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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Gwumps: Post-Traumatic Wastelands – But whether or not you choose to have sex with a bi-curious elf who sounds like Antonio Banderas, the trend seems to be continuing – game developers are trying to incorporate more and more “realistic” elements of adventuring as they expand what an RPG can do.  Two games especially – Dead Space II and Fallout: New Vegas – have tackled with various success two key elements that I think have been horribly, almost criminally, overlooked.  These are: 1) The effects of violence on the psyche and 2) The emotional tolls of dealing with that violence.
  Tags: writing gaming videogames rpg fallout
• No merit in merit pay for teachers | Walt Gardner | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – It is tempting for teachers to gloat because they have long maintained that such strategies would do little, if anything, to alter outcomes. A quick rewind through history explains why they were right.
  Tags: meritpay performancerelatedpay usa education teachers
• The Escapist : Ghosts of Juarez – “The game depicts Juárez and the border as a place where there are terrorists and it is not the case. Juárez is a city where we promote work and everybody is working to better the city.” This is the head of the state of Chihuahua’s Interior Department, explaining why the state has banned Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, and ordered all copies confiscated. The Mayor of Juárez, Héctor Murguía, has spearheaded the effort after labeling the game a “despicable” attempt to portray Mexico’s “best border region” as violent and unsafe.
  The gaming press chalked it up to moral panic. Ubisoft released a statement pointing out that the story was fictional. No one was interested in exploring why the game had touched a nerve, and as a result, the gaming industry lost a crucial opportunity to examine the increasing overlap between military shooters and geopolitics.
  Tags: mexico videogames drugs organisedcrime
• 50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos – Neat!
  Tags: photography history weird cool
• LENIN’S TOMB: #26march report – It was something that I haven’t really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you’re a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.
  Tags: protest london britain cuts recession
• New Statesman – The heavies of the state – When Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, he insisted on a gentle approach to the growing unrest among the urban poor. Almost two centuries later, more and more British people are convinced that the police’s role is to impose the government’s austerity programme, by force if necessary. How did this happen?
  Tags: police politics power
• New Statesman – Why I’m marching today – Whatever happens, the eyes of the world will be on this city today. The ancient streets are going to shake with the stoppered rage of the public, as they have done so many times before. Seven hundred years ago, Wat Tyler led thousands in a march against feudalism and entitlement, against wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of a few rich families who owned everything and were answerable to noone. Seven hundred years later, we’re still marching, because it’s still happening.
  Tags: protest london britain cuts recession
• Nurses, lawyers, students, teachers: the faces of the anti-cuts protest | Society | guardian.co.uk – Protesters converged on London with one clear message for David Cameron’s coalition – the people are not happy
  Tags: protest london britain cuts recession
• SchNEWS 764 – 25th March 2011 – No Flies On Us – It’s March, so it’s time for a new war. To no-one’s great surprise we’re bombing the Arabs again. A few facts for history buffs – not only did “Operation Defend Libyans From Bombs By Bombing Libyans” start almost exactly seven years after the start of the Iraq War, but 2011 also marks one hundred years of aerial bombardment. The target of those first ever bombs dropped from planes in 1911? Libya.
  Tags: history libya middleeast revolution
• Slapped Down | Eurogamer.net – The defence, already mooted very publicly by hugely popular webcomic and arbitrator of gaming taste Penny-Arcade, is that hey – in Call of Duty you slaughter thousands, so how is slapping a girl to calm her down in Duke Nukem Forever “offensive”?
  It’s a persuasive argument. It’s also stupid and disingenuous. The slaughter of thousands by an improbable super-soldier is pretty blatantly within the realms of utter fantasy. Slapping women? That’s something which, sadly, happens every day in countless households around the world. There’s no funny, goofy way to give a player – playing as an all-American hero – a button which slaps a woman to calm her down, because there’s no way to do it without reinforcing the basic and sadly still widely held view that this is an acceptable thing to do.
  Tags: sexism games
