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

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

• The Tories lie when they say ‘community right to buy’ « Though Cowards Flinch- Yet even before that, the whole idea that communities would have any greater ‘right to buy’ than they ever had before was a simple Tory lie.It’s a lie that shows no sign of ending any time soon.
  Tags: toryscum bigsociety communities britain privatisation
• SlutWalk NYC: Real Empowerment, Corsets and All — In These Times – This is another danger of the media-friendly, heavily “branded” feminism represented by SlutWalk. Brands erase diversity within the field to ensure their own survival; it’s just how they work. And investment in the brand, the image, the name that gets more attention than “March to End Sexual Violence,” can hinder willingness to change when necessary. Steele, I should point out, stressed her obligation “as a feminist, an activist, and as a human” to listen to criticisms like these. But the SlutWalk brand, powerful as it is, may simply prove too much to give up.
  Tags: branding feminism slutwalk usa new york activism protest
• LIB DEMS, THE NHS & THE DOG THAT NEVER BARKED – The Lib Dems could have stopped this. The Liberal Democrats could have said “no” and killed this Bill that no one – not patients, not GPs, not nurses, not consultants, not NHS managers – thinks is a good idea.[i] But they didn’t when the Bill was in the Commons. And they didn’t at their annual conference. So quite why anyone was surprised when they didn’t stop it yesterday is, frankly, a bit beyond me.
  Tags: nhs liberaldemocrats toryscum privatisation profiteering
• Gadget patrol: Bigger is better? – TL;DR: it’s not about one-handed phone use; folks who think in terms of smartphones as a one-handed device are still stuck in the telephone age). The real bone of contention is what to do about ageing eyeballs in the era of visual media. While the market for one-handed talk-to-me gadgets is declining, the number of folks with sub-optimal eyesight is only going to grow with time. It doesn’t matter how much more convenient it is to use a gadget one-handed, if you can’t see the screen. And we’re trying to display so much information via smartphones that something has to give: my money is on the screen diagonal.
  Tags: mobile smartphones technology futurism design
• Tiger Beatdown › MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT! – And here’s the thing: while I am screaming at you, I am also asking, nay, DEMANDING that you scream with me. And I am asking that you become as angry as I have been this past week. Because without anger and without righteous indignation and without the deep, relentless demand for change, my feminism, YOUR feminism, everyone’s feminism will fail. It will be bullshit.
  Tags: feminism anger plurality intersectional nonsectarianism race sex
• Voices of finance: banker’s ex-girlfriend | Joris Luyendijk | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – ‘Bankers like him have this need to impress, and when they can’t use money to do that, they don’t know what to do’
  Tags: finance people behaviour banking money poppsychology

• New Statesman – Watching the Arctic melt, I realise apathy must be frozen out- The greatest threat to the future of humanity is now not political brinkmanship, but paranoid indifference: the certainty that the future is both finite and short and that all we can do is burn what little of the remaining money we have and hope civilisation outlasts us.This is a terribly foolish way to live. The anarchist thinker David Graeber writes in Debt: the First 5,000 Years that in response to the blinding obviousness of economic and ecological world buggeration, “the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves ‘progressives’ – is simply fear. We can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.” Graeber adds: “About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”
  Tags: climatechange environment futurism activism
• Yahoo! YSlow for Chrome – YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
  Tags: web tools useful wordpress
• Fright Night (2011) – Even The Straight Boys are Queer « Ruthless Culture – By confusion the mainstream with the marginal and the queer with the straight, Fright Night communicates a profound cultural uncertainty about maturity; what does it mean to be a grown-up? What does it mean to be a man? According to Fright Night, we are nowhere near to having clear answers to either of these questions.
  Tags: teenagers queer cinema vampires adolescence comingofage malesexuality
• Science In My Fiction » Blog Archive » “Are We Not (as Good as) Men?” – Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Hollywood, hard science, uplift, and a lack of female characters. Sounds like an SF review of an SF movie!
  Tags: sciencefiction sf film uplift
• Astrogator’s Logs » Blog Archive » Snachismo, or: What Do Women Want? – About thirty years and fifty men later (counting short-term encounters), I think I’m finally ready to answer Freud’s burning question: What Do Women Want? I do not purport to answer on behalf of my entire gender. But I can unequivocally say what I want in my men and to put it in a soundbite, the answer is: Snachismo.
  Tags: gender sex relationships funny interesting machismo snachismo
• Science In My Fiction » Blog Archive » To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club – Being a research scientist as well as a writer, reader and reviewer of popular science and speculative fiction, I’ve frequently bumped up against the fraught question of what constitutes “hard” SF. It appears regularly on online discussions, often coupled with lamentations over the “softening” of the genre that conflate the upper and lower heads.
  Tags: sciencefiction hardsf science sciency ish
• 8 Simple Questions You Won’t Believe Science Can’t Answer | Cracked.com – The field of science is capable of some amazing things, mostly because it’s filled with all the Albert Einsteins and Doogie Howsers the world has produced over the centuries. But it may shock you that some of the most mundane, everyday concepts are as big a mystery to scientists as they are to the average toddler.
  Tags: science amusing interesting
• To My Someday Daughter, by Geordie Tait – a Magic: the Gathering Miscellaneous Article – “This letter is mostly about some stuff that happened recently, but it’s also about me, your dad, and how I’ve changed as a person over the years. It’s an open letter, so I’m going to let all my friends read it, too. By the end of it, some will be mad at me, perturbed and energy-sapped because I’ve made them feel guilty and asked them to question things that seem natural to them. Some will dismiss me, too entrenched in the perceived righteousness of their ways. They will tell themselves that I am expressing a progressive viewpoint for the express purpose of ruining their fun.” Fucking fantastic.
  Tags: feminism sexism misogyny respect understanding beingadecenthumanfuckingbeing
• Playing God « Second Person Shooter – When I grew up, some games were off-limits. Diablo was a no, because Satan was right there in the title. Grand Theft Auto was also disallowed when my parents caught me mowing down police officers and lines of Elvis impersonators with a machine gun. Mortal Kombat was banned for obvious reasons—you can rip out a man’s ribs and them stab them through his eyes—but even Golden Eye was mysteriously “lost” one day after a particularly hilarious match of only shooting each other in the knee caps. I can understand the logic behind all of these decisions, but I’ve always been confused about why I wasn’t allowed to play The Sims.
