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It’s been just over 8 years, 8 years since I took control of the UK, and look at how far we’ve come. Remember that Horrible recession? Not any more, I’ve already destroyed it, quadrupled our GDP and gave us a £100bn surplus. Remember how close the last election was? Not on my watch, I just started my third term with 75% of the vote.
You’ve probably heard my drunken and sober rants about how the Tory party is busy fucking everything up right now, about how censorship and restricting our rights is wrong, about how you spend to get out of a recession and so on, and now thanks to Democracy 3, I can prove my theories work, at least in a sandbox good enough that it’s predecessor has been used in classrooms across the world.
So how did I achieve my victory? Simple, I picked one issue at a time, and watched as the pieces fell into place. It started slow, a subsidy here, a legalization of weed there, an alteration of a tax rate there, a public works project here… Soon enough I’d made our security forces effective enough to eradicate crime, and that annoying organised element that was causing me the last stretch of bother? Legalise weed, legalise prostitution, tax the shit out of it and voila, a couple of billion for the deficit and better health for potheads and prostitutes across the board.
Soon enough I was spending like a mad man, health and crime problems a thing of the past, the only thing I couldn’t shake was the UKs Alcohol problem, but I am only a man, a man who really likes a drink himself, so fuck changing drinking laws. It’s around here it all started to go wrong, just after I won my second term (with 68% of the vote). I’d implemented far too many policies, the delayed effects of their costs snowballing in to an insane deficit of near £100BN, inflation was getting out of hand again and I’d caused another recession. Was it worth it? Yes, I had falling unemployment, almost no crime, no health problems and perhaps most importantly in just a few years I would have an insanely well educated workforce, heck I’ve educated my people so well that nobody gave a flying fuck when I decided that my pro-choice stance was now the law.
A few months later and the influx of highly paid service workers has fixed it all, I now had a £100bn surplus and 75% of the vote. I was a political god, with money to burn. surely this power won’t go to my head, right?

It’s 23:30, the night is dark and the skies are lovely and clear, perfect conditions for what should be an easy run to Dublin. I got the phone call two hours ago, there’s a terrible Irn Bru shortage in Ireland and as their number one customer and resident nutter with a pilots license Barr had asked I make an immediate run across the Irish Sea to rectify the situation. I agreed of course, for a reasonable fee of 1000 bottles of the sweet orange juice.
My heavy footsteps echo across the tarmac as I approach my baby, a Learjet 45 proudly coated in a strange imitation of the X-Wing’s colouring, her door open and several pissed off looking baggage handlers loading in the last few cases. “Is she ready?” I ask, a low grunt my only reply as the last cases is hefted on board. “If you guys have damaged the seating I’ll kill you, fixing that shit ain’t cheap.” Her usual cargo of passengers strangely absent as I ascend the steps, on the plus side this meant I didn’t have to wear pants for this flight, trust me, there is no greater thrill in this world than flying in your boxers.
A short conversation later and I’m in the air, the lights of Blackpool quickly disappearing from view as I pitch up and head to my assigned flight level, 10,000 feet, for those of you that like details. For some reason the towers really want to bounce me around today, so I spend the first 20 or so minutes talking to various controllers over and over, eventually I get some peace just north of the Welsh coast, the song and dance of opposing airspace lost into the vast emptiness of any sea. I fiddle with my MP3 player, music breaking the silence as I settle into the routine, scan my instruments, scan the horizon and enjoy the view.
No more than ten minutes later, this routine is broken by a loud beeping noise, shit, that’s not good…. My eyes jump straight to the Master Warn as I punch it off, silencing the alarm and giving myself room to think, my eyes immediately follow down, looking for the warning lights, Engine Two seems to have low pressure, why on earth is it going so nuts about that? I finish processing the list, my stomach sinks. There’s a fire in Engine Two, and the fuel gauge is rapidly spinning down. It’s times like these you’re thankful for the training, with little more than a few choice words to the endless dark outside I grab my checklists, thumbing the thick tome to quickly find the right page. “Engine Fire Procedure”, got it!
Now, remember how I mentioned it was Engine Two not too long ago? In the panic of the moment I did something that is a classic example of why TWO pilots are usually needed. In my attempt to fire through the list and save myself from this damn mess I slip, I get the engines back to front in my mind, and my finger jabs at the wrong fuel cut off. A few seconds later, as I’m checking what I think is my working engine’s temperatures and pressures I see something is wrong. My working engine is flying through fuel and not providing thrust? That’s not right…
Never have I felt like more of an idiot, as my fingers quickly kill the right engine, and  activate the fire suppression system, hopefully that should stop me from exploding in mid air. I glance at my altimeter, wanting to see just how bad my sink rate is… It’s frozen still, great an instrument failure too, thank god there’s a second one, but I don’t have time right now. It’s around now I did something entirely stupid as I’m doing all of this, my mind focused on stopping engine 2 from burning, my subconscious decides to help out. My other hand comes off the stick, causing the plane to lurch forwards slightly, as the effects of drag begin to take their toll and pull the nose down, my fingers punch desperately at two buttons they’re all too familiar with, the ignition and the starter motor.
The silence ends, the relatively loud woosh of the jet resumes and I can’t help but sigh, confirming the fire is out as my hand returns to the control yolk, crisis averted, lives saved. Well my life, and that of the Irn Bru in the back. My eyes finally return to the Altimeter, just north of 9000 ft, that was one hell of a glide, good job I have that spare engine. I announce my PAN-PAN to ATC, and after a quick scan of my charts find Liverpool is the nearest airport equipped to deal with the situation, the nice long runway should help given I’m down a reverse.
Apart from the longer stopping distance, and the waiting fire crews the landing is uneventful. I’d always planned on flying into or out of my home town, I just never thought it would be in such a damaged shape. They tow me clear of the runway, and usual service returns within the hour. Such a small delay for a non-routine landing.

Once again after several hours of work I find myself cursing rails, why oh why does it never play nice with anything? After finally getting the server running in terms of capistrano, a working gem set and no more issues with log ownership rails found yet another way to fuck up. Apparently interacting with mysql is just too much to ask, even when the database, password and username are correct it still spits out lovely access denied errors.
Is there seriously nothing rails can do without fucking up? I don’t get it, its a beautiful language in concept yet actually making it function as intended seems to be a whole bucket load more effort than any reasonable person would spend trying to make it interact with things that just work with anything else. And that’s withot even considering testing and all the shit that has put me through over the past few months.
I want to get rails, I really do, it seems like it should be real fucking useful once its learned, especially in terms of potential time savings yet the longer I spend trying, the longer it takes to get anything to play nice. Its sickening, the entire point of the language is supposed to be convention over configuration, yet I’m spending more time burried in various configuration files just trying to make it function. What the fuck is with that?
Anyways… I just needed a rant, and thought it could at least help keep a few of you from ever delving into the hell that is rails.