The London Riots

They are garnering attention around the world as everyone asks why. They started after the shooting of a young father in a police operation. When the police failed to give a statement at a peaceful protest organised by his family the peaceful protest turned into a riot. Things have spread far and wide since then not just London but also significant incidents in Birmingham and other sites in the Midlands.

This has sparked a lot of discussions over the cause, as in the underlying causes and not the shooting that initially sparked the first riot. Some argue that cuts in social spending are to blame, more point to the disenfranchisement of young people in inner London. Others use the tired old phrase (in my opinion) of it is all down to feral youths. Still others blame social networking.

I don’t have any solutions to offer other than concentrating on protecting people’s houses and property in terms of police numbers. I have heard some positive stories in the aftermath of the riot though, things like a group of local men banding together to protect their neighbourhood from the riots and of course the twitter led campaign for volunteers to come and help clean up London.

So I guess what I want to say is even though this stuff is terrible perhaps something good might come of it, which is all kinds of cheesy I know but still worth saying. On the other hand it might just give the government more excuses to cut back on our civil liberties. Stop and search, detention orders heck we even have on the horizon cameras to read our body language to see if we’re potential terrorists. When you took a step back and look at things you wonder how we got this out of control.

I just hope tonight proves to be the beginning of the end.

Oslo and the coverage

So Oslo is trending across Europe at least on Twitter after two seemingly linked terrorists attacks in Norway one actually in Oslo and the other at a island 30 miles away from the capital. It seems to be a bombing at some government offices and someone pretending to be a policeman opening fire at a Young Labour Party of Norway Summer Camp. The death count will undoubtedly keep on rising so I won't post one on here just head over to whatever news provider you trust (or the one you least hate given recent events). My thoughts go out to everyone affected by the attacks there.

This goes to show you tragic as it is how a real story fares up against this madness involving the press, the police and everything else.

The news coverage was getting into the inappropriate, you can almost imagine the reporters asking if anyone had seen people blown to pieces by the blast and then enquiring "And how did it make you feel?". I find it interesting that everyone else only seems to now realise how thoroughly nasty and unscrupulous press can be. The public at large seems to draw the line at hacking the phone of a murdered girl but I tend to think obtaining the medical details of a young person against the wishes of their parents just because his father happens to be the Prime Minister is way past the pale.

Anyway you don't need me ranting about the press. I'm off to post some auctions on World of Warcraft to make fake electronic money.

• Your favourite Blogger is currently on a vacation of sorts having to use the time or lose it.
• I'm currently getting into the new summer shows like Teen Wolf, Leverage and Alphas
• Financing are challenging to say the least trying to get my way out
• Missed out on a chance to see Alyson Noel during her European tour because of finances.
• Thinking about starting a business though with no money it might prove challenging.

That is a bullet pointed summary of what I have been up to except I guess for the World of Warcraft stuff which included losing a spirit beast to someone doing the rare kill achievement. Annoying but then consider it was a guild mate who killed it and things get rather annoying. Other than that it has been the grind to do PVP. If someone had told me how much time it would take me to do it then I probably would have had another 3 month break to be honest but now I am more than halfway there with around 2.3k resi on my shadow priest. In theory I should get some honor back due to the well known issue with the season 9 gear being changed to honor then replaced after a week but I certainly am not counting on that.

We shall see, we shall see

True Blood and The Southern Vampire Mysteries

SPOILERS FOR THE NEW SEASON OF TRUE BLOOD!!!

So we're two episodes in to the new run of True Blood and already we can see how the writers have begun to further define the differences between the True Blood and Southern Vampire universes. It is bad in some ways that clearly we (those who read the Southern Vampire Mysteries) won't get to see certain big events that I for one would have been interesting to see on screen. We do have some references to the book series but these are just names. Like in the case of Luna who was a spy for the supes placed in the Fellowship of the Sun who helped Sookie out.

So anyway let us move on to the series itself Janina Gavankar is awesome, it is good to see Sam involved in a storyline that is not entirely angst ridden for once and with a clear separation between him and Sookie which for me is a good thing because the puppy dog eyes thing can become a bit tiring after a time. Deborah Ann Woll is excellent as Jessica reflecting something that we don't see in the books, a young vampire struggling to adapt to everlasting undeath.