• Vilifying Gaddafi externalises evil | Richard Seymour – The air strikes on Libya are, under the terms of the UN resolution, supposedly intended to protect civilians and result in a negotiated settlement between Colonel Gaddafi and the rebels. This has resulted in some controversy, as air strikes devastated Gaddafi’s compound – Bab El-Azizia, the presidential palace abutting military barracks in Tripoli. The defence secretary Liam Fox has insisted, against British army opposition, that Gaddafi would be a legitimate target of air strikes. Assassination, whatever else may be said about it, would leave Gaddafi unavailable for negotiations. But a “compound” – what could be wrong with bombing such a facility?
  Tags: humanitarianintervention war bombing libya demonisation middleeast
• BioWare writer defends romance options in Dragon Age II- Destructoid – BioWare writer says “check your privilege”. Bloody marvellous.
  Tags: games writing privilege sexuality
• “When It’s Not Your Turn”: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire” « The <b>Hooded</b> <b>Utilitarian</b> – “There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike.  Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia.  We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.” Sheer genius.
  Tags: literarycriticism television thewire funny
• Calendar patterns – Interesting stuff – evaluative patterns in the author’s film criticism.
  Tags: film criticism
• The Lord of the Rings – “Watching The Lord of the Rings marked yet another step along my inevitable descent into senility. Because I watched it with Elizabeth, and I sounded like the elderly husband in the aisle seat at the matinee. “Huh? Wait, who’s that? Am I supposed to know who that is? And that guy! Isn’t he dead? Oh, this is a different guy? Well, what does he have to do with anything? And what did he just say?” Amazing review of the LOTR trilogy. I liked them, but this is still very funny and very astute.
  Tags: review criticism funny film
• Charlie Brooker: Midsomer’s plain daft. So why might adding brown faces make viewers suspend disbelief? – Putting aside the legality of a major commercial venture apparently enacting an employment policy that excludes people on the basis of skin colour for no good reason, many have complained that to suddenly introduce “ethnic” characters would be “PC gone mad”. Yes it would, if they introduced them solely to do a storyline about grime MCs or arranged marriages, or showed them walking around the village shaking hands with all the white folk. But no one’s asking for that. You don’t even have to change the writing. Just widen the audition process. It won’t hurt. It can only help.
  Tags: multiculturalism television writing actors disability prejudice
• Working-class Tories become an endangered species | Richard Seymour | Comment is free – Rightwing mythology has it that the cuts are necessary because of Labour’s reckless spending. The state has become bloated, choking the life out of the private sector. [...]
  But the TUC’s latest figures on the distribution of unemployment in the UK – which has now climbed to its highest level since 1994 – send a subtly different message. They show that joblessness in Labour constituencies is on average twice that in Tory constituencies. The extremes are telling. The Tory seat of Stratford-upon-Avon has only one jobseeker for every job. The core Labour constituency of Glasgow North West has 41.7 people chasing every job. The message, conveyed in the usual euphemisms about being “out of touch”, is that the Tories are the party of the shires, warriors for their class who never have to see the misery they create. And the TUC is right. After all these years, and all these spin cycles, the Tories are still a party of wealth.
  Tags: tories cuts conservatism britain politics history
• The Chimpanzee Complex… Stripp’d – This is the first in what will be an on-going series of columns. Every month, Jonathan McCalmont will look at a different set of comics. These comics will usually be part of a series and will either be translated or from one of the indie publishers. The aim of the column is to celebrate the diverse ways in which different comics, manga, graphic novels and sequential art approach ideas from science fiction, fantasy and horror when they are not trying to squeeze them into the spandex-clad postmodernity of the contemporary super hero story.
  Every month, this column will bring you a critical analysis of a different comic.  A comic that will be… Stripp’d.
  Tags: comics criticism
• 5 Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot – There’s a famous saying that goes, “the reason it’s a cliche is because it’s true.” Well, that saying like the five that follow, sucks. There are many reasons cliches exist and most of them have to do with humans being a pathetically unimaginative species, desperately clinging to any perceived aphorism in the hope that it will bring comfort or create the illusion of intelligence. Here are the five I hate most.
  Tags: lists stupidity language cliches aphorisms

