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

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

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

• Cuts Are Not The Cure on Vimeo – Good little video.
  Tags: video cuts recession tax britain
• New Statesman – It’s an education, all right – Anyone who believes that knowledge has no price should look away now. For the past month I’ve been involved with an investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches that revealed just how far the market has penetrated higher education. We discovered highly paid managerial elites running universities as factories where students are little more than customers shopping for degrees.
  Tags: education business corporatism marketforces university
• SchNEWS 766 – 8th April 2011 – Sick to the Gills – Last Friday (1st), the death of a 27-year-old Belgian man after a brutal police attack a week before sparked rioting across the small city of Gilly, near Charleroi. The cops’ violent outburst took place in broad daylight in the middle of the street, and was all because the man, called Sandro, was thought to have taken a Coke from a shop.
  Tags: police murder riot belgium
• New Statesman – Willetts has reminded us that social mobility is a scam – Today, children born to working-class parents are overwhelmingly likely to remain working class. Children who go to low-achieving schools usually end up in low-paying jobs, especially in former industrial towns. Wage repression has meant that it is now nearly impossible to raise a family on a single person’s wage, meaning that most couples with children are obliged to work two full-time jobs between them. Labour has become more precarious, and structural unemployment has continued to rise. Top jobs in politics, journalism, law, management, business and finance are held in trust for the sons and daughters of the wealthy, as opportunities go to those who can afford to work as unpaid interns or, increasingly, to pay for vital work experience. In fact, like nearly every other journalist under 35, the main reason I have this platform to talk to you now is that I’m a beneficiary of the private-school-and-intern system.
  Tags: socialmobility capitalism class society britain selfinterest horatioalger rhetoric
• Eve Online: Audience With The King Of Space | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Eve Online player The Mittani is the CEO of Goon Fleet, the single largest corporation in Eve Online, both loved and reviled for its practices which include teaching new recruits to scam other players. As of two weeks ago The Mittani was also voted in as the new Chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, the player-run and player-elected body that CCP liases with with the aim of improving the game. Prior to the announcement of the election results, I caught up with him at the Eve Fanfest for a mammoth interview. Click on through for talk of warfare, intrigue, hatred, propaganda, and why he says Eve Online is a terrible game.
  Tags: eveonline interview politics psychology espionage socialnetworks
• I live sweat… – “I think it’s something that’s hard to recognize if you don’t experience it yourself” Mariel Loveland of Candy Hearts on her experiences of sexism in the punk scene – From then on, the difference became clear. It’s the male band members who don’t take you seriously, and when you get upset with how you’re treated, ask you if you’re menstruating. It’s the promoters and planners who screw you, then call you a diva when you assert yourself.  It’s the kids who don’t talk to you after your set, but talk to your male bandmates because they assume you’re only there for show.  It’s the people who think you’re sleeping with the guitarist, the people who assume you’re queer,  or the journalists who mention your weight in reviews.  It’s every single time a producer has told me I can’t play guitar on my own record because “sweetie, you’re not a studio musician” or “sing it again, but naked.”
  Tags: sexism feminism misogyny punk hardcore
• 7 Psychotic Pieces of Relationship Advice from Cosmo – Quite enjoyed this article about the paranoia and revenge fantasy periodical, Cosmopolitan.
  Tags: magazines crazy media churnalism funny
• Exclusive Stream: Teenage Bottlerocket’s “Mutilate Me” – “Check out this exclusive stream of “Mutilate Me” from Teenage Bottlerocket’s Mutilate Me EP, out April 12 on Fat Wreck Chords.” Still love this band.
  Tags: band music
• LENIN’S TOMB: Springtime for NATO in Libya – Can I just risk a modest proposition? NATO, the CIA and the special forces belonging to the world’s imperialist states are not forces of progress in this world. Does anyone disagree with that? If not, then it follows as surely as night follows day that the successful cooptation of the Libyan revolution by NATO, the CIA and special forces is a victory for reaction. It’s no good hoping that the small, poorly armed, poorly trained militias of the east of Libya, who are now utterly dependent on external support, will somehow shake themselves free of such constraints once – if – they take power. Even if they eventually get some of the Libyan money that has been frozen by international banks, as UN Resolution 1973 promises, it will have come all too late to have been decisive.
  Tags: libya middleeast imperialism humanitarianintervention nato usa
• Amazon Cloud Drive elicits pearl-clutching and déjà vu | opensource.com – I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Reading Amazon’s announcement about the recent Cloud Drive music service, I immediately thought of quite a few other moments where the music industry provoked a sense of overwhelming… disappointment.
  They just don’t get it.
  They. You know, The Music Industry. Sony. Metallica. Lars Ulrich. The RIAA.
  What don’t they get?
  Tags: cloudcomputing musicindustry technology
• 7 Basic Things You Won’t Believe You’re All Doing Wrong | Cracked.com – If you’re like us, you might sometimes have a problem with complex tasks, like trying to drive an ambulance and send a text message at the same time. But hey, at least most of us have figured out the simplest things that get us through the day, right?
  Except, you know, some of the simple things we’ve done every day of our lives, like …
  Tags: lifehacks health
• Some Stuff About Open World Games | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there’s even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I’m interested. It’s an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It’s kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it’s to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment – and its openness – implies.
  Tags: openworldgames sandboxgames illusion gamedesign
• Sons Of Anarchy, season 1 – DVD review for VideoVista – [W]e rely upon certain visual, narrative and thematic cues to guide both our emotional reaction to the text and where it is that we should place our attention as an audience. Sometimes, these cues will be contained in the text in the form of stock characters, familiar tropes or storytelling techniques common to a particular genre but they can also exist outside of the text in the form of book jackets, trailers or where in the book shop we find the book.
  All of these cues forge links between the given text and our memories of other texts and so they nudge us into particular sets of reactions based upon the suggestion that ‘this text’ is a bit like ‘that one’.
  Tags: genre reading genresignalling narrativecues