  Tags: gaming personal religion anxiety escapism faith
• Autonomism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, etc. It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists.
  Tags: politicaltheory autonomy socialism anarchism

• David Cameron’s immigration promises were desperate and self-defeating | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Torn between his business allies’ enthusiasm for immigration and the Tory bedrock, Cameron has been left looking foolish
  Tags: immigration uk politics davidcameron
• Riots as revenge « Though Cowards Flinch – Back in the 19650s and 1960s, both Conservative and Labour governments, in collaboration with willing councils, pursued overtly racist housing, employment and education policies towards the people then immigrating from South Asia and the West Indies.
  At the time, a sociologist who did have the “cognitive resources” needed to ”anticipate revenge effects” (which Chris says policy makers lack), said…
  Tags: racism society poverty inequality britain sociology
• Oi!  | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Yes, Oi! is a subgenre of punk rock played predominantly by skinheads. And depending on what kind of experience you may or may not have with such folks (or what kinds of movies you’ve watched about them), your view of Oi! may be duly influenced. Of course, not all skinheads are racist; the working-class youth movement began in England in the late ’60s and originally had reggae as its primary soundtrack. Oi!, however, didn’t rise until the following decade, when a chunk of the punk subculture chafed at the pop and/or art trends that had begun to proliferate in the movement. For better or worse (but mostly better), Oi! was punk’s first roots revival.
  Tags: punk history punkrock oi skinheads uk music
• How to read a press release: Case studies from the Daily Mail and the Guardian « Though Cowards Flinch – Research has recently been produced from the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, which has found that a third of Europeans are suffering from a mental disorder in any one year. Further still, women suffer disproportionately from depression, which has seen an increase over the last four decades.
  Tags: media journalism journalisticstandards rightwingbullshit
• Dead Sea Apes – Cool drone band from Manchester, worth checking out.
  Tags: band music
• New Statesman – News from Nowhere – I’ve left London, and I am sailing to a new island that has appeared out of the ice in the Arctic circle. No, this is not a prank. I’ve been invited along with an eclectic collection of academics, artists, lawyers, activists, sixth-formers and scientists to sail to this small pitch of land, which has been named NowhereIsland, as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
  Tags: fuckingawesome socialexperiment fun theory politics society culture lifestyle
• Private schools aren’t doing as well right-wingers like to think | Liberal Conspiracy – I do love to see more stats supporting the argument that exams aren’t getting easier, and that private schools ain’t all that.
  Tags: education uk schools privatisation
• I live sweat… – “If you didn’t want to scoop ice cream for a living, you got in the van.” – Kate Tyler Wall examines the role punk has played over decades of economic shifts. – I’m waiting for the punk scene to come to the fore again and get in the world’s face about it. Pat Graham of Spraynard (whom I’m going to see open for Kid Dynamite this weekend) said in recent interview that he’s worried punk audiences are too focused on just having a good time at shows, but that “punk is more than just singing your favorite songs with your friends.” Punk songs don’t have to be overtly political to capture the essence of a time and place. TV Party summed up the ’80s just as well as any Dead Kennedys diatribe. Too much earnestness reminds me of what passed for ’70s and ’80s political resistance in the university town where I lived (what Frank Turner aptly describes as “idiot fucking hippies” in “60s battle reenactments”).
  Tags: punk history subculture economiccrisis
• Sirs – Neato.
  Tags: band music
• Brainy Gamer: Unplayable – I’m pretty sure I’ll continue to teach Ultima IV. The series is simply too foundational to overlook, and I can develop new teaching strategies. But I believe we’ve finally reached the point where the gap separating today’s generation of gamers from those of us who once drew maps on grid paper is nearly unbridgeable. These wonderful old games are still valuable, of course, and I don’t mean to suggest we should toss them in the dustbin.
  Tags: teaching gaming history
• Dire Straits’ homophobic faux-pas | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Still, one wonders if we gain anything by erasing history. When certain publishers removed the “n— word” from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there was a widespread outcry – and it was based on some very solid grounds. Yes, the word appears many times; yes, the word is unambiguously racist. But erasing evidence of racism from Mark Twain’s work, while valorising Twain himself, is hypocritical: sanitising history makes it impossible for us to learn from our mistakes, or even to know that we’ve made them.
  Tags: language censorship homophobia bigotry radio
• Don’t be afraid of the snark | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Mockery and derisive laughter are the natural responses of people who feel powerless and pushed around; if there’s nothing else we can do but register our discontent, we should register it. And if we can make the whole ordeal less painful with a few jokes, we should do that, too. But we shouldn’t mistake the relief it gives us for actual power.
  Tags: snark internet writing dialogue
• Cheerleader’s protest after assault was not ‘frivolous’ | SE Smith | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Sex offenders, apparently. The US supreme court decided this week that if someone assaults you and you refuse to cheer for him at a basketball game, the school district is justified in suspending you from the squad.
  Tags: rape rapeculture sports texas supremecourt misogyny sexism twofoursixeightfuckyouguys
• What Christine O’Donnell wouldn’t tell Piers Morgan | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – This is far more serious than believing in witches. O’Donnell represents a lethally extreme strain of homophobia, which has many supporters, and O’Donnell has been open about this fact when in safe company. The fact that she backs off in less sympathetic environments only shows that hers is a policy of seduction – winning over as many people as possible before telling them that certain Americans deserve second-class status. It’s both worthwhile and necessary to call that out, and Morgan has done us all a service.
  Tags: teaparty fruitcakes farright homophobia television interview
• Tiger Beatdown › “Elitism:” Now, It Basically Just Means “Not Having Sex With Everybody” – What you CANNOT do, however, is participate in a subculture, build a lifestyle around the subculture, become WORLD CHAMPION of the subculture, and then scream bloody murder because someone finds your participation in the subculture unattractive. That’s not you being “bullied;” that’s just you exercising a massive and unrealistic sense of entitlement. And when you shriek that some woman is a “bitch” and a “cunt” and a “narcissist” and a “predator” and whatever else, just because she didn’t want to fuck some dude, just because she detailed her reasons why and didn’t bother to pretend she found the guy’s interests attractive, and just because that makes you worry that there might be people in the world who don’t want to fuck you or who don’t find you attractive (SURPRISE, there are, this is also true for everyone else in existence), well: guess who’s actually the bully in this situation?
