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Pack up your six shooters and mount up, because I have arrived in the Wild West.

Granted Phoenix Arizona is less wild than it was in the days of the gold rush, it is still quite a change from my humble hometown city of Brisbane, Australia.

for those who have never been, Phoenix is flat, sprawling and dusty. There are many more trees than you would expect from this desert valley. Conifers (pines), palms and many other trees that can handle the heat of summer, are mostly kept alive by tremendous amounts of water channeled down from the Colorado River. Lawns are kept green with sprinklers and in some cases a monthly flooding from the water main.

Random garden in front of Camelback Mountain

As a result of this care from the human inhabitants, Phoenix and it’s satellite cities are an Oasis in the desert, sustaining a large population of seasonal birds and insects, not to mention people.

I’m living with Lei in an apartment on the border between Phoenix and Scottsdale. The Apartment is small, but funnily enough I feel like I have more room, seeing as in Brisbane I spent most of my time in my tiny little room on the computer. Now I have the whole apartment to enjoy.

Lei and Hammy in our Apartment

There are several advantages to living in a big city like Phoenix, and in the United States in general. I just missed the Basketball season, which was something I was really looking forward to. They’re still playing games at the moment, but Phoenix didn’t make the playoffs, so there’ll be no games for me to watch here.

Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns, Jan 26, 2009.

I could also watch the Baseball for as cheap as $5 (the seats are way up the back). One of the most important advantages however is the music. Bands and festivals touring the U.S. will almost always come to Phoenix.

Last weekend we went to U-fest, a rock festival sponsored by the local rock radio station.

Lei and Me at the U-fest

The rock music that’s popular these days doesn’t exactly float my boat, but there was one band that I really enjoyed. An 80’s Metal parody band called Steel Panther. The song below is “death to all but Metal”

What I’m really looking forward to however is Flight of the Conchords, playing this month downtown. We ordered tickets before I even arrived They are making (or have made) a new season of their T.V. show, so I’m expecting to hear some new songs. One of my favourite Conchords song is below:

Finally, because Arizona is right on the border of Mexico, we feel a kinship with our south-of-the-border cousins. Because of this, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo on Tuesday (5th May), in honour of the Mexicans defeating the French. We drank Corona and ate Tacos. And the cats seemed to enjoy themselves aswell.

Hammy celebrating Cinco de Mayo

Until I post again, get ye gone varment, there aint enough room in this town for the two of us, ya hear?

It has been several months since I first heard of the Australian Federal Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the I.S.P. level. I had my concerns about this, due to my experience with filtering at school. There are always legitimate sites that are blocked. I was also concerned about the slippery slope this represents for possible political censorship of news and information by the government.

But I did not feel the need like some, to protest the matter in public, because the stated aims of the system were to block child pornography, which is something that I would support.

My attitude has changed though, because it appears my fears have been realised. The controversial site Wikileaks has published a leaked version of the sites on the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) blacklist. This list includes online gambling sites, regular pornography (that is, not children but adults), an anti-abortion site, the site of a dental surgery in Queensland, and even includes the Wikileaks page of a previously leaked blacklist for Denmark’s filtering system.

The leak of this blacklist and others highlights a conundrum. It is that by releasing the list, those who want to see such illegal content and have no restrictions on their internet use, have been given a large list of sites to go to. On the other hand, if kept secret, the list can contain news and blog articles, and partisan political sites in an attempt to suppress freedom of speech (it’s worth mentioning freedom of speech is not enshrined in the Australian law or constitution).

I will only be in favour of this system, if there is developed a clear and narrow guideline of the nature of material deemed unfit for viewing, enshrined in legislation. This will allow site owners who find their sites banned, to appeal to a court to decide whether their site falls within the guidelines of the legislation. As it stands, the bureaucracy making the decisions within ACMA cannot be trusted to make judgements in the interest of free speech and expression.

If I were to link to the Danish blacklist today, or any other link on the blacklist, even before implementation of the ISP filtering, I could be fined $11,000 a day until the link is taken down. This begs the question… if the ACMA blacklist is secret, how would one know that the link is being made to something unlawful, and likely to cost thousands of dollars?

