(US, that is)
ICONS, that RPG with some bits by me and far far more bits by the awesome designer Steve Kenson, is on sale for a buck, down from 30. Publisher’s having an anniversary-cum-thanksgiving sale.
If you’re a gamer, trust me – this is worth a dollar.
(Sale expires very soon.)
Last week the government’s Welfare Working Group issued its options report, asking for submissions on various proposals for dealing with NZ’s beneficiaries. Gordon Campbell is not impressed: “Reality check: when work was available in the 2000s and job searches were being case managed, unemployment sank to record lows with fewer than 20,000 on the dole. Conclusion: when jobs are there, people work: and when they aren’t, they can’t.” (Also, Danyl at the Dim-Post has an instructive chart on the nature of the “problem”.)
Nevertheless, this manufactured Welfare Crisis now has its response. The whole exercise has the air of a political fait accompli – the decisions have already been made, so the WWG is a lengthy exercise in developing a rationale for a pre-chosen course.
However, I’m not going to talk about the options under discussion or the frustrating ideological basis of the group’s activity. I just want to point at one tiny aspect of the report that infuriated me no end.
The very first words in Reducing Long-Term Benefit Dependency: The Options, appearing before indicia and publication details, are a proverb:
“Anei tātou nā ko te po: ana tātou nā he rā ki tua”
Here we are in the night, and the day is yet to come.
When I saw this I became so furious I couldn’t go on. This reveals rather more about the paradigm of the WWG than I think they realized. Providing support to the weakest members of society is equated to the awful, painful night; a stricter regime to reduce that support and make life more difficult for beneficiaries is cast as the relief of day.
It’s just dumbfounding. I mean, even if you buy into the WWG premises (long-term benefit dependency is a major problem, our current welfare system is an unsustainable economic burden, stricter controls are necessary), it takes a particularly blinkered perspective to decide that the best metaphor for this is night passing into day.
And of course the bitter irony that this a Māori proverb, when Māori will be disproportionately affected by the measures within (not least because many Māori live in rural areas where jobs are hard to come by anyway, thanks to the vagaries of the economic system we’ve imposed on their country over the last 170 years).
Sure, it’s a minor thing, and presumably Enid Ratahi Pryor and Sharon Wilson-Davis, Māori women on the WWG, think it’s an appropriate inclusion. Perhaps I’m over-reacting. Nevertheless, I think that choices around such small details can communicate more than pages of carefully neutral policy-speak, and this specific choice and the worldview it suggests sit very wrong with me.
According to the agenda, I am speaking at approx 10am tomorrow at this conference. My topic will be boring. As in boring holes in the skull. Yes, I am squeezing a trepanation metaphor into a 10-minute talk about a web implementation. I must amuse myself somehow.
Also amuse myself with linky. To wit:
Haven’t had any Star Wars linky for a while. Remedy ahoy: Dress Jesus up as a Star Wars character. Star Wars mice. It’s never too early to talk to your kids about Star Wars. Star Wars vintage travel posters. Katie the Star Wars girl. And my old boss and her husband led* the project for the biggest ever Lego mosaic (and it is Star Wars themed).
[*not really, see comments; oversimplified to make it look like I know all the most important people in the world, because knowing all the loveliest people in the world clearly is not enough for me]
Mitchell & Webb: Elderly Sherlock Holmes
Time lapse of the aurora borealis
Privilege-denying dude changes face (but not attitude)
Jem’s cartoon wardrobe. Very thorough.
From Blaise: complex mathematical problem solved by bees
From Hamish Cameron: some research figured out a few secrets of how Facebook does its news feed. This made me change some of my settings in useful ways.
From Chuck G: Danny MacAskill does crazy stuff on his bike and makes Scotland look like paradise.
From CJ who is also talking at the conference tomorrow, this great article on cyborgs: “But a cyborg revolution was happening the same year Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term. A hostile environment was being tamed by a newly and artificially capable people. It escaped notice and critique though, because the modified weren’t men, and then environment wasn’t space. The modified were women, and the environment was men.”
