Fandom random

Another brief link update post, because I'm note quite squeezing all of my life into the available hours at the moment, but here are things more people should see.

There's a meme going round where you take a fandom and pick people you'd have various kinds of interactions with, if the characters existed in your mundane life. A bit like an extended version of shag-marry-cliff, I suppose. Well, sovay and nineweaving have been doing this with Shakespeare characters, which I thought some of you might appreciate.

Also, vorkosigan is trying to play Sorting Hat with the saga characters. Leading to some really nice, detailed meta about both Vorkosiverse and the Harry Potter houses.

---

I probably shouldn't put on Twitter that I spent the night in A&E without expanding at greater than 140 characters length. Primarily, I am perfectly fine, honest, it was just a minor mishap. Which means that it's a thankfully not terribly interesting story.

( mildly medical, not gory )

So in short, that really could have been a lot worse, and the NHS has done me proud in several respects.

The Liverpool Care Pathway controversy

Everybody already agrees that the Daily Mail is a terrible newspaper, and Melanie Phillips is a terrible journalist. However, her recent article about the Liverpool Care Pathway hits a new low of deeply, deeply irresponsible journalism with very real social effects. I'm not going to link to the article, but the title pretty much says it all: No Care Pathway – killing people doctors deem worthless

As a result of this lazy, ignorant, misleading article, there has been considerable discussion of the issues of end-of-life care. I started discussing it on Twitter with nanayasleeps, and realized that what I wanted to say about it doesn't really fit on Twitter. nanayasleeps linked to Tom Chivers' response to Phillips excrementally awful article, which is reasonable enough in itself, but people seem to be interpreting it as contributing to a debate about the decision to cease life-prolonging medical interventions. That's not actually what the Liverpool Care Pathway is about.

( discussion of dying in the medical environment )

So there you go; no matter what your moral views are on this extremely delicate issue, it's got to be better to have the facts available rather than horrible, utterly misleading scaremongering.