• Why Does It Matter That Game Designers Are Evil? – Surely, when engaging with a piece of art, the only thing that really matters is the effect that it has upon you as a thinking individual? Far from sounding the death knell for video games, Rogers’ piece is describing the beginnings of a gaming golden age. An age in which difficulty curves and XP progression are shaped by the contours of our brains, an age in which games achieve the capacity to reward and punish with absolute precision and absolute conviction, an age in which entertainment becomes a branch of neuroscience. If evil game designers means better games then I shall be the first to fall to my knees and praise the Dark Ones for they are truly the source of our deliverance from a world both boringly cruel and cruelly boring. Evil is not the death of games design… it is its logical end point.
  Tags: games gamedesign writing ethics
• a closed mind – the games press has been really excited about this game called a closed world, a game about the experience of being “LGBTQ” and dealing with oppression! of course, christine love, robert yang, stephen lavelle and i have been making games about being queer for YEARS. why does a closed world get the big press? because it’s not challenging. i’m not referring to the game’s difficulty, although you can’t ever lose the game. what i’m talking about is that in a closed world, homophobia is an rpg monster that you defeat using skills like ETHICS and PASSION. it’s not a complex system of interwoven and often subtle oppressions. it’s not the reason most of the trans women i know are on food stamps. it’s a bad guy, and you kill it, and you win.
  Tags: queer gamedesign gaming writing characters laziness
• Interview: How GAMBIT’s A Closed World Tackles Sexuality, Identity – One common criticism of video games — often levied by those most passionate about them — is that the range of experiences they represent is too narrow. These players are tired of games that all seem to tell the story of the archetypal, male “bald space marine, and are looking for more diversity on the frontiers of gender, race and sexual identity.
  Tags: sexuality identity gamedesign queerness
• The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow – The past year has been one of the strangest ever in the life of game designer, lecturer and author Ian Bogost. It started with the launch of the most successful game he’s ever developed, and ended with him bringing it to a strange, cathartic end. That game was Facebook title Cow Clicker, a now-infamous satire against social games. For its creator, though, it’s been more complicated than that. As his friend, I confess to being a little relieved it’s over with. This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how ultimately he decided to learn from it instead of becoming upset.
  Tags: facebook games videogames socialmedia gamedesign satire
• Tiger Beatdown › In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits – That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.
  Tags: corporatism capitalism disastercapitalism pmc security immigration racism
• Surprised the BBC is ignoring #occupywallstreet? You shouldn’t be – To get an idea of just how many people there are currently protesting in New York one could do better than to watch the BBC. Despite the fact that thousands have rallied in recent weeks against what has become known in the popular lexicon as the ‘feral rich’, the Corporation has dedicated little time to this mass protest.
  Tags: bbc media news journalism objectivity selectionbias
• New Statesman – Occupying Wall Street – The ’99 percent’ statistic has become emblematic of the American wing of what is phrasing itself as a global protest movement, taking its inspiration from square occupations in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Great Britain. Another statistic you can see daubed on placards around the Plaza is that the wealthiest 400 Americans have more combined wealth than the poorest 150 million. Later in the day, the United Steelworkers union becomes the latest in a growing list of labour organisations and non-profit groups to throw its support behind Occupy Wall Street, ahead of a united march next Wednesday.
  Tags: usa protest resistance occupation bailouts classwar
• Book Review: Political Discourse and National Identity in Scotland – After the “historic” victory in Scotland for the Scottish National Party (SNP), it was inevitable that the question of Scottish nationalism would re-emerge. Little attention has so far been given to analysing attitudes of nationalist sentiment, making Political Discourse and National Identity in Scotland both timely and necessary, addressing both “elite” and “non-elite” perceptions.
  Tags: scotland nationalism politics surveys statistics research
• Ludwig II… Stripp’d – If the goal of politics is to create happiness on Earth, then it follows that escapism, much like religion, is a bad thing because people who escape the realities of life are not only failing to improve the world, they are tacitly supporting the status quo. Clearly, all that time we spent levelling up in World of Warcraft should have been spent fighting The Man and films involving giant robots hitting each other are nothing more than a narcotic that Capitalism uses to keep us docile and ignorant. For many critics, the purpose of art is to draw the people’s attention to their plight [...]. Never mind that the intricacies of academic theory and cultural discourse are just as much of a distraction from changing the world as giant robots.
  Tags: escapism realism fiction genre manga yaoi romance politics
• Saturday Soapbox: Horrible Bosses – Article – So bosses aren’t on the way out. Sorry about all that: it was just a cheap starting point to build a discussion around. But, as with any game mechanic like traversal, levelling, or even health, it’s worth taking a look at bosses every now and then just to make sure that they’re still fit for purpose. Pinky Roader, after all, deserves nothing less.
  Tags: gaming bosses gamedesign

