WA Election Coming Up

I had a bit of shock yesterday when I saw a cluster of stalls handing out election pamphlets and thought for a moment it was a polling place and I'd misremembered the date of the state election.

The election's not until next weekend, but it reminded me that I hadn't got around yet to researching the minor parties that will be contesting.

The problem as usual is the upper house ballot. There have been a few reforms since the last go-around, one of which made it so that everybody in the state votes for all the upper house seats instead of just the ones allocated to their electorate; as a result, the ballot has nearly 150 candidates representing a dozen parties. On the plus side, other reforms have made it so you don't have to number every single box to express a preference: if you choose to vote "below the line", preferencing each individual candidate, you only have to mark your 1st through 20th preferences, and can lump anybody after that in last place if you want to (and you may well want to). There's also been an overhaul of "above the line" voting - previously, you could put your mark against the name of only one party, and then they would get to dictate your preferences on your behalf, not only for their own candidates but for the rest of the ballot as well; now, it's been made into a straightforward preferential vote, where you number the parties in order of preference.

None of the online tools I've used in past years for constructing a below-the-line preference list seems to be operating this year, and I'm actually considering voting above the line for the first time. The main downside is that I wouldn't be able to give a vote to any of the ungrouped independent candidates, but none of them look especially appealing in any case. (And the one set of grouped candidates - those who have banded together in order to gain a shared box above the line - is not getting my vote in any case: it's headed by an avowed anti-vaxxer and includes a guy who changed his name by deed poll so that he can run as "Aussie Trump", as well as some other people whose candidate statements consist of the kind of vague appeal to "traditional values" that I've learned to regard as a red flag.)

None of the major news sources seem to have done a round-up of the minor parties this year, but fortunately many of them have a tendency toward expository names: for instance, one party is officially registered as "Stop the Pedophiles! Save the Kiddies!", which I reckon tells me everything I need to know about not only their policy stance but also their level of professionalism.

I've also found a blog series called "Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews", which is doing a detailed profile of all the minor parties and independent candidates, starting with an introductory post. The blatantly partisan viewpoint from which the author is operating has a lot of overlap with my own, and where it doesn't the inclinations are clear enough to be accounted for.

Week in review: Week to 28 February

This week I earned a level-up in Ingress, and am now at Level 12. I've actually had sufficient XP to meet the requirement for Level 12 for a while - and indeed, at the moment of my promotion to Level 12, already had enough XP to meet the requirement for Level 13 - but, while XP is sufficient for the lower levels, the higher levels also require a minimum number of achievements in game activities like capturing portals and creating fields, which I've been slower to attain. I had been looking forward to Level 12 because that used to be the level at which the full range of higher-level abilities was unlocked, but it took me so long to get from Level 11 to Level 12 that in the mean time they changed the promotion ladder so that the full range is now available to everyone above Level 10, so getting to Level 12 has been a bit of an anti-climax. I suppose I'll push on and try to reach Level 13 anyway, since I've almost got enough achievements for it already.

On Sunday, I had several hours free and the weather was nice, so I decided to go for a walk around the golf course. The local golf course has a track that runs all the way around the outside of the perimeter fence, and people often use it for dog-walking and similar activities; the course is on the edge of town and surrounded on several sides by undeveloped bushland, so there's a nice view and occasional wildlife. I've been all the way around once before, accompanying friends who were walking their dogs, but this was my first time on my own. I had a good time, and was glad I'd thought to bring a water bottle, and probably should have thought of sunscreen as well.

The February prompt in the monthly themed reading challenge is a book with a word in the title related to a body of water. I read Sea Wrack and Changewind, a collection of short stories by Sharon Lee that came out last year. The stories all share a setting, and often characters, with the novels of her Carousel trilogy, and I probably wouldn't recommend the collection to anyone who hadn't already read the novels; I hadn't realised how long it's been since I read them myself, and I kept running up against moments where a story took as read some detail that I couldn't recall.

As if I didn't have enough reading challenges already, I came across a Book Chain reading challenge and decided to give it a go. The idea is that, after the first prompt (which is "a book with 'a' or 'the' in the title"), each prompt is defined in some way by the previous book, whether broadly (the second prompt is "a book that's in a different genre from the first book") or narrowly (the third prompt is "a book that has a noun or adjective in its title that also appears on page 50 of the second book"). I'm counting The Visitors and Sea Wrack and Changewind as book one and book two, and we'll see how it goes from there.

At the board game group this week, we played Paladins of the West Kingdom, which took all evening. It's the complicated kind of game that I usually don't enjoy, and I'm not sure whether I did enjoy it.

Had a productive week at work.