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Linkfest: February 2nd – February 4th

Shaun CG — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:23:41 +0000

Del.icio.us links for January 30th through February 5th:

Tiger Beatdown › Getting People With Disabilities Out of Sheltered Workshops and Into the Community- Not only are workers trapped in positions with limited opportunity for advancement, but they’re also forced into poverty. This is a very different narrative than the one presented by supporters of sheltered workshops, who seem to think they provide workers with ‘independence’ and ‘self-confidence.’Furthermore, such environments are also ripe for abuse. A particularly vile case was uncovered in 2010, when intellectually disabled workers at a meatpacking plant were discovered living in dangerous ‘employee housing,’ working excessively long hours and earning approximately $0.41 an hour courtesy of the contracting agency that oversaw their employment. Many disabled workers in such environments are not aware of their rights, aren’t sure about how to report abuses, or may not understand how to identify and discuss abuse. Employers can keep disabled workers in a state of fear, ensuring that unsafe, dangerous, and hostile conditions are allowed to persist for years. Not all sheltered workshops are like this, of course, but the system is structured in a way that makes it easy for them to become so.
Tags: usa disability employment human rights abuses
Tiger Beatdown › Those who die to keep us safe: European Union’s Frontex and the administration of immigrants- Unnamed. Alone and in conditions that go beyond those most Europeans reserve for their house pets. I searched frantically for her name. I believe in the politics of names, of naming, of subjects, of people who have faces and feelings, lives and dreams. I thought of the dreams of this woman who traveled half the world to die of a preventable disease in the “land of civilization”. Samba M. That’s all I could find. A final act of dehumanization, her family name reduced to just an initial, stripped of her singularity and her personhood. She traveled following what I can assume to be dreams of a better future only to become an unnamed body in a Spanish detention center.And then I went down the rabbit hole of the European Union’s policies on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. This is not the first time it happens. Last year I wrote quite extensively about the corporate profits behind the detention of undocumented immigrants. This time, however, I was interested in the policies and enforcement that lead to the abuses. People die. We forget. More often than not, we are not even aware of these deaths. Each of these immigrants, a person, a human being killed by State policies and the arm that executes them. I desperately wanted to understand why.
Tags: immigration europe EU migrants personal political human rights abuses state murder
TAFT 2012 | Welcome To My World – Science fiction doesn’t often do politics. There’s no shortage of sf writers willing to explore ideology or, more frequently, shove their personal ideology down a reader’s throat in the crudest way imaginable, but engagement with the real way that societies make policy decisions is not often the focus of interest[i]. However, Jason Heller’s debut novel, Taft 2012, is a sf&f book with a politician on the cover and a blurb on the back that makes clear that the story is concerned with an American presidential election campaign.
Tags: usa history sciencefiction politics electoralpolitics bi-partisanship analysis criticism
Scientists to Breach Buried Antarctic Lake, Untouched for Millions of Years | 80beats | Discover Magazine – After two decades of drilling through miles of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists are about to breach an underground lake that has not been exposed to the surface in more than 20 million years. Lake Vostok, as the body of water is called, is part of a chain of more than 200 lakes hidden beneath the ice, some of which were formed when Australia and Antarctica were still connected. Vostok will be the first one of all to be opened when the drill hits water next week.
Tags: science exploration drilling discovery antarctica russia
S T O R M S – More awesome aggressive, noisy modern hardcore.
Tags: band music
Anonymous Expose Nazi Third Position ‘Bridging Tactic’ with Ron Paul – International Business Times – The nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P) pursued a “bridging tactic” with the Ron Paul Revolution movement that support the Republican candidate for the White House, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.
Tags: usa politics libertarianism neonazis rightwing anonymous
No Coast – Intense noisy hardcore.
Tags: band music
BSFA Review – Vector #269 « Everything Is Nice – In the last issue, I suggested that there was an increasing Transatlantic divide within science fiction. Since then I’ve read two debut SF novels which have further fuelled this belief. Both are published by Night Shade Books in the US but have no UK publisher and, although they are only a mouse click away from the British reader, this at least partially removes them from the discourse. For example, they won’t turn up on the BSFA or Arthur C Clarke Award shortlists because they can’t.
Tags: intersectionality genre sf fantasy literature novels
Kill Screen – Attack of the Clone Attackers- There is a dark moon rising in the world of games and it goes by one name: CLONES.The rise of social and mobile platforms has lowered the barriers of entry to game development over the last few years, but it’s also been accompanied by the march of the walking dead. Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit screamed “CHEATER” at social-games giant Zynga for allegedly creating a copy called Dream Heights. (Another apparent clone called Small Street has already emerged as well.) Then there is the fleet of alleged Minecraft clones: Cube World, CraftWorld, Minebuilder, Minecrafted, and so on. And just this week, cloning turned to lawsuits as Spry Fox, maker of Triple Town, filed a copyright infringement suit against 6waves Lolapps for its alleged misappropriation Yeti Town.
Be warned. Copycats live among us.
Tags: gaming business practices clones gamesindustry personality
LENIN’S TOMB: Gangs of London – Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: “You might have 100 people in your gang – we have 32,000 people in our gang. It’s called the Metropolitan Police.”
Tags: london police gangs britain violence crime corruption