• PC Gamers Save The World, A Bit | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – “Foldit players leverage human three-dimensional problem-solving skills to interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology. Players collaborate with teammates while competing with other players to obtain the highest-scoring (lowest-energy) models. In proof-of-concept tests, Foldit players—most of whom have little or no background in biochemistry—were able to solve protein structure refinement problems in which backbone rearrangement was necessary to correctly bury hydrophobic residues. Here we report Foldit player successes in real-world modeling problems with more complex deviations from native structures, leading to the solution of a long-standing protein crystal structure problem.” Living in the fucking future.
  Tags: gaming science research problemsolving crowdsourcing
• Keith Stuart: Do game reviewers really understand innovation? | Technology | guardian.co.uk – The ‘better sequel’ mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don’t want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I’m willing to blunder through if I’m going to get an experience I never had before. I felt the same about Killer 7 and Shenmue and the mobile game, Nom – flawed every one of them, but I don’t begrudge the creators a single second of the time I spent toiling with imperfections.
  Tags: games criticism reviewing gamesjournalism
• FightingFantasist: The British OSR Starts Here… – Right then, let’s out with it. Form ranks, King’s Colour to the fore. We don’t recognise much of the American-led OSR. The Brit experience looked something like this…
  Tags: gaming rpgs britain history 1980s
• COD XP: The Bug and the Windscreen Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – While nobody will say how much this all cost, one spokesman admits the two-day event has a budget comparable to a US television advertising campaign. A conservative estimate would put that at $15 million. So this is an event, a game, that is all about establishing hierarchy. Sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windscreen. COD: XP is a 28-acre, $15 million windscreen.
  Tags: gamesindustry activision callofduty hierarchy
• BMJ – A Blot on the Profession – Interesting BMJ article about institutionalised prejudice in the assessing of applications at a medical school.
  Tags: discrimination prejudice institutionalracism medicine study statistics system:filetype:pdf system:media:document
• Optimizing WordPress – Tips for Speed | Three Wise Men – Handy.
  Tags: wordpress web
• Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn’t Work | Economy | AlterNet – We have a choice: Americans can continue to accept large-scale unemployment as “natural” and permanent, even — a truly grotesque development — as a basic feature on a bipartisan road to “recovery” via austerity. Or we can follow the lead of the jobless young in the Arab Spring and of protestors beginning to demonstrate en masse in Europe. Even the newly minted proletarians of Ventura, California, sleeping in their cars, may decide that they have had enough of a political and economic order of things so bankrupt it can find no use for them at any price.
  Tags: history usa unemployment reservearmyoflabor government publicworks protest uprising
• The health reform Bill moves one step closer – Telegraph – It is worthwhile remembering that the Commonwealth Fund report last year placed the NHS top for equity, efficiency, safety, effectiveness and patient satisfaction. It was also cheaper than France, Germany and the US. That is not to say that there is not room for improvement. It seems utterly perverse, however, to open up our system to providers in other countries, such as American and German health-care companies, which, as shown by the Commonwealth Fund report, have a track record of providing a more expensive and inferior services in their own countries.<br />
  The Bill now passes to the House of Lords, where it will be debated. We can only hope that they have the sense and independence of mind to put the interests of the electorate first and put right this tragic wrong that has been done to our health-care system.
  Tags: nhs britain healthcare privatisation coalition toryscum
