• Tiger Beatdown › Getting People With Disabilities Out of Sheltered Workshops and Into the Community- Not only are workers trapped in positions with limited opportunity for advancement, but they’re also forced into poverty. This is a very different narrative than the one presented by supporters of sheltered workshops, who seem to think they provide workers with ‘independence’ and ‘self-confidence.’Furthermore, such environments are also ripe for abuse. A particularly vile case was uncovered in 2010, when intellectually disabled workers at a meatpacking plant were discovered living in dangerous ‘employee housing,’ working excessively long hours and earning approximately $0.41 an hour courtesy of the contracting agency that oversaw their employment. Many disabled workers in such environments are not aware of their rights, aren’t sure about how to report abuses, or may not understand how to identify and discuss abuse. Employers can keep disabled workers in a state of fear, ensuring that unsafe, dangerous, and hostile conditions are allowed to persist for years. Not all sheltered workshops are like this, of course, but the system is structured in a way that makes it easy for them to become so.
  Tags: usa disability employment human rights abuses
• Tiger Beatdown › Those who die to keep us safe: European Union’s Frontex and the administration of immigrants- Unnamed. Alone and in conditions that go beyond those most Europeans reserve for their house pets. I searched frantically for her name. I believe in the politics of names, of naming, of subjects, of people who have faces and feelings, lives and dreams. I thought of the dreams of this woman who traveled half the world to die of a preventable disease in the “land of civilization”. Samba M. That’s all I could find. A final act of dehumanization, her family name reduced to just an initial, stripped of her singularity and her personhood. She traveled following what I can assume to be dreams of a better future only to become an unnamed body in a Spanish detention center.And then I went down the rabbit hole of the European Union’s policies on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. This is not the first time it happens. Last year I wrote quite extensively about the corporate profits behind the detention of undocumented immigrants. This time, however, I was interested in the policies and enforcement that lead to the abuses. People die. We forget. More often than not, we are not even aware of these deaths. Each of these immigrants, a person, a human being killed by State policies and the arm that executes them. I desperately wanted to understand why.
  Tags: immigration europe EU migrants personal political human rights abuses state murder
• TAFT 2012 | Welcome To My World – Science fiction doesn’t often do politics. There’s no shortage of sf writers willing to explore ideology or, more frequently, shove their personal ideology down a reader’s throat in the crudest way imaginable, but engagement with the real way that societies make policy decisions is not often the focus of interest[i]. However, Jason Heller’s debut novel, Taft 2012, is a sf&f book with a politician on the cover and a blurb on the back that makes clear that the story is concerned with an American presidential election campaign.
  Tags: usa history sciencefiction politics electoralpolitics bi-partisanship analysis criticism
• Scientists to Breach Buried Antarctic Lake, Untouched for Millions of Years | 80beats | Discover Magazine – After two decades of drilling through miles of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists are about to breach an underground lake that has not been exposed to the surface in more than 20 million years. Lake Vostok, as the body of water is called, is part of a chain of more than 200 lakes hidden beneath the ice, some of which were formed when Australia and Antarctica were still connected. Vostok will be the first one of all to be opened when the drill hits water next week.
  Tags: science exploration drilling discovery antarctica russia
• S T O R M S – More awesome aggressive, noisy modern hardcore.
  Tags: band music
• Anonymous Expose Nazi Third Position ‘Bridging Tactic’ with Ron Paul – International Business Times – The nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P) pursued a “bridging tactic” with the Ron Paul Revolution movement that support the Republican candidate for the White House, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.
  Tags: usa politics libertarianism neonazis rightwing anonymous
• No Coast – Intense noisy hardcore.
  Tags: band music
• BSFA Review – Vector #269 « Everything Is Nice – In the last issue, I suggested that there was an increasing Transatlantic divide within science fiction. Since then I’ve read two debut SF novels which have further fuelled this belief. Both are published by Night Shade Books in the US but have no UK publisher and, although they are only a mouse click away from the British reader, this at least partially removes them from the discourse. For example, they won’t turn up on the BSFA or Arthur C Clarke Award shortlists because they can’t.
  Tags: intersectionality genre sf fantasy literature novels
• Kill Screen – Attack of the Clone Attackers- There is a dark moon rising in the world of games and it goes by one name: CLONES.The rise of social and mobile platforms has lowered the barriers of entry to game development over the last few years, but it’s also been accompanied by the march of the walking dead. Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit screamed “CHEATER” at social-games giant Zynga for allegedly creating a copy called Dream Heights. (Another apparent clone called Small Street has already emerged as well.) Then there is the fleet of alleged Minecraft clones: Cube World, CraftWorld, Minebuilder, Minecrafted, and so on. And just this week, cloning turned to lawsuits as Spry Fox, maker of Triple Town, filed a copyright infringement suit against 6waves Lolapps for its alleged misappropriation Yeti Town.

  Be warned. Copycats live among us.
  Tags: gaming business practices clones gamesindustry personality

• LENIN’S TOMB: Gangs of London – Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: “You might have 100 people in your gang – we have 32,000 people in our gang. It’s called the Metropolitan Police.”
  Tags: london police gangs britain violence crime corruption

