China Events, Future Travels

Jul. 10th, 2025 08:29 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
Two nights ago, the Chinese consulate in Melbourne hosted a dinner for committee members of the Australia-China Friendship Society. It was held with no particular agenda in mind, but with less than ten people participating in the wide-ranging conversation, as one could expect, it did include a rather pointed look at a certain powerful but irresponsible world leader. The Consul-General was, of course, very diplomatic in his words and I could be a little more blunt (ironically, through understatements), but that is our respective positions. It was also an opportunity to send our farewells to the Vice Consul General who has served here for four years and welcome their replacement, who I am sure will do very well. On a directly related matter, the following night I attended the spectacular "Folk Reimagined" concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre, which was performed by members of the Guizhou Chinese Orchestra and the Australia Orchestra, which was a rather brilliant performance. I attended with Susie C., an old friend from Perth who has recently moved to Melbourne, and Fiona P., who recently spoke at the ACFS on bi-cultural experiences and history. On a much more modest scale, the Australia-China Friendship Society is holding a social dinner next Tuesday at Song's Dumplings; delicious food, inexpensive, and very good company.

As much as I would dearly love to visit Guizhou as soon as possible with its incredible landscapes (there is a very enticing trip on offer in early 2026), it is increasingly likely that I am going on a more distant (and much more expensive) adventure at the end of the year. Kate R., and I are plotting (following plenty of conversation over three extensive visits to the National Gallery of Victoria over three days) about taking a trip to South America and Antarctica at the end of the year, which would include Lima, Machu Picchu, Buenos Aires (where I can satiate my Jose Luis Borge needs), Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic peninsula, and Montevideo. All of this is, somewhat, a result of having accumulated long-service leave (which I skipped in my last job to take this current one) and a dearth of international travel in my youth, albeit with a few interstate visits. Speaking of which, a quick trip to the top-end is planned in a month to visit Lara D., check out the apartment I helped purchase, and attend some events of the Darwin Festival.
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[personal profile] emperor
It's time to vote for the next Chancellor (previously); I've looked at the candidates and their statements, but still don't have an obvious-to-me choice of who to vote for.

When I asked on mastodon, I got two responses (one for Sandi Toksvig, one for her or Gina Miller); FB has shown me one friend saying that Chris Smith is "a nice bloke, but also the only candidate worth of the role"; and I've been sent this from someone who evidently doesn't share my general political view (though I'm inclined to agree that being the author of tuition fees probably rules John Browne out).

I can see why people might think Wyn Evans is a good option, but his proposals seem to me more the sort of thing you'd expect the vice-chancellor to do, rather than the chancellor who is not really involved in the running of the university directly.

I'm currently inclined to put Sandi Toksvig first; I'm sure she'd be great at the schmoozing-major-donors thing, but also at engaging with staff & students and advocating for the University.

I'm planning to vote in person on Saturday...

[this post is public, I am screening comments by anyone not already on my DW access list, will unscreen if I think they're making a useful contribution]

On weight loss medication.

Jul. 9th, 2025 08:53 am
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[personal profile] lnr

I wrote this on Bluesky last week, but wanted to save it in slightly longer form

On obesity and weight loss and medication

As a well off, educated, active person, who likes food including healthy things, but still has a lifelong struggle with my weight I do find even the best intentioned discussions around obesity hard. I'm currently heading towards a healthy weight/waist size using Wegovy, but that's a short term aid. What happens when I stop taking it? The advice from my practitioners is that obviously unless I keep up enough healthy changes I will gain weight, and I know that. But I don't know *how*. How to not eat when I'm hungry. How to never want to eat the foods that other normal people eat. I can book in some one-to-one sessions with a dietician and psychologist when I'm closer to trying to maintain my weight, but I honestly don't know how much it will help.