• How the Murdoch press uses misogyny to attack Julia Gillard – He’s right: News Limited is picking a tacky, misogynistic, and utterly transparent fight with the Prime Minister, and they’re doing it so that the very wealthiest people in the country can stay so. She may not be making the sort of moves that appeal to the left, or being the sort of person who appeals to the right, but her party won the election fair and square. There’s something else going on. I’ll put it bluntly: if Gillard were a man, the media landscape in Australia would be looking vastly different right now.
  Tags: australia politics newsinternational media misogyny
• Debate: GOP Crowd Cheers Dying Uninsured Man, Ben Bernanke Treason Claim | Mother Jones – A round-up of recent Tea Party / GOP scummery.
  Tags: usa rightwingbullshit
• A Legal Defense Fund for Climate Scientists | Mother Jones – A pair of scientists is trying to rally public support—and funding—to help other scientists fend off attacks from climate deniers. They’ve launched a legal defense fund to help individual scientists like Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann deal with the sizable legal fees that have resulted from attempts to gain access to their emails and other correspondence.
  Tags: climatechange capitalism legalfunds science
• Mad Men, and the new crop of retro sexist TV shows – In a show where everyone is a bigot, you end up liking some of the bigots. A smart show will use this against you; I’m of the opinion that Mad Men is a very smart show, luring you in with its beautiful surfaces and pretty people, then making you scream when you see the horror they take for granted. But very few shows have that sort of scalpel-like grace; in fact, this new breed looks to use mainly blunt implements, battering us relentlessly with awfulness toward women and other living things. And if people can watch a show as finely calibrated as Mad Men and come away with the message that it is somehow desirable to act like Roger Sterling, it’s foolish to think that these other shows aren’t attracting a viewership that is more turned on by the awfulness than the “critique.”
  Tags: television criticism retro sexism racism
• Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps) – Charlie’s Diary – My take on horror is that it’s a tone; you can add a tint of horror to any other genre. Horror goes well with SF (“Alien”), with fantasy, with crime, with thriller, with romance, with literary realism, with just about every flavour. It’s the monosodium glutamate of fiction. We add it because it’s a contrast-enhancer.
  Tags: horror genre fiction writing criticism
• Ex-MI5 chief says Tony Blair got it wrong…a lot | Liberal Conspiracy – The Guardian reports today on a speech yesterday by the former MI5 Chief Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller. In earlier lectures she criticised the invasion of Iraq, said the term “war on terror” was unhelpful and said 9/11 was “a crime, not an act of war”. Yesterday she said it was important “to try and reduce terrorism by talking to its advocates” and that many anti-terrorist laws passed by the Labour government were “unnecessary” and “unproductive”.
  Tags: intelligence mi5 waronterror iraq britain foreignpolicy newlabour
• NHS ‘watchdog’ will be a “bloated monster” | Liberal Conspiracy – Monitor – the government’s revamped organisation to regulate competition in the NHS – is set to become ‘a bloated bureaucratic monster’, Unite, the largest union in the country, has warned.
  Unite said that Monitor’s running costs were set to soar from £72 million-a-year to £82 million – with a 600-strong staff being paid twice the national average wage of £26,000.
  Unite said that ministers were creating a bloated, old fashioned bureaucracy which would be responsible for handing over lucrative NHS contracts to the ‘government’s friends’ in the private healthcare sector.
  Tags: nhs privatisation britain corruption
• Book Review: Consuming the Congo – WSJ.com – Those seeking to distill this morass into a less murky essence risk oversimplification. It is true that minerals have played a crucial enabling role in the conflict, making it easier to finance the fighting and at times forming a strong motive for individual actors. But politics, even in the Congo, cannot be reduced to profit maximization. Nor would removing minerals from the equation quell all of the fighting—some groups are fighting for more than money and some have diversified into timber, cannabis and palm oil.
  Tags: resourceconflict conflictminerals congo DRC africa analysis
• Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
  Tags: identity goodness morality ethics
• Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
  Tags: identity goodness morality ethics