• Kill Screen – One Up: Luke Schneider – As the sole member of the Radiangames studio, Luke Schneider has been making some of gaming’s best shoot ’em ups for the past two years. But despite the high quality of titles like Ballistic for Xbox Live Indie Games and Super Crossfire for iOS, his venture into self-employment has not been a rousing success. At times, Schneider feels that dealing with financial concerns and the burden of working alone is more than he bargained for. Our conversation revealed his day-to-day struggles  in chasing the indie dream.
  Tags: interview indiegames dedication difficulty xboxlive dreams
• Kill Screen – Review: Fear Is Vigilance- “Eventually I began to see the game as an allegory—not just for what it means to believe in a meaningless cause, but for what happens when you don’t. Whenever I see a politician or lobbyist get up on the “cause” soapbox, I have to worry that I’m not being fed a manufactured problem that only they have the solution to. And now I have to wonder the same thing whenever I see those exhausted student activists. I don’t care about their cause. Chances are I won’t, ever. But how many of them have ulterior motives? How many will develop those motives once they’ve lost their optimism—because of people like me, who won’t take the alarm?”What a pathetically apolitical angle to adopt. This review is most interesting for what it doesn’t say.
  Tags: games reviews rubbish
• Tiger Beatdown › This Is Terrorism: Anti-Abortion Group Creates Database of Reproductive Health Providers- It is not coincidental that the people behind terrorism aimed at shutting down access to reproductive health care are usually white, Christian, and middle class. That plays a significant role in why their actions, which involve things like threatening people with death, attempting to bomb facilities, and suggesting they have access to bioweapons, are apparently not considered terrorism. Quite simply, a failure to label domestic terrorism as such when it involves white, middle class Christians is a reflection of racism and the other -isms that dominate social attitudes in the US, because you can damn well bet that if the people involved were nonwhite or people of colour, low-income, and/or non-Christian, they would be treated as the enemy, and the government as well as the media would be vilifying them.Instead, the vile tactics of the anti-abortion movement have been tolerated for an extended period of time, and this has given members of the movement a considerable degree of boldness and bravery. Dr. Tiller was shot in broad daylight in church. This is terrorism. And it’s time for everyone, not just the reproductive justice movement, to start talking about it like it is. This is terrorism. This is terrorism. This. Is. Terrorism.
  Tags: usa terrorism abortion reproductive rights women’s rights rightwingheroes christianity
• Tiger Beatdown › “Self proclaimed feminists” and the new editor of Huffington Post France – Back then, when I asked “Why is nobody holding Dominique Strauss-Kahn accountable?” I was specifically talking about mainstream media. This management of mainstream world views, of ideology and rhetoric is not innocent, nor is it removed from the consequences it carries on our daily lives. So, I have to wonder about the ethical constructions that allow someone like Ms. Sinclair, one of such managers of ideology, to remain married to the guy who brought so much suffering to vast regions of the Global South. How does someone who claim to be concerned with matters of “the dignity of women here and elsewhere” reconcile her politics with the fact that she is married to a man who has been, for the most of his career, in the business of spreading indignity.
  Tags: personal political feminism personal freedom media social lies
• I live sweat… • “Of course you want to do right by other people, but there’s a certain point where you just have to work on yourself.” – Mariel Loveland of Candy Hearts, interviewed by Andy Waterfield- Pretty sure doing what we want to do on our own terms is the holy grail of punk, eh?I never really thought of it that way, but I guess your right. This whole “doing what I want” thing sort of came about when I was talking to Christian about being unhappy about something and he was just like stop complaining, don’t worry about it and do what you want. Doing what you want is the key to happiness. I think he might be right about that.
  Tags: interview punk indie
• AFP: All-girl Russian punk band rages against Putin – MOSCOW — Wrapped up against Russia’s midwinter in vivid balaclavas, brightly coloured minidresses and not much else, eight members of an all-girl punk group stood on a platform in Red Square and started an impromptu show.
  “Riot in Russia!” they screamed, before taunting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and urging Russians to hit the streets in protest.
  The band, Pussy Riot, has been gaining Internet notoriety after their January 20 gig of sorts, the latest in a string of impromptu performances to protest Putin’s candidacy for the presidency.
  The radical feminists’ eyecatching show in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral lasted mere minutes, but long enough for them to let off smoke flares, wave a flag and strum an unplugged guitar. Police let the women play a short song lampooning Putin — twice — before detaining them.
  Tags: punk protest activism feminism russia putin radicalism
• WhatWeShouldBeDoing.net: NEWS: New VERME track… – We’re pleased to bring you this new track from Italy’s Verme. The track is called “Lo Squallore Deltonno” and is featured on their brand new tape which you can still buy from our store (I’ll be doing a mail run within the next two days), or you can pick up a copy from them on their tour with Well Wisher this week. You can check out the dates here. The last date of which also features DIVIDERS and PIPEDREAM. It’s almost a WWSBD family gathering. Check out the poster to the left.
  Tags: band music stream
• Oh God, What Is Alain De Botton Banging On About Now? « Everything Is Nice – Putting aside the nonsense about buildings being an “indispensable part of getting your message across”, why do atheists need to get the message across at all? I am an atheist. This is for the simple reason that I don’t believe in god. As long as I am not discriminated against, however, I don’t care what anyone else believes. Despite positioning himself as the cuddly alternative to Richard Dawkins, he is guilty of exactly the same crime: proselytising. I’m sure I speak for a lot of atheists when I say I wish they would both just fuck off.
  Tags: atheism proselytising religion architecture london
• SchNEWS – ACTA Now – Anyone following the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) development in recent weeks might have breathed a sigh of relief after a seeming success. Wednesday (18th) was marked as the largest online protest in the history of the internet day to date. Websites of all sizes were in total blackout for 24 hours in protest of proposed legislation before the US House and Senate that will alter the internet for ever and for worse. Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Tumblr and Twitter and even Facebook opposed the bills along with everyone else that uses the internet.
  Now there is a new baddie in town, meet ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The treaty already has the support of the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea. It has been called worse than SOPA and PIPA and today it is due to be signed by Poland.
  Tags: internet law international intellectualproperty
• SchNEWS – Willing and Disabled- Sick of government attacks on the vulnerable while their fat cat mates live it up on bank bonuses? Daft question really but with the government’s Welfare Reform Bill making it’s way through parliament (the alleged ‘massive defeat’ in the Lords is just a minor setback) it’s time to fight back.Pushed to the limits, a representative few of the tens of thousands of disabled, sick and elderly targetted by the Tory cuts are going to gather at 11.30am at Holborn tube station on Saturday 28th for a ‘daring and disruptive act of civil disobedience’. Organisers say – Be ready with a charged Oyster card, ready to travel to a secret location.
  Tags: disability cuts protest benefits recession

Del.icio.us links for January 20th through January 22nd:

• MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Above Them – Step Back Release – Above Them have teamed up with Punktastic to stream another new song from their upcoming album “are we a danger to ourselves” – Yes, it irks me a little that there’s no question mark either. Anyway, the song is called “Step Back Release” starting with just Oli’s vocal and guitar then kicking in (epicly) into the pounding buvvem’s rhythm we’re all used to. It’s another great song from an album that is very special.
  Tags: band music
• The Ontological Geek: Guest Article: Skyrim is Gonzo Pornography – After 70 hours or so of play, I finished the main quest line of Skyrim. By this point I had completed the Thieves’ Guild quest line and a smattering of other quests from all over the map. I had discovered dozens of dungeons, slain many dragons, and finished more petty side-quests than I care to admit. When I decided to stop wandering the map and focus on finishing the central plot of the game, I was able to complete my remaining tasks in a couple hours, kept slow by my insistence on playing as a Bosmer archer instead of using any of the many methods of combat that render encounters trivially easy to complete. As the dragon-god Alduin evaporated in a shiny flash of elaborate death animations, I didn’t feel like a hero. I wasn’t even sure I had actually finished the main questline, there was so little fanfare. What I did feel like was that I had just finished a cheap porno, and that I should probably start playing something else before someone noticed me.
  Tags: skyrim game design gonzo pornography immersion
• Odd Partners: Videogames and Environmentalism – 
On Dec. 27, 2011, game developer Just Add Water released an HD remake of the under-appreciated Xbox game Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. Like the previous three games in the Oddworld franchise, Stranger’s Wrath is at its heart an environmental game, a quirky first person shooter with an important message about the control of natural resources and the threat of unregulated corporate practices to the natural world. If the Atari E.T. fiasco is a memorial to the gaming industry’s environmental shortcomings, the Oddworld games are a perfect counterpoint, a reminder that video games and environmentalism can coexist, however oddly, and strengthen each other.
  Tags: oddworld videogames environmentalism
• MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Watch Commander – Cheating Death (NEW SONG!) – Those lovely guys from Watch Commander have been working hard over the last few months on their debut album that should be out in the next few months. They’ve uploaded the song ‘Cheating Death’ to their soundcloud account and obviously, it’s real good.
  Tags: band music
• Solar storm of 1859 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Solar Superstorm,[1] or the Carrington Event,[2] which occurred during solar cycle 10, was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history, and the largest flare, observed by Richard Christopher Carrington, became known as the Carrington Super Flare.
  Tags: history astrophysics solarstorms
• World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary- In earlier think-pieces I discussed a very normative, predictable, conservative (in the sense of unadventurous) version of the likely shape of the next century.Of course, it’s not going to be like that.
  Tags: futurism worldbuilding society uncertainty prediction
• Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Blank Slates & Scripted Decision Making- In light of my recent thoughts on developing a new approach to dialogue systems (or, more accurately, thanks to a recommendation from the designer I’m working with on a nursing simulation side project) I was approached recently to produce a short interactive dialogue demo for a middleware firm based on some of those ideas.Their core system, though, is a traditional dialogue tree, and it got me to thinking – if we’re limited to the usual tools and can’t factor in any procedural elements then what practical guidelines can we follow to avoid the usual problems around motivation, depth of simulation and reward?
  Tags: gamedesign narrative dialogue dialogue systems
• 6 Scientific Discoveries That Laugh in the Face of Physics | Cracked.com- “As we’ve pointed out before, there are some startlingly simple questions that science can’t answer. And then there are the special occasions where the universe up and does a freaking magic trick that seems to be designed by an unjust, all-powerful entity dedicated to making scientists slowly pull off their glasses while saying, “What in the hell?” For instance …”Fun list, even if #1 has, I think, already been disproven.
  Tags: science super science physics astrophysics space
• BBC News – Exoplanets are around most stars, study suggests- Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to an average of 1.6 planets, a new study suggests.That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

  Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.
  Tags: space planets exoplanets space exploration

• It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world | | Independent Editor’s choice Blogs- It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.
  Tags: femicide infanticide gender children infants south asia

Del.icio.us links for December 11th through December 17th:

• Skyrim and the Quest for Meaning | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – Simple games are satisfying because they tell simple stories. Complex games, on the other hand, can often be profoundly unsatisfying, as they also attempt to tell simple stories. An excellent example of the failure to develop complex narrative techniques to fit complex games is the narrative wasteland that is Bethesda Studios’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). Far more than a poorly written game, Skyrim is a damning indictment of video game story telling, in so far as it completely fails to imbue the events of the world with any kind of emotional significance. Skyrim is a deep and complex game, yet the experience of playing it is very much akin to spending a week on lithium.
  Tags: skyrim gamedesign narrative ludonarrative story
• Our Time Down Here – Last Light – Album stream. Pretty good!
  Tags: band music
• BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: THE BITCH, THE STUD AND THE PRAWN- It is very difficult to properly see the times you are living through, but it is made more difficult today by the insistence of politicians and commentators that there is no alternative to the present economic system. This almost hysterical mantra closes down other, different perspectives and makes it impossible to draw back and see what the present world is really like.I’ve stumbled on a wonderful documentary film made in the 1960s that in an odd way does help give some kind of perspective on today. It’s about two brothers called Billy and George Walker. Billy was a boxer and George was a gangster who became Billy’s manager. The film is a beautiful record of the way two brilliant chancers were manipulating British society and the media at a moment in 1964.
  Tags: history britain politics business gangsters geezers capitalism adamcurtis
• Seasonal flame bait – Charlie’s Diary- I’m off to do a reading in a few hours, and it’s chilly outside, so I feel like turning up the heat. Therefore:My view of contemporary US politics, which is that of an outsider and obviously incomplete (and possibly faulty, and subject to change) is as follows
  Tags: futurism domesticpolitics usa politics classwar plutocracy
• LENIN’S TOMB: The late Christopher Hitchens – Don’t take this the wrong way, but the glowing tributes to Christopher Hitchens are both tasteless and incorrect.  Have some decency.  The boring wisdom has it that Hitchens broke the mould intellectually.  He did not.  For all the unique saleability of the Hitchensian idiolect (or intertext), he was a very conventional thinker, in addition to being a provincial.  He also had a reputation for being a fierce defender of universalism, but in fact his was the provincial universalism of empire.  One might, in the same speech, catch him defending the right of others to disagree with him, then find him denying that right to Iraqis, insisting that they be coerced at gunpoint into vouchsafing his opinion.  He had a reputation for possessing a powerful intellect.  He was certainly an intellectual, and a powerful speaker and writer, a polemicist who out-classed many of his opponents.  Yet, by insisting on the difference between being an intellectual and having an intellect, I don’t merely mean to be scurrilous. His difficulty in handling complex ideas was as notorious among his peers as his facility with emotionally potent oversimplifications.
  Tags: obituary ChristopherHitchens
• Christopher Hitchens: the life of a contrarian « Though Cowards Flinch – For those interested in the life of the Hitch, there are few stories left untold – his being beaten up by theocratic thugs in Beirut, the waterboarding, his long time spat with his brother have been laboured over and over. His drinking sessions including one which saw him hospitalised after a game of bare hand tumbler crushing with lifelong friend Martin Amis, his schoolboy bisexuality and his love of his Mother are less known, but they make for interesting reading, and prove that beyond his own output – which seldom failed to deliver – the life of the Hitch is itself something rather literary.
  Tags: obituary ChristopherHitchens
• MTV uses its passing familiarity with music to name the year’s best artists and songs | Music | Newswire | The A.V. Club – To determine their winners, MTV gathered an internal “brain trust” roundtable composed of various MTV employees and “moderated by Sway,” as all democratic assemblies must be, whereupon they considered the many things one must consider when choosing the standout musicians and songs of the year, i.e. they “pored over the charts, debated stuff like Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and watched a ton of music videos.” And using those metrics by which modern music is always measured and properly evaluated, here are 2011’s Top 10 songs and artists, according to MTV. See you next year, MTV’s Best Music Awards and also, presumably, most of the artists on these lists.
  Tags: music awards bullshit
• SchNEWS – Direct Action Newsheet – Dale Farm: Where Are They Now? – Except that previously these families had their own small plots of land spread over the six acre area which now resembles war torn Beirut. The scale of destruction is hideous. Where there were once roads there are now deep furrows – most of the plots have been excavated down to the water table. Mounds of earth and rubble (bunding) 6-10ft high surrounds the perimeter of the farm and encloses each plot preventing any attempt at access, and just in case any residents feel able to overcome these barriers an injunction is in place to prevent the placing of caravans on these plots. Not only this, but an access road that was supposed to be left for the remaining five plots has been dug up and turned over with a deep furrow running down the middle, leaving only a perilously thin walkway for the residents to use.
  Tags: travellers eviction essex land
• Tiger Beatdown › Europe and the politics of Neo-Obscurantism and violence – These days, media is full of stories about “saving the European Union” and rescuing those nations in financial distress. Talks of “unity” and “shared values” abound. As a European resident, moreover, a very angry European resident that is all too aware of the violence the member States of the EU allow to happen on their watch, I must ask: which Europe is worth saving? The Europe of the values of inclusion or this Europe some of us suffer on a daily basis? The Europe of violence, exclusion and racism? Because the incidents in Liège and Florence, together with the endless list of non deadly aggressions that happen on a daily basis are part of this continent, even though many would prefer to remain silent about them or claim that they are “isolated”. If anyone needs to be disavowed of the notion of “isolated” incidents, all they need is read the list above. Sadly, these are the values that Europe currently stands for.
  Tags: europe racism violence nationstates obscurantism enlightenment eu
• Opinion – Why Saints Row: The Third is Good for Women – PlayStation 3 Feature at IGN- For the third game, the producers decided on a complete reboot — making everything ridiculously over the top, focusing on fun, and likely looking at how they could appeal to a wider audience. Even casual gamers should have no problem completing the game – not only is there a difficulty meter, but you can spend cash that is paid periodically into your bank account on abilities to help you along.Whether the whole gangster genre where you play as a crime lord wrestling to take control of a city, fighting other gangs, stealing cars, and spend a lot of time shooting people is something that women would find appealing is another argument entirely. Saints Row The Third is a step in the right direction and Volition deserves to be applauded.
  Tags: openworldgames crime gangstanonsense violence egalitarianism