• Johnny Foreigner Vs You (Cursed Version) by johnny foreigner on SoundCloud – Create, record and share your sounds for free – Another new JoFo song.
  Tags: band music
• What Drummers Get by johnny foreigner on SoundCloud – Create, record and share your sounds for free – New JoFo song.
  Tags: band music
• Punknews.org | SHARKS – Full album stream by UK band Sharks. It’s actually a bit disappointing compared to some of the songs I’ve previously heard. Hopefully it’s a grower…
  Tags: band music
• RetroN 3 – BootlegGames Wiki – “The RetroN 3 is a 3-in-1 NES, SNES and Genesis clone console distributed in the US (and possibly designed) by Hyperkin, released in 2009 in black and red versions for $69.99. [1] The Retron-1 was simply a Famiclone and no Retron-2 is known to exist, but Hyperkin also released a 2-in-1 NES/SNES clone called the C2.” Totally getting one of these when I have a bit of cash. :)
  Tags: gaming
• Above 49: What Is Forfeit – [I]magine a show, film or novel that instilled that feeling of engagement. Not just wondering “What will happen next?”, but a deep pondering of what was going on and why. What the work really meant. Now think about how many times that’s happened to you playing a game.
  There’s a handful of canonical examples (e.g. Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Planescape: Torment), but the ratio is far, far lower. I hate making games vs. other media comparisons, but I beg your indulgence on this one. As games have become more playable, readable, they’ve also adopted the least appropriate ways of communicating a message. I don’t mean a plot necessarily, I mean something more fundamental than that. The core thing a game is actually about, what an architect would call the “parti” of a building’s design. Having a plot with characters and events is certainly one way to communicate that message, but there has to be something there to begin with. Otherwise, it’s just sound and fury signifying nothing.
  Tags: television videogames gamedesign playeragency
• The Sunk Cost Fallacy « You Are Not So Smart – Farmville has shrunk since then. About 50 million people were still playing in early 2011 – still impressive considering the fantasy megagame World of Warcraft boasts about a quarter as many players.
  So, it must be really, really fun. A game with this many players must promise potent, unadulterated joy, right? Actually, the lasting appeal of Farmville has little to do with fun. To understand why people commit to this game and what it can teach you about the addictive nature of investment, you must first understand how your fear of loss leads to the sunk cost fallacy.
  Tags: videogames socialgaming gamedesign sunkcosts psychology humanfallacies
• New Statesman – The shame is all theirs – The NHS is not a moral arbiter. Addicts, alcoholics and those who acquire injuries in gang fights and bar brawls are not required to justify their need for treatment before receiving it. The only patients who are obliged to make a moral case for referral to a doctor are women seeking abortions. Now, right-wing politicians want to go further and force women with crisis pregnancies to undergo counselling.
  Tags: abortion women humanrights
• The Beautifully Dark Side of Videogames – Artistic mediums that ignore the reality of sin are sentimental at best. Thomas Kinkaid may paint a lovely cottage, but there is very little richness and resonance to his work because it lacks an acknowledgement of this key truth. Videogames, on the other hand, tend to acknowledge our inherent sinful nature without even trying. In fact, videogames’ biggest strength is that they illuminate our nature and force us to come to terms with it. In a videogame we are, simply put, selfish jerks.
  Tags: sin morality videogames
• Ramones | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Crawling out of Queens with a look that was half The Wild One and half The Music Machine, the Ramones seemed, aptly enough, like a biker gang doing an amphetamine-addled impression of ’60s garage rock. That is, with a little Stooges, Beach Boys, and girl-group pop tossed into the blender. In today’s pop-culture currency, that’s pure cash—but in the early ’70s, nothing could have looked or sounded more insane. And yet, the four original Ramones (singer Joey, guitarist Johnny, bassist Dee Dee, and drummer Tommy) not only found an audience, but also ignited the punk movement. The high esteem in which the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame-inducted group is held—and the monolithic homogeneity of its songs, a quality that’s exaggerated by both fans and detractors—can be a turnoff to the uninitiated. So can the deliberately mind-numbing brattiness of the Ramones’ music. Beneath the cartooniness, though, is a body of music that transcends punk.
  Tags: punk music history ramones
• LENIN’S TOMB: Where is the bombing of Libya going? – Those who argued that the bombing campaign in Libya was a desperate effort by the US and its allies to cohere around a strategy, in the face of a regional uprising that had thrown them onto the back foot, now have an additional support for their position. The US is pulling out of the air war, amid divisions and recriminations, and is saying that it will not engage in the training or arming of the rebels. In short, it is retreating from any explicit military involvement in the Libyan revolt. This may amount to an admission of failure. Perhaps such a withdrawal was always planned, and the US is merely handing the baby to the more eager NATO allies. But remember that the US had an explicit posture that it would not support either a no-fly zone, or any use of force beyond that. This was true right up until the drafting of UN resolution 1973.
  Tags: libya bombing humanitarianintervention
• My Fridge Food – Recipes you already have in your Fridge – Things to make with the ingredients you have.
  Tags: food cooking
• The American Dream is SPENT: Two Visions of Contemporary Capitalism | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – Much like the rest of the strategy genre, business simulation games are ultimately about engaging with a model of political economy. [...]
  However, what is most noticeable about these business simulation games is that, regardless of how closely they may or may not mirror the economics of the real world, they all make sense. They all present capitalism as a rational system that can be successfully gamed and effectively ‘beaten’. But is this not a rather large assumption to make about the nature of capitalism? After all, if recent events prove anything it is that the financial system is profoundly irrational. Two recently released browser games have responded to the credit crunch by using different techniques to demonstrate both the irrationality and injustice of contemporary capitalism. This column celebrates their critical gaze.
  Tags: gaming gamesdesign strategy capitalism business makeitpersonal indiegames
• Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds – By Heather Chaplin – Slate Magazine – It’s a compelling idea, certainly. I’ve been covering video games for more than 10 years and am especially interested in the “serious games” movement; I believe whole-heartedly that wonderful things can happen when people play. But gamification advocates do not preach the beauty and power of play. Perhaps without knowing it, they’re selling a pernicious worldview that doesn’t give weight to literal truth. Instead, they are trafficking in fantasies that ignore the realities of day-to-day life. This isn’t fun and games—it’s a tactic most commonly employed by repressive, authoritarian regimes.
  Tags: gamification seriousgames gamedesign lifehacking
• 6 Fitness Tips Everyone’s Heard (That Don’t Work at All) | Cracked.com – So this last year, I’ve been trying to do the old lose-weight-get-strong thing, so I can fit into a bikini and smash through walls. You know, the same thing millions of other Americans are striving for.
  When I started out, I thought, naively, that different things work for different people and I should look around and try different ideas to see what works for me. I was a fool to have thought that. According to countless self-proclaimed fitness experts, there is only one way to avoid obesity and early death: their way. Among the tips you’ll have screamed at — from website and magazine headlines — are …
  Tags: exercise fitness health myths
• Free to protest? I can still be arrested if my placard reads: ‘Nick Clegg, oh dear’ | George Monbiot – If the government was serious about repealing “all of the intrusive and unnecessary laws that inhibit our freedom”, would it not have begun with measures like this? Instead it has published a bill that, it initially promised, would allow “members of the public to protest peacefully without fear of being criminalised”, but makes not a single move towards this end.
  Tags: crime justice law protest abuse legislation
• About Eve University | EVE University – Organisation dedicated to helping people to learn how to play EVE.
  Tags: gaming learning
• 5 Important People Who Were Screwed Out of History Books | Cracked.com – We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that if you’re dedicated, hardworking and a little bit lucky, you can change the world. The bad news is that if you’re un-white, a woman or if your name doesn’t rhyme with anything cool, there’s a strong chance no one will remember you.
  So let’s take a moment to remember those who got screwed out of history books in favor of some more famous or charismatic peers. Like…
  Tags: history interesting
• No Rock And Roll Fun: PRS take falls; blames “piracy” – “That’s a nice gesture from an organisation that usually tries to force you to buy a licence for humming on a crowded bus, but how sickening that it’s not a move they’re taking to encourage people to enjoy music, but to fawn over two very rich people having a bunfight. If you’re running a small community event on May 7th, perhaps to raise funds to fix a church spire or to try and plug some of the many gaps in public provision being opened up by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, you’re out of luck. Pay up, people.” Oh, the PRS. The PRS. Shakes head sadly.
  Tags: musicindustry prs corporatism
• How to tweet bile without alienating people. Or making 13-year-old girls cry | Charlie Brooker | Comment is free | The Guardian – “The outpouring of bile directed at 13-year-old Rebecca Black for her YouTube song Friday shows how unhinged such mass hate campaigns can be” – tru dat, but as a tumblrian as well as a tweeter I gotta say I saw way more good-natured lulzyness and even ppl defending RB than I did bullying. Not to say it didn’t happen, but not everyone on the bandwagon was there to be a dick about it.
  Tags: music stupid internet twitter bullying
• New Statesman – What really happened in Trafalgar Square – Neither mindless nor violent, young protesters were forced into a stand-off with police.
  Tags: recession cuts britain protest directaction
• Infographic of the Day: A Mind-Blowing History of Sci-Fi | Co.Design – Artist Ward Shelley has produced another fine, fine, fine hand-drawn flowchart that will blow your mind: This time, it’s dedicated to the 2,500 years of intellectual history that have produced the modern sci-fi genre.
  Which sounds totally ridiculous, but just look at the chart and you’ll understand its beauty:
  Tags: sciencefiction history charts art

