Crazy Dreams

Scandal! Scandal! Read all about it!

2009-10-18T21:35:51Z

Really short form:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament

Short form:

While trying to defend the reputation an oil company that sickened tens of thousands and killed at least 15 by illegally dumping toxic waste, a British law firm simultaneously infringes press freedoms, the 1688 Bill of Rights, and the rights of Parliament when they prevent The Guardian from reporting both a question in Parliament and why they can't report it. Bloggers spread the censored information overnight, a Member of Parliament suggests holding the law firm in contempt of Pariament the next morning, and the firm doesn't even make it until the 2:00 PM court hearing before giving up. Political fallout looks like it's going to eat the firm alive.

Long form:

A British oil company, Trafigura, has a really bad reputation for things like smuggling oil for Saddam and bribing government officials.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/inside-trafigura-pollution-conservatives

Trafigura then pays an obvious fly-by-night operation in Africa to take 400 tons of incredibly toxic waste which they then illegally dump, sickening at least 31,000 people and killing at least 15. Trafigura denies everything, including that anyone got sick, even after company e-mails planning the whole thing are obtained by the press. (Trafigura says that the e-mails should "not be taken literally".) Trafigura hires a $1000-per-hour law firm, Carter-Ruck, to sue anyone that writes a negative news story about them. They even sue the lawyer representing the 30,000 sick people.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/trafigura-oil-ivory-coast

Trafigura pays for a report on the toxic waste to be produced. When the report turns out to be bad for them, Carter-Ruck successfully gets any mention of the report censored as well as any mention of the censorship censored. They even sue the BBC. They keep this up even after Trafigura has settled the class-action against them. Unfortunately for Trafigura and Carter-Ruck, Parliament gets to debate whatever they want as long as they're honest about it, so a question about the censorship is raised by a Member of Parliament (MP) and published by Parliament in its usual list of questions to be answered by government officials later.

Carter-Ruck tells The Guardian—one of the country's best-known newspapers—not to report on the question in Parliament because it mentions the censorship and discussion of the censorship is censored. The Guardian vows to fight and gets an emergency court hearing scheduled for 2:00 PM the next day. The Guardian also publishes a chilling announcement that their attempt to report on Parliament has been censored and names Carter-Ruck.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament

Exactly 42 minutes later, the first alert blogger digs up and posts the full text of the question in Parliament. Things snowball from there, so that the following morning "Trafigura" and "Carter-Ruck" are top Twitter keywords for the London area, not to mention some of the top-trending Twitter keywords for the whole world. The magazine Private Eye goes ahead and publishes the complete text of the question in its morning edition.

Parliament gets angry. As far as they're concerned, this not only concerns the basic rights of their citizens and press, it implicates the supremacy of Parliament and the very Parliamentary priviledge that lets them debate whatever they want. A series of motions are made, including a motion for an Emergency Debate to consider whether Carter-Ruck's actions constituted Contempt of Parliament.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/13/guardian-court-parliament-reporting-gag
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/13/trafigura-carter-ruck-gag
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/audio/2009/oct/13/guardian-house-of-commons

Carter-Ruck doesn't even wait for 2:00 PM but surrenders over lunch on the reporting of the question, although the original gag order about the report remains in place.

Now everybody's riled up about the "super-injuctions" that make it illegal to report that the gag orders even exist. There are public protests in front of Carter-Ruck's offices. The Prime Minister is pushing for reform, the Justice Secretary is investigating it personally, an MP has said that they will report Carter-Ruck to the Law Society for even asking for one, and a debate on the whole thing is scheduled for the following week. The fractious political parties have united on this one.

Carter-Ruck's reaction? Write a letter to every single MP telling them that Parliament's own rules prevent them from holding the upcoming debate even though the Speaker, who has the final say on such matters, had said the opposite the day before. The MPs laugh at them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/15/carter-ruck-trafigura-parliament-injunction

Trafigura and Carter-Ruck completely give up on the original gag order about the report on their toxic waste. The Guardian happily publishes the complete report.

The Guardian declares victory, complete with score.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/18/trafigura-fight-press-freedom-victory

For more information:

Further news stories will probably show up under the following tag in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/trafigura-probo-koala

Check out things like their "Press freedom" and "Freedom of Speech" tags as well.

I have plighted my troth and am now affianced.

2009-09-01T07:17:12Z

Translation: I'm engaged.

