Unsent Letters

Okay, well, three weeks behind is better than two months. Hi!

Books
Read T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace for the first time, and found it soothingly undemanding.

Listened to the audiobook of Rick Morton's Mean Streak, about Robodebt, on the strength of how excellent Morton's livetweeting was during the Royal Commission.

I found Mean Streak initially a bit hard going not just because of the awfulness of the subject matter (which I'd factored in) but because of Morton's extended literary riffs (in the first seven chapters, he draws detailed analogies with Heller's Catch-22, Kafka's The Trial, Borges' entire body of work, and Piranesi's Carceri.

Reading this as I was over Easter, I began to anticipate that any moment now he'd go "According to the Christian gospels, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy. Do you know who else was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy? Welfare recipients under Robodebt!" like a reverse youth pastor, but he never did, and eventually I came to understand the analogies as not an excessive and unnecessary stylistic choice but rather the last defences of a mind besieged by Lovecraftian horrors.

There was some levity, though: Morton and his publisher were obliged to allow some of their subjects to exercise their right of reply. He provided space for this as an appendix at the end of the book. There were no real surprises in the politicians' responses, just some unpleasant reminders for readers, e.g. Stuart Robert exists and is presumably the same species as us.

Kathryn Campbell's reply, however, was the funniest part of the whole (admittedly deadly serious) book. It was amazing.

Just knowing she paid her lawyers, plural, to draft and send this document to Morton's publishers for inclusion in his book, is such a wonderful reminder of the wide variety of people in this world.

Morton could not possibly have condemned her as harshly as her own self-defence did.

One of the allegations Campbell disputes, in this rebuttal which took 57 minutes 56 seconds for Rick Morton to read (the whole audiobook being 15 hours 32 minutes) is that she is a micromanager.

Another is that (as Morton stated) the commissioner said she "failed to address in any manner concerns about the illegality of income averaging, despite being aware of concerns about the illegality of the scheme".

Having already argued that Commissioner Holmes was wrong; and then that Commissioner Holmes' above finding was only the commissioner's opinion, not a finding of fact; she then felt the need to stipulate that Commissioner Holmes' wording was not "failed to address in any manner," it was "did nothing of substance".

She didn't say I didn't do anything at all, she said I did fuck all. Unless you correct the record to reflect that the Royal Commissioner's report into the worst public service fuckup of the century (so far) said that I did fuck all, not nothing at all, I'll sue you.

Ms Campbell either has never read Much Ado About Nothing (act IV, scene 2), or she did, and she took it as personal advice and unlike Dogberry had the power to ensure she was writ down an ass.

Currently reading: Sax Brightwell's Low Dawn and the audiobook of Rachel Neumeier's Tuyo.

Fandom
Posted a thing.

Crafts
Got around to packing up and sending another Sekrit Project.

Tech
Started watching a five hour YouTube video about data structures and algorithms, then (half an hour in) spent the evening making a number guessing game in Twine Harlowe, using binary search.

Next time I'll use Python or Javascript or something. I don't care that I don't know Javascript.

The problem is, I keep telling myself I'll just do a quick snack-sized learning activity on my phone, and Twine (or another thing I've tried recently, jsdares.com) will seem so convenient and then I'll be in a self-made hell of how unsuited their web-based interpreters are for mobile, ugh.

Garden
Bought some calendula seeds to sow.

Cats
Their previous favourite toy, the Mousie, is on stress leave: after some gastric issues it was eventually diagnosed with disembowelment.

I'm happy to say that Ash and Dory are welcoming the Mousie's substitute, the Birdie, with full lethal force.

How are you all?