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So today I had a cheerfully productive day. I went for a walk, got and fitted a new headlamp bulb to the Prius*. The old one appears to have been a posh xenon blue bulb, the new one was, of course, a bog-standard one. Hopefully I won’t notice too much in the way of dimming, because I sure as hell have no desire to repeat changing it.

That done, and myself fed, I set to on the greenshed. I call it a greenshed because it’s quite definitely not really a greenhouse. It’s more an agglomeration of windows in a frame made from old pallets.

So long ago I can’t even recall when, we collected a bunch of old windows from a guy who’d saved them when they were stripped out of his (parents?) house with the intention of building something…and never had. So we loaded them, with some difficulty into the Volvo and dragged them home, enabling us to fail to build something with them. We stacked them outside. They’ve been in a variety of places outside. Bottom of the garden, top of the garden… Eventually I put them under the deck where they have sat, gradually getting grottier and grottier.

Anyhow, today I declared, was the day to start making the Greenshed, because the pea plant we planted is attempting to escape the clutches of the container in which it has been planted. This weekend I have plans involving pots and potting compost for the seeds which have made with the growing.

Aaanyhow. So I started clearing the space. As you may have noticed when I made the doors for the under-deck space, there’s a teensy bit of crap in that corner.

So I started by sorting the wood that ‘may be vaguely useful’ from the ‘completely rotten and/or filled with nails and screws that should have gone to the tip ages ago’. Most of it’s now down the bottom of the garden lying in wait for a deeply exciting trip to the tip. Then I used some of the wood from my trip to a local very-nice-company-who-let-me-take-pallets-away a few days ago…

I’d already stripped them down to a small, convenient (and obviously safely located far from the gas fire) pile of timber…

I then spent a lot of time mocking things up, measuring and faffing around.

Finally I laid into the wood with my delightful Makita jigsaw. I really should be using the chop saw, but I lent it to a friend…**

Sadly I didn’t actually take a photo of how far I’ve got. I’ve created a frame for the windows (quite proud of that as it seems to be a pretty good fit. Especially given the unsquareness of the wood I’m using. I’ve also created the front and back of the base. I now need to create the base-sides, the back of the main (glass) section and the roof glazing. All of this is made from random windows, so it’s a bit entertaining getting it all to fit.

I am now contemplating getting a better cordless drill. We have the craptastic ‘Challenge’ Drill which went from fully charged to completely discharged in about 14 screws. Given that I want a new battery pack for the power saw (having managed to force some charge into the battery I found that the saw does indeed work, albeit only briefly with the battery that I’ve got). I’m contemplating forking out for a semi-decent decent cordless drill… which might be a nice addition to our collection of things.

* Dear god, how do large-handed mechanics cope with modern cars. It was entertainingly challenging to get the bulb in between the fuse box and the headlamp casing. The first bulb disappeared down into the engine bay after I got it out and I seriously started to debate the possibility of leaving it there after nearly wedging my had in one of several gaps I used to get it out.

** I could have used the tablesaw too, but that would involve getting it out from under the pile of chaos. More and more I want a ‘workshop’ and a separate garage.

gabrielsaunteredvaguelydownwards:

“voting for ukip is a protest vote!”

that’s nice

what happens when they get into power

is everybody going to sit in awkward silence in their living rooms, clutching the daily mail in one hand and a rich tea biscuit in the other as they silently mouth “i didn’t mean it”

it’s too late

sirens sound

nigel farage kicks your door down

he pins you to the chair

“i heard your great-grandmother was polish” he snarls

in the distance, a dog howls

So as the Con/Dems continue their march towards entirely privatising the NHS whilst proclaiming loudly that having private companies run big chunks of the NHS is entirely different to privatisation, because it’s still free at the point of use (leaving ‘at the moment’ left distinctly unsaid), I was struck by a brief thought.

When people complain about an experience in private health systems, they tend to say “This doctor (or doctor’s surgery) sucks”, or “this insurance company will rip you off” or “this hospital’s terrible”. The difference I see with the NHS is that people tend to generalise. A bad experience leads to “The NHS is terrible”, and a good one to “The NHS is the best thing ever”. And it’s neither. The NHS is, I think, a fantastic thing. It’s not a perfect thing, not by any means. It’s clunky, and overrun by a plague of managers (bonus points to the Con/Dems for making that vastly worse). It’s bureaucratic, often not even vaguely ‘patient centred’ and sometimes slow to respond to changing demographics or demands.

