Well, I already knew I was an extremist, as Nick Clegg was kind enough to inform me of it a couple of years ago.

What I hadn’t realised was that I’m practically one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. According to George Robertson – sorry, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen – Scottish independence would be “cataclysmic in geo-political terms”. Gosh, nice to know we count for so much.

There’s a lot of inflated language going round about the independence campaign and it’s daft. Really, if a measly 8.4% of the UK’s population peacefully vote to govern themselves, that’s going to cause the fall of Western civilisation is it? Particularly when what’s being proposed actually sounds a bit like a loose confederation with the rest of the UK? There’s a lot of good will there, if folk are prepared to stop caricaturing independence for a small country as a global catastrophe, and comparing the Unionist cause to that of Lincoln in the American Civil War.

George Robertson’s a coof – if you don’t believe me, watch him comprehensively lose this debate in Dundee last year, turning a 38% margin in his favour into a 13% lead against him. And remember he was involved in determining the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system that was going to help devolution “kill Nationalism stone dead”.

Let’s take his words as seriously as they deserve, at this, the dawn of the Apocalypse. If the world says it’s time to go, tell me, will you freak out? No; with fires in New York, locusts in Detroit, and zombies in Atlanta, you’ve gotta laugh at the zombie in the front yard:

And I really, really want to thank you for reading to the end. ;-)

There’s a Kickstarter project for a new range of 28mm steampunk/gothic horror figures, with accompanying table-top rules. Empire of the Dead: Requiem is a sizeable expansion to the Empire of the Dead range from West Wind Productions. Of particular interest are the horse-drawn vehicles; a Black Maria, 4 hansom cabs for £40, a brougham, a London omnibus, a Victorian fire engine and a landau.

The project was funded within the first two hours, but more support does no harm and unlocks further options. Depending on your interests, you might get a bargain. Check it out:

It’s possible to do some cool things with JavaScript, but fundamentally the whole language is still an evil hack that we’re stuck with because it’s widespread, requiring clever hacks like jQuery to hide some of the unpleasantness. A prime example of hackishness – which will no doubt be fixed once they realise just how foolish it is – has  appeared on the pages of the Herald.

“Premium content on heraldscotland is now only available to registered users.” Yes, indeedy, it’s true – sort of. If you visit a “premium” page full of prime journalistic content, like the letters page for example, you’ll see the whole article at first, but before you’ve finished reading it, all but the first paragraph or so will disappear.

…hang on a minute…

So, the whole page is already loaded in your browser, but you can only see part of it? View source…

Yep, the whole thing is still there, there hasn’t been a page reload or anything, it’s just been collapsed down using JavaScript. This is a form of security through obscurity (relying on the user not knowing how to sidestep it), which is a notoriously weak approach to protection.

So far, so daft. But the bit that prompted me to write was this. At the end of the “real” content of the page, there’s a noscript tag (intended for the attention of people browsing without JavaScript, the only people who’ll be able to read the entire page without hassle). It says:

You need Javascript enabled in your browser in order to view this page.