The descension of Hakan the great.
The ascension of Håkan Juholt to party leader of the Swedish Socialist party, the Social Democrats, was meteoric. None of us knew of this relative insider and none of us, knew what to expect.. if anything.
Like all things velocity related, there’s a a law of nature that comes into play when the meteor hits the atmosphere of a planet. Let’s call it friction.
Håkan, a very friendly looking person and no doubt a good man to those he calls his friends, resigned the other day from his post, because he believes in the social democrats, he said.
The followup to all this, were his ramblings in the media, on all things related to his person and position, but most of all his shenanigans with certain economic issues he had take advantage of.
Now why i’m posting this is because i’ve been reading too many posts, facebook reblogs, where persons of interest are accusing the media of being slanted, the media of being against a left coalition in majority and that the opposition is rumored to be using ufo technology from the crash-landing at Kebnekaise to mind bend the former leftist voters to vote bourgeoisie.
People, there is no mustache twirling mad overlord behind the curtain, its more circumstantial than that.
Now if we take a closer look at Juholts behaviour in the media, we see a man who’s utterly devoid of any form of media training, a man who believes its his role to solve issues stemming from his own faults.
But we also see, just a man.
The greatest fault of any leader is not to listen to his employees, the lesser evil of a leader is to ignore criticism.
I actually found him wanting due to this, but he rose up and abdicated his position, because, he believed in something greater than himself.
He has a vision.
That floored me, What Sweden has been lacking for decades, is a leader with a vision. Sweden needs someone to take the reins and form a solid vision of how to take the country forward.
For anyone who is willing to take the reins for the Social Democrats, there’s a need to reform the party from within, renew the organisation and modernise the party. that is no small endeavor, and it is not. for the meek.
Whoever makes that happen, and I hope it is Johanna Graf, is the person that will make me cast my vote in favor of the party.
hat tip to Deeped for making me notice Johannas post that catalysed this post in turn.
loose canon; the swedish compromise
Reading forums and talking to .. well lets call them “passionate” consumers of fiction, be it tv-series, comics or books spanning entire forests, you often find them touting and challenging the canonicity of the writer/creators own “universe” of fiction.
This often due to cross-franchise entertainment like games, comics and movies made out of, say, a series of tu.. oh sorry, books.
Now this is actually fine, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, me, I like to enjoy what I consume via the various mediums.
Take one of my favorite examples, Star Wars, early on it was a hopshod ragtaggled bunched together impression of various sources — Lucas early script was a loose impression based on Akira Kurozawas “The hidden fortress” — but today it spans a multi-billion franchise consisting of books, comics, the movies, tv-series and games.
but what most fanboys discuss is the canon and its redheaded stepdaughter “continuity” — who’s a real bitch — the inherent facts as they’ve interpreted it via one of the above sources.
Now forums on the net are a place where fanboys bunch together to continously one up eachother and earn a badge of honour for being “Correct” regarding the topic of discussion, usually it follows a pattern somewhat like this:
User A asks a question, receives a reply, someone corrects the reply, a flamewar erupts, people are rude to one another, someone insults someone’s mom, threats are made, moderators step in to calm it down, Strawmen A & B start their incessant tripe and Power User A corrects everyone, thus earning credibility.
Needless to say, its something forumgoers feel insane amounts of passion for, but normal people feel, well. indifferent towards.
it’s essentially one of those “cant see the forests due to all the tree’s” sort of deals, to me anyway.
But the way it works in a franchise license like the Star Wars franchise, is that the span is through various mediums and corporations, in that there’s even an inverted pyramid of classifications involved, relating to just canon, and more often than not this is not regulated by a writer or a creator, but by an Intellectual Property Rights Lawyer, let’s just refer to that guy as the “badguy” henceforth.
So this badguy has created a set of classes pertaining to which part of the published information is the primary source for all the lore relating to the story.
This to keep a firm grip around continuitys throat as it relates to, the canonicity of the story.
A more hands on description of this classification is a set of classes, lets call name them A all the way to D.