And finally… Kim Jong-il looking at things.
Even overseas readers will probably be aware that the Pike River Mine explosion on the West Coast of our South Island has ended badly – after five days with conditions too unsafe for rescue, another explosion has nullified the small chance that anyone in there had survived. 29 people have died.
I don’t have anything much to say about this. It’s dominating everything in NZ, not least because we’re a small country and a lot of people have ties to the region and the families. But it would feel strange not to mention it here.
On the weekend, the front pages of three out of four Sunday papers at one shop showed people praying. The prayer stories continue today. It’s out of step with the usually secular approach of our media, but I think it’s an appropriate reflection of the mood of the nation. It’s a reflective time right now, even for those who don’t pray.
The Doctor turns 47 today. Happy birthday, old chum. Have a dance to celebrate.
But watch out for that Myrka!
Went to interactive theatre piece Apollo 13: Mission Control last week. It’s on a third season in Wellington and has toured around the country and to Oz; tours further abroad are being planned. It’s been hugely successful, and deservedly so.
The basic setup: the show takes place in Mission Control for the Apollo 13 mission. The audience are the staff of MC. Seated behind consoles with buttons and lights and networked telephones, the audience have a job to do. (Some audience just sit in the “press gallery” – slightly cheaper tickets, no console.) Mission Control’s command staff lead the audience through the situation as the astronauts (video-feed projected on the front wall) experience a series of problems. One of the astronauts is also an audience member, selected from the crowd before the show.
It worked well. The large, diverse crowd was engaged and enthusiastically got to work solving logic puzzles, suggesting problem fixes and reporting on developments as they happened. The performed characters roamed around the room, issuing instructions, grabbing news, and identifying problems needing resolution. From time to time this action was broken with a broadcast from Walter Cronkite (played, charmingly, for laughs) or other such extra incident. Cronkite interviewed the astronauts; later, Cronkite interviewed members of the Mission Control staff (i.e. audience members). There was lots going on, and good humour reigned.
The characters are all drawn pretty broadly so they could play strong against the general hubbub and with very little time to make their mark. I was particularly interested in how they drove inter-character drama, with the general mayhem regularly breaking into scripted/semi-scripted conflicts between the performed characters, whose different values set up regular disagreements.
The physical interactive elements were highly appealing. Switches and lights on the consoles worked; you could use the phones to call other consoles, and (in the comms team) to those outside Mission Control. (The highlight of my companion’s experience was a conversation he had by phone with someone in Australia – or, to be more accurate, a performer backstage putting on an Australian accent. He was the only one who enjoyed that phone call first-hand.) Pencil and paper were essential tools, and several times audience members used the chalkboard at the front of the room or searched through the filing cabinets for relevant information. All of these elements contributed to a powerful sense of place.
It was, to be sure, a resounding success. I was highly impressed with what is obviously a well-oiled machine, staffed with gifted performer/improvisors. The show’s high-concept is splendid and unassailable – the kind of idea you might spend your whole life waiting for, the perfect marriage of concept and execution. This show deserves to run and run, and I expect it will tour a lot of places in times to come. Look out for it. Go see it – go be it.
That said, I want to say a bit more about it. Because, personally, I want more. Not because Apollo 13 isn’t a success, it clearly is; but because it’s so obviously just scratching the surface of what is possible with this kind of show. As some of you will know, I’ve been developing an interest in interactive theatre for a long time; back at least as far as the “game theatre” event Aliens Apocalypse in 1999, and more recently for last year’s Affair of the Diamond Necklace show. There’s lots of really interesting stuff happening in performance interactivity at present, particularly over in the UK where it crosses over with the creative games/urban games movement. All of these approaches are opening doors that have previously passed over, and entering territory that is largely unexplored. It’s an exciting time for those interested in the different ways you can relate a performance to an audience.
And in Apollo 13 I saw some really smart, really innovative stuff – some genuine risks being taken, which in interactive theatre is a huge and appealing plus all by itself. But I also saw some of the same challenges that face other attempts to navigate this territory.
