Month: May 2009

No, Seriously?

I have slept on this, and now that I have a new day before me and I can perhaps view things in their proper perspective, can I say:
Christine Rankin as families commissioner? W T monkey-fighting F is this insanity?
And she was offered the children’s commissioner position before that? (Can’t find a linky for this, it was in the Dom Post yesterday.)
For the furriners who have made the mistake of reading this far:
* Take the most divisive public argument in recent NZ history, the so-called “anti-smacking legislation” that removed the defence of reasonable force for prosecutions of physical abuse of children
* Add the most divisive and despised civil servant in the last couple decades, the brash overconfident wonder who took our social safety net provider and ran it gleefully into the ground in the bad old 90s, under a welfare-is-bad National government; she was of course on the side of the reactionaries in the smacking argument
* Serve hot!
Says Ms Rankin: “We need to stop being politically correct.”
*head smash wall – repeat until fade*

Dollhouse Roundup (no spoilers)

Watched the last episode of Dollhouse the other day.
Back in March I said that integrating the procedural into the serial would 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.

Turns out it was the first one. The show really delivered the goods in the second half of the season, giving solid hits on meaty ideas as well as fun plots and the twisty-twist goodness you want from a conspiracy show. It was in no way perfect – some of the reveals were undercooked, with the Alpha backstory in particular not being what I hoped it would be – but it still made me happy to be watching it. And the ideas – it gleefully kicked the lids off a half-dozen issues and tipped them out, raising many questions about identity, gender, power, memory, rights…
It also gave me my favourite TV moment of the last few years, where Victor was in the chair with the [X] imprint and being asked questions. You’ll know the one if you’ve seen it.
Anyway. I recommend it. Clipshow the first five episodes then get into the good stuff.

The 48: “Dedication”

For our 48-hr film this year, Jenni’s Angel’s got the genre ‘revenge movie’. The requirements were a rock as a prop, the character Alex Puddle who was an exaggerator, and the line “It doesn’t fit.”
We had a big group at Indigo City to brainstorm when this info came in. My job as head writer was to pull some direction out of this process and winnow down to a solid idea we could all get behind and execute well. I found it really hard. There were a few new things we did that seemed to work well but we ended up spending a long time going almost in circles. It was my job to push out of the circles but I just couldn’t see a direction – not one of the ideas felt right to me. We eventually seized on one idea because, even though I couldn’t see how to make it work, I had a good feeling that we could find a way. Sure enough, we did, with some pieces falling into place in the final stages of the brainstorming session and the rest on the way to our writer’s retreat.
While everyone else slept, the writers punched out a screenplay. We were a new writing team – me with Jackie, Jenni and Steph. We had one person drive the laptop while we talked our way through the outline, then broke the outline into story beats, then turned the story beats into script. We were pleased to find that this went smoothly – the idea unfolded well into the space available, and unlike previous years we weren’t struggling to chop out whole characters and plot twists to fit into the time limit. Finally we went through the whole thing and challenged every word in every line of dialogue, which improved the final version a lot. We sent it out to the troops around 2.30 or 3.00 – which was somewhat earlier than anyone had expected.
We ate mostly healthy-type food while we worked. Mostly.
I was on site at Indigo City about 6.30am as the troops started to arrive. Talked through the piece with our directorial team and the actors, then sat down for a proper read-through where we identified a few dialogue changes to make, most pretty minor, but also adding one extra conversation between our main characters – I scurried into a corner to write that, producing what I think ended up as one of the best exchanges in the whole film, at least from hearing the actors run their lines.
As we set out to the first location I rushed home to write and print a prop, a page of half-written manuscript from an old-school typewriter (thank you free font libraries). After delivering that I hung on set for a few hours and kept working with actors and lounging in the sunshine, until finally bailing when Jenni appeared.
The plan was to go home and sleep but that didn’t work, so I just sat around in a daze for a few hours then went back down to the second location to help get that set. Mostly I was just furniture here as well – the well-oiled Jenni’s Angels team didn’t have much need of an extra pair of hands at this stage. When we broke for dinner I went home and that’s where I stayed while the rest of the team got it done.
We ended up handing in our ‘safety cut’ – the precautionary early version we send down to the hand-in venue in case our final cut runs late. Our safety cuts have always been solid versions of the film so I’m not worried that it wasn’t the intended hand-in version.
Now we have to wait for our heat on Thursday, which is when we’re allowed to watch the film for the first time. I’m looking forward to it. The 48 is a fun challenge every year and I have a good feeling about this year’s film. Its name is “Dedication” (chosen by Jackie) – appropriate to all of us, I reckon.
Thanks team, and especially writing team. You guys are great.