• 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

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

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

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

• The Presence of the Past in Fallout 3 | Play The Past – Fallout 3 offers much to swoon over. In hindsight though, the most memorable moments from my game play are not slow-motion replays of exploding super mutant heads. Most of the in-game moments that have stuck with me involve interactions with, Apple II-ish green-screened in-game terminals. Computers that have apparently been running since before the nuclear holocaust.
  Tags: gaming history exploration fiction writing
• Out with the old politics | Laurie Penny – What we are seeing here is no less than a fundamental reimagining of the British left: an organic reworking which rejects the old deferential structures of union-led action and interminable infighting among indistinguishable splinter parties for something far more inclusive and fast-moving. These new groups are principled and theoretically well-versed, but have no truck with the narcissism of small differences that used to corrupt even the most well-meaning of leftwing movements.
  Tags: britain politics leftwing students activism resistance
• Have I got a new host for you? – Have I Got News For You gets a prime slot in the Christmas Eve TV schedule tonight. So what is the secret of its continuing success?
  Tags: television entertainment currentaffairs politics britain
• Johann Hari: The under-appreciated heroes of 2010 – Who did we under-appreciate in 2010? In the endless whirr of 24/7 corporate news, the people who actually make a difference are often trampled in the stampede to the next forgettable news-nugget like Lady Gaga’s meat-dress. So in the final moments of this year, let’s look at a few people who deserved more of our attention.
  Tags: heroism 2010 whistleblowers politicians activism protest fightingback inspirational
• Knockoff Toy Fails | Fork Party – Why does Safari Spider-Man have such a tiny head?
  Tags: funny copyright toys failure
• Rights, not righteousness – Because women’s labour is central to the projects of globalised capital, and control of women’s bodies and identities is central to those of political fundamentalism, it is essential for a 21st-century left to take the needs of women as its own. The left must understand that women’s issues are the crux in this period and place these issues at the strategic centre.
  And what would a feminist left look like?
  Tags: leftwing feminism usa manifestoes ideology
• The 20-Minute Hotel Room Workout | Nerd Fitness – Quick workout programme.
  Tags: exercise fitness workout
• New Statesman – How Twitter changed the face of dissent – December 2010 will surely be remembered as the month when the global ruling class lost its monopoly over information.
  Tags: socialmedia socialnetworks information web internet protest civildisobedience
• 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam – A conservative commentator recently made headlines by claiming 10 percent of all of the world’s Muslims are terrorists. An amazing claim, considering that equals 150 million terrorists and if each were to pull off an attack killing just 40 people, they could exterminate all non-Muslim life on earth.
  Either they’re not all that dedicated to terrorism, or the claim is utter insanity.
  Well, if there’s one thing everyone thinks of when they hear “Cracked.com” it’s “friend of Islam.” Which is why we feel compelled to clarify a few misconceptions for our readers. Also, there is no way this article will ever come back to haunt us in any way.
  Tags: islam islamophobia racism faith secularism

• 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

(Apparently I haven’t had time to really read anything that interesting this week… bummer.)

• DirectDraw Hack – DirectDraw fix for Win95 era games on Windows 7.
  Tags: gaming patches hacks
• Virginia On Duty on MySpace Music – Cool Malaysian screamo band from Kuala Lumpur.
  Tags: band music
• ‘Keyboard Bashing’ – Platforming on the PC: A Brief History – Quite enjoyed this column about the history of platforming games on the PC – my sister and I played a lot of Duke Nukem 1990 and Crystal Caves back in the day.
  Tags: pcgames gaming history
• Submissions to See Sharp Press – Publisher starting an anarchist/atheist/rationalist SF imprint.
  Tags: writing publishing fiction sf anarchism
• The Truth About The Epic Beard Man Viral Video – “Back in February, a fight took place on a public bus in Oakland. A week later, four million people had watched the video on YouTube. “AC Transit Bust Fight I Am a Motherfucker” featured all the key ingredients for a video to go viral: colorful characters, a silly catchphrase, and most importantly, someone getting badly injured.” The Internet is fucking retarded.
  Tags: internet memes stupidity racism

