So, does anyone out there in internet land remember this?
From 1997 to 1999, NBC broke new ground by webcasting a spin-off of the acclaimed show, Homicide: Life on the Street. It was called Homicide: Second Shift, and had its own cast of characters using Photoshop to get its characters into the same sets and locations as the TV show. Sometimes TV characters guested on the web version; occasionally web actors had cameos on the TV version. There was even a full-fledged crossover, the episode “Homicide.com” in the final season, which started on the web, had its second part on TV, then resolved itself on the web.
I was aware of Second Shift when it aired, but didn’t have the net access to engage with it at the time; and NZ’s broadcasts of Homicide were hardly in synch with the US broadcasts anyway. So it slipped by me.
I’m wondering if anyone out there remembers Second Shift, and particularly, if anyone can access copies of the material? It doesn’t seem to be included on any of the Homicide DVDs, even the big complete set. Surely it can’t be lost forever?
(I already posted this on the hive-mind of pop culture that is RPGnet’s Other Media forum, but garnered only tumbleweed. Help me, internets!)
More DomPost WTF
Today the Dominion Post, our capital city’s newspaper of record, features as its below-the-fold front page article the demented rantings of the online reactionary lunatics. (Not so prominent online, thankfully. The comments themselves are here, and they’re just as stupid as you might expect.)
Anyone who reads comments anywhere online will know these people – emboldened by anonymity, aggrieved by a world too complex for them, they seize the opportunity to decry political correctness and to call for a return to barbarism. They’re everywhere, sadly, but they are also a vanishingly small percentage of the total population.
They have been mercilessly lampooned for a long time, even by such outlets as the Private Eye, which for all its many virtues is hardly up with the play in the internet age. There is an addictive website devoted to ridiculing the more idiotic bletherings of this disgruntled rump. And yet, there they are, reported as front page news. As if they matter; as if they’re worth listening to.
Another fine journalistic decision by the DomPost. You know, I bet if you google for five minutes you can find people online calling for Obama to be lynched – that can be your front page story tomorrow!
That word –
The hippie quotient was surprisingly low… though there were the odd pair of ubiquitous multi-coloured stockings
– I do not think it means what you think it means.
Urban Driftwood
My first evar poetry publication? Yes it is, and more.
Urban Driftwood is a collection of writing (poetry and prose) by some young Wellington-based Kiwis. It’s about the journey from being young to being less young in a city where the wind always blows. I’m one of the four writers, which should tip you off that this has been in the works for a long time: nine years, in fact, since Dan (of Freshly Ground) decided he was going to assemble it.
So this is writing from a decade ago. Best guess is that I was 18 when I wrote the earliest piece and 22 when I wrote the latest one. When Dan was finally bringing UD into being earlier this year, I bravely resisted the temptation to revise or censor anything, so it is an authentic snapshot of me and my voice a decade back from now. There is still much to like – in fact, I think my favourite piece of mine was the aforementioned earliest one, a short prose piece called “Tyrage” that made its debut on the Victoria University electronic bulletin board system when I was a wee first-year.
The collection is a nice blend of voices, which was always Dan’s intent – he, Jane and Stephen all bring distinctive rhythms and styles and they balance each other well. Jane’s meditative simplicity, Stephen’s shaggy-dog shrugs of tone, Dan’s thoughtful density and my whatever. I am pleased to say that it lives up to Dan’s initial hope that we four writers together would be more than the sum of our parts.
So I commend to you, Urban Driftwood. Well done, Dan, on getting it done!
Urban Driftwood is available on Lulu, the lovely net-based print-on-demand service. For US$10 (plus freight) a copy will be printed and bound and dispatched to your door.
We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Linky
The only acceptable excuse for not regularly reviewing the best photoblog there is is that you only internet at work (some images include arty nudity). Everyone else, get on to it. It reliably makes me laugh, gasp, and marvel.