Yeah, I know that I don't really use this thing anymore. But I've got a social situation that I want some advice on, being all autism-spectrum and all. Here's how my train of thought goes:

1. I've had lots of social problems in my life, for obvious reasons, some of which resulted in people not speaking to me anymore. These were mostly my fault, although I don't feel guilty that I didn't have the social skills and experience necessary to avoid some of them; still, it was things that I did that left them understandably upset.

2. Some of the aforementioned situations have involved cute girls in one way or another, including a case in which someone who had stopped speaking to me was willing to give me another chance once they heard that I had gotten a new girlfriend; I wouldn't be obnoxiously pursuing them if I was dating someone else. (This anecdote is important to my point.)

3. In situations in which someone has turned on me for reasons that were not my fault, including those that have refused my attempts to apologize and refused to forgive me even years later, I'm happy to leave things as they are, but when I parted with someone on bad terms for reasons that were entirely my fault and haven't spoken to them since . . . well, I don't want to go through life with that on my conscience. And yes, I feel that I have a serious religious duty to at least make the effort to repair relations with them, even if we have so little in common now that we never speak to each other afterward because we're completely disinterested in each other.

I've actually got ways of getting in touch with everyone I'm thinking of, if only through mutual friends. (In some cases, mutual friends who might be reading this; would you mind helping me?) Does this sound like a good idea? Should I leave everything up to the mutual friends or should I just have them deliver messages from me? (The latter is more personal, but the messages might be ignored just because it has my name on it.) Should I just send them notes asking for forgiveness, or should I sound out some of them on whether they would be interested in coming to the wedding--which is far enough in the future that we aren't even thinking about scheduling it--so we can at least see each other again? Exactly what should I say to them?

I'm very confused.

Hmm.

2008-08-03T09:49:56Z

So today I had to tell a guy who was hitting on me very hard to not press his luck. I nearly told him to watch his hands, as well.

I am flattered and annoyed in equal parts.

Intelligence vs. Social ability

2008-07-03T00:40:32Z

Well, whatever they've done to LJ in my absence hasn't removed my ability to post for free yet. On to the actual update:

My mother sent me the following, which I have obtained permission to share:

"The May 2008 issue of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin (Vol. 21, No. 2) has a very interesting article about diagnoses on the autistic spectrum arising from genetic (but not usually inherited) causes. My favorite bit was about the introduction of a single mutation into mice, who became less social -- but smarter."

I love the discovery of a unicausal link between increased intelligence and decreased social ability/tendency. It does help one to feel better: "I had to be this way to be smart, so it's okay." (And yes, I just invented the term "unicausal link.")

GSLIS @ UIUC for the win (and a fair chunk of the alphabet)

2008-02-12T21:06:57Z

"We are pleased to inform you that we plan to recommend your admission to GSLIS!"

Now I just have to interview and whatnot to see if they'll give me funding.

What I'm Up To (Adapted from some IMs to Q)

2008-02-01T01:03:19Z

I'm keeping busy. Hopefully I'll get a job selling tea or something (I've applied) and will be able to keep up with my bills until grad school (Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). In the mean time, I've decided that Critical Mass (http://criticalmass.crazydreams.org/) is officially open for business, I'm starting to redesign Crazy Dreams (http://www.crazydreams.org/) to reflect the fact that the webfiction community stuff is now somewhere else (and probably everything else should be reorganized), I'm ignoring CAR-PGa's website (http://www.car-pga.org/) until I'm finished with more immediately pressing or overdue business, and I ought to do some thinking about TEI (http://www.tei-c.org/) to post to the mailing list. I'm also reading the Rats, Bats, and Vats series of SF novels, playing Dynasty Tactics 2 (among other things), and occasionally wondering if I'll ever have time to actually write more fiction. Oh, and I'm helping my girlfriend set up a fantasy RP set in a world of her own devising; I'm going to Assistant-GM, running a quest-giver NPC and the mundane political system.

The Answer

2008-01-07T03:55:01Z

Everything's back to normal now. Oh, and I now have a website called Critical Mass in addition to my other ones. ^_^

What am I doing with my life?

2007-12-28T20:43:42Z

Those of you on my friends list got to read a bit of profanity last night, along with a promise of explanation. Those of you not on my friends list don't read this thing anyway.

