From The Morgue

It is the birthday of Strong Light today. Now you know.
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From the Online Weirdness file: a petition to save the TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles from cancellation. The one complication: not only has the TV show in question not been cancelled yet, it hasn’t even started screening. (Yes, it’s a conscious attempt to poke fun at trigger-happy TV networks, Fox in particular; but still, that is quite weird, yeah?)
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A beaut tiki tour through Kiwi slang. A lot of it is a few generations out of date, but it’s a good trip through the lexicon. Aussies and Brits will spot some crossover slang I’m sure. (I can’t remember where I picked this up from. Put your hand up if it was your blog. EDIT: It was, of course, the redoubtable off-black!)
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Scott McCloud, comics creator and comics theorist, produced the first two parts of something called ‘The Right Number’ back in ’03. It has a unique presentation method that you really need to see for yourselves.
This was under the now-defunct Bitpass micropayments system. Micropayments look increasingly unlikely to materialise, so with Bitpass gone McCloud has made the published parts free. Part Three is meant to be coming soon, also to be free. Definitely check this one out.

When our national museum, Te Papa, unveiled its logo to be a big ol’ fingerprint, there was a roar of condemnation and approbrium. Countless wits offered up the sentiment that they would be quite happy to be paid an awful lot of money to put a thumbprint on a piece of card. Kiwis thought the logo was a joke and a rip-off.
Wrong. The fingerprint is a great logo. I stood up for it then and I stand up for it now. Logo designers get a lot of abuse they don’t deserve. My personal involvement with design, spectating from an administration role at the Massey University design school, impressed upon me just how tricky it was to get things right.
All of the above is just to establish my credentials so that when I say the London Olympics 2012 logo is a design trainwreck of the highest order, you don’t think I’m bashing it just for the fun of it. No, I really mean it. This is a disaster that graphic designers will drink to for decades to come.
I first heard about it here, just yesterday, as James Wallis expounded on its crapness. And, y’know, he’s right, as he so often is. Take a look:

These jagged pink chunks represent the numbers 2012 and… and something. Just take a second to read the shape. It’s rocky and riddled with fissures. It looks like something that has been smashed. There’s no guide for the eye giving you a sensible way to look at it. The sharp turns are not welcoming. The negative space is nearly crowded out of existence, providing no relief. The colours are loud and aggressive. Quite frankly, it looks altogether too pleased with itself.
So far, so rubbish. Then the esteemed Mr Wallis linked across to here, where you could watch the video introducing the logo. Motivated by the fact that James professes to have a mate in there playing wheelchair basketball, I clicked on that link and…
…and shook my head in astonishment. Because there was a warning beside the video:

(Image rescued from google’s cache.)
That’s right. The introductory promotional video for the logo for London’s Olympic games had a seizure warning attached to it.
Now, sometimes you get crappy design outcomes. You get bad briefs, poor ideas, foolish choices, stupid development, and you end up with a graphic design turd. But this – this just beggars belief. It passed across everyone’s desk and no-one ever thought, well, hang on, perhaps we don’t want a promotional video that will send epileptics into fits. Perhaps that would be a bad look.
I watched the video and I almost had a seizure. Gigantic primary-coloured graphics flashed across the screen. It was rubbish. It was so rubbish it actually was bad for your health.
Anyway, if you didn’t see it yesterday, you missed your chance. It’s gone now. The BBC has the story:
Epilepsy fears over 2012 footage

A segment of animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympics has been removed from the organisers’ website after fears it could trigger epileptic seizures. Prof Graham Harding, who developed the test used to measure photo-sensitivity levels in TV material, said it should not be broadcast again. Charity Epilepsy Action said it had received calls from people who had suffered fits after seeing it…