A - is the “do what the creator demands of us puny plebs” (the filth called pre-trilogy movies)
B - is what the Creator himself creates. i.e the mainline (The Star Wars trilogy)
C - is edge stuff like comics, books and RPG’s of the Star Wars franchise, products that contain /some/ canon that the Lucas does not pay much attention to — if at all —
D - basically, this is stuff that is not an essential part of the storyline and retains some inklings of The Canon, stuff like Games.
That’s the basics the law that people like the badguy spill forth, at least in how it relates to the Star Wars franchise.
Firefly, Star Trek and B5 has a similar dress up from what I understand, or well. not Star Trek, since Gene Roddenberry is basically the reason to why the term “Retcon” exists, but the essentials are the same.
But its even more convoluted in our modern time, not only is there a badguy, but more often than not it’s a team of them, led by what’s called an “Intellectual Property Rights Manager” who sets direction.
And this is why, Canon, isnt up to frothing fanboys on online forums.
I know i’ve posted this here and there for the better part of two months, but in august I reached one of my goals. Now with 5 more kilos to eighty i’ve started the process of tweaking my musculature through hard training.
I’ll be refraining from weightlifting this time around ‘cept for those barbell weight things, of which I’m currently hefting 30kg on per arm.
This time, it’ll all be about getting in shape and tweaked musculature, i’ve had it with being the slow brute ;)
Free the imprisoned Egyptian bloggers!
In times when freedom of the press is supressed and media controlled by government or other interests, the responsibility of pointing out wrong-doings, falls to the citizens. The civil journalism found on the internet form an integral engine for developing democracy in many countries. With blogs and other social media as their tools, they expose injustice and misconduct in the society, even when the media landscape is being completely controlled.
As the Arab Spring’s historical events have shown, bloggers are not only citizen-journalists. With them they carry the hope of democracy, freedom and dignity to all. Freedom of speech on the internet, has become one of the most important dividing lines between dictatorship and democracy. Here you lift injustice and wrong-doings in the every-day life, and with the might of the pen you work towards change.
In many places the situation, for those that are engaged in democratic change, has become increasingly difficult. Several countries imprison or persecute people that critize their governments openly in social media. One example of this is the faith of the Egyptian bloggers Alaa Abd El Fattah and Maikel Nabil.
Alaa Abd El Fattah is one of the main activists in the large and lively egyptian bloggoshere. In 2006 he was arrested, by the Mubarak regime, to set an example to other bloggers. Bloggers that critically discussed the things that happened in Egypt were regarded as a threat. Unfortunately nothing has changed and today the process of democratization is endangered by this.
About a month ago, Alaa was imprisoned again. This time it was the ruling Military Council of Egypt. His time in captivity is prolonged by two weeks at a time, which causes his family great concern, and especially his pregnant wife. The process against him shows that the aim is to silence an important node in the movement for democracy in Egypt, before the election. Earlier this year this movement toppled the dictator Mubarak, and it is once again taking the protests out to the streets.
Yet another civil rights activist, Maikel Nabil, has been in prison since the end of March this year, accused of distortion of the slogan ofthe Egyptian Military Council, ‘the army and the people are one hand’, at his blog. He discussed and ciritized the development after the fall of Mubarak, under the heading “The army and the people are never one hand”. This was interpreted by the regime as an attack on the system, and Maikel is now serving a three-year sentence for high treason.
Alaa and Maikel are far from alone. In addition, they are used as warning examples to intimidate others not to challenge and critisize injustice, or speak in situations where others remains silent. In a democracy-under-construction, this is a sign of a dangerous development that the surrounding world ought to react on.
We, the undersigned, have all, just as Alaa and Maikel, choosen to participate in the public conversation through blogs and other social media. We hope that more people wants to raise the issue of the importance of free speech, and show the surrounding world that we take notice and that we care. Freedom of speech and thought must be respected, and all bloggers that are being imprisoned because of their opinions must be freed immediately!
Our message is clear: Free the champions of free speech!
net1 and the use of permissive software
One of the basic tenements of network security is the first principle, networks are non-permissive enviroments.
What this means is that every system that you introduce into the enviroment, you take good care to lock down to avoid outside operators gaining access.
The standard operating procedure for introducing new systems into an operating enviroment is trial by vetting and standardisation.