  Tags: feminism internet dating funny
• How Doctor Who became Nurse Rory – And then we got there. The moment I stopped caring. Amy is surrounded by killer robots, in possession of a life-saving tool that can do anything she can think up, and Rory actually has to instruct her to “think” something. But even this isn’t condescending enough, apparently. Because Amy then turns to Rory, and asks him: “What do I think?”
  Tags: doctorwho television sciencefiction feminist critique ugh
• Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece | ThinkProgress – A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it doesn’t strike me that we do ourselves any favors as active feminists by leaching depictions of sexual violence, women making bad decisions, and institutionalized sexism from our fiction, or by dismissing entire swaths of consumers or modes of consuming fiction.
  Tags: feminist critique fiction fantasy epicfantasy writing
• Tiger Beatdown › Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin” – So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly. Because the fact of the matter is, in my ever-masochistic quest to be hip with what is happening in pop culture these days, I read the first four novels in the series. And my conclusions were: Dear God, George R.R. Martin is creepy. Quite possibly the creepiest author I’ve read in QUITE SOME TIME.
  Tags: fantasy criticism funny sexism racism writing epicfantasy
• Kill Screen – Laughing Stock: Doug TenNapel – For the designer behind the most outrageous platformer of the fourth generation, Doug TenNapel is surprisingly puritanical about the role of comedy in videogames. Earthworm Jim, co-created by TenNapel and released in ’94, shook up the medium with its surreal style, darkly comic tone, self-knowing satire and preoccupation with cow-launching, and led to outstanding reviews, two sequels, and a television show. But for all his game’s visual dynamism, TenNapel, a graphic novelist by trade, says it is the gameplay that supersedes all other elements, including laughs. TenNapel’s stepped away from games for the moment to work on the online comic Ratfist, but still has strong opinions on games: a space, he believes, of visual limitations but artistic possibilities.
  Tags: interview gamedesign artists 90s
• BBC News – Scottish soldier convicted of transgender prejudice – A soldier from Kinross has become the first person in Scotland to be convicted of transgender prejudice.
  Tags: progress prejudice justice crime
• I, Singularity… – Charlie’s Diary – The coming revolution in the English-language genre is here. And it’s this: we’re diverse. I’ve taken to calling it the Rainbow Age of science fiction, because the one thing I notice about the writers in my cohort is that we are multicolored, multicultural, multinational, multiethnic. We come from a wide range of class and religious backgrounds and life experiences. We do not conform neatly to gender binaries or established sexual identities. You cannot assume that we are male, or heterosexual, or white, or American or English or Canadian, or of protestant or Jewish background, or that we are probably professional or middle class.
  Tags: sciencefiction fantasy genre multiculturalism
• Eve’s CSM Fight Back, And Some Thoughts | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Unfortunately for CCP, players like Gianturco are much better at this stuff than they are. The company has been prone to devs saying the wrong things, as well as making some catastrophic design errors along the way. Of course that’s almost always forgiveable because things can change, and the game is a work-in-progress. It’ll evolve. It always does. But CCP are increasingly unable to come away from misjudgements or battles with player-opinion while also looking like a winner. This will be their most difficult challenge yet. And I believe that’s because this is the most fundamental battle they are ever going to face: a battle over how to run both their game, and their company.
  Tags: gaming eveonline development gamesindustry
• New Statesman – An afternoon with the English Defence League – On both sides of the political spectrum, politicians and policymakers have urged us to try to understand the disenfranchisement of white, far-right groups like the EDL, rather than dismissing their protests as “mindless violence”.
  Rioters from the inner cities, by contrast, are sent to jail for six months for stealing bottles of water; their rage at a system which does not want to educate, house or employ them written off as “pure criminality”.
  Tags: edl racists fascists scum
• All they are saying is give war a chance – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – From being a movement that boldly declared its independence, it became wholly dependent on external powers. Most tragically, elements within it became obsessed with ‘Africans’, who were frequently arrested, harassed, or killed. In the days following the capture of Tripoli, several news organisations have found evidence of rebels rounding up black men and killing them. “This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya,” reported Channel 4′s Alex Thomson. This jars with the language of human rights with which the opposition validates its claim to rule. It is also a disgrace to the February 17 revolt.
  Tags: libya revolution conservatism entrenchedpower civilwar

There have been no genocides targeting people who like Dungeons & Dragons. Liking comic books does not mean you are at a vastly higher statistical risk of domestic violence or rape. Playing video games will not result in your being legally disallowed to marry your partner, and nobody has suggested a constitutional amendment restricting the rights of people who read fantasy paperbacks. Nobody has ever murdered a sexual partner and subsequently given, as the legal defense for said murder, “I found out that he liked Doctor Who.” America is not built on a history of enslaving people because they attended Comic-Con.

I could go on here, but you get the point. Social snottiness is all over; there are jokes about nerds, there are jokes about hipsters (and whole blogs based around goofy pictures or mean blog posts about hipsters), there are jokes about frat-boys and bros and Dave Matthews fans, there are jokes about Goths and metal doodz and everyone else. People judge each other on grounds of taste. That’s life. But — crucially — these are jokes based on choices. Nobody chooses to have a marginalized, oppressed identity. And the historical consequences of having a marginalized, oppressed identity are far more serious than belonging to a subculture that people make jokes about.

(From the comments)

TigerBeatdown.com is my new favourite blog. It is the best. I cannot get enough of funny, right-on feminist writers.

That is all, thanks for reading.

• LENIN’S TOMB: Tower Hamlets: they did not pass – The evidence of UAF placards being hosted on Whitechapel market stalls and in business windows is suggestive of hard work having paid off.  Activists spent weekends giving out thousands of leaflets, holding rallies and meetings, and working hard to consolidate support for this sort of response to the EDL.  One of the major rallies hosted over a thousand people in the East London Mosque just one week after Breivik went on the rampage, and featured Norwegian socialists and trade unionists urging East Enders not to allow fascists and racists to march on Tower Hamlets.  That argument was evidently won among large numbers of people, and it counteracted the pressure to wind down the counter-demonstration and leave it to the police.  This is how racists and fascists are defeated: patient, grassroots work, preparing the ideological terrain, organising coalitions and disorganising the opponents’ strategies as much as possible.
