Speed cameras – everyone knows they’re just a shallow attempt to gouge money out of the poor, unsuspecting public, right? We should do away with them, as they serve no practical purpose and don’t really do anything, right? Actually, wrong. And here’s the theory of social contract, with a little grumbling of my own, to explain why. Read more »

In World of Warcraft, I have a lovely druid named Telaru.

This is Telaru. She is a happy dancing cow.

Telaru is a resto cow. She enjoys healing, long walks through the Thousand Needles, and screaming at the tank to pull more than 3 but less than 8 mobs, tyvm. When she heals, she wears a moon on her head, yelling to all who will hear that “if you can’t see the moon, I can’t heal you!” This leads to occasional jokes about the healer mooning people. World of Warcraft is srs bzns.

But what’s this I see? Could it be a GIANT OWLBEAST OF PEWPEWLAZORBEEM BOOMBOOMPEWPEW???

Telaru uses BOOMKIN DANCE! It's super effective!

Today, Telaru got to level 40. She now enjoys healing, screaming at the tank, and nuking the crap out of anything that moves.

For more exciting news about Telaru, you can follow her RSS feed here, or you can follow the combined feed of Telaru and Aralena (my Hunter) here.

The Australian Federal Government has increased the tobacco excise by 25% (yay!) and is also legislating that cigarettes must be sold in new, “plain” packaging stripped of trademarks and pretty colours. The reasoning is that by making cigarettes more expensive, and less pretty, it will be less attractive for people to take it up. If you have a look around in some of the comment threads on news stories, you’ll see that some folks are saying that if we do this to tobacco, we should be doing this to alcoholic drinks as well. You’ll also see folks saying that if we’re not going to do it to alcoholic drinks, we shouldn’t be doing it to smokes as well. Should we be treating them the same? Is tobacco blinding us to another very real danger? What are the stats on Alcohol Vs Tobacco, and their cost to society? Read more »