From The Morgue

This weekend just gone, apart from being ridiculously busy with events (St Patrick’s Day and birthdays and weddings and EP launches and so forth) was also the weekend of the Relay For Life. This annual event is run by the Cancer Society of New Zealand. In Wellington, the waterfront Frank Kitts Park was taken over by a small tent city, around which sponsored teams ran and walked in relay from Saturday afternoon to midday Sunday.
The event fundraises for the Cancer Society and raises awareness of the costly presence of cancer. Participating cancer survivors (and their supporters) received enormous support; a key part of the event was a memorial ceremony for those who had not survived. It was all very festive, and abundant with goodwill and a moving generosity of spirit.
It was also, when considered, quite strange.
With my best outsider perspective, what we had was a large number of people literally walking in a circle without true purpose or any kind of destination, and engaging in this rather surreal activity in order to earn charitable activity on the part of other people. I exchange my pointless activity for your financial investment in a cause. That is a strange cultural equation. It is also a very familiar one, extending across a number of cultures in broadly similar form.
It doesn’t make terribly much sense on first glance. It is, in some ways, similar to a bet. In a bet, I claim that I can perform some task; you doubt me and accept the bet in order to force me to back up my claim; I attempt to perform the task to prove myself and gain the reward. However, sponsorship is the mirror image of betting. My ability to perform the task is never in doubt, so you pledge money not to force me to prove myself, but to support me in my support for a particular cause.
And that, of course, is where the logic can be found. Sponsorship operates out of personal connection. We are supporting a person, and the nature of their act and even their cause is of secondary importance. If we feel socially bound to the person, and the cause fits in the very broad category of ‘a good cause’, then we will likely sponsor that person. Additionally, this allows us to be ‘good people’ without the difficulty or challenge of actually aligning with a cause (or, less cynically, it allows us to reserve our full energies for our personal priorities while still supporting other causes with which we agree.)
When I was younger, and I first understood the concept of the then-frequent telethon televised appeal, I wondered why people had to wait for a telethon in order to be charitable. If there was money to be donated and a worthy cause, wasn’t that enough? It took a few telethons before I came to see that nothing is so simple. Human beings are not rational creatures. We do not easily look beyond ourselves. We are not capable, except in the most unusual cases, of comprehending a grand view of a large interconnected society. Furthermore, we are operating within a system that discourages such a perspective. Our concerns are almost entirely local and our judgments are emotive. This tendency, I suspect, is hardwired into us.
Sponsorship, then, is a way of tricking the human system. Our local and personal social responsibilities are leveraged.to trick us into giving financial support to a cause that is not local and not personal. And its just as well this works, because otherwise these worthy causes would not be receiving the support they so desperately need.
With Cal, I walked in circles around the tent village for an hour or so Sunday morning. It was a very pleasant experience, with people dancing and the sun coming up over the harbour. The activity’s ontological connection with cancer was tenuous; the practical connection was overt and powerful. We were performing an absurd act for the best possible reasons. If this is what it takes for us humans to choose action over inaction and support over apathy, then that is all the justification it needs.

So, I’ve been doing a bunch of reading in the feminist blog circuits lately. It has been quite eye-opening. I try to stay aware of this stuff but, really, there’s this whole world of analysis I’ve been missing, a parallel stream of cultural analysis with a focus on gender power dynamics. I find it invigorating to read, and also quite intimidating sometimes, because it definitely challenges me to address my own expectations and behaviour.
And partly springing out of that, over on Gametime, which is a group blog focused on roleplaying games where I’m a contributor, I have been running a series on fantasy cover art.
Specifically, on the way gender representation has worked out on the covers of Dragon magazine, the long-running (30 years!) periodical with a focus on the Dungeons & Dragons game.
It is a seven-part series, and it has lots of images of covers down the years, and lots of graphs, and a few words to tie all the covers and the graphs together. It starts here.
When I had finished, I made sure the current Dragon staff were aware of what I was up to, and there were some good responses, including a lengthy and considered reply from Dragon’s current editor-in-chief. Which was really good to see. The reply is reproduced here.
If you are a reader interested in feminist issues, in fantasy, in gaming, in magazine publishing, or in any other area that intersects with this, I encourage you to go check it out.
And that’s what I’ve been up to the last couple weeks, aside from Ron the Body. (Now completed rewrites for chapters 1 to 16. Chapters 17, 18 and 19 to go.)

