Swingers Linky

Widget that takes any song and makes it Swing, by lengthening the first beat and shortening the second. With examples: Sweet Child of Mine, Cream, Money for Nothing. Ah heck, I’ll embed the last one:
Money for Nothing (swing version) by TeeJay

Via the Alligator, the Bad Translator machine

Another machine to suck your time/amuse your workmates: Six Degrees of Black Sabbath. Jean Grae to Julee Cruise in 7 steps! (via Public Address, who got from Ol’ Dirty B’ard to NZ Christian singer Brooke Fraser in 14 steps)

And you’ll shortly be hearing about how Sex and the City 2 is actually about oppression of women in the Muslim world. Gobsmacking misjudgement of what people want out of SatC2, or gobsmacking misjudgement of what people behind SatC2 can convincingly deliver? You decide! But make sure you don’t miss Seattle’s The Stranger dishing out the scorn. Contains spoilers.

Someone cares about this an awful lot. Traumatic childhood experience? It is easy to imagine such a thing. Tights are not pants.

My buddy Julian is getting married to the lovely Sabine (they’re getting married in Lebanon and I’m gutted I can’t go – how many times in my life will I get invited to a wedding in Lebanon? Not many!) Sabine’s brother Georges is a singer-songwriter in Montreal, and has just released an EP on Canadia’s Ambrosia label: Dark Rooms Have No Corners. It’s pretty cool. Here’s the first track, Feather:

Via Jack, News In Briefs, which collects the best bits of The Sun‘s Page 3 girls – their opinions on current events.

Via Ryan Paddy, the Museum of Bad Art, which is an actual museum. It has its own acronym: MOBA.

And finally, via Dangerous Minds which is where I get most of my linky these days to be honest, the Bay City Rollers and Ann Margaret perform in front of the most amazing audience you could ever want. Warning: includes knitting.

Conserve Versus Converse


Heard Kelvyn Eglinton of Newmont Waihi Gold on National Radio this morning making the case for drilling into conservation land. His line (people who’ve had media training always repeat their line word for word several times unless they’re very skilled) was that there’s plenty of low-value conservation land in the protected Schedule 4 territories, so lets see if we find some high-value minerals there and then we’ll have a conversation about what to do.

There have been well over 30,000 submissions on the government’s mining proposals. That is a phenomenal number – one for every hundred voters in the country. It’s impossible to know how many are against the mining of schedule four land, but I think 95% would be a fair guess.

I think that means, Kelvyn, that we’ve already had the conversation. What’s more, the government know it – they are carefully preparing a backdown, with the man responsible Gerry Brownlee seizing on a minor issue to pointedly distance himself from Newmont. It’s clearly the enormous vote-loser everyone sensible expected it to be. We’re no closer to understanding why the Nats didn’t see this steamroller of negative public opinion a mile off, they certainly haven’t revealed any late-stage maneuvers to show they were controlling the story the whole time. It isn’t because they’re poor at media management – witness their expert delivery of the budget, as smooth a piece of media control as has ever been seen in this country. They just didn’t see it as a problem until it was far too late. I can only presume they really are that out of touch with the national identity and with what New Zealanders truly value.

Its pleasing to see a grass-roots opposition movement really take off. Kelvyn Eglinton’s conversation is over before it starts. And that makes me happy.

(More info: http://www.2precious2mine.org.nz/ )

Suburban Gothic

Cal posted the other day about getting into the Hutt groove. It’s been playing on my mind, too, as I settle back into the neighbourhood of my yoof. I can feel old channels reopening, old patterns reigniting. Leafy streets and low garden walls and drawn curtains and the line of the hills. Older marrieds, high schoolers. Empty streets after dark. The feeling that everything is one step back from view.

Suburbs work out community differently, spacing everyone out, reducing the social importance of physical proximity. Freedom to grow each plot of land in a different way; people do. Lots of worlds unhindered.

We don’t stop at the skin. We’re networked, social, contextual. Our environment is part of who and what we are. Suburbs shape a particular imagination. Curious, respectful, measured, gothic. Vast tracts of surface calm, punctuated by moments of upheaval which quickly sink from view. Intrusions from unstable worlds. The suburbs encourage an imaginative structure where causality is concealed, even impenetrable. Where the observer cannot uncover the web of connections that would make sense of an event. I’m reading ‘The Big Sleep’ right now, and Chandler’s detective stories are chronicles of the big city. There, the fundamental principle is that of overlap, of constant surface tension, the precise opposite of the suburban reality.