Last night I went along to the local Drinking Liberally, where the speaker was Gordon Campbell, brilliant journo formerly of the now-broken Listener, currently delivering incredible election coverage for a pittance over on Scoop. If you are a New Zealander and you have the slightest interest in the fate of this nation, you owe it to yourself to get on to his Election 08 coverage. Start right now with his latest piece, an analysis and discussion of our two main party leaders refusing to debate with our minor party leaders – in a proportional system, that’s a big call. Top-notch stuff by one of NZ’s best journalists, free to the web. You can’t go wrong.
No Right Turn linked to this and it is well worth your time: The Guardian writes about Jamie Oliver’s new show. The continuing social/political awakening of Jamie Oliver is one of the more welcome developments of the last decade – he is an incredibly high-profile figure with the capacity to reach a huge audience and shift perceptions around the incredibly important subject of food. This article writes about how, in his new show, he comes face to face with the UK working class who have lost the ability to manage their own nutrition; and, even more interesting, it shows recent research that demonstrates how buying crappy food makes rational sense to those on a tight budget. Class still structures UK society.
Speaking of class, check this out: this is the page to register to buy tickets at the Royal Opera House in London. Have a look at the drop-down options for “Title” – it goes somewhat further than “Mr, Mrs, Ms.” (This one tipped off by the Private Eye.)
ObYouTube: David Letterman reacts to John McCain snubbing him. He doesn’t take it too well. (This one has been all over the web for the last week.)
And finally, this was surely the most incredible kids media content of the 80s – the ridiculous, gory and downright amazing Dinosaur Attacks cards from Topps.
Monbiot’s ‘Heat’
Last night just before lights out I finished George Monbiot’s Heat: How We Can Stop The Planet Burning, his recent book about halting runaway carbon dioxide emissions before the world fries. This is a 2007 revision of the 2006 first publication, generously gifted to me by Ed Lynden-Bell, and it displays Monbiot’s habitual tenacity for referencing, with 50 pages of endnotes balancing 215 pages of content.
Heat is the climate change version of his Age of Consent; that book said, I’m calling for change in how we run the world, and I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and actually say how a new and fairer social system would function. It’s a compelling vision, full of ideas, mustering the thoughts of dozens of others and assembling them into a new way to order the world. His vision has its doubters, but as he himself said in that book’s final chapter, at least it is a vision, and it should give future conversations a place to begin.
In Heat, Monbiot takes the same approach with climate change. He puts his money where his mouth is and comes up with a way to reduce C02 output to safe levels without returning civilisation to the medieval era. Again, it is a densely-researched and compelling vision, calling on alternative technologies, changes in method, expectation adjustments, etc. He targets transport emissions, retail sector emissions, home energy use emissions, and considers the use of renewable energy sources and better-designed energy grids with admirable candour. He hits his targets in every area except air travel – flights, he concludes, can’t be rationalised and air travel will have to be massively cut.
It says that change is possible, that our situation is not irreversible; but also that change will need to be massive. Very few areas of our lives will be untouched by transformations necessary to keep our ecosystem going. It will take a great deal of effort, and crucially, a great deal of political or corporate leadership. And that, of course, is the trick; we have the means to save ourselves, but the decisionmakers are not primed to act.
My optimism is renewed from yesterday’s low point, but there’s a need for action. No Right Turn passes on a Guardian report saying that the need is urgent. But we end up in the same place we’ve been for years: I just some guy. What can I do?
Monbiot’s answer is to join a group like the Campaign Against Climate Change or People and Planet. My answer is similar: don’t underestimate the power you have if you engage. Here in NZ at least, the levers of government are all laid out ready for you to push. Letters you send and phone calls you make actually have an impact on local, regional and national government. To a lesser extent the same is true in other democracies.
So join an outfit or get a small group together and do something. (I’ve been supervising nearly 25 such small groups up at university who have been buzzing over the last month, changing their lifestyles and reaching out to affect others.) Change is possible, and it’s up to us.
[Hmm. Four climate change posts in a row. Guess it’s been on my mind this week…]
Ice Core Man
Yesterday I attended a talk by Lonnie Thompson, Ohia State University prof and paleoclimatologist. He was the guy in Inconvenient Truth (one of many Gore talked about as “my friend [name]” who was extracting ice cores to measure changes in climate over thousands of years – that famous moment in the movie with the long graph and the hydraulic lift was based on data from his work.
