Category: And also

White Man’s Akira

Don’t worry folks, even though lots of really big things in the world are going wrong, there’s still room for some very small things to go completely wrong too.

The script for the Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures live action adaptation of anime artist Katsuhiro Otomo’s 6-volume graphic novel Akira has been sent to a short list of actors… I’m told that for Tetsuo, Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield and James McAvoy have been given the new script. For the role of Kaneda, the script has been given to Garrett Hedlund, Michael Fassbender, Chris Pine, Justin Timberlake and Joaquin Phoenix. The two leads are expected to come from that group of actors.

[They’re not actually going to have Robert Pattinson playing a character called Tetsuo. The Deadline link says the action has been moved from Neo-Tokyo to New Manhattan. He’ll be Theodore. Justin Timberlake will be Kevin. I guess they won’t be teenagers any more either.]

Christchurch is long-term

My friend KiwiInZurich, a regular commenter here, tonight sent me some text messages from Christchurch:

I have access to the cordoned area of chch and it is as bad as the media reports show if not worse. The dmg is very extensive and central chch will be closed for a long time.

Another indicator of the scale of damage: the Rebuilding Christchurch blog suggests moving the CBD.

Surreal. That’s the word.

Tim McNamara of InternetNZ gives a thought-provoking account of a tour of the city yesterday.

The media doesn’t do it justice. If we could just communicate the scale of it everyone would be donating.

There’s heaps of stuff going on, but it isn’t enough – it can’t be. This is a long-term situation. I say this as a reminder to myself: keep contributing. Keep finding ways to contribute.

How to raise $60,000 for ChCh

After the quake in Christchurch, I started thinking about what I could do to help. I think most New Zealanders thought along the same lines. One of the first things I thought of was the OneBookShelf fundraiser bundles that had worked so well for Haiti and Pakistan.

It works like this. The tabletop role-playing game community, due to a range of factors, some years ago developed a marketplace where people pay for copies of books in PDF form. (The whole e-book revolution going on in traditional publishing? The TTRPG crowd have been there, done that and bought the ironic t-shirt.)

Due to another set of factors, the marketplace is heavily concentrated around one vendor, OneBookShelf, which has two linked storefronts, DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. This isn’t a huge commercial sphere – tabletop roleplaying is a hobby long past its cultural prominence. A side effect of this is that the RPG community does feel like a community – in some sense it is small and knowable.

Now all of those conditions mean that when the Haiti disaster arrived, the OneBookShelf team could launch a very effective fundraiser. Publishers donated books to a special bundle. About $1300 retail value of electronic books was sold as a charity bundle for just $20. The sale ran for about a week and raised $175,000 for Haiti.

It was an incredible success, and a lesson in how a marketplace of electronic products can make everyone win. The publishers got to help with a charity effort and got samples of their product into the hands of many, many people who might never have seen them otherwise. The purchasers got the genuine satisfaction of helping and also walked away with a huge stack of cool stuff. And the people of Haiti got a whole lot of money they would not have otherwise got. (I blogged about the Haiti effort a year ago, and talked a bit about what it means for electronic marketplaces.)

Walking down the Terrace I decided that it was time to check in with the NZ-linked RPG publishers I knew to see if they were keen in following the logic of the bundle to raise funds, either on our own or as part of a formal OneBookShelf bundle. I also decided to contact Gareth at Adamant, publisher of much RPG stuff with my name on, to ask for his support.

The Kiwis & expat Kiwis & Scottish honorary Kiwis were keen, with at least one of them already thinking along the same lines. Gareth, likewise, told me he was already investigating the possibility. Apart from my email conversations I saw someone online suggest a bundle fundraiser. So the idea was out there. Gregor Hutton contacted Matt McElroy at OneBookShelf, and Matt was totally on board – I don’t know, he might well have already had things in motion, but either way the bundle was launched. Publishers were invited to contribute and soon a bundle of ~$300 worth of cool stuff went on sale for $20. (A $5 donation option was also made available.) Every cent was destined for the Red Cross NZ appeal, chosen by Matt based on suggestion from me.

The sale just ended. US$46,125 was raised. That’s over $60,000 NZ. I’m astonished and delighted.