The first novel I wrote, “in move”, was set in the world I knew best: the Hutt Valley, mid-90s, teenage boys. (Brian maintains it should be titled “Hutt Boys”.) It’s intensely autobiographical in the sense that it captures the emotional truth I felt growing up here. Looking back on it now, after over a decade away from here, I can see more clearly how it also captures the place. The logic of that novel is essentially suburban. The four central characters are all sealed in their own impenetrable, unstable worlds, and the story is about what happens when they are forced to cross boundaries and negotiate new alignments. The story wouldn’t work in a different environment.

It’s good to be back. I know how this works, I know how my creative energy plays out in this space, I know how the hills look in the morning. I’m excited to see what we can reach.

Facebook will win

“Facebook is my pick for the social networking site that will still be thriving in five years when MySpace and Bebo and Hi5 and all have succumbed.” – me, June 4, 2007*

You almost can’t surf the interwebz these days without coming across the Facebook backlash. It’s a deserved backlash – Facebook, seemingly under the direct guidance of its founder Mark Zuckerberg, has been playing fast and loose with the data of its users, and doing its best to keep users unaware of what it was up to.

So I have several friends who’ve quit Facebook entirely recently, and anti-Facebook links are enthusiastically circulated. (Including this great tool that scans your Facebook privacy settings for you.)

It kinda seems like the end of days for Facebook; or at the least, the beginning of the end. (Or maybe the middle of the end, with Twitter as the beginning of the end.)

But you know what? Facebook isn’t going anywhere. All of this activity I’m seeing, and you’re probably seeing too if you’re reading this, is just a storm in a teacup. Clamber out of the teacup and check out the rest of the table, and you’ll see it’s not stormy at all out there.

Here are the three reasons why Facebook is going to keep trucking on:

1. Sharing photos and holding events
Facebook *owns* the event-coordination space. You can manage invitations and details and everything right there in one spot, and then you can share the photos you took! For the past year, people not on Facebook will have noticed that they are starting to get forgotten – they’ll only hear about events afterwards, in passing. Facebook’s fighting it out with Flickr and Picasa for photo-sharing too, and my guess is it’s winning – Flickr and Picasa are where people who care about images go, but for people who just want to show pics of their friends to those same friends, why would you step outside Facebook’s door?

2. Farmville
Wiki says: “Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010. The total FarmVille users are over 20% of the users of Facebook and over 1% of the population of the world.”

The number of people who love to play Farmville is several orders of magnitude greater than all those who care about online privacy. These people are going nowhere.

3. Where do I log in? I can’t find where I log in.
If you never read about the “where do I log in?” meme, you really should. Find it here. Basic lesson: a significant chunk of internet users fundamentally don’t understand what they are doing online. These people want to log into Facebook. Arcane privacy concerns will not play to this audience at all.

So: Zuckerberg is right. Facebook can do what it wants to privacy settings and it will still triumph.

It makes me wonder, what would force change? I dunno about this. Three guesses, though:
* making it personal – if some aspect of this argument really gets to Zuckerberg himself, then he could lead a major change. I don’t know what it would take to reach the guy, though, he seems quite impervious to any outside agument.
* making it legal – get the U.S. govt involved (no other govt will do) and even the biggest internet website will have to play along. But how to raise that behemoth in a way that works to the good, and not the randomly destructive?
* stoking fear – the only thing that will get users off Facebook (apart from a competitor who can make a good show and stick around a long time to soak up users) is fear. People would ditch Facebook because of fear. These fears would have to be primal and probably irrational. I don’t know where they might come from. That would work.

So I guess I’m expecting Facebook to stick around, and to be honest I’m not too worried about that. I hope the backlash does make some major changes in how Facebook does what it does, but its fundamental service – photos and events – works well for me. I dip into the stream of chatter from my friends about once a week and that’s always quite fun. As far as I’m concerned, it can stay.

That said, I’m still waiting for the integration of Facebook social networking with mobile devices (iPhone et al.) Twitter has scored big with its comfortable fit on the mobile platform, but an integrated Facebook-as-cellphone-OS can’t be far away now, and once that (or its open-protocol relative) hits, there’s no going back – next stop, mirrorshades.

*I got it wrong – it only took two years for MySpace, Bebo and Hi5 to fall.

Rumpus Linky

First up, a notice – many local readers will recall the spectacular Rumpus parties of previous years. d3vo is not hosting one in 2010 (and we missed 2009 too) because he’s getting his DJ on at a gig called Speed of Sound. Friday June 4th, free entry, scratch that rumpus itch!

