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Snail Chase In Wellington


Hear ye hear ye: delightful friend Ed’s film The Last Great Snail Chase is playing at the Film Archive in Wellington this Friday and Saturday (7pm both days).
This is a chance to see this very interesting, expressive and entertaining film on the big screen (or, indeed, at all).
Here’s an interview with Ed about the film at Lumiere, a couple of reviews at Flicks, and my post about seeing the premiere two years ago.

Writing Update – March

So my plan to write twelve short stories in twelve months continues. Yesterday I sent the first two for the year off to local lit journal JAAM.
Story #3, promised to readers a month ago, has been mothballed – it just doesn’t work and I don’t want to send anyone to sleep. I need to totally rethink what I’ve done there and see if I can salvage anything. There’s one really cool idea in it but everything else feels wrong and the cool idea isn’t leveraged well enough. Gah.
Story #4 is in progress. This one I actually sat down and made some notes about in advance of writing the first word, a level of planning that is rare for me. It helped me find the right way into the idea, I’m sure, but I’m now second-guessing where I thought I was going. Still, I think there’s promise in it. To be continued.
There is no story #5. Yet.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I could definitely be going faster but it does feel like things are getting done. So that’s good.
Meanwhile, I’m meeting with comics artist girl for an hour every Monday to work on page design and tighten up scripts. It is fruitful. I wish I could draw as well as she does.

My God, Its Full Of Twits

“I don’t get Twitter” is becoming the “I don’t watch television” of the interweb age; but Damien Christie shared a grim realization that if one doesn’t secure one’s preferred username now, one will be forced in future to take a grotesque approximation with underscores and numbers all through it. This prospect terrified me; I signed up immediately.
So now I’m on Twitter. I don’t need another online social channel, to be quite honest – I’m on Hoffspace for crying out loud, and that is sufficient for almost all my needs – but now that I’m on there, I have to admit I’m fascinated by the 140-character limit. That, my friends, is a hook.
No Dollhouse post this week, or probably for the rest of the season unless I get particularly enthused. Ep 7 was cool fun; watch this show. (35 characters…. sayyyyy…)

Gamblerz in Dubtown

Not many people turned up to see the Gamblerz Crew perform yesterday, presumably because hardly anyone knew it was on and knew who the Gamblerz were. They missed out; it was wild. I have never seen moves like I saw on that stage.
Well, except in vids like this one, showing the crew in June ’08:

‘Gambler’s’ motto is ‘Happy b-boying.’ It’s also ‘enjoy b-boying,’ but I want to define it as ‘happy b-boying.’ Happy B-boying! Isn’t this the fundamental reason why we all dance? I start with a fresh mind, to make a b-boying scene where not only Gambler but all Korean b-boys can be happy and can enjoy b-boying; hoping to upgrade the Korean b-boying scene and to help it develop more in terms of the b-boying spirit, so that more people can learn about b-boying and understand it, approach it and enjoy it, and find happiness in that enjoyment; so that everyone can pursue happy b-boying. – crew founder Darkness, quoted at length in a Wikipedia page that will be extensively revised before too long.
Between the two Gamblerz sets a bunch of other dance crews jumped on stage, including some seriously little kids showing off their moves. Pity the Welly b-boys who had to come on not only after some of the world’s best b-boy talent but also a whole gaggle of cute kids.
Anyway. Free world-class entertainment = good.

Oh It Is To Linky

You’ve seen the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are already, right?
Serious bit: computer security circles are rumbling a bit about a big virus already embedded in millions of machines and set to receive new instructions on April 1. I don’t know enough to say whether this is a real issue or just sky-is-falling stuff, but practising good computer hygiene is very important anyway. So read this, and if you don’t have ’em already, pick up your completely free virus protection at AVG or Avast.
Now. Usually at the end of each linky I try to put the weirdest, most inexplicable thing down as “and finally”. But today there’s too much stuff worthy of the spot. So here’s what I like to call “And finapalooza”:
And finally…
…heavy metal band name chart…
…how did I not hear about this 25-second Smurfs film?
…
…Cat Sh*t One, a gritty war film starring animated bunnies, man what
…Wolverine art appreciation month
… a Japanese TV show convinces children they are being attacked by zombies
…Christopher Walken justifies the existence of Twitter
…Yvette’s Bridalwear (via)

