• LENIN’S TOMB: Racist vengeance in Libya – There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that “African” mercenaries acted as Qadhafi’s fifth column.
  Tags: libya racism revolution rebellion imperialism
• LENIN’S TOMB: A couple of recent police killings – A lot of people showed some very nasty streaks during the UK riots. Social media was groaning with almost Streicherite hate-mongering and calls for violent repression that a Ustashe would think twice about. Bring in the army! Water cannons! Plastic bullets! Live bullets! Shoot them all!  Massacre them!  Massacre them!  And now that’s all over and the state has regained control, and the explicit bloodthirst has receded back into its usual subterranean psychic flow, there’s no need to do anything rash.  The police will simply take whatever new repressive technologies are handed to them, add them to the repertoire and continue to maim and consume bodies, perhaps at a slightly higher rate.  The intensified social antagonisms will be resolved with the carefully scripted, bureaucratic application of violence.  A few hundred deaths, a few thousands injuries, a few bad headlines, a little more fear and resentment, more CCTV, and the retooling of the state for the age of austerity is complete.
  Tags: britain police power violence authority
• New Statesman – The anti-choice minority are being allowed to dictate policy – The battle for abortion rights in Britain has begun in earnest. This week, the small, vocal, venal group of Christian conservative lobbyists working in Westminster to roll back women’s right to reproductive choice has won a victory. The Department of Health has confirmed that abortion clinics will no longer be allowed to offer counselling to women presenting with crisis pregnancies, who may instead have to go to biased religious counsellors if they wish to receive advice and information on abortion. This has been done without any debate, circumventing the parliamentary process ahead of next week’s discussions on this and other anti-choice amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill.
  Tags: abortion britain religiouszealots
• SchNEWS 785 – 26th August 2011 – Atos Shrugged – This is the third website run by disabled activists to have been forced offline after heavy legal threats from Atos, without the company ever having to have their supposed evidence tested in court (or held up to ridicule more like). Some of the things the sensitive company has found unbearble in the past include subverted logos, the website name ‘AtosRegisterofShame’ and the phrase ‘Atos Kills’.
  The only thing to do with a bully is overwhelm them with sheer numbers. The company has gone through an extensive – and no doubt expensive – corporate rebranding; online activists have been responding by suggesting a more honest corporate identity
  Tags: atos corporatescum disability benefits privatisation
• Nothing To Lose « Electron Dance – I characterise each computer gaming decade in the following way:<br />
  1970s, Genesis – The first computer game businesses appear with Atari dominating<br />
  1980s, Democratisation – Home computers enable ordinary computer users to make their own games<br />
  1990s, Corporatisation – Profitable games require the polish and resources that only big business can afford<br />
  2000s, Revolution – Game development becomes cheaper and games break out of narrow genres in a big way
  Tags: gaming history gamesindustry
• Hark! A Vagrant’s Kate Beaton on History, Comics, and Crowded Elevators | The Hairpin – Kate Beaton is the artist and mastermind behind the web comic, Hark! A Vagrant. In it, she affectionately satirizes iconic figures from Queen Elizabeth to those wacky Fitzgeralds, winning her a spot in the hearts of history and lit nerds (and everyone) everywhere. Her second book, which will feature classic strips as well as new material, will be released by Drawn and Quarterly this fall. We caught up with Kate to ask her the tough questions.
  Tags: katebeaton webcomics art interview
• Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky | The Hairpin – Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky
  Tags: books funny
• Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary – (Actually, there are several reasons I’m not on Google Plus, nor on LinkedIn or Twitter or a bunch of other social networks, starting with “attractive nuisance” and moving on through “waste of time” and “I dislike the amount of spam you’re sending me” and ending in “thank you but I don’t want you to monetize my personal information”: but this is the stuff specific to Google Plus …)
  Tags: socialnetworks design realworlduse web2.0 google
• LENIN’S TOMB: No tears for Qadhafi; no cheers for NATO – I would strongly caution against getting carried away with the prospect of permanent revolution here.  I think the US and its allies will very quickly stabilise this situation.  There will be no analogue to ‘de-Baathification’.  The old state structures will be preserved and adapted, and the new government will enjoy considerable legitimacy provided it delivers on a basic menu of elections and political rights.  Moreover, the parties that win those elections will likely be the more pro-capitalist elements allied to the ruling class factions in the leadership of the transitional council.  The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime.
  Tags: libya proxywars middleeast africa
• Gamasutra – Features – Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics – Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation. We need to stop looking for answers, whether those answers would come from a technical innovation whose arrival only renews obsession with the next breakthrough, or from the final exploitation of the true nature of our medium by means of a historical discovery so obvious that it will become indisputable. The answers lie not in the past or the future, but in the present, which is all we will ever get in any case.
  Tags: gamedesign historicalaberrance
• Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds | Liberal Conspiracy – Each year, approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested and prosecuted in military courts, the majority on charges of throwing stones. These courts can and do imprison children as young as 12, even though Israeli civilian law prohibits the imprisoning of a child under 14 years of age.
  According to B’Tselem’s latest report, 60 per cent of the children jailed for stone throwing between 2005 and 2010 were aged 14 or under. Prison terms range from a few days to over a year. One 14-year-old boy was sentenced to 20 months, while nearly a third of minors aged 14-15 are locked up for four months or more.
  Tags: israel humanrights children youth
• Analyst Breaks Satire Barrier, Become Parody | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Pachter also attacked the idea of unions within game development, saying that people who earn a lot of money don’t need any protection, apparently because money provides them with a cloak of impenetrable entitlement: “I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair labor practices. Sweatshops should have unions but games studios, which tend to pay people a lot of money, shouldn’t. I just don’t think people who make over $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection cause they might have to work overtime.”
  Tags: employment unions gamesindustry bullshit
• What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then? | Liberal Conspiracy – I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.
  Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.
  That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?
  Tags: rightwingbullshit farright islamophobia racism terrorism britain
• Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement | Liberal Conspiracy – Islamic ideology had questions to answer after 7/7 and the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now.
  The Anders Breivik of this world do not emerge from nowhere, just as the English Defence Leagues of this world do not emerge from nowhere. They are fostered by an ideology legitimised by screaming tabloid headlines and the fear-mongering of politicians who really should know better.
  And unfortunately whilst Breivik’s actions were the actions of a nutter, he is not the only nutter out there.
  Tags: farright rightwingbullshit britain norway terrorism
• Deborah Cohen: Amy Winehouse’s battle with addiction « BMJ – Her celebrity status meant every painful twist in her chaotic lifestyle was played out in lurid detail in the press— blood soaked ballet pumps, arms razed with scratches, slumped in a corner at parties. Hardly glorification.
  I’d been to several festivals where she’d played—or tried to. Incoherent and stumbling, close-ups on large screens beamed out a small pale girl whose wrinkled skin belied her age.
  People turned, tutted, walked away. Some jeered and booed. Others stood and watched wide-eyed in horror. (Some wide-eyed from ingesting a similar cocktail of class As and booze—their drug consumption not having turned bad.) You have to question the wisdom of thrusting such a vulnerable person onto a stage—trial by rather hypocritical festival going crowd. Sympathy, one the whole, was notable by its absence.
  Tags: addiction drugs death britain popculture popstars
• Punknews.org | Hot Water Music: “Up To Nothing” – New HWM song. Mighty fine.
  Tags: band music
• Journalism; when is it justified for a writer to work for free? | Funambulism – The Controversial Bit: yesterday morning, I posted on Twitter the following: Hypothesis; people who write for free are using their secure financial situation as an unfair advantage. Any antitheses?
  Tags: journalism writing freelancing gamesjournalism
• искра/iskra: The Big Issue – So it seems David Cameron is to edit the next edition of the Big Issue.<br />
  This should come as a surprise to none. The Big Issue is perhaps one of the most foul and conservative institutions working in homelessness in the UK. Its liberarian fuckwittery is summed up exactly in its tagline, “Working Not Begging”.
  Tags: homelessness britain libertarianism bigissue