I had a role in making this fundraising happen, but just a small one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally taking credit for the part I played! But the vast bulk of thanks must go to Matt and team at OneBookShelf for developing this fundraising model out of nothing a year ago – I think it’s an incredibly innovative approach, one that deserves a huge amount of attention from people working in the charity sphere. And of course huge thanks are due to the publishers who contributed to the bundle, and all the people who blogged and tweeted and above all purchased it.

It’s been an emotional week. The success of this bundle gives me cause to smile.

Not least because, man, there are some cool games in that bundle, and I hope a lot of people play the heck out of ’em.

RPG bundle for Christchurch

Nearly $350 of RPG stuff for $20

All proceeds to earthquake relief in Christchurch.

Helping get this up and running has been a significant preoccupation in the last couple days. I’ve written before about similar efforts to help Pakistan & Haiti. The Christchurch quake isn’t on the massive scale of those disasters, but it has hit our small country pretty damn hard.

If you’re into tabletop games, drop US$20 on this bundle. You will be rewarded with some incredibly cool bits of gaming genius, and you’ll be directly donating to a good cause. Everybody wins.

Thanks to all those who purchase, all those who contributed products, and all those who helped make it happen.

Prayers

Even overseas readers will probably be aware that the Pike River Mine explosion on the West Coast of our South Island has ended badly – after five days with conditions too unsafe for rescue, another explosion has nullified the small chance that anyone in there had survived. 29 people have died.

I don’t have anything much to say about this. It’s dominating everything in NZ, not least because we’re a small country and a lot of people have ties to the region and the families. But it would feel strange not to mention it here.

On the weekend, the front pages of three out of four Sunday papers at one shop showed people praying. The prayer stories continue today. It’s out of step with the usually secular approach of our media, but I think it’s an appropriate reflection of the mood of the nation. It’s a reflective time right now, even for those who don’t pray.

Jim Liu on global consciousness

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while. In late September, my friend, colleague and occasional mentor Jim Liu gave his Professorial lecture. I was forced to miss the event, but was able to watch the whole thing online. I recommend you do as well – it’s a great talk. It’s called Towards a Psychology of Global Consciousness, and brings together a bunch of Jim’s research interests to reach a conclusion that’s challenging, even shocking.

First, he goes through some fascinating research into how we perceive history, using a huge international survey where people in different countries listed events and people from history in order of importance. This stuff is fascinating in its own right, and Jim uses it to draw some conclusions about the basis of what he calls a global consciousness.

Then he connects this to the NZ situation, and looks at how NZ history is conceived and how Maori and Pakeha relations are complicated by our views of history. (“Historical negation” emerges as an incredibly powerful method to preserve the status quo.) But it’s also clear that Maori culture is much better suited than Pakeha culture to make sense of the collectivist/high-power-distance societies that are rapidly increasing in global power.

Finally he turns to one of those rising societies, China, and looks at the basis of societal relations in Chinese culture. Their model of benevolent authority, Jim suggests, is the way the world is going. In fact, given the failure of democracies to cope with the signal challenge of this era, climate change, perhaps a benevolent authoritarian society is the ideal way forward.

It’s an extremely challenging conclusion, and you really need to hear Jim tell the whole story before dismissing it. Fortunately, you can do exactly that, and read all his slides, right here. It’s a bit under an hour (don’t be fooled by the duration on the video, they just left the camera running in the room after everyone had gone) and worth every minute, particularly for fellow Kiwis.

Enjoy.

Outrageous Fortune (no spoilers)

NZ’s longest-running drama Outrageous Fortune ended last night, at the close of season 6, still owning the ratings and once again becoming a global trending topic on Twitter. Phenomenon.

I wonder if the West family are now iconic fictional Kiwis who will last the ages? They must come close. They’re getting their own museum exhibit, even. They definitely have a distinctively Kiwi style, and they’ve been hugely successful here. But to last, they need to do more. They need to own a chunk of this nation’s symbolic real estate. Kiwis need to see a bit of ourselves in them, something that hasn’t been well-expressed anywhere else.

Hmm, who else is there? Definitely this guy:

Even though he existed mostly in very brief sketch comedy, this guy:

Probably this guy:

Maybe these guys? Too soon to tell?

(I know, let’s consult Wikipedia’s index of fictional New Zealanders… Hmmm. A few anime characters, a couple of misbegotten superheroes, and Madge Allsop. Er… go Kiwi?)

My instinct is that the Wests will last. What d’you reckon?