The first time I lost a big chunk of weight I was *sure* I wasn't going to be one of those people who gain it all back again. But I found it so so hard to stay where I wanted to be that eventually I couldn't face trying any more. I do wonder if in future a very low dose of GLP1 agonists or similar will be a long term maintenance option for people like me. Its not an option now. When I hit a BMI of 23.5, or reach 2 years of taking them, I'll be cut off. Then we get to see what realistic help is available at that point. I don't want to have to battle my weight forever, and right now it's not a battle. But how do you even prepare for that?

(no subject)

Jul. 8th, 2025 08:47 pm
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[personal profile] rbarclay
Today it took me 1h50m to cycle home from 'ork. Instead of the usual 1h5m.

Of the 21.25km I did not have a torturous headwind for about 0.2. But that wasn't enough, of course, because added to that ... last week we had a heatwave with >42°C, which broke over the weekend.

Fine!

But now it's the other extreme - cycling home today it got down to 11°C. And I was fucking freezing my ass off, esp. combined with the headwind. And a nice medium rain, just to spice it all up. I do always carry a light sleeveless rain jacket and ultra-thin rain gloves, which up to now were always perfectly sufficient in the summer months.
But at 11°C, with wind and rain, wet shoes and soaked-through shorts... pushing the bike through a pedestrian railroad underpass near home I had to take a minute and grab the railing, because otherwise I probably wouldn't even have managed to stay upright from shivering and sheer exhaustion.

(As an added bonus: opting for public transport instead of the bike is a no-go right now, because - as every year - summertime is public transport maintainance time, which means it'd take me 2h+ per direction.)
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[personal profile] tcpip
Yesterday was the aphelion when the Earth reached the furthest distance from the sun at 157 million km (the closest distance, the perihelion, is 146 million km). It seemed appropriate on that day to describe the relatively flat shape of the solar system and how "flat earthers" need to think bigger. Interestingly, the aphelion and perihelion change with some regularity measured as Milankovitch cycles, which is a driver of long-term climate change. On that topic, I had an interview this week concerning my doctoral progress and grades to date ("mention très bien", to use the Université de Paris system). The next part of my studies is "Climate Change Denialism", which I am sure will be absolutely fascinating, having missed out on doing climate change psychology at the University of Wellington. Speaking of which, I attended a University of Wellingto alumni event on during the week with a Professor of Statistics, Peter Smith, talking on "Fluids in your phones?", about the development of liquid antenna for the next generation of mobile devices. And, to continue the theme, I have been recently offered the role to coordinate alumni events for Murdoch University here in Melbourne.

The week has also witnessed some activities in the aesthetic dimension as well. With an early submission made for Midsumma Festival, I have officially become a producer with my inaugural effort being for Liza Dezfouli's comedy-cabaret "Binosaur". Also, I have ventured out locally with Kate R., twice with aesthetics in mind, once was for Lightscape at the Botanic Gardens, which was beautiful, but rather low numbers due to drizzle, and today for a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria. This evening, I attended the awards ceremony for the Melbourne Poet's Union International Poetry Competition, which featured a marvellous and insightful speech by the well-known anarchist poet, Pi O. Finally, last night I visited ACMI for millihertz producing a rather raw and politically challenging audio-visual production with the descriptive title "Cruise Missile Intersectionality".

To finish the alliterative headings, I will conclude with some reflections on "athletics". Last week, I posted an announcement and a couple of photos of my significant weight loss over the past year (117 to 82 kgs), along with a descriptive essay on how I achieved it. I will point out that I'm not planning to lose anymore, although body composition still has room to change. I've had to hunt through my high school records - four decades in the past - to find when I had a similar weight and, in the process, have discovered my athletic records of the time, which were "quite good". I was among the best in the school for medium and long-distance running, plus I played cricket, rugby, football, and volleyball at an interschool level. But ultimately, I couldn't stand the aggressive competitiveness and the yobbish fans, and dropped out of all those activities. I hope that I can avoid all that in this rejuvenated period of my life.
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[personal profile] liam_on_linux
Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess.

When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™ branding.
 