• 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

• Punknews.org | The Traders – Album stream for this French melodic hardcore outfit. I dig!
  Tags: band album stream
• The Ghost Is Out There from Pedals by Rival Schools | Listening Party – New Rival Schools album stream.
  Tags: music stream
• Libyan Rebels Capture British SAS Unit — News from Antiwar.com – That’s what the British military learned today when, after a solid week of Libyan rebel leaders insisting that they didn’t want any foreign intervention in the ongoing efforts to oust long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi, they decided a great idea would be to dispatch a unit of their special forces, the SAS, to Benghazi to “offer help.”
  But the rebels’ troops spotted the plain clothes troops and hauled them away, worrying that public support would be damaged if they were seen as a Western-backed coup against Gadhafi, one of the chief reasons they have repeatedly spurned US and British offers of military help.
  Tags: libya middleeast revolution military humanitarianintervention
• No Rock And Roll Fun: Coca Cola to use music to target teens, destroy teeth, ultimately ruin music – So, the plan is to spume out the Coca Cola Music project. Coke and music go together like Ross and Rachel, in that it’s a relationship that nobody really quite believes works, but they keep returning to it because the people in charge don’t really have any other ideas and hope we all join in pretending it’s a good thing and a plausible pairing.
  Coke’s previous run outs in music included The Moment When Everyone Realised Jack White Was Just A Hack For Hire; that Robin Beck single; the expensive flop of MyCokeMusic and setting Michael Jackson’s hair on fire.
  Tags: corporations musicindustry bullshit funny
• Gaming, rape culture, and how I stopped reading Penny Arcade – Lifestyle Features – Tea-bagging is common, and it’s not about homosexuality — it’s about power. Shoving your virtual jock-strap in your powerless enemy’s face is just a way to assert dominance. So tell me again, my fellow gamers, what does the word “rape” mean when you use it? You’ve managed to completely divorce the word from its actual definition? Right.
  Tags: rape respect gaming power analysis
• Seeing Like A State: Why Strategy Games Make Us Think and Behave Like Brutal Psychopaths | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – What all of these games have in common is a tendency to make even the most liberal of gamers behave like brutal tyrants. For the player of strategy games, little computer people serve only as a means to an end. We do not care about whether or not our little computer people are happy, we only care about whether or not they are productive. If they are not productive then they are in our way and little computer people who get in the way of their players tend to wind up brutalised, enslaved and dead.
  Tags: gaming strategy politics psychology
• BC ruminates – Achievements – The Badger Commander – At first, Achievements weren’t important to me. Whether I got them or not did not matter, that all changed when I hit around the 8 thousand mark and discovered that a co-worker had 11.
  It became a healthy competition between friends but quickly devolved into an unsavoury obsession for me. It took 2 years, 100 games and 30 thousand achievement points for me to finally realise that I was tired of constantly chasing those meaningless points.
  Tags: gaming achievements
• The revival of imperialist ideology – Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, those ambassadors security experts, all seem to worry about what will happen in the ‘vacuum’ (which, significantly, depicts Libyan people, the revolutionaries who are bravely undertaking this historic struggle, as a mere absence). Are Arabs ready for democracy? Will the ‘disorder’ allow ‘al-Qaeda’ to ‘reappear’? What will happen to oil prices? And this seems to be the point. It is precisely because they know that Qadhafi will not survive, and are desperately worried about what sort of independent political forces may follow (it has nothing to do with ‘al-Qaeda’), that they are anxious to ‘help’.
  Tags: imperialism humanitarianintervention libya
• Richard Peppiatt’s letter to Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond | Media | guardian.co.uk – “Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt resigns in protest at what he says is the newspaper’s anti-Muslim propaganda” Hell of a way to quit.
  Tags: journalism journalisticstandards racism islamophobia
• Clarissa Explains It All | TV | Memory Wipe | The A.V. Club – “The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth-oriented entertainments of the not-too-distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half-forgotten toys. YouTube compilations of long-lost TV-show intros. Countless blogs playing “Remember when?” with movies and videogames whose rose-colored recollections aren’t always properly earned. With Memory Wipe, The A.V. Club takes a look back at some of our formative favorites with clearer eyes and asks that all-important question: Were they really that great to begin with?” I used to love this show. Great retrospective!
  Tags: television history
• YouTube – …Of Death – This Shit Is Fucked – Ridiculous screamo song.
  Tags: screamo skramz music video
• The Steez of Skramz – Screamo is dead. It is the Fiddler’s Green of liberal arts college dropouts who now screenprint merch for Warped Tour side-stage bands and smell like their cats. Where the sky is the color of test presses, the pots of vegan chili are never-ending, and apoplexy, histrionics and veiled earnestness mix to create that ambrosia of nostalgia: skramz. A place where all conversations begin “Have you heard (Funeral Diner, The Kodan Armada, Yaphet Kotto)?” and the answer is always, “Oh man, I love ‘em! Do you have their split with (Welcome the Plague Year, Gospel, Envy)?”
  Over the achingly wistful yet exhilarative hours of reminiscence, you’ll find you’ve mated for life, like a male anglerfish latching on to a female to become a living sperm sac (you’re both the sperm sac, forever supplying the other with Mediafire links to discographies of broken-up and long-inconsequential acts).
  Tags: screamo skramz emo music history funny
• Costumes: the Wearable Dialog • Indistinguishable From Magic – I mentioned before some of my favorite character designs in the world of comics and have been meaning to tackle this subject again.  I came to realize, however, that “character design” is itself a fairly massive subject, and that it would be best to break the topic down into separate installments.  Today, true believers, we’re going to talk about outfits and costumes, which are often a pivotal part of a character’s design.
  Tags: comics art design
• Figures: They Speak For Themselves (mildly NSFW) • Indistinguishable From Magic – Continued from the last article about costume design, today we’re going to talk about those wacky things you hide underneath clothing.  Figure drawing is a pivotal tool to any artist, but being able to effectively render humans and creatures is only part of the equation.  Even if your draftsmanship is solid, you won’t get far if your designs are uninteresting.  Effective and dynamic figures are the cornerstone of having compelling characters in pretty much any comic.