This has actually been getting a lot of mainstream press attention. That means Marvel plan on sticking with it for, oh, at least a year. [More seriously, it’s an attempt by the Marvel Comics lads to emulate the legacy hero thing they have going at DC, where they’re on to their fourth or so Flash and Green Lantern by now. It won’t work, even if it’s a serious attempt, because the next group in charge will want to spike sales and will bring Cap back to do so.]
I used to read Captain America. I read it when he gave up his identity because he lost faith in America. And when he lost his job because the government wanted to control him. And when he turned into a werewolf. And when he was drawing his own comic book adventures for Marvel Comics. And when he almost went transgender thanks to a villainous feminizing process. And when he got very sick and, er, died. (He got better.) Once upon a time I would have cared about this. But now? Now I just don’t care.
What is surprising to me is that many other people actually do. I’ve come across lengthy impassioned discussions online where hundreds of people who never read comics weigh in on the horrors of Captain America’s death while Osama bin Laden is still threatening our freedom or whatever. The news made a big deal of it all over the world and the event has the great and the good in pointy-headed comics lit circles talking. (Warren Ellis, Heidi Mac, Dirk Deppey etc over at the Engine, frex.)
How did this get to be a major media event? I mean, Does anyone read superhero comics any more that isn’t already an initiate? Seriously. Anyone? Young folk love superheroes (see the movies – heck, even the Fantastic Four movie was a hit), and they love comics (see the suggess of manga – where the real sequential art action is these days) so why don’t they love superhero comics?
(Well, there are lots of reasons, and they are all boring – price rises, competing media, distribution issues, etc. About a decade ago, Marvel began a surprisingly good attempt to go mainstream, with some cutting-edge creators doing very good work and some solid, if failure-prone, attempts to broaden the market. 2003’s Trouble was a late example of this; intended to recreate the romance comic market for teenage girls, with a story about a girl getting unexpectedly pregnant; unfortunately it was sold in comic shops, so the photos of teen girls in swimsuit on the covers were somewhat recontextualised . It also wasn’t particularly good, by all accounts. Superhero connection – this was how Spider-Man was conceived. Yes, wrap your brain around that True Believer, Marvel released a miniseries about how Spidey’s mum and dad conceived him. This was the death knell of Marvel’s attempt to take supers stuff to the mainstream.)
It just makes me think of Mark Gruenwald. He’s the guy who loved comics so much that when he died, they put his ashes in the printing ink of a collection of his best work and sold it to comics geeks all over the world (not me). He wrote Captain America for 10 years, longer than anyone else. I think he wouldn’t have liked this plot development too much.
I guess there is no point to this blog entry then. I just wanted to write about superhero comics for once and this was an excuse. Go figure.

Scottish machinima production outfit Strange Company have recently produced a couple of short films on the subject of fair trade, as part of their .Fair Game initiative.
There are two: one, made in The Sims 2 and developed in conjunction with a local high school, is a nice short piece, and the other is an elaborate World of Warcraft riff that I only barely followed since I don’t play World of Warcraft. If you have the WoW bug, then that one’s for you.
Download or stream them here.
What are machinima? In a nutshell, short animated films made inside computer games. It’s a developing field and I’m lucky enough to have one of the co-authors of Machinima for Dummies on my blogroll; he should be along to correct my nutshell description and any other misconceptions in this post before long. Whereupon I will harrass him for wedding photos, thus bringing everything back into balance.
Anyway, it’s great to see companies getting in behind the Fair Trade effort. (It is a much bigger thing in the UK than it is in New Zealand, sadly for us Kiwis.)
(Also of note: only a bit over a year out of Scotland and my ability to interpret the accent is fading… had to listen to the first line of the Sims film three times before I understand what he was saying…)