  Tags: activism fascism antifascism edl uaf london towerhamlets protest democracy directaction
• HOPE not hate blog: The guns of The EDL – We are now publishing these photographs of senior EDL members and activists to prove once and for all for any doubters, that the EDL are not just a pressure group with legitimate concerns about radical Islam. They are the flip side of the same coin.
  Stephen Yaxley-Lennon says we are five years away from a Breivik styled massacre here. We believe they are already a terror group in the making.
  Tags: edl racists terrorism farright
• LENIN’S TOMB: The Metropolitan Police and the EDL – If you want to understand why the police are not to be relied upon when dealing with the far right, this story offers part of the answer
  Tags: police racism rightwingbullshit
• Deus Ex: Invisible War – Retrospective | PC Gaming | Gaming Daily – “The sequel to Deus Ex has always had an important use. Find any community of PC gamers and suggest to them that Invisible War was actually pretty good and you are guaranteed a few hours of cheap entertainment. The game is hated by Deus Ex fans, to the point that many will repeatedly announce that no, it definitely doesn’t exist. Unfortunately having finally played through it this month as part of my “ohmygodDeusEx3!” preparation, I find myself in an unfortunate position. You see it turns out that Invisible War is actually pretty good.” Another piece revisiting Invisible War that I pretty much agree with.
  Tags: gaming videogames deusex
• The Last Dream « Electron Dance – “History is an educator but its dark twin is nostalgia, which is history as inertia. It is easy to over-romanticise and talk about the golden days of [insert personal hobbyhorse here].”
  The finale of Joel’s Where We Came From Series – read it all.
  Tags: videogames gaming nostalgia history progress design pioneers
• rejectamentalist manifesto – Enthusing over the delicious taste of strawberries when the government shits on a spoon & tells you it’s jam
  Tags: pr journalism bullshit gaddafi libya
• SchNEWS 786 – 2nd September 2011 – Seeds of More Ruction – The Israeli military has begun supplying settlers with tear gas and stun grenades in anticipation of Palestinian protests. The arming of settlers is part of ‘Operation Summer Seeds’ – the Israeli Defence Force’s (IDF) response to Palestine’s application for UN recognition (see SchNEWS 784), which is expected to go through in September.
  Although the US will veto full membership of the UN, Palestine is expected to gain the title of non-member state. This is unlikely to have much effect on the day-to-day life of a Palestinian, but Israeli authorities are expecting it to act as a trigger for further demonstrations like those seen in May (see SchNEWS 772).
  Tags: israel palestine settlers violence
• SchNEWS 786 – 2nd September 2011 – Leaky Arguments – But with little irony about dancing with the devil, a WikiLeaks tweet declared; “We have already spoken to the [US] State Department and commenced pre-litigation action.” – in a bizarre twist the people he has most pissed off are the only ones even more keen to stop unredacted cables circulating than he is. Strange bedfellows indeed – but merely attempting to deflect pressure by pointing the finger at the Guardian is never going to save his skin, if it needs saving, nor win many new friends.
  Tags: wikileaks julianassange bizarre realpolitik internationalaffairs
• Revealed: Nadine Dorries and her real views on abortion | Liberal Conspiracy – Nadine Dorries herself claims she is pro-choice. But while many of her opponents dismiss the claim, it has been difficult to undermine it without real evidence.
  But I’ve been passed on comments she made in an interview just a few years ago that seriously question the claim she is pro-choice.
  Tags: abortion britain law
• New Statesman – Cameron struggles with the Bullingdon question – “We all do stupid things when we’re young,” says Cameron. Why then “zero tolerance” for the looters?
  Tags: class onelawforthem davidcameron britain riots justice
• Final Destination 5 (2011) – The Last Laugh is On Us « Ruthless Culture – What makes this satire so potent is the fact that it works on two different levels.  Audiences laugh at the characters’ attempts to avoid death because they have seen the previous Final Destination films and know that in these films nobody ever escapes.  However, as in the films, the last laugh lies with death itself for while we laugh at the characters’ attempts to escape, we do exactly the same thing as they do; We work out, we eat right, we go to Church, we play with crystals, we have monkey glands injected into our faces. We do all of these things because we think it will keep us alive but in truth, death is waiting for us and there is no avoiding it.  We squirm and squirm and squirm and yet death is inevitable but despite this fact, we feel entitled to laugh at the characters in Final Destination 5 because we supposedly know what they do not.
  Tags: horror genre satire death humancondition
• WhatWeShouldBeDoing.net: INTERVIEWS: Lou Hanman (Caves) – For a relatively new band, Bristol’s Caves have surely achieved a lot! From Fest appearances to countless Euro tours, and records released on Yo-Yo and Kiss Of Death records, Caves are without a doubt one of the leaders in the current UK scene. I talked to Lou Hanman about the new record “Homeward Bound”, Sexism and a bunch of other stuff and this is what she had to say…
  Tags: bands uk punk interview
• Riots: Sony warehouse raid ‘ was professional heist’ – Telegraph – But evidence has now emerged suggesting that the well-guarded Sony DADC distribution centre was deliberately targeted by a professional gang, in a carefully planned raid, using the riots as a distraction.
  Tags: britain riots fire crime musicindustry
• Let the EDL racists march | Nina Power | Comment is free | The Guardian – Calling for a ban on marching because of cost is incredibly foolhardy – the next time trade unionists march, or students protest, will we see the government deny them the right for “economic reasons”? The debate over banning is better framed in two separate but interlinked ways: in terms of civil liberties (particularly articles 10 and 11 of the European convention on human rights, which protect the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly) and, more importantly, in terms of practical opposition to fascism and racism wherever they emerge.
  The ban on the EDL will not stop the group holding a “static protest” in Tower Hamlets on 3 September. It won’t stop their lies and attempts to intimidate. Those who abhor the EDL and everything they stand for should come out on the streets to oppose them if they can, rather than calling on the government to step in and stop them, a tactic that can only further the government’s evident quest to eliminate public protest in general.
