Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Roger Douglas Hunua wgah'nagl fhtagn

Yes, he's back. Like a Great Old One woken from dreamless sleep to raven and slay when the stars are right, Roger Douglas has returned to complete his "unfinished business". As for any hope that he's learned a thing from the disaster he imposed on the country, fat chance:

My only regret is I didn't get the job finished.

There's no recognition of the pain he inflicted on us, and certainly no recognition that the policies he and his co-conspirator Ruth Richardson pursued are largely responsible for the gap between New Zealand and Australia he keeps harping on about. "Finishing the job" won't close that gap; instead it will widen it further. It will however make the rich richer and the poor poorer, while stripping away the public services we need to survive and turning us into a country like the US where the poor just die rather than impinging on the consciences and pocket books of the rich.

Fortunately, there is a flaw in Douglas' plan: it relies on getting elected. And the policies he represents are about as popular as syphilis among everyone but the tiny clique of ultra-rich money-men (and they are almost all men) who comprise National and ACT's base. But with a high list placing and a "vote Rodney, get Roger" campaign (something ACT seem to regard as a selling-point, rather than a threat), even that can be overcome.

So will Roger get to roger us again? At this point, its worth remembering that despite the denials and protests, ACT is National's favoured coalition partner. Their influence will naturally depend on the numbers, but they will demand something for their support. So, it may be a case of "vote Key, get Roger" as well.

It might pay to remember that on election day.

(For those baffled by the title, see here).

Climate change: disturbing images

After paying attention to climate change for a few years now, the overwhelming image of what passes for policy "debate" on the issue is of the government releasing detailed policy while Nick Smith screams and bangs on a pot to hide the fact that he has no response; meanwhile, in the background, various people are standing around with their fingers in their ears yelling that nothing is happening, while Gerry Brownlee crouches over a centrefold of an open-cast mine while dreamily murmuring "sexy coal"...

Obscene but true. Please deposit your SAN points in the receptacle provided.

Lovecraft meets Dilbert

Imagine that there are crawling tentacled horrors waiting at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set to invade reality and raven and slay. Imagine that there are people who know this - and therefore that there are secret government agencies whose job it is to stop them. Imagine those guardians of reality have managers, office politics, HR departments, paperclip audits, and all the petty bureaucracy that comes with being a modern, efficient government department.

That's pretty much the premise behind Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives. It combines the horror of H P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos with the horror of modern bureaucracy - with a good dose of geek humour thrown in. Magic being a science (and a specialised branch of mathematics, at that), it naturally attracts geeks - particularly when they inadvertently discover how to summon Nyarlathotep and almost destroy Birmingham. But it's not all laughs - there's about a squick a page of ickyness (more in some places), and the peculiar horror of a setting in which classified government documents blandly state

We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimise casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

It's well worth reading, if you can get hold of it.

Layout fixed

Thanks to zANavAShi, the Great Old Ones have been sealed away with the Elder Sign the layout has been fixed, and now resizes properly and works in IE6 (and, apprently, Opera8, though I haven't checked it). I'm not sure about other browsers, but that should cover most people.

Meanwhile, I've become aware that there's a validation problem with the new RSS feeds. Unfortunately, this isn't something I have any control over - I just click a box, and Blogger does the rest. They do seem to work OK in BlogLines, though, and the LJ feed still works for those of you who like to get NRT that way. People who seriously use RSS (I don't) may want to suggest a way around the problem.

So, what next? There's a "recent posts" hack similar to the comments one, which I'm thinking of installing (the archive is likely to be too unweildy after a few days, so I'll zip it up to "monthly"), and I'm thinking of using Feedblitz so people can get NRT by email. And of course I need to get my labelling scheme properly sorted out. But for the moment, I'm just happy that things are working properly again.

The eyes! The mouths! The tentacles!

That's how I feel about blogger layouts and cascading style sheets ATM. Before the great migration, I had a blog layout that was slow and clunky, but worked. I've been trying to replicate that layout in the new version; unfortunately it seems that no matter what I try, it fails to work in Internet Explorer. This isn't so much a problem for me, as I use Firefox - but obviously I'd like it if people stuck in non-tabbed browser hell (often through no fault of their own) could read it too.

The problems all seem to revolve around my preference for having a sidebar on the left, which then causes various problems for the body of the blog which can only really be solved by whacking the sidebar with "position: absolute". On the plus side, this means I can get the body to load first, giving people something to look at while the vital "recent comments" javascript does its stuff. On the minus side, it means that in IE6 the page is always bigger than the window, which causes obvious problems reading (I shudder to think what it looks like in older versions). Still, at least it kindof renders properly - some of my attempts earlier tonight saw the blog body split after the first post or the sidebar disappear entirely in IE, which was even worse.

So, anybody know how to fix these things? Or how to ensure the blog body takes up its full available width, rather than shrinking to fit in some post windows (e.g. Sedition by Example). Or how to get my sidebar and body the same height (a minor annoyance compared to the others, but still something I'd like to fix - ideally without needing background pictures or more obnoxious JavaScript). I am planning to do a new layout some time, but don't have the time at the moment for serious work (let alone the design skills), so at the moment I'm trying to (mostly) reproduce what I had.

Of course, I could always switch back to the old table layout I was using before, and I'll do that by the end of the week if I can't solve these problems - but that would lose some of the functionality I was hoping to gain by upgrading. So, any suggestions?

Cthulhu no longer waits

Cthulhu movie trailer [YouTube]

OK, so it's not The Call of Cthulhu; instead it looks to be more a contemporary version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. But it still looks cool, and I'll probably have to see it if it ever makes it to the big screen.

(And some day I'll have to see the H P Lovecraft Historical Society's 20's silent movie-style adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu as well - if only for the neat art deco blasphemous idol).

Nameless horrors

Crooked Timber blogs about Charles Stross' "A Colder War". I read this a few years ago when it featured in a Dozois Year's Best anthology, and it grabbed me immediately. It starts out ordinarily enough - just a soulless CIA analyst looking at some files - and then before you know it you're down the rabbit hole and reading about shoggoth gaps and an exchange of weakly godlike entities. It has everything - Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Oliver North and Stephen J Gould; a fantastic cross between the Mythos and the Cold War.

Like many, I was struck by the similarities between Stross' vision and Delta Green - except that it seems too overt. The world of Delta Green is supposed to be indistinguishable from our own; the horror is hidden behind the curtain, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye (or, if you're unlucky enough, it swallows you whole in the middle of the night). Having shoggoths paraded through Red Square like SS-20s, or nameless horrors imprisoned under the Pentagon as a final deterrent (a more insane form of MAD) would spoil that aspect. Besides, no-one in Delta Green would be mad enough to see the Mythos as a weapon... would they?

3D6/1D6 SAN loss

The Green Parrot is a Wellington nightspot, famous for being frequented by MPs, particularly Winston Peters. But while walking through town last night, I noticed it's neighbour for the first time - a strip club. With a large banner advertising jelly wrestling.

For some reason, this made me think of a drunken Winston, glistening with lime jello as he slides about the ring trying to get a grip on Gerry "the bruiser" Brownlee...