• Why is Unilever playing hardball with its striking workers? | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – What is taking place now, though, is a qualitative escalation in employer attacks on employee incomes. It is part of a wider structural adjustment that the UK is going through, led by a political initiative from Whitehall. Just as the public sector pay freeze has been matched by falling real wages in the private sector, with a resulting lost decade in living standards, so the attack on public sector pensions has been concurrent with the private sector pensions raid. Indeed, many of the government’s reforms are explicitly aimed at making it easier for the private sector to hire people at lower costs. For example, the introduction of locally negotiated public sector pay, announced by George Osborne on the day before the 30 November public sector strike, is justified by the claim that high public sector wages crowd out local enterprise. More generally, the assault on welfare is likely to depress the cost of labour throughout the private sector.
  Tags: britain labour politics recession strike
• Tiger Beatdown › The troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable – I have bad news for all of us: Fox News killed the internet trolls. All of them. Or, you know, Fox News gave jobs to a few of them and legitimized the rest creating what I like to call “The Foxnewsification of mainstream media”. These days, MatrixMansplainers really mean what they are saying. Their sexism, racism, hatred, bigotry, their anger are not just argumentative tactics, they are legitimate drivers for policy making. MatrixMansplainers actually drive our politics and our public discourse. If you are in the US, you will find MatrixMansplainers repeating right wing Tea Party talking points. If you are in Europe, they will spell out their allegiance to figures like Geert Wilders or the British BNP. You can see MatrixMansplainers express their racist outrage in public spaces. You can see them “debating” anti reproductive rights legislation with zealotry. These people have carved a legitimate political force and because of this Foxnewsification of mainstream media, these people believe that every space should allow them to express their opinions unchallenged.
  Tags: trolls internet censorship editorialpolicy debate discussion civility value
• “Holy looming planets, Batman!” Half A Post About Non-Genre Science Fiction Films « Everything Is Nice – The Guardian wonders if science fiction is creeping into more mainstream films. My ears pricked up at this as this is something I started thinking about earlier in the year. However, I didn’t get round to actually completing my thoughts so here is the first half of them:
  Tags: genre sciencefiction film
• On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Few videogames, it seems, have been able to learn the lessons of Stalker. We might never actually see its progeny. Like EVE in the world of MMOs, it might remain an outlier experience, essentially unrepeatable in the future history of games. No matter how much other games might try, they land far from the careful blend of freedom and tight combat that Stalker delivers. The Fallout games seem like a bizarre pantomime by comparison. Even more promisingly action-angled games such as Borderlands have struggled to make the notion of “open world” really work in the player’s favour, ending up with something more like a loot-gobbling Diablo variant than a thrilling immersion in an alien environment. The third iteration of Stalker, meanwhile, was even more open, even weirder, even more sinister. And, like a rare material from a far away resource, it remains incredibly valuable to the gamers who have discovered it.
  Tags: games postapocalyptic openworld crossgenre
• The ten most overrated games of 2011 | Quarter to Three – Every year I try to explain that this list isn’t necessarily about games that are bad. It is instead about games that I’m surprised weren’t received more critically. So again, let me point out that I actually like and continue to play some of these games.
  Tags: 2011 retrospective games
• Charlie Brooker: 2011 has been like an end-of-season finale. 2012 doesn’t stand a chance | Comment is free | The Guardian- It’s almost time to bid farewell to 2011, and as is my custom at this time of year, I’m working on a review-of-the-year type programme, and have thus spent the past few weeks reliving 2011 in the form of countless edited DVD highlight compilations of the year’s news reports and TV shows. It’s like your life flashing before your eyes, but slower and with sunnier locations.After a while, everything is reduced to an impressionist smear in your head. The protracted battle for Libya becomes a blur of tarmac, sand and black smoke intercut with footage of people repeatedly firing into the air, as if they’ve declared war on the sky. The August riots resemble a cross between an apocalyptic zombie movie and an unusually depressing edition of Alex Zane’s Rude Tube. The economy is just a series of satirically huge numbers scrolling across the screen while a voiceover recites the words “brink … precipice … abyss … void …” over and over again.
  Tags: 2011 retrospective
• When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post- There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

  All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.
  Tags: education usa curriculum