• Wanker – Charlie’s Diary – Meanwhile, purely in the interests of asserting my freedom of expression, I think it would be jolly amusing if as a result of his censorious superinjunction Fred Goodwin somehow became the top google hit for the search term wanker.
  Tags: bankers fucktherich fredgoodwin
• Radical squatters: Taking back what’s theirs | Laurie Penny | Comment is free | The Guardian – What does a dictator’s house look like? In a leafy Hampstead cul-de-sac, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi owns a £10m mansion. The London base of the Libyan dictator’s son is held by a company based in the British Virgin Islands for tax reasons, and boasts a swimming pool, a private cinema – and, now, a dozen activists squatting in the living room.
  Tags: activism squatting
• Little Ease – Friend’s new band, sounding purty good.
  Tags: band music
• FT editorial: call City’s bluff to move abroad | Liberal Conspiracy – While everyone pays lip-service to the need for a safer system, not everyone’s commitment runs very deep. In recent months the financial sector has been lobbying ever more fiercely against structural change or higher capital requirements, arguing that the banks are pretty much safe as they are.
  Institutions have warned that further regulation would simply result in defections to less onerous jurisdictions. HSBC is talking to its shareholders about whether it should move its domicile to Hong Kong. Standard Chartered has hinted that it might do the same.
  Such threats should be faced down, not just because they are unreasonable but because they are of questionable credibility.
  Tags: finance business economics recession banks tax
• Duo launch the first Marxist iPhone app | Liberal Conspiracy – ‘Situationist’ connects you to random strangers to “help you snap out of the routine of contemporary capitalist life”. It is an application based on your geo-location. It alerts members to each other’s proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”.
  These situations vary from the friendly (“Compliment me on my haircut”) to the subversive (“Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station”).
  Tags: mobileapps technology socialmedia situationism
• New Statesman – Violence against women in Tahrir Square – Right now, thousands of Egyptian women who gathered to commemorate the centenary of International Women’s Day in the newly-liberated Tahrir Square are being assaulted, harassed and brutalised. Not by Mubarak’s thugs, but by the men who lately stood beside them as equals on the barricades. As I write, images and reports are coming through on Twitter from women fleeing male aggression in the symbolic heart of what is already being called the Arab Spring. Speak it aloud, let it ooze over your tongue: how bitter does it taste?
  Tags: revolution egypt feminism sexism patriarchy
• Five year retrospective – Charlie’s Diary – Five years ago I more or less finished writing “Halting State”, although it wasn’t published until mid-2007. Around that time, MMOs were getting an increasing amount of interest, and a startup forum/social site called GuildCafe commissioned me to write an article about the next 25 years.
  While I linked to it from my blog, the original article stayed on GuildCafe’s site, but GuildCafe have apparently been through some changes, and the original article has succumbed to link rot.
  So I’m reprinting it below. And my question for you is, what’ did I get wrong in 2007?
  Tags: gaming futurism sf prediction mooreslaw hardware computing
• BioWare RPG Cliche Chart – Heh.
  Tags: gaming gamesdesign cliche system:filetype:png system:media:image
• Bird Calls – s/t Tape | Art For Blind – Shouty indie punk band from Leeds.
  Tags: band music
• A Day In The Life Of Minecraft Creator Mojang | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Something occurred to me during my time with Mojang that I’d not thought about before. Minecraft taps into something on a really primal level – it’s about the very most basic human needs. It addresses the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, focusing on the need for homeostasis and shelter ahead of the subjects of most other games, that appear higher on Maslow’s pyramid. Friendship, family, respect, morality, problem solving and so on are the subjects on which most games will centre their narratives, even if they’re just about shooting soldiers in the face. But Minecraft gets at what lies underneath. Persson sees it so much more clearly. “If you base your game on reality, you don’t have to design – you can just copy.”
  Tags: gaming gamedesign philosophy psychology
• F A X 2 1 – Today, nobody believes in reality. Fiction remains stronger than fact. All stories are true – satires in particular. Imaginary heroes are more dependable than the other kind, living or dead. Whatever you need is unavailable, so choose the brighter new tomorrows that you want instead. FAX 21 is a muse (news) blog-fest of science fiction concepts and fantasy ideas for genre enthusiasts. Paradox free since next year!
  Tags: genre fiction sf fantasy slipstream meta pastiche

Del.icio.us links for December 15th through December 19th:

• Teenagers: Under their skins – Is it the swell of the internet and the invention of reality TV (two things that shadow the decade since I was 18) that seem to have made today’s teenage lives just a little bit harder? Problems were similar, but the knowledge that anyone can be a star if they want it enough certainly seem to stem from the internet and audition shows. But then, too, the teenagers I spoke to were more eloquent than I remember any teenager being back then. As a teenager in the 90s, I felt blank. My diaries were lists of people I hated and CDs I’d bought – I couldn’t have discussed my thoughts (as today’s auditionees did) on “respect” or “media pressure”, even at gunpoint. Taught to question their motives, to find out “what kind of person they really are”, young people now are able not only to locate a feeling but to analyse it, discuss it and learn how to treat it. Is this, as well as being the saddest, the scariest and the least shockable, perhaps, the most articulate generation yet?
  Tags: teenagers youth britain generationaldifferences society
• Unions warn of massive wave of strikes – Len McCluskey, the newly elected leader of Unite, says union leaders will be holding a special meeting in January to discuss a “broad strike movement” to stop what he described as the coalition’s “explicitly ideological” programme of cuts. Writing in the Guardian, McCluskey praises the “magnificent student movement” that has seen tens of thousands of young people take to the streets to protest at the government’s plans for post-16 education, saying it has put trade unions “on the spot”.
  “Their mass protests against the tuition fees increase have refreshed the political parts a hundred debates, conferences and resolutions could not reach,” he said.
  Tags: protest activism resistances cuts unions britain politics recession
• Johann Hari: Your right to protest is under threat – These protesters are not defying the will of the British people; they are expressing it. Look at their two great causes: opposing £27,000-a-degree fees for university students, and making the super-rich pay the £120bn they currently avoid in tax. Opponents of top-up fees outnumber supporters by 10 percent, while 77 percent of us support a massive crackdown on the people who live here but do not pay taxes here. This isn’t an attack on democracy, it’s a demand for it. It’s a refusal to be part of the silent majority any more. When politicians are defying the will of the people – and breaking the “solemn pledges” on which they took our votes – protest is necessary.
  Tags: protest democracy britain freedom civildisobedience
• How the disabled were dehumanised – That we live in a state where police attack women, minorities and the visibly vulnerable in what has been suggested are deliberate tactics to provoke protest crowds to riot is not something I see much need to debate. The truly fascinating aspect of McIntyre’s story is what it reveals about how the British understand disability: namely, that real disabled people are not whole human beings. The attitude is that there are two types of disabled person: there are real disabled people, who are quiet and grateful and utterly incapable of any sort of personal agency whatsoever, and fake disabled people, people like Jody McIntyre, who are disqualified from being truly disabled by virtue of having personality, ambition, outside interests and, in this case, the cojones to stand up to a corrupt and duplicitous government.
  Tags: protest disability cuts democracy vulnerability
• LENIN’S TOMB: No confidence. – Now it’s fair to say that the NUS leadership has probably lost the confidence of the majority of students. Those who are leading the campaign against the fee rises and the dropping of EMA are now also pushing forward a ‘no confidence’ motion against NUS president Aaron Porter, which seeks to have Porter ousted at an extraordinary conference of the NUS. The motion cites: “His failure to call or even back another National Demonstration, his refusal to back up his promises of support for occupations, his weak stance on police brutality and his collusion with the Government in identifying cuts”. It goes on to note that Porter proposed, and the NUS executive accepted, that the union would not back the main march from ULU; that Porter later stated that he was “not at all proud” of the main march; and that the NUS instead organised a separate, poorly attended candlelit vigil away from the main march.
  Tags: students education nus unions protest coalition recession
• Yahoo closing down Delicious; but why won’t Carol use the F-word? – Analysing the memo from Carol Bartz, it’s hard to see where she thinks future growth from Yahoo is coming from – especially as she’s shutting so many services right now. But what about the one she doesn’t mention?
  Tags: web2.0 socialmedia internet business technology
• Anarchy rules! But it’s about a lot more than just lobbing things at police – Anarchism has a long and proud history, a complex and symbiotic relationship with Marxism, and has been an important international movement. The splits within it and away from traditional and centralising parties of the left have meant it has had very different incarnations in different parts of the world, from Spain to Bangladesh; from Kropotkin to Proudhon, Bakunin to Emma Goldman, from Noam Chomsky to Jello Biafra, anarchism has never gone away.
  To have this complex movement – which, at heart, is about total redistribution of power – reduced to little more than a jibe at someone who throws something at a policeman is a travesty.
  Tags: anarchism politics britain protest directaction
• If you want to protest, prepare to be kettled | Phil Shiner – What does this recent move to state coercion tell us about this government’s approach to the fundamental rights at stake: the right not to be unlawfully imprisoned; to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly? It is plain that such protests are set to escalate as the coalition government, in the guise of responding to the Labour government’s economic mismanagement, now introduce the transparently obvious electoral Tory programme to roll back the state permanently, and to complete the Thatcherite free-market approach that prevails in the US. The post-1945 settlement of the welfare state is about to be permanently decimated, and unless the British public have become anaesthetised, there will be a kickback. So next up it will be trade unionists, the unemployed, nurses, teachers and local government workers. Prepare to be kettled, insulted, abused, batoned, arrested on a pretext to justify coercion, intimidated and then subjected to a propaganda attack in the media.
  Tags: protest britain activism police kettling law coalition democracy
• Charlie Brooker’s 2010 | Culture | The Guardian – So 2010 has slithered past, leaving a gooey trail of memories in its wake. As befits the opening page of a new decade, it was a year with a markedly transitional feel. A tainted old era full of Gordon Brown and Big Brother came to an end, paving the way for a fresh haul of new, improved bullshit.
  Tags: 2010 britain news
• Mark Steel: A clear case of attack by wheelchair – The police like to set their public relations department a special Christmas challenge, don’t they? Because that’s the only explanation for them being filmed on the anti-fees demonstration, chucking a disabled man out of his wheelchair and shoving him along the road, unless it was to enjoy telling their PR team, “Stick a positive spin on that for us, could you?”
  Ben Brown of the BBC tried his best, when he interviewed Jody McIntyre, the man who was dislodged, and said aggressively: “There’s a suggestion that you were rolling in the direction of the police.” Now, let’s suppose this was the case (which I can’t help but doubt), how much force is needed, I wonder, to stop a man with cerebral palsy who keeps rolling, even when asked to stop?
  Tags: satire funny protests students recession cuts london bbc media journalism
• Homelessness: A tragic form of poverty – People from poor countries tend to assume that rich countries will have solved such social problems. But the reverse is true. According to a 2007 survey by York University’s centre for housing policy, homelessness was found to be increasing in Sweden, Canada, the US, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The rate remains stable in Australia, and England and Germany were the only countries studied where falls in homelessness were apparent.
  Tags: homelessness socialissues britain jordan cuba eu poverty
• Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really know what he stands for? – If Liu’s politics were well-known, most people would not favour him for a prize, because he is a champion of war, not peace. He has endorsed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he applauded the Vietnam and Korean wars retrospectively in a 2001 essay. All these conflicts have entailed massive violations of human rights. Yet in his article Lessons from the Cold War, Liu argues that “The free world led by the US fought almost all regimes that trampled on human rights … The major wars that the US became involved in are all ethically defensible.”
  Tags: nobelprize writing peace humanrights china
• The government is simply bullying disabled people – Vital sources of support for disabled people are being torn from them, and myths about benefits encouraged.
  The political activist and author Helen Keller once said: “Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.”
  Tags: disability benefits britain coalition recession cuts
• 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will – Classic Vonnegut.
  Tags: quotes kurtvonnegut literature

• The rest is noise: Throats’ guide to metal – “…we turned to Alex, Thom and Mark from Holy Roar’s newest noiseniks, Throats – who are well and truly flying the flag for rage and bile with their debut EP, Throats – for the lowdown on their favourite bands.”
  Tags: metal music
• The Encyclopedia Of Decency: The White House Tapes – (Rush transcript – Oval Office recorder 1.4 – start time 14.29, 1/23/10)RAHM EMMANUEL: You wanted to see me, Mr. President?

  PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes, Rahm. Take a seat. We may have… (Oratically brilliant Presidential pause) …a rather significant problem.

  EMMANUEL: Yes sir. Can I take it you’re referring to the column in today’s London Observer?
  Tags: funny nickcohen satire decentism

• British Newspapers Make Things Up | Psychology Today – In April 2008, I wrote that British journalists interpret “freedom of the press” to mean that they can make up anything they want and publish it as fact in British newspapers. Now another evolutionary psychologist has learned the lesson the hard way.
  Tags: britain journalism newspapers lies news science media
• Mass Effect 2 editorial « The Cynical Brit – When is an RPG, not an RPG? This is what it boils down to. There are certain people that believe Mass Effect 2 sacrificed too many RPG elements from its predecessor and became at best a fancy cover-shooter and at worst, a Gears of War rip-off. Hyperbole and enraged, impotent screaming aside, is there any merit what-so-ever to these accusations? Let’s take a look at the so-called ‘RPG elements’ of the original Mass Effect.
  Tags: gaming rpgs masseffect2 review
• The Myth of Meritocracy – Of course, there is no culture large or small which is able to hold a purely unbiased view of the people who participate in it. Gamer culture is no exception. Personal characteristics that count against you in the real world and its dominant, mainstream culture carry over into the virtual world. Gender is one of the largest biases which skew the meritocracy most gamers try to abide by, leading to a culture where hard work and practice pay off – but they pay off much less for some people.
  Tags: gaming gender sexism
• Overton window – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after its originator, Joe Overton, former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue.
  Tags: politics psychology theory propaganda society marketing rhetoric
• Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF – So here’s what I think. RaceFail was a good thing. In fact, I think it was a necessary thing — not just for me and other writers/fans of color, but for the SFF field as a whole. Bear with me; I’m going to have to put on my psychologist hat to explain this.
  Tags: racefail09 race writing genre fandom sff
• McGOP: The Virtues and Vices of Sameness – I’m not going to comment too much on the topline findings of the Daily Kos / Research 2000 poll, of Republican identifiers, which many others have written about extensively. What I found more striking, actually, were the cross-tabs. On just about every question, the results showed essentially no difference based on age, gender, race, or geography — once we’ve established that you’re a Republican, these differences seem to be rendered moot.
  Tags: statistics analysis republicans usa rightwing conservatism
• Daily Kos: State of the Nation – As I’ve mentioned before, I’m putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world. But I found myself making certain claims about Republicans that I didn’t know if they could be backed up. So I thought, “why don’t we ask them directly?” And so, this massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans, was born. The results are nothing short of startling.
  Tags: usa republicans rightwingbullshit batshitcrazy
• Kid Pix: The Early Years – Ben: Dad, what have you been doing upstairs?
  Dad: Writing a short history of Kid Pix.
  Ben: Do you really think anyone is going to want to read that?
  Tags: software history computers childhood parenting education mac
• Dirty Scavenger on MySpace Music – Dirty Scavenger are a grungy 3 piece band, based in England, performing songs written by Jo Maultby about her experiences of life on the streets, protesting, and other adventures. (She has a pretty awesome voice.)
  Tags: band music
• Brighton Pavilion: A Green leap forward? – John Harris voyages to the seaside seat where Caroline Lucas could become Britain’s first Green MP
  Tags: politics electoralpolitics greenparty labourparty conservativeparty britain brighton sussex carolinelucas
• No cops, no parks, halted economic activity: conservative paradise – We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs—home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family—has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. Unfortunately, it seems less paradise to have much-slashed government, and more stinky, ugly, boring, and scary.
  Tags: taxes publicservices civicplanning business industry economics usa
• LEATHERFACE on MySpace Music – New song from Sunderland’s finest!
  Tags: band music hotdamn!

• Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World – “Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.”
  Tags: satire comedy funny creationism youngearthcreationism religion
• Aspects of a racist diatribe – What are the precise dimensions of a ‘culture’ that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as ‘culture of dependency’, ‘culture of blame’, ‘culture of violence’, etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or ‘culture’, rapists, robbers and murderers.
  Tags: racism rightwing media journalism journalisticstandards hatespeech language
• Dunning–Kruger effect – The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
  Tags: psychology incompetence competence people studies
• My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads – we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.
  Tags: majorlabels musicindustry money accounting transparency bullshit riaa music recordlabels business
• What Really Happened in Rwanda? – Halfway into our presentation, a military man in a green uniform stood up and interrupted. The Minister of Internal Affairs, he announced, took great exception to our findings. We were told that our passport numbers had been documented, that we were expected to leave the country the next day and that we would not be welcomed back into Rwanda — ever. Abruptly, our presentation was over, as was, it seemed, our fieldwork in Rwanda.
  Tags: rwanda history research studies unpopular+conclusions africa ethnicity civilwar
• What happened in Rwanda? – Some statistics and citations from a study of killings in Rwanda.
  Tags: statistics rwanda history politics genocide distortion justice
• The shade of Labourism – For the last decade or so, much of the far left at any rate has shared a perspective that there needed to be a drastic realignment on the left, and that the window for this was provided by disaffection with New Labour’s right-wing rule.
  Tags: labourparty leftism farleft socialism politics UK britain activism strategy electoralpolitics
• Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World. – “Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones.” Paul still wins at pulling out the best quotes.
  Tags: peterwatts science academia peerreview climatechange globalwarming politics debate internet bullshit obfuscation
• Eco-malthusianism – What is driving ‘climate change’ is a particular kind of economic activity, not population growth. Lifestyles are important too. Those sported by the richest tend to exploit and run down our environmental life support systems the hardest. The carbon footprint of a multi-billionaire philanthropist is certain to be dozens of times higher than that of an African labourer. To put it one way, Bill Gates will emit more CO2 jetting to conferences on population growth than a coltan miner in the DRC will in is entire lifespan. So maybe Bill and Melinda shouldn’t have any fucking kids. And, by the way, Bill needs that coltan miner, and the genocidal armies who ensure that the ore is delivered to western corporations such as Microsoft, so he shouldn’t really get lippy about population growth.
  Tags: populationgrowth overpopulation climatechange philanthropism resources poverty classwar capitalism media
• Matt Taibbi – Sarah Palin, WWE Star – It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.
  Tags: politics personality sarahpalin republicanparty fringepolitics rightwingheroes partisanry
• The Bitch is Back: Books: GQ – 2009′s most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault
  Tags: objectivism aynrand USA article philosophy economics humour utopianism ideology
• THE FLATLINERS on MySpace Music – Yes yes yes yes yes
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• LENIN’S TOMB: The graveyard of the Russian empire – What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: “I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too…” Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the ‘Saur revolution’, support womens’ rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship. But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity.
  Tags: history war invasion occupation USA USSR afghanistan communism capitalism
• LENIN’S TOMB: A few points about that ‘age of austerity’ – The economic crisis has thrown that ideological hegemony into disarray. In a recent poll, only 11% of people questioned in 27 countries approved of the way that free market capitalism is working. While the majority of people feel that the system can still be saved and made to work with adequate reforms and redistribution of wealth, sizeable minorities say it is totally unworkable and “a different economic system is needed”. That minority is 20% in the UK – smaller than many others, but still a massive number of people questioning the basic running of society. That is the basis for a social movement. If that questioning, and the anger that underlies it, is not articulated by the left then it will be appropriated by the far right. Actually, forget ‘will’ – it is being appropriated by the far right.
  Tags: politics leftwing rightwing reformism capitalism polls UK
• Noam Chomsky – War, Peace, and Obama’s Nobel – The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned — not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama. The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
  Tags: nobelprize politics war nuclearweapons IAEA USA iran afghanistan iraq india pakistan israel middleeast
• Pseudo Nippon on MySpace Music – Weird Japanese pop/beat/experimental music, sounds like pretty good fun.
  Tags: band music
• OX_BOW on MySpace Music – Experimental avant-garde group combining grinding noise with minimalism and throttled screams.
  Tags: band music
• T ∑ ∑ T H on MySpace Music – Rad noisy punk ‘n spazz throbbing electro thing.
  Tags: band music
• A Lesson In The Abuse of Information Technology (The Menzingers) – Rad rad rad
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst – One of the awkward aspects of modern physics is that its two most successful fields, relativity and quantum mechanics, are fundamentally incompatible, as things happen in the quantum world that relativity says should not be possible. That’s left physicists looking for a way to harmonize the two, with two primary contenders: string theories, and quantum gravity theories. Testing either of them has been a bit challenging, but researchers have now managed to use a single, intensely powerful photon detected by the Fermi Telescope to significantly limit the number of viable quantum gravity theories.
  Tags: astrophysics science research technology space stringtheory quantumtheory theoryofrelativity theory
• Xerox develops silver ink to usher in new era of low cost printable electronics – Integrated circuits are made up of three components – a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric element – and currently are manufactured in costly silicon chip fabricating factories. Printable electronics promises to make the mass production of thin, cheap and flexible electronic circuits a reality, but researchers have been faced with the difficult challenge of developing conductive electronic inks that work in an ordinary, everyday environment. By creating a silver ink to print the conductor, Xerox has developed all three of the materials necessary for printing plastic circuits.
  Tags: technology computing electronics futurism
• Crisis and recovery: myths about China – “Any talk of global recovery needs to start by looking at two key places – China and the USA. The two countries are locked together in an unwilling but interdependent dance from which neither can escape. The USA is China’s largest trading partner with 21 percent of China’s exports going to the US and almost eight percent of its imports coming from there. In the US, China is now the USA’s number 1 trading partner, representing up to 19 percent of total trade vs Canada’s 14.5 percent.” Fascinating post about economic policy in China, the US and Europe, the effects of the recession upon strategies being followed, the dangers China’s elite face and what changes there might mean for the rest of the world.
  Tags: economics growth development capitalism investment production exports politics china USA europe
• Winterval watch: Here we go! – I had been a bit concerned, given that it’s getting towards the end of October. But here we are at last. Hooray! The first “Christmas is being called something else for fear of offending terrorists or something” quote is IN – and it’s been found by the BBC, of all people.
  Tags: bullshit idiocy funny christmas holidays britain christianity are+people+really+this+thick?
• Noam Chomsky on the Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire – Today, a conversation with one of the most important dissident intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky, on the global economic crisis, healthcare, the media, US foreign policy, the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resistance to American empire. Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, social critic, and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  Tags: noamchomsky politics USA geopolitics barackobama afghanistan war southamerica neoliberalism economics capitalism protectionism
• Noam Chomsky on US Expansion of Afghan Occupation, the Uses of NATO, and What Obama Should Do in Israel-Palestine – To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.
  Tags: noamchomsky politics USA strategy resourceconflict geopolitics barackobama afghanistan nato europe russia history isreal palestine
• The Encyclopedia Of Decency: When I Called It “Human Rights Watch,” I Meant “Watch The Baddies, Not The Goodies” – As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join a militant wingnut circle-jerk with a mealy-mouthed and disingenuous hissy fit of epic proportions.
  Tags: amazing funny humanrightswatch israel palestine bias bullshit warcrimes decency
• thefuckinEDC on MySpace Music – Pretty rad histrionic punk/indie/emo outfit. Remind me of La Dispute.
  Tags: band music
• Laura Stevenson – 3 tracks from Laura Stevenson & the Cans. <3
  Tags: band music
• Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human Girl – We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.This isn’t science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.
  Tags: corporatism law conservatism business rape
• Exclusive Interview With Ashok Banker! « The World SF News Blog – Ashok Banker is the best-selling author of the Ramayana series, and a prolific novelist, short story writer, journalist and blogger. An outspoken critic of Western publishing, he has refused interviews in the past with the New York Times,Salon.com and even a feature cover for the Washington Post Book World, and so we were delighted that he’d agreed to this interview. Here, Banker speaks candidly to Charles Tan about his difficult childhood, his views on US and UK genre publishing, and his role as India’s “self-appointed poet laureate without a license.”
  Tags: interview writer author genres genrebending genreghettoes
• Twenty questions for the BNP – I’ve suggested a few issues Nick Griffin could be asked about when he appears on Question Time – have I missed anything?
  Tags: bnp fascists racists politics interviews
• How Safe is the HPV vaccine? – I’ve been reading a lot about the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine and the risk of serious side effects and even death. I thought I would seek out the numbers and put them in context. Especially given headlines claiming the HPV jab is “as deadly as the cancer” it seeks to prevent.
  Tags: vaccinations diagram statistics medicine health information hpv
• They don’t get it – It’s not just Jan who doesn’t get a lot of its. A lot of people don’t get a lot of its. But we should forgive them their ignorance, their lack of understanding of these new social media phenomena. They have been brought up in a didactic world of media, where newspapers tell you what to think and why to think it; not in a world where readers give back as good as they get, want to correct inaccuracies and don’t stand for being lied to.
  Tags: media news newspapers printmedia dailymail homophobia prejudice racism commentary socialnetworks
• If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, can Carter-Ruck ban all mention of the sound? – Super-injunctions raise a worrying question: what else don’t we know? Hitler could be alive, and in negotiations to present the Radio 1 breakfast show
  Tags: charliebrooker funny law censorship freedomofspeech UK corporations carter-ruck trafigura media news
• The Fall Of Boss Koala on MySpace Music – Probably the best of the (all good) Scottish screamo / post-hardcore / indie bands I’ve listened to today. Hot damn indeed!
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Archive on MySpace Music – Electronica / trip-hop outfit from London.
  Tags: band music
• Kaddish on MySpace Music – There is a pattern to these Scottish screamo bands, which is that they are good. Kaddish are from Dundee!
  Tags: band music
• Black Channels on MySpace Music – Why, it’s another Glasgow screamo band! Also pretty damn good.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Mesa Verde on MySpace Music – Rad screamo from Aberdeen!
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Carson Wells on MySpace Music – Aberdeen indie / post-punk / screamo band. Rad!
  Tags: band music hotdamn!