My hope is that the Senate, when it comes to passing this legislation will push for amendments that narrow the scope, introduce a mechanism for appeal, and supply adequate warning to site owners to remove links before incurring a fine.

Another poem. I don’t write them that often, but since I don’t post enough in the blog, I’ve got two back to back

This one doesn’t have any real deep meaning, just a bit of fantasy. Well it does cover a few themes, war, peace, death. Enjoy…

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Softly falls the winter breeze o’er my chilled and dying face,
through sight in fade I gaze aloft to bright and wondrous space.
A swirl of light to spark the soul and take my mind away,
this noble night of nights to die, “what better way?”, I try to say.

Death has come for an early gift, “the voice I take from thee”.
But in my mind one speaks secure, the voice forever free.
It sings and ponders and cries aloud, to coax onto the tide,
one last great voyage to a land in time, where memories reside.

There at once is the boy I was, with glowing will untamed,
to step to life in leaps and bounds, for life was just a game.
A roll of dice to mark the fate-bound path so deeply etched,
in the stone of that forgotten life, so far away I stretch

The boy escapes my gaze so quick, into the darkened night
and in his place another ghost from old forgotten life
The King of flowers, Fairvelus, the fair and just embodied
who lay in bed, devoid of life, his mind from mortal coil is freed

But those he left behind weren’t free, they suffered slavery,
for the rule of heir King Oberoi was blackened tyranny,
in fire we forged the tools of war, to spread with vicious speed,
the lies of that great King of fire, “for freedom we fight thee”

“A game no more is this life grown dark”, speaks a man of thirty-four
his heart seems lost in despair too great, to bare it anymore.
In the fading light of a winter’s day, he reaches for the hilt
to pull the sword and strike the blow, and end the greater guilt

The death of flowers, our greatest King, unhealed by my own powers.
His life to me entrusted true, but dead within mere hours.
And now the world is bound in dance, the waltz of war eternal
to win the man a greater prize, this world for King infernal.

“why should my life fall to despair?” cries the man in revelation,
to sheathe the sword and fight again, to save a life worth saving.
This life is not a single man, but the living world out there
A King of fire to be smothered out, in the name of Flowers fair.

A new king here would not suffice, to save the world a tyrant,
for the heir of heirs might once again, make a generation silent
as I drew my sword for one last time on my cousin King of Fire,
I spoke the words “for peace” and swung, to end his fate so dire

An heir to Fire was I, the first in line to take the throne,
but to the people I gave the power, to choose one of their own.
So gave rise to our republic, named by the roll of dice
not fire, not flowers, but in honour of those endless stars in flight.

In final breath those memories wash, to reveal the flying night
not blurred by dying eyes but clear, majestic and so bright
“what better way to die?” I think, under the Republic of the Stars
where the skies look down in endless joy to see our peace at last.

This is a poem I’ve written, which is in part about the dichotomy of human existence and evolution, competition and cooperation. They have been transformed here into Love and Anger:

How far I fall from favour fair
my harp thrown out in the cursed air
it lies upon the polished stone
to remind me yet of broken bone

For as I stare into that harp
and feel the dawn of my despair
my mind departs to long ago
when by the sword I made my fare.

Then as now in the joy of youth
the song and verse made sorely mute
back then it was the battle cry
tonight by fire the funeral pire

Alas my heart grows cold for thee
while you burn upon that bed of oak
I sing a merry song of glee
In the rising shadow, the blackened smoke

I will long remember those words you gave, on the battlefield that day
“our foe was monster born” you cried, our duty for to slay

The dead lay ’round us, foe and friend alike
equal in their destiny to fall upon the pike
and as I raised my victim’s mask to gaze upon his face
I saw a man not unlike me and cowered in disgrace.

On that day the words of one spurred men to fight again,
but only brothers did they kill, not beasts but fellow men.
And so ’twas I who sang rejoiced for the passing of the major,
his accomplished soldier, but not his kind, for love and not for anger.

We will forever, us humans being, dance between these ancient feelings,
not love nor anger will ever win, but sweetly I’ll keep singing.
The harp remains split there in two, but I feel no more sorrow,
for I have my voice and love within, to take unto tomorrow.