  Tags: comics art design
• Angry at the banks? Of course we are! | Bill Nighy – I’m an ambassador for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which calls for a tiny tax of just 0.05% on every casino-style financial transaction in order to help poor people, reverse public service cuts at home and abroad, and tackle climate change. In this role I’ve seen how people’s sense of fairness has been stretched to the limits by the continued spectacle of huge pay increases and bonuses in big companies while ordinary people suffer.
  Tags: banks progressivetaxation equality uk
• Concerned neighbours warn against foreign intervention in Libya | World news | The Guardian – Arab states have warned against any foreign intervention in the Libyan crisis and pledged to support the unity of the country even as they struggle with the implications of the unrest sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
  Tags: revolution resistance activism protest strikes democracy
• Egypt’s revolution has been 10 years in the making | Hossam el-Hamalawy – “Mubarak’s iron-fist rule and the outbreak of the dirty war between the regime and Islamist militants in the 1990s meant the death of street dissent. Public gatherings and street protests were banned and if they did take place, confronted by force. Live ammunition was used on strikers. Trade unions were put under government control.” Potted history of Egyptian resistance to Mubarak’s regime in the 90s and 00s.
  Tags: middleeast egypt protest history resistance activism strike
• The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist – One great way to briefly turn the conversation toward myself at a party is to answer the question, “So, what do you do?” with, “I’m a writer.” Not that most of the people I’ve met at parties have read my novels or short stories or feature articles; when they ask, “Have I seen any of your stuff?” I shrug and the conversation moves on. If I want attention for an hour or so, however, I’ll tell them my horrible secret — for several years I made much of my freelance income writing term papers.
  Tags: writing freelancing nickmamatas essays
• How To Stop The Anger About Video Games, From Outside And Within – Video gamers have had a weird past month or two. Fans who follow the culture closely online, whether that’s through the Twitter feeds of their favorite personalities, the comments sections on their daily blogs or in the threads of the forums they haunt, might’ve noticed a certain degree of cultural friction happening.
  Tags: videogames gamingculture immaturity
• How can we achieve development goals if we ignore human rights? – At a talk at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton on Thursday, a member of the audience explained how, while doing some recent work for a major development agency, he had been told todo a search-and-replace for all references to human rights in policy documents.
  It was, he said, a typical example of how human rights were being steadily eradicated from the language of development organisations and donors.
  Tags: humanrights poverty aid development internationalaffairs liberalism reformism
• 6 Terrifying Ways Crows Are Way Smarter Than You Think – Mankind has a long and checkered past with crows and ravens: They have been feared as symbols of death, because they’re all black and scary, revered as creators of the world because, well, it was either them or the seagulls, and worshiped as trickster gods, because of their baffling intelligence. Intelligent enough, in fact, for us to start worrying …
  Tags: wildlife birds interesting animals intelligence
• 6 Important Things You Didn’t Know We’re Running Out Of – When we talk about a shortage of “resources,” most people immediately think “oil.” But the only reason oil is the most famous of the dwindling resources is because we feel the spike in prices, since we have to go buy the stuff ourselves on a weekly basis.
  But other resources that are key to keeping our society operating are running out just as fast, but much more quietly. Pretty soon, you may turn on CNN to hear about wars being fought over something ridiculous, like …
  Tags: resourceconflict resources scarcity
• Mary Ann Sieghart: Nobody likes quotas, but they work – Every battle for women’s representation goes the same way. Women complain and men take no notice. Next, independent evidence is produced that the organisation would win more votes/make more money if there were more women in it. Most men shrug their shoulders, but a few take note. Finally, some enlightened men start making the argument. Ah, at last! Maybe there’s something in it.
  It’s like the old cartoon in which five men are sitting at a boardroom table, with a woman at the far end. The chairman says: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men would like to make it?”
  Tags: sexism quotas representation feminism
• nihilistic_kid: The Truly Stupid – We are all bedeviled by the stupid. Some people are just simple, or easily distracted, or willful in their disengagement from their own minds. And, of course, there are the social stupidities of racism and sexism and national chauvinism, along with other foolishness, which are extremely common because they are so useful for political and even psychological reasons [...] Then there are sophisticated disagreements [...] Finally, there are the various supernaturalisms which certainly seem stupid [...]
  There are, however, a handful of red flags out there—people with these positions are just stupid, and their stupidity is pretty obvious because nobody who ever thought about the topic actually agrees with them. There’s no real disagreement, just people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t on these topics. Understanding and agreement are one; to disagree really does just mean that you’re stupid and likely not worth talking to.
  Tags: stupidity people socialisation
• Remembering Ghassan Kanafani – Kanafani was living in exile in Beirut with his wife and young children. He stepped out of his house in the company of his 17 year old niece Lamees, his sister’s daughter. They climbed into the family car. When he turned the ignition key the car exploded. All the windows of the house were blown out. His wife Anni ran outside and saw the wreckage of the car and the corpse of her niece. She cried out her husband’s name but couldn’t see him. But then she saw a body part: his left leg. She stood paralysed. Behind her, their nine year old son, traumatized, banged his head repeatedly against a wall. Their daughter sobbed her father’s name repeatedly.
  The Israeli secret service, Mossad, had put a bomb in the car. It was retaliation for a massacre at Lod airport, perpetrated by Japanese terrorists. Kanafani had nothing at all to do with the massacre, but as a prominent Palestinian intellectual and spokesman for Palestinian nationalism, he was deemed a suitable target for a revenge killing.
  Tags: novelists palestine israel statemurder