Net1 is a broadband isp, utilizing the old NMT(CDMA) network in Sweden, they do this at a low monthly cost to the consumer and with several different gateway router solutions.
After noticing that my d-35 router had the PfSense logo as a favicon — the icon you can see on a tab in chrome, or in your adressbar on firefox/ie — i started looking around and i gained root access to the pfsense telnet console from an external ip-adress.
So i decided to go the full length and check out the D-40 series model as well, and not only does it have an open telnet port facing all network interfaces. You also telnet into it, without typing in credentials, and gain access as the superuser.
After doing this, i was greeted by the openwrt banner and realised that there’s quite a few things that you can add to the D-40 to enable it to do more. If this was intentional by Net1 I do not know, since they have yet to reply to my week old email regarding this.
so to anyone reading this and being a net1/ice.net customer, please get your linux toting geek friend to lock down your router. there’s potential for lots of nasty stuff happening to your router if you do not.
M A S S I V E new trailer for the Syndicate game remake.
Syndicate Announce Trailer (HD) (by syndicate)
We, too, have mobilized. We come from near and far, by any means necessary, some on private jets, others on extremely large private jets. But you will not find us sleeping in a park and waiting in line at a Burger King to urinate. Have you heard of Mustique? Because that’s where we have mobilized. Don’t bother trying to Google Earth us, though, because we have proprietary military software that prevents you from doing so.
We are the 1 percent.
on books and genres.
Having had the wonderful oppurtunity to work via the internet for most of my career also means i’ve spent an ungodly amount of time socializing via the net, meeting new people, goading nublets on support forums and well, forming relationships with people on the other side of the globe.
One of those friends is a guy in Germany, Falk — no really, that’s his name — he’s an astute, alert, detail oriented person, which means he’s almost always anal about pretty much everything.
I remember that time when I was digging through kernel source for linux 2.6.18 and trying to nail down a bug, all the while being encouraged by Falk — for you non-germies out there it’s also Swedish for Hawk — with words such as “do you really know what you’re doing” “did zey cover zat at ze marketing Kurze” well, yes. its a spurr alright.
Or that time we were discussing a bleepin’ game and he went into details about WORLD BUILDING as in, writer, as in setting. not level-editor. me? i just wanted to know if the game was good.
By now you’re probably wondering why i’m writing this. Well, as it turns out, i have this thing for sci-fi books. they make my nipples hard.
But when I asked him for a few hints he pushed me in the direction of several titles of which i’ve ploughed through more than 20 books.
Now to me, Sci-fi implies hard-sci nerdery or like in the case of Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe “the rule of cool”, Horror implies something supernatural and Vampire-werewolf-old-myth-goes-tits-up implies something at the beginning of that line.
So to you Germans out there, look. I like sex, or well sometimes I don’t.. well yes I do.. Ok. But what i do not want to read, is sex-disguised-as-$BOOKGENRE.
shenanigans
The Occupy movement has by the the time of writing been an ongoing display of gusto aimed at the financial oligarchies around the world. Private Military Contractors were sent in to deal with the Occupy camp in phoenix, Paramilitary groups have been spotted besting about other cities, police in NY, Oakland, San Francisco and Seattle have at several times brutalised the Occupy activists.
Now the Federal boys in blue have agreed that its time to shunt this party, and well their pals over at the Heimatslandsicherheitsdienst have also weighed in.
This, at a time when the US State Department are criticizing the dictatorship of Syria, for their use of secret police and paramilitary forces to quell arrest, assault democratic rights activists. not to mention dissappearing murdering said activists.
What do these two have in common? the constant is criticism aimed towards the ruling oligarchy. And the people of both countries, are asking one simple question: “why are the rich getting richer?”
personally, all I want is a political party that has the stones to stand for something, something similar to a) maximise individual liberties b) protect the bleepin’ commons. c) a minimalisation of the various coefficients of a nationstate. Now I realise all of my wishes are orthogonal to one another, but that’s what negotiations are for. But I know that my wishes are miniscule, mostly due to the “Batten down the hatches” approach of any party involved in the ruling oligarchy goverment
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