• Postal strike is an act of desperation – “As usual they emphasise the effects of strike action, not its causes. In the case of the postal workers the causes are simple, and they are experienced daily by the ordinary, hard-working people who deliver our mail.” A good piece, although as usual I want to punch the snide, smug, arrogant contrarian shits in the comments.
  Tags: royalmail strike UK privatisation jobs employment
• Another Wall Street bubble, thanks to the bailout – I suppose it shouldn¹t come as a surprise that the biggest of the big banks in America that sucked up tens of billions in government aid are now rolling in profits. That¹s how this game works. Thus, JPMorgan has just reported a 580% profit increase over last year to a whopping $3.6 billion third-quarter profit. The reason is, purely and simply, ­ that the money that the US government pumped into the banking and financial sector has created a new Wall St. bubble ­ with stock prices rising by nearly 50% to top the psychological benchmark of 10,000.
  Tags: economics economiccrisis capitalism boomandbust politics banking USA
• The pitfalls of tolerance – The Tories are lauded for adopting a new attitude of ‘tolerance’ toward homosexuals, and one feels an immediate pressure to partake of this cosiness, this idea that something uncomplicatedly benign is happening. Increasingly, moreover, one is apt to hear ‘tolerance’ name-dropped in respect of racial problems in the UK, in which the absence of ‘tolerance’ is either a euphemism for racism, or an attitude ascribed to supposedly self-segregating minorities. And in its function as part of a martial ideology, ‘tolerance’ is what NATO troops defend against ‘native fanaticism’. The word and its various significations do a lot of ideological work, obscuring and inverting crucial social relations, and smuggling in a patronising attitude to the subjects of said ‘tolerance’.
  Tags: tolerance politics society racism imperialism cultural UK colonialism history
• Spec-tac-ul-ar. Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love adversity – The news media spectacle of the Credit crisis, portrays our socially produced institutions of Banking Conglomerates and Federal Banks appearing as ‘god like personalities controlling our lives without reason or accountability’. Richard Seymour traces a corresponding spectacularising and alienating representation of Capitalisms inherent cyclical logic of wealth obliteration.
  Tags: capitalism culture film art representation alienation consumerism materialism richardseymour
• Better off on the dole – The focus on [recruiting] young people makes strategic sense. In 2006, 14,000 people left the British armed forces, but only 12,000 signed up – and most of the new recruits were teenagers. Last night at a Stop the War Coalition meeting, I learned a bit more about what this effort to draft the kids now entails. For it seems that the British Army is now placing stalls at further education colleges on enrolment day. And what they do when there is offer students a £5,000 bursary to sign up for the army there and then. They do not immediately join, for they are only sixteen, but rather complete their two years of study at college, and are then committed to four years of military service. This makes Britain the only country in Europe that targets sixteen year olds for military recruitment. And they don’t even necessarily stick to their own rules in this process, as it was revealed back in 2007 that the British government had sent soldiers under the age of eighteen into southern Iraq.
  Tags: waronterror armedforces recruitment UK britain afghanistan iraq youth teenagers propaganda
• Court considers stripping Silvio Berlusconi of immunity – Italy’s prime minister, already on the defensive because of a lurid sex-and-drugs scandal, could go back on trial in two cases if an act passed last year to shield him from the law is thrown out. In his address to the court, Berlusconi’s lawyer, Gaetano Pecorella, said that as a result of changes to Italy’s electoral law the nation’s prime minister could no longer be regarded in the same way as other politicians. Pecorella told the judges the prime minister was “no longer ‘first among equals’, but must be considered ‘first above equals’.”
  Tags: italy silvioberlusconi corruption capitalism
• Marek Edelman – This is what Marek Edelman did. In April 1943 he, along with some confederates of his – notably Mordecai Anielewicz, Chaim Frimmer and Adam Halperin – embarked on a violent uprising, using a combination of home-made and obsolete weapons, against the Nazis. Their aim was to stop the Nazis from transporting them to Treblinka, one of the Operation Reinhard camps, and murdering them. Two thirds of the ghetto’s population had already been taken away by the time the Jewish Fighting Organisation was formed.
  Tags: history ww2 genocide judaism resistancemovements
• The new rules of news – “Here’s a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I’d insist upon if I ran a news organization.” Bugger me, if only even half of these were applied.
  Tags: journalism web2.0 socialnetworks socialchange communication dialogue newspapers media
• Punknews.org | Defiance, Ohio – Distance and preoccupation tend to be the Achilles’ heel for most bands, but folk punk act Defiance, Ohio manages to make it work. Perhaps circumstance prohibit them from the more traditional band experience. Though, given everything the members are involved in, the core requirements are there: they do play shows (sometimes), they do put out records (sporadically), and they do communicate with each other (a lot). In an effort to make up for their lack of touring this year, they are making the trek down to play Fest 8. Upright bassist Ryan recently talked to Matthew Bentel about the challenges popularity incurs, the insatiable desire to stay involved, and the increasing interest in “licensing” their music.
  Tags: interview band music
• Punknews.org | The Gaslight Anthem – “Trusty Chords” (cover) – Video of the Gaslight Anthem covering HWM’s ‘Trusty Chords’.
  Tags: band music thegaslightanthem
• Hot Water Music – Retrospective Vol. 1 « (((unartig))) – Part 1 of a 4-part series of HWM retrospectives, full of live videos.
  Tags: band music hotwatermusic
• LONG DISTANCE CALLING on MySpace Music – Another rad epic prog metal/post-rock band.
  Tags: band music
• BETWEEN THE SCREAMS on MySpace Music – Epic/prog metal band.
  Tags: band music
• SPIRES on MySpace Music – Mid-pace melodic emo… really, really good.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• THE ARTERIES on MySpace Music – Neat UK punk rock.
  Tags: band music
• Above Them on MySpace Music – Ace melodic punk rock band from Yorkshire.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Illness on MySpace Music – Wicked Brighton drum/gtr 2-piece.
  Tags: band music
• MIHAI EDRISCH on MySpace Music – Awesome French screamo band (tribute page with tunes).
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Punknews.org | About Nothington – Full album streams for the new album, plus preceding album ‘All In’.
  Tags: band music
• The Emergency Room on MySpace Music – Dan Andriano (Alk3) acoustic side-proj.
  Tags: band music
• Calvinball (free album download) on MySpace Music – Pretty ace Exeter punk band.
  Tags: band music
• OK PILOT on MySpace Music – Their new songs are excellent!
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• BANGERS on MySpace Music – SxC!
  Tags: band music
• BROTHERS on MySpace Music – Pnk rck.
  Tags: band music
• Men on MySpace Music – I LIKE MENlololol
  Tags: band music
• run,WALK! on MySpace Music – SRS RADNSS
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Torture the Artist on MySpace Music – “Members of Screeching Weasel, Rise Against and Common Rider have joined up with vocalist Jorge Orillac – the nephew of the President of Panama – to release a record as Torture the Artist.”
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Failures’ Union on MySpace Music – Warm fuzz-pop/indie band (slightly a Lemuria side project).
  Tags: band music
• A TEXTBOOK TRAGEDY on MySpace Music – Good metalcore band with some occasionally cheesy, occasionally excellent melodic bits and vocal harmonies.
  Tags: band music
• Future of Music Summit: 115,000 albums and only 110 ‘hits’ – “U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier”
  Tags: musicindustry music business economics
• This film is on: inside the ATP movie – The comments make it sound like the film may not be so great, but this article is a great explication of why ATP is so rad.
  Tags: festivals music independentmusic
• The Thick of It: top 10 Malcolm Tucker quotes – To celebrate the return of Armando Iannucci’s political comedy on Saturday, 24 October, we recall Tucker’s finest moments.
  Tags: funny quotes
• My book is mine, not Google’s – Google has the support of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, but it faces formidable opposition. Some 400 legal objections have been filed, and the US Department of Justice has serious concerns. The dispute was due to be resolved in court next week, but at the last minute Google and its partners asked for the case to be adjourned so they could make revisions. A hearing will still take place, but only to inform the parties concerned how Google intends to proceed.
  Tags: books publishing web online google
• Everyday Genius: Ellis Sharp – Impressionistic short story by Ellis Sharp.
  Tags: fiction ellissharp story
• What is a “clip job”? – “In the end, this article is just another “we love us” sort of thing, chockful of imaginary enemies, like “the publishers.” What exactly that’s supposed to mean remains unspoken, but well, what did you expect from a clip job?” THANK YOU. God, I wish fandom would shut up about this imagined snobbery.
  Tags: SF fantasy books publishing genre writing snobbery literature literati
• Why I Flame – As companies try to build their brands through newsgroups, e-mail feedback, and Web forums, the job title “Professional Flamer” stands ready to be penciled into the office hierarchy, right under “Chief Yahoo” and just over “Minister of Indie Culture.” In service to our employers, we flamers slither across the Internet—a realm where rudeness is a form of currency—and take out the customers, competitors, and wannabes who target businesses out of misplaced rage or the need to feel important.
  Tags: nickmamatas internet web flaming argument PR
• ‘Spider pill’ offers new way to scan for diseases including colon cancer – “A new way to scan for diseases, including cancer of the stomach or colon, using a remote contol ‘spider pill’ camera with moving legs, has been hailed by scientists in Italy.” Send one into Berlusconi, stat! Better yet, send an army!
  Tags: medicine science research technology cancer disease diagnosis robotics
• 100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words – For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content’s own words.
  Tags: technology innovation content art creativity music television film business copyright
  