A lot of the blogosphere is talking about Conservapedia, a new alternative to Wikipedia that takes as its rationale for existence the presumption that Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in a left-wing and un-Christian way. (Cue “the facts have a liberal bias” wisecracks.)
It is oh-so-easy to mock. The whole project is ridiculous for attempting to promote one controversial belief system in, er, a wiki. That anyone can edit. Yes, anyone. Which gave rise to the following info on the page about dinosaurs:

Since 565 A.D. there are reports about the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie by birth), a large Monster living in Loch Ness, near Inverness, Scotland, where one of the best curry restaurants in the area can be found (beware the chicken Madras). People who saw Nessie described the Monster as it would look similar to a dinosaur. This information, along with a hazy picture of a black shadow, was released as a joint venture by the Inverness Tourism and Sheep-shearing Quality Control Board along with the Xinjiang Department of Tourism and Bad English Signage’s dinosaur-like monster reported sightings. So far the initiative appears to have been unsuccessful as not many Scots appear to have found their way to Xinjian, nor have many Chinese been spotted in the Inverness area.

Due to claims of dinosaur and human coexistence, that page was always going to be a target for outsiders. I didn’t find my way there because I was looking for laffs, however. My brush with Conservapedia began from wondering what it had to say about the sometimes-controversial game Dungeons & Dragons, and the dinosaur link was the second on the list of search results. (Conservapedia’s D&D entry is quite good, FWIW.)
I started thinking that perhaps, despite its many flaws, once we’re done making fun of the Southern Baptists, we outsiders should consider using Conservapedia as a communications tool? Instead of using it for mockery, we could take it seriously, embrace it, and try to embed within it ideas of multiculturalism, gender equality, and other liberal causes? If conservatives are going to use Conservapedia, surely we should try and get some good information in there?
Looking at the discussion page for dinosaurs soured me on that notion. Check this out:

Why is the word “evolved” in inverted commas in the second sentence?
–Horace 20:27, 22 February 2007 (EST)
Note Horace’s use above of the Britishism “inverted commas” instead of the proper American “quotation marks”. This shibboleth makes his contributions look rather suspiciously like the work of a Wikipedia agitator. Dr. Richard Paley 17:21, 23 February 2007 (EST)

I’ve really got nothing to add to that. Sorry, Conservapedia. You are a joke to me, and I hereby renounce any attempts to find a different way of engaging with you. It’s for the best. (The Pope is the antichrist. Conservapedia says it so it must be true! Sorry, conservative Catholics, Conservapedia isn’t *for* you.)

Well, unsurprisingly, the Hot Fuzz NZ premiere was a delight. Peter Jackson said he respected the guys because they made movies for the right reasons. Simon Pegg gave a shout-out to the gig he’d done ten years before in the tiny Bats theatre over the road. Nick Frost said coming here had given him a chance to see a sister in Auckland, who he hadn’t seen for 20 years. Edgar Wright said that the Embassy theatre was lovely and that was the whole reason why they were there.
There were doughnuts. They were crazy. I ate one and then felt full for the next 24 hours.
And, somehow, only 300 of the 400 free tickets went. The word just didn’t get around very far, it seemed. I met Jonathan P, who was co-ordinating the whole thing, the following night and he acknowledged that they were still learning how powerful the online word-of-mouth thing is.
Speaking of meetings, I ran into Tom of WellUrban, meaning that once again I have a real-world acquaintance with everyone on my blogroll. Ha! (Although rumour has it another blogger on the list at right spotted Mr Beard later that evening, but was too shy to make his acquaintance…)
The movie itself was loads of fun. I was impressed by how tight the material was – sometimes you’d have gag + setup + payoff + character revelation + plot advancement all in the same four-word line. The economy and pace of it was great. Structurally it was a bit wonky, not quite sustaining its energy through the middle, but once it worked its way through to the climax, man, that climax delivered. Timothy Dalton was a delight, as well.
Anyone know who played Janine?

