurray! I thought, but it was too good to be true.

Dru’s name was wrong. We had both sent out our applications at the same time, both applications needed to reference each other, and yet the managed to get my new surname right but hers wrong.

For fucks sake.

In a discussion with a friend over phones, I covered a little bit of my personal philosophy regarding how I treat freedom and open source software amongst other things.

When it comes down to it, I believe in the best tool for the job where the term best means ‘allows me to do the job in the most satisfactory, fun and efficient way possible’. Now, I’m willing to make some sacrifices to balance this out with my desire to conform to my ethical desire to do so using freedom-supporting tools.

Given two tools, a commercial/proprietary one that does everything I need and in the way I like and a freedom-supporting tool that may be lacking in some areas that while annoying, are not essential, I would choose the freedom-supporting one. However, when the feature difference between tools is immense, I will choose the best tool for the job regardless of how it fits in with my ethical standpoint.

Now, some people might say this is hypocritical. To which I say, go fuck yourselves. When I use a non-freedom-supporting tool, I make sure to always be on the look out for alternatives, or to try and contribute to a ‘near-miss’ freedom-supporting project if I can. I doubt anyone in the world is 100% freedom-supporting in their lifestyle choices. I don’t suppose even the most hardline, black and white attitude freedom lover for goes everything that they don’t have 100% freedom with.

The world is one of compromises. For instance, I’m not much a gamer, but I like the occasional game. I have a GP2X a mostly freedom-supporting portable gaming device that runs Linux on which I play home-brew games. That doesn’t completely fulfil me though and all the other offerings out there aren’t satisfactory except for commercial/proprietary ones. The Xbox 360 I will not support as even though I would probably prefer it objectively to the PS3 due to the range of games, etc, I find supporting Microsoft is an absolute no ethically. I admit, my attitude is slowly changing towards them, in their favour, but currently my view is that they are only slightly less scummy than they were. Thus, I have a PS3. Sony I also have strong ethical problems with, regarding their DRM escapades amongst other things. I don’t support Sony and I try to make my views about Sony quite clear. I do not like Sony or endorse them in any way. Once again I am picking the best tool for the job, the job being that of entertaining me without majorly offending my ethical viewpoints.

I’m not going to give up non-free things because I wish the world was 100% freedom throughout. I’m not going to stop listening to bands that don’t release their work under free-culture licenses. I’m not going to stop reading books that weren’t published under a creative commons license. I’m not going to needlessly limit my life for an ethical view point. I can still espouse my ideals and support them. Reducing my quality of life doesn’t make the world better and it doesn’t help the cause. As much as people would like to believe that it sends a message, that message gets lost as so much noise in the signal.

We are a race of people that like convenience and progress and practicality and fun. A group of people that forgo a lot that to follow a hard line freedom-only attitude are only going to make the freedom-loving attitude in any degree look silly to the majority that we are trying to promote it to. No-one things going back to the past and living like the Amish is that great an idea or we’d all be doing it. Of course, I don’t have a problem with the Amish or how they choose to live, but as soon as someone tried to ram that attitude down your throat, you have a problem. There’s a time and a place to take a stand but limiting ourselves for little benefit isn’t one of them. It might give yourself a sense of self-satisfaction, but it’s not you you’re trying to convince.

Got back from Cropredy today. Another awesome festival this year with some awesome performances by 3 Daft Monkeys, Whapweasel, The Family Mahone and others. Julie Fowlis was really quite good as well.

Didn’t end up hanging out with Dad, Tony and Candy (uncle and aunt) much though, it was a little hard to stay together amongst 20000 people with poor phone reception and waking up at differing times, etc. The only downer on the event was the rain on the last day, but other than that it was an excellent 3 days.

I did my usual trick of demolishing some books. I finished Fight Club by the time we reached the camp site on the way up, then proceeded to read the book Dru brought up to read while she was asleep and for an hour or so during one of the performances. I bought another book to read on the way down, Next by Michel Crighton which so far is pretty enjoyable.

Work the last few days has been a little hectic and stressful but the true extent of that will become truly apparent tomorrow when I head back to work and find out if there are any messes for me to clean up.

The podcast may be gone but the ‘rock conference’ lives on! I kinda expected it to happen, but hearing it confirmed was awesome. Now I just need to find something to do all the time in the year between LUGRadio Lives!

LRL08UK was awesome. The social aspect was even better than last year. Shoutouts to Bytey and Andrea, two awesome people we hung out with as well as Matt, the guys and cool Scot/American Andrew. See you guys next year!

It was one expensive weekend. I spent about £700 since I paid for everything more or less. Lost had the bad luck to have his bank fuck him over during the weekend, so he couldn’t get at any of his cash. I also bought Dru a ASUS eee 900, which doubled up the expenditures to the £700.

I did my best to put my camera to good use and took about 80 odd photos (of which only about 50 were usable) and bumped them up on flickr. Got some good shots and a lot of mundane ones.

All in all, an awesome weekend. Looking forwards to next year.

Hmm, haven’t posted in a while. Here’s a quick summary of the last few weeks.

• Well, the wedding is still progressing nicely. It’s an arse trying to get anything sorted with honeymoons though due to all the legal gumph with name-changing and visas, etc.
• Work is still busy as hell.
• Heading up to the last (sniff, sniff) LUGRadioLive today
• I am loving jQuery more and more
• Sweatmistress (don’t ask, it’s my weird sense of humour at work again)
• I’ve been trying to write more, joined a cool site called Protagonize
• New drums and a digital camera!
• Forbidden Kingdom is awesome, Jackie Chan looks great in dreds
• Dr. Horrible is also awesome. “The hammer is my penis.”