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: September 4th – September 11th

Shaun CG — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:04:31 +0000

Del.icio.us links for September 4th through September 11th:

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

Linkfest: August 30th – September 4th

Shaun CG — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 14:16:54 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 30th through September 4th:

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

Linkfest: August 21st – August 28th

Shaun CG — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:55:28 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 21st through August 28th:

LENIN’S TOMB: Racist vengeance in Libya – There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that “African” mercenaries acted as Qadhafi’s fifth column.
Tags: libya racism revolution rebellion imperialism
LENIN’S TOMB: A couple of recent police killings – A lot of people showed some very nasty streaks during the UK riots. Social media was groaning with almost Streicherite hate-mongering and calls for violent repression that a Ustashe would think twice about. Bring in the army! Water cannons! Plastic bullets! Live bullets! Shoot them all! Massacre them! Massacre them! And now that’s all over and the state has regained control, and the explicit bloodthirst has receded back into its usual subterranean psychic flow, there’s no need to do anything rash. The police will simply take whatever new repressive technologies are handed to them, add them to the repertoire and continue to maim and consume bodies, perhaps at a slightly higher rate. The intensified social antagonisms will be resolved with the carefully scripted, bureaucratic application of violence. A few hundred deaths, a few thousands injuries, a few bad headlines, a little more fear and resentment, more CCTV, and the retooling of the state for the age of austerity is complete.
Tags: britain police power violence authority
New Statesman – The anti-choice minority are being allowed to dictate policy – The battle for abortion rights in Britain has begun in earnest. This week, the small, vocal, venal group of Christian conservative lobbyists working in Westminster to roll back women’s right to reproductive choice has won a victory. The Department of Health has confirmed that abortion clinics will no longer be allowed to offer counselling to women presenting with crisis pregnancies, who may instead have to go to biased religious counsellors if they wish to receive advice and information on abortion. This has been done without any debate, circumventing the parliamentary process ahead of next week’s discussions on this and other anti-choice amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill.
Tags: abortion britain religiouszealots
SchNEWS 785 – 26th August 2011 – Atos Shrugged – This is the third website run by disabled activists to have been forced offline after heavy legal threats from Atos, without the company ever having to have their supposed evidence tested in court (or held up to ridicule more like). Some of the things the sensitive company has found unbearble in the past include subverted logos, the website name ‘AtosRegisterofShame’ and the phrase ‘Atos Kills’.
The only thing to do with a bully is overwhelm them with sheer numbers. The company has gone through an extensive – and no doubt expensive – corporate rebranding; online activists have been responding by suggesting a more honest corporate identity
Tags: atos corporatescum disability benefits privatisation
Nothing To Lose « Electron Dance – I characterise each computer gaming decade in the following way:

1970s, Genesis – The first computer game businesses appear with Atari dominating

1980s, Democratisation – Home computers enable ordinary computer users to make their own games

1990s, Corporatisation – Profitable games require the polish and resources that only big business can afford