And that, my friends, is how its done at the very highest level. An inspiration to us all.
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Rubbish as that was – and I suspect the logo will be redesigned or abandoned entirely before the year is out – I actually have sympathy for the other marketing angle for the games. The 2012 games committee are pushing it as “everybody’s games”, and trying to use it as a motivational tool for people to get out and take some risks or make some changes in their own lives. That’s a laudable goal, and I approve. You can see more of that take on things in the movie that replaced the Olympic Seizure Heroes one.
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Just heard from Jenni that our 48-hour film was mentioned twice at the finals – we came runner-up in ‘Best Makeup’ and in the top three for ‘Best Script’. That’s incredibly cool! Yay team!
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And another reason why the internet entertains me – I can spread the good word about the previously-mentioned Judd Apatow interview to someone who hadn’t heard about it despite being a cast member in Freaks & Geeks. Heh.

What do I do when short on time? I share something amazing from YouTube, of course! In this case: Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash performing together.

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I sent out a morgueatlarge travel email about Melbourne. For those not subscribed, this can be read here. If you thought you were subscribed but didn’t get this, well, looks like you’re not – send me an email and we’ll sort you out.

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I have made friends with a lot of babies lately. I seem to be quite good at it.

Finally got a chance to see Derren Brown’s Seance, as TVNZ decided to screen it, over three years after the original UK broadcast. This was the show when psychological magician Brown staged a seance for a dozen students, then revealed at the end that the spirit they had so convincingly contacted was in fact an actress. It caused a minor media blowup in the UK, although nothing like the reaction to the Russian Roulette gag where Brown apparently relied on his ability to manipulate someone to avoid firing a blank round at his own head. (Both are summarised at Derren’s wikipedia page.)
As previously noted in this blog, I love Derren Brown. His mixture of psychological tricks, sleight of hand and misdirection is blinding to watch, and his absolute confidence wins me over every time. Every word he says is calculated to have exactly the right effect, and it’s astonishing because he seems quite happy to improvise, trusting in his command of his material to not put a single foot wrong.
One of the tricks Brown uses a lot is his ability to put susceptible people into a trance-like state of suggestibility, what we commonly refer to as hypnosis. Hypnosis is a deeply weird thing. While everyone agrees that the subjective experience of hypnosis is authentic and dramatic, there is no consensus about what the heck is actually going on. Does it even exist, or is it an elaborate learned performance? Cal had me wondering tonight whether I’d be susceptible – I’ve never tried and don’t ever really wish to. I think I could be, but my fierce analytical interest in all this stuff might mean I’m not. How mysterious.
This little wander through the web also turned up a great quote that seems quite insightful about how we process and understand truth via television:

JAMY: Pointing the camera at the audience.
DERREN: It’s all about reactions. Very interesting, isn’t it? Because people who would not be that interested in watching a magician on television–in a more mainstream light entertainment kind of show, where you might have a fixed camera watching a guy at a table where you see everything so fairly–people will say they don’t believe it because it’s on TV. And yet you watch Blaine’s show, and sometimes you’re seeing the same trick that you’ve seen Copperfield or Paul Daniels or whoever, there are parallels there–and yet you believe in it so much when Blaine does it. And yet the rules are far less stringent. The camera is all over the place sometimes, and yet you believe it more.
JAMY: Because the real question with magic on TV is always credibility, and yet there’s not an absolute black-and-white way to achieve that.
DERREN: No. Apart from stumbling across this idea that it is all about reactions, and that what makes it real is this thing that we all know only exists in the head of the spectator. And suddenly a show comes along that is all about those reactions. It’s a show of people freaking out. And when you watch that, you just buy it, and you believe it, and you’re there, and you’re forced into sharing that reaction, and questioning what you’ve seen, and it’s a really simple and really great idea.

As a final note, it’s worth pointing out that Brown is a magician, and while he denies using confederates, he confirms that many traditional magician cheats are part of his techniques, and not all of it is psychology. The famous gag where Brown hypnotises a guy playing an arcade game then puts him in a real-life mockup of the game, hunting zombies, seems to me an obvious setup. Regardless, Brown is clearly very very good at things like cold reading and suggestion (there’s a great description in his book Pure Effect of how he uses psychological techniques to suggest a particular card to someone). I love him anyways.
(Those with high google-fu may still be able to locate copies of several of Brown’s books online in pdf form. Worth it if you can find them.)