• Infamous 2: Mindless Fun and the Basis of Aesthetic Judgement | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – As my opening reviews suggested, whether a work constitutes mindless or mindful fun is largely a matter of individual perception and predisposition. One can play Infamous 2 and be uplifted by the political allegory just as easily as one can play the game and hate the fact that it manipulates us at every turn. Similarly, there are times (as with the work of Haneke and Eisenstein) when the manipulative character of a work is a source of prestige rather than animosity.
  Tags: psychology consumption subjectivity entertainment brain
• LENIN’S TOMB: The sadistic state – The criminal justice system is engaged in a demonstration of the state’s ability to control the territory, because that very ability is just what has recently been in doubt.  The moral and ideological pedagogy behind this disciplining and consumption of bodies teaches us that the party of order is in control, because its claim to rule hinges considerably on its ability to rule.  This is, of course, the hallmark of a very brittle social order.
  Tags: britain justice police power authority violence force
• LENIN’S TOMB: The competing common senses of the riots – In light of this, the repressive responses have to be seen as ranging from the delusional to the obscene.  Among the delusional, bring back national service.  A simple point: Greece has national service.  You work it out.  Equally delusional are the hopes invested in using bigger and better weapons.  The policing breakdown here was not military – the gun that apparently killed Mark Duggan was not a toy.  Look at it.  That gun is a beast.  It’s designed to decimate flesh.  Police use these weapons on citizens.  The idea that they haven’t got enough weapons or powers is fuelled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality.  What happened was a breakdown of leadership and legitimacy.  Resorting to more repression as a way of ironing out these problems will both intensify them in the long run and hurt and damage a lot of people along the way
  Tags: riots britain police rightwingbullshit
• New Statesman – Demonising the young won’t heal our cities – As panicked politicians with little understanding of social disorder fight to reclaim the narrative, it is vital that we resist the easy story of “us” <br />
  and “them”.Because the truth is that it’s all “us”. The disorder will continue until we acknowledge that the young people who rampaged through Manchester, Liverpool, Brixton, Tottenham and 50 boroughs of London are as much a part of the “real Britain” as those who nobly came out the next morning to clear the debris from their trashed high streets. The language of “true Brits” defending themselves against a feral underclass is precisely the language of social division that predicated these riots.
  Tags: britain classwar socialdivision riots
• SchNEWS 784 – 19th August 2011 – The U.N. Holy Land – The machine-gunning of an Israeli bus and the subsequent air-raids on Gaza represent another dangerous turn of the screw for Palestine. Anxious to rescue themselves from their own domestic discontents (see SchNEWS 781) another border war might be just what the Israeli authorities want.
  Tags: israel palestine occupation statemurder resistance protest
• Why riot? – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – No-one wants to hear social and economic justifications for rioting, least of all anyone in the UK political class. But justification is not what is at stake. The issue is explanation, as that will determine the response.
  Tags: britain riots police coalition
• Civil disorder and looting hits Britain: We have been here before | The Economist – These are bold claims, amounting to a thesis that Britain has been wrecked and transformed from a familiar, law-abiding spot to an alien hell hole in just three or four decades. But here is an odd thing, surely: go back precisely three decades and you get to the summer of 1981, scene of some of the nastiest riots in modern British history, when racially charged violence saw tracts of Brixton in south London and Toxteth in Liverpool burn for days.
  Tags: riots britain moralpanics media lazyjournalism kneejerkreactionaries blametheparents
• Your Critic is in Another Castle: The Chatty RPG – But then there is the world of gaming.  Or rather, there are the worlds of gaming.  When you reach a new location in an RPG, what’s the very first thing you do?  (After saving, of course.)  You talk to every. single. person. in town.  At great length.  You ask them their life stories.  You perform their tasks and errands, up to and including murder.  You ask anyone and everyone you meet if they need help, and if they do, you immediately proffer it.  Your sword (or gun — Fallout and Mass Effect are not innocent of this) is at anyone and everyone’s disposal, with small exceptions for not helping members of a problematic alignment, or persons perceived as evil or shady.
  Tags: writing gamedesign playeragency npcs worldbuilding
• Your Critic is in Another Castle: Beyond the Girl Gamer 2.2: We all live in a… – A game can include female characters galore, and yet still find itself an example of incoherent world-building that doesn’t take gender or sex into account in any way.  [...] The first game mainly portrays female NPCs as servants, nobles, locals, or witches — and though not ideal, this is at least theoretically consistent.  By the second, nearly all groups, factions, and character types are a fairly hefty gender mix.  Men and women both guard town walls, or oppose you with malice (i.e. swords), or are dungeon bosses.  And yet women who get lines or quest segments are still mostly there to be plot devices, rather than to be characters with agency.  Your player character can be female, and yet nearly the entire game is designed around the responses of a male player character.
  Tags: gamedesign writing gender fantasy
• Epilogue: Nations as Characters – Too often, historical criticism of games is based on accuracy and realism, something that is difficult to talk about meaningfully in an art that relies on abstraction. (You can ask why some things are abstracted and some are not, of course.) But what historical game analysis really needs sometimes is kicking at the premises. This series is pretty much 25000 words kicking at the idea that we give nations personalities and they are often consistent from game to game, developer to developer, and this says something about how we turn history into a pastime.
  Tags: gamedesign history nationstates nationalcharacter abstraction
• The Zulu National Character – It’s honestly hard to justify the Zulu as the greatest of the African civilizations. Their migration and warfare did not lead to any great empire; a tiny corner of South Africa along the Indian Ocean. Give Shaka credit for survivability and military insight, but he wasn’t the Napoleon of the Cape. There is no Code of Shaka, after all.
  The Zulu were, however, the most obvious of the African. Like the Babylonians, Meier probably used them in the game because, first, he needed an Africa civ that wasn’t Mediterranean Egypt, and second, people knew who the Zulu were. Recognition was the important thing here. The default name for the first Zulu city in Civ 1 and 2 was Zimbabwe – which is not even a Zulu city.
  Tags: africa history empire gaming gamedesign eurocentrism
• Daily Routines – How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.
  Tags: interesting writers biography
• LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Magicland – Beck was still polishing his act in his early days at Fox; does anyone remember when he simulcast a close-up of his own eyes in real time as he sermonized? Immediately, Stephen Colbert was on the story, pretend-praising Beck, saying, “Glenn has climbed into his genius cannon and lit the fuse.” He pegged Beck as a personage whose eyes offered “a wormhole to another world,” and it wasn’t long before Jon Stewart and the South Park boys were feeding on Beck’s performances; it was fertile ground. This kind of attention of course brought out Beck’s petulance, which is never far from the surface. Unlike Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, or, as far as anyone can tell, Michele Bachmann, Beck fancies himself a comedian.
  Tags: glennbeck usa rightwingbullshit funny media foxnews
• Socialism and/or barbarism: An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part one) – Lastly, we disagree that  “what we’re witnessing now has absolutely nothing to do with” that shooting.  And that is the real difference, the tiny crack between us that widens into a yawning gulf, a division that  cannot be squared.
  For we want to understand the world in its historical particularity, how and why it has gotten to be the way that it is, and why that is insupportable.  You, however, simply want to make sure that it goes on as long as possible.  Regardless of the quality, regardless of the consequences, regardless of anything other than your collected capacity to declare that it’s a nasty world out there, but at least we have our decency.  At least we sit high enough to look out over the killing fields.  At least we got here by legal measures.  And how dare they.  How dare they.
  Tags: riots britain rightwingbullshit analysis
• New drug could cure nearly any viral infection – MIT News Office – Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.
  Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.
  Tags: medicine research science future health
• S.F. gay married couple loses immigration battle – “Citing the Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama administration denied immigration benefits to a married gay couple from San Francisco and ordered the expulsion of a man who is the primary caregiver to his AIDS-afflicted spouse.”
  Tags: homophobia usa immigration law
• An Open Letter to David Cameron’s Parents « Nathaniel Tapley – Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron, Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
  Tags: politicians riots hypocrisy tories davidcameron
• Marechera’s Poetry – Dambudzo Marechera was a performer. Throughout his life, he continuously reinvented himself by putting on roles, donning costumes, and creating myths about his person. This was what he saw as both the inescapable effect of colonization, and a reaction against it. To Marechera, being colonized meant being a ‘mimic man’ destined to imitate the colonizer. Yet he believed that liberation from colonization could happen through making self-reinvention a way of life, adopting a fluid identity that resisted being defined, categorized, and spoken for.
  Tags: poetry
• New Left Project | NLP Blog | Democracy BBC Style – John Reith, the founding father of the BBC, made much of the democratic potential of broadcasting. His concept of democracy however was rather unconventional.  In May 1933 he told an audience at Manchester University that in his view: ‘A man may be as good a democrat as any other and yet reject, in the light of philosophy, history or experience, democratic process to accomplish democratic ends’ [1]  Two years later he made a similar remark praising Mussolini for his pursuit of ‘high democratic purpose by means which though not democratic, were the only possible ones.’ [2] Reith’s fascist sympathies did not end there. Like many other British elites of that period he was quite open about his admiration for Hitler, and according to his daughter Marista Leishman, having been effectively ousted from the BBC, he came to believe that his personal calling was for dictatorship.
  Tags: democracy fascism bbc britain history
• The Smart Set: Paperback Politics – August 5, 2011 – If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.”
  [...]
  There is another writer whose political and philosophical influence is finally being felt in the public sphere. You may have read one of his books as a child. His name is Robert A. Heinlein, and he wrote science fiction.He was a libertarian enamored of military might, a conservative who championed free love. His heroes are certainly competent. They’re also folks who hack the systems in which they live, not elitists who abandon a corrupt world full of moochers and looters to worship the dollar as an end unto itself.  And unlike Rand, most of Heinlein’s work is actually readable.
  Tags: robertheinlein libertarianism usa politics aynrand objectivism capitalism individualism books sciencefiction
• LENIN’S TOMB: A crisis of ideology and political leadership. – The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people.  There’s no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound.  There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics.  That still doesn’t mean that the riot doesn’t have a certain political focus; that it doesn’t have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality.  The rioters here, whenever they’ve been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are – most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.
  Tags: riots london violence rebellion vandalism looting capitalism
• LENIN’S TOMB: Reactionary birdsong – While we await a pronunciamento from Cameron (ie not from his butler), there is a seam of political reaction already in the post in response to the riots.  The right-wing is going stir crazy over these events.  You need only follow the Tweets relating to each new hotspot and the Twitterers who express, far more concisely than the ‘vox pops’ on the news, the instapundits, the right-wing blogs, and those politicians who have so far been dragged out their hangovers by the media, where this is all going.  Here’s a brief songsheet.
  Tags: riots britain language media journalism punditry
• Penny Red: Panic on the streets of London. – Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
  Tags: london riot inequality capitalism recession cuts
• Top Gear’s electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC’s standards – So how does it get away with it? It’s simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top five TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year. Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that “our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures”. But in this case we can’t be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC’s standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it.
  Tags: television bbc hypocrisy drivers cars
• Liz’s blog » In which I join the 21st century – List of neato places for acquiring ebooks and other Kindle-friendly gubbins.
  Tags: books ebooks reading
• Kill Screen – Review: Duke Nukem Forever – There is a tendency to think of modern games as acontextual—to ignore their past. We trick ourselves into ignoring those previous iterations, such as the gap between Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid, because frankly they do not matter so much. This is the future. We are beyond those childish days, and their constraints no longer shackle us.
  Tags: games criticism reviews
• nihilistic_kid: Who’s Pulling Your Strings – Of course, in the creative sphere, it’s actually fine to use someone else’s thoughts. They’re only interesting though, when the creator is aware of the other people in his or her head, and the many things they have left there. Attempting some endeavor—whether writing or overthrowing a country’s government—without first being aware of the puppetmasters and their plans for you, and for history, is doomed to the clichés of repetition and ultimate defeat.
  Tags: writing thought cliche imagination creativity preconceptions psychology
• Chris Christie slams fearmongering over Sharia law – New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie defended his decision to nominate a Muslim judge to the state Superior Court against conservative critics who warned that the new judge will implement Sharia law. The notoriously blunt-spoken Christie calling their fears “crap” and “crazy.”
  Tags: usa islamophobia crazy
• Polygamist leader convicted of child sex abuse – Yahoo! News – SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — A jury convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of child sexual assault, in a case stemming from two young followers he took as brides in what his church calls “spiritual marriages.”
  Tags: religion mormonism sects polygamy weirdmotherfuckers

