This has been getting muchas love from the blogs, for good reason:
At a Web 2.0 conference last week, Clay Shirky discussed how sitcoms are like gin, and how four-year-olds understand the world, and how people find the time to LOLcat or WoW.
Here’s the transcript.
Shirky’s bit about participatory culture is worth getting your head around. I think I have a post on this coming, but for now you can get your fix of awesome ideas straight from Shirky.
Good Weekend
If a busy and rather non-productive one. I read poetry (Mr Scott Kendrick’s much-loved Wellington poem Lambton Shuffle ) at Hottieperm’s talentquestparty, kicked a football around a schoolyard without breaking myself, made some very nice soup and fed it to people, watched the end of The Wire season 4, talked Mexico with people going to Mexico, did some work on Ron, slept in real good, and had a very nice time overall.
And right now I’m waiting for the one-hour-before-food direction for my short antibiotic course to elapse so I can have some breakfast and go to school. Another late start. Ach.
Anyway. Here’s a taster of the art for the first issue in comic story The Beast, written by me and with art by Brynn. (Previously mentioned waaaay back in Feb ’06, here.) Learning how to do comics collaboratively – there is much for us both to get our heads around. Anyway, enjoy.
Youthful Apprehensions, Cont.
Not amongst the bon mots common to our merry band of youthful chums, but nonetheless known to us from the chatter of older types, was the phrase, “pipe dream”, in such usage as this example: “don’t endear yourself to the splendid plans you’ve heard for the new playing area; these plans, I’m afraid, are something of a pipe dream”.
Naturally I presumed that there was a metaphorical pipe, through which one’s projects must progress before achieving completion. By reference to this metaphorical pipe, and invoking the word ‘dream’ one could create the suggestion that something much desired would, in fact, not exist at all, but be something merely wished or “dreamed” to be in the pipe – and of course, wishing is not sufficient to award existence, and by this same rule, a “pipe dream” would be a project that would never come to fruition. Properly, it belongs in the same general category as the (perhaps apocryphal) hallucinatory oasis.
This interpretation of course gained much greater credence when our school studies of philosophy led to long discussions of Cartesian dualism, and the trenchant response of Gilbert Ryles and his derisive coinage, “the ghost in the machine”; indeed many happy hours were spent lingering after school caught up in vigorous argument, taking up one position or another in this engaging problem.
And to this day, while long since disabused of my youthful misconception, I retain a certain fondness for my interpretation; for I’m sure you’ll agree, all projects and assignments do progress in a fashion akin to matter along a pipe; and all that matters is the type of pipe it may be!
Ah, the naivete of youth!
From Felix’s War Diaries
(Felix Rooney is my great-grandfather. His diaries begin October 27th 1916. There is a short explanatory note at the front: “My original diary embracing the trip from N. Zealand to Egypt, Gallipoli & France was destroyed with all my effects when the Huns raided us in the mushroom at Armentiere in July 1916.”)
Anzac Day excerpt from April, 1917, a short slice of life away from the front:
Tuesday 24th
Have hurt my foot so had a day off. Harry and I had a good day together. Weather getting good now. Battalion went into St Omer to-day. A few rums and cafe and turned in.
Wednesday 25.
Had another day off. Taking it easy to give my foot a chance. Second anniversary of Anzac Day. A few rums and cognacs drunk to-night.
Thursday 26.
Feeling all right so went on parade this morning. We went out to where trenches have been dug to represent those at Messines, German and British. We made two attacks, taking the ridge, as we will soon have to do in reality. Got home about 4.P.M. Fine weather now.
The Battle of Messines in June went well, in part due to the extensive planning described here by Felix. I might post that diary entry another day.
Thursday Linky
Friday being a public holiday here in NZ, your linky cometh early. Durty furriners might consider it a mid-week special, but they are durty furriners and there is no accounting.
Another from talula – people re-enact their childhood photos with usually-hilarious results. [EDIT: linky seems deaded! perhaps it will live again tomorrow?]
Take a moment to tap your name into this week’s web petition thing, the Ape Manifesto, which calls upon governments to save the wild primates. They have almost 10% of their targeted 1 million signatures as I type.
Superlate pointed me at the delightful Growcube game which is both very simple and very complex.
Political development of the week is the Flat Earth society reaching out in solidarity to climate change sceptics. Its a brilliant wind-up, and they stumbled on a mini-scoop – almost-Prime-Minister Don Brash in the audience to hear from the latest rent-an-expert why you should keep driving your SUV.
