shads

You should give the Amiga version a go via an emulator. You might be interested in the differences. Loved that trilogy back in the day.

Oh I think I have seen this one, don't the vampires get to go public now? And we find out werewolves and fairies are real too?

"Don't get too excited. Don't get too excited. Don't get too excited. Don't get too excited. Don't get too excited. Don't get too excited."

Its not working.

I apologise if my summary is too biased/inaccurate, tried my best to be as impartial and factual as I could while falling asleep on my phone at 4am.

Honestly not sure what to expect if a snap election is called, we can be a funny populace to call and a snap election leaves little time for political messaging to percolate, but also a commensurately short time to combat any poor messaging that gains a foothold.

I think Dean Winters (the Labor leader) may be unpopular enough to cause Labor some grief at the ballot box, but the Liberals fumbling is going to give the party a small lift. Labors stance that they won't partner with the Greens will also cause them some grief.

I personally think independent stand the most to gain and will hold balance of power in whatever minority government gets through.

Gun to my head - Labor minority.

The stadium is a Lightning rod issue, but it is far from the only one.

Briefly we have had a Liberal government that is terrible at organisation and makes deals based upon cronyism, nepotism and or incompetence.

The state government has demonstrated that they are largely incapable of delivering any projects on budget and lack forward planning capability. For example two new high speed ferries were commissioned to connect Tasmania and Victoria to accomodate post COVID tourism increases. These ferries were constructed in Finland and were ready before the facilities required to berth them here in Tasmania, this has meant that we have had to pay a port in Scotland to hold on to them until we can get our side of things ready.

We have had a number of crises in our Public Health and hospital systems leading to extended delays for people seeking both emergency and planned treatment.

When it became obvious that the State government was unable to balance a budget they opted to institute a Public Service hiring freeze. Talked about instituting a government body to emulate the stated goals of DOGE.

The stadium is possibly the most politicised matter, our previous Premier got super focussed on getting a Tasmanian AFL team. After a lot of big talk AFL provided a pathway that a lot of people felt was demonstrative of them not wanting a Tasmanian team to go ahead, setting a requirement that a new stadium be constructed in a difficult/impossible location, with conditions that would potentially exclude its use for other sport and event types, with the state largely being the ones to bankroll a project that had a hopelessly optimistic budget.

Since there has been a yearning for an AFL team in Tasmania for a very long time the government and AFL are leveraging this to get people to back the stadium regardless of it's feasibility.

All of this came to a head when the Liberals released a budget that would increase state debt to more than $10 billion by 2029. This would be a trigger for a bunch of state assets being put up for sale.

So the Labor Party leader pushed for a No Confidence vote, which has been successfull. By convention the Premier is expected to resign once a No Confidence motion has passed, but Jeremy Rlockliffe has opted to instead fight this by calling an election.

Now I really shouldn't have started typing all this up at 4an. I'm going back to bed. Good night.

Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.

Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.

Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won't spoil if he can't bring himself to eat.

From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:

• Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
• Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
• Nutritional outcomes can be targeted

Which is intersecting with:

• America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
• There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
• Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
• Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.

Yeah that's a situation alright.

You know I never considered that, I guess I just saw the Asian influences and never considered the parallels to Christian allegory. Makes sense.

Its funny because the overlap of people who are in to Star Wars and Evangelical Christianity really took me by surprise. How are those two things so closely aligned? And let's face it, remove the people who fundamentally believe it is their obligation to proscribe how and what people think and you get a whole bunch of people who realise that peoples gender identity is none of their damned business.

When gay marriage was being debated here in Australia my sister (who is gay) was super upset the whole time. She talked about how much the fight affected her and wished that people who were against would just understand.

I told her I was a complete supporter of gay marriage for a whole bunch of reasons including:

• human decency
• equality
• people who don't like gay marriage can just... Not get married to another person of the same gender.
• people should just mind their own fucking business

However I did also point out that a lot of the loudest voices against gay marriage literally did not give a flying fuck about the issue, it was a convenient wedge and distraction for them, the people who need a group to vilify for political reasons would have to find another target for persecution as soon as they lost this particular convenient red rag to a bull.

Today in Australia, I believe, the usual suspects who use fear and hatred as the bedrock of their politics have been able to tap into a deeper vein of ignorance to make Trans people that target.

Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because "they are so easy". Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.

They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.

I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.