• LENIN’S TOMB: Let it bleed – The Star’s offices have been raided, so both the Murdoch and Desmond group – the most vile, degraded end of the capitalist media – are implicated thus far. I doubt it can stop there. And the relationships between police, politicians and press executives – comprising a potent combination of state, capitalist and ideological power – are under scrutiny now. David Cameron looks in a very precarious position over this. In this light, I think any socialist who sees this purely or mainly as a jobs issue has seriously lost perspective. The situation is rich with materials for socialists to operate on, presenting a set of wide open opportunities.
  Tags: media journalism tabloids capitalism britain
• New Statesman – The momentum of the Murdoch backlash must not slow – For years, the Murdoch press has manipulated a particular type of moral outrage in order to peddle its propaganda of war and hate. Now, with the scandal of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was reportedly hacked by a detective employed by News of the World, that very same moral outrage has been turned back against News International. It’s like an attack-dog finally turning around to savage its abusive master.
  Tags: media government oligarchiccapitalism corruption
• Artificial Stupids | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy – One of the hoariest of science fictional archetypes is the idea of the artificial intelligence — be it the tin man robot servant, or the murderous artificial brain in a box that is HAL 9000. And it’s not hard to see the attraction of AI to the jobbing SF writer. It’s a wonderful tool for exploring ideas about the nature of identity. It’s a great adversary or threat (‘War Games’, ‘The Forbin Project’), it’s a cheap stand-in for alien intelligences — it is the Other of the mind.
  The only trouble is, it doesn’t make sense.
  Tags: ai artificialintelligence sf sciencefiction research computing
• New Left Project | Patriotism – A Dead-End Solution to a Non-Problem – Don’t open the door, and definitely don’t answer the phone: it’s probably someone trying to sell you some ‘new patriotism’. Its salespeople are Labour politicians. Its purpose is to enable Labour to ‘re-connect’ with lost voters.
  Tags: labourparty britain politics nationalism
• L.A. Noire: The Team Bondi Emails Article | Eurogamer.net – At the story heart’s were eleven testimonials – delivered by former Team Bondi employees interviewed under the condition of anonymity – which detailed the oppressive work conditions that hundreds of staff endured throughout those seven years. Among their complaints were an “ominous crunch” period of development which continually shifted year to year; a studio-wide expectation that staff would work overtime and weekends; a praise-free working environment; and a boss named Brendan McNamara, who one of the sources called “the angriest person I’ve ever met”.
  Tags: gamesindustry crunchtime management
• Cheryl’s Mewsings » Anthologies: Some Data – On Saturday I mentioned that I had been sent some data about gender splits in anthologies. I have since been taking a close look at it and want to present some of the data.
  Tags: sf fiction books anthologies gender
• Turning The Page « Electron Dance – We’re actually skirting around a more fundamental issue, the real elephant in the room. The loss of the printed manual is a signal from the future. It is an omen not of the death of print, but the death of product. We all see the writing on the Facebook wall.
  Tags: gamesindustry production digitaldistribution
• Smart Casual? Article – Eurogamer – His games have been played by in excess of 200 million people, but he is neither famous nor revered. Such are the new economies of scale in the casual gaming boom that a Dutch designer in his early twenties can entertain an audience twice the size of that enjoyed by the best-selling video game of all time, and remain almost entirely anonymous.
  Tags: casualgaming gamesindustry socialnetworks
• LENIN’S TOMB: Predator – I consider this story sinister down to the last detail. Not just the hacking of Milly Dowler’s voicemails; not just listening in to every word spoken by a distressed relative; not just deleting messages when the inbox was full, to make space for more messages; but actually profiting from the brief moment of false hope when people thought that Milly Dowler must have deleted the messages herself and thus be alive, by sending hacks round to conduct an exclusive interview with the unaware family about their hopes. In a depraved way, they circled around the vulnerable, knowingly, cynically awaiting a moment of weakness, brazenly bleeding them dry when the opportunity presented itself, creating some of the torment that they then exploited.
  Tags: tabloids media capitalism
• Chasing the Orgy: Good Reviews or Good Friends? « Ruthless Culture – One of the reasons why reviews are always in crisis is because they are born of an attempt to free intellectual culture from the need for geographical proximity.  The book review was born not of the retreat of patronage as a means of funding artistic lifestyles but of the tragic fact that many people wanted to sit in the same coffee shop as Dr. Johnson than was entirely practical.
  Tags: reviews criticism writing academia
• I live sweat… – “Critical self-awareness should cause people to realise their actions restrict others…” – Amy Greer casts a sociological eye over the pit – I don’t wish to use something as reductivist as the female/male dichotomy card to explain what I think is happening when people, mostly males, mosh. Rather than a basic gendered distinction, I would rather argue that a complex interplay of social norms, performance, ritual and also cultural specificities intersect in an interesting way that is both generalisable to many experiences of popular music and culture and specific to my specific experiences of specific types of hardcore. I feel anxious writing this; too often the words of individuals are taken as representative opinions of entire groups. It is not my intent to represent any broad group, any ‘gender’ or experience, I am merely articulating my own opinions, as based on personal experience.
  Tags: moshing hardcore punk sociology
• There’s more to the Facebook generation than the odd poke – If the male leader of an Islamic charity were to advise the government on how girls should dress and consume popular culture, there would be uproar. Instead, the Prime Minister congratulates Bailey in an obsequious letter for voicing “an issue that concerns so many parents”. It is reassuring to know that, in this decadent modern world, there are still powerful, middle-aged men on hand to manage and censor the sexuality of young women.
  Tags: sexism sexuality youth teenagers britain