• Seeing Games « Electron Dance – The vOICe system, initially developed in 1991, downscales an image, strips it of colour and maps the result to a short burst of sound. Each pixel is converted to a frequency – the higher the point, the higher the frequency – with brightness used as the volume of the pixel’s sound. Each column is then played in sequence over a second. For example, a horizontal line is heard as a pure tone while a scatter of dots is converted into a sequence of beeps. [...] The real world would sound like noise to the inexperienced, but the human ear already performs complex audio processing [...] and is able to distinguish overlapping sounds with ease. Wright said that given four to six weeks of practice, users are able to interpret the real world. But the really astounding thing is that veteran users make use of the system more for the rich “visual” experience – using it to appreciate what is around them – than accomplishing tasks, transcending its functional purpose.
  Tags: disability assistivetechnology blindness gamification
• The Lag Effect: PSN and Xbox Live Analysed • Articles • Eurogamer.net – Whatever happened to the low-ping bastard? The scourge of the early days of online gaming, the LPB would dominate Quake deathmatches by simple virtue of the fact that their connection to the server was often orders of magnitude faster than anyone else’s, resulting in complete and utter domination. It was easy to identify the LPB: a quick look at the roster of game players placed their “ping” times alongside their names, making it easy to spot those with obvious latency advantages.
  Fast-forward to the present day and services like Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network dominate online gaming. Even though fast broadband is now the norm – eliminating the sub-par latencies associated with the days of dial-up online gaming – the lag hasn’t completely gone away. Instead, game developers are using a wide variety of technology to hide latencies from the player, leading us to wonder: is online gaming fair? If you’re playing at a disadvantage, to what extent do you actually know?
  Tags: onlinegaming networks analysis
• Tiger Beatdown › Climate Change, Bullying, and Gender – Some hard truths from African leaders at the conference included a serious discussion about who is most responsible for climate change, and failings on the part of the West when it comes to confronting the issue and seriously committing to reducing emissions. A turning of the tables occurred, with African leaders demanding that industrialized nations start taking action on the issue. Issuing demands to save the world is, of course, viewed as upstart behaviour when it comes from people who are not occupying positions of global power, especially when those people are pointing out that the people responsible for the problem should be a big part of the solution.
  Tags: climatechange environment globalisation power realpolitik globalsouth

• SchNEWS – Direct Action Newsheet – Brighton University’s Vice Chancellor must be kicking himself. The university was on lock-down yesterday (Nov30), not out of support for the strike, but to prevent a possible occupation. Unfortunately for him, the students waited ’til the 2nd, when the uni was wide open and vulnerable again. Thirty plus occupiers are now camped out in the very public art gallery space and more are expected as the space gets established. They’re protesting in solidarity with the public sector workers, against the increase in fees and the fact that the VC made noises in opposition to the White Paper to please students and staff  – and then signed a public letter to the government in support of fee increases. The uni is also targeted for their lack of transparency regarding links to dodgy private companies.
  Tags: brighton university education occupation
• The Making Of: Flotilla – Edge Magazine – Brendon Chung knows a lot about failure. The Californian game designer of one-man indie studio Blendo Games has whole hard drives full of his screw-ups. “Honestly, I fail like 90 per cent of the time,” he confesses. “My hard drive has all these aborted foetuses of games that are just bad, broken and not even close to looking done. The other ten per cent of the time you hit something that’s pretty ugly and terrible, but you see some potential there and you file it away, hopefully to bring it back and use it in some fashion in a later project. Overall, though, it’s very discouraging.”
  Tags: interview games development indiegames spaceopera
• Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news. – Starting almost ten years ago, Jason Yungbluth began a short backup feature in a comics anthology under the title WEAPON BROWN. It takes the tropes and beats of the atypical “post apocalyptic bloodbath”, but filling its cast with clear analogues for the Peanuts gang. The comic has become something of a sleeper hit, gaining more and more attention. I sat down with Jason to ask him how things are going in the industry for him now.
  Tags: interview comics satire pastiche postapocalypse
• Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber- What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone what shape the forces of resistance to it are likely to take. Some new form of green capitalism? Knowledge Keynesianism? Chinese-style industrial authoritarianism? ‘Progressive’ imperialism?

  At moments of transformation, one of the few things one can say for certain is that we don’t really know how much our own actions can affect the outcome, but we would be very foolish to assume that they cannot.
  Tags: history debt money finance empire war slavery

• BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: DREAM ON- The protest movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is very clear about what it is against – an international capitalism that is cruel, unfair and untenable. But the movement refuses to say what it is for. Much of this refusal comes from a belief that modern capitalist society is extremely skilful at co-opting dissent and that any discussion with the media is the first step in being reabsorbed into ‘the system’.It also has the added benefit of irritating mainstream journalists and commentators.

  I want to tell an odd, romantic, but ultimately very sad story that shows where this fear of possession on the left comes from. It is set during last the time that British, European and American students tried to be a vanguard for revolution. It shows how that fear can easily lead to a pessimistic belief that all one’s dreams for a better future are just illusions – and how that pessimism then came to paralyse the left in Britain throughout the eighties and nineties.

  But the story is not all sad – because I think it shows that the same thing does not have to happen again.
  Tags: adamcurtis history revolutionarytheory liberation politics classwar utopia

• Britain’s trade union movement: why strike? – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)- Why has it come to this? In a sense, the answer is obvious. ‘Austerity’ involves the most serious attempt to restructure the economy, to the detriment of working class living standards, in decades. It involves reducing wages and pensions, diminishing bargaining rights, cutting jobs and reducing the bargaining power of labour. Everywhere that these measures have been introduced, whether in Wisconsin or Greece, there has been resistance.Yet, there was no guarantee that the British trade union movement would respond in the way that it has. Decades of declining union composition since the serious defeats inflicted on organised labour – notably, on the miners and the print workers – have left unions in a weaker position.
  Tags: britain politics history strikes resistance cuts
• Demon’s Souls and the Meaning and Import of Virtual Death | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic- The problem with video game writing is that it tends to be written by fans of video games. The corruption and stupidity of games journalism are not isolated quirks of the system but symptoms of a flawed approach to the medium. Fans, by their nature, approach their choice of medium wanting to fall in love: Good games are filled with good things; bad games are filled with bad things. Love the good things. Hate the bad things.While I think that this approach to art can be intensely rewarding, I also think that it has its weaknesses and the most obvious weakness is a failure to recognise that bad things can sometimes be good.  They can be good because these bad and un-fun things make the good bits glow that much brighter, and because even painful and unpleasant experiences have meaning and importance. This is a column about the role of death in video games and how a more sophisticated appreciation of one of the least fun aspects of the gaming experience might unlock the door to a world of new themes and experiences.
  Tags: videogames narratives death themes
• MOVING NORTH UK ZINE: LUCA BRASI- Touring the east coast of America this year I met a bunch of great people, and a couple of those guys happened to be a pair of awesome dudes from Tasmania. Who else buys you a beer during D4 for remembering drunk names?Anyway, it turns out these guys were in a band called LUCA BRASI and I wanted to check them out so they sent me a link to this song.
  Tags: band music australia
• After November 30th « Though Cowards Flinch- The overall impression I took from yesterday is that we may be getting our tactics very wrong for the war of attrition to come, and that we need to pay attention now to the basics of strike organisaton.I accept that those who marched yesterday generally had a good time, and may have come away from the post-march rallies buzzing with solidarity.  But city centre demonstrations, where we all go to the pub afterwards, will not win us the battle.  Instead, we need to get seriously local, we need to get seriously organised, and we need to get grim.
  Tags: strikes marches protest cuts pensions publicsector tactics strategy classconsciousness
• The shoe is on the other Foot – It’s not Labour’s left that’s stuck in a time warp « Though Cowards Flinch- While many of us on the left did not necessarily agree with the political trajectory taken during the New Labour years, we understood that there was no inherent shame in trying to look like a credible party of government. The political landscape in the ‘80s and ‘90s was undeniably bleak for socialists, and reflected something the outgoing Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan had said several years earlier: ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.’As if by prophesy, 30 years later we are again at a moment of profound political change. The certainties that have shaped political discourse for so very long are again being challenged, if not by the political class then by workers and students right across Europe and beyond. Questions many of us have long been asking about our economic system are today routinely being raised by those with little history of political struggle – people whose sense of injustice has developed as they’ve seen living standards fall and prospects for the future become increasingly bleak.
  Tags: britain politics thatcherism history future labourparty

