You try to protest against one of the nastiest governments in the world, putting your life at incredible risk, trying to slowly build some kind of resistance – and nobody notices, except for the government you’re fighting against. That’s what’s just happened in Turkmenistan, according to [the website of an anti-government group](http://www.tm-iskra.org/news2006/news2006-22.htm) (RUS):

On 17 February, somebody removed the hand holding the [Ruhnama](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rukhnama) from a statue of President Niyazov, in ‘Turkmenbashi Square’ in the city of Mary. Another statue in the region had a bucket of shit thrown on it, and in Ashkhabad somebody has gone as far as scattering leaflets calling for the overthrow of the government

Pretty good going – but costly. The reaction has involved investigations, mass detentions, troops moved into Ashkhabad, and the arrest of two unfortunate souls.

[found via [Turkmenistan.neweurasia.net](http://turkmenistan.neweurasia.net/)]

You probably all know that the president of Turkmenistan has formed his own religion, has forced the entire country to follow it, and has written a holy book called the ‘Ruhnama’. But had you seen the merchandise?

And if that isn’t enough for you, there’s the quiz.I wish I had a paid account, so I could test you all on the basic questions that all Turkmen children are supposed to know. Like:

3. Turkmanbashy attended Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad

A.) true

B.) false

8. If a horse which can gallop when it is fat can also gallop when it is thin, it is a good horse

A.) true

B.) false

10. Can ants united defeat a tiger or a lion?

A.) true

B.) false

18. The Türkmens spread throughout the world during which age?

A.) First

B.) Second

C.) Third

D.) Fourth

After far, far too much wrangling, I’m pretty much done with the rejigging of this site. In brief: WordPress is enticing, but for some reason hellishly buggy with my setup. Movable Type gives me scary-looking licenses to accept at every turn, feels like a lumbering corporate monster, and lacks any kind of grace – but it works. Works, that is, apart from when you want to import old posts from somewhere else. A few comments are gone, but I can live with that.

So:

1. I’ll no longer be updating the old blog on Blogsome. It’s a good service, but I needed something that I could integrate with the other bits and pieces here, and that I could customise. Not being able to add in custom themes and plugins was a big downside with Blogsome, even if it made total sense in terms of security and stability
2. I have started up a little side-blog, so I have somewhere to put things that don’t deserve a full post to themselves. When things drop off the front page sidebar here, you’ll be able to find them
   
   here
   
3. Also for things that don’t deserve a full post, I’ve put recent links from [my del.icio.us page](http://del.icio.us/oedipa) on the left. Del.icio.us is something I’ve found continually useful over the past year, and I find my links there more interesting than most of what I’ve actually blogged.
4. I’m going to look for a way to get my rough notes back up here, possibly as a wiki. There’s some useful stuff there amidst the dross.
5. I’ll try to resist the tempation to fiddle and tweak, but it is
   
   so
   
   tempting. I’m sure there’ll be trendy things appearing and vanishing from the sidebars every now and again, and perhaps I’ll even adjust things so they work better. You never know.

I want to see a photograph of this – Moscow police are going to start using airships to monitor traffic.

A decent enough human-interest piece on the difficulties of being a female journalist in Iran. But it’s spoilt by the introduction:

Women living and working in Iran, particularly those working for the foreign media, are finding all kinds of difficulties strewn in their path, writes Frances Harrison

Is she (or whoever wrote that sentence) really claiming that female journalists have a harder time than other women in Iran? The article itself shows how she managed to use her status as a journalist to get past sexist restrictions, by threatening not to report things she wasn’t allowed to see.

The Washington Post has had a clutch of good articles on Iraq recently.

On the aftermath of the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, the US claims that the problems are over. , as do (mostly unnamed) “Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats“. Good news, except that these aren’t really people I trust to tell me how well things are going in Iraq. And 1300 deaths isn’t something you can ignore this easily. At least there is something on the human effects of the curfew

And then there’s a worrying article, titled “An End to the Soft Sell By the British in Basra“. The gist is that over time the British are losing their “softly softly” approach (softness being strictly relative in the first place). But it’s the incidental comments that are disturbing: the murder rate in Basra has doubled since November, the military are leaving their bases less and less, the police forces are little more than a cover for sectarian militias.

Finally, 1/3 of US veterans of Iraq have reported mental problems. That’s a huge number, especially considering the likelihood that a good few will be suffering but not willing to see a psychiatrist.

Planning to be in London Friday, Saturday and Sunday next week. Might stay there Monday and Tuesday too, if there’s anything interesting happening. So…

Is anybody going to B-Movie next Friday? I’m looking mainly at _proserpina_ and duranorak, but presumably some of the rest of you go occasionally?

If not I’ll probably go anyway, because I almost prefer going out by myself. But it does look pretty tiny – it’s hard to lurk unobtrustively in the corner when there are only a dozen other people in the building.

And if anybody else is in London and would like to meet up, then yay! Currently I don’t have any plans for Saturday, but Sunday is looking pretty packed.

Online RPGs affect players’ perceptions of reality. People who play a MMORPG think that assaults with weapons are more likely than those who don’t play. There’s the start of a discussion on whether the same might apply to positive ‘cultivation effects’ (which is apparently the appropriate jargon). The next question is whether you could rejig the rules of a game in light of this – and whether you should.