• 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: Students lead, NUS follows – As the occupations continue across the country, we’ve started to see a shift in the political leadership of the labour movement in this country in response to student militancy. Trade unionists have openly endorsed direct action, and Ed Miliband has already felt the need to declare that he was ‘tempted’ to speak at the student protests – which, lame as it is, makes a change from the ‘invisible man’ act he’s being doing amid all this. But far more notably NUS president Aaron Porter has apologised to students at the UCL occupation for being “too spineless”, supported occupations, and pledged the NUS’ support for this Tuesday’s action.
  Tags: students protest militancy resistance youth coalition cuts recession
• Radiator Blog: Gay (But Not “Gay”) Characters in Video Games – The argument that [all] gay video game characters should downplay their sexuality might be well intentioned, but is ultimately representative of the most dangerous kind of homophobia — a homophobia wrapped in intellectualism, appearing “tolerant.”
  Tags: sexuality homophobia games writing criticism
• Case Study – Love – Almost everything in Love is generative. The world, AI, player interaction and objectives are all driven by a growing number of complex rulesets that constantly drive emergent gameplay. One of the key features of this approach is the construction of procedurally generated worlds for each game server. These landscapes are procedurally generated and then slowly rebuilt over time via ongoing algorithmic remodelling. Radical shifts in tectonic type or altitude give the game a fantastic almost ‘prog rock’ aesthetic where new regions overwrite previous terrain with new outcrops or plateaus.
  Tags: games proceduralgeneration
• day9tv on blip.tv – More StarCraft 2 matches with commentary.
  Tags: none
• The Escapist : Wussy RPG Girls – If you’ve ever played a JRPG, particularly one from before the early 2000′s, chances are you’ve encountered the Wussy RPG Girl. Meek and doe-eyed, these healer characters double as the love interest and are usually billed as the “heroine,” though they seem to possess little power of their own. In fact, it’s rare that they do anything more heroic than grappling with low self-esteem or getting kidnapped – which tends to happen a minimum of twice.
  Tags: sexism writing jrpgs games
• Every RPG Ever – Chart poking fun at formulaic RPG plots.
  Tags: games rpgs system:filetype:jpg system:media:image
• A cure for the common cold may finally be achieved as a result of a remarkable discovery in a Cambridge laboratory – In a dramatic breakthrough that could affect millions of lives, scientists have been able to show for the first time that the body’s immune defences can destroy the common cold virus after it has actually invaded the inner sanctum of a human cell, a feat that was believed until now to be impossible.
  Tags: medicine science research illness
• 18 essential Dragon Age mods – Another great list of mods.
  Tags: mods games
• commute til we die – Radicalisation always represents the attempt to bring about a condition that can actually be described as life.
  Radicalism opposes itself to the swaddling, coddling, tunnel-vision of life as defined by the culture you live in. It questions the factuality of social, political and economic “fact”.
  To call a McJob a fact–as in “facing the facts of life” –to call the Debt a fact–as in “facing the facts of the economy” –to call a career at Price Waterhouse a fact–as in “it’s a fact that you have to get on in life to get the things you want” –is the most grotesque distortion of the facts. These processes are as artificial as the malls & offices in which they take place.
  Tags: coalition cuts radicalisation resistance life
• YouTube – HuskyStarcraft’s Channel – StarCraft 2 match commentary
  Tags: starcraft esports games
• Biggest student rebellion since ’68 – Several fires burn on the tarmac, someone gives an impromptu speech from atop a concrete wall, and a chant goes up: “Let us out! Let us out! Let us out!”. I am in the middle of Britain’s student revolt, and I am amazed by the high spirits of thousands of kettled children and teenagers. For my part, I can only think how cold it is. Things keep “kicking off” on the frontlines between police and protesters. Further up Whitehall, a huge crowd of kids has gathered outside the kettle. I’m told the younger kids are walking around telling the police to go fuck themselves. They’re so angry, more than I can explain, about being kettled in. When asked, the sheer righteous fury they express is impressive.