2000s, Revolution – Game development becomes cheaper and games break out of narrow genres in a big way
Tags: gaming history gamesindustry
Hark! A Vagrant’s Kate Beaton on History, Comics, and Crowded Elevators | The Hairpin – Kate Beaton is the artist and mastermind behind the web comic, Hark! A Vagrant. In it, she affectionately satirizes iconic figures from Queen Elizabeth to those wacky Fitzgeralds, winning her a spot in the hearts of history and lit nerds (and everyone) everywhere. Her second book, which will feature classic strips as well as new material, will be released by Drawn and Quarterly this fall. We caught up with Kate to ask her the tough questions.
Tags: katebeaton webcomics art interview
Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky | The Hairpin – Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky
Tags: books funny
Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary – (Actually, there are several reasons I’m not on Google Plus, nor on LinkedIn or Twitter or a bunch of other social networks, starting with “attractive nuisance” and moving on through “waste of time” and “I dislike the amount of spam you’re sending me” and ending in “thank you but I don’t want you to monetize my personal information”: but this is the stuff specific to Google Plus …)
Tags: socialnetworks design realworlduse web2.0 google
LENIN’S TOMB: No tears for Qadhafi; no cheers for NATO – I would strongly caution against getting carried away with the prospect of permanent revolution here. I think the US and its allies will very quickly stabilise this situation. There will be no analogue to ‘de-Baathification’. The old state structures will be preserved and adapted, and the new government will enjoy considerable legitimacy provided it delivers on a basic menu of elections and political rights. Moreover, the parties that win those elections will likely be the more pro-capitalist elements allied to the ruling class factions in the leadership of the transitional council. The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime.
Tags: libya proxywars middleeast africa
Gamasutra – Features – Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics – Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation. We need to stop looking for answers, whether those answers would come from a technical innovation whose arrival only renews obsession with the next breakthrough, or from the final exploitation of the true nature of our medium by means of a historical discovery so obvious that it will become indisputable. The answers lie not in the past or the future, but in the present, which is all we will ever get in any case.
Tags: gamedesign historicalaberrance
Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds | Liberal Conspiracy – Each year, approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested and prosecuted in military courts, the majority on charges of throwing stones. These courts can and do imprison children as young as 12, even though Israeli civilian law prohibits the imprisoning of a child under 14 years of age.
According to B’Tselem’s latest report, 60 per cent of the children jailed for stone throwing between 2005 and 2010 were aged 14 or under. Prison terms range from a few days to over a year. One 14-year-old boy was sentenced to 20 months, while nearly a third of minors aged 14-15 are locked up for four months or more.
Tags: israel humanrights children youth
Analyst Breaks Satire Barrier, Become Parody | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Pachter also attacked the idea of unions within game development, saying that people who earn a lot of money don’t need any protection, apparently because money provides them with a cloak of impenetrable entitlement: “I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair labor practices. Sweatshops should have unions but games studios, which tend to pay people a lot of money, shouldn’t. I just don’t think people who make over $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection cause they might have to work overtime.”
Tags: employment unions gamesindustry bullshit
What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then? | Liberal Conspiracy – I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.
Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.
That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?
Tags: rightwingbullshit farright islamophobia racism terrorism britain
Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement | Liberal Conspiracy – Islamic ideology had questions to answer after 7/7 and the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now.
The Anders Breivik of this world do not emerge from nowhere, just as the English Defence Leagues of this world do not emerge from nowhere. They are fostered by an ideology legitimised by screaming tabloid headlines and the fear-mongering of politicians who really should know better.
And unfortunately whilst Breivik’s actions were the actions of a nutter, he is not the only nutter out there.
Tags: farright rightwingbullshit britain norway terrorism
Deborah Cohen: Amy Winehouse’s battle with addiction « BMJ – Her celebrity status meant every painful twist in her chaotic lifestyle was played out in lurid detail in the press— blood soaked ballet pumps, arms razed with scratches, slumped in a corner at parties. Hardly glorification.
I’d been to several festivals where she’d played—or tried to. Incoherent and stumbling, close-ups on large screens beamed out a small pale girl whose wrinkled skin belied her age.
People turned, tutted, walked away. Some jeered and booed. Others stood and watched wide-eyed in horror. (Some wide-eyed from ingesting a similar cocktail of class As and booze—their drug consumption not having turned bad.) You have to question the wisdom of thrusting such a vulnerable person onto a stage—trial by rather hypocritical festival going crowd. Sympathy, one the whole, was notable by its absence.
Tags: addiction drugs death britain popculture popstars
Punknews.org | Hot Water Music: “Up To Nothing” – New HWM song. Mighty fine.
Tags: band music
Journalism; when is it justified for a writer to work for free? | Funambulism – The Controversial Bit: yesterday morning, I posted on Twitter the following: Hypothesis; people who write for free are using their secure financial situation as an unfair advantage. Any antitheses?
Tags: journalism writing freelancing gamesjournalism
искра/iskra: The Big Issue – So it seems David Cameron is to edit the next edition of the Big Issue.