I had a bit of a shock last night. My reaction was not helped by the fact that just beforehand I had just finished reading Watchmen for the first time. (I had purchased it earlier that day.) Neither was it helped by the fact that, upon looking at the (also just-purchased) book that I was going to start reading in order to recover from the shock, I discovered that it was a sequel to something that I hadn't read, and I have no interest in owning or reading sequels without the original. Given the circumstances, I hope that my little display of angst last night may be forgiven me.

So what was the shock? Well, it was nothing most people would find upsetting, so first let me explain some things that I have not talked about a lot. This has to do with my goals and desires in life, so hopefully you'll find it interesting.

I want to change the world. Actually, "driven" is the term that keeps springing into my mind: I am driven to change the world. I want to be able to look ten thousand years into the future and be able to say that the world of 12,000 AD would have been different were it not for me. Not merely were it not for someone with my skills in my position, but for me. This is partially because I am not sure if an afterlife exists—although if it does, I'm fairly sure that the Roman Catholics are right—and, as Glen Cook's Black Company novels say, "It is immortality, of a sort," but I'd be doing my damnedest to change the world even if I knew for certain that God exists. (Incidentally, I'd prefer that the change in the world be a good one, partially because that's the sort of person I am and partially because if God exists, I don't want to piss him off; Pascal's Wager still holds.) I have never been quite certain how I will accomplish this, but I am absolutely certain that I will not be happy in a world where I am merely a statistic waiting to die. Apparently some people are, but I don't dream that small; I'm the CrazyDreamer for a reason.

About half a decade ago now, I got pissed off at all of the mediocre artists and webcomics that got so much attention while fiction languished, so I started something that I had never seen or heard of before: a webfiction. In later years, I ran across a few others, so it turned out that I wasn't the only one or possibly even the first, but I could still, if I played my cards right, be the one who made it popular, right? Eventually I rewrote my website to concentrate on promoting webfiction. Then, last night, I run across Pages Unbound. Oh, look. Someone's already had the idea of popularizing webfiction, has been doing it for a long time, has half an order of magnitude more entries than I knew existed, has been writing webfiction herself for twelve years, and is popular enough that it's her day job.

Can you count how many goals, backup goals, and pitiful attempts at self-respect in this area got destroyed by that one site? Yeah. Turns out I'm nothing but Yet Another Stupid Hack who can't even use making other people popular as his claim to fame. Half of my interest in writing—I'm sane enough to not bet that I'm going to be popular on the basis of writing talent alone—and half of my interest in digital humanities—a field I enjoyed partially because it involved digitizing text and partially because it left me with enough energy to write—have gone out the window. Now how the heck am I supposed to leave my mark on the world? Go into politics? (Don't think that I haven't considered it as a long-term plan.) I just have this sudden feeling that I don't know where I'm going with my life, and until I have a plan to change the world, I'm not sure what the point of my existence is.

For the past year and a half, doubt about existence of God has gnawed away at my sanity. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't care as much about not having an immediate plan to achieve immortality through my effect on the world. As it is, you can see where that gnawing's suddenly hit bone.

Predictions

2007-07-21T03:08:57Z

Okay, just to get my views on the record:

Spoilers from England should be out by now. I have no interest in checking. In fact, I'm going to have to wait for my book from England (to avoid the American re-writes), so I'm going to be vulnerable to spoilers for a couple of weeks, I should think. Anyone who spoils it for me will be shot. What follows are my guesses.

SNAPE
What should happen: I'm conflicted between Dumbledore being right and wanting to finally crush the hopes of everyone who wants to believe that he's a good guy against all evidence. Back when he was still viewed as a bad guy (up until the end of Philosopher's Stone, basically),
What will happen: I'll have to go back and re-read the end of Half-Blood Prince to see exactly what proof we have that Dumbledore is dead. I suspect that this will be the lesson about giving everyone a chance and the guy you love to hate and pick on being a good guy. Dumbledore arranged for a very convincing fake death to let Snape re-infiltrate the Death Eaters without getting himself killed for his previous betrayal. Snape possibly dies a heroic death saving Harry at the end.

DUMBLEDORE
What should happen: He comes back. They always do.
What will happen: He comes back. See also under "Snape."

HARRY
What should happen: Harry needs to die, regardless of whether or not he comes back to life. It's the really obvious ending, making Harry a Horcrux and all.
What will happen: Either the author wimps out entirely or he dies and comes back to life.

thecrazydreamer @ 2007-04-03T17:01:00

2007-04-03T22:03:45Z

When do you give up on friends?