• PUNKADIDDLE: Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time 9: Winter’s Heart (2000) – To step briskly ab sublimi ad ridiculus, Jordan’s career manifests something similar. Insofar as Heroic Fantasy is a fundamentally narrative artform, to which readers go in order to experience the pleasure of following the movement of characters through time, Jordan says: no. Wotix is the closest he has yet come to a book that disperses that force of narrative momentum—that great strength of the novel as a mode—into a great swarm of indistinguishable coexistent characters and non-progressions. If the traditional novel takes the shape of a quest, a linearly horizontal progression through narrative time, Wotix explodes that linearity in a bewildering near-dimensionless knot or tangle of non-progression. (I <3 sarcasm.)
  Tags: writing fiction fantasy robertjordan criticism
• Death to the spoiler police – I am a great fan of the pleasures of surprise. When I discuss or review new films and books, I’m cautious not to disclose key plot twists. But as I find myself in the thick of finale season and drowning in a sea of springtime blockbusters, it seems I can’t have a decent water cooler conversation without feeling like I’m tap dancing through a minefield of, “Wait, wait, don’t tell me!” So let’s get a few things straight: Starting with the fact that once a work enters the pop culture vernacular, it is not society’s responsibility to provide you with earmuffs until you finally get around to experiencing it.
  Tags: spoilers reviews criticism popculture
• Bastad! Rats! on MySpace Music – Fun gruff melodic shouty punx band!
  Tags: none
• Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed – ur minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them.
  Tags: brain information lifehacks psychology
• This ‘brave’ coalition is more like a cowardly cabal | spiked – The coalition between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is not a bold leap forward into a ‘brave new world’ for politics. It represents a cowardly retreat from political engagement and debate by isolated elitist cliques desperate to cling together for security. [...] However, most critics of the coalition are also on the wrong track. Contrary to claims from the Labour left, it is not a Thatcherite Tory regime hiding behind a Liberal mask. And contrary to the claims from right-wing Tory critics, the deal does not mean the government has been hijacked by leftie Lib Dems. Instead, this unprecedented coalition confirms the end of British party politics as we have known it, the final abandonment of any pretence that the old ideas of left and right still have any meaning in parliament or beyond. It can be seen, not so much as a ‘betrayal’ on either side, as a barefaced admission that so far as the political elites are concerned there is no principle left to betray.
  Tags: coalition electoralpolitics neoliberalism liberaldemocrats conservativeparty
• A Piece of Internet History – “On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.” Usenet <3
  Tags: history internet communication usenet technology
• Defend the Republic! Ban the burqa! – As Muslim women become liberated, they take off their burqas. A programme for the liberation of Muslim women – or immigrants in general – would be a fine thing, and yet this would involve changing their conditions of life and aiding their full participation in Belgian or French society. To ban the burqa is to take on the question of marginalisation at the most superficial level; it is to attack the symbol, to tear off the niqabs and to believe that this is liberation.
  Tags: islam feminism liberalism politics burqa
• Mocking Muhammad: a shallow Enlightenment – Muhammad-baiting is a shallow, theatrical performance of Enlightenment values. It is a simple (in both meanings of that word) and shortcut way of demonstrating that you are for Freedom and Truth at a time when those values actually lie in tatters in Western society and few seem to know what they really mean or even whether they’re worth defending. For those who find the thought of really standing up to cultural relativism and anti-Enlightenment backwardness too terrifying a prospect, drawing Muhammad has become a quick-and-easy way of demonstrating that you’re a secular, liberal kinda guy.
  Tags: islam liberalism enlightenment racism clashofcivilizations
• The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment – Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
  Tags: usa israel palestine judaism politics religion culture occupation liberalism