Now, some linky.

Bus driver gets a birthday surprise. (First seen via Hamish R, rapidly propagating across the internets because it’s lovely.)

Real-life Iron Man suit. And real life Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. In my day we just built Airfix models.

How recipes should look

25 photorealistic drawings made with a BIC ballpoint pen (warning: a few drawn boobs, still probably safe for work) (via Adrian Parker)

Furry Like Me: investigative journo takes on furry subculture

I Judged A Book By Its Cover (via Suraya)

Schoolkid-built robots perform to “Robo Boogie” by Flight of the Conchords (via Simon Carryer)

Experience 1970 through a JC Penney catalogue *shudder* (via bartok)

America’s ten most corrupt capitalists

And finally… U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan remake the video to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’. Joyous. See it to believe it.

ICONS

People who pre-ordered ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying received their electronic copy yesterday. (Hard copy coming soon.) That’s my name on the cover, because some sections of the book are by me, but they’re pretty small-fry. The major action is by ace supers RPG designer Steve Kenson, who pulled the system together and did a bang-up job of it.

ICONS is a quick’n’easy role-playing game for four-colour superhero action. It’s geared for broad strokes stuff – Nazi Gorillas in Antarctica, Mt Rushmore coming to life as a four-headed goliath, that sort of thing. I have a lot of affection for it, and not just because my name’s on the cover.

The real selling point, and it surprises me to say it, is that you randomly generate your superhero – there are a bunch of charts to roll on that tell you what super powers you end up with, and then it’s up to you to make sense of all of them. This works really well with the big, bold style of ICONS, where you are free to come up with characters somewhat wackier than the usual – there’s a reason the exemplar hero is Saguaro the Man-Cactus. A big part of the fun people will have is sitting down in a group and coming up with some heroes together.

(This is also funny because random generation was always a problem in previous games to use this approach, like Villains & Vigilantes and Golden Heroes. Those games didn’t encourage this wild-and-woolly aesthetic, which I think is the difference. Credit also to Dan Houser, the illustrator, for showing exactly how a Man-Cactus is a cool character, and by that example how your weirdo hero will also make sense in play.)

Anyway, ICONS does a great job at supporting one of the best kinds of role-playing game fun: sitting around with your friends being wildly creative and making each other crack up. It’s good stuff, and I’m delighted to have my name on it.

ICONS at the Cubicle 7 store

Also, announced in the bundle, some PDF-only adventures, including one by me and one by occasional-commenter-here Theron:

Reservoir Hill (NZ, 2009)

Locally-made digital Emmy-winning web series Reservoir Hill had an old media screening in omnibus form over the weekend, and I ended up watching much of the broadcast.

It’s about a girl named Beth who arrives in a new subdivision and finds everyone reacts to her in an unusual way. Very soon she finds out why, and that stakes out territory for the show somewhere between Twin Peaks and Shutter Island. The rest of the show follows her investigations into the mystery, shot through with moments of teen drama.

It’s a fascinating production, very well-made, making much of its anonymous suburban setting (it was shot out Porirua way). The colour palette is very Twilight, all washed-out colours and muted tones, stylistic and moody but not as over-the-top as Twilight seemed to be from the few minutes of that I watched.

Most fascinating was the interactive elements. After each episode, with Beth facing a decision, online viewers were encouraged to text her advice. These text messages were referenced by Beth in video blogs she made, and also seemed to affect the direction of the show: the character’s phone would beep, we’d see a close-up of her phone displaying a text message giving her advice, and then she’d follow the advice.

I’d love to know more about the logistics of this. Co-Director David Stubbs was interviewed by the Herald at the start of the project and said that they would actually let the text messages drive the production:

Each week scriptwriters will be responding to Beth’s texts and Bebo messages and deciding which suggestions, if any, will form the rest of the plot.

They will film episodes two days before screening. “It’s an amazing and quite frightening logistical effort,” Stubbs says.

A Good Morning interview elaborates – the episode goes live Monday evening, and they accept input until Weds evening, write script for the next instalment Thurs morning, prep Friday, shoot over the weekend, and cut it for release on Monday day.

This sounds crazy, but they’re all sticking to the story. They must have a pretty tight structure in place already, with locations and cast members lined up, so the script isn’t written from nothing and production can be developed based on that. It’s an incredible logistical mission even with the most minimal interactive elements.