A (belated) Happy New Year!

It’s that time of year again, when we shake off the shackles of the year that was and look forward with hope (we hope) to the year ahead and beyond.

I started this article with the expectation to go over the interesting and sensational events that have marked the year ‘08, but I have changed my mind. I have decided to list my hopes for the reforms to improve the world of tomorrow.

1: Reforming the United Nations:

The United Nations was formed after World War 2, and the representation was divided among the major powers. Britain, Russia and the U.S. have power of Veto over any security council resolutions. For the organisation to survive into the future, and to play a meaningful role, it needs to be representative of the influence and stake that each nation has in the world.

2: Tackle global warming

There is still plenty of doubt on the airwaves, about whether or not the earth is warming, and to what extent humans play a role in this warming.  There is however some pretty strong evidence to say that global warming is real, and that it’s being accelerated by human burning of fossil fuels.

Doubt has never been a good reason not to act. In almost any new challenge, there is doubt, and the job of governments and societies is to weigh the risks. According to our best predictions, the consequences of global warming are a drastic change to our climate and way of life. If these predictions are true, rivers fed by mountain glaciers will dry, the sea level will rise by meters from the melting of the greenland ice caps, and cyclones will become more common as the waters warm.

So if our best predictions show this to be probable, even if just 50% probable, we need to act, because the cost of not acting far outweighs the risks of acting (that is the burden of a tax on greenhouse emissions on economies highly dependant on those emissions)

What the world lacks is leadership, and the political will to make the changes. History has shown that societies can adapt very well to drastic upheavals, as long as the leadership and organisation is there to see it through.

In my opinion it is a win-win, because even if it were all proven to be untrue, the energy sources borne out of this upheaval will provide our planet renewable energy that will fuel the development of the whole world.

3: Renew the social contract

The social contract is the idea that we all contribute to the society in which we live, to make it a better place for all to enjoy and succeed in.

In recent decades it seems that in many parts of the western world, the social contract has been eroding away through successive tax cuts, a redistribution of wealth to the wealthy, and an emphasis on the individual rather than the community.

In some countries like the U.S. the problem isn’t necessarily the tax cuts for the middle class, but the vast number of loop-holes and concessions that see industry and commerce in the U.S. paying the least amount of tax in the western world. It is also the priorities of the governments, who spend a large portion of the budget on the military while neglecting public works, education and health.

I’m sometimes afraid that the egalitarian ideals that were a hallmark of Australian society, of the great middle class, are being lost. I had a discussion at a party with a guy who talked of how free education should not necessarily be a fundamental of society, if it costs the government too much, plunging them into debt. This was an idea laughable in it’s short-sightedness, forgetting that education is an investment in future productivity.

Of course history shows that taxing the populous into poverty has devastating effects, and it should be appropriate to the needs of the society in creating a better social institutions,  infrastructure and services, rather than the indulgences of those in power (that includes the fighting of unnecessary wars)

What gives me hope in Australia, and makes me think that the opinions of the person at the party were in the minority, are the polls that suggest a large majority of Australians are open to rises in tax if it means an improvement in infrastructure, public transport, public education and public health. The egalitarian ideal is not yet lost.

I went to a party on Saturday at a friends place. One of the other guests was a young conservative bloke with glasses. The conversation went in and out of politics, at which time he would espouse the virtues of the Howard years. This was not surprising in the least; a good deal of the country is conservative. What struck me most was that this guy was racist and openly so. First it was the aboriginals, then it was the Asians, and then it was black people.

As Lei rightly pointed out to me, those that are openly racist don’t really get very far in modern civil society. But it got me to thinking about the attitudes of some in Australia, especially in my state of Queensland.

I’ll touch on two issues, because I think they’re related to some degree. The first is to do with our attitude towards refugees and immigrants, and the second is to do with plain old Racism. I believe they’re both related because they are both about “us and them”.

We had a heated discussion at the dinner table about the Children Overboard debacle of 2001 (wiki) and the climate surrounding that after the recent “The Howard Years” program aired on the ABC. My dad would often slip into the term “those people”, as though they were a homogeneous group, ignorant of their plight and circumstance.