• Game Logic vs Choice & Consequence | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – If the next five years of big-title gaming development can focus on closing that disparity of what we want to do in a world and what developers can afford to let us do, rather than pushing technology to add complexity to raw assets, we can end up with environments that are more interactive, manipulable, intelligent and alive, rather than just prettier. It’s important to empower us, as players, to do whatever we want in games and, essentially, to make the choices and options worthwhile by having the game react in the most interesting ways it can.
  Tags: narrative gameplay storytelling emergentgameplay branchingnarratives criticism
• Modern Warfare 3 Isn’t An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK) | Kotaku Australia – So this is what I ask of you, and of all videogame critics and players alike: stop using “freedom” as a metric for a game’s quality or, even worse, for a game’s gameness. Every game is a dance between player and code, but that doesn’t mean the player always gets to lead. A game that leads the player can be just as meaningful, significant, intelligent, stimulating or exhilarating as a game that lets the player do whatever they wish (within the games confines). The player is not the centre of the equation, and neither is the game. It’s the interrelationship between the player and the game that matters most.
  Tags: games criticism narrative gameplay storytelling reviewing
• Modern Warfare 3 Is ‘An Un-Game With A Core Of Nastiness’ | Kotaku Australia – I’ve just this minute finished the singleplayer campaign for Modern Warfare 3. It leaves a very bitter taste at its climax. But perhaps not the same bitter taste that flavours it throughout. It is an enormously high-achieving action FPS, on a scale like nothing before it, turned to 11. And it’s a bloodthirsty, bombastic and clumsy un-game, with a core of nastiness.
  Tags: gaming narratives war pomposity jingoism ideology gameplay
• Sexy Videogameland: Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common- Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting — “it’s just like a movie,” was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn’t a negative. We felt awed.The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.
  Tags: cutscenes games history narrativedevices
• Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Stories in Ulikely Places: SWAT 4 – SWAT 4 is a game that tells engaging stories without the schoolboy reliance on a grand overarching narrative. Who says games should be about a ten hour story and not ten one hour ones? It’s a game that intelligently combines scripted narrative (in the mission briefings and level layouts) with procedural content (in the random enemy positions and emergent scenarios), and presents it all through gameplay that reflects the both.
  Tags: games narrative storytelling writing
• LENIN’S TOMB: Occupy Tahrir Square – it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers.  We needn’t deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play.  They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation.  But, where they have supported progressive political struggles – for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship – they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations.  The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation.  In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists.  The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.
  Tags: egypt protest strike occupation resistance middleeast islam revolutionaryanalysis
• Passive Incoherence and How to #Occupy The Moral Highground « Ruthless Culture – The truth is that the Occupy movement stands for all 100 of these answers and none of them. The movement’s political power flows from its capacity to serve as a semantic sponge for the inarticulate rage that most people feel about the current economic and political climate. By refusing to elect leaders and put forward a binding manifesto, the Occupy movement appears incoherent but this incoherent simply strengthens its moral authority. No matter how informed you are and no matter what your precise economic and political views might be, you can look at the Occupy movement and see something for you. They are a raised fist and a raised fist has all the meaning in the world.
  Tags: ows occupation resistance protest
• LENIN’S TOMB: Egyptian revolution – Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests.  Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria.  Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, “huge crowds” are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir.
  Tags: occupation resistance revolution egypt middleeast imperialism
• Tiger Beatdown › What’s Your Slavery Footprint? – The United States Department of Labor has a list of items produced with the use of slave and child labour, but even it admits this list is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t address the use of slave and child labour in the United States, and some nations are overrepresented in the list, while others aren’t present at all. What it does highlight, however, is that slavery touches almost every consumer good imaginable, and that slaves tend to be people most vulnerable to exploitation, like women, indigenous populations, and people living in poverty.
  Tags: slavery labour globalisation globalcapital ethics consumerism
• Kill Screen – Review: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon – “As far as I can tell, aside from this insect’s uncanny ability to ruin a day spent lounging in the grass, there are two reasons we may find the above scenario appealing. The first, of course, is that ants are communists. Biologist E. O. Wilson was fond of vindicating Karl Marx’s belief that socialism works, by saying, “He just had the wrong species.” Sterilized worker ants are biologically hard-wired to live their lives in total interest of the colony because their existence cannot extend beyond the queen’s ability to reproduce. The lifestyle they promote is anathema to the kind we idealize and are genetically predisposed to.” Only Killscreen could write this in a review of an EDF game. :D
  Tags: gaming criticism reviews edf

