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From Tiny Acorns…
I’m currently closing in on the completion of the first draft of what will hopefully become my second published novel. Word count at the moment is 90,000+ words, every single one of them written on a train. Writing on the train has been my standard modus operandi for some years now. But just recently, while…
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You [censored] Hypocritical [censored]!!!
Labour party supporters (not necessarily the Labour party itself) are currently slamming away at the Lib Dems for talking to the Tories about some sort of coalition, totally ignoring the fact that it wasn’t the Lib Dems who took this decision, but the British people themselves when a hell of a lot more of them…
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The Tragic Story of Oxfordia
Let’s talk about a small, remote, poor, and undeveloped country called Oxfordia that recently held an election. Oxfordia has a simple “first-past-the-post” election system; the country is divided into two halves, each of which returns a member of parliament. The results of the election were as follows: East Oxfordia Labourious Party: 21,938 votes (42.5%) The…
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LibDems And The Mad FPTP Dance
Some of you might be wondering just how it’s possible for the Liberal Democrats to increase their share of the vote, albeit by only 1% or so, but to then have lost several seats. The point you have to bear in mind is that because of the way they get squeezed, bashed and generally thrown…
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Will The iPad Change The Way We Read Comics?
Yesterday, I got a chance to have a real play on a friend’s iPad. And yes, I really am taken. But that’s another story, for another post. Of all the apps I played with, the one that really got me thinking was the Marvel comics app that my friend had purchased. It’s a really nice…
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Brighton Festival Events One to Four
A few years back we went to Edinburgh for the festival. I remember being really jealous of people who lived in the city; I resolved that should I ever live there I’d become a festival fanatic each August, immersing myself in it and seeing as many events as I could. We didn’t move to Edinburgh; at…
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On Why The Lib Dems Just Might Be Different
It’s no secret that the Lib Dems are doing better right now than they have since the early 80s heyday of the SDP, nor that the Tories and their friends in the press have gone into serious and sustained brick production as a result – something neatly demonstrated by the picture to the right of…
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First Past The Post: A Good Idea?
The BBC have put up an election calculator, where you can plug in various hypothetical national votes shares for the parties and then see what the election result would be, assuming consistent swings. You can find it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm I had a play around, and managed to come up with an interesting scenario. Imagine you had the…
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A Round-Up Of My Old Convention Reports
People seemed to quite like my Eastercon report, so I figured I’d post some links to previous gaming convention reports I’d done for my roleplaying webzine Critical Miss, just in case anyone was interested. Here they are: * * * * * Gaelcon… Probably The Greatest Convention In The World While shopping at GenCon we…
Jonny Nexus 