  Tags: protest resistance government britain
• Selma James – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Selma James (born 1930) is a co-author of the women’s movement classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike.
  Tags: writers thinkers activists feminism
• Kill Screen – Profile: Coconut Island – However, in videogames and other creative industries, just as in manufacturing, China remains line-production-oriented. Though economists predict that soon this will no longer be the case, the country’s reputation as “the world’s factory” is not unearned, and it remains the rule for much of the local game development industry. Local developers working for the larger international publishers historically have been focused on outsourcing or smaller projects with limited creative control. In those cases where major creative work is done locally, it is often foreign leads that run the project.
  Tags: china gamesindustry

• Bissell, Braid, and the Use of Words | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling – This is a key passage in a much lengthier discussion that left me with increased respect for Braid and for the other things its creator was trying to say. Blow’s ideas, elicited and then elaborated by Bissell, made more sense to me than Blow in his own words.
  And all at once there crystallized for me what I find problematic about Braid.
  Tags: games writing indiegames art
• Alice Launch Trailer Is Messed Up, Amazing | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – They are not wrong.
  Tags: games trailer video
• New Statesman – Human cost of welfare reform – There used to be a liberal consensus that it was the government’s responsibility to provide employment and ensure that those unable to work were entitled to a minimum standard of living. As the Welfare Reform Bill oozes unchallenged through the Commons, the real scandal is not that the government is lying through its teeth in order to justify its evisceration of the welfare state. The scandal is that no one in Westminster is prepared to make a moral case for welfare provision as the honest heart of social democracy.
  Tags: employment work britain cuts coalition
• LENIN’S TOMB: Class and common sense – The ‘Chavs’ phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a ‘pramface’, there a ‘Croydon facelift’, and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The ‘chav’ is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade’s repeated moral panics about the ‘underclass’: nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on.
  Tags: chavs classconsciousness workingclass underclass bigotry neoliberalism britain
• Punknews.org | David Combs (Spoonboy, Max Levine Ensemble) talks sexism in the punk scene – “In a punk context, I can say with certainty that the scenes I’ve visited that were the most gender inclusive have always been the most exciting and thriving music communities. There’s nothing to be gained for men in maintaining the boy’s club.” Excellent essay on sexism in punk. The comments even show some signs of brane which is pretty unusual for PunkNews.
  Tags: sexism punk music scenes
• The Keepers Of All Games Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – The National Archives, Kew: home to records, documents and other ephemera of cultural importance. It may be a short distance from the grime and bustle of Westminster, where Britain’s future is cut and shaped daily, but to enter its leafy grounds is to press pause on that work. Instead, it offers a chance to reflect upon and study the notable detritus of our past, a national Wikipedia made of bricks and mortar, where history is held and filed in neat, curated rows.
  It’s here that Iain Simons and James Newman, co-founders of the National Videogame Archive project, have called a meeting to discuss their efforts to preserve the digital heritage of the interactive entertainment industry. It’s a poignant choice of venue. For all the great many things preserved at The National Archives, not one is a video game.
  Tags: gaming history documentingthepast
• Egypt: Gene Sharp Taught Us How To Revolt! · Global Voices – “Last February, Sheryl Stolberg of The New York Times wrote an article about the political science professor, Gene Sharp, whose ideas were credited by her as being an inspiration for the Egyptian revolution, as well as many other uprisings in the region.” Western media claiming credit for the Egyptian revolution? Never!
  Tags: media revolution revolutionarytheory funny mockery
• Twitter won’t bring down Ahmadinejad – Mike Madden – Salon.com – The crackdown by Iranian authorities on traditional journalism means Twitter and Facebook updates — at least the ones by people who are actually there — are providing a real service; the more widely the message is spread, the more the world can be outraged by the government’s oppressive reaction to the protests. Still, the Internet isn’t causing a revolution — it’s documenting it. That’s plenty to be proud of, without needing to exaggerate things in the name of solidarity. So keep the Tweets coming. Just don’t forget that the real action — and the real risk — isn’t happening anywhere near a computer.
  Tags: socialmedia socialnetworks revolution activism iran democracy protest
• 5 Reasons Twitter Isn’t Actually Overthrowing Governments | Cracked.com – “During the recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing a comment about how important Twitter or Facebook was to the protesters. By the time a former national security advisor suggested nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize, you probably got the impression that social networking was saving the world. Sadly, the reality is that Twitter was about as important to the revolution as Bill Paxton was to the marines in Aliens. Why?” This whole ‘social media as a revolutionary tool’ thing has always rung false to me, so good to see more writers taking the myth apart…
  Tags: socialnetworks revolution protest activism socialmedia twitter facebook
• LENIN’S TOMB: Not saving the Liberals – Dan Hind makes some astute observations here, on the need to break the coalition before the next election. He argues for a strategy designed to split the Liberals, and in so doing save them from historical oblivion. A few observations, then.
  Tags: liberaldemocrats neoliberalism economics britain politics strategy radicalism
• Poll: everything more popular than Daily Mail | Liberal Conspiracy – When asked whether they regarded various things as “positive or negative aspects of Britain today”, the Daily Mail came out bottom, viewed less positively than “membership of the European Union”, “the TUC”, “ethnic and religious diversity”, “civil partnerships for gay couples” and “the BBC”. The NHS was viewed most positively, then the BBC, then the Royal Family.
  Tags: polls statistics britain
• I live sweat… – “…I needed an alternative to mainstream society – the space to be who i want to be.” Lou Hanman of Caves on strict gender norms and their impact on punk and hardcore. – It was really great to be asked by Andy to contribute to his series on sexism in punk. When he said he’d been trying to think of someone from a band in the UK punk scene, to write something from a UK point of view, it sounded like he couldn’t think of many people.
  This makes me feel sad and reminded me of a question I recently answered for a zine – “What it’s like for a woman in punk – do I feel outnumbered?”
  Tags: caves bristol punk sexism feminism
• ‘Call of Duty’ Targets a Monthly Fee – WSJ.com – “Consumers are used to paying $60 each for videogames that run on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now the publisher behind the industry’s biggest videogame franchise— “Call of Duty”—is about to find out whether it can get them to pay a monthly bill, too.” So, Activision are actually going for this. I am kind of hoping for egg on their faces.
