Insanity

H/t: The Torch

Canada has the beginnings of military involvement in their Pride marches. As in gay sexuality Pride. The word referring to being proud of who you are, which is ultimately what many kinds of marches are about.

It’s a slap in the face to me and Australia. Not only is Canada a place (the 4th) allowing gay marriage, but now we see gays being able to serve in the military is becoming intrinsically part of their military. Beyond law and/or doctrine.

The truth is being gay is not a problem and in examples like military service what really matters is not who you have sex with but rather what degree you fit with the military needs. My reading in conservative circles show most just do not get something this simple.

Well Canada does get it and they as a nation can rightly be proud of it. Canada’s military will be strengthened by the involvement of gays in a more honest level who are no longer going to be turfed out on an excuse.

Went to a local game arcade today. I have not visited one in quite a while and paid attention to it going through. It’s interesting from an offline community perspective where this community is very loose knit and mostly quite young. Four things stood out to me compared to the familiarity I had with arcades as a young man.

The most disturbing was the plethora of gaming machines. In other words gambling. Some of these were directly about money. Three were of the aim a coin (20 cents in this case) through the slot to win kind. For example, one caused a small bucket of coins to tip, another caused a little bulldozer to push some coins forwards into the collection point.

More of the gambling games were less direct but still about risking money to WIN!!!! There were, of course, a bunch of ’skilltesters’. These grabbing arm devices and manipulated into position to hopefully grab displayed items. One box even had jewellery but chocolates and simple toys were more common. And then there were ticket dispensers where collected tickets from any of the machines won by various means could be transferred for a fairly wide variety of items.

I’m no gambling advocate and it seems this industry evades gambling law and scrutiny and we are having children directly targeted. I am concerned targeting these unprepared kids with such concepts is setting up problems for later.

The next thing noticed is easily predicted by anybody. Namely a decline in the actual video games. Computers and consoles like the playstation, xbox and wii have very much edged out the competition there. In fact, video games accounted for no more than ½ the machines there and most involved one of the other points I mention.

Thirdly I saw a significant rise in physically interactive games. Dance-like steeping games, strong man games, throwing balls and shooting water cannons or guns. It’s clear the demand for such is still strong and this is how I view the success of wii beyond the bad pricing decisions of the other two major consoles. Wii has many interactive games and associated devices, I have even seen a fitness game where you actually exercise during gaming.

The last interesting thing, especially from a community aspect is a continuing rise in social gaming. From the basic linked car (and other) racing games to even a gambling game where one can win a jackpot. There were several small team video games like the gun and water cannon shooters as well.

In my internal ponderings of who I am and what I want to do now I have uncovered a desire in me to understand and very probably use online and offline communities. I feel this is a major area somewhat neglected in modern life and which is undergoing colossal levels of change. I hope to be able to use my understandings to in some way ‘make a living’. I will be the first to admit my social skills are not that highly polished.

Perhaps at an online level that is so but offline I have the disadvantage of the hearing impairment and that means much of the social skills I have garnered have been rather deliberately and late learnt rather than picked up more smoothly and easily as a child. However this can also be an advantage. My understanding of some of the basic concepts such as manipulation is higher at a conscious level due to this need for manual and considered understanding.

As part of this I have discovered and delved into the so called Web 2.0 phenomenon. Web 2.0 is a bit of a misleading term (calling it Web 1.1 is good enough really) for it’s really about more complex association structures still built on the same Web 1.0 structures.

There are many examples and all relate at some level to online communities. Here are some examples. Blogs, wikis, Facebook, Lijit, Digg, Diigo, del.icio.us. Notice how many have fancy names? All of these offer more advanced ways to communicate with other internet users with minimal effort. I may even review some of those. More recently I’ve become interested in a wiki called MeatBall which is about online communities. It is in essence an online community on online communities. What a spin!

On the offline side I have a long way to go. I need a more robust social network for that.

After nagging my hosting provider I have now upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. Oh the sparkly pretty goodness. I might trawl through the addons to see if there’s anything there worthwhile to use in this blog.

Update: Ahh yes I’ve managed to screw up the entire tag and category thing with the automated category to tag converter.  It deletes the original categories..

Update 2: There is no fix apart from restoring a backup so it stays put.  I’ve added some links in like a blogroll.

Looks like this is it for Australian involvement in Iraq. The recently elected Prime Minister Rudd did promise this, however involvement in Afghanistan will likely be ongoing a while longer.

It’s not officially verified yet, this will come soon no doubt.

Update:  It’s officially verified by Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

The new-look Telstra phone bill came today. That’s really what it was too. New-look, not better-look and most definitely not more environmentally friendly.My old bill took or or two pages and provided some details of calls made. The new-look does away with all that detail nonsense to keep you less informed. The pretty tree brochure explaining such wonderful features as a promotional ‘updates and special offers’ area and how it’ll use less paper and very importantly to sign up for the online billing in Telstra so they can pour more of their advertisements onto your day in between their shoddy uptime and web design in the hope they might bother to tell you where your charges come from.

The new bill itself would take up only one page if they had bothered to print the ‘important messages’ in the big white space below the billing details. No it had to be printed on a new sheet of paper.

So in summary we have 3 pages of paper compared to the original 2, less informed, and more promotional rubbish. But don’t worry the high ‘connection’ fees still take up the bulk of the bill.

I want to ditch this. The new plans from my ISP may allow me to ditch their landline altogether.

H/t Darwin City News

One of the unfortunate sides of being a gay man are the accusations directly or indirectly that being gay equates to being a paedophile. A very popular, untrue and repulsive belief especially amongst religious Conservatives and Pederasts. But for all the dark clouds, the silver lining is many of us pay attention to the problem.

Now when a baby, toddler or child of let us say 7 or so is involved people are quick to align their displeasure of paedophilia. We take the effort to report it and follow up with legal action. We try to remove the child from the situation. This is the right thing to do after all, for this is about rape, abuse and harming a child which has few to no tools to self protect, warping their sexuality and life so much that their adult sexuality and life can be problematic as well.

This is Unpopular Paedophilia, the kind we recognise, and recent societal focus on this has probably helped many children in the future although perhaps we need to be careful not to imprison children with fear.

And then there is Popular Paedophilia.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve installed a new ‘wijit’ from ‘lijit’. I am dubious about all these phonetic and word distortion games the internet is so fond of lately. But it does make proprietary names easier. This widget is a little search thing to the right. My best guess is it’s some kind of personalised network search tool which looked interesting in concept so I thought I’d give it a try to see how it works.

Anna works for Cara, an organisation that helps, enables and gives opportunity for people with severe and multiple disabilities in South Australia. For example, Cara does work in accommodation, respite and skill growth for some 600 children and adults.

Anna goes a little beyond just working for Cara, and in my personal meetings with this wonderful lady, she shows her passion in this field. Thus Anna is embarking on a Great Wall of China Trek in September 2008 involving much discovery, walking and fundraising, with the aim of raising funds and awareness for Cara, no doubt learning and having fun on the way.

Anna would love to raise $5500 for this cause and you can donate directly or if you want to be more or differently involved support this Great Wall of China Trek in other ways like encouragement or spreading the word. There is a facebook group going too.

Finally have akismet spam killer going on here. 2000 suggestions for sex, drugs and Nigerian giveaways gone. I even had a real comment in there. What a shocker!