• The Tablets | Free Music, Tour Dates, Photos, Videos – Brooklyn electro / garage / pop group.
  Tags: band music
• From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide – If the circumstances were not so calamitous, the American-orchestrated removal of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti would be farcical.
  Tags: haiti history coups usa imperialism caribbean
• Haiti must decide Haiti’s future | Mark Weisbrot – Haiti today is an occupied country, with almost no legitimate authority. United Nations troops police the country, and international NGOs provide most basic services, which are severely inadequate. More than a year after the earthquake, there has been little progress in removing rubble, or providing adequate shelter or sanitation for more than one million people displaced. [...] Humanitarian needs are dire.
  The situation in Haiti is potentially explosive, and it is not because, as the US state department argues, Aristide might return before the election. Rather, it is because they have denied Haitians their right to self-government, and continue to do so. Aristide has been Haiti’s only national political leader for the past two decades, and his party the country’s largest political party. It is long past time that the international community recognised that reality, rather than trying to exclude them from the political process through intimidation and violence.
  Tags: haiti caribbean usa imperialism coups democracy
• Yemen arrests anti-government activist – Faqih said: “The protests are significant but Yemen is a very different place from Tunisia: we have no middle class, a weak civil society and a president who relies on social not political ties. Many of his supporters will stay with him until the last day.”
  Early this month Yemen’s parliament gave preliminary approval to a constitutional amendment eliminating presidential term limits, a measure that would allow Ali Abdullah Saleh to stay in power past the end of his mandate in 2013.
  Tags: yemen middleeast democracy
• The fate of the Arabs will be settled in Egypt, not Libya | Seumas Milne – The key to the future of the region remains Egypt. It is scarcely surprising if elements of the old regime try to provoke social division, or attempts are made to co-opt & infiltrate the youth movements that played the central role in the uprising, or that the army leadership wants to put a lid on street protests and strikes.
  But the process of change continues. In the past fortnight demonstrators have occupied & closed secret police headquarters, & the Mubarak-appointed prime minister has been dumped – and Egyptians are now preparing to vote on constitutional amendments that would replace army rule with an elected parliament and president within 6 months.
  There is a fear among some activists that the revolution may only put a democratic face on the old system. But the political momentum remains powerful. A popular democratic regime in Cairo would have a profound impact on the entire region. Nothing is guaranteed, but all the signs are that sooner or later, the dominoes will fall.
  Tags: egypt libya uae saudiarabia middleeast revolution protest democracy internationalaffairs
• New blow to Big Society: Scout Groups hit by cuts | Liberal Conspiracy – In total, at least 2,000 Groups are vulnerable to rent increases with many warning that they will have to reduce outdoor activities, increase subscriptions for parents or even close as a result.
  The contribution of adults working in the Movement, all volunteers, is equivalent to £380 million paid services for young people annually. Throughout the UK, Scout Leaders give 37,620,000 hours of their time each year providing a range of exciting and challenging activities for young people, raising their self esteem and encouraging them to contribute to their local communities. 55% of young people involved in Scouting also volunteer for local community projects, twice the national average.
  Tags: recession cuts bigsociety
• Space Asshole: The Video Game: The Song: The Chords | Procedural Dialogue – Most amusing song.
  Tags: games sf music video
• BLDGBLOG: Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville – Over the course of the following long interview, China Miéville discusses the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his recent, award-winning novel The City and The City; he points out the interpretive limitations of allegory, in a craft better served by metaphor; we take a look at the “squid cults” of Kraken (which arrives in paperback later this month) and maritime science fiction, more broadly; the seductive yet politically misleading appeal of psychogeography; J.G. Ballard and the clichés of suburban perversity; the invigorating necessities of urban travel; and much more.
  Tags: chinamieville urbanenvironments cities london writing fiction psychogeography
• What if China became the world’s policeman? | Michael Tomasy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – This got me wondering. America of course is called the world’s policeman. What if, 25 years from now say, that were China?
  I’m asking out of genuine curiosity. I’m sure some of you will think of ramifications that elude me. We begin with the obvious downside that the US will no longer be the world’s #1. [...] It would surely force Europe to spend more on military matters, if the US were no longer the feudal lord and protector, and America could spend less, maybe. It could also force the US and the EU to coordinate more.
  What it would mean for the people of the world could depend to some extent on what sort of society China itself is in the future. People who disparage American imperialism tend to forget that the US spends many billions on democracy and civil society and the promotion of women’s rights and other things through quasi-governmental endowments and agencies. China has a big Africa investment fund, but I doubt much of it goes toward those sorts of things.
  Tags: internationalaffairs globalpolitics china usa eu futurism
• Evaporating Genres (2011) By Gary K. Wolfe – Jazz Age Criticism – There comes a point in most discussions when it becomes abundantly clear that all disagreements are disagreements of definition and that all of the arguments and denunciations that preceded this realisation were due to the fact that people were talking past each other. This realisation is pretty much endemic in the humanities because the humanities spend so much of their time discussing issues such as ‘justice’, ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the good’.
  Tags: debate discussion argument rhetoric language semiotics
• A matter of life or death in Zimbabwe | SocialistWorker.org – The benign neglect by the media of this not-quite-historical event is worth some reflection, though. As I wrote in this column a month ago, there has lately been a strong presumption that social networking is, as such, democratogenic.
  It is true that platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Twitter can be helpful, even catalytic, for popular mobilizations. But as the authors of a recent report from the United States Institute of Peace note, there is a strong confirmation bias on that point. People only pay attention to the role of social media in political movements when the latter are gaining strength or moving forward.
  If the opposite happens–if support begins to dwindle, or a campaign is stillborn–it never occurs to anyone that online communication may have generated or amplified public fear, cynicism or passivity. That seems to be what happened with the Million Citizen March.
  Tags: socialnetworks activism socialmedia fear autocracy communication
• Mnemotechnics And Ultima Underworld II | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – This isn’t like other Ultima Underworld II retrospectives. This is Dan Griliopoulos’ account of Ultima Underworld II as a “memory palace“, a mental construct which Wikipedia describes as a “mnemonic technique that relies on memorised spatial relationships to establish, order and recollect memorial content.” That’s the starting point. Let’s find out what he’s up to in there.
  Tags: memory psychology gaming biography
• Record companies damages request more money than the entire music recording industry has made since 1877 – No quote needed really.
  Tags: musicindustry corporategreed funny
• How Valve Opened Up Portal 2 Xbox 360 Interview – When Gabe Newell asked Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray fame to come work at Valve, they of course answered the call – the developer was about to ship Half-Life 2.
  Now, six-and-a-half years later, the writing duo have an impressive credits list under their belt: Half-Life 2: Episode 1, 2, The Orange Box, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 and, come April, Portal 2.
  Here the childhood friends talk in-depth about the creation of their latest offering. How did Portal 2 come to be? What’s changed? How does it all tie into Half-Life? And what’s next? Read on to find out.
  Tags: interview games gamedesign funny
• Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com – “As bad lots go, you can’t get much worse than the hordes of Mordor from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Led by an utterly evil disembodied entity who manifests himself as a gigantic, flaming, pitiless eye, and composed of loathsome orcs (or goblins), trolls and foreigners, Mordor’s armies are ultimately defeated and wiped out by the virtuous and noble elves, dwarfs, ents and human beings — aka the “free peoples” — of Middle-earth.
  Well, there’s two sides to every story, or to quote a less banal maxim, history is written by the winners. That’s the philosophy behind “The Last Ringbearer,” a novel set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of “The Lord of the Rings”) and told from the point of view of the losers. The novel was written by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, and published to acclaim in his homeland in 1999.”
  Really need to get round to reading this…
  Tags: books fantasy subversion
• EVE Online helps Japan quake aid in crazy EVE-like way- Destructoid – EVE Online is a pretty unique game. It and its unified, always-on player base manage to do things in their gameworld that few MMOs, nay, few games barely conceive. It’s intimidating as all hell, but damn if it isn’t fascinating. Just like their latest way of helping Japan out in the wake of the massive earthquake.
  Tags: gaming economics humanitarianaid
• YouTube – NEPHICIDE by JOGGER – Awesome dreampop / techno / black metal music video looking back at the musicians’ youth in a tongue in cheek fashion.
  Tags: music video band blackmetal retrospective biography
• Bomer – Drawings of Homer Simpson by bored cartoonists at a convention.
  Tags: drawing sketch art funny cartoon comics

• Hungover Owls – Awwww <3
  Tags: animals hangovers
• Motherlode of potential planets found: more than 1200 alien worlds! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine – And it gets better: of those planets found, 54 are in their stars’ habitable zones. Now, many of these are massive planets unlikely to be Earth-like, but the huge news is that five are near-Earth sized, and one is actually very close to Earth’s size!
  If this pans out, then it implies there could be a million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
  Tags: space planets astronomy colonization
• Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979 – Misagh Parsa argued that the revolution of 1978-79 was made by several different social groups, each for its own reasons. The revolution was fought against the monarchy, which presided over an oil-exporting economy that had gone into overdrive because of the big fourfold run-up of prices in the 1970s. Many felt that they were not sharing in that prosperity, or were inconvenienced by the Shah’s authoritarian government.
  Tags: egypt iran revolution insurrection democracy middleeast islam history
• tim.oreilly.com/herbert/ – Tim O’Reilly’s 1981 book on Frank Herbert in full.
  Tags: books frankherbert dune
• Stone tools discovered in Arabia force archaeologists to rethink human history | Science | The Guardian – A spectacular haul of stone tools discovered beneath a collapsed rock shelter in southern Arabia has forced a major rethink of the story of human migration out of Africa. The collection of hand axes and other tools shaped to cut, pierce and scrape bear the hallmarks of early human workmanship, but date from 125,000 years ago, around 55,000 years before our ancestors were thought to have left the continent.
• Tags: archaeology prehistory
• The Brainy Gamer: What a beautiful world we’ve destroyed – This statement applies to the in-game narrative, but the player soon learns to appreciate its extra-game resonance as well. One can blast one’s way through Metro 2033 and watch the nuclear missiles fly at the end. But if you want a different, more hopeful ending – and more importantly, a more meaningful experience as a player – you must pay more careful attention to the people and world around you. You must “do more than act without thought or doubt” – and that’s an approach shooters rarely ask us to adopt. Metro 2033 turns our conditioned FPS expectations on their heads, but refuses to announce its intentions. In a game full of anomalies, it’s a perfectly anomalous approach to game design.
• Tags: gaming gamesdesign morality choices
• Way Back When – A Visit to The Tank Museum – Film Production students from Bournemouth have produced a stunning short film for The Tank Museum.
  The film, which was shot on a budget of just £1,500, aims to show how museums can fire the imagination and bring history to life.
  Tags: film video history
• American Thinker: The Story of the Egyptian Revolution – Where Egypt will go from here is an enigma. In a sense everything will be the same. The army that has ruled Egypt since 1952 will continue to rule it and the country will still suffer from a huge vacuum of ideas and real political alternatives. On the other hand, it will never be the same again. Once empowered, the Egyptians will not accept the status quo for long.
  Tags: egypt protest revolution democracy middleeast
• Heavy Rain: Free Will and Quick Time Events | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – It could have been ugly. When the French developers Quantic Dream announced that they were working on an ‘interactive film’ that used quick time events as the primary mode of player interaction you could hear the sceptical harrumphing from orbit. Many gamers compared the game to Cinematronics’ infamous laser disc-based arcade game Dragon’s Lair (1983).
  Tags: gamedesign philosophy
• List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia – This list describes fallacious ideas and beliefs which are documented and widespread as well as the actual facts concerning those ideas, where appropriate. Inclusion criteria are as follows: a misconception’s main topic must have its own article; the misconception must have reliable source(s) which assert that it is a common misconception (or synonym thereof); the misconception and its reference(s) must be present in the topic article; the misconception must be currently held, as opposed to ancient or obsolete.
  Tags: interesting misconceptions
• Africa: a continent drenched in the blood of revolutionary heroes | Victoria Brittain | Global development | guardian.co.uk – “Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity.”
  Tags: history congo africa colonialism empire
• Part 8: 1997: The ballad of Oasis and Radiohead | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? | The A.V. Club – Transcending suckiness is the very essence of Definitely Maybe. Given what Oasis became, “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” might smack of the same old self-aggrandizing chest-thumping that people eventually tired of. But Noel Gallagher was a failed criminal and ex-roadie from Manchester when he wrote “Rock ’N’ Roll Star.” It’s a song about the dream of being famous by a guy seeking the freedom that great wealth has always represented to poor people locked into generations of boredom and decay. I didn’t grow up on the hardscrabble streets of Manchester, where dyslexic Noel struck out as an attempted house burglar at 18 and ended up carrying amps for forgotten Brit-rockers Inspiral Carpets, and his brother Liam eked out the equivalent of $100 a week painting fences after getting kicked out of school at 15 for fighting. But with three years of junior-high-school hell in my rearview mirror, I was all about escaping my past. Oasis had seemingly willed itself into becoming rich and famous.
  Tags: music 1990s history grunge altrock pubrock ladrock britpop
• Beryl – “Sludgy noisecore” band from Wales.
  Tags: band music
• Robert Fisk: Exhausted, scared and trapped, protesters put forward plan for future – Already, there are dark reports of demonstrators who dared to return home and disappeared. The Egyptian writer Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who is involved in the committee discussions, is fearful for himself. “We’re safe as long as we have the square,” he said to me yesterday, urging me to publish his name as a symbol of the freedom he demands. “If we lose the square, Mubarak will arrest all the opposition groups – and there will be police rule as never before. That’s why we are fighting for our lives.”
  Tags: egypt middleeast revolution democracy protest
• Cairo’s biggest protest yet demands Mubarak’s immediate departure – “Genuine opposition politics in this country has always relied on people taking the initiative, and that’s what we’re seeing here – on a truly astounding level,” said Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian author who has been closely monitoring the spontaneous political activity on the ground. “There is more transparency and equality here in Tahrir than anything we’ve ever seen under the Mubarak regime; anyone and everyone can have their say, and that makes the demands that come out of the process even more powerful.”
  Tags: egypt middleeast revolution democracy
• On my return to Haiti … | Jean-Bertrand Aristide – As I have not ceased to say since 29 February 2004, from exile in Central Africa, Jamaica and now South Africa, I will return to Haiti to the field I know best and love: education. We can only agree with the words of the great Nelson Mandela, that indeed education is a powerful weapon for changing the world.
  Tags: haiti democracy