But it’s a thing with a really good core, and a, and corny I know this sounds, a wonderful core principle. That healthcare should be available to everyone regardless of their ability to pay.

But despite all being one ‘thing’, each hospital has reinvented the wheel so many times. In my agency nurse I see everything from the great to the terrible. I see hospitals where I would take myself and I see places I wouldn’t take a dead dog. I see places that are organised beautifully, and trusts who couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up. But every place I go, people assume that every other hospital is the same, because people don’t really understand how independent each hospital is. How targets and procedures are tweaked. How the management of each site is completely different.

The NHS is an incredible thing as a whole, but if you have the misfortune to be near a crap GP with a less than great hospital then your only experiences will be terrible; thus the opinion that the NHS sucks. And worse most people won’t change their GP (even if they do suck, unless they really royally upset them), so they just get lousy experiences repeatedly. All of this is incredibly difficult to get over – really the only way is to drag these underperformers up, but I’ve no idea how you do that without throwing money at the problem.

Meh.

scratchdoc:

whisperwhisk:

zennistrad:

In light of the controversy that has been extending back for more than half a year at this point, something extremely depressing has come to light.

Not too long ago, Totalbiscuit, a popular games critic who is supported by GamerGate (though he claims to be neutral), wrote a lengthy Twitlonger questioning the theory of media influence, particularly in video games, asking “where are the scientists?”

In response, an actual social scientist posted a lengthy explanation of media influence. It’s a very good read, and I suggest anyone who’s interested read it. However, what was most important was what was added at the end.

[added on reflection] Let me also say on other thing. There are a number of us in academia who love games, care about games, and believe games are important.  We have been working for years to make games a legitimate tool for education and for study, and we were making progress.  People were starting to take games seriously.  And then came GamerGate. I have seen the careful progress of a decade come crashing down, and now, when I go to talk about games to industry groups or fellow academics, GamerGate always comes up as an example of how terrible and immature people who play games are.  It will take years and years to repair the damage, and it is absolutely devastating to the serious study and application of the power of games to real problems.  We are going to have trouble getting grants, getting foundations to fund
games, and getting people to take us seriously.  It is devastating and
makes me very sad.

For many years, people have been fighting for games to be recognized seriously as an art form. GamerGate, as it seems, has caused serious damage to that. Social scientists have been studying the influence of games, not just because of their negative effects, but because of the potential positive effects as well. Games could potentially be a powerful tool to help teach empathy, and increase satisfaction and happiness.

But now that GamerGate has shattered public perception of gaming in academia, we may never be able to fully understand how to allow games to reach their full potential in this regard. But it’s not just media studies in video games that have suffered.

Rebecca HG, also known as 8BitBecca, is a video game archivist. Her work is vitally important to the future of video games, as the passage of time guarantees that physical storage media degrades and becomes unusable. Within decades, many out-of-print games may be lost forever, outside of illegal ROMs.

But now, thanks to GamerGate, video game archiving as a professional practice is all but dead.

To any reasonable person, this would be devastating. Nobody benefits from this. Academics refusing to take games seriously means that games can never be realized as an art form. Even worse, without academia the task of preserving, understanding, and maintaining the cultural history of games becomes a daunting task. Half of all American films made before 1950 are lost forever, and were it not for the work of archivists and academics, it’s likely we would never have been able to preserve even that much.

So what happens to video games when academics don’t take them seriously at all? What happens when people refuse to archive games or study their cultural significance?

To put it bluntly, video games will have no future. If we do not take care to study the cultural history of games, it may forever disappear to us when cartridges and CDs inevitably die, emulators become obsolete, servers shut down, manuals are lost, and the publisher history fades into obscurity.

This should make any gamer uncomfortable, but unfortunately, this is not the case. GamerGate has not been shy about their disdain for academia in video games, as evidenced by the popularity of anti-academic figures such as the Youtuber known as “Sargon of Akkad”, who is one of the most widely-praised supporters of GamerGate. Just reading the title of one of his videos tells you all that you need to know:

In this context, GamerGate’s reaction to the news that academia is no longer taking games seriously is depressingly predictable.

GamerGate is killing video games. And that’s exactly what they want.

#it’s about a total lack of ethics relating to games in general

Ironically they will achieve ethics in game journalism, by eliminating it all together.

caladri:

The costs required to keep a corporation “alive” are fully tax-deductible, while the costs of keeping actual humans alive are not.

I often wonder if setting myself up as a corporation with myself as the sole shareholder would be a more effective use of my limited resources.