  Tags: videogames callofduty activision exploitation puregreed
• ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS – Viceland Today – Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.
  Tags: metal africa scenes botswana
• Kill Screen – 5-10-15-20: Bryan Lee O’Malley – As you may know, we’ve partnered up with Pitchfork to do a variety of things, big and small. One of those is borrow! The 5-10-15-20 format is something they dreamed up more than two years ago to ask musicians about music that moved them at five-year intervals. We’re doing the same for videogame people. First up—Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, who’s been blessed with the trifecta of comic, film, and game for his cast of pugilistic outcasts.
  Tags: bryanleeomalley scottpilgrim videogames biography

Del.icio.us links for May 9th through May 29th:

• SchNEWS 773 – 27th May 2011 – No Spain, No Gain – We’ve got the Arab Spring – what about a European summer? It’s a week since thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators pitched up in central Madrid (see SchNEWS 772) – and revolution fever is spreading across Europe like nits in a playground. With the Spanish sit-in still going strong – and intending to remain until at least the 29th – street demonstrations have also hit Greece, Georgia, and, er, Bristol. Protests are spreading to Italy, France, Portugal, Austria even German – could it be that last year’s initial protests against austerity measures are maturing, one year on, into a broader demand for political reform?
  Tags: democracy protest recession europe
• I live sweat… – “My gender role, as defined by me, is an equal one. I can do anything a man can and I can’t imagine it any other way.” – Lisa Garelick from Kind of Like Records on women in the independent music industry. – Some people may argue that more women aren’t involved behind the scenes because there aren’t a lot of women into the music or who go to shows. I’d cite the bigger shows (Bouncing Souls, whatever passes as The Misfits these days) as a prime example where I’d look out at a vast crowd and see an even ratio of men to women scattered throughout. A few days later, I’d go to a DIY basement show and see those numbers tip drastically. I’d be one of three girls in the room and I would be so upset. Why was it that the other girls didn’t want to be a part of this? Was it me? Was it them? What was the problem?
  Tags: punk feminism empowerment diy
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor | Cracked.com – Cracked comedy, obv., but also a fair few reasons why being poor isn’t just a case of inadequate bootstrapping.
  Tags: poverty economics classwar richpoordisparity usa
• Kill Screen – From Chalks to Blocks: Minecraft in the Classroom – Joel Levin plays Minecraft. That would be an unremarkable fact, considering that he’s one of about two million people that play the indie sandbox game. But instead of constructing 1:1 replicas of the Starship Enterprise or functioning 16-bit computers, Joel has crafted an entire class curriculum in and around a Minecraft world. Levin documents his radical approach to teaching computer literacy at a private school at The Minecraft Teacher.
  Tags: minecraft education learning children
• LENIN’S TOMB: The Tories and (the ideology of) crime – The Tories, we know, are the party of order. They stand for decent, law-abiding tax-payers, and would like a little less solicitousness toward the criminals if you don’t mind. But not these days – or at least not at this precise moment, for our affairs are highly volatile. The Tories are allowing themselves to be out-flanked to their right by Labour on this issue. How could this be?
  Tags: recession crime liberals racism reactionaries tories
• Counterpunch | MySpace – Glossy Chicago pop-punk.
  Tags: band music
• THE HUMAN PROJECT | MySpace – Leeds punk band with a good sense of fun.
  Tags: none
• RADICUS | MySpace – Awesome Peterborough punk group, could be ones to watch!
  Tags: band music
• YouTube – Fucked Up – “David Comes To Life” – Trailer for Fucked Up’s forthcoming concept album.
  Tags: band music video
• Darko – Sweet throaty UK punk band.
  Tags: band music
• Laughing in the Face of – Birmingham punk on Lockjaw records.
  Tags: band music
• TURN AND RUN | MySpace – Another Peterborough hardcore band.
  Tags: band music
• WE ARE FICTION | MySpace – Peterborough rock band.
  Tags: band music
• WITHOUT FIRE | MySpace – UK pop punk band.
  Tags: band music
• The Spanish Tahrir – There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 2011 has come to mark a turning point: from the web to the street, from conversations around the kitchen table to mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from outrage to hope. Tens of thousands of people, ordinary citizens responding to a call that started and spread on the internet, have taken the streets with a clear and promising demand: they want a real democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people. They have been unequivocal in their denunciation of a political class that, since the beginning of the crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and obeying the dictates of the euphemistically called “markets”.
  Tags: spain protest cuts recession europe resistance directaction occupation
• The Bakersfield Sound | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Country music conjures up an unfortunate set of imagery for many: pick-up trucks, Confederate flags, mullets, and tallboys of Bud Lite for starters. The intelligentsia has historically found the genre easy and fun to ridicule, dismissing it as the soundtrack of ignorance—hillbilly idiocy in musical form. Country can be a daunting field for neophytes to get into because it brings so much cultural baggage with it, most of it negative, and because the homogeneous pabulum you hear on contemporary country radio doesn’t provide much incentive to go beyond the stereotypes or preconceptions.
  Tags: music country history
• War is Over Article | Eurogamer.net – Towards the end of this year, the PlayStation 3 will celebrate its fifth birthday, with the Xbox 360 blowing out six candles on its cake about a week later. By this stage in the lifespans of their predecessors, these consoles would already be well on the road to replacement – five years after the launch of PlayStation 2, Sony was talking openly about the PS3, while five years after the launch of Xbox, Xbox 360 was already on shelves.
  Tags: gaming hardware consoles
• Public sector pay – the myths exposed | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – According to a Policy Exchange report highlighted by the Telegraph, public sector workers are 40% better off than their private sector counterparts, if wages are taken on an hourly basis and pensions are included. This is a longstanding claim on the right, used to justify attacks on public sector pay and pensions. The problem is that neither the numbers, nor the narrative, are on the level.
  Tags: economics rightwingbullshit mythbusting pay employment
• Fucked Up for Spin – Drawing of Fucked Up for Spin magazine… totally awesome.