• GOTY 2010 – Call of Pripyat | Gaming Daily – Call of Pripyat is my game of the year because playing it is to experience something unpredictable, something of an unknown quantity. You don’t get that too often these days, especially in a game of such quality and magnitude.
  Example:
  Entering the Jupiter Research Complex, a mass of derelict office blocks and gaping rooms filled with rotting technology.  It’s perhaps one of the most impressive locations in the game.  I creep through its corridors.  Strange sounds hum and echo from all directions.  I shoot a few wild dogs that threaten me.  I reach my objective, a crashed helicopter that has fallen through the roof of one of the larger buildings, and retrieve the black box.  Nothing happens.  I creep out.
  NOTHING HAPPENS.  There’s no set-piece, no explosive boss fight.  This game is so cool, so assured, that it just leaves me to absorb the atmosphere it so skilfully creates – it allows me the space to become absorbed.
  Tags: games gamedesign stalker
• Part 6: 1995: Live, Bush, and Alanis Morissette take the pop path | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “When my journey through the past of popular ’90s alternative rock began two months ago, I had a not-so-simple goal: I wanted to reconnect with my long-lost teenaged self, and in the process rekindle the passion I once had for the music of my youth. Pure, unadulterated myopia aside, I hoped that readers would relate to my experience of looking back and realizing that sizeable swaths of my adolescence didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. I wanted to recover that history by playing old, dated albums and trying really hard to hear them as I did back then, no matter how poorly some of my former alt-rock heroes had aged. Because while opinions might change, the past doesn’t. The record is set—I liked what I liked in the ’90s, and I wanted to remember why.” Part 6 of 10 of ‘Whatever happened to alternative nation?’
  Tags: music criticism history grunge altrock 1990s
• Inside ‘Anonymous’: tales from within the group taking aim at Amazon and Mastercard – My guide pointed out that the Anonymous group is conflicted from its core, because it’s an outgrowth of people who themselves have come from /b/, which means that many aren’t that interested in morality. They’re in it for the lulz – or they’re into whatever Anonymous and its associated scenes are doing for the money. Which means that the idea of attacking Amazon, or PayPal, or Twitter, over a moral or ethical issue is something of a new experience for the group. Usually they’re into tormenting people.
  Tags: anonymous hacktivism hackers web generationaldifferences onlineculture internet
• Punknews.org | House Boat – EP stream from the excellent pop-punk supergroup HOUSEBOAT.
  Tags: band music stream
• Generation Wiki’s web savvy – We are Generation Wiki. We are interconnected collaborative creatures, and we like to share. We link and like, comment, post and poke. We Yelp when we’re hungry, Skype when we’re lonely and Gchat throughout the day. Our cell phone bills are light on minutes and long on data almost every month.
  We are the first of our kind. A computer has sat comfortably in some nook of our home for as long as we can remember. We grew up trying to find Carmen Sandiego, and came of age to the beeps and cackles of a 14k modem connecting to America Online. Before we had our own car, before we had our own cash and before we had a fake ID, we had chat rooms, instant messages and inboxes. We had an entire world wide web of possibilities with which to explore beyond the confines of our bedroom walls. Our rebellion was data-driven, a battle cry of zeros and ones where power grew out of the results of a search engine.
  Tags: internet wiki generationaldifferences society culture technology cyborg
• Student fees protest: lawyers launch legal challenge to kettling | Education | The Guardian – “Lawyers have launched a legal challenge to the police tactic of kettling during recent student demonstrations, claiming a breach of human rights.
  The lawyers, acting for five of the thousands of demonstrators penned in by police last Thursday, have written to the commissioner for the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson,arguing that kettling breaches European human rights legislation.”
  Check out the quotes at the end as well – banning protest, use of water cannon, don’t misbehave or it’ll go on your permanent record… shut up, sit down, do what we tell you.
  Tags: protest civildisobedience kettling police
• The Mathletes – Fuck Death / Part One / Trees – Neat album stream from… THE MATHLETES. Featuring that guy who writes a sarcastic blog about the comic Marmaduke, yeah?
  Tags: band music stream
• Robert Fisk: Qatar’s the star – and Washington is worried – Despite the leaked US diplomatic reports on Qatar and their claim that it is a major source of “terrorist” funding, Washington would do well not to mess with the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.
  He is the only world leader to march out of an American vice-president’s office in fury after just seven seconds. And his Al-Jazeera television station – for truly it does belong to him – has revolutionised reporting in the Middle East. Qatar may be tiny but in the region, it is very, very big indeed.
  Tags: qatar middleeast internationalaffairs
• Israel faces tougher line from EU after former heads call for Palestinian state – Twenty-six European grandees have urged the EU to adopt a tougher stance towards Israel including taking “concrete measures” and exacting “consequences” over continued settlement building on occupied land, which they say is illegal under international law.
  The former EU leaders said that in the face of “the ongoing deterioration of the situation on the ground”, the EU, in co-operation with other international bodies, should put forward a “concrete and comprehensive proposal for the resolution of this conflict”. A deadline of April 2011 for progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians should be set, after which the international community should intervene.
  Tags: israel palestine eu internationalaffairs pressure peace
• Part 5: 1994: Kurt Cobain is dead! Long live Soundgarden! | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “By the “Where were you when?” standard, Kurt Cobain’s suicide either doesn’t qualify or my memory is truly fucked. I know I remember finding out about it on a Saturday morning at school while waiting to get on the bus for a forensics tournament. (Extemporaneous speaking—yeah, I was pretty good.) Cobain’s body was actually found the day before, along with a can of Barq’s root beer, some towels, the shotgun with which he killed himself, and half of his $100 supply of Mexican black tar heroin. (He injected the other half before pulling the trigger.) I must not have watched any television the night of Friday, April 8; if I had, I would’ve known where he shot himself (in the greenhouse behind his home), who found his body (an electrician hired to install security lighting), and which CD was playing on the stereo when he died (R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People).” Another in the Onion AV Club’s alternative nation series, this one exploring the death of grunge’s most famous proponent.
  Tags: music grunge history nirvana kurtcobain suicide
• CLUB UNICORN – Tropical Girl on SoundCloud – Electro track made by my flatmate (and sung on by a bunch of other friends).
  Tags: music stream
• The true cost of your new Christmas laptop? Ask the eastern Congolese – Eastern Congo’s hell is an instance of how globalisation generates ungovernable spaces. Where there is a collision of desperate poverty, plentiful guns and a world greedy for natural resources, a brutal chaos results. To combat that, it takes a very tenacious sort of global campaigning – bringing to attention each element of the system and the part it can play in leveraging change – and mercifully, that is what is now finally starting to happen.
  Tags: globalisation capitalism powervacuums africa electronics conflict
• Lost civilization under Persian Gulf? – A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published in Current Anthropology.
  Tags: history science geology anthropology archaeology
• the soft kettle – Hard kettling is the sadistically ironic punishment of people who felt trapped enough to demonstrate in the first place; it says, “If you complain that you are restrained by our wonderful democracy here, we will only restrain you more & harder. That will teach you.” It makes material the soft boundaries by which the demonstrator has already been traumatised.
  Soft kettling is really quite hard to fight. It comes from the left (or what’s left of it) as well as from the right and centre. Writers like Benjamin Barber sold a core message which went, essentially: “Things are fucked but when we say that we must be careful not to offend anybody, or actually catch their attention.” Any pushing anyone does now is always going to be described, by someone in the soft kettle walls, as a “thoughtless”, “juvenile” or “irresponsible” step.
  Tags: kettling society socialisation politics normalisation
• Murderbullets | ORC STAIN – The bulk of this was done sometime between Wonton Soup 2 and Orc Stain, starting out as a entry for an anthology. The theme of the anthology was “The last comic you would ever draw”, so I took it rather literally and did 8 pages of a cracked out character drawing a book in a post apocalyptic wasteland that would grant him entry into the afterlife. Also, for some reason a moose was chained to his toilet. I got wrapped up in figuring out how this situation came to be and developed an elaborate back story involving time travelling, mutants, knife fights and cybernetic dolphin street gangs. Of course none of this would fit into an anthology, so I decided to take a stab at a full length book. (Amazing gonzo post-apocalyptic comic. Brilliant art!)
  Tags: comics postapocalypse gonzo art
• YouTube – Police vs protesters Benny Hill style! – Posted without comment.
  Tags: video funny police protests students
• The student movement evolves – Sitting on a fountain in Trafalgar square, slurping a nice hot cup of tea in the freezing rain and snow, watching the children’s crusade brave the elements and police lines to chant for the downfall of a government it sees as corrupt and illegitimate, I have never felt prouder of my generation.
  Tags: students recession protest activism coalition cuts education
• Disco Wasteland – Fallout: New Vegas gets dance mod – Cannot stop loving this. <3
  Tags: games fallout dance funny
• Tom Gabel On Against Me!’s Future – No Label, New Drummer – I’ll roughly summarise the career ofAgainst Me!: they’ve been through a lot of shit, a lot of good times and written some staggering music along the way. Over the last couple of months a lot seems to have come to a head for them – drummer George Rebelo left to rejoin Hot Water Music and they found themselves dropped by Warners, the major label they’d made their home for the last two albums – but the mantra seems to be onwards, soldiers.
  Frontman Tom Gabel has always been a good person to interview – he doesn’t give too much away and makes you work for an answer, but get him talking and he’s engaging, funny and honest. In this extensive interview we talked everything from what’s on his mind today to how he feels revisiting his past.
  Tags: interview againstme tomgabel punk
• The Cautionary Tale of a Short-Lived College – Government – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Founders College, in rural South Boston, Va., was pitched as a sort of Great Books college for devotees of Ayn Rand. And while the for-profit college was never accredited, it operated with authorization from Virginia to issue degrees.
  At the time the college was approved, it had no official faculty, no facilities, and, it turned out, shaky finances. “I’m stunned that the state would register a place like that,” says Ray Weiss, the onetime enrollment director. “What did we really have going for us when they registered us?”
  (More hilarious objectivist failure!)
  Tags: college usa education objectivism capitalism funny failure
• Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest – The prison protest has entered the wireless age.
  Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.
  Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.
  Tags: prisons capitalism indenturedservitude protest
• Cancún agreement rescues UN’s credibility but falls short of saving planet – The modest deal wrangled out by the 200 countries meeting at the Mexican resort of Cancún may have done more to save a dysfunctional UN negotiating process from collapse than protect the planet against climate change, analysts said today.
  “The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them.”
  Tags: climatechange unitednations diplomacy internationalaffairs environment
• John Pilger: Why are wars not being reported honestly? – Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.
  At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.
  Tags: war journalism media compliance wikileaks democracy news reporting journalisticstandards
• An Open Letter From The Arthur C Clarke Award – Read this if you’re at all interested in UK science fiction!
  Tags: sciencefiction britain uk books fiction awards
• LENIN’S TOMB: I am the mob – Inevitably, the ‘mob’ – the subject of official invective – is depicted as an opponent not merely of a policy, but of “democracy”. But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy. Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
  Tags: democracy britain cuts protest mob
• How do you make an audience of MPs laugh? Well, the story about where their Ugandan aid money went is pretty funny | Jane Bussmann | Comment is free | The Guardian – I landed from New York last week to find Britain in meltdown. London hasn’t been this much fun since the poll tax riots. I had to drop in on the Houses of Parliament to do a tech rehearsal for my show there tomorrow, Bussmann’s Holiday – the first X-rated comedy to be performed inside the Palace of Westminster. Its subject is WikiLeaks’s best exposé yet, combined with aspersions cast on the cause of Kevin Spacey’s late-night injuries, and the thought: “Imagine if Bob Geldof wasn’t such a Jeremy Hunt.”
  Tags: comedy satire uganda internationalaid africa
• YouTube – Mitchell & Webb Nazis – Genius skit.
  Tags: history comedy satire nazis ww2
• “why you say I shoulda went to school”: 14 awful celebrity Twitter feeds – Oh dear.
  Tags: celebrity fame exposure web2.0 terrifying+psychological+insights
• LENIN’S TOMB: Tea parties, old and new. – The ‘Tea Party’ has its origins in a particular ideology of American capitalism which comes from the South. We hear about the ‘southern strategy’, in which the Republican right has used race and ‘culture wars’ to build support in the formerly Democratic South, and used the Christian Right to mobilise a mass base from the South behind policies that favoured elites. But in fact, it would be more accurate to think of this process not as a cooptation by a traditionally Northern Republican Party, but rather as the successful bid for national political hegemony by the southern right.
• Tags: capitalism neoliberalism usa americansouth whitesupremacism
• The 7 Most Horrifying Cost Cutting Measures of All-Time – Money is tight, and everyone is cutting costs. But it’s all about knowing where to cut; the family will skip the vacation, but doesn’t try to save on clothes by turning the neighbor’s cats into loincloths.
  Unfortunately, when large organizations try to cut costs or figure out new sources of revenue, they tend to take the kitty loincloth approach. We’re talking about…
  Tags: funny costcutting capitalism
• Editorial: Panorama – Addicted To Games? – Timed to coincide with tonight’s release of World Of Warcraft’s Cataclysm, BBC 1′s Panorama tonight covered the topic of videogame addiction. I have always approached the subject of gaming addiction with great seriousness, because it’s my belief that if gaming is inherently harmful, I want to know about it, and I want to warn others who game. And I want to approach the subject with appropriate scrutiny, and with evidence-based understanding. It’s something I expect of others when they approach the subject. It was not present tonight. It was astonishing. An openly ignorant series of anecdotes and half-truths, forming a dangerous, lazy treatment of a serious subject.
  Tags: gaming games addiction scaremongering tabloidmedia television