And it clearly worked – the Bebo page and the message boards testify to the fact that they had viewers enthusiastically giving advice to Beth, and winning the Emmy is huge. There’s some elements I can quibble with, like the interactive audience not quite making sense within the fiction, but that’s small stuff. Overall the show is a great achievement, and it’s nice to see some pitch-black local drama for a teen audience.

It’s worth a look, I reckon. First episode is here – it’s six minutes long. Check it out.

Funny People (USA, 2009)


IMDB entry. (We watched the extended version on DVD, so I might refer to bits missing from the cinema cut.)

My affection for the works of Judd Apatow is well-known, so it pains me to say that this one is Not Great. However, I liked it a lot anyway. Your mileage may well vary.

Seth Rogen is a young comedian, starting out. Adam Sandler is an old comedian, jaded and terminally ill. There are two stories running here: young guy gets a break from old guy, and old guy tries to find a way to patch things up with his old flame.

This is mostly a dramatic film set within the world of comedy performers, and so it gets to have its cake with the funny stuff and eat it too with the serious stuff. Mostly that hangs together well, although there are one or two funny-but-real moments that don’t work at all, like Seth Rogen man-blubbing.

In fact, Rogen is a weak link throughout. And that’s the second thing that pains me to say, as my affection for Mr Rogen is also well-known, dating from his Freaks and Geeks days. He’s out of his depth here though, and although he’s game as anything and tries really hard the engine just doesn’t run for him here. Sandler is great, once again showing off the dramatic chops that mean “Best Actor Adam Sandler” is surprisingly likely to be a real event some time in the future. Leslie Mann in the part of the Director’s Wife is actually pretty damn good too.

Those two stories mentioned above? It’s clear throughout that they don’t fit in the same movie. An attempt to unify them with a climactic race-to-the-airport scene just falls completely flat. But I enjoyed this film anyway, because it felt almost painfully truthful now and then, and was really funny a bunch of times, and coming away from it I actually thought I understood what being a comedian might be like. (Plus, Eric Bana’s small role as the husband of the ex-girlfriend is marvellous, and I could watch Eminem yelling unwarranted insults at Ray Romano all day.)

So it’s even more of a big, rambling structural mess than Apatow’s other films, but it’s always watchable and sometimes even surprising. It’s not a classic for the ages, but its certainly not a failure. Watch it sometime, if only for the glimpses into comedy behind-the-scenes.

Ghost Linky


Modern Vermeer – via Allan Varney

Design for the first world: developing world designers solve first world problems.

The Knifeman has begun a series of reviews/discussions of ghost stories. So far: Ghostwatch, Candyman, Haunting of Hill House, The Fog, Poltergeist.

Dude buys all of 2000AD from issue 1 to issue 1100-ish. Dude blogs each issue as he reads ’em. He’s almost done. Find the ones you read as a kid and relive your yoof.

Classic Star Wars trilogy, in lego, in 2 minutes:

A couple minutes of the massively crowd-sourced Star Wars remake/homage, Star Wars Uncut

Star Wars Uncut “The Escape” from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

The Gator finds some old photos, including a rare shot of me rockin’ the Abe Lincoln beard. ROCKIN’ that beard I say.

The Wire characters on a D&D alignment chart (via the Dim-Post).

And finally… I always wondered.

Of Tax Rates and Bob

This post would be much better if I actually had the numbers it needs. But I’m posting it anyway, because I’m not afraid to look like an idiot on the internets.

This story from Radio NZ was mentioned on the radio news as I was waking up this morning. It included a quote from Roger Douglas, from the economic-uberliberal ACT party. I can’t recall the numbers he cited (can anyone find ’em? I just listened to another news broadcast and they didn’t repeat this story) but it was along the lines of “the top (small)% of earners pay (much bigger)% of the tax”.

Keep that in mind and review this graph from No Right Turn, that shows almost half the wealth of NZ is concentrated in just 10% of the population:

This makes clear that Douglas is keeping the other half of the equation covered. With such great wealth concentration, it doesn’t seem nearly so problematic that there’s tax concentration. In fact, isn’t tax concentration exactly what we should expect from a well-functioning system?

And as a complete aside, I love the saga of Bob, the limited-English Chinese youth who ran away from home and slept rough in Otara – the roughest, toughest, scariest-to-us-white-folks place in NZ – where he was befriended by a Samoan youth and taken in by that family. And they decided to call him Bob.

Faleto’a, who already has seven sons, welcomed him into her family. “This is my beloved son Bob,” she told Campbell Live. “I love him just the same as my boys.”

This, when tensions between Asian and Pasifika ethnic groups in Auckland are rising. It’s just a good reminder that people are basically awesome.