  Tags: activism protest youth cuts kettling london britain students police coalition
• New Statesman – Inside the Whitehall kettle – Before we go any further, let’s remind ourselves precisely what kettling is, and what it’s for.
  Take a protest, one whose premise is uncomfortable for the administration – say, yesterday’s protest, with thousands of teenagers from all over London walking out of lessons and marching spontaneously on Westminster to voice their anger at government cuts to education funding which will prevent thousands from attending college and university. Toss in hundreds of police officers with riot shields, batons, dogs, armoured horses and meat wagons, then block the protesters into an area of open space with no toilets, food or shelter, for hours. If anyone tries to leave, shout at them and hit them with sticks. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s effective.
  Tags: kettling protest london britain recession cuts coalition youth
• Why I Write Reviews « Torque Control – The most irritating sentence in the paragraph, however, is the third. “Reviewers who want attention should instead write their own stories.” What’s objectionable here is not just the too-common canard that reviewers are frustrated fiction writers; it’s the suggestion that reviewers should want to write fiction, that fiction is in some undefined way inherently the superior activity, the true end-point of the urge to write, the only form of writing worthy of attention, that reviewing is but a stepping stone to that goal.
  Tags: reviews criticism literature writing
• Simon Gane – Comics artist Simon Gane’s blog.
  Tags: comics art punk
• FarmVille: they reap what you sow | Laurie Penny – There can be no more elegant example of the alienation of the modern workplace than the fact that hundreds of millions of employees across the globe spend their lunch hours pretending to be farmers on the internet. With all the breathtaking and transformative power of the web at their fingertips, armies of workers and young people still choose to spend their online hours growing virtual potatoes on badly animated digital fields.
  One of the biggest forums for this activity is FarmVille, the online role-playing game made popular through Facebook, whose players tend and trade digital crops and livestock. Almost 100 million people subscribe to the game, which has just announced profits of $500m (£300m) for 2010. I have an account myself, and have spent many happy hours playing on my virtual farm, although my attempts to grow virtual opium were swiftly curtailed by the virtual CIA.
  Tags: facebook webgames zynga gaming
• The Battle For StarCraft II | Edge Magazine – It wasn’t meant to be like this. Not at all. Blizzard’s long-anticipated launch of StarCraft II was meant to be a dream –a triumphant return to the RTS genre that made the company’s name in 1997, when the first StarCraft revolutionised realtime strategy gaming. The centrepiece of the game’s launch? South Korea, the epicentre of world competitive gaming, where the low-specs original spread like a virus, hopping from the gamer fringe to become a mainstream sport within five years. Of the ten-million-plus copies of the original game sold worldwide, half were in South Korea. Two television channels sprang up to broadcast matches between the 12 Proleague teams, and fans flocked to see elite players face off against their rivals. The best players pulled in big money, earning up to £200k a year.
  With so many players and fans still playing the original, with dedicated television channels running constant promotion, with an entire sport evolving from a single game, what could possibly go wrong?
  Tags: esports korea starcraft gaming
• Life Lessons from Nerdy Gamers – My youngest son is a serious gamer.  It is a label that invokes judgment from even the most liberal adults.  Gamers are viewed as lazy, unmotivated, and self-absorbed. I always suspected that something magic was happening in the gaming communities–the joy on my son’s face told me that it was serving some great purpose, and I’d understand it in time.  Psychiatrists believe that the gamers are programming their minds for war.  I once asked my son about this, knowing that he probably knew more than most therapists.  His answer set me straight, “Mom, don’t you think we know the difference between pretend and real.”  Of course, he did.  It is the adults that don’t know the difference between pretend and real.
  [...] They are watching their minds as they play, and discriminating true from false at a very high level.
  Tags: games gaming esports starcraft intergenerationalrelationships