• LENIN’S TOMB: Note on a wedding – The monarchy still functions as the guarantor of a caste within the ruling class, which any good bourgeois wants admittance to – give an old chief executive an OBE, and he will consider himself to have truly lived. It still bestows social distinction – more than that, it upholds and perpetuates the superstitious belief in distinction, in meritorious ‘honour’ as well as ‘honour’ by birthright. Its systems of ranking still structure hierarchies within the state, notably the police, the navy, the air force, and the army. It is still the major patron of ‘Britishness’, the myth of a temporally continuous and organically whole national culture, which every legislator in search of an authoritarian mandate invokes. It is the sponsor of martial discourse, inviting us to believe that the British ruling class and its stately authorities, notably its armed forces, cleave to ‘values’ other than those of egoistic calculation.
  Tags: monarchy britain imperialism capitalism
• New Statesman – Inside the Millbank Tower riots – Glass is being thrown; I fling myself behind a barrier and scramble on to a ledge for safety. A nonplussed school pupil from south London has had the same idea. He grins, gives me a hand up and offers me a cigarette of which he is at least two years too young to be in possession. I find that my teeth are chattering and not just from cold. “It’s scary, isn’t it?” I ask. The boy shrugs. “Yeah,” he says, “I suppose it is scary. But frankly…” He lights up, cradling the contraband fag, “frankly, it’s not half as scary as what’s happening to our future.”
  There are three things to note about this riot, the first of its kind in Britain for decades, that aren’t being covered by the press.
  Tags: students riots demonstration protest direction britain education cuts
• New Statesman – Aversion therapy for the poor – Centuries ago, when ordinary men and women first began to dream of political suffrage, a radical theory surfaced whereby people without property or assets had as much right to a living as anybody else. Thomas Paine wrote in 1795 that every citizen should expect a minimum income as compensation for the “loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” That notion has this week been utterly abandoned by the British administration.
  Tomorrow, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions will announce a new “contract” with the poor. Those receiving the miniscule and dwindling stipend that the government grants anyone without means to support themselves in these straitened times may be required to toil for the state, for free, or face being shoved off benefits.
  Tags: recession cuts britain tories coalition unemployment
• Why are Black Game Characters Failing the Audience? – February is Black History Month. As an African-American I want to take this opportunity to study some of the issue surrounding games and the portrayals of African characters or those with African heritage. I’d like to make comparisons between stereotypical, defective and one-dimensional characters like Barrett and Augustus Cole and more complex, but still problematic characters such as Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson. I’m also going to pick out some positive black characters in other entertainment media, as well as a precious few in games.
  Tags: games race stereotypes
• LENIN’S TOMB: Just the beginning – I’m not frightened by the media’s hysteria, or browbeaten by the servile centre-left that wants to keep opposition as timid as possible. When people ask why occupy a building, how that helps the cause, the answer is very simple: we want to disrupt the processes of power, and we want them be frightened to do what they’re about to do to us. We want them to be afraid of us. They’re about to dismantle our social safety net, shred higher education for millions of working class people, cut teaching in schools, raise the cost of living for everyone except the rich, throw hundreds of thousands of people on the dole, creating many more redundancies as a byproduct, and cheating a whole generation of the education and employment that they need for a decent life. That’s war, and you can’t do that to people and expect them to be polite about it. More occupations, protests, and strikes, would only be the moderate and sensible response to this government’s social vandalism.
  Tags: resistance classwar britain recession cuts
• Cops who hate the working class – It is that situation which produces the conflicts that coppers face daily, which leads to them being spat on, yelled at in the streets, and hated by many, and which also leads to them roughing people up, killing people in custody, racially abusing suspects or non-suspects, harrassing kids, and so on. No doubt it is exhausting. No doubt the police man or woman goes home feeling tired, disgusted, emotionally drained, sick to the back teeth of the kinds of people they encounter everyday. No doubt this coarsening, hardening, grinding experience of daily confrontation leads to a certain contempt for political correctness and anything else which could be seen as hypocritical, pretentious or soft-headed. No doubt that is what leads to a police woman referring to a working class girl, killed moments ago by a fellow officer, as “scum”. But there’s nothing in this that redeems the police woman’s motives, or mitigates the offence. Rather, it just calls for the casting of a wider net of critique.
  Tags: police britain class antagonism
• Antimatter? Not such a big deal | Roz Kaveney – Well, scientists have captured anti-matter. An atom or two for a fifth of a second. I’m sorry, but until there is a whole planet of the stuff with alien beings to whom we can’t talk for fear of going boom, I refuse to be more than a bit impressed. I remember the end of James Blish’s Cities in Flight sequence, when two whole universes were about to collide and Mayor Amalfi was there at Point Zero trying to be turned into the big bang for a whole new universe. Now, that was cool.
  One problem with being a long-term reader of science fiction and fantasy is that you get blase about science itself because you have seen it all before. My sense of wonder was overloaded by the time I was 16; I am never going to get that rush again. Even major breakthroughs make me go ‘Whatever!’.
  Tags: science sciencefiction familiarity modernlife
• frames of reference – 9:25pm, I’m watching a TV programme about the Jewish transports. I’m watching trainloads of Jews arriving at Auschwitz, or trainloads of Jews being used as trade goods towards the end of the war. Then I’m watching the ad break. The first ad is for Lloyd’s Bank, with its streamline cartoon train & its slogan, “Lloyds: for the journey.” After that, it’s an ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops. I get up & turn the television off & go to bed. I’m finding it more & more difficult to cope with these kinds of connections & before I fall asleep I wonder if I could find a house somewhere that doesn’t have TV reception or broadband, or perhaps even electricity. You can cook perfectly well with gas, but its biggest advantage is that you’re not tempted to use it to keep in touch with your so-called culture.
  Tags: culture britain modernlife MJH
• Science is about embracing your knockers – If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. Then people discuss what they think this all means in the real world.
  Tags: science journalism libel britain
• The season of snark – To use a metaphor: let us postulate the existence in the ante-bellum Deep South of benevolent, morally righteous slaveowners who did not flog or rape or oppress their slaves. (I know, I know … it’s a thought experiment, okay?) Would that be enough to exculpate the institution of slavery? I’m pretty sure the answer lies somewhere been “no!” and “hell, no!” Slavery is an inherently oppressive institution because it deprives a class of victims of their most basic right to autonomy, and the failure of a [hypothetical] individual slave-owner to be corrupted does not invalidate this oppressive nature of the system.
  Similarly, the existence of benevolent, incorruptible, morally righteous monarchs who do not tyrannise their subjects citizens does not redeem the institution of monarchy.
  Tags: monarchy britain royalfamily oppression
• Charlie Brooker | The words you read next will be your last – The moment I’ve finished typing this, I’m going to walk out the door and set about strangling every single person on the planet. Starting with you, dear reader. I’m sorry, but it has to be done, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.
  And for the sake of transparency, in case the powers-that-be are reading: this is categorically not a joke. I am 100% serious. Even though I don’t know who you are or where you live, I am going to strangle you, your family, your pets, your friends, your imaginary friends, and any lifelike human dummies with haunted stares and wipe-clean vinyl orifices you’ve got knocking around, perhaps in a secret compartment under the stairs. The only people who might escape my wrath are the staff and passengers at Sheffield’s Robin Hood airport, because they’ve been granted immunity by the state.
  Tags: funny charliebrooker twitter terrorism antiterrorism uk stupid
• Back to Black – “It’s in this light that we must view last year’s controversy – not as a blow to videogames, but rather as a sucker punch to the idea that videogame violence makes for a cheap and easy controversy for the lazy tabloid hack or rolling news channel editor. In this light, is it any wonder that nobody seems particularly keen to root out controversy over Black Ops? So loathe are the tabloid press to waste their time this time out, in fact, that even Cuba’s rather odd condemnation of the game has been reported in a joking, “well fancy that!” tone instead of with the fire and brimstone that would have accompanied such a story a few scant years ago.”
  Tags: videogames media violence tabloidmedia
• Me and the Wii – Chris Hecker’s Website – Back in the 1990s, a friend of mine was a fairly senior marketing executive at Microsoft [...]. I hung out with her and her husband [...] fairly often, and I noticed she was always very careful and measured about how she spoke in public. One time, I was at their house for dinner, and I bluntly asked, “Why don’t you ever say anything interesting or subtle when the press is around?” Without pausing, she said, “When I was a junior marketing person on Excel, somebody from a trade magazine came by to talk about the new version. I gave him the demo and we talked about the new features, and it went well. Towards the end, he asked if it had any bugs, and I said ‘sure, we postponed or resolved as won’t-fix about 2,000 minor bugs’, which was pretty good for a piece of software the size of Excel, localized into so many languages. The headline for the article was ‘New Version of Excel to Ship with 2,000 Bugs’. From that day forward, I have always been careful about what I say to the press.”
  Tags: gamesindustry journalism
• Part 2: 1991: “What’s so civil about war anyway?” | Music – “The trickiest part of writing history is putting styles, trends, and social movements in proper perspective. Not everybody spent the ’60s making babies in the mud at Woodstock, or the ’70s doing blow with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. We dwell on these things because they’re easily recognizable signifiers of their respective eras, but a lot gets overlooked when you use the easy shorthand of Nehru jackets and Bee Gees songs. The spectrum of experiences in any era is simply too wide; it makes me wonder whether the so-called “monoculture” ever really existed, where “everybody agreed on” what was good on the radio and the three TV networks. Maybe we’ve just gotten better about recognizing that even really popular things are irrelevant to significant portions of the population.” Great article about the enmity between Nirvana and Guns ‘n Roses.
  Tags: music history grunge cockrock 1990s nirvana gnr
• George Bush Book ‘Decision Points’ Lifted From Advisers’ Books – When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn’t getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises “gripping, never-before-heard detail” about the former president’s key decisions, offering to bring readers “aboard Air Force One on 9/11 [...]; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq,” [Etc.]
  Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial “decision points” of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush’s character: He’s too lazy to write his own memoir.
  Tags: literarytheft georgewbush fuckingcretins books plagiarism
• Fuck Provenance | Funambulism – Fuck provenance. The joy of many modern critics seems to lie in the attribution of intention to the auteur, or at least cause to the auteur, focusing on the backstory more than the object of study; the importance of something is thus pushed back, the homunculus raised to the point of key importance, and credit or blame ascribed to this new creation instead of the creator or the piece, and so on, ad infinitum. The homunculus is to blame, no it’s the sense of ego, no it’s the neuroticism in that ego, etc. Value drains out of the object and down this chain of blame or praise.
  What does this hunting for origins add to the enjoyment of the piece?
  Tags: art criticism creation deathoftheauthor