When do you decide that it's okay if someone dislikes you, even if it's because of a simple misunderstanding? (Amy) When do you decide to stop catch up with friends whom you've barely spoken to in years? (Sarah, James, Dan) When do you stop trying to track down old friends whom you've lost touch with? (Beth) When do you stop caring that someone, without apparent cause and without explanation, will no longer respond to you, not even as a member of the public when they're desperate for business? (Tori) When do you stop wanting to keep track of people whom you once cared about but who won't speak to you? (Cat, LinLin)

When do you let go?

There's more, but those are the ones that I'm willing to put in an unlocked post. These questions, in various forms and with various names attached, have tortured me for years. Please comment if you have anything to say.

* * *

Last night, I saw someone deliberately injure an animal. They swerved well out of their lane to run over a possum. It didn't die immediately, but it was clearly paralyzed below a certain point. It spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out what had happened, then began dragging itself off by its front legs. Seeing this was very upsetting.

If the possum doesn't die slowly of internal bleeding, it will die very slowly of starvation.

Phone

2007-02-28T08:59:10Z

Bought a Nokia 6133 to replace my dead phone. Got other major financial hits this week, too. Lost more than half my semester's budget over the course of a few days. Stress level = high.

Ta-da!

2007-02-08T18:23:46Z

Got through to Fuitadnet's support staff. Everything was fixed in minutes. Unless the DNS change is propogating slowly in your part of the 'net, everything should be up and running again. (I haven't tested e-mail yet, but my site is there.)

Well, hell.

2007-01-24T13:04:48Z

I finally update my webfiction, Wet Hero, and my domain name renewal immediately screws up and send my site to internet Limbo. This also means that my public e-mail address is down for a little while; make sure you're e-mailing my "real" account (the Hotmail one).

Hey, ho!

2007-01-18T11:23:40Z

I've updated Wet Hero. Shock!

I hate it when people with irrational fears (usually due to a bad experience or two) get reinforcement by having a bad experience when most of us have perfectly good ones. It makes it very difficult to convince them that their fears are unwarranted.

DEAR IDIOTS: It's a FOUR-HUNDRED-LEVEL course. There are MANDATORY PREREQUISITES, including CLASS LEVEL. It is open to GRADUATE STUDENTS as well as undergrads. Please, please, PLEASE do not sign up for it if you are a FRESHMAN. I do not want to read your crap, and I have no doubt that it is crap because clearly you are an idiot and clearly you don't believe that these courses can teach you anything because then you would be doing Intro to Fiction Writing instead of something that's at the same level as the PRO SEMINAR. Alternatively, if it really isn't that hard, it has no business being classed as a 400-level, but that just changes who's being an idiot and needs reminding of the seriousness of the 400 level.

Damn.

2007-01-13T21:58:54Z

To paraphrase Q, I may or may not have just put my cell phone through the laundry. And by "may or may not have," I mean "Oops."

Oi!

2007-01-11T12:02:27Z

Yes, I'm still here. Why does my edit box look all wonky?

Am I around for another long span? Dunno. Maybe I'm just bored right now and I'll lose track of it again when school restarts. (A distinct possibility, given that during school I more-or-less live at my girlfriend's suite, and I tend not to bother logging in to stuff from her computer.)

RFC: Mobile Device

2006-11-27T06:05:57Z

Request For Comments: Mobile Device

I really need something to replace my PDA and my Pocket PC.
If it can replace my phone as well, that would be a plus.

OS:
Something running Windows Mobile 5.0 seems like the way to go on this one.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devices/default.mspx
Certainly needs to support a range of applications.
(Multimedia, translation, dictionary, who knows what I'll want; requirements below.)

Considerations:
Needs a QUERTY keyboard (possibly as an add-on). I'm not typing with my thumbs, damn it!
Needs word-processing software.
Needs scheduling software.
Needs a reasonable screen resolution.
Needs to be able to talk to my computer.
Probably should go online. (Web browsing is most important here; I want to be able to look things up.)

Also:
Ought to work in Japan in case I decide to teach there. (Power and data connectivity?)
Japan also seems to have cooler devices than the U.S.
http://www.microsoft.com/japan/windowsmobile/default.mspx

Problem:
It seems that I cannot actually get what I want out of what is available.

Comments?

Other Business: I still haven't gotten back into the hang of checking LJ regularly. Sorry. On the up side, I'm reading the Girl Genius mailing list again. I've missed playing "Guess That Offscreen Voice!"