The first challenge: smooth transition from audience activity to performer activity. Here, as with Diamond Necklace, there were pre-scripted sequences where performed characters interacted and the attention of the audience was expected. These were seamlessly integrated into a context where the audience did not have any attention expectation and could look where they liked and talk to whomever they wished. In short, these were moments where the audience was reminded it had to be an audience. In Diamond Necklace, we cheated, because our fiction placed us in the court of a King and Queen who could explicitly demand attention with but a word. That excuse doesn’t hold in Mission Control, so the transitions have to stand on their own. Many of them worked smoothly, but some really jarred. Once, the lighting changed to throw spotlights on two characters entering opposition; it threw me out of the moment.
The second challenge: content distribution. When you’re offering an experience like Apollo 13, different audience members will necessarily have different experiences. As soon as you have differences, you have inequalities. It is extremely difficult to ensure anything like an equal distribution of content through an audience, without maintaining extremely high staff-to-audience ratios. This is properly seen as, at least in part, a feature and not a bug: some people don’t want much interactive content, they want to do a few things but mostly to watch others do more. However, it’s not enough to decide that’s the end of it. Achieving equality of access to content is also hard; there are major bottlenecks and no method of oversight. In a show like this, where the content available is strictly limited, audience members are in a zero-sum game; every Australian phone call had by my companion was a phone call everyone else misses out on. Just by the way the evening worked out, I had less content thrown at me than those of my console-buddies; I had a great time regardless (and it gave me more time to just observe), but I wonder if some audience members would feel hard-done-by if this happened? I felt this show didn’t do a great job of managing this issue, but it did ameliorate it by having lots of shared content that was the same for everyone so there was a good baseline participation level even if many other events passed you by.
(Another possible solution for interactive theatre in general is, instead of trying to handle distribution better, you just try and have so much content that everyone has more than they need; best way to get that is to turn your audience into content-generators, like in a live-action role-play. But that’s far from straightforward, and I haven’t yet seen a general-audience interactive theatre event that has even tried to do so.)
In any case, it’s got the creative brain-bees all a-buzzing. Lots to think about. These two challenges are, as I say, not problems with this show, but rather challenges for anyone trying to step into this space – I’m leaving out all the things Apollo 13 does so brilliantly and solves so effectively (obvious example: audience buy-in). This sets a high standard right off the bat. I’m really excited to see it come out of my home town.Many congratulations are due to Hackman for this incredible show. It’s really quite fantastic. Go see it -go do it! – if you can. And I’m going to keep thinking about it, and will look forward to what Hackman do next.
(See also Steve Hickey’s writeup. He went along just the other day, and had a very positive experience.)
Because Pearce demanded it! And because I do it every Friday if I can. Here is FRIDAY LINKY!
Stanley Kubrick is on the record that HAL was not gay.
Lego pop-up house (Youtube link) via Kitty, and Lego Lovecraft house (via Keane)
Kate Beaton linked to this blog about American book cover design, and this was the entry that blew me away. These designs are from around 1880 but look like something you’d see in the 1970s. Incredible.
Also incredible from the 1880s: photos of old London
Hyperbole-and-a-half’s post about how her dogs coped with the stress of moving is getting much attention because it is hysterically funny. Read it!
Privilege-denying dude! (via Daniel Gorringe)
Famous giant monsters – scale diagram
NZ Herald has photos of an orca surfing.
Very cool Steampunk Batman designs on Warren Ellis’ message board
Lots of people in academia will have had this circulated to them – a guy who (claims to) write papers for cheating students describes his work. (Making Light figures it’s on the level and makes some very smart comments about how this relates to privilege.) Best thing for me is that the guy’s article reads perfectly in the voice of Will Ferrell’s essay-provider character from Undeclared
(NB Ferrell is not as annoying in this role)
US economic decline described super-clearly – all the things that are broke
And finally… SATYR MASTERS FROM ABYSS
I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while. In late September, my friend, colleague and occasional mentor Jim Liu gave his Professorial lecture. I was forced to miss the event, but was able to watch the whole thing online. I recommend you do as well – it’s a great talk. It’s called Towards a Psychology of Global Consciousness, and brings together a bunch of Jim’s research interests to reach a conclusion that’s challenging, even shocking.