• PUNKADIDDLE: Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time (1990-2005) – But of course it goes without saying that reviewers respond to the book they have read, not to the idea in their heads of the sort of people who like the book they have just read. Apart from me, I mean. Obviously when I review, I do so specifically to mock the value-systems and worth of people who read. People like you, sir. And you madam.
  Tags: reviews criticism sensitivity
• The unspeakable in full cahoots with the indefensible – Most public sector workers will have a pay freeze for three years, meaning a de facto pay cut by whatever the rate of inflation is (currently 3.5%). Average real term spending cuts will amount to 25% except in ringfenced spending in health and international aid. 25% is a huge reduction, even bigger than anticipated, or advertised. There are a few off-setting measures that would in theory protect the poorest – linking pensions to earnings, increasing child tax credits – but the net effect will be a severe squeeze on working class consumption.
  Tags: economics recession coalition neoliberalism classwar
• Emergent Gameplay: Deus Ex Made Me Part 2 – I ponder how incredibly difficult it would be to make a game like that for a major publisher today. Reasonably advanced for 2000, today it’s clear DX’s simple environments and primitive people enabled both its scope and its depth. Our standards have risen in some ways, but are they unequivocally the right ways? [...] Optimistic or simply naive, I hope that someday we will shed our destructive addiction to technology and production value as ends rather than as means. In the Deus Ex I play today, the physics aren’t too janky, the characters not too low-poly, the environments not too boxy to inhibit the experiences: of exploring, experimenting, and imagining. I strongly believe our success as a medium depends upon our ability to rediscover and cherish these very best qualities of games; to trust in the intelligence of our players, and challenge them to learn and grow. That was the golden age DX seemed to promise us, and it may yet come.
  Tags: games gaming deusex ionstorm history
• Mark Weisbrot, “How the Media Mislead the Public about Venezuela: The Case of Stephen Sackur’s Interview with Hugo Chávez” – Most of the western world thinks that Venezuela is some kind of dictatorship where Chávez has made people poorer.  They have no idea why he has been re-elected twice, each time by a larger majority.  This kind of reporting explains why they are so misinformed; sadly, it is all too typical.
  Tags: journalism interviews media bias Venezuela hugochavez
• School Daze – by Liel Leibovitz – In Israel’s fractured electoral system, the ultra-Orthodox parties still wield an obscene amount of power and influence, and the laws governing aid to unemployed students were designed to benefit their constituents, the majority of whom do not work and spend their days studying Torah. But a law, Jenny thought, was a law; it couldn’t discriminate between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. She decided to appeal to the Supreme Court.
  This was in 2000. She heard nothing. Struggling, taking on odd jobs wherever she could find them, she managed to complete her studies and began a master’s degree in social work at the university. She was determined to spend her life helping women who suffered the misfortunes she had had to overcome. For a decade, no word came from the court.
  Until this week. The discriminatory policy, the court finally ruled, was to be overturned immediately. The ultra-Orthodox politicians called it an “evil verdict,” and promised to resist.
  Tags: israel judaism politics religion segregation conservatism democracy
• Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer on MySpace Music – Gentlemanly English hip-hop, squire.
  Tags: band music
• Hightide Hotel on MySpace Music – Warm & friendly emo/indie in the vein of Snowing, or Mineral crossed with Grown Ups.
  Tags: band music
• By Surprise on MySpace Music – Rough-edged indie / punk rock band.
  Tags: band music
• Punknews.org | Gatorface – Stream of Gatorface’s new record.
  Tags: band music
• Philadelphia Grand Jury on MySpace Music – Touring with JoFo later in the year.
  Tags: band music
• KEROUAC on MySpace Music – “where will you drink when these wells run dry?”
  Tags: band music
• GALLOPS on MySpace Music – V. cool experimental electronic outfit, forthcoming release on Holy Roar.
  Tags: band music
• don kenn gallery – Awesome drawings of monsters on post-its.
  Tags: art drawing sketch monsters
• That’s How I Roll – A Scientific Analysis of Dice – It turns out that I *was* rolling more 1′s.
  Tags: gaming studies
• The politics of budget cuts – An analysis of the forthcoming battle over public spending cuts, including examination of the role of the Labour Party in the same.
  Tags: britain politics recession publicspending cuts classwar
• The capitalist calculation problem – In the real world, rational economic decision making is only possible to a limited extent due to the existence of an extensive non-market sphere, socialised public bureaucracies, national statistics agencies, offices for public planning and development, local authorities with oversight, etc etc. Tellingly, their behaviour becomes more irrational, wasteful and incompetent the more they are penetrated by marketised logic, the more they attempt to behave like corporations. They accumulate high overhead costs, duplicate capacity, fail to collect relevant information, and undermine the very rationalising aspects of service delivery that they are there to provide.
  Tags: economics statistics calculation methodology capitalism
• KOSMOCHLOR: Umberto Eco’s Rules for Writing (Well) – “After those lists of 10 rules for writing The Guardian recently published*, I thought Umberto Eco’s rules should be on line, too, in English–I haven’t found other translations so far…”
  “The rules used to be 40, but four of them bore no meaning for non-Italian speakers. As the saying goes, the worst treason to the original text is literal translation; so mine isn’t. The square-bracketed notes  are mine. I have also added a few links for the curious and the brave.”
  I do think I’ve seen these before but, still good.
  Tags: writingtips funny writing literature
• Barbaric Document: a notorious story – China Mieville on H. P. Lovecraft.
  Tags: literature racism prose art prejudice video
• New Statesman – War of the words – “If science fiction is no longer a viable form, it is because the humanist assumptions that underpinned it are no longer credible even as fictions. The hybrid type of writing that has evolved in recent years is symptomatic. “Slipstream”, “cyberpunk” and “new weird” blend together influences as diverse as Arthur Machen and Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Williams and William S Burroughs. What these styles of writing have in common is an absence of politics. No world-changing project features in any of them.” I don’t feel this is a correct assertion, but it’s certainly a thought-provoking article.
  Tags: books reviews politics utopia humanism hope sciencefiction