I'm Baaaack!

2006-10-21T03:10:20Z

Some of you may know that my computer has not been able to go online for six weeks. As a result, I did not read LJ. (If there's something important that you're assuming that I know because I usually read your LJ, let me know and I'll get right on it, but I'm not reading a month and half of backlog, damn it!) This is now fixed, and I am online again.

I have discovered that none of my ICQ buddies sent me a message in that entire month and a half. NOT A SINGLE ONE. *sadness*

I'm sure that I screwed up tonight, but I don't know how or if (how) it affects things.

2006-09-23T03:32:10Z

Wanting to cry is like wanting to throw up: It will make you feel better (in the short run) and you might really want to, but that doesn't mean that you can.

I learned how to not cry a long time ago. I had to. I never learned how to cry again.

Right now I want to. I was biting my lip "to keep from crying," but not really. It's just something that I'm told that people do to keep from crying, and I needed to show what I was holding in. I'm really good at not showing it when I'm sad, and unless I'm really close to you I'll do it automatically. It also helps that I don't have any body language of my own.

I have Asperger's syndrome (AS), a.k.a. high-functioning autism. I have no social instincts; all that I know is what I've worked out by conscious observation, correlation, and objective rule-learning. As a result, I'm pretty helpless. I offend people accidentally on a regular basis. I've mostly overcome my resultant crippling shyness, my social anxiety that causes horrendous, physically crippling IBS attacks, and my near-suicidal depression, and now I actually have a few friends. This is good, because I've gone through all that (and continue to go through the AS, which is incurable and basically untreatable) as an extrovert. I want to have friends, I really, really do; I just can't. I offend too many of them. Also, I'm getting old.

I am, by years since admission, a seventh-year student. I have watched my friends in the year ahead of me graduate. I have watched my friends in the year behind me graduate. (I never made any friends in my own year.) Not that I had many friends in the year behind me left; I accidentally offended a couple of them, and the others had to ask me not to hang out with them because it was easier to throw just me out of the group than to throw out everyone who no longer wanted to see me around. As a result, I lost the first girlfriend that I'd managed to keep for more than two weeks. I didn't make any friends for the next two years, and by the time that I started making new friends again, I was so much older than everyone that I got odd looks from students and interrogated by ResLife. I'm too old to keep making friends with people who would rather just call the police about the creepy old guy wandering about.

Tonight I got the distinct feeling of having serious screwed up again. I don't want to lose my only real chance at any new friends this year, but until I find out if I have screwed up so badly that I shouldn't even talk to people again, I can't talk to people in case I have. After all, I don't want to make things any worse. But if I can't talk to them, I can't ask; I've lost by default.

There's a million more things that I want to say, but I've forgotten them by now. I'll remember them some other time when there will be no way to get them off of my chest or to let people know about them so that they'll understand when I screw up or don't know what to do or say.

C'est la vie (si vous etiez moi).

[Comments disabled. If I want to hear from you, you probably know how to contact me by now.]

Umm?

2006-08-26T20:31:25Z

Okay, so Weta makes rayguns. They even sell them.

20 July 06 - "When I received my ManMelter for use on my trip to the rain forests of Vasplurgia, I blew my left leg off at the hip. Marvelous invention!"
-Major. Alfred Beardlington

See?

(Now go check out their website and look at all the cool pictures.)

Back!

2006-08-25T23:48:48Z

I'm back from my vacation. Any entries posted from last Saturday untill now have not been read and probably won't be.

Also, my move to the renovated house has been put off until the 6th. Someone stole our air conditioning. ^_^;

EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

2006-08-05T00:06:09Z

For the second time in my life, someone who didn't already know me has used one of my cards to contact me. I am, quite frankly, almost as excited about this as I am about getting back into WashU. It gives me hope again. *happy ^_^* Now, if only I was single . . .

JOY

2006-08-01T23:42:12Z

JOY!!!!!

I'm a WashU student again. Go me! *does his happy dance*

Weird.

2006-07-28T22:56:44Z

I'm so used to being stressed out over deadlines and how much stuff that I need to get done that, when I get a rare moment of nothing much to do, I end up too confused by the lack of structure to even work on my long-term projects.

Lots of interesting stuffs, but I'll only post the most recent.

2006-07-25T17:41:00Z

Apparently water can read and has emotions. --> Linky!

Okay, so only one thing. But it was funny!