The other characters like Jason, Hoyt, Lafayette and Andy are also moving forward in engaging storylines that I am eager to see develop. I'm Shaft and I'm totally addicted to True Blood. Thanks to shows like True Blood, Leverage and hey even the likes of Teen Wolf the summer is no longer the preserve of crap TV.

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There is a UK Comic Con style event next month which will have Alyson Noel as a guest (not to mention an appearance by Karen Gillan apparently) someone who I would like to meet but I fear I won't have the necessary funds to go and attend. Plus after doing some further research it looks like she is there on a Sunday which makes it near impossible to get back from and paying out for an overnight stay is just not an option. Sigh I thought getting a job would mean that I would be able to do things like this.

Short Post - Chat Rooms

I sat down and considered which way I wanted to go with this topic. I’ve been frequenting chatrooms off and on for years and they can be a very mixed bag. Met a few decent friends who I still keep in contact with via them but a lot of the time you meet temporary acquaintances and even more often than that  you meet people not worth mentioning.

You can see this even on online games like the well known MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) where the internal chat system tends to display all the worse aspects of the online community. I can’t count the amount of times I have been told to go kill myself or insulted in a thousand varied and often offensive ways.

A lot of people don’t see the point of chatrooms of talking to strangers from strange lands or whatever. The appeal of chatrooms can be the anonymity of it all which in certain cases will allow the shy to come out of their shell a bit and talk to people who they may not have had the courage to talk to face to face, the flipside of course being that without the face to face there is no end of the hateful that some people might be tempted to say. It is a reflection of society which may well have been influenced by the growth of faceless communication chat rooms, texting and that sort of thing.

I don’t think we can blame the current state of society on chat rooms though they and the way people conduct themselves in them are merely symptoms.

World of Warcraft - Keep on Trucking

I have been taking steps to improve the DPS of my Hunter, currently the Psuedo-main role in my host of characters. Most of my (iLvl 350) gear has been enchanted but I will freely admit that I have not yet bought one of those new pointless ebonsteel belt buckles (inflation rip off thanks very much Blizzard) but legs, boots, hands and wrists are all sorted.

I have banned myself from the Troll dungeons after no less than three kicks for low DPS (which was around 9k when I could check) but I have been going into normal Heroic Dungeons trying to tighten up my rotation. I have done the good old elitist jerk research but I think the next logical step is to invest in some sort of addon to help with all the timers as I find myself wasting chances to hit Kill Command when it comes off that cooldown either through getting to happy spamming Cobra Shot or not managing Focus properly. After a couple of days of dungeon training (which due to time constraints meant about 6 dungeon runs) I found that my DPS was improving to at least 12k sometimes more but I am not sure if that was down to boss gimmicks like that stone dragon with the wind buffs.

I have not finished with my quest for my killing power though as I am just finishing up my research on a Marksmanship spec. I have heard that it can do more DPS in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing so it is worth a try, I had some experience with it from 60-70 or so but that was pre Cata so it has been changed a lot since then.

Currently I run a Beat Mastery spec as laid down by EJ with a blank second spec. I do harbour hopes of obtaining the spirit leopard and visit Sholazar at least 3 times a week in hopes of picking him up but so far no joy.

I should also give a little time to discuss the fact that I have moved two of my characters into a new guild from Fight Club. Fight Club is just ridiculously dead and has been so since I returned from my break. My definition of dead is a 200 character guild that I have rarely see get above three people online at once even on the weekend and that is including me. 

The new guild is Forgotten Kingdoms and I decided to join on a bit of a whim, after talking to their co GM randomly through bonding over our mutual interest in the Sega Saturn. It is a level 20 guild with all those rather attractive guild perks that I have been missing at FC. Also I intend to grind out the rep to buy all the heirloom pieces for at least one armor class so that the levelling process is as painless as possible (note to self at 1200 a pop I might want to work on my gold reserves which are down to 25k eek!). Before I transferred over the characters, level 85 hunter and level 83 shadow priest I got them both the 100% guild tabards to aid with the reputation grind which should take some of the sting out of it in theory.