  Tags: band artwork fuckedup system:filetype:jpg system:media:image
• Punchbag Artists | Resolution Magazine – Now it’s no big surprise that on the internet anyone can be a critic. While professional reviews can be brutal and punishing, down at the anonymous, anarchic end of the scale, criticism can mutate into public humiliation and denouncement of not just a game but also its architects. APB is not an isolated case. Zombie Cow’s Privates is a “game for perverts”. Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV is a “faux 8-bit piece of crap.” 2K Marin’s in-development XCOM is “like wanting a puppy for your birthday but getting dogshit.”
  But what does this do to the developers on the receiving end?
  Tags: angryinternetmen criticism gamesjournalism
• Amateur Dramatics « Electron Dance – The audience of our game theatre, though, is not the same as that of literature and film. They are a vital piece of the theatrical puzzle, the ones who get to play the lead in the drama. The problem is that every player is different. We each have a different twist to our imagination, a different fantasy to fulfil.
  Tags: gaming videogames playeragency immersion
• I live sweat… – “…we fall woefully short in practice.” – Aaron Scott, aka. Attica! Attica!, on punk, sexism, and how men can help. – I am a straight male who loves punk music. By pure chance of my sexuality and gender, I am a person of immense privilege. I am also a member of the demographic that comprises the majority of the punk scene. I’m writing this in the hope that fellow members of our demographic will take a deeper consideration of our role in sexism within the scene. While we supposedly value ideals of inclusiveness and egalitarianism, we fall woefully short in practice. And we, as males who love punk music, can and should take an active part in dismantling sexist norms and coming closer to realizing those ideals.
  Tags: sexism punk maleprivilege
• I live sweat… – “I didn’t want to be the weird muslim kid, I wanted to be the weird punk kid.” Donna Ramone on Islamophobia in punk. – I didn’t want to be the weird muslim kid, I wanted to be the weird punk kid.
  Tags: muslims punk racism
• Screen Machine – “According to a lot of film writers Scott Pilgrim was made for one or all of the following - gamers, comic book fans but, worst of all, for misogynistic (if geekier inclined) males. The misogynistic tag is what troubled me the most because even though I call myself a feminist – I really liked Scott Pilgrim a lot. I loved the pacing, the gags and thought the soundtrack was stellar. So I had another look.” Good review looking back over the accusations of sexism & MPDG-ism in SPvTW.
  Tags: review criticism sexism feminism scottpilgrim
• YouTube – Tropes vs. Women: #1 The Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Good video on the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ cliche.
  Tags: film cinema writing characters cliches feminism
• China Miéville leads radical SF’s invasion of the mainstream – The radicalism inherent in the best science fiction is at the heart of Miéville’s work, and makes it perfect reading for our troubled times
  Tags: chinamieville sf fantasy radicalism
• Apple’s Chinese workers treated ‘inhumanely, like machines’ – An investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers has revealed the shocking human cost of producing the must-have Apple iPhones and iPads that are now ubiquitous in the west.
  Tags: technology capitalism manufacturing offshoring employment
• Were the Anti Iraq War Demonstrations of 2003 Too Good to Be True? by Paul Street | ZSpace – The marches of March 2003 were organized as much by the televised images of the boorish Bush and his loathsome, transparently arch-authoritarian Vice President (Darth Cheney) and Defense Secretary (Donald Rumsfeld)as by any sophisticated, impressive, in-place, and battle-steeled peace movement. And, as I worried at the beginning, it was all too partisan and Democratic, insufficiently able and/or willing to grasp the imperial and militaristic nature of the Democratic Party in connection with the Iraq War and more broadly. It was opposed not to much to criminal militarism as such as to the clumsy and boorish, translucently blatant cowboy imperialism of a Texas Republican president, leaving one to suspect that many off its members would be far less likely to be hitting the streets if the wars they claimed to oppose were being conducted by supposedly kinder and gentler imperialists like Al Gore or John F “Reporting for Duty” Kerry.
  Tags: electoralpolitics reformism war antiwar protest usa democrats liberalism
• Unusual software bug – Wikipedia – Unusual software bugs are a class of software bugs that are considered exceptionally difficult to understand and repair. There are several kinds, mostly named after scientists who discovered counterintuitive things.
  Tags: software testing
• Defend The Right To Protest – Defend the Right to Protest was launched in response to violent police tactics and arrests at the student protests of November and December 2010, with the support of activists, MPs, trade unionists, student groups and others. We campaign against police brutality, kettling and the use of violence against those who have a right to protest. We campaign to defend all those protestors who have been arrested, bailed or charged and are fighting to clear their names.
  Tags: protest activism police britain justice

• The Retired Gambler « Electron Dance – But with the emphasis on reflexes and movement combos, it was the kind of game that made me feel old. I worry about that. It’s common knowledge that games are getting easier with modern design methodology eating away at the hardcore punishment of our formative years. The first Sonic the Hedgehog, for example, is the hardest of the entire Sonic series on the Megadrive (Spinball excepted). I can defeat Half-Life 2 in my sleep, but Half-Life still requires patience and TLC at certain points.
  Tags: videogames aging culturalnorms difficulty
• The Eleventh Colossus | Tap-Repeatedly – This is human nature, I think. The more we love, the more we see the flaws; the more unfair we are when we judge them; the more difficulty we have letting them go. The Eleventh Colossus ate up maybe 30 minutes of a 16-hour game. That’s like three percent. But even now, when long years have buffed away any other complaints I might have had, I remember less that it transported me and more that it couldn’t do it throughout – the Eleventh Colossus had broken the spell.
  Tags: videogames gamedesign frustration eleventhcolossus
• The Second Game « Electron Dance – I loved being a foreigner.
  HarbourMaster’s “This Gaming Life”, essentially. Interesting reading.
  Tags: videogames biography
• Kill Screen – Intern Affairs: I Am the Metacritic – I had no particular problem with the editorial censorship of stupid opinions; that’s sort of why we have editors. Still, this policy had it backwards: An editorial staff ought to catch and refine overly punitive or overly forgiving reviews before the site published them, not after they realized that their piece ran against the trend. Wasn’t that the point of an editorial sensibility? Also, even if we assume the validity of the rationale behind this policy, mean—as any ninth-grader knows—is not always a good measure of a set of numbers.