I think I’ve found a social networking thing that works for me. Most of them have left me cold, and the ones I liked – orkut, for instance – never got much traction and thus collapsed. Recently I received a prompt from a friend to join Facebook, so as a test I gave it my gmail address book to see who was already on. I was rewarded with a big list of people from my travelling days. So I signed up, got back in easy contact with all of them, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the whole Facebook interface and system.
Facebook has also, just recently, broken out of the North-American-college-student demographic and gone much much wider. Whether this is a temporary surge or a long-term thing I don’t know, but right now 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. On the other hand, Warren Ellis – who is good at this stuff – thinks Facebook is useless, so I might be proved hideously wrong. Anyway: my profile.
(Besides, social networking sites will only really take off when they become native features of a cellphone network, which is a good few years away yet.)
Also, from the Onion: MySpace outage leaves millions friendless.

I hate waiting for buses. But I try to be a good public-transport moose.
Today, I thought to myself, I am going from new apartment to Dale’s game – do I drive, so when it finishes I can get home quickly? No! There is a bus outside Dale’s that will take me right home! It comes at 10.23 and if I miss that there is another at 10.53 and every half hour after that! I can be a good public-transport moose and, worst case scenario, I wait half an hour!
I reach the bus stop at 10.20. No bus comes. At 11.16 I text the bathless one and beg her to come and pick me up because I am starving and I have a cold and WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO BUS?
At 11.20 there is a bus. Stupid buses.
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Also: Wellingtonians who drive – how is that bypass traffic chaos working out?

Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki continues to dream about achieving political power. He fails to understand that New Zealand is very different to the USA, and the urging of his US mentors is only setting him up for failure.
In a splendid example of this self-defeating blindness, he mustered out his Destiny Church to protest against a conference on religious tolerance.
The best thing I’ve read about it has been Matt over at the Xenodochian, discussing Tamaki’s claim that New Zealand is a Christian nation with characteristic insight. Go read.
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Meanwhile, looney-tunes US cultist Fred Phelps has for a long time drawn mockery from pretty much everyone for the views his sect promotes. And when you watch this video you’ll see exactly why, once you’ve finished gawping/laughing in disbelief/crying/laughing and crying and gawping all at once. It’s a parody of ‘We Are The World’ called ‘God Hates The World’. And, yes, all of these singers are desperately sincere – the Phelps doctrine is that God hates everyone except Phelps and his circle.
Enjoy. And be very afraid.

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Oh, just remembered! Courtesy the other moose – a big big article about Freaks & Geeks/Undeclared/40-Year Old Virgin maestro Judd Apatow, concerning his new film. If you are reading this and don’t know any of these references, consider yourself urged to correct that situation forthwith.

Mostly I ignore online petitions. They tend to be poorly considered and unlikely to make any kind of difference and it’s easy to ignore them. However, these two were well worth my time and I think they might be worth yours as well:
Avaaz.org is attempting to build the largest ever petition about climate change, to submit to the G8+5 leaders who are soon meeting in Germany. As I write they have hit 209,204 signees, on their way to 225,000 – that’s a jump in about 10,000 from the start of today, if I remember right. It’s great to be so close to the goal – click through and sign it , and keep that bar moving closer to the end…
Amnesty’s flotilla to close Guantanamo was recommended to me by idiot/savant of No Right Turn this weekend; he described with great enthusiasm his jet-ski-riding wild-haired avatar. The neat thing is when you sign this petition, you get to devise a character to represent you – what they look like, what they wear, and what transport they are taking to Guantanamo. It’s nifty. Have a go!

