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Linkfest: January 29th

Shaun CG — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:20:57 +0000

Del.icio.us links for January 22nd – January 29th:

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

Linkfest: November 28th – December 4th

Shaun CG — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:47:54 +0000

Del.icio.us links for November 28th through December 4th:

SchNEWS – Direct Action Newsheet – Brighton University’s Vice Chancellor must be kicking himself. The university was on lock-down yesterday (Nov30), not out of support for the strike, but to prevent a possible occupation. Unfortunately for him, the students waited ’til the 2nd, when the uni was wide open and vulnerable again. Thirty plus occupiers are now camped out in the very public art gallery space and more are expected as the space gets established. They’re protesting in solidarity with the public sector workers, against the increase in fees and the fact that the VC made noises in opposition to the White Paper to please students and staff – and then signed a public letter to the government in support of fee increases. The uni is also targeted for their lack of transparency regarding links to dodgy private companies.
Tags: brighton university education occupation
The Making Of: Flotilla – Edge Magazine – Brendon Chung knows a lot about failure. The Californian game designer of one-man indie studio Blendo Games has whole hard drives full of his screw-ups. “Honestly, I fail like 90 per cent of the time,” he confesses. “My hard drive has all these aborted foetuses of games that are just bad, broken and not even close to looking done. The other ten per cent of the time you hit something that’s pretty ugly and terrible, but you see some potential there and you file it away, hopefully to bring it back and use it in some fashion in a later project. Overall, though, it’s very discouraging.”
Tags: interview games development indiegames spaceopera
Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news. – Starting almost ten years ago, Jason Yungbluth began a short backup feature in a comics anthology under the title WEAPON BROWN. It takes the tropes and beats of the atypical “post apocalyptic bloodbath”, but filling its cast with clear analogues for the Peanuts gang. The comic has become something of a sleeper hit, gaining more and more attention. I sat down with Jason to ask him how things are going in the industry for him now.
Tags: interview comics satire pastiche postapocalypse
Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber- What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone what shape the forces of resistance to it are likely to take. Some new form of green capitalism? Knowledge Keynesianism? Chinese-style industrial authoritarianism? ‘Progressive’ imperialism?
At moments of transformation, one of the few things one can say for certain is that we don’t really know how much our own actions can affect the outcome, but we would be very foolish to assume that they cannot.
Tags: history debt money finance empire war slavery
BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: DREAM ON- The protest movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is very clear about what it is against – an international capitalism that is cruel, unfair and untenable. But the movement refuses to say what it is for. Much of this refusal comes from a belief that modern capitalist society is extremely skilful at co-opting dissent and that any discussion with the media is the first step in being reabsorbed into ‘the system’.It also has the added benefit of irritating mainstream journalists and commentators.
I want to tell an odd, romantic, but ultimately very sad story that shows where this fear of possession on the left comes from. It is set during last the time that British, European and American students tried to be a vanguard for revolution. It shows how that fear can easily lead to a pessimistic belief that all one’s dreams for a better future are just illusions – and how that pessimism then came to paralyse the left in Britain throughout the eighties and nineties.

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

Linkfest: November 15th – November 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:18:31 +0000

Del.icio.us links for November 15th - November 27th:

Game Logic vs Choice & Consequence | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – If the next five years of big-title gaming development can focus on closing that disparity of what we want to do in a world and what developers can afford to let us do, rather than pushing technology to add complexity to raw assets, we can end up with environments that are more interactive, manipulable, intelligent and alive, rather than just prettier. It’s important to empower us, as players, to do whatever we want in games and, essentially, to make the choices and options worthwhile by having the game react in the most interesting ways it can.
Tags: narrative gameplay storytelling emergentgameplay branchingnarratives criticism
Modern Warfare 3 Isn’t An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK) | Kotaku Australia – So this is what I ask of you, and of all videogame critics and players alike: stop using “freedom” as a metric for a game’s quality or, even worse, for a game’s gameness. Every game is a dance between player and code, but that doesn’t mean the player always gets to lead. A game that leads the player can be just as meaningful, significant, intelligent, stimulating or exhilarating as a game that lets the player do whatever they wish (within the games confines). The player is not the centre of the equation, and neither is the game. It’s the interrelationship between the player and the game that matters most.
Tags: games criticism narrative gameplay storytelling reviewing
Modern Warfare 3 Is ‘An Un-Game With A Core Of Nastiness’ | Kotaku Australia – I’ve just this minute finished the singleplayer campaign for Modern Warfare 3. It leaves a very bitter taste at its climax. But perhaps not the same bitter taste that flavours it throughout. It is an enormously high-achieving action FPS, on a scale like nothing before it, turned to 11. And it’s a bloodthirsty, bombastic and clumsy un-game, with a core of nastiness.
Tags: gaming narratives war pomposity jingoism ideology gameplay
Sexy Videogameland: Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common- Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting — “it’s just like a movie,” was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn’t a negative. We felt awed.The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.
Tags: cutscenes games history narrativedevices
Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Stories in Ulikely Places: SWAT 4 – SWAT 4 is a game that tells engaging stories without the schoolboy reliance on a grand overarching narrative. Who says games should be about a ten hour story and not ten one hour ones? It’s a game that intelligently combines scripted narrative (in the mission briefings and level layouts) with procedural content (in the random enemy positions and emergent scenarios), and presents it all through gameplay that reflects the both.
Tags: games narrative storytelling writing
LENIN’S TOMB: Occupy Tahrir Square – it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers. We needn’t deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play. They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation. But, where they have supported progressive political struggles – for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship – they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations. The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation. In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists. The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.
Tags: egypt protest strike occupation resistance middleeast islam revolutionaryanalysis
Passive Incoherence and How to #Occupy The Moral Highground « Ruthless Culture – The truth is that the Occupy movement stands for all 100 of these answers and none of them. The movement’s political power flows from its capacity to serve as a semantic sponge for the inarticulate rage that most people feel about the current economic and political climate. By refusing to elect leaders and put forward a binding manifesto, the Occupy movement appears incoherent but this incoherent simply strengthens its moral authority. No matter how informed you are and no matter what your precise economic and political views might be, you can look at the Occupy movement and see something for you. They are a raised fist and a raised fist has all the meaning in the world.
Tags: ows occupation resistance protest
LENIN’S TOMB: Egyptian revolution – Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests. Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria. Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, “huge crowds” are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir.
Tags: occupation resistance revolution egypt middleeast imperialism
Tiger Beatdown › What’s Your Slavery Footprint? – The United States Department of Labor has a list of items produced with the use of slave and child labour, but even it admits this list is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t address the use of slave and child labour in the United States, and some nations are overrepresented in the list, while others aren’t present at all. What it does highlight, however, is that slavery touches almost every consumer good imaginable, and that slaves tend to be people most vulnerable to exploitation, like women, indigenous populations, and people living in poverty.
Tags: slavery labour globalisation globalcapital ethics consumerism
Kill Screen – Review: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon – “As far as I can tell, aside from this insect’s uncanny ability to ruin a day spent lounging in the grass, there are two reasons we may find the above scenario appealing. The first, of course, is that ants are communists. Biologist E. O. Wilson was fond of vindicating Karl Marx’s belief that socialism works, by saying, “He just had the wrong species.” Sterilized worker ants are biologically hard-wired to live their lives in total interest of the colony because their existence cannot extend beyond the queen’s ability to reproduce. The lifestyle they promote is anathema to the kind we idealize and are genetically predisposed to.” Only Killscreen could write this in a review of an EDF game. :D
Tags: gaming criticism reviews edf

Linkfest: October 17th – 23rd

Shaun CG — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:39:52 +0000

Del.icio.us links for October 17th - 23rd:

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

Linkfest: October 3rd – October 9th

Shaun CG — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:09:43 +0000

Del.icio.us links for October 3rd - October 9th. I’m still having to add these manually since the new Chrome extension worked for two bookmarks, and now hangs when sending the links to delicious.com. Good work team!

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

Linkfest: September 12th – September 19th

Shaun CG — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:37:11 +0000

Del.icio.us links for September 12th through September 19th:

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.

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

Linkfest: August 8th – August 21st

Shaun CG — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:56:50 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 8th through August 21st:

Infamous 2: Mindless Fun and the Basis of Aesthetic Judgement | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – As my opening reviews suggested, whether a work constitutes mindless or mindful fun is largely a matter of individual perception and predisposition. One can play Infamous 2 and be uplifted by the political allegory just as easily as one can play the game and hate the fact that it manipulates us at every turn. Similarly, there are times (as with the work of Haneke and Eisenstein) when the manipulative character of a work is a source of prestige rather than animosity.
Tags: psychology consumption subjectivity entertainment brain
LENIN’S TOMB: The sadistic state – The criminal justice system is engaged in a demonstration of the state’s ability to control the territory, because that very ability is just what has recently been in doubt. The moral and ideological pedagogy behind this disciplining and consumption of bodies teaches us that the party of order is in control, because its claim to rule hinges considerably on its ability to rule. This is, of course, the hallmark of a very brittle social order.
Tags: britain justice police power authority violence force
LENIN’S TOMB: The competing common senses of the riots – In light of this, the repressive responses have to be seen as ranging from the delusional to the obscene. Among the delusional, bring back national service. A simple point: Greece has national service. You work it out. Equally delusional are the hopes invested in using bigger and better weapons. The policing breakdown here was not military – the gun that apparently killed Mark Duggan was not a toy. Look at it. That gun is a beast. It’s designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven’t got enough weapons or powers is fuelled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality. What happened was a breakdown of leadership and legitimacy. Resorting to more repression as a way of ironing out these problems will both intensify them in the long run and hurt and damage a lot of people along the way
Tags: riots britain police rightwingbullshit
New Statesman – Demonising the young won’t heal our cities – As panicked politicians with little understanding of social disorder fight to reclaim the narrative, it is vital that we resist the easy story of “us”

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

Linkfest: July 11th – July 17th

Shaun CG — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:05:39 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 11th through July 16th:

Video: Woman Welder Sits In Atop Crane to Protest Job Cuts | Labor Notes – Nine thousand college students, labor activists, and human rights advocates from across South Korea began to gather at the center of the port city of Busan July 9. They came to support a woman welder named Kim Jin-suk who has been staging a lone sit-in since January on top of a 115-foot shipyard crane. The demonstration became a 48-hour intermittent clash with riot police, who used clubs and fired tear gas liquid from water cannons to keep Kim’s supporters away.
Tags: protest occupation labourmovement southkorea
SchNEWS 779 – Rolling Out the Unwelcome Mat – The closure of the Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) on Monday (11th), following new legislation denying legal aid for all immigration cases, has left hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers without legal support.
The service had been running for 35 years from London and regional offices, with 300 employees. At the time of the shock closure – which staff discovered via notices on doors when they turned up for work – there were 650 active cases. Claimants are now being told to ask courts for their hearings to be delayed and to find themselves alternative legal representation.
Tags: immigration racism cuts britain
New Statesman – Nadine Dorries, abortion and newspeak on the right – Whether they are discussing cutting public services or obstructing abortion access, the language of “choice” is always employed when confiscating people’s most basic rights. We’re not restricting access to higher education — we’re letting you choose whether you want to pay £8,000 or £18,000 a year!
The left, too, is guilty of equivocating, of parroting the neo-liberal language of “choice” when we really mean to speak of “rights”.
Tags: politics language orthodoxy debate abortion choice rights
Tropicália | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Tropicália, or tropicalismo, as it is sometimes called, is not the rhythmic Carnival music of samba, nor its gentler successor, bossa nova, though it sometimes contains elements of both. It is just one brief offshoot of musica popular Brasileira—MPB—the catchall for the country’s post-bossa pop music. Being from Brazil, the tropicalistas sang in Portuguese. They were psychedelic dabblers, part of a broader art movement that included poetry, spontaneous theater, and pop art. They had political notions that grew out of the worldwide revolution of 1968.
Tags: music history brazil
Moberly–Jourdain incident – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The Moberly–Jourdain incident, or the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924). The women were both from educated backgrounds; Moberly’s father was a teacher and a bishop, and Jourdain’s father was a vicar. During a trip to Versailles, they visited the Petit Trianon, a small chateau in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they allegedly experienced a time slip, and saw Marie Antoinette as well as other people of the same period. After researching the history of the palace, and comparing notes of their experience, they published their work pseudonymously in a book entitled An Adventure, under the names of Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont, in 1911. Their story caused a sensation, and was subject to much ridicule.
Tags: history weird
Computer learns language by playing games – MIT News Office – In 2009, at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), researchers in the lab of Regina Barzilay, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, took the best-paper award for a system that generated scripts for installing a piece of software on a Windows computer by reviewing instructions posted on Microsoft’s help site. At this year’s ACL meeting, Barzilay, her graduate student S. R. K. Branavan and David Silver of University College London applied a similar approach to a more complicated problem: learning to play “Civilization,” a computer game in which the player guides the development of a city into an empire across centuries of human history. When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.
Tags: AI games learning computing
Aesthetic Authenticity and Not Being a Good Cultural Citizen « Ruthless Culture – To say that humans are fond of self-delusion would be something of an understatement. Lacking the sort of all-encompassing social meta-narrative that delivers us a pre-packaged sense of place and identity, many of us choose to define ourselves through what we do. Some of us sing, some of us paint, some of us write and some of us have anonymous sex with multiple partners. We define ourselves not merely by doing these things but through a process of emotional investment whereby how well we are doing as individuals becomes intimately tied to how well we are doing at a particular activity. This process of emotional investment offers us some respite from the postmodern condition but it is also a minefield of self-delusion.
Tags: postmodernity humancondition media engagement self
Amazon’s Tablet Is No Threat To Apple, It’s A Huge Threat To Google | LinkedIn – Last September, we got a tip from a source that Amazon was preparing a tablet that would run Google’s Android operating system. The source was a good one — they had also correctly called Amazon releasing their own Android app store. It took a while, but it looks like they nailed this news as well. Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon plans to release an Android-based tablet by October.
Tags: technology tablets corporatism
7 Awesome Images That Will Make You Mourn The Space Shuttle | Cracked.com – These images bring up an important question: At what point did we forget that the Space Shuttle was, essentially, a program that strapped human beings to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math? How jaded do we have to be to lose collective interest in that?
Tags: photography images space spacetravel
The ‘perfect victim’ theory of rape, and how it’s reported | Liberal Conspiracy – There is a pervasive rape myth that influences a lot of the ways newspapers and mainstream media outlets continue to talk about rape. Feminists call this the myth of the ‘perfect victim’. It is a myth because of course a perfect victim does not exist.
But what this myth does is create a false divide between victims and survivors of rape who the media consider ‘innocent’, and victims and survivors who the media paint as blameworthy, or guilty of ‘causing’ the rape.
Tags: rape sexism sexualassault crime justice
Hideously diverse Britain: His ancestor was a slaver. Now he’s saying sorry – It’s a gesture. Set against the suffering imposed on Prince and millions of others, it couldn’t be otherwise. But it is a statement and it has, according to Nash, prompted fresh discussions about race and privilege in Bermuda and how best to move his country forward. He would rather not be the focal point of it all. He just did what he did. The name worth remembering is Mary Prince.
Tags: history slavery britain bermuda racism
Disabled and Hardcore | Eurogamer.net – Fitzgerald was born in 1979 with arthrogryposis, a rare condition where underdeveloped muscles cause the joints in the arms and legs to become frozen in position. Put simply, Fitzgerald cannot move his arms, hands, feet or legs.
To get around this, Fitzgerald plays games with his face by using a customised controller held to its right-hand side by a stand that screws into his wheelchair. As his H2O team mates set up Fitzgerald’s controller, the referee confirmed to the other team that yes, the guy in the wheelchair would be playing. Sensing an early victory, H2O’s rivals smirked and teased.
Tags: gaming disability accessibility
Game Studies – Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now: On Self-Effacing Games and Unachievements – In this paper, I use a party game that I co-designed, Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now (B.U.T.T.O.N.), as a case study to suggest some alternative possibilities for the design of digitally-mediated play and games. Specifically, I argue that that intentionally “broken” or otherwise incomplete game systems can help nurture a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play. I propose two terms: “unachievements” and “self-effacing games,” which help articulate the specific qualities that distinguish broken games like B.U.T.T.O.N. from more traditional digital games. In addition, I situate these games in terms of Henning Eichberg’s concept of the “impossible game” and Bernie DeKoven’s notion of the “Well-Played game.” In drawing our attention not just to players, but also to the relationships between them, Eichberg and DeKoven offer us provocative clues on what it might mean to design for togetherness.
Tags: gamedesign studies
New Statesman – The Question Time drinking game . . . and a political hangover – You drink again every time a minister blames anything on “the mess Labour left us in”, and if the vanishing credibility of this sound bite as an excuse for imposed austerity elicits boos from the audience, which it usually does, you drink twice. This should leave you nicely battered by the time there’s a break in questions for Dimbleby to say, with all the confident self-mastery of an Englishman attempting to buy condoms in a Croatian chemist’s, “if you’d like to follow us on Twitter, here’s our hashtag”.
Tags: drinking politics britain funny partypoliticaltedium
Kill Screen – All This and Miso Soup – So what does this have to do with collecting and games? Really, Miso Soup is a commentary on Japan’s postwar culture and relationships with the West, a product of some very real history that still has an impact on products today. America’s quiet occupation yielded a postwar policy that exported goods be culturally mute, stripping national identity from products to maximize potential in a global market.
Tags: games collecting japan history culture

Linkfest: May 30th – June 5th

Shaun CG — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 16:03:13 +0000

Del.icio.us links for May 30th through June 5th:

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

Linkfest: March 20th – March 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:32:48 +0000

Del.icio.us links for March 20th through March 27th:

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