This was and probably still is a common attitude among a large part of Australians to those that arrive illegally into the country. John Howard famously said with great vigour, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. This kind of attitude won him great praise among the ordinary Australian, and what we ultimately saw was a government willing to send refugees to an exorbitantly expensive pacific processing centre on Nauru in order to say that they had never arrived in Australia.

John Howard’s rousing speech missed something vitally important in the whole affair, which should have been obvious. A refugee fleeing a war torn country or escaping persecution, more often than not does not have the opportunity or the time to apply for refugee status in Australia at the country of their origin. They run and they don’t look back. This is the premise under which the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was created (and duly signed by most countries in the world, including Australia)

So listening to my dad talk about why it was the right decision to turn the boats away was angering to say the least. It showed an attitude of the Us, the privileged, and Them, the criminals, the “queue jumpers”.

I recall someone saying, there is a tendency for those who have reached the top of the ladder, to kick it away so that others may not climb. I see this at work here, in a country founded and prospered by immigration. You need only meet a few people who have escaped hell to find opportunity and peace in a country like Australia to see that they are more driven and productive than most native-borns.

This is where I see the relationship most strongly between the refugee issue and racism. Australia is a large country and one with enough resources to take in the relatively small amount of refugees that arrive on our shores (these are especially small when compared to Europe for example). I believe that the distaste that many feel for allowing them to enter is not confined to refugees, but also to immigrants in general. It is an urge to keep out those that are different, those that don’t share the common attitudes, language and values, for fear of an erosion of those very values and attitudes.

This shares a common thread with the Racist notion that there is something superior about “Us”, our culture, our way of life, and that allowing “Them” the freedom and acceptance into society enjoyed by ourselves, would act to diminsh that society.  The Racist is of course the more ignorant, for a view that the colour of one’s skin might have any real influence on their abilities or values. But both attitudes are deeply ignorant of the potential of all the world’s people to thrive and succeed in Australian society, if they are allowed to do so.

Growing up in Brisbane, I was friends with many people of different backgrounds and I never had any problem with them, they were just another kid who I loved to play cars or action figures with. So I don’t believe that racism and intolerance is something born, it’s something taught through example. The policies of Australian government at the time of my growing up and perhaps a bit before then,  allowed many people to come to Australia, and the public schools were the powerhouse of integration. An environment of acceptance bred acceptance. In the metropolitan city, I always expected to find minimal racism, a view that people were just people. So it was indeed disturbing to face such intolerance.

I had of course heard plenty of cultural slurs, especially in High School, the “Violent Lebs” for example, but I always understood this as people casting a shadow over a community because of the actions of a few.

I stood up to the bloke at the party, as much as I could without ruining the mood, because everyone else brushed it off. I feel that if noone stands up and says “Hey, that’s wrong, you should be ashamed of yourself”, then people will think that this is acceptable, that this is part of what it means to be Australian.

I do not accept that. I always imagined the land where I grew up to be a place where disaffected peoples of the world could come and find a place to enjoy life and the sun and the fruits of their hard work in an accepting and vibrant community.

When we turned away those most in need, we lost part of something that we could be proud of, and that is worth mourning.

I now declare the Cloudwisp blog formally open! wooooooo

I am decommissioning the blogs portal and have transferred mine and Lei’s blogs to standalone versions of Wordpress. The decision was mainly spurred on by the fact that the multi-user Wordpress doesn’t support post by email, but it was also because no-one else but us was using the portal

Enjoy

In an age of Iron clad warlords and peasant fodder, of warfare and cruelty, the story follows a young boy by the name of Wart, an orphan who is adopted by Sir Ector, whose estate is on the edge of the vast Sherwood Forest.

The book is written from the point of view of a modern writer in the modern age, retelling a history. There are many references to modern English culture at the time of writing when explaining events within the story and bringing them into perspective.

On the whole this is useful, but at times it suffers from age, whereby the references themselves have no meaning to the current generation.