• Suspended-animation cold sleep achieved in lab – Top boffins in the States believe that they may be on the track of a way to place living human beings into suspended animation, allowing them to survive long periods effectively frozen before being “reanimated” with no ill effects.
  Tags: science sciencefiction suspendedanimation research
• rejectamentalist manifesto – A century ago it was already clear that international law was ‘a maze of plausibilities’. Ask a landscape gardener: the point of a maze is not to get out, but to get lost.
  So what if, in the face of Israel’s cruel flaunting, we scythe through the hedges? Refuse to bicker over precedent, interpretation, custom, & all the rest of the endless pantomime?
  What if, instead, we pursue other strategies to isolate the hijack state, & in response to its jurisprudes of murder, simply say: ‘Fuck your law’?
  Tags: internationallaw israel palestine activism protest justice
• Dance, Fight, Push People Over! | Red Wine Panther – Alec’s produced stuff.
  Tags: band music
• Hark! An Interview with Kate Beaton – Kate Beaton is the artist behind Hark! A Vagrant, the weekly webcomic whose popularity has exploded over the last year. Her clever mix of irreverence, literary references, and detailed historical mockery obviously strikes a chord with many readers, from the hundreds that lined up for hours at TCAF to get her new book signed to her admirers at the New Yorker. Be warned: visiting the archives of her website will cost you many hours in productivity—and, strangely, create a yearning to learn a little more about history, Beaton’s favourite subject. Beaton spoke with Torontoist’s comics columnist Dave Howard a couple of weeks ago about comic delivery, Canadian history, her own history, and her creative process.
  Tags: interview comics history art katebeaton
• Gideon’s trumpet – In short, the deficit is not the cause of weak private sector demand and investment, but the result of it. An attack on the public sector is an attack on one of the few sources of economic growth, and thus on the basis for future taxable income and profits. It may make the deficit larger. It may tip the UK into another recession, or depression. Moreover, there is no great urgency in the UK paying off the deficit, despite the sabre-rattling of the financiers
  Tags: conservativeparty liberaldemocrats coalition recession economics futurism
• Are Cameras the New Guns? – In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.
  Tags: privacy surveillance law USA police justice copwatch
• The 6 Most Insane Moral Panics in American History – What’s wrong with kids these days? Not enough, apparently, since grown-ups seem to feel the need to just make shit up. Even the flimsiest evidence can convince parents and lazy journalists alike that there is some new, horrible threat to our moral character.
  Often these turn out to be grossly exaggerated. Or, as in cases like the ones below, completely fucking retarded.
  Tags: funny stupid moralcrusaders usa history
• Ilan Pappé: The deadly closing of the Israeli mind – Nothing is further from the truth than this optimistic scenario. The only version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the one that both the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more assertive Hamas in Gaza could never ever accept. It is an offer to imprison the Palestinians in stateless enclaves in return for ending their struggle. Thus even before one discusses either an alternative solution – a single democratic state for all, which I support – or explores a more plausible, two-state settlement, one has to transform fundamentally the Israeli official and public mindset. This mentality is the principal barrier to a peaceful reconciliation in the torn land of Israel and Palestine.
  Tags: israel palestine peace society oppression mindset socialisation
• Rooks on MySpace Music – New Brighton punk band, supporting OWTH later in the year.
  Tags: band music
• Overachiever For a Day – I noticed recently that Xbox 360 Achievements were starting to encroach on my gaming worldview. I have no interest in PS3 Trophies or the medals they hand out on Flash-game sites, but I’m a sucker for the allure of the Gamerscore. I found myself returning to mediocre games to scrimp an extra 50 points, or wasting time on joyless tasks like feather-hunting in Assassin’s Creed II.
  I intended to break myself of this predilection. (Let’s not call it an “addiction.”) I like Achievements, but I wanted them to be a sideshow rather than the main event. I figured that if I could boost my Gamerscore in one insane, all-out blaze of glory, maybe the points wouldn’t have such a hold on me anymore. It would be like smoking a whole pack of cigarettes at once to break your nicotine habit.
  Look, I didn’t say it was a good plan. Just a plan.
  Tags: gaming achievements psychology funny
• Rebel Frequencies: M.I.A. is right, NYT is wrong – “Lately it seems like the only thing following M.I.A. around more than controversy is bad journalism.” Interesting and spirited defence of M.I.A’s spat with the NYT.
  Tags: music journalism popstars protest controversy provocation media
• The Brothers Bloom (2009) – The Failed Re-Enchantment of the Postmodern World – …while cinephiles speak of the truth and beauty of film, the reality of the modern cinema is a gauntlet of bad faith and protective cynicism.  A cynicism born of the fact that, before you even decide what film to see or what screen to go to, you are assailed by empty promises.  Promises of new technologies and more comfortable seats.  Promises made by aggressive marketing campaigns and trailers designed to raise expectations to the point where no human-made work of art could ever possibly satisfy them.  Arrived at the cinema you must then navigate a flood of yet more adverts and yet more trailers for yet more films demanding yet more money and yet more of your time.  To face such an onslaught without cynical detachment would surely be to go mad but this protective detachment is also the enemy of art as it seeks to protect us from that which defines a great work of art: emotional transport.
  Tags: culture cinema art psychology

