Posts by Kracklite
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
The cake is real
Sky Cake!
Sorry, as you were.
-
Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Greg Dawson,
for all practical purposes
Ah, well, being truly practical means thinking in the long term, not mere millennia.
-
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Bennett, another self-infatuated fool, thinking for some reason that he's funny, a "satirist" of some description because he's comfortable and some people dare to upset him. Real satirists are Swift and Burroughs, people who have never been comfortable, who never could be comfortable.
Jim Hopkins, Paul Henry, Paul Holmes, Lindsay Perigo, Joe Bennett... Ker-rist! I'm a middle-aged, middle-class white male. Does this have to happen to me? Are more than half of my neurons going to wave bye-bye, let slip this mortal coil and join the choir invisible, am I going to become a professional victim of political correctness?
Thank His Divine Shadow (Cthulhu's taking a day off, being dead and all) for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band:
So Norman, if you're normal, I intend to
be a freak for the rest of my life... SO THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERE!More seriously, I never ceased to be amazed by the continued persistence of the fools who think that "temporary" authoritarian solutions are the answer. The means does not justify the end, the means is the end.
Oh dear, I'm ranting. I need a cup of tea.
-
In reply to no-one, just an observation/opinion:
<soapbox> Some idiot was on Morning Report saying that we need an autocracy to get things fixed quickly. If this were The Standard, I'd say it revealed a government conspiracy to establish one, and if Labour were leading the government still and I was Matthew Hooton, I'd say the same, but I can understand it's just venting.
Still, while it may seem attractive, and there are going to be increasing calls to "cut through the red tape" and for there to be "efficient management" as shock gives way to frustration, the record for autocratic systems in dealing with disasters is poor. In a hierarchical, authoritarian system, no one wants to report bad news to their superior, so they don't, and the response often becomes a second disaster. Messy as any open, ad-hoc, responses and spontaneously-organised networks and the champions of various individual suburbs might be, their transparency is better, I think. </soapbox>
-
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I don’t know if the Cathedral would be right, or would be offered, but I’d like to see a building become a memorial/museum to what has happened to Christchurch and the eventual rebuilding.Something that had educational/relaxation/historical elements to it.
That is what cathedrals are for now. Consider St Paul's and Westminster Abbey in London - they're reliquaries. It's my hope too, but I also think it's inevitable.
-
[Oh, and literally can't say anything about the Christchurch quake. First, strangely numb, and second, everyone else says so much so well. Love to you all, emotional prostheses that you are.]
-
Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to nzlemming,
Danke, mein herr. Maybe (no, not maybe) it’s the pessimist in me, but I remember Dmitri Orlov, drawing on his experience of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decline of civilisation will not be a grand apocalypse (and Patton Oswalt furnishes great imagery: sentient razors that cut into you, volcanoes spewing menstrual blood and so on), but rather a slowly rising tide of crumminess as repairs and updates are put off and, vaguely quoting The Life of Brian, a friend will borrow another friends hammer and forget where he left it…
-
Also, NatLib attempts to archive the entire NZ Web on a more-or-less annual basis.
Wunderbar, but can you tell me what strategy is employed to avoid obsolescence?
I hope that it's not just taken for granted that it will be readable decades from now. Clay tablets are easier to read than floppy discs these days.
-
Scotch o'clock.
-
Just to join in:
Can anyone make head or tail of what Jim Hopkins is on about?
Why on earth would you try? It's like running repeatedly headfirst into a particularly dense object. It's only good for you in the sense that it feels wonderful when you stop.