Now, by contrast:
 
I've spent proper time trying to get some rough estimates on Linux distro usage. Ubuntu is cagey but claims ITRO low double-digit millions of machines fetching updates. Let's say circa 20M users.
 
Apparently, over 95% on LTS and the vast majority on the default GNOME edition. (Poor sods.)
 
The others are cagier still, but Statistica and others have vaguely replicable numbers.
 
My estimates are:
 
~2x as many Ubuntu as Debian users
 
Between them they are about 2/3 of Linux users
 
All Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora derivatives are about 10% of the market.
 
Comparing them to Steam client numbers, Arch is much of the rest: the gap between ~75% Debian family and ~10% RH family.
 
In China, the government has been pushing Linux *hard* for 8-9 years. Uniontech (Deepin) is one of the biggest and last November boasted 3M paid users. 
 
Is that all? 
 
Kylin is also big but let's guess it's #2.  
 
So, if, optimistically, 10% pay, then that's only 20-30M, comparable to Ubuntu in ROTW.
 
Maybe Kylin (also a Debian BTW, they both are) brings it to 50M. 
 
ChromeOS is a Linux. It's Gentoo underneath. Google sells hundreds of millions. Estimated user base is 200-300M and probably a lot more.
 
Chromebooks outsold Macs (by $ not units, so 10x over) in the US by 2017 and worldwide by 2020.
 
Which means there are, ballpark, order of magnitude scale, 10x as many ChromeOS users as all other Linuxes put together.
 
The year of Linux came 5-6 years ago.
 
But it's the _wrong kind_ of Linux so the Penguinisti didn't even notice. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Jul. 3rd, 2025 05:36 pm
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[personal profile] emperor
This is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, and provides the backstory for Imperator Furiosa in that film. So here we see her life from a child in one of the remaining green places to the Imperator we meet in Fury Road.

Aside from the opening, this film is very much in the orange-and-black dieselpunk post-apocalyptic vein of Fury Road. There's a lot of high-speed chase-come-fight sequences, which are quite the spectacle, a fair amount of bloody violence, and some quirky funny moments (especially from Chris Hemsworth as Dementus), which provide a little comic relief.

Furiosa doesn't let off full throttle very often, so this is not one to watch for interesting ideas or a nuanced plot. But if you can avoid thinking too hard about how plausible it all is (or isn't), it is pretty entertaining.

clamp / median / range

Jul. 2nd, 2025 02:45 am
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[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-07-02-cmp.html

Here are a few tangentially-related ideas vaguely near the theme of comparison operators.

Read more... )

Jimmy Swaggart?

Jul. 1st, 2025 06:19 pm
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[personal profile] infrogmation
Corrupt hypocrite televangelist Jimmy Swaggart died at 90. (I keep hearing lots of people just assumed he died years ago.)

https://www.aol.com/news/us-televangelist-jimmy-swaggart-dies-160057339.html


About 1989, some friends had a "Jimmy Swaggart Party" at a seedy motel in a suburb of New Orleans - they claimed the room they rented was one Swaggart used to meet with prostitutes. All attendees were to dress as either televangelists or hookers. The tv set was tuned to a porn channel, with a paper cutout of Swaggart pasted on it so he'd be in every scene.

We had something else we had to do that day, but figured we had to stop by briefly, because the concept was so on point.

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Joint Union Statement

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:53 pm
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[personal profile] lnr

We did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes

We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)

Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:

https://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/joint-trade-union-statement-on-the-supreme-court-ruling-on-the-equality-act/

EHRC Consultation

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:49 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

Finished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.

Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:

Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.

The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.

I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.

Wicked (2024 film)

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:25 pm
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[personal profile] emperor
This is the first in a two-part adaptation of the musical of the book (which is in turn a re-interpretation of The Wizard of Oz investigating the Wicked Witch of the West's backstory). It's a very long time since I saw The Wizard of Oz, and I've not read the Wicked book nor seen the musical. review, with spoilers )

The songs are reasonable (though none of them have stuck in my head), the leads are very good, and it's very pretty. And I was pleased to recognise Peter Dinklage by his voice :) But I don't think I'd recommend it as a film.

