{"id":1280,"date":"2010-04-24T10:28:39","date_gmt":"2010-04-24T18:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2010-04-24T10:44:52","modified_gmt":"2010-04-24T18:44:52","slug":"lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1280","title":{"rendered":"Lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flanders<\/strong> asked, in the comments under the Octopus post, when I was going to share my “good news”. Logically Enough<\/strong> surmised that the octopi had got me. The truth is somewhat worse: my good news is on hold for the time being, having been swamped by an unrelated development that is, well, not so good.<\/p>\n

After receiving some very positive indications from the Prosecution earlier this week \u2014 she wasn’t going to push for jail time, she doubted the judge would hand any out, the guy writing the presentencing recommendations was “very mild” \u2014 I’ve just been hit with a presentencing report that recommends jail time. Four to six months of it.<\/p>\n

What’s odd about this is not that a cheery prognosis was followed by a kick in the teeth; that’s pretty much been the norm ever since this whole fiasco kicked off. What’s odd is that the recommendation isn’t even consistent with the rest of the report, which cites numerous “positives” to my benefit and no “negatives” that can be factored into the decision at all. Furthermore, the person who signed off on the recommendations is not<\/em> the person who penned the report itself (as is usually the case, I’m told), but someone higher up the food chain. I leave the math to you.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s up to the judge now. He sat through the trial,\u00a0 heard the guards tripping over each other’s stories, knows I didn’t assault anyone (evidently the guy who writes the sentencing reports does not even have access to the official court record, which doesn’t routinely get transcribed from the video). The judge has also, by now, seen a variety of testimonials from Respectable Citizens as to my good character \u2014 not to mention an appeal from proudinjun, the juror who’s been speaking out on my behalf.\u00a0 In a rational system I would appear on Monday at 2pm, and be on my way back home before six.<\/p>\n

Of course, in a rational system this would have ended the moment the Feds decided not to press charges. In this<\/em> system, there’s now a significant chance that I go into Port Huron on the 26th and simply don’t come out again. I’ve therefore been running around for the past couple of days making arrangements for the paying of bills and the feeding of cats should I go dark. Since there’s no internet access in jail I’ll be putting the ‘crawl into stasis just before I leave, in case of the worst (earlier, should some bloodthirsty troll happen along before then; I have neither the heart nor the time to spare on any more hope-you-get-ass-raped jokes at this point). If I make it back to Canada I’ll boot everything right back up. If not, my good friend Dave Nickle has the keys, and will be managing the site in my absence. Whether he wants to post relevant updates here, or on his own blog, somewhere else or nowhere else, is up to him.<\/p>\n

I’m really sorry I never caught up on responding to all the comments I wanted to. The Sarasti thread shows no sign of dying off, and I would have liked to have hung around and hashed out some of the cool ideas you guys are playing with. I would at the very least liked to have said hi to 03<\/strong>, and enquire further into her Sarasti fetish. (Hi, 03<\/strong>. What’s up with that Sarasti fetish?) I have a couple of half-finished text files languishing on my desktop, waiting to be finished and posted.<\/p>\n

But this presentencing report hashed everything. It arrived almost a week late, and in light of those earlier hopeful signs I’d allowed myself to get complacent in the interim. (I’ve always been too much the optimist.) Now the fun stuff has to take a back seat to apocalypse prep.<\/p>\n

Anyhow. I hate to break up the party, but there are other places you can convene until rifters.com boots back up. There’s a facebook page devoted to Squidgate<\/a>, and another more general Wattsian fan site<\/a>. Both were pretty much moribund last I checked, but I know you guys could shock some life back into those dusty pages if you show half the enthusiasm I’ve seen here. Dave will doubtless be posting, either here or over at his place<\/a> (which you should check out anyway; honestly, the guy’s a more clever and diverse writer than I am, plus he’s got a Real Job).<\/p>\n

Feel free to chat here until the lights go out \u2014 if we’re lucky we can make it all the way to Sunday evening. If things shake out as they should, I may be turning them back on as early as Tuesday. If they shake out as they generally have up to this point, however \u2014 well, I guess I’ll see you on the other side.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

PS. Apologies also to those who contributed to my defence fund, whom I still haven’t got around to thanking.\u00a0 I’ll keep at it when I return.\u00a0 It’s just that there may be a greater delay than even I was expecting before you hear back from me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flanders asked, in the comments under the Octopus post, when I was going to share my “good news”. Logically Enough surmised that the octopi had got me. The truth is somewhat worse: my good news is on hold for the time being, having been swamped by an unrelated development that is, well, not so good. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-squidgate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1288,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}