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(no subject)
1. I finally gave in and registered for BarricadesCon. I had been dithering because the last few online con I registered I ended up only attending a few things, I'm not sure I have the brain for even a semi-academic con (or the general smarts level of current Les Mis fandom for that matter) and I haven't been super deep in Les Mis for... awhile.
But on the other hand: snéance. Snail séance. Even if I only make it to the snéance it will be worth £10 admission.
2. While I had my credit card out I bought the Ukraine charity itch.io bundle. Did I need 900 more indie games? Have I played even a single one of the games from the 2020 bundle? No, and no. Have I in fact played any games since 2020 except Minecraft and silly phone games?no, because MinerVGA totally counts as Minecraft v.-0.1 But look if I ever want to play games, now I will have even more! Maybe I will become a Twitch streamer and play a different indie game from the bundles every day, weirder things have happened.
3. I put in an application for a cat at the animal shelter! It was for "some hypothetical cat" because the lady at the desk last fall recommended I apply for "kitten waitlist" if I thought I might want a cat in the next month or two, even if I didn't want a kitten, because the applications get backlogged. So ball's in their court now I guess. None of the cats currently on their website told me they were my perfect cat yet, although poor Stella Sweet Pea is the only one who's been at the shelter since I started looking a year ago, so I will have to at least ask about her.
4. Well, my post about archiving and linking ethics became suddenly very relevant didn't it!
Have a minor update to that post with my opinions on the things people have been doing to back up LJ content in the last couple of days:
---importing a public LJ account you control to DW is always okay, I put it in the same category as Open Doors imports since it's still basically the same sort of site, and people can fairly easily claim their content and remove it if they want.
---importing a mostly-locked LJ account to DW is a little iffier, even if you keep it locked, since the people in the lock on DW won't be the same ones as on LJ? But in an LJ comm you always had the risk that the lock rules would change on you, so it's probably fine.
---importing a comm you control to a public non-dw website is also a little iffier, since people won't necessarily be able to claim/control their content
---posting a public copy of an lj comm or account you don't own is, as usual, bad, don't do it
---saving a private copy for yourself is also fine, as always
---passing private copies around privately is fine
---(if it's an LJ community or project that's fandom-related, had a reasonably large readership, and predates c. 2012, somebody probably already has a private copy somewhere from one of the previous panics over Russia owning LJ, so don't worry too much.)
---saving a private bookmark is always fine
---saving a public bookmark/link list of public content on lj is fine
---deliberately saving a copy to wayback or equivalent is tougher, but if a website is actively endangered, that's a little bit different than just doing it to everything automatically, so I would at least consider it.
---saving bookmarks or link lists where you link to wayback copies instead of the original even though the original is still up: why?? Why do people do this?? Don't do this, this is a bad idea for so many reasons.
5. Being on a grand jury is exhausting even though it doesn't feel like it at the time, and there are not enough hours in the day for sleeping. (on the plus side I just found out I get to have my full day's normal pay in jury leave *and* keep my jury pay, so getting paid twice wooooo?)
But on the other hand: snéance. Snail séance. Even if I only make it to the snéance it will be worth £10 admission.
2. While I had my credit card out I bought the Ukraine charity itch.io bundle. Did I need 900 more indie games? Have I played even a single one of the games from the 2020 bundle? No, and no. Have I in fact played any games since 2020 except Minecraft and silly phone games?
3. I put in an application for a cat at the animal shelter! It was for "some hypothetical cat" because the lady at the desk last fall recommended I apply for "kitten waitlist" if I thought I might want a cat in the next month or two, even if I didn't want a kitten, because the applications get backlogged. So ball's in their court now I guess. None of the cats currently on their website told me they were my perfect cat yet, although poor Stella Sweet Pea is the only one who's been at the shelter since I started looking a year ago, so I will have to at least ask about her.
4. Well, my post about archiving and linking ethics became suddenly very relevant didn't it!
Have a minor update to that post with my opinions on the things people have been doing to back up LJ content in the last couple of days:
---importing a public LJ account you control to DW is always okay, I put it in the same category as Open Doors imports since it's still basically the same sort of site, and people can fairly easily claim their content and remove it if they want.