Also is:
I R SRS ZOMBIE MOVIE ZOMG
and an incredible application that quickly cleans your screen
*jumps out Monkey-style* Linky!
Where do you get your music?
I don’t get it by paying for it, nosirree. (Largely because I don’t have any money.)
I get my music now from teh bloggery*.
Pearce does a regular Friday music slot, providing mp3s of stuff as it takes his fancy.
Gareth Michael Skarka has been doing his Friday music series for years now, and there’s usually one or two tracks I’ll pull down from him each week.
Warren Ellis does his The 4AM podcast specifically to bring the new music to the huddled and adoring body-modified masses.
And just now Mike has launched a weekly MP3 feature.
The music is in abundance. The old ways are already dead, even if they don’t quite know it.
* Also from the partners of my two sisters, who regularly send odd mix CDs my way, but they aren’t webpages so I can’t share the bounty I’m afraid…
‘The Beach’ (Danny Boyle, 2000)
I watched The Beach on DVD a few days ago. I wasn’t expecting much. I enjoyed the throwaway pleasures of Alex Garland’s novel, but had steered clear of the film – I didn’t think the unmarked Leo DiCaprio was a good pick for limit-pushing backpacker RIchard; Danny Boyle’s ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ was unrelentingly terrible; and the bitterly ironic story that a genuine natural paradise had been wrecked by the production turned me off.
Turns out it’s quite good. The expected nadir, where DiCaprio gurns and cavorts as a live-action Super Mario character while hallucinating the video game around him, is just as ridiculous as I’d been warned, but I wasn’t ready for it to recover from this and deliver a climax that I actually found more genuine and more powerful than the one in the novel.
DiCaprio doesn’t convince as the world-weary backpacker, either, and he plays Richard as a bit of a goofus at all the wrong moments so its hard to see why all the ladies swoon over him, but in general his undoubted charisma carries him through.
The film and novel both dig around in fertile ground, the line between ‘authentic traveller and exploitative tourist. Relatively unexplored in fiction, but urgently at stake in every backpacker hostel you find on the road, where travellers play sincerely-meant status games establishing who is more authentic than who. The truth, of course, is that the traveller culture we have today inevitably changes everything it observes, just as it did when Dr Livingstone went on his journey, only faster and more profoundly. There is a profound moral dilemma in travel at this time on earth, and The Beach is a grotesque exploration of the consequences of ducking out of this dilemma; and the film version is worth a look if any of this resonates with you at all.
Rob Gilchrist: Respect, That Man
The headlines should read “Arrogant Private Eye Outspied By Novice.”
More genius journalism from Nicky Hager, whose reputation and wide net of sources continue to do him proud. The Private Investigation firm Thompson and Clark Investigations (TCIL) is rightly in the firing line for again trying to recruit a spy in activist circles (I wrote about the last instance of this too). It seems likely Solid Energy is again involved, against direct instruction from the government, so there’s going to be some chaos out of this.
The best bit is how it went down. Rob Gilchrist, a Christchurch guy with some links into these groups, was approached by Gavin Clark and a pitch was made for him to start spying for TCIL. Gilchrist played along, set up a second meet, and brought along a tape recorder. He then recorded Clark’s recruitment attempts on three separate occasions, feeding the info to Hager who broke the story on Sunday.
Ordinary guy Rob Gilchrist outplayed professional PI Gavin Clark at his own game. That fills me with glee.
Clark, as quoted in Hager’s article, trying to butter up Gilchrist and ending up chumping himself:
I can see exactly where you’re coming from, and I think it’s good you’ve got social values; you know, things that keep things in check. But sometimes people’s ideas are so extreme that, you know, I don’t know if the world could sustain a population of all vegans. We’d be overpopulated.
Oh, my, I’m laughing again. What a buffoon. If it wasn’t a reprehensible action by a determined resident of the ethical sewer, sourced in the large-scale villainy of Solid Energy’s reactionary culture, and continuing despite every possible ordinary restraint, then the hilarity wouldn’t taste so damn bitter.
[mediawatch] Listener calls out the hounds
NZ’s current affairs mag the Listener has got some stick from me in the past for its editorial policies under Pamela Stirling. A new development put the wind up me even further.