• Revealed: millions spent by lobbyists fighting Obama health reforms – “America’s healthcare industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Barack Obama. The campaign against the president has been waged in part through substantial donations to key politicians.” Money talks, power listens.
  Tags: politicalcorruption lobbyists USA barackobama reformism healthcare business money politics
• LENIN’S TOMB: The BBC is promoting the BNP – Great response to that fucking BBC web interview with the two clueless BNP yoot-fascists.
  Tags: bnp fascists interview media bbc politics UK britain
• Bill Maher: New Rule: If America Can’t Get it Together, We Lose the Bald Eagle – I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can’t make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs – oh, and there’s still 60,000 troops in Germany – and can’t make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress’s climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions… by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where’s the fire? Oh yeah, it’s where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!
  Tags: USA politics culture funny
• China celebrates 60 years – The Big Picture – China formally kicked off its mass celebrations of 60 years of communist rule with a 60-gun salute that rung out across Beijing’s historic Tiananmen Square earlier today. Hundreds of thousands of participants marched past Tiananmen Square in costume or uniform, with floats and dancers mingling with soldiers and military hardware. Collected here are photographs of the once-in-a-decade National Day parade in Beijing, and of others commemorating the anniversary elsewhere.
  Tags: photography photos china militarism armedforces patriotism
• Vitalic on MySpace Music – Pretty fucking excellent electro. The French know their shit.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Incoming Cerebral Overdrive on MySpace Music – Awesome prog/alt/experimental metal band.
  Tags: band music
• Internet Forever on MySpace Music – Still so very <3
  Tags: band music
• BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME on MySpace Music – Prog metal, pretty good. Stupid teaser track for the new album though, rubbish.
  Tags: band music
• Skin Like Iron on MySpace Music – goodXcore
  Tags: band music
• Pink Narcissus on MySpace Music – Rad Brighton band.
  Tags: band music
• Guilty Parents on MySpace Music – New signing to Holy Roar – pretty good.
  Tags: band music
• American Steel on MySpace Music – As reviewed the other day… fucking excellent band.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• How the iPod became an instrument of war – It was a throwaway statistic in an article about the heavy metal band Slayer that got Jonathan Pieslak thinking. During the Gulf war, he read, some 40% of the band’s fan mail came from soldiers stationed in the Middle East. Professor Pieslak is a music theorist at the City College of New York. Over the past few years he has interviewed US soldiers about the music they listen to and – more importantly – what they listen to it for.
  Tags: music conflict war soldiers brain psychology
• Boredoms on MySpace Music – love love love
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Why hasn’t there been a science fiction Booker winner? – Not a single science fiction novel made this year’s Man Booker longlist – this is despite, as Robinson points out, the extraordinary quality of the best of contemporary science fiction: “the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing … one has to ask, how is it that a group of such intellectual power could be working at one time, and our time at that?” I’m obviously not in a position to say whether his generous assessment of my novel is correct, but I would enthusiastically endorse his broader thesis. UK science fiction is indeed going through a golden age.
  Tags: books publishing sciencefiction UK