This should come as a surprise to none. The Big Issue is perhaps one of the most foul and conservative institutions working in homelessness in the UK. Its liberarian fuckwittery is summed up exactly in its tagline, “Working Not Begging”.
Tags: homelessness britain libertarianism bigissue

Linkfest: July 4th – July 10th

Shaun CG — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:22:32 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 4th through July 10th:

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

Linkfest: May 1st – May 8th

Shaun CG — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:32:06 +0000

Del.icio.us links for May 5th through May 6th:

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

Well, here’s the thing: According to science, we’re all the smelly guy. Figuratively, that is.
Tags: funny psychology people
Blame the Media if AV Fails « Ruthless Culture – Whether in print, media or TV, the British media have done their best to present the AV referendum not as an opportunity for the British public to change the nature of their democracy but as an internecine squabble amongst Britain’s political classes: ‘Oooh… how will Nick Clegg react to David Cameron campaigning against AV?’, ‘Oooh… does the number of big Labour beasts in the No camp suggest that Miliband is failing to win the loyalty of the Blairites?’, ‘Oooh… will Nick Clegg be forced to distance himself from Chris Huhne and if he does so will he alienate the left wing of his party?’ and so on and so forth…
Tags: av britain politics

Linkfest: April 18th – April 24th

Shaun CG — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 08:00:10 +0000

Del.icio.us links for April 20th through April 22nd:

