“Mmp” is the sound you make when you’ve been gagged and tied to a chair by a villainous smuggler and your kindly aunt is standing unknowingly just outside the door and you wish to alert her to your presence so she can free you and help you thwart the smugglers.
MMP is the proportional electoral system we use in NZ. There’s currently a massive consultation underway. The team that have set this up have done a really amazing job – there’s clickable ads all over the NZ web, and lots of real-world notices too. The website has lots of useful information divided up into small, understandable questions, and you are encouraged to respond to those same questions (though more extensive responses are welcomed of course). This makes it really easy to look at this hugely important issue and give some input.
And it is a hugely important issue. Just look at the debacle in the UK right now, or the last few decades of US governance, for some clear evidence that your electoral system has a huge impact on your society’s welfare.
I’ve said before on here (somewhere or other) that the biggest problem with participation in our democracy is that it’s a pain in the butt to do anything more than vote every few years. This is the first time I’ve seen something that shows it doesn’t have to be this way. Kiwis, I implore you to check it out & have your say.
Hmm. I wonder, which would have launched more puberties: gold bikini Leia or tightpants Labyrinth Bowie? Suggestions for methodology and funding welcome.
What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit? Many many smart people respond. Includes the usual suspects (Dawkins, Brand, Lakoff, Shirky) and names I didn’t expect (Rudy Rucker, Brian Eno) and many more I’d never heard of. The entries I read were all great (one inspired suggestion: kayfabe). Well worth your time; I’m gonna come back to this.
Linky named in honour of the rye whiskey that broke inside the Alligator’s bags en route to the Hutt Valley. We did not drink you, rye whiskey, but we inhaled your aromas.
Some linky then:
Modernist Journals, complete in PDF. Includes, for example, all three issues of The Blue Review (1913) edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Quite, quite wow.
The death and return of Superman, as goofy film. Marvellous. I used to describe this storyline as “DC using up all public goodwill in order to give Superman a mullet.”
The great shift of medium for the comic form, from paper to digital, passed its tipping point sometime in the last few years. Over the same period, the market for “literary” comics-as-books has grown enormously, the economics that supported the popular “pamphlet” comic book format have utterly collapsed, and (with ironic timing) the primary content of those dying pamphlets has become the biggest moneyspinner in the Hollywood arsenal. This makes for some interesting times.
Consider:
Popular webcomic “Order of the Stick” is running a crowdfunding campaign to gather $60K to fund a *reprint* of a print collection of its freely-available online strips. As I write, it has beaten its goal sixfold, and there are almost three weeks still to go.
The Avengers film is going to launch a new trailer during the Superbowl, the most expensive advertising spot there is. It will do huge numbers at the box office (+ more if it’s any good). Probably 99.5% of viewers will never have read an Avengers comic book, and never will afterwards either. (The real secret of success here: Comics people teaching Hollywood how to do a crossover with film properties. Comic books figured out how this works back in the 30s. Hollywood never did until Aliens vs Predator – which was of course a comics adaptation.) (Although Freddy vs Jason came out first.) (And no, those Abbot & Costello films don’t count.) (True fact: Hollywood has never really understood IP, even while it fights furiously to defend it.)
Comics from around the world, particularly Europe and Asia where the medium is thriving in print as well as digital, are also more available to the English-speaking world than ever before. Two Euro examples:
Billy pointed at this marvellous strip that takes advantage of screen presentation in an absolutely stunning way, and tells a heck of a story as well.
And various comics types have been delightedly sharing this amazing 24-hour comic by Boulet – created from nothing to completion in (just over) 24 hours. Fantastic!
Every single one of these items is just amazing to me. (I won’t talk about Before Watchmen, because after six months of rumours I’d already resigned myself to its existence. And besides, the Alan-Moore-devised role-playing adventures provide all the prequel content I need…)
This one’s been popping up all over, because it’s marvellous: a girl who can say words backwards. I love this video not just for the party trick itself (which is lovely and fascinating) but for the details: the girls in the back seat conferring as they try to come up with the hardest words they can, the guy looking around for inspiration and naming everything he can see which tells you a lot about where they are, the fact they are in a car in the first place, and best of all the way the video ends. (Oh crappers.) It’s all so damn genuine.
ALIEN linky now: Jones the cat’s view of Alien (Via qarl) and the wonderful ALIEN AGE 11, which is a comic adaptation of Alien made by an 11-year-old who had only read the novelisation and never seen the film (via dritchie).
So anyone who’s hung out on film geek websites will know that my worst fears about Prometheus, as lengthily burbled in previous post, were fulfilled in the trailer released the very next day. Oh well.
Tumblr really has taken this “Ryan Gosling is the thinking woman’s crumpet” idea and run with it, huh? Ryan likes Occupy, NPR, crafting, libraries, and no doubt many more
Via d3vo: Is it old? The above link: “ridiculously old”.
Xmas interview with the Nek Minnit guy manages to be one of the most sensible & human things you will encounter in the mainstream media this whole season.
The wealthy do not create jobs. Sorry, Thatcherite/Republican ideologues. Two great essays from the last week: Potlatch, Business Insider. Different and complementary. One of them via Svend, the other via who knows.
