political life in a torture state

Life inside a CIA "black site" - a detainee never charged and eventually released testifies about the American and Jordanian torture regimes. The Americans used sleep dep, cold cell, and isolation; the Jordanians beat on him a lot. He says he preferred the Jordanians.

Senator Reid is, of course, respecting the hold placed by GOP Senator Lindsay Graham (SC) on a bill that would pass (yet more) law against this sort of thing, by extending the Army Field Manual rules on abuse of prisoners to the CIA. That's because Senator Graham supports the programme described above. (Mr. Bush has also promised a veto of any such legislation.) (More here.)

Compare and contrast this as you like to Senator Reid's choice to ignore Senator Dodd's hold on the FISA bill with retroactive amnesty for telecom industry surveillance lawbreaking.

Also, CIA agent John Kiriakou described the American torture system in detail, on ABC, then NBC; his description is recapped in Harper's Magazine. This is also the sort of hold honoured by Senator Reid.

For the record, I sent out all my faxes yesterday. (Yes, i actually sent out paper faxes. Yes, it costs money and is a pain in the ass. But I've heard they're the least ignored. Sadly, I can't confirm that.)

the Age of Stickers gives way to the Age of Stamps

14 of 52

More convention stickers here, part of the same frenzy mentioned before. About 2/3rds of the way down this page, we got chased up a floor of the convention centre as the space was being closed off! Yeah, we were all hanging on until the last minute. The girl in the upper left I tried to photograph a couple of previous times during the convention in that costume, but she was always dashing between rooms. (I think she was a runner.) Fortunately, she showed up at stickerfrenzy, with stickers. ^_^


Namjatown! (15 of 52)

Several of the stickers on this page are from people I'd already gotten stickers from, but since some people have multiple kinds of stickers, we decided redundancy was good. Note more cats, like y'do. ^_^ The sticker of the very last person I met in convention space is labeled, of course; and the NAO sticker on the bottom right was rescued - I found it on the pavement outside the doors to the convention centre, and rescued it for my book as the last thing I did at Worldcon. (I really didn't want the convention time to be over yet.)

After that we did some packing and resting up and wandering more around Yokohama, taking more pictures, eating out, and that night going to Cosmoworld, the amusement park halfway between our hotel and the convention centre. (I posted a few pictures at the time.) It's strange how sweet that night is in my memory - no more convention, not going anywhere particularly amazing (except for the ferris wheel - quite tall, which was awesome) but just kicking around on a hot Yokohama night, hanging out playing videogames and going to the haunted house (which was great) and riding rides just because we didn't have anything better to do and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And it was.

Then the next day we took the train to Tokyo, and we got a little lost after getting off at the last station, but I realised we were off course and figured out where we were and put us back on course straight to Sunshine City - and, once we'd gotten into the hotel, Namjatown! We weren't there very long before we noticed a lot of stamps and ink pads floating around, and once we'd noticed a few, figured out that this was what the Namjatown Passports were supposed to be used for! But we all decided we had books already and I know I knew what I was gonna keep doing with mine, and I stamped anything I could find. (As all the stamps were chained down, it was easy to find them, because kids would stamp as much of the wall as they could reach with the stamps, which meant there were these dark circles that served as highlights for stamp locations.)

Some of the stamps above indicate different sections of the park; others indicate specific attractions. I think the skeletons were from the revolving-gravestones matching game. (They had names in back, of course in kanji, but we still solved it. ^_^ ) The musician is probably from the main stage area (I only saw one), and the spirit cats (Mononoke Neko) were all from the haunted section - specifically the one where we tried another haunted house, only this one included a game that we didn't entirely understand until it was far too late and the poor kidnapped kawaii nekochan got ROASTED FOR DINNER BY HIS CAPTORS because we didn't get enough words right.

That was kinda hardcore. I love Japan so much. ^_^