Back from police - they seemed very understanding, even I did gibber a bit, and some of their questions did make me doubt the sequence of events.

Attempted distractions from my woes ATM - compiling RPG notes into PDFs, complete with photos, etc. Cthulhu write-ups for the last 50-odd sessions already well past 100 pages of small print. Rogue Trader almost as extensive, already. Have to write up the special front-page hand-outs for next Cthulhu session too - they should provoke much swearing from my players.

Speaking of players, some of you may recall the terror Ian spread on the X² servers. As recounted here, here, and here. Now, of course, he's playing X3, and has discovered that half his most amusing old tricks won't work in this one. It doesn't matter, since he just invented a stack of new ones.

Such as backing his warship into the shell of a rival's orbital facility, using it as extra armour while he happily blazes away at anybody that tries to position themselves where they can actually hit him.

His sector is already causing much debate among the other players, because as last time almost all his production goes into orbital weaponry. And every now and then a single freighter will emerge, quietly tour everybody else's sectors buying up more squash mines, etc, and go back in again. And anybody that tries to follow it gets blown out of the sky by the automated laser towers. One rival tried sending in a spy satellite, which lasted just long enough for that player to see just how FULL the IanCo sector was before Ian had subverted it to his own use and sent it back the other way. The entire IanCo sector shows up as a War sector now, despite the fact that Ian is the only player with anything left there. The other players are highly suspicious of course, but as soon as they start sending police ships to scan his freighter, he just switches to another one.

One rival looked to be setting up a similar arrangement in their own sector. So Ian dispatched an entire wing of small, lightly armed ship with orders to "attack everything". This slowed down the other player's computer so much, all his holdings in other sectors became easy meat.

IanCo used to have the motto "Destruction is our Business".. Now it's "IanCo - All your citizens will find full employment in our war factories. Because We Care"

Situation re: last Friday not improving.

Turns out the Mundijong Police screwed up mightily - they didn't tell the motorcyclist's wife until Saturday, for one thing, and they should never have released the van. It should have gone into impound, so the crash police could look it over. So by the time the Crash Investigation police got up to work on Monday, work had already replaced the tires and done the bulk of the panel beating. And now the van is back in impound, and will be for the rest of the week at minimum. Work wanted the van back on the road by Monday afternoon, and me back as soon as I don't degenerate into a gibbering heap behind the wheel.

So TODAY'S incident, where a cop stepped backwards onto the road in front of me, while I was driving, DID NOT FUCKING HELP.

I didn't hit him, indeed, didn't come particularly close to hitting him, but for FUCKS SAKE.

*gibbers*

McDonalds giving away Pony toys. That cheered me up, for a few minutes. Thought about watching the episode Lesson Zero, but an episode about the bookish and somewhat obsessive pony cracking up from stress would probably be a really really bad idea right now.

Some of you might be wondering why there's been such a flood of posts on here, most of them pony-related. Some of you know why there's been such a flood. MLP:FiM is a wonderfully distracting program, and for the last few days I've been in dire need of distraction.

That's because, on Friday, I was involved in a serious car accident.

A motorcyclist ran into the side of my van at a roundabout, and was hurt. Seriously hurt. He was screaming when then moved him to the stretcher. He was incredibly fortunate, that despite it being a tiny country village, it seemed as though the intersection was crawling with first aid officers and nurses within seconds.

Everybody has been incredibly supportive, from all the medics that kept telling me to go get treated for shock, and the cops who drove me home, and the bystanders that directed traffic or put up cones, etc, and all the people that have been ringing my boss to see how I am, but I still feel totally, gut-wrenchingly sick.

Crash Investigation Team are coming to pick me up and interview me on Thursday.

*curls into ball*

happy mother's day by `bri-chan on deviantART

One of the strange things about FiM fandom - the background ponies.

This, for example, is a pony who has appeared for less than a minute, in two episodes, and hasn't had any dialogue in either.



Yet the fandom promptly invents a name for her - Octavia - and goes on to develop a consensus about her background, career, relationships, etc.

And then, of course, you get the fanfics, music, art, filks, ponymods, etc that build on that consensus. It's bizarre.



Of course, her relationship with other background pony musicians comes up as well.

*thinks*.... So, Pinkie Pie has a certain phrase...




And Norse god Loki is well known for birthing the eight-legged horse Sleipnir...



MIND IS BLOWN


Okie Dokie Loki by ~CertainSomeone on deviantART

"Go forth, Pinkie Pie! We ride to Asgard!"


And do you think those are the only links? Hay, no...

One of Australia's more common scorpions, found across most of the southern half of the country, and up into Papua New Guinea. They're tiny things, only 3-and-a-half centimetres in body length, and adorably cute when attempting to threaten you. This one was quite a surprise to me, in a number of respects. For one thing, it was out in broad daylight, and secondly, Lychas marmoreus is actually considered medically important - practically unique, as far as Australian scorpions go.



Little Marbled Scorpion (Lychas marmoreus)? Size: about 25mm long. Seen in a house on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. 1 January 2010. Photo by Angela

The first thing was surprising because nearly all scorpions are nocturnal hunters, and I've certainly not seen one out and about in daylight before, even though they're one of the first animals I saw around the house here when I moved in. Indeed, I found one in my art folder - Lychas marmoreus is somewhat notorious for getting into houses. Admittedly, the one I saw the other day was not looking well - perhaps, judging by the weather, it was half-drowned - but it was still a pleasant surprise for me.

Less pleasant was looking up what species it actually was, and discovering that the Little Marbled Scorpion has actually been implicated in the death of a toddler, in Pemberton in 1929. Most other websites simply say that the sting can cause immediate pain, and medical attention is advised.

That this scorpion is one to be wary of shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, given that it's a member of the Buthidae family, which includes such lovelies as the Southern Mankiller, and the Deathstalker, and a variety of other quite alarmingly lethal arachnids. The fact that the Marbled Scorpion has delicate claws should also have been a giveaway, since the size of the claws is a reasonable and inverse indication of the the lethality of the venom ( as the Caustic Soda podcast put it "big claws are for hugging" ).

That said, I remain surprised that there are any even potentially dangerous scorpions in Australia. On a continent that enjoys shockingly venomous monotremes, snails, octopi, jellyfish, fish, plants, and caterpillars, the apparent absence of any deadly scorpions was always an amusing oddity to me. Of course, it was always possible we did have lethal scorpions, but nobody ever finished the sentence "I've just been stung by a - BLEAGH".