Day: December 3, 2010

Friday Linky Time

It’s Friday link-y time, it’s Friday link-y time…
(sung to the tune of the Howdy Doody song.

Lord only knows how I know the Howdy Doody song, this show never came anywhere near NZ as far as I can tell.)

An outstanding new vid from local YouTube sensation, Griffin Point. The opening bit is nice but then it steps up a gear:

Following my review of the show earlier, here’s NASA’s online document archive for the Apollo 13 mission.

Winners of the 2010 Interactive Fiction competition. Most of them you can play online, including top-placing game Aotearoa.

Comedians do charity remake of We Are The World. Intro by Kurt Russell (!) is tops, song is worth sticking with just for the Weird Al bits because Weird Al is awesome.

This week’s Star Wars bit: Star Wars posters for non-Sci Fi movies

Fraser Carson of Wgtn comms outfit Fresco looks at what World Vision are doing with their charity dollars and is unimpressed – is costly old media the best option for charity marketing?

Wire fans: Andre Royo plays Bubbles again in this short vid where he meets another trolley-pushing character called Bubbles (from a show called Trailer Park Boys that I’ve never even heard of before). The cognitive dissonance you experience watching this is because Royo is cleanshaven and, well, clean.

The 10 most beautiful public libraries in the US. I’ve been to three of these, actually.

Kermode & Mayo’s Cinemagoer Code of Conduct:

Theirs is the only podcast I listen to every single week.

And finally… OK GO’s Danimal takes on the Muppet drummer Animal in a staring contest. Best bit is when Floyd tries to psych the human out.

Wikileaks: No thoughts

Jon wondered why I hadn’t commented on the new Wikileaks “cablegate” affair. A fair question, especially given the last Wikileaks thing turned this blog into a genuine internet sensation (for about 3 seconds) (and not due to any editorial effort on my part, I literally just cut and pasted from their twitter feed, go figure).

Answer is: I don’t know what to make of it. This is clearly a more complex action than previous Wikileaks releases. My instinctive feeling is that this is a good thing as a one-off targeted at a country that rationalises itself as a global policeman, but in general this is a dangerous precedent. Diplomacy needs to function out of public view, and losing that assurance of discretion is certain to have a limiting effect on positive as well as negative efforts.

But I find it hard to feel bad about this if it puts the UK govt’s handling of Iraq in the pooh. My fury over that whole affair remains undimmed, seven years on.

So ultimately – I don’t know what to say. I’ll wait to see how things shake out. Assange is clearly a tosser, and yes he may be a sex criminal too but that doesn’t mean he’s not doing good work.

Jon’s own post on the matter is well worth a read – a good summary I think.

Making Light do some good coverage of the issues, particularly the response of the US media.

Glenn Greenwald has been getting a lot of attention for this firebreathing attack on the US media coverage of Wikileaks and what it says about the state of the fourth estate in the USA.

But the most interesting thing I’ve read yet is this article that looks at Assange/Wikileaks’ motives. Short version: Assange’s stated view is that authoritarianism must inevitably rely on a conspiratorial approach. The contradictions between authoritarianism and conspiracy provide a vulnerability that can be exploited by wikileaks. So the point of the cablegate affair is not the cables themselves, but the response they force in the US government.

All these articles give me some interesting starting points but I don’t feel I’m anywhere near understanding the depth of what this affair means. Too complex, too soon, too something. I dunno. Opinions & interpretations welcome.