Chaosium Convention Melbourne

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:49 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
My weekend started on Thursday evening, venturing out with Kate R., to the deco Sun Theatre in Yarraville, where a 20th anniversary screening of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" was showing with the making of the film, and with a Q&A session with the director and the producer. It was an especially clever low-budget film, deciding to produce in a 1920s style; black-and-white, silent, and with inexpensive but real special effects. Distacted by dinner, we ended up entering the cinema a good twenty minutes late, so on Monday we decided to watch again at my very local cinema (i.e., my place).

It was all a prelude for Chaosium Con, held at the Moonee Valley Racing Club with some 250 people in attendance. Chaosium is quite a fascinating company, as a producer of board games and role-playing games. Established fifty years ago this year, they have produced a great number of games which are very well received by aficionados, including the high fantasy "RuneQuest" once considered a serious rival to Dungeons & Dragons, "Stormbringer" from the world of Michael Moorcock, Larry Niven's "Ringworld", the highly acclaimed "Call of Cthulhu", and the literary brilliance of the Arthurian "Pendragon", and so many more. The company is "just right" in terms of size; large enough to be a successful global publisher, small enough to have personal connections with the fan base. This probably the right time to mention that my main RPG project for the second half of this year will be writing a campaign for "Call of Cthulhu" with the working title "Fragments of Time, Slices of Mind"; it involves "The Great Race of Yith", and that's all you need to know.

I was there to look after the RPG Review Cooperative stall, which did quite well because RPG fans love rummaging through old games from the 80s, 90s, and 00s. I became good friends with our neighbouring stall run by a blacksmith (Morgan F) and a 3D printer (Ash M). It also turns out that our Cooperative was also the only non-Chaosium sponsor of the convention, albeit with a modest sum. Also from the Cooperative, Liz B., worked on the registration desk, Karl B., ran several sessions of his post-apocalyptic Australian-setting RPG, and Chris McC., ran a session of "Superworld" set in Perth. I am encouraging the committee to release a double-issue of RPG Review for Chaosium games, new and old, this year. They have made an incredible contribution to the gaming world, and it will certainly be a real pleasure to explore and publish with the incredible and creative energy.
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[personal profile] rimrunner


Cover art for the anthology Shakespeare Adjacent, showing a portrait of William Shakespeare, sitting in front of a laptop and holding a smartphone. He has a pair of earbuds in and is wearing a digital watch. In the background are modern objects: a digital photo and an electric lamp.



I'm so excited to announce that the Kickstarter for the 2 Jokers Publishing anthology Shakespeare Adjacent is now live! It's a delight to work once again with Lou Tambone, who also co-edited From Bayou to Abyss, as well as co-editor Ali McDowell. I have a longstanding love for Shakespeare's stories, especially his skill at characterization and, of course, his witty dialogue. I also love how his stories can be remixed, retold, and translated to other media without losing any of their power or relatability. It's a real treat to get to play around with one of my favorites of his plays, and try it out in a novel setting.

I don't write a lot of romance, despite having respect and affection for the genre, so I decided to try my hand at one of the romantic comedies. Of course there's a lot more going on in Much Ado About Nothing beyond the central romances (as fun as it always is to watch Benedick and Beatrice spar--if you've never seen David Tennant and Catherine Tate in those roles, incidentally, it's well worth it), including the larger political context in which the story is set, the family rivalry between Don Pedro and Don John, and the changing gender norms and relationships at the time that Shakespeare wrote it. Do all of these still work in a future Western setting beset by drought and political deterioration?

Back the Kickstarter, and judge for yourself--and get 12 other stories to read, into the bargain!



An invitation to back the Kickstarter for the anthology Shakespeare Adjacent, with the book’s cover showing a portrait of William Shakespeare, sitting in front of a laptop and holding a smartphone. He has a pair of earbuds in and is wearing a digital watch. In the background are modern objects: a digital photo and an electric lamp.

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