People and Borders

The Alligator‘s gone back home. Hopefully not for too long; he’s undergoing immigration department processes to get back here and be able to work. He’s young with no dependents, a skillset that’s in the NZ skill shortage list, experience running a successful business and plans to start a new one here; just the kind of person our systems should be set up to encourage, one would think. It still seems to be a long slog with little comfort to be had and little certainty in outcome
He’s not alone of course. Sonal is searching for a way to get back into the UK, for love, for work, for every good reason. 2trees went through epic battles with the same country’s immigration section that only begun to be resolved when he married the local girl he’d been with for years; and that still hasn’t been the end of it.
Sonal asks bluntly what immigration controls achieve. And certainly, there is plenty of room to question that, in a globalised world where money flows easily.
I don’t have any answers, at least none that I can vouch for – I could happily expound on some random theory or other but that would have only a stopped-clock’s chance of being correct. In fact I don’t really have anything much to say at all. I just wanted to mark this stuff out for future though. And perhaps to suggest that, this thing we have of seeing the promise of the world, and allowing people to sink connections into different places but then making it so hard for them to stick around unless they can buy their passage? That isn’t a good way of doing things. Not at all.
—
Wellingtonians: I am rather excited by the arrival in our fair city of the Gamblers, one of Korea’s premiere b-boy teams. I highlighted these guys in a Friday Linky back in June last year – linking to this incredible article about them at Salon. Sunday, Capital E, 2.30-3.30 is showtime. They’re touring other centres in NZ too.

Dollhouse Ep 6 (No Spoilers)

This is the episode that takes it up a notch. It does so. It does so smartly and enthusiastically and swiftly. It is good stuff.
It means that I’m going to stick with Dollhouse to the end. What they are doing here is seriously interesting ideas TV, and there’s precious little of that on the box.
Warning, however: the procedural stuff that so conspicuously failed to sing in the first five episodes will still be a major part of the show for the rest of the season. We shall hope that it is done more cleverly than it has been so far; we shall hope also the interesting stuff is integrated into the procedural content, rather than sitting alongside it as has been the case in most of the episodes so far. Whether or not this is achieved will determine whether Dollhouse will be remembered as an incredible one-season show that took a little while to hit its stride, or a weird one-season oddity with great ideas and poor execution.
The fan service/bra shots moments were noticeably missing this episode, too. This episode makes it abundantly clear that they do know what they are doing, and while you can argue their choices, they aren’t putting in salacious content without being aware of the implications. They are, in fact, aggressively positioning the viewer as complicit in systems of exploitation and abuse. The way the episode ended, with a beautiful heartbreaking song as [edited because it was a spoiler], seemed like it was reaching too far except it also worked on its own terms – because despite myself I did sympathise with that [character].
(Prediction: within a week there will be on YouTube a “clips compilation” from Dollhouse eps 1-5 gathering all the important bits together, so you can watch all the background you need then jump straight into episode 6.)
[Apologies for the spoilers. They were minor but they were there. Brain was not in gear.]

It’s Not Over

Copenhagen Climate Congress, 10-12 March 2009
Key Message 1: Climatic Trends
Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.
Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable
There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches to deal effectively with the climate change challenge… A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now…
Gareth Renowden at Hot Topic, 13 March 2009:
This seems to me a very good summary of the climate problem: it’s worse than we thought, we need to act now, and we’ve got the tools to do it. Now all we need is the willpower and the commitment. Politicians, are you listening?
George Monbiot, march 17 2009
Yes, it might already be too late – even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow – to prevent more than two degrees of warming, but we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender.
Systems of power are made of people, and people can change, and achieve change. It’s not too late. Not yet.

Anticipated Linky

Back on the scene like a linky machine!
You gotta know this one got me excited: Canadian history cartoonist Kate Beaton finally gets a proper website.
This is amazing – a transcription of the story conference that decided how Raiders of the Lost Ark was going to go. You will never see Indy’s relationship with Marian the same way again.
Kim Stanley Robinson, noted SF author whose masterwork Red Mars got linky here a couple weeks back, writes about the climate crisis: Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme. This is real deal thinking.
A really interesting looking free game is described over at Xorg. I haven’t played it yet myself but I have downloaded it, which by itself is pretty unusual for me. Check it out!
authonomy, a Harper Collins publishing site where users post their masterpieces and other users rate the excerpts, top-rated stuff getting bumped to where the editors can attend to it… This is a really cunning mix of crowdsourcing and PR that might signal some interesting times ahead.
The Grizzled Dog creates his own supernatural mythology around dubious behaviour and stealth photography in Bangkok.
It has been a good year for gigs, not that I’ve been at any of them; the latest to rock the socks of the gig-going crowds was Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, who shared a little ditty she’d written about our own fair city:

Its no wonder everyone loves her.
And finally… girl whose YouTube channel is full of acoustic Bad Religion covers gets close while the band do a soundcheck and sings with them.