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design- As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.
  Tags: futurism tacticility interaction technology
• Tiger Beatdown › You Can’t Fight Child Abuse Without Fighting Ableism- Hillary Adams defies social narratives about disability, which is often perceived as a state of helplessness and inability to act with autonomy. She demonstrated ingenuity and enterprising behaviour, two things people with disabilities are not supposed to do, when she taped her father abusing her. She communicated on her own terms, another thing we are not supposed to do, when she posted the video and started talking about it. This makes it easier to ignore the disability aspect of the case, to treat Adams as exceptional and focus just on the abuse.But abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the fact that Hillary has CP matters. Which means that it should be part of the discussion. Because any conversation about ending child abuse must include disabled children. Not just because they are children too and thus are part of the picture, but because they are particularly vulnerable to abuse and because there are disability-specific issues that must be addressed at the same time we fight child abuse as a whole.
  Tags: childabuse ableism disability
• Tiger Beatdown › Roma women in Europe: the silenced, underreported gender oppression – European countries are always praised for the strides they make towards gender equality. European nations consistently rank on top of quality of life rankings and measurements. Moreover, the EU is held as a sort of modern gold standard for the promotion of human rights and the values of “reason and enlightenment”. Gender equality and anti discrimination laws are enshrined in the European Constitution and the upholding of human rights is considered one of the measurements for admission of new member states to the Union. However, while so many paternalistic European politicians claim to want to save Muslim women from their “oppression”, there is a group that hardly ever gets the same kind of “savior complex” discourse: Roma women. Their status as “Other” invisibilized and erased from mainstream discourse; their systematic persecution, more often than not, State endorsed, a small item in the back pages of European press.
  Tags: roma racism europe prejudice britain
• Protests highlight severity of benefit cuts for disabled people | Society | guardian.co.uk – Ministers have admitted that limiting the employment and support allowance will save only £4bn, rather than £5bn originally envisaged, over five years. Neil Coyle, director of policy at the Disability Alliance, said: “The Treasury has made it clear that they do not care where the axe falls – you simply have to deliver the savings. With the disabled already being targeted we will see more cash coming from the people least able to pay and in greatest need.”
  Tags: disability britain recession benefits cuts coalition
• Men Explain Things to Me | Gender | AlterNet – When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky letter to the New York Times explaining that, though Muybridge had made improvements in camera technology, he had not made any breakthroughs in photographic chemistry. The guy had no idea what he was talking about. Both Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book on Muybridge, and I had actually researched the subject and made it clear that Muybridge had done something obscure but powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time to speed it up amazingly, but letters to the editor don’t get fact-checked. And perhaps because the book was about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
  Tags: sexism chauvinism gender
• IGDA Writers Panel: Players Versus Characters, 2 « Electron Dance- Last year’s panel was held in a lecture theatre at South Bank University which was spacious and desk-enabled. At BAFTA, the audience were not as lucky. Dinky chairs jammed us into snuggling distances with our neighbours and I had to be careful not to poke out someone’s eye with the careless flick of a pen. The panellists got to wave their arms about and express themselves with gusto, but I didn’t have enough room to swing a gnat.But every crowd has a silver lining – at least I got a free drink.
  Tags: writing videogames narrative character
• Toward a post-Murdoch age – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – In the UK, a broad coalition, supported by the National Union of Journalists, has arisen to coordinate the ideas of academics, media workers and activists as to what a post-Murdoch media could look like.  One of the major problems facing this coalition is how to explain the extraordinary gap between the press’s self-image and the reality.  Part of the explanation must hinge on the limitations of the press’s ‘apartness’ from the dominant institutions of society which Alan Rusbridger referred to.  The press may not share the aims of the government, but it does depend on governments (and police, and judges, and major-generals, etc.) for information and access, which is always more forthcoming to ‘cooperative’ journalists.  More compellingly, the press doesn’t just share the “same aims” as commerce – it is commerce.
  Tags: journalism newsinternational corruption corporatism
• Tiger Beatdown › If you protest racism during Black Face season in The Netherlands, you will be beaten up and arrested – What happened afterwards will turn your stomach. Police demanded the activists to disband and stop protesting. They were told this was a children’s event and that children had the right to celebrate the holiday without disturbances. Two men and two women were arrested (link goes to news report in Dutch) when they stated that they also had the right to protest practices that actively harm them. They were told, in no uncertain terms, that they had no right to be there. One of the men resisted. He yelled that it was his right to protest. This video here, caught by a bystander, shows what happened to this protester. He was dragged outside the Parade, brutally beaten, thrown into the ground, dragged some more. In the video, you can see this young Black man, wearing a t-shirt that states “Zwarte Piet is racism”, subject to State violence in order to protect a Dutch tradition that is clearly not open for debate. The right of the White majority to wear Black face every year should be protected through whatever means necessary, even at the expense of those who are harmed by it.
  Tags: holland racism europe stateviolence
• Is Cameron about to re-engage his “toxic constituency”?- There is also another school of thinking, positioned by a quote which may or may not have come from Fredreich Nietzsche, questioning thus: “Do everybody deserve the vote”?One might easily contend, also, that in the event of true British democracy Katie Price or Jeremy Clarkson could be our prime minister – so in a way we should count our lucky stars that our democracy is only a shadow of its full meaning.

  I, however, take a different view, being in favour of democracy on principle and not seeing it as a utility that ought to be used when it suits me. As tyrants fall in the Middle East I know full well about the possibility of there being a radical Muslim Brotherhood element to post-Arab Spring politics, but appreciate that this must be challenged with ideas and committed action.
  Tags: democracy politics britain davidcameron

• music.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object) – Guide to the history of and many scenes of TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO. Well, all electronic music, really.
  Tags: music reference history guide electronic

• David Mitchell | Give me Ryanair’s brazen villainy over the bogus compassion of BP | Comment is free | The Observer – This strategy led the Today programme’s John Humphrys to ask a silly question last week: “Isn’t the reality that so long as the oil companies are as greedy for profits and nothing else as they are, this problem is not going to go away?” he said, with reference to the issue of replacing oil with renewable energy. It’s silly because it only demonstrates Cynicism 1.0: he knows these corporations aren’t as eco-committed as they claim because they can still make money out of oil. But he implies that a time might come when plcs aren’t “greedy for profits and nothing else”. Cynicism 2.0 is realising that it won’t and that we can only properly harness the power and wealth of oil companies for developing sustainable energy sources by creating a business environment in which that activity is as profitable, or looks like it will become as profitable, as drilling for oil.
  Tags: environment ethics ryanair business comedy
• Tiger Beatdown › Unionbusting at Qantas Causes Global Travel Nightmares – Effectively, he was asking the government to crush the union for him, putting a decisive and definitive halt to worker demands for better conditions, fair pay, and long-term security for the airline. Joyce claimed that the airline has been under attack from the unions, and was under threat of closure without intervention, but it rang false from a man who was netting an absurd amount of money every year while callously locking workers out to get his way; and none of those over 7,000 workers would receive pay during the lockout. The Qantas lockout felt like the petulant action of a man who takes hostages first and asks questions later and indeed there were indicators it was retaliatory in nature:
  Tags: strikes australia classwar corporatism
• The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest – It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul’s cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.
  Tags: london economics history class democracy accountability protest
• Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke – No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. “Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”
  Tags: censorship internet china activism satire cartooning
• Tiger Beatdown › Who Exactly IS The 1%? – There’s considerable confusion circulating over who is in the top 1% in the United States, with a constant barrage of numbers that seem to shift depending on source, agenda, and timing. These are often used as derails, and it’s easy to derail with arguments about how to define the top 1% in the United States, because there are a number of different ways to look at it, all of which are valid. In all the discussion, people do generally seem to agree that the inequality is staggering, and there are a number of very colourful and stunning charts to point this out and argue about precisely how staggering it all is.
  Tags: politics ows classwar analysis
• Fest 10 Hangover: Friday – “Here is the start of the three part series recounting the weekend of Fest 10. It started Thursday at 5 pm, when we left. It would be an uncomfortable 20 hour drive, needless to say. Five people in a 4runner isn’t ideal, and it was hard to get any sleep. Every time I would wake up, I would think several hours had passed. It was usually anywhere from five minutes to an hour though. We stopped a few times for bathroom/food/coffee breaks.” Aside from this bit, I WISH I WAS THERE.
  Tags: punk music festival florida usa
• LENIN’S TOMB: OWS vs. the Octopus: On Making a Demand- The biggest and broadest social movement we have seen in this country since the anti-Vietnam war protests has begun. The anti-capitalist revolts in Seattle, the movements to establish and defend the rights of the undocumented in Arizona, the defense of organizing rights in Wisconsin, the robust and indignant response to the murder of unarmed black men by the Oakland Police Department have prepared the way, nationally, for this moment. Internationally, the revolutions in the Middle East have raised the flag of full transformation. These are our waypoints, our history, our archive of how we got here.The question we have asked ourselves, for so long now, has been: how far can they push us before something breaks?