(special message for non-Wellingtonians at conclusion of post)
Wellingtonians!
As noted a week ago on my LJ, there will be a MySpace related sneak preview of Hot Fuzz tonight. Hot Fuzz is the new film by the Shaun of the Dead guys, and has been getting wonderful chatter from the UK.
Also, it is presented by Peter Jackson, who has a cameo in the film.
Also, the Shaun of the Dead guys (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright) will all be in attendance.
Also, the preview is free. Just turn up.
Queues will be tolerated from 4pm. Session starts at 6.30. Venue is, of course, the Embassy. Get along! More info here.
===
Non-Wellingtonians!
Don’t you wish you were in Wellington?

This is my 500th post.
Post 400 was [mediawatch] The Nuclear Fanatic, an excoriation of a dreadful syndicated article about the supposed clear and present threat from Iran. Sept 5, 2006 was the post date.

This kind of propaganda stands in the way of clear understanding; it most certainly stands in the way of any potential for peace… It’s worth picking bits of it apart. You can see how the system operates – the premises underlying this piece aren’t examined, they’re taken as read, and these premises are what is truly communicated in the piece.

Post 300 was Sometimes It Writes Itself, a silly tale of my past posted on Feb 13, 2006.

I walked up to her and said… “I can see myself in your pants.”

Post 200 was Assigned Further Reading, where I linked to some damn cool stuff, and which should all be read now by you, yes, you. Follow the linky, and when you’ve done that, follow the linkies. That was from Feb 11, 2005.
Post 100 was A Plant Bit Me And Ran Away, in which I have a minor gardening mishap, back on July 10, 2004.

Wow. I’d forgotten plants could do that.

There was no Post 0.

Everybody love Mr T. I sure did love him when I was young and talked my parents into letting me watch the A-Team even though there was guns. Because there was also Inventing, in the sense that every week the A-Team would be locked in a workshop surrounded by goons and they would have to invent something with which to bust out of the workshop and take down the goons. (Usually they would invent a tank.)
But, did you know:

• Mr T provided the impetus for one of the very first internet memes, the Ate My Balls phenomenon of 1996-1998. The original Mr T ate my balls website is still around, as is a Salon article on the phenomenon.
• Mr T partnered with Hulk Hogan in a tag team match in the first Wrestlemania. Watch Mr T whale on some famous wrestler dudes here.
• Mr T’s legendary rap number “Treat Your Mother Right” was ghostwritten by Ice T. Seriously. Okay, I’ve never found confirmation, but it has to be true. Watch T rap and mothers dance here. ‘Treat Your Mother Right” was from T’s renowned video, Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool.
• Mr T had a supporting role in the legendary cult oddity Freaked, as a Bearded Lady. He was playing alongside an uncredited Keanu Reeves, who covered his face in hair for the entire film. I love this movie always.
• One of the Onion’s best ever articles was driven by our man Mr T: “Mr T Announces Pity List for 1986”. It features Mr T announcing “This year I pity the following fools…”
• This is all the Alligator’s fault, dammit, I should be working. Check out more Mr T awesome, here and here.

The other big noise around NZ lately has been the progress of Green MP Sue Bradford’s “anti-smacking bill”, which essentially outlaws the physical disciplining of children.
This has, predictably, kicked up a righteous hullaballoo. The hardcore fundy Christians hate the attack on their God-imposed responsibility to smack their children into obedience and love. Libertarians are upset that the state is going to tell them how they have to raise their children. Everyone agrees that, for those parents who kill their children, this legislation isn’t going to provide much disincentive.
I support the bill. I don’t have kids, so I can’t speak to the difficulties of parenting and discipline. But I know this – I have on many occasions watched as some mother or father laid down a mighty load of smacking on a misbehaving child. Furious, stressed parents at the end of their tether, trying to just get through their shopping and go home, who smack down their children, hard. Every time I have witnessed this kind of display, I have felt sickened, and also helpless.
This kind of treatment is unacceptable. If the bill passes into law, then it will also be illegal.
The other issues are sideshows. The real concern is this kind of physical beating of unruly children, which happens every day, all over this country. I welcome this legislation as a step in pushing such behaviour beyond the pale, where it belongs.
—
This is turning into “issues week”. Gosh, which pressing ethical conundrum shall I glibly solve tomorrow?