“In the circus, acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called “Icarian Games”. Considering the fate of Icarus after he flouted his father’s advice and flew so close to the sun his wings melted, perhaps some dark humor is intended.

“In our particular re-enactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.”

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

So begins Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking work of memoir and comics, Fun Home. It’s an apposite beginning: at once literary, darkly humorous, and reservedly dramatic. Here, as throughout, Bechdel’s father is centre-stage, for this is a story of the last twenty years of his life, and the first twenty of Alison’s.

Bechdel’s artwork is fantastic; stylised and thorough with a wonderful eye for detail, and often playful. Sometimes she points out her small flourishes of authenticity, like part of a Halloween costume worn well after the event is passed. A fine example of more subtle detail is in a panel that follows several pages discussing the Gothic Revival house Bruce Bechdel has restored and in which the family live;  below the caption “Yet we really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms” is a scene of the family in their 1860s living room. The children are playing and the parents are watching television whilst sharing a bucket of KFC. The anachronistic nature of the scene speaks for itself.

As any honest work of memoir must be, it is at times brutal in its depiction of events and character. Bruce Bechdel is portrayed as a man of violent tempers, intolerant cruelty towards his children, and central in driving the comic’s author into an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is also shown as capable of simple acts of kindness and warmth, as a master of period restoration and interior design, and as a highly-cultured, well-educated man. The picture that emerges, overall, is of a man with severe problems, tragic weaknesses and admirable strengths.

The book is split into seven chapters which all circle around the central fact of Bruce Bechdel’s death. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of his life and how it interacted with Alison Bechdel’s; a slow process of exploration is thus established, with each cycle layering greater detail, depth and understanding upon the events depicted. Sometimes events are returned to, where with the benefit of hindsight simple statements or actions have a suddenly greater meaning. Indeed, these intertwining narratives – mirroring the spiralling fall of Icarus from the sky – emphasise how tightly bound Alison and Bruce’s lives are. When Alison realises she is a lesbian and comes out to her family, this event is a catalyst for revelations about her father’s affairs with teenaged boys. And following her father’s death, Alison remarks that “his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him”: this book is part of an attempt to explore and understand that resonance.

Ultimately, the conclusion that this reader reached is that, for all of his problems, Bruce Bechdel was for better or worse a part of his family. This sounds tautological, but it would have been easy to disown him; families have fractured over less. It’s a story of acceptance, of a slow and grudging process of attempting to understand someone with whom one shares an intimacy at once familiar and estranged, and of efforts to establish common ground.

True understanding is of course impossible, as the fact of Bruce Bechdel’s death – suicide or accident – can never be established, and nor can a line ever be put under something so complex as a human life. But as an endeavour to understand and portray a flawed man as a human being worthy of respect and sympathy, it is an overwhelming success. Fun Home is a breathtakingly sophisticated and taut work of cathartic memoir, and a work that I see myself returning to again and again.

Alison Bechdel | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• -ZX-: Super 90′s Emo/Hardcore Post – Now here’s a great little treat for all you real emo/hardcore fans out there (myself included). I found this on the Collective Zine forum, it’s a huge list of download’s that someone kindly put up featuring hundreds of old emo bands from Baby Harp Seal, Across Five Aprils and many many more. I am slowly working my way through the list and there is some real outstanding stuff on here. So get on it.
  Tags: emo music downloads
• Smart Pop Books — Holy Signifier, Batman! – Batman, as one of the most iconic and enduring of comic book heroes, is ultimately nothing more than a bundle of images that have proven themselves to be far more valuable and compelling than any storyline, movie, or book of essays on the character. Batman is a Pez dispenser; he is a bat-shaped belt buckle. Batman is not a hard-ass vigilante, nor is he a duly deputized crime fighter; he is a stamped silhouette on a box of cereal.
  Tags: batman popart linguistictheory comics icons logos symbols signs camp
• The people’s historian – Howard was an inspiration to all of us on the left, especially in the times when we were fighting difficult battles and not winning many. His writings taught us that the resistance to oppression lives on–and that the struggles of ordinary people have the potential to change the world.They also taught us something else: that every high point of struggle is only possible because of the smaller battles that came before it–ultimately, that it matters what individuals do now to oppose injustice and to organize for the future.
  Tags: howardzinn obituary radicalism activism politics history heroes

• 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