First, he goes through some fascinating research into how we perceive history, using a huge international survey where people in different countries listed events and people from history in order of importance. This stuff is fascinating in its own right, and Jim uses it to draw some conclusions about the basis of what he calls a global consciousness.
Then he connects this to the NZ situation, and looks at how NZ history is conceived and how Maori and Pakeha relations are complicated by our views of history. (“Historical negation” emerges as an incredibly powerful method to preserve the status quo.) But it’s also clear that Maori culture is much better suited than Pakeha culture to make sense of the collectivist/high-power-distance societies that are rapidly increasing in global power.
Finally he turns to one of those rising societies, China, and looks at the basis of societal relations in Chinese culture. Their model of benevolent authority, Jim suggests, is the way the world is going. In fact, given the failure of democracies to cope with the signal challenge of this era, climate change, perhaps a benevolent authoritarian society is the ideal way forward.
It’s an extremely challenging conclusion, and you really need to hear Jim tell the whole story before dismissing it. Fortunately, you can do exactly that, and read all his slides, right here. It’s a bit under an hour (don’t be fooled by the duration on the video, they just left the camera running in the room after everyone had gone) and worth every minute, particularly for fellow Kiwis.
Enjoy.
Oh curse you babby! For you have win!
Been obvious for a while now that the writerly push was not going to achieve an End-state before babby day, even if babby decides to be well late. So the contest is hereby over. I declare loss!
Reasons for loss are twofold:
* Got really, really busy with stuff. It threw me out of my groove and took over my life, and even token continuation of novel was not possible during. Sad to say, but that is life.
* Novel got harder than I expected.
I’m gonna talk about that second one a little. I’m conscious of writing this during Novel Writing Month, when lotsa people are pushing through to write a text in one short month. This is the opposite of that. There, the goal is to hit wordcount – to just! keep! writing! until you get where you need to go. Everyone knows that when you come out the other side of NaNoWriMo, you are faced with the task of editing and shaping what you created into something you can stand behind. But by creating something to work with, you have already overcome the greatest obstacle.
Working on Day One at first felt a bit like that. I had a clear vision of where I was going and how to get there. I launched into the project at speed and raced through the first major act without pause, confident in my direction and the strength of the core idea.
Then I hit something unexpected. The narrative in front of me, which had previously been a straight, clean road, suddenly became a huge and complex interchange with different routes racing off in dozens of new directions. To change metaphors: it was like a firework – one trail going up, then a sudden explosion into dozens of new lines.
Now, I tried to pick one and get on with it, because that’s how you get things done; I’ve done it in the past. But this time I realized quickly that the problem was deeper than that. I knew my start and I knew my ending and I knew the arc of my middle, but it all got tricky when I tried to line them up and match them to the world I’d set up and the concerns I set in motion.
It all got complex. You can see it in the journal – an unbroken stream of prose suddenly starts jumping back and forth with scenes being written increasingly out of sequence until there were arrows everywhere dragging this bit into connection with that bit. Scenes lost context, like images flashing on a screen. And then finally the writing stalled out completely to be replaced by notes to myself, charts and character notes, explorations of the various options ahead. That’s what I’ve been working on for a while now, sorting stuff through in my head now rather that writing a novel and seeing what doesn’t work. I’ve even dragged out the Dramatica engine for the first time in half a decade to see what it has to say. (Answer: useful stuff.)
It’s perhaps a sign that my craft is getting better – that I can see problems coming a mile away. But I’m also keenly aware that I’m putting a lot of work into this that isn’t helping progress towards The End. And that seems to matter – although it feels like work, it also doesn’t feel like progress.
Anyway. Babby is the winner. Novel will have to be patient to reach its full expression.
I first heard about The Room in this AV Club article from March last year. It’s an indie 2003 melodrama that has become a midnight-movie audience-participation sensation, because it’s so bad and so weird. This weekend I finally saw it for myself, going with NotKate and R the Judge.