We All In The Linky

Tonight, the 48 Hr Film Comp begins. I’m leading the writing team. We have some big acts to follow – check out the track record of Jenni’s Angels in past years:
2008: Borkhardt Hates You Too (superhero)
2007: Destination Earth (science fiction)
2006: Monster Hunter IV: Beyond Repair (monster movie)
2005: It’s A Wonderful Library (what genre was this, again?)
Should be a blast. In meantime, here be some linky.
Vanity Fair’s 10 Best Political Videos You’ve Probably Never Seen. Nixon rails against Bohemian Grove for being full of homos! Nixon plays the piano! Reagan goes on a game show and… you gotta watch that one, actually.
Japan has an island of empty buildings. Some guys sneaked on to it and took lotsa photos.
Pride & Prej as Marvel comic. (Our local store had a couple copies of the first issue, it sold out fasty.)
As always, I’m a sucker for collaborative one-take music videos. Here’s a guy called Nyle, and his track Let The Beat Build, which seems to be him with his performing art school friends. Love it.
This one is a favourite. Back in the early 90s, a company called Leading Edge Games released a boardgame based on the film Aliens. I had a chance to buy it, once – there were a couple of copies at our local chain bookstore Whitcoulls – but it was way out of my price range so I had to go away and think about it, and I never saw it again. It goes for crazy sums on ebay now – trust me, I’ve looked – so I’d resigned myself to never getting to play it. But now someone has created a computer version of the game, free to play online. It is just as devilishly hard and addictive as had been promised by those good reviews fifteen years ago. Yay!
Gnod – uses some kinda weak AI to build networks of connection between books and films and so-on. Use it as a recommendatorium. Interesting to play around on.
And finally… this New Yorker article gave me the biggest gross-out moment I’ve had since Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Read only if you dare. It’s called… The Itch

Rodney being a Rodney

I cannot comfortably express how infuriated I am by this. I was so angry about the demand for a review that I put a campaign together to resist the time-wasting. And now I find that the people who made the demand are so cynical about it they’re not even participating in the process?
*deep breaths*
On the bright side, an ACT-less committee will probably do a better job of engaging with the science, right?
(Man, this turned into week-of-climate-change-posts. Huh.)

How Science Works

And while I’m talking about this – the Wisharts of the world seem convinced that the massive scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic global warming is (a) overstated and/or (b) groupthink and/or (c) faked to earn research funding.
Well, in my not inconsiderable personal experience of knowing actual scientists, I have noticed one overarching principle: the chief activity of scientists is taking the piss. In fact, it could fairly be said, urine extraction is fundamental to the scientific development of knowledge.
So here’s a rule of thumb for you: if a proposition has survived the piss-taking efforts of a generation of scientists, there’s probably something to it. AGW has.
(Wishart, sadly, hasn’t.)

Crazy Ol’ Ian Wishart

There’s a very amusing blog-exchange going on between Gareth Renowden of climate blog Hot Topic and Ian Wishart of independent current affairs mag Investigate. It’s on the subject of Wishart’s new book “Con Air”, about how global warming is an unscientific fraud. Renowden tore it to shreds in a review, and predictably Wishart responded; Renowden decided it was simpler not to engage with his nonsense, which got another Wishart response. So Renowden proceeded to dismantle Wishart’s claims, picked up another Wishart response, and then shot that one by showing the research Wishart was talking about actually meant the opposite of what he thought it did.
There are lessons here of course, about how keeping the argument going is a de facto win for the forces that want to stop us from addressing climate change.
There are much bigger lessons here about the fixation of belief and how people like Wishart find themselves adopting the positions they do. (See also.)
But really, I just recommend these for the popcorn value. Wishart is always a laugh when he goes on the attack, which he pretty does when anyone looks at him funny. He calls Gareth “trufflehunter” instead of his name, under the impression that this is an insult; I imagine Gareth, as past president of the NZ Truffle Association, would be quite comfortable with this moniker. (Gareth’s co-blogger is referred to as Quasimodo, which is taken with surprising good grace.)
The argument over whether climate change is anthropogenic ended a few years ago. There’s plenty of science to argue over, but not this. The Ian Wisharts of the world will keep thrashing for a while yet, and to be honest, we should be gentle with them. They’re having a hard time of it, the poor wee things.

Affirmed

That’s the best word I can come up with right now to describe how it feels to see my submission to the climate change committee on the parliament website.
It shows that the effort I went to didn’t just disappear into the aether, never to be seen again.
It shows that my voice has been heard by everyone sitting on that committee. (Not listened to, necessarily, but certainly it has been heard.)
It shows that our democracy has functioning channels of straightforward communication.
It’s a good feeling, actually. I recommend it. Participate.

Bill McKibben and 350

Friday night, I went to a public lecture by Bill McKibben, who is the originator of the 350 movement. This movement is based on the work of top climate scientist Jim Hansen, who has said that atmospheric CO2 levels above 350ppm are not compatible with human civilization. We’re already over that concentration.
Bill was a funny and engaging speaker, well-polished. He spoke about the social justice aspects of climate change – his personal turning point was looking at a crowded ward of shivering victims of Dengue fever and wondering how many of those beds were attributable to the emissions of his home country, the USA. (Answer: a quarter of them.)
It is crucial to get CO2 levels down. Crucial doesn’t even begin to describe it, actually. This is the most important work there is right now. Individual action isn’t enough; we need to achieve a global agreement for a carbon pricing system. Only with a strong price signal can we achieve the change we need in the time we have.
In December, the world meets at Copenhagen to discuss these issues. It is pretty much our last chance to get this global agreement before we’re committed to very dangerous levels of climate change. Bill and 350 are pushing Oct 24 as a global day of action, to send the message to our leaders that we want Copenhagen to deliver. My views on the value of public protest have waxed and waned over the years, but I am optimistic about this day of action. Partly because the 350 crew have thought about this hard and have already had some success at pushing political change; partly because I haven’t heard of any better plan than this.
So, this is a heads-up. I talked about the 350 movement, and the necessity of political leadership, this time a year ago. I’ll be talking about it more over the coming months. This is important.
NZ outpost of the 350 movement.
(Idiot of NRT was also at the talk. We did some plotting and scheming afterwards.)