On being a Lib Dem in 2012

I remember the good old days of being a Liberal Democrat. The days when I could argue about politics for hours, be proud to wear a yellow rosette and generally feel superior about my political views.

I am not saying I don’t support the Lib Dems anymore, I do. It’s just that now in debates I have to explain a lot of policies, dispel a lot of lies and myths and at times simply apologise for the mistakes. It usually involves a long rant at me where I feel like I have to defend not just the party but myself for supporting it. Don’t get me wrong I love debating and thanks to my legal training I am quite good at it. Recently, however, I found it so frustrating and disheartening.  The worst is when I agree with people who are having a go at me (about tuition fees for example). It is easier not to tell anyone that I am a libdem at all!

My driving instructor likes telling me that the libdems won’t ever be in power again because they destroyed the country worse than Thatcher did. I know it is not true but I tend to laugh it off rather then get involved in a long argument.

I had a bad experience of my own last year. I was the agent for a local by-election and did badly. We came forth after the BNP, since then my candidate defected to Labour. In a way I still haven’t completely recovered from that and lost a lot of my campaigning spirit.

I agree with Tim Farron when he says that ‘With just 23% of the vote, we’ve got three-quarters of our manifesto into government policy. Let’s focus on that success, and stop apologising for the quarter we didn’t get.’

He didn’t, however, say how to recover from bad losses, get into the righteous mood of fighting for our principles and stop being ashamed about bad calls like tuition fees. Any ideas?

Kamchatka

One of my first oil paintings.

Diablo 3 review

Well, firstly, congratulations to all fellow Diablo fans – it has actually happened. Diablo 3 is out in our lifetimes!

I was incredibly excited about 15th May. I bought it, downloaded it, had my Diablo 3 t-shirt on and had crazy amounts of caffeine ready.. You all probably already heard that starting to play wasn’t quite as simple as that. It took me 7 hours.. Nightmare but I forgave Blizzard instantly when it worked!

I chose to be a Witch Doctor called Olgatron.

Some things I noticed in the first few hours:

1. You can pick up money by just walking over them. No need to press alt to see what items are on the ground neither. Yay!
2. No more ugly map! A very civilized map in the top corner. I kept pressing tab just as a matter of habit but it doesn’t let you move with a big map open which can only be a good thing – we can enjoy new lovely graphics!
3. This is a very skill-based game. Some are quite funny (one enables you to turn monsters into chickens). Much needed improvement of skill system has happened. Hooray! It might be too skill based, for example I don’t think you can just run around hitting monsters with a hammer anymore. But it’s OK. I can go back to my beloved Diablo 2 for that.You don’t appear to be able to choose attributes –its automatic with levelling up. Boo! However, you can now see a very long list of advanced statistics about your character, which makes my inner geek very happy.
4. No more stamina bar! Oh how useless it was!
5. Health potions system is different. You now have to wait for a while before you can use the next potion. Interesting. Will definitely make it harder in hardcore level. Which I of course am planning to complete.. (I will need something to do in the next 20 years waiting for Diablo 4)
6. New game is scarier than Diablo 2. Monsters are sufficiently creepy and zombies are FAST. More like 28 days later Zombies than Shaun of the Dead ones.
7. From my professional point of you, a big problem is that it is not at all visually impaired friendly. I hope that it will be improved.

 So overall it seems pretty, exciting, with plenty of new ideas. I was always going to be hard to impress. I am not at this stage prepared to say that it is better than Diablo 2 but I am definitely pleased and relieved that it’s not rubbish. And tired. So goodnight.