A chap named Dave Hansford in the Listener’s Eco column recently featured a piece on the ways in which climate change sceptics can effectively hack the media machine and get far greater coverage than their fringe perspectives deserve, with significant consequences for public understanding of climate change (and, consequently, limiting political will to make necessary changes).
This, naturally, kicked up a stink with the local climate change sceptics; international sceptic honcho Joseph Bast of Chicago was appraised of the situation and, in a letter published in the April 5 issue, demanded Hansford’s silence forevermore on the subject. The following week, the sceptics had their right of reply printed (opposite another article arguing the case for anthropogenic global warming). All par for the course in a magazine that is, as John Drinnan noted in the Herald blog, “no longer part of the movement”.
Then things took a twist. Hansford was booted from the Ecologic column. Local global warming blog Hot Topic noticed this (or was tipped to it), and made a post suspecting that sceptic pressure was responsible for the dumping. Hansford, for his part, came along to comment his own suspicions that this was the case.
You can read that article here, but not at Hot Topic itself, because it’s gone from there. In its place, a note that the article had been taken down thanks to the Listener and “their friends at [local law firm] Bell Gully”, and an obviously lawyer-drafted post apologising and retracting a bunch of stuff, including things that weren’t even alleged in the initial posting.
That’s when it got interesting to lots of people. I don’t think Hansford was booted because of sceptic pressure, or at least not *just* due to sceptic pressure; but Stirling’s response to this relatively innocuous and balanced blog post is startling. Legal blogger Steven Price of Media Law Journal posted about it with a sensible post, the conclusion of which deserves quoting in full:
The proper response would have been a one-line letter politely telling the Listener to sit on its thumb. I doubt that any further action would have been taken. But bloggers, and those who host their blogs, can’t always be that brave. That’s what makes leaning on assertions of legal rights in situations like this reprehensible, I think. I would have been much more persuaded by a thoughtful and factual response from the Listener’s editor on the blog itself setting out the magazine’s version of the story. It would have been much cheaper. And much more in keeping with the Listener’s commitment to open inquiry. And it wouldn’t have produced what’s likely to be an explosion of interest in the criticisms…
So that’s what I’m doing here – adding to the ‘explosion of interest’. Pamela Stirling’s continued dalliance with climate change scepticism is disheartening, but her response (and it is, presumably, her personal response) to this affair has been foolish and vicious and is worthy of condemnation. This is not how things should be done here. Not only that, I’m certain it’s convinced a lot of her critics that she’s guilty.
If you’re a Listener buyer, skip it next week, or the next couple of weeks. Email or ring to say why.
[Hat-tip to Poneke, who has covered this affair pretty damn well.]
Friday Linky
From the other moose, I give you seminal West Coast rappers N.W.A. with their debut album, Straight Outta Compton – Explicit Content Only. That’s right, its remixed so it’s only the explicit material. This brings back memories.
The site has loads of other interesting art projects. I like HipHop PopUp, an online player of Kanye West’s Graduation album that pops up the websites of brands as he mentions them. Its a pretty neat critique of the bling culture at work in much of hiphop. Also Satanic Images, which searches online galleries for photos that were the 666th image recorded by that particular digital camera.
Here is World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that ran to a conclusion last year. Depicting a world responding to an oil crisis, it engaged a lot of people with vivid imagined accounts of what life would be like. I’ve only just found this so Im only just getting my head around it. It seems like a neat way to explore this issue, although like Zeb Cook, I wonder if this is so arcane it ends up restricted to an elite – maybe not exactly the elite Zeb is talking about, but a preaching-to-the-converted thing does seem likely. It was promo’d at SXSW, fer pete’s sake. Anyway, I’m just amazed I haven’t heard about it before.
I’ve been dabbling in a new phenomenon on YouTube lately – clips of Iranian women getting into trouble for not wearing the hejab properly. Girls wailing as they’re forced into police cars, or roughly pushing aside old ladies who are trying to restrain them. It’s fascinating and troubling, and best viewed with some kind of contextual knowledge – Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will do. Beware of the comments, where neo-Nazis, American freedom bigots, Persian Muslims of both traditionalist and reformist stripe, other Persians, Arab Muslims, other Arabs, feminists, and others conduct furious five-directional wars full of invective and lacking much illumination.
And to close, here’s forty-five years of Doctor Who clips played to an Eminem-Benny Hill theme mashup. Probably bewildering to the uninitiated, but fun nonetheless.