---importing a mostly-locked LJ account to DW is a little iffier, even if you keep it locked, since the people in the lock on DW won't be the same ones as on LJ? But in an LJ comm you always had the risk that the lock rules would change on you, so it's probably fine.
---importing a comm you control to a public non-dw website is also a little iffier, since people won't necessarily be able to claim/control their content
---posting a public copy of an lj comm or account you don't own is, as usual, bad, don't do it
---saving a private copy for yourself is also fine, as always
---passing private copies around privately is fine
---(if it's an LJ community or project that's fandom-related, had a reasonably large readership, and predates c. 2012, somebody probably already has a private copy somewhere from one of the previous panics over Russia owning LJ, so don't worry too much.)
---saving a private bookmark is always fine
---saving a public bookmark/link list of public content on lj is fine
---deliberately saving a copy to wayback or equivalent is tougher, but if a website is actively endangered, that's a little bit different than just doing it to everything automatically, so I would at least consider it.
---saving bookmarks or link lists where you link to wayback copies instead of the original even though the original is still up: why?? Why do people do this?? Don't do this, this is a bad idea for so many reasons.
5. Being on a grand jury is exhausting even though it doesn't feel like it at the time, and there are not enough hours in the day for sleeping. (on the plus side I just found out I get to have my full day's normal pay in jury leave *and* keep my jury pay, so getting paid twice wooooo?)
no subject
eg embezzlement, murder?
no subject
We don't try cases, we look at preliminary evidence and decide if the case is good enough to even bother with a trial. I don't think Australia has a direct equivalent but it's a sort of a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors can also subpoena witnesses to testify under oath in front of a grand jury in order to gather evidence to figure out if it's even worth asking the jury to indict, so we're also spending a fair amount of time just listening to witnesses in cases where we may not ever even decide anything.
I can talk about procedural and general stuff like the above but can't even hint at any specific cases; grand juries have even stronger secrecy rules than petit juries, because in some cases the fact that the case is even being investigated is secret until after the indictments, and since often nobody's even in custody yet, breaking secrecy can be really dangerous for everyone involved, too.
Because of that, we don't have just one case, we look at lots of cases. Yesterday we heard, iirc, more that half a dozen witnesses from almost as many different cases. Since it's a Federal grand jury, we only look at federal criminal cases, but I think federal crimes in the US and Australia are pretty similar. It can be anything from minor workplace safety regulatory violations to child sex trafficking rings, and we can hear cases over the whole range in one day. (Which I think is a large part of why it's so exhausting when we do a whole day!)
no subject
I've never been on a jury in Australia
[and am now chronically ill enough that I would not be able to manage it, even without COVID - I can only concentrate on listening to speech for about 90 minutes before I start missing words and zoning out, no matter how hard I try to pay attention. Plus I need the ability to lie down and be horizontal regularly]
but from what I've heard,
you turn up,
and if you get picked, you get ONE case
which could be "this person was selling a skincare product without the appropriate Therapeutic Goods Administration safety permit" (a real case that really happened in my state, the person accused claimed the skincare product was a food and not a skincare product, and ate a jar of it in court)
or could be murder
but you never get more than ONE case.
Do you have judge-only trials with no jury? We have them here occasionally - I think it's up to the defendant to opt-in, which they do sometimes because either:
a) the defense lawyer thinks the defendant will alienate a jury;
b) due to COVID there are lengthy wait times for a jury trial, and the defendant wants the trial over and done with because they can't get bail because of the risk of them reoffending or intimidating witnesses
The last judge-only trial I heard about in my city was a man who had been accused of murdering three women for his entertainment (also some sexual assaults etc) - he asked for a judge only trial because his defense lawyer did not think a jury would be sympathetic to him[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_serial_killings#Trial
no subject
I was a near miss for ending up on a petit jury for a mass shooter trial just before Covid, but thankfully the defendant decided to plead guilty, that would not have been good either. There are a lot of judge-only trials though, they may be more common than jury for some crimes - defendants can request one if they want, they tend to go a lot faster, and I think a lot of times either the defense lawyers convinces the defendants they're better off with a judge, or the prosecutors do deal-making where they agree to drop certain charges in exchange for the defendant doing a quick non-jury trial for the others.