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ghoti_mhic_uait's, but if not then I might need to withdraw the odd one of these offers.) Let me know if you're interested in any of these, otherwise I plan to take them to a charity shop in a week or two. Condition distinctly various (some covers damaged, spines generally broken, etc.), but they should all be readable enough.I feel like I haven't been reading a lot recently, but that's probably because I've been reading a single enormous thing: Worm. I've been describing it glibly as "grimdark superhero fic", but I'm not sure that's really very accurate, so let me try to do a better job.
( some minor spoilers but hopefully not too many )ceb for digging out the link.
is mise bó
tá mé an-caoin
léigh mé an dán
ar idirlíon
nuair is mian leat
canaim amhrán
fanaim rómhall
lím an t-arán
Coláiste Lurgan (Lurgan College) is an Irish-language summer school in Connemara; it has a musical project called TG Lurgan which does lots of brilliant translated covers. Here are a couple, worth watching even if you have little or no Irish 'cause they're obviously having such a good time with it!
( videos )(I'd run across them before, but eyebrowsofpower reminded me of them today.)
I came across 17776 a little while back via shockproofbeats. It's a startlingly original piece of web fiction: it's partly about the far future, partly about American football, and partly about the human condition and its affinity for play. I've heard it compared to Homestuck, although it's very much shorter - I think the main thing they have in common is that they're both making inventive use of the medium.
Some people mentioned they found it tough going at the start and gave up (the first episode is mostly a very long scrolling calendar, particularly bad on mobile, and there's quite a bit of embedded video and such; it may well work a bit better on desktop, although I read/watched the whole thing on my phone). It's worth persevering.
I reckon this is on my list of Hugo nominees for next year, if only I can work out what category to put it in.
TL;DR: if you're concerned about another Con/LD coalition, you should know the Lib Dem constitution was changed a few years ago to make that harder. Details follow.
There was a conversation over on liv's journal about how the Liberal Democrats make the decision to go into a coalition, and in general lots of people have made comments along the lines of "I can't vote Lib Dem because they'll just go and prop up the Tories again". In May 2010, just after the Tories made a coalition offer, I wrote to my newly-elected Lib Dem MP (Julian Huppert) to say how scared I was about it, including this:
Their offer doesn't seem worth the price of a Conservative government with a working majority, and I'm concerned that if the Lib Dems accepted it we would not only alienate our base but also ruin our chances of electoral success for another generation by associating ourselves with the draconian spending cuts that seem inevitable. I could only even start to support an LD/Con coalition if there were a clear and believable commitment towards PR, in which case there's just a chance that it might be worth the risk. Otherwise, it seems like suicide.
So, er, yeah. But obviously I wasn't the only person in the party thinking this, and the rules were changed in 2012 to make it harder for the parliamentary party to enter a coalition without the consent of the party as a whole. It was really difficult to work out retrospectively what exactly had been changed, because Lib Dem data publication is not quite what it might be, but with a pointer from miss_s_b I was able to dig it out of old conference reports. I'm reposting that here as a top-level journal entry so that I can point people to it without others having to deal with the resulting comments, and so that nobody else has to go through the effort of trying to dig it up.
Here are my sources:
The old rules, dating from 1998, were that "any substantial proposal which could affect the Party’s independence of political action" required:
The new rules are that if the Commons Party after negotiation and consultation decides to support a coalition government, then it shall seek the approval of a special conference, and the motion requires a two-thirds majority of those present and voting at conference to pass. (See Article 23 of the current constitution for the details. Side note: Tim Farron moved the conference motion to add this article.)
This is a significant tightening: a two-thirds majority of conference is now absolutely required, whereas previously MPs and Federal Executive could act alone if they had a 75% majority among themselves. Even if Tim Farron is gung-ho to cosy up to the Tories (which I personally don't believe, but let's run with it), to think that another Con/LD coalition is likely under these rules, you have to not only believe that Farron and the rest of the parliamentary party would support it, but also that a supermajority of the most activist subset of Lib Dem party members - the sort who've spent the last couple of years working to claw things back from near-destruction at a national level - would want to do it all again after the last time with a party committed to exactly the opposite of our primary campaign message. Being cynical about politicians who are only out for power or whatever is one thing, but this seems a whole lot less plausible to me.
(Full disclosure: I'm a Lib Dem member and very low-level activist, i.e. I occasionally get sent out to deliver leaflets and such. I have nowhere near enough time or energy to go to conferences or gets involved with party policy. I have plenty to criticise in Lib Dems past and present, but I also want to make sure that my criticisms are accurate.)
Edited 2019-05-09 to update link to constitution, and to refer to Article 23 rather than Article 22 as a result of amendments.