• Revealed: the hidden army in UK prisons – The number of former servicemen in prison or on probation or parole is now more than double the total British deployment in Afghanistan, according to a new survey. An estimated 20,000 veterans are in the criminal justice system, with 8,500 behind bars, almost one in 10 of the prison population.
  Tags: britain armedforces veterans crime prisons law imperialism
• G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon – Only a few hundreds protesters took to the streets of Pittsburgh to mark the opening day of the G20 summit of world leaders, but the police were taking no chances.
  Tags: police protest activism g20 USA technology
• G20 Protests – One of the better comments I’ve seen about the repression of the G20 protesters points out that when the ‘Teabaggers’ inspired by Glenn Beck turned out to protest over healthcare reform, they could bring a gun and cite the second amendment, without being harrassed. G20 protesters get beaten up and exposed to top notch military technology if they just cite the first amendment.
  Tags: police protest activism leftwing rightwing USA
• LRB · Roy Mayall: Diary – According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false.
  Tags: britain royalmail publicservices bureaucracy privatisation politics management lies statistics
• There will be no ‘invasion’ from ‘jungle camps’ – At a moment when the Labour home secretary, Alan Johnson, expresses his “delight” at the pitiful sight of hundreds of French police rounding up mainly Afghan asylum seekers in a makeshift camp in Calais, it is time to defend the right to claim asylum in Britain. Johnson, in language that seems more concerned about the Daily Mail front page than the wording of the 1951 Geneva convention on asylum, pre-judges the issue by talking about protecting “genuine” refugees but insisting they should not be allowed to come to Britain to have their claims decided.
  Tags: immigration britain france europe asylumseekers racism xenophobia rightwingbullshit war refugees imperialism
• Blurred boundaries for teachers – Following the jailing this week of Helen Goddard, the teacher who had a sexual relationship with a pupil, Jon Henley looks at how texting, emailing and social networking sites are radically changing the teacher-pupil relationship
  Tags: britain schools education teaching relationships profit
• The very British values of John Enoch Powell – Enoch Powell is the subject of reactionary encomium wherever the issues of race, integration and post-colonial Britain arise. They say that he wasn’t a racist, just a decent English patriot who was saddened by the dilution of national identity. They say that he was right. They say that the current multicultural situation is intolerable and perverse, and that this was foreseen by Powell. ‘They’ talk an incredible amount of rubbish.
  Tags: britain history racism patriotism xenophobia nationalism farright immigration rhetoric
• Sabra and Shatila – To destroy the basis of Palestinian nationhood, Israel had to crush every manifestation of civil society, political and military development among the Palestinians living in border areas and miserable refugee camps, from 1949 onward. Repeated incursions into Jordan, including the bombing of Irbid, and the ethnic cleansing of one and a half million people from the Suez Canal area in 1970, was a logical corollary of this. The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan had been the Zionists’ key ally in the originary purge of 700,000 Palestinians that enabled the Israeli state to come into being.
  Tags: israel palestine jordan lebanon middleeast politics genocide stateterror
• Alas, poor Trotsky – When neoconservatives perish, do they share the same circle of hell as Leon Trotsky, or that of Joseph de Maistre? Is their sin one of revolutionary hubris, or militant reaction? It is a staple of both liberal and right-wing critics of neoconservatism that it is a mutation of Trotskyism, a ‘foreign’ revolutionary doctrine overthrowing classically American conservative discourse.
  Tags: neoconservatism trotskyism politics ideology history
• Wicca Lies (conclusion): An Unsupportable Pack of Lies – You see, there isn’t much actual magic in Wicca 101. There’s not much psychic development, just basic grounding and centering, maybe a few breathing exercises and some chants. There’s not much on group dynamics, on working with a group and managing the needs of such a group. And there’s certainly no push to encourage students to study primary source material. So given these deficits, it’s obvious that these should be the agenda for any classes beyond Wicca 101. However, there’s an intractable problem that any would-be Wicca 200 (and above) course developer faces. If such a class were to be in any way honest, then class 2, lesson 1, sentence 1 would have to be this: “OK, all of that stuff we taught you in Wicca 101? Forget it. None of it was true.”
  Tags: wicca paganism religion spirituality belief politics history
• Gin, servants and bloodlines for royalty’s Alf Garnett in a tiara – It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy – selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they emerge – produces warped and dim people and demands that we scrape before them. What’s a poor monarchist to do? They can only lavish a thick cream of adjectives – “dignity”, “charm”, “majesty” – over the Windsor family in the hope that some of us are fooled.
  Tags: britain monarchy aristocracy class imperialism racism royalfamily
• Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam – Three years in the making, this feature documentary follows the progression of the Muslim Punk scene: from its imaginary inception in a novel written by a white-convert named Michael Muhammad Knight to a full-blown, real-life scene of Muslim punk bands and their fans.
  Tags: punk music islam counterculture USA muslims rebellion
• The Decade Of Custom, Made To Order Products – Me and DIY go way back. Through running Big Scary Monsters Records, a label born, bred and sustained through ‘do-it-yourself’ ethics and ideas, I’ve taught myself the ropes and learnt lessons the hard way over the past 7 or 8 years.
  Tags: DIY music labels musicindustry business
• Rory Henderson (American Steel) – American Steel are in full on support mode for their most recent Fat Wreck Chords release, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Tonight we bring you an interview between our own John Numbskull and American Steel’s Rory Henderson.
  Tags: band music interview
• ‘Let Them Know – The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records’ by Various Artists – The compilation for the LA punk label’s 25th anniversary features some of the best in the genre covering each other’s songs, including one of Pennywise’s last recordings with their original lineup. (Full album stream here!)
  Tags: music stream
• Apologies, I Have None – A stream of the excellent London punk duo’s latest EP.
  Tags: band music
• Black Wine on MySpace Music – Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Videos – 80s-style US alt-rock band feat. ex-Ergs! guitarist.
  Tags: band music
• Burning Love on MySpace Music – Ex-Cursed! Dirty rock & roll combined with crushing hardcore.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• DIE EMERGENCY [2006-2009] on MySpace Music – Awesome ex-ANOTKTWR punk band.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• Why are we the naked ape? – RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. “No one supposes,” wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, “that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.”
  Tags: evolution biology paleontology humanity history research studies theory
• Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, and the Strange and Difficult Path of Feminist Dudes: Some Thoughts – Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent. It’s built around an organization – the titular Dollhouse – which erases volunteers’ personalities and memories and renders them childlike and passive, in order to implant them with new, built-to-order personalities custom made for wealthy clients who wish to order the “perfect” person for a specific job.
  Tags: television review criticism analysis identity rape power control society politics josswhedon
• Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, and the Strange and Difficult Path of Feminist Dudes: Some Thoughts – Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent. It’s built around an organization – the titular Dollhouse – which erases volunteers’ personalities and memories and renders them childlike and passive, in order to implant them with new, built-to-order personalities custom made for wealthy clients who wish to order the “perfect” person for a specific job.
  Tags: television review criticism analysis identity rape power control society politics josswhedon
• Asking the Wrong Questions: Alpha and Omega – Hey, you know what show could really use a bit more online discussion? Dollhouse! “Echo,” the original, unaired pilot for Joss Whedon’s by no means triumphant return to television, and “Epitaph One,” the shelved thirteenth episode of its first season, are now viewable through various and sundry means. Taken together, they paint a very different picture of the show from the one arising from the first season. Not simply because they are both well-written, engaging hours of television–hardly stellar on either count, but certainly head and shoulders above most of the season’s conventionally aired episodes–but because they illustrate how wide the gap is between the show Whedon envisioned and tried to create and the show he was allowed to make.
  Tags: television criticism review analysis josswhedon rape identity
• Strange Horizons: Two Views: Dollhouse, season one, reviewed by Bernadette Lynn Bosky and Gianduja Kiss – Dual review of season one of Dollhouse from Strange Horizons. Worth a read if you’re interested in the show.
  Tags: television criticism review
• 5 Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy – “We all understand that action movies are cheesy escapism. After all, could one commando really take out a whole compound full of bad guys? Actually, yes. It turns out the history books are full of stories of soldiers doing things so badass they’d hesitate to put them into a film for fear of killing the realism. Like these five, for example.” Insane.
  Tags: soldiers military war history heroism insane
• Hark, a vagrant: 213 – Jules Verne <3 Edgar Allan Poe.
  Tags: comics literature history funny