The Room was written, directed, and produced by its star, Tommy Wiseau. His character, Johnny, is engaged to Lisa, but Lisa embarks on an affair with Johnny’s best friend. This tears Johnny apart. Alongside this core triangle there are many unexplained asides including a character announcing she has breast cancer (never referred to again), a character tearfully admitting his involvement in the drug trade (never referred to again), and a character having an embarrassing underwear-related incident (the character later gives a detailed description of the incident to another character in case you slept through it the first time; after this, it is never referred to again).
We saw it at the Paramount and the cultish midnight movie crowd were enthusiastically in attendance. Two young men came in costume as Johnny and Lisa. Masses of plastic spoons were hurled at the screen. Everyone chanted “go! go! go! go!” as the camera panned across the Golden Gate Bridge. I suspect I lost about 1/3 of the dialogue in the film to the din of audience catcalls. It was a bit wild.
Even in this chaotic environment, this film got to me.
First up: it is a terrible piece of filmmaking. The script is awful, the performers are all over the place (including Wiseau himself who is on another planet entirely), the set dressing is absurd, the cinematography is rubbish, the pacing is bizarre. It’s a whole other level of bad filmmaking.
But these weaknesses I think enhance the crazy power of the film. By the end my mouth was hanging open. I was astonished by what I’d just witnessed (and, thanks to the audience engagement, been part of.) The Room is Wiseau’s unique view of the world. It is impossible to imagine that this story is not drawn heavily from autobiography. As the AVClub article says, someone hurt Wiseau, badly.
The title is perfect, because this film is immensely contained. Almost everything happens in one room, and the plot and the characters likewise seem trapped there, venturing out into sunny San Francisco from time to time but returning over and over to that one space. Despite Wiseau’s prominence in the material around the film, we see a lot more of the unfaithful Lisa. She is a compelling villain; her vicious lies and extreme selfishness seem to stem primarily from the fact she’s a woman.
Others have noted that nothing much happens in the film; there’s a lot of incident, but very little plot development. I’d describe it slightly differently. I think that lots happens in this film, it’s just that it’s largely the same thing happening over and over again with slight variations. Johnny finds out about the affair three times in three different ways. The characters declare their core statements repeatedly: “I’m going to have some fun,” “He’s my best friend.” The same sex scene happens twice, using the same shots edited together in a slightly different order. All of this is in no way linear. (In fact, another AV Club article points out that time in this film doesn’t advance; although lots of things happen, the wedding is a month away at the end of the film just as it was at the start.)
It has instead the character of obsessive rumination. These are the tortured thoughts of someone lying awake at night going over and over everything that could have happened, all the different ways their partner might have betrayed them, all the good times that are irreversibly tainted, all the ways they might resolve this situation. You’re trapped in these inwardly spiralling thoughts for the duration of the film. It is a deeply intense experience. For me, it made the climax of the movie hugely shocking and viscerally powerful.
I almost want to think of the film as a piece of outsider art. Wiseau was helpless before his drive to create this film as an expression of his thoughts and feelings. He has radically exposed himself, and seems oblivious to this fact. What he has made does not fit within the standard mode of production for film or storytelling. It’s a deeply personal expression that creates its own world.
And, lest it seem like I’ve forgotten: it’s deeply terrible. It deserves every bit of the loving mockery it has gathered.
I found going to see this in the cinema was an incredibly worthwhile experience. I don’t know that I’ll ever go again – being trapped in Tommy Wiseau’s sweaty, clenched nightmares is not exactly my idea of a good time, even if there’s a bunch of other people there shouting out amusing comments. The Room lived up to its billing as an amazing late-night experience; to my surprise, I think it lived up to Wiseau’s personal hopes far more than he might ever have realized, and exposed far more of him than he could possibly have understood.
(Aside: this is one of the very few times I’ve seen Happy Birthday sung on-screen. In fact, I can’t recall another specific time. All due to copyright claims and related issues.)