#! /usr/bin/python3
from argparse import ArgumentParser
from datetime import datetime
import os.path
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import dateutil.parser
from icalendar import (
Calendar,
Event,
)
import requests
parser = ArgumentParser(
description="Generate iCalendar file for Cambridge bin collection days.")
parser.add_argument(
"id",
help=(
"Unique identifier for this calendar, normally your host name. Make "
"sure that this does not collide with any other calendars."))
parser.add_argument("address", help="Your street address in Cambridge.")
parser.add_argument("postcode", help="Your postcode.")
args = parser.parse_args()
now = datetime.now()
req = requests.get(
"http://bins.cambridge.gov.uk/bins.php",
params={"address": args.address, "postcode": args.postcode})
soup = BeautifulSoup(req.text)
cal = Calendar()
cal.add("prodid", "-//riva.pelham.vpn.ucam.org//bin-days//EN")
cal.add("version", "2.0")
cal.add("calscale", "GREGORIAN")
cal.add("x-wr-calname", "Bin days")
cal.add("x-wr-timezone", "Europe/London")
for div in soup.find_all("div", style=re.compile(r"^text-align:center")):
desc = div.contents[0]
when = dateutil.parser.parse(div.b.get_text(" ").rstrip("*"))
while when < now:
when = when.replace(year=when.year + 1)
event = Event()
event.add("uid", "bin-days/{:%Y%m%d}@{}".format(when, args.id))
event.add("dtstart", when.date())
event.add("summary", desc.capitalize())
event.add("transp", "TRANSPARENT")
cal.add_component(event)
with open(os.path.expanduser("~/public_html/bin-days.ics"), "wb") as out:
out.write(cal.to_ical())On Debian, this requires the python3-bs4, python3-dateutil, python3-icalendar, and python3-requests packages. You'll probably want to change the output path to somewhere that your calendar software can see (so if it's a web service such as Google Calendar then it needs to be something that corresponds to an accessible URL). The web-scraping is pretty gross, but it's the best I can do given the council's published data. Ideally this would itself be a web service that could generate calendars on demand for a given address and postcode, but like I say I'm lazy.
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ghoti and I have been watching our way through Once Upon a Time. It's basically televised urban fantasy, subgenre "mining folk mythology for fun and profit". The central conceit is that fairy tales are real and their characters live in other realms, until an event where an ensemble-cast-ful of them are cursed into our world and lose their memories of the Enchanted Forest. Each episode interleaves the main present-day plot with flashback sequences from the fairy-tale past, which are used to great effect to develop individual characters. We're up to season four at the moment and still thoroughly enjoying it; the setting means that the show's creators can mix in new underlying tales from time to time, which does a good job of keeping things fresh.ewx linked to a news article about a paper on phylogenetic/linguistic analysis of the roots of folktales. With this recent TV consumption, the main thing that jumped out at me was ( spoilers for season one ). If you're willing to accept the poetic reading of "time" as something like "recorded history" or "civilisation", "Beauty and the Beast" being around 4000 years old also puts a nice gloss on the Disney song "Tale as old as time / Song as old as rhyme" (which I only just found out was sung by Angela Lansbury in the film!).Due to a miscommunication, ghoti and I have ended up with two more £7.50 tickets to this exciting poetry slam at the Junction on 6 Nov than we in fact need. Would anyone like to take them off our hands?
I've decided to switch to being vegetarian.
This is definitely at least somewhat prompted by hanging around with liv and jack a lot more lately, although neither of them has been evangelising to us about it! (Something about this seems to invite possibly inappropriate religious metaphors; I almost wrote "convert" rather than "switch" above.) And of course ghoti went vegetarian herself a few months ago, and since she does most of the cooking in our household that tended to cut down my meat intake anyway. The children still eat meat, so I could have asked to keep having meat as well, or could have made myself corned beef sandwiches or whatever for lunch, but somehow neither of those seemed to happen. Maybe this is the seductive allure of halloumi at work?
I think, really, I'm generally looking for ways to tread a bit more lightly upon the earth. We gave up our car a couple of years back, which definitely started with a practical prompt (an MOT test that came back with uneconomical-to-repair problems), but was also a way to improve fitness and reduce our energy footprint. I do take plane trips a couple of times a year, mostly for work, which I suppose wipes out practically every other thing I could possibly do, and I'm not totally convinced that individual action is the way to deal with climate change anyway; but these seem like weak excuses for not doing what I can in other respects. Livestock agriculture is ecologically expensive.
At this point I'm not being careful about things like gelatine or rennet, nor about cooking equipment that's also used for meat; I'm just refraining from the actual eating of chunks of dead animal.
ghoti and I played Monastery, which I think worked much better the second time although the rules are still not the clearest piece of writing in the world and I had to resort to BoardGameGeek to disambiguate, which was OK until I failed to correctly explain what I'd learned to ghoti and ended up inadvertently gaining an advantage as a result. Hopefully next time we'll know what we're doing.liv, as with the previous anthology The Book of Jhereg which included books 1-3. The first three were more or less otherworldly detective yarns and thoroughly enjoyable; but I'm not far enough through these two to say much about them yet. Maybe later.ghoti for those as my phone's camera isn't working. Assuming that all goes well, we plan to keep one and have homes lined up for the other three.