This year, I arrived on the set of our 48-hour film early on at their second location, up by Carter Observatory in the gardens. In contrast to last year’s rainy mudfest, this was a perfect day for an outdoor shoot, with abundant sun and minimal wind. It was great. Within seconds of my arrival I was deployed holding a shade to help with light control; with great efficacy the team shot a routine involving Fraser and Jenni smiling to camera with a horrifying prop and grotesque make-up job adding some interest. I managed to corner Frank long enough to find out what was going on – we’d drawn ‘science fiction or monster’ as a category, and having done monster last year, the brainstorming had turned up the idea of doing an alien travel-show segment about what to do when you visit earth.
Around about this point I noticed the large plastic-wrapped object alongside Fraser and Jenni was actually another person. This was Giffy, just one of several indignities to which she would be subjected across the day.
We raced through shots up at the gardens, then relocated to a downtown apartment to close out shooting for the day. Everything went fairly smoothly. I had a bunch of simple jobs, lifting and holding and carrying and doing a run back to base with a tape. (Although hix yesterday claimed I made two crucial suggestions shortly after arriving on set; that’s not how I remember it, but I’ll take the credit for them nonetheless!) It was neat. There was a tension on set, but a productive and energetic one, without any of the nasty stress that was so frequently kicking in last year. Weirdest moment for me was being instructed in how to use a wax strip, in order to use it on the hairy chestal region of Fraser; I ended up not having to fulfill that particular duty, and I can’t say it bothers me overmuch…
So shooting on our film, Destination Earth, was completed in record time (for our team!) and in post-production was given sound and computer effects that turned it into a very neat piece of cinema. It is, I think, easily the best of the three Jenni’s Angels entries.
It played on Thursday night, in the last heat of the evening. This year Cal and I went along, and it was a treat. There’s a great atmosphere at the heats, lots of clapping and smiles and nervous excitement. There were great things about every film on display, but Destination Earth was better than the lot of them (I can say this because I was just a runner and have no creative investment in the film) – except for the one with the sheep.
(The one with the sheep was an ‘unnecessary sequel’ to March of the Penguins. It was absolutely incredible. Half the cinema were making baa-baa noises on their way out.)
And so that’s the 48 experience over for another year. We’re still waiting for results, finding out how our film did and there are final screenings and award announcements and so forth to come, but the making and the screening are the big events and they’re done. It was a very different experience this time – just being a lackey, instead of a writer + monster, meant it was exponentially less draining for me, but a similar amount of fun.
There’s something fantastic about the 48. Hundreds of teams racing to make a short film in just 48 hours, all those great little bursts of culture produced. It makes me feel good. Nice one, the 48. Nice one.

Last night I became a godfather to Isaac Garrick Rabarts, son of my friends Dan and Chrissy. It was a real honour. I share godparent duties with Ian and Alana, so it’s a three-way split for being mindful of Isaac’s spiritual wellbeing.
I had to think a bit before I said yes to the invitation. A godfather has a specific responsibility to be a leader for the child in terms of God and Christianity, and I don’t take such a responsibility lightly. But I’m not exactly an active churchgoer at the moment. In fact, I suspect the category under which I best fit right now is ‘agnostic’.
However, and this is crucial, when I went through the long journey of self that led me to where I now am, I never turned away from faith. It receded from me, but perhaps I never entirely lost touch with it. I never misplaced my affection for the community of which my family was part, and in which I served for many years. To the contrary, I cherish my experiences, and value the formative role they played in my life. And so, after this reflection, I decided that yes, I could be a good and honest and genuine godfather, because in some way that I can’t quite put into words I am still part of that community; and while I am turned towards different questions now, I have not forgotten what came before.
So, once I settled in myself that I could take on this role with authenticity, I accepted Dan and Chrissy’s invitation; and I can tell you that it was a rare and special honour to be present for Isaac’s baptism and to be there as he was welcomed into that wonderful and supportive community. I look forward to his future!
I must note, however, that there are some things about being a godfather that I haven’t yet figured out. For example, I’m not sure when I start worrying about putting horses heads in people’s beds, etc. I was advised today that this generally waits at least until the child can talk, so I have a bit of time to study up. Just as well.