In amongst some fun stories about yak-based transport systems, the message was sobering. Thompson focused his talk on glacial retreat, explaining that glaciers are the “canaries in the coal mine” for climate change because they are so sensitive to all the indices of climate. Most of his talk was a series of before and after photos of glaciers, all around the world, thinning and retreating and turning into lakes. The image that sticks in my memory is a flower bulb kicked out of a melting glacier that was frozen 5200 years ago – so we know that that particular glacier has never retreated this far in that period. (Mention was also made of Otzi the iceman who also was frozen 5200 years ago – turns out there was an unprecedented cold snap around that time).
The overall message was both clear and familiar: global climate is changing, rapidly, as a result of human activity; we are heading for a tipping point after which change will drive itself and we’ll be helpless to pull it back; if we don’t achieve massive changes swiftly then we are in big, big trouble.
And this on the same day that the wind farm opponents celebrated keeping their pristine views of unblemished hillsides.
Like Stephen, I am not exactly bursting with optimism today.
Related: leader of NZ’s free-market party, ACT, declares himself a climate change sceptic
Aaargh.
A report by Greater Wellington regional council recommends a five-year moratorium on wind farm development at Belmont Regional Park, five years after the council called the site a “world-class wind farm opportunity”… “With the increase in wind energy projects in New Zealand, issues of cumulative effects on the landscape and visual aspects are starting to arise,” said the report, written by the council’s manager of development and strategy.
The above is from this Dom Post article, which ran this as a front-page story and presents the ‘visual aspects’ as the main reason for the moratorium. Surely, surely we are past the point where ‘visual effects’ should be halting a project like this? How much closer to disaster do we have to skate before the scenic views of our hills, nice as they are, are put in proper perspective?
Aargh. The report is not available yet on the GW website. I look forward to reading it for myself.
Green Billboards 2008
I just want to give some recognition to the best design work of the NZ election campaign thus far, and it has come from an unexpected source – the Green party. The Greens don’t have a history of excellence in the visual design stakes, and their hoardings for the last election were (IMHO) pretty damn ugly:
The whole series of 2005 billboards is visible here.
This year, they have put some serious resource into the billboard campaign – either that, or they’ve stumbled across an exceptional designer willing to work for cheap. Everything about their ’08 boards is on point. Check out this one, which was the first one I saw:
It’s perfect stuff – the composition of the image is great, the broad horizon speaks to the Green’s themes, even the demeanour of the model is well-placed. The simple, simple, simple message is genius. And I love the typeface of the key message (although I would have preferred the “vote for” typeface to match). Best of all, it works on the big scale – it looks fine on the screen, but enormous on the side of a building it really throws weight.
It’s great to see. Billboard design has symbolic importance for this election, thanks to the role played in the 2005 election by the highly contentious (and very well-designed) “iwi/kiwi billboards”. Sure enough, googling up the images for this post has turned up much interest and praise, some of which is summarised here at FrogBlog. Labour partisans The Standard even fear these billboards are too slick!
I think this is a significant step up in game that the Greens need to make if they want to make it happen this election. They have clearly decided internally to campaign on the “vote for your children” line, which seems like a risky choice to me but executed this well they might pull it off. I’m impressed with these billboards, and their new leader Russel Norman is giving a good account of himself (even though he seems to be hated in the house?). You go, Greenies.
Friday, w/ Assorted Linky
Your assortment of linky this Friday includes:
Concept Ships – a blog of conceptual drawings of nifty spaceships. Breathtaking imagery. Good for SF and design heads or anyone who likes nice pictures of things.
The Superest, another drawing blog, in which an artist comes up with a wacky superhero/villain, then another artist devises someone who would defeat them, and so on. The first twenty or so were nice but meh, then somehow it found its groove and since then it’s been amazingly inventive. Plus: funny drawings!
Via the Alligator, a New Yorker piece on Sarah Palin, elites and moose: “Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there.”
And speaking of moose – how about some baby moose and their mama playing in a sprinkler?
And finally, a free-in-pdf comic in which a gorilla who is also a luchadore fights creatures from the Cthulhu mythos. I linky you…. El Gorgo!