  Tags: criticism reviewing videogames scores bullshit
• Kill Screen – Too Much Love – I’m an entertainer and I make games. I’ve talked about where games were going for a while, but usually no one cares what I say. I had a realization that this gamification talk was just the tip of this big iceberg that people weren’t aware of. The iceberg is that the nature of game design is really changing. It used to be that game design was about efficiency and effectiveness, but now it’s about what people find pleasurable. You’ve been seeing it bit by bit over the 20th century. Something fundamentally has changed in the nature of society.
  Tags: gamedesign culture extrudedculturalproduct videogames
• Opinion: Why Braid really is pretentious « BeefJack – The Gamer’s Sauce – ‘Pretentious’ is a word that gets wheeled out an awful lot by people who simply don’t want to look into something enough to understand it. You didn’t really get that film you just watched? Call it pretentious. Can’t figure out what the person who wrote the book you’re reading is going on about? Must be because it’s so pretentious. It’s a lazy, thoughtless response that deserves to be made fun of.
  But, at the same time, people use this argument in turn to make it sound as if ‘pretentious’ has no meaning. If anyone calls a piece of art out as full of itself, whether it’s a book, film, game or anything else, the moment they say ‘pretentious’ they’re accused of using words they don’t understand. This is just as lazy, with people dismissing any argument they don’t like the sound of because the person making it summed it up with a label that’s easily abused.
  Tags: pretension rhetoric argument criticism indiegames
• I live sweat… – Superfluous Stronghold: We’re Punk But We Ain’t Perfect – P.S. Eliot’s Katie Crutchfield offers her views on sexism in punk – I don’t think we all need to have identical convictions. It isn’t a cult. But these fundamental differences and gaps make me feel pretty fucking unsafe. It isn’t punk. It isn’t what punk is about. It is both antagonizing and depressing that shining a light on this big flaw in our community warrants the response it gets. We, as punks, as anarchists, as free-thinking, coffee-drinking, Black Flag-loving, well-read, well-articulated, over-stimulated punks, are supposed to be the progressive ones. We’re the people who call out the bigots. We’re the people who embrace the differences in each other. We’re the weirdo loner geeks who endlessly support the other weirdo loner geeks. Gender, race, age, sexual identity and any other trivial or biological property should draw no lines between us. [...] The predominant, mainstream consumer-motivated world at large is a creepy place to be. We should be united in our hostility and we shouldn’t be partitioned by an inability to empathize.
  Tags: punk sexism feminism outsidermusic solidarity
• A (Difficult) Day In The Life Of An MMO Studio | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – We recently catapulted our correspondent Dan Griliopoulos over the ocean to have a nose at upcoming Roman Empire-themed MMO Gods & Heroes; a preview on that itself is due very soon, but first let’s try something a little different. Dan was kindly granted an extraordinarily high level of access to Austin, Texas developer Heatwave Interactive (staff at which worked on some of the earliest and most legendary MMOs) as they worked on the game during its late stages – their meetings, their design and marketing dilemmas, their thoughts on competition, painful decisions about to delay or not to delay… It’s rare insight into the hard work and heart ache inherent in creating an MMO, games of (in)famously sprawling scale and complexity.
  Tags: mmo gamesindustry gamedevelopment
• Valve On Portal 2: Spoiler Interview Part Two | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – you’re allowed to say, “I wanna go try this thing, or do this thing”, or, “Hey I know this guy, let’s do this thing with them.” It’s always encouraged. The Peggle stuff was literally, Eric Tams, who works here, worked on the original Peggle. We’re friends with him, let’s do something more, let’s keep having fun. If we’re having fun doing it, then the community’s probably having fun consuming it, and if they’re having fun they’re going to stick around. It’s kind of simple that way. If we were tight to the bone, starving, and had no money, we’d still try to be doing this stuff, but maybe there’d be somebody looking more closely at it. But there’s still this idea that just doing all these things, and letting people run with things they’re passionate about, in the end will work out.
  Tags: portal valvesoftware gamedesign comedy actors
• Valve On Portal 2: Spoiler Interview Part One | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – RPS: But there’s also this maternal cruelty about her.
  Jay: The passive-aggressive nature of her is definitely the through-line. She’s never going to overtly attack, it’s always these subtle mind games. Which again was super-fun for us when Wheatley was in charge, and trying the same thing. He’s ham-fisted in his approach, “Fatty-fatty-fat-fat.”
  Tags: portal writing comedy valvesoftware characters
• Riot Grrrl | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Although the best riot grrrl records stand on their own, they’re inextricable from the political movement that inspired them, and which they were instrumental in spreading. When Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna opened “Double Dare Ya” by calling for “Revolution girl style now,” she knew there was an audience listening to her.
  Tags: music history riotgrrrl diy punk
• Shiny Media – My bit part in its downfall by Gary Cutlack | The MCV Blog – I was lucky enough to board the Shiny Media gravy train just as it was leaving the station, loaded down with mail bags full of venture capital it got from new backer Brightstation in early 2007. Toot toot! Next stop dotcom millionaire status!
  Tags: websites gamesjournalism writing advertising
• Where are the right-wing defenders of liberties now? | Liberal Conspiracy – Round-up of royal wedding “pre-crime” arrests.
  Tags: police arrests crime injustice
• 5 Shocking Ways You Overestimate Yourself | Cracked.com – Have you ever sat next to the smelly guy? Did you ever wonder why nobody tells him that he smells, or why he can’t smell himself? Doesn’t he notice people getting up and changing seats when he sits down? How can he live his whole life being unaware of a flaw that is readily apparent to a total stranger 10 seconds after they’ve met?<br />
  Well, here’s the thing: According to science, we’re all the smelly guy. Figuratively, that is.
  Tags: funny psychology people
• Blame the Media if AV Fails « Ruthless Culture – Whether in print, media or TV, the British media have done their best to present the AV referendum not as an opportunity for the British public to change the nature of their democracy but as an internecine squabble amongst Britain’s political classes: ‘Oooh… how will Nick Clegg react to David Cameron campaigning against AV?’, ‘Oooh… does the number of big Labour beasts in the No camp suggest that Miliband is failing to win the loyalty of the Blairites?’, ‘Oooh… will Nick Clegg be forced to distance himself from Chris Huhne and if he does so will he alienate the left wing of his party?’ and so on and so forth…
  Tags: av britain politics