• The Millions: What About Genre, What About Horror? – “Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago[...]” Now this is how you write an opinion column.
  Tags: writing genre horror literature rant essay
• ‘Clean City’: São Paulo Scrubbed of Outdoor Ads – In September of 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising – even pamphlets. It’s all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city itself the focal point rather than colorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
  Tags: advertising architecture urbanenvironments
• Jason Sanford: I promised myself I wouldn’t rant, but then… – Great rant (about Norman Spinrad’s ignorance of non-Anglo SF writers) that mentions plenty of interesting authors to check out.
  Tags: writing sciencefiction reading books
• Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards – To whit, games that can show as much or as little as the creators wish, with no apparent concern as to the hardware they’re running on. It’s done by using points instead of polygons, it runs purely in software, and it can even do its thing on a mobile phone. It sounds amazing. It sounds crazy. Maybe it is – grud only knows we’ve seen plenty of wondrous-sounding technology promises fail to arrive over the years, but let’s hope this one can pull it off. The rough concept behind it is that the game is only ever rendering the pixels you can see at any one time, rather than trying to muster the whole shebang on a constant basis.
  Tags: gaming engines technology design computing
• Racism is linked to Religious dogmatism – Religious people can be racist, and that’s not news. But are they more likely to be racist than non-religious people? A new study now confirms this hypothesis.
  Tags: racism religion studies prejudice dogmatism
• Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem – From the very beginning of the game, you’re faced with choices that will shape your Shepard’s personality and the way other characters in the game react to you. But the ones that stood out to me were ones that reverberated with political and racial allegory.
  Tags: race gaming masseffect
• Colonics on MySpace Music – Dan / Ash / Trudy!
  Tags: band music
• iwrestledabearonce on MySpace Music – Crazy rad hipster grindcore
  Tags: band music
• Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future – I don’t know how to predict the future, and I never will. But I do know how not to predict it: don’t stick to your boss’s comfort zone by predicting that doing exactly what you’re doing now is exactly the right thing to do forever.
  Tags: futurism prediction technology society design imagination sciencefiction
• Blood Red Shoes: From DIY to ‘Professional’ / In Depth // Drowned In Sound – We picked Steve’s brain to discover what he’s learnt over the past few years, shifting from the do-everything-yourself punk scene to the corporate-sponsored festival arenas. Here’s the piece, with advice for any bands who might follow this path, entitled: TEN THINGS I HAVE LEARNED: From a DIY band to a “professional musician” by Steve Ansell.
  Tags: music diy musicindustry

The Arcade of Cruelty, by Joseph "J.P." Larkin

I’ve reviewed a fair mix of self-published books in my time. They included a few gems but quite often they were frankly fucking awful genre novels, written by people who evidently didn’t read widely. As such I stopped accepting them for review. For some reason, in 2008, I accepted for review The Arcade of Cruelty, a book which sounded like an oddball collection of self-hating diatribes and darkly humorous artwork. About three months later, after I’d all but forgotten about it, a copy arrived in the post – sent from the US via the cheapest international tariff available, a very sensible move as it’s a huge, weighty book.

Since then it’s sat on my shelves as I’ve not really known what to do with it. I’ll be frank: it’s more of a vanity project than any of those terrible SF books I’ve read have been, even the ones that middle-aged men had been dreaming up since their university days (oh, I loved those press releases, let me tell you). You see, it’s more like a scrapbook than anything else, albeit one that’s 250 glossy, high-quality and colour printed pages. It’s also sub-titled “A Tender Cry For Help in Words and Pictures”. There’s a lot of self-deprecatory humour in this book, although most of the time it’s much more generous with the self-loathing than it is with the funnies.

It breaks down into a number of discernible sections, after a dedication (with a small portrait) to an ex, “even though she’s kind of a cunt”. There’s a lot of hilarious misogyny here and this is just scraping the surface. There’s a fake foreword written by a “Mrs Simon Ray” (no, me either). I suppose it does a passable job justifying the existence of the book and introducing the reader to their, uh, host. Then there’s a joke biography. The conceit of The Arcade of Cruelty, you see, is that its author is dead, and this is a collection of ‘early works’ gathered together in tribute (in the way that the lesser descendants of great writers enjoy raping their legacies for cash).

Then there’s 25 pages of defaced (in the author’s youth) school photos with captions mocking both the original subjects and defacements. After that there’s a few pages of early comics and sketches; the sort of thing you’d find in the notebook of any high-school student with a modicum of artistic talent. Then there’s the reprint of a pretentious but vaguely interesting xeroxed (photocopied, non-American readers) booklet plus a few other monotype prints. And then the fun really starts with pages and pages of portrait-based comic strips, which start out as mostly blocks of Courier type teenage angst and slowly evolve into really, really bad jokes. At least the accompanying subtitles – these are present all the way through – acknowledge this. Later there are some strips about the artist’s first girlfriend, and slightly disturbing drawings and jokes about girls who rejected him, and various other subjects like assholes and cellphones, and then some monotypes from the author’s art school where the subtitles, probably for lack of anything else to say, are just pornographic shit.

There’s a chapter of collages from teenage “beat-off binders”! From this I learned that other teenagers collected cut-outs from underwear catalogues. Glad it wasn’t just me.

After this there are a tonne more sketchbook excerpts, which are better than the earlier excerpts but not by much. Some of them are mildly politically acerbic and various others are efforts by the artist to grapple with his response to 9/11; half of them mock the event, and others mourn it, and some are accurate cultural commentary. This is probably the most emotionally complex part of the collection, if you put aside the field day a trained psychologist could have with the whole book.

The most positive thing you can say about this book is that it was brave of its author to publish something that so brutally lays bare his neuroses, petty jealousies and misanthropy. It’s nothing if not honest, although no doubt it’s intensely skewed by the author’s apparent self-loathing, even masked as it is in self-deprecation and weak humour. But it’s not something that is going to be of interest to anyone who is not 1.) the author, 2.) a friend or family member of the author who is already aware he’s kind of fucked up, or 3.) if you think a sort of fake post-mortem scrapbook autobiography is an interesting book despite not being very good.

At one point, the book’s author-cum-narrator writes: “Enjoy, you sorry sack of shit. Oh, and don’t forget to go fuck yourself.”

Suits me fine. I’ve no problem with attempts at offending me, but it’s harder to bother with something that doesn’t make me laugh as it’s doing it. A single Anal Cunt song is funnier than pretty much this entire book. I will, however, keep the book around as a deeply weird conversation piece. And here’s a pull-quote for the book: “Thanks for this extreme cultural oddity, Joseph Larkin, and all the best with your fucked-up life.”

Also-Ran

P.S. Also-Ran doesn’t seem to mention this book anywhere on the site any more, and seems to be a record label now. I don’t know any of the bands on there, but the links page points to some rad bands, so… cool, I guess.