The first part of the book is the most fantastical part of the epic, with Wart meeting Merlin, who will become his tutor and mentor. It is also the funniest part of the novel. The old wizard is going backwards in time, and often makes reference to the future, which Wart plainly doesn’t understand. Merlin takes Wart on many adventures, turning him into an ant, a goose, a fish, and Wart meets the comedic and noble King Pellinore who is forever chasing the questing beast. We follow Wart and Kay as they help Robin hood (or Robin Wood) and Marion rescue their kin from evil spirits in the forest.

The book contains too much to cover every happening, but there are adventures abound, in the spirit of a Knightly epic.

As Wart reaches maturity, the world is changing. The King Uther Pendragon has died, and the adopted brother of Wart, Kay, has become a knight, and Wart his squire. They travel to London to fight in a grand tournament, but here Kay has forgotten his sword and Wart is sent back to fetch it, only to find the Inn is locked and shut.

There he sees the sword in the stone, in front of the church, the one who so many have tried and failed to retrieve. Of course this part of the story would be familiar to anyone, and you would have guessed now, that the Wart is really Arthur Pendragon, who will become king after pulling the sword from the stone.

King Arthur, after coronation, wages war on all the dissenting Lords and Kings to bring them under the banner of England. It is at this crucial point, that he reflects on his position, his actions and his conscience, and decides that force, or might, should not be used for it’s own sake, but rather for the sake of justice. This spurs him to create the round table.

Lancelot, at the time of the founding of the round table, is merely a boy, who has travelled to England, enamoured with Arthur and the ideals of the court of the King. He speaks to Arthur who asks the young boy to return from France when he is older to join the Round Table.

The story explores a strange kind of love and idolising by the young Knight that provides much tension later in the story when Lancelot and Arthur’s wife Queen Guinevere fall in Love. A bizarre love triangle.

The story is of course, too long to summarise in this review, and parts of the story might be familiar to most. The thrust of this novel however is Arthur’s attempts to create a Kingdom of peace, protected by his round table and, as he grows much older, a Kingdom of laws while the round table collapses around him by factional fighting.

It is the story of an imperfect ruler, with the noblest of intentions, who is in the end undone by the atrocities of his youth as much as he is undone by the justice that he holds high. He would put his personal feelings aside of love and friendship for Lancelot and Guinevere to uphold the values of the legal system that he had created, sentencing them to death, only to find this choice tear his Kingdom apart.

It explores the nature of humans, their thirst for war, and questions the idea that we may ever be perfectible. It takes Mordred and the Orkney clan not as inherently evil, but as people, bent by past grievances into current violence and malice, and concludes that because we can’t forget the past, we will never have peace. The nature of humans is for vengeance.

It is these themes that spurred me into writing this review, and made the book, after some of the hard parts, a rewarding read.

I had told myself that when Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (online MMORPG) comes out, I would try it out. I had spent a few years of my life playing Mythic Entertainment’s last game Dark Age of Camelot, and my hopes were of a new RPG which borrowed something from Dark Age. Hopefully something that would make me feel at home in the new world.

When the game had finished installing I was to discover that superficially, they had borrowed more from World of Warcraft than they had from Dark Age of Camelot. The Warcraft User Interface was almost an exact template for the Warhammer interface, even down to the quests.

When you look a bit closer at the quests, you get a clue as to what this game is really about. The game highlights on the map the general area of the quest objective. This told me that this game wasn’t designed for those who love wandering around for hours trying to find a dusty sack behind a tree.

Mythic have obviously taken the Warcraft user interface for it’s ease of use, and perhaps out of lack of imagination, but they have created, in my impression so far, a game that is mostly about PvP, the slashing, bashing and zapping of other players.

The game moves seamlessly from quest and monster areas into contested battle zones where quest objectives, and plenty of kills are there to be had. The range of classes unique to each realm and race make for a dynamic and exciting PvP experience.

I have experienced only a fraction of the game so far, but in that time, this game has not disappointed.

Sigmar be your guide… or something I will see you on the battlefield!

I have just installed a plugin to embed flash files into blog posts. A more productive use of the plugin can be found on Lei’s blog (check the blog roll), but here is a test…