  Something has broken. And re-formed. And billowed – radiant and heterogeneous – into existence.
  Tags: ows occupation protest democracy anticapitalism

• Local Culture – I want to write something about how Southampton is one of the most vital cities in Britain; but I can’t. In reality it has become another homogenized, identikit high-street town with Primark pavements and the trodden in gum of Tesco and Wetherspoons getting stuck to the bottom of our shoes. As a friend said to me recently: “these days ‘local culture’ means talking about the X-Factor in different accents”.
  Tags: punk zines localism community
• BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: THE GHOST OF THE COLONELS – The discussion of Greece today in the press and the political offices of Europe is almost completely ahistorical – everything is couched in utilitarian terms of economic management. I just think it is important to put the present crisis in a wider historical context. Above all the extraordinary history of the military dictatorship and the savage effects it had on the whole of Greek society.
  Tags: greece bbc history journalism democracy
• IGDA Writers Panel: Players vs. Characters, Part 1- October 26, 2011. It was time to attend another IGDA writers panel. Last year’s panel write-up on Environmental Narrative had been well-received, so I was encouraged to do a repeat performance this year.The panel’s theme this time around was “Players Vs Characters” – the games writer’s pocket incarnation of “What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object?”
  Tags: none

• A blunt critique of games criticism – I read Ben Abraham’s weekly summary of game criticism over at Critical Distance. Unlike a decade ago, there is now an absolute deluge of essays being written about games. I see reactions, counter reactions, and copious commentary. What is difficult to find is good writing that dreams of improving the art and craft of games.
  Tags: criticism writing gamedesign games gamecriticism
• who killed videogames? (a ghost story)- “What we’re saying,” the smaller man says, “is that the other guys are making things that people will fathom playing for three months if they play it for a week, and that we’re going to make a thing that people will consider playing for six months, if they play it for three days. We’ll generate a mathematically proofable engagement wheel. The players will come for the cute characters, and–”I’m not listening anymore. For all I care, he is probably going to say “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
  Tags: gamedesign videogames socialnetworks monetization socialgaming facebook zynga psychology manipulation evil
• Telling Tales: The Art of Videogame Stories in 2011 – In fact story telling in games is taking on more intricacy all the time. It now assumes – under the banner of “narrative design” – that there’s more to spinning a good yarn than lobbing some dialogue on top of an existing premise for conflict. This undertaking, the work of the narrative designer, is a pursuit that meshes writing and game design together in a more tightly woven form that we might previously have been used to. This is not simply slotting exposition between the action, but something more integral.
  Tags: videogames design gamedesign narrative storytelling
• The Personal Is Political – For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about—namely “therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” Another name for it is “personal” vs. “political” and it has other names, I suspect, as it has developed across the country. I haven’t gotten over to visit the New Orleans group yet, but I have been participating in groups in New York and Gainesville for more than a year. Both of these groups have been called “therapy” and “personal” groups by women who consider themselves “more political.” So I must speak about so-called therapy groups from my own experience.
  Tags: feminism politics essay gender personal quellism theory directaction
• Not Safe For Work – Although Chaud hadn’t intended to go public so early, he ran with it and threw open the doors of the Polymorphous Perversity blog. He invited the people of internet to send him private sexual material: nude images and personal fantasies. The images would be cropped and de-personified for in-game avatars; the fantasies would be used to add reality and depth to the game’s sexual tapestry. In May, Chaud’s mood was ebullient: “I had a very weird insight today: I treat my game like a girlfriend… Yeah, I know, weird. But the good thing is: it loves me back.” But his posts were infrequent and in June he made a quick remark that this special relationship was fast becoming dysfunctional
  Tags: sex gender perversity desire psychology sociology gaming gamedesign
• In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood – Well, hats off to the science fiction community, you have successfully goaded Margaret Atwood into producing a volume of SF criticism. This is a frankly bizarre state of affairs, something that just a couple of years ago I would have found impossible to believe, but Atwood’s introduction makes very clear that this is not an exaggeration.
  Tags: writing literature review sciencefiction margaretatwood
• Japanese noise-rock – The Japanese hardly invented the notion of blaring, atonal rock music, but for some reason, a number of its best-known practitioners hail from that friendly little island in the sea. There are a few speed bumps on the road to noise nirvana, however. Noise-rock, by its very nature, isn’t very popular; it consists of screeching, howling, searing blares of vocals, drums, guitars, and electronics, and few people can stand to listen to it. So its audience is pretty limited, no less so in Japan than in the English-speaking world. Many “Japanoise” albums are only available as imports, making them expensive and hard to find; the language barrier also ensures that it can be confusing to sort out one release from another. Music as alienating as this also has a built-in snob appeal, making it difficult to get good recommendations from fans who want to keep their club exclusive.
  Tags: music noise japan
• WE SPENT YESTERDAY CRYING IN THE ATHENS RIOTS – Tear gas. Fucking tear gas. I stink of it. My bomber jacket and hair are cracking from it; my nostrils are basically Dresden and Nagasaki. I hate tear gas. The Greek police though, they fucking love it. Today, in the centre of Athens, they responded to 100,000 plus protesters the way they usually do: nailing them with canisters of vile, noxious crap.
  Tags: greece athens protest directaction uprising youth police eyewitness
• Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and bloodshed – And this performative aspect can take on a whole cruel turn as well. We are supposed to “stay in character” all the time, play the role that was assigned to us and perform it well, with soul, with passion. If you were lucky enough to get the role of “recognized feminist blogger” or “recognized name within Social Justice”, you should not deviate from the scripts that “feminist and/ or Social Justice blogging” are supposed to entail. Your opinions should be carefully weighted because if you say something wrong, the pelting of rotten vegetables begins. That is, if the blogger makes a mistake, the audience of prosumers will begin the collective dance commonly known in blogging as the “call outs”.
  Tags: feminism blogging socialjustice echochamberdebate behaviour sociology internet
• It’s All For A Cause, You Know: Breast Cancer, Pinkwashing, and Objectification – October, as many readers are no doubt aware, is ‘breast cancer awareness’ month in the United States. The tide of pink-branded products, courtesy of a campaign started in the early 1990s by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, might have been a tipoff. Of course, pink branding is also spilling over into other months of the year—it really started to ramp up in September this year, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find some pink-branded products, or witty ‘breast cancer awareness’ slogans, at other months of the year as well.
  Tags: feminism cancer charity advertising branding