A co-ordinated strike is the next step | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – “Imagine,” said PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, “what a difference it would make if we didn’t only march together but took strike action together.” The cheer that resounded from the crowd in Hyde Park spoke for itself. This was 26 March, the day that half a million workers from across Britain turned out for the most significant manifestation of trade union strength in decades – although you may remember it as the day when some windows were broken.
Tags: tradeunions strike britain
LENIN’S TOMB: The English ideology III: the ‘white working class’ – Authenticity merely consists in ‘being from here’, not merely being British and white, but being of this particular small community. Try leafleting in a BNP target area and one of the challenges that fascist sympathisers are likely to throw at you (assuming they aren’t numerous enough to kick your head in) is that you’re not from the area. Respectability consists of two intersecting aspects: employment, in which one can be said to be contributing something to the pot deserving of entitlement to services and funding; and conformity to certain social mores, in which one can be said to be integrated. The fascists and their supporters view the poorest of the working class with utter horror and disdain, as being almost as bad as immigrants.
Tags: bnp edl whiteworkingclass class analysis britain racism classism
New Statesman – The battle of Stokes Croft – Across the country a growing wave of squatted communities and occupied social centres is facing eviction and persecution by local authorities. Last night it was Stokes Croft’s turn. “Ten years ago you probably wouldn’t have wanted to walk through this area at night,” said local student Sam Barnard, 21, who spoke to me over the phone from the middle of the riots. “But recently community projects like ‘the Peoples’ Republic of Stokes Croft’ have been helping to develop the area. Buildings have been revamped and pubs and shops are encouraged and nurtured.”
Tags: bristol britain police protest riot
New Statesman – Put vendetta aside and vote Yes to AV – The Alternative Vote feels like a compromise, and it is. It’s easy to feel torn between the longing for a more honest politics and the desire for revenge. There is time, however, to express such conflicts when we have a voting system that honours real choice. If we ever get second preferences, I’ll happily vote for bile, spleen and spite – but my first preference is for a clear and heartfelt challenge to parliamentary privilege. That’s why I’m voting Yes.
Tags: av voting democracy
Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Why Game Endings Suck – Ultimately, though, I think there’s a key problem with the way we’re looking at the ending: we’re looking at it from a gameplay perspective, not a narrative one.
Tags: gamedesign narrativedevices
Kill Screen – Intern Affairs: Killing In the Name Of – I started killing at age five. My first victim was a waddling, bug-eyed mushroom, minding his own business on a little stone street on a nice clear day. I stamped him to death. Then I laughed. Thus began a career in bloodletting, a full 21 years of remorseless murder, which has spanned history as well as prehistory, crossed species, bridged dimensions, and gone entirely unpunished. I have shot, stabbed, sawed, strangled, burned, impaled, disemboweled, decapitated, defenestrated. I have munched Cheetos while doing so, chatted on the phone, showed my friends, showed my parents. In fact, I just killed somebody yesterday. I think he was a blood mage, but I could be wrong. At my age, they tend to run together.
Tags: violence videogames gamedesign denial
LET’S TALK ABOUT TEENAGE GIRLS & TUMBLR | MetalSucks – While Facebook and Bandcamp are great tools for streaming your music and communicating with your fans, I think Tumblr is the most interesting social media platform right now. It’s the closest thing we have to a magical window into the minds of the consumers who drive the music industry (teenage girls), but I haven’t really seen many bands/labels take full advantage of it.
Tags: tumblr teens socialmedia marketing interesting
The Escapist : Who Cares About Mario? – it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about Nintendo nostalgically – as if it hasn’t been relevant to anyone since the last time you played Super Mario Bros. 3, or Ninja Gaiden, or GoldenEye 007, or whatever your particular point of reference is. In reality, of course, young people continue to have their formative videogame experiences with Nintendo.
Tags: nintendo youth children gaming gamesindustry
The 6 Weirdest Dangers of Space Travel | Cracked.com – When mankind finally makes the big leap from Earth to space, it’s probably not going to be the time-warping black holes or mouth-raping aliens that do him in. In fact, tomorrow’s astronauts will be on the lookout for dangers that are laughably mundane. For every one dude who gets awesomely exploded by lasers or asteroids, hundreds will die of …
Tags: spacetravel interesting

Linkfest: February 20th – February 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 14:24:10 +0000

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

With unpaid overtime, we’re giving our employers £29bn worth of free labour | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – You’re being exploited in more ways than you know. The TUC reports, not for the first time and surely not for the last, on a form of exploitation that rarely gets attention in the media. Workers are contributing £29bn worth of free labour to British employers every year simply by working unpaid overtime. This surplus is being squeezed out of workers through market discipline – the threat of unemployment or reduced prospects.
Tags: work employment exploitation economics
Wisconsin police join up with anti-Walker protesters – Wisconsin – Salon.com – The Wisconsin police have entered the fray at the State Capitol building in Madison — and in dramatic fashion. More than a hundred police officers entered the Capitol today and joined up with the hundreds of protesters who have waged demonstrations in the building for a week and a half.
Tags: police protest usa
On Magazines and Conversations « Ruthless Culture – In an example of what can only be called postmodern irony, one of the recurring themes of the discussions I have over Twitter is the near-impossibility of online discussion. Sure enough, the internet is filled with bloggers, reviewers, commentators and critics all furiously opining on one issue or another but conversation implies give-and-take or call-and-response whereas most blog posts tend to be lengthy monologues bellowed into a storm of utter indifference. We write about the arts but we seldom actually converse, ‘the conversation’ is not something that people have, it is an abstract entity that exists half-formed between dozens of blog posts, reviews and articles. Like the world, it is everywhere and yet impossible to locate.
As a result, I thought I would make a few announcements and post a few links that have recently helped my thinking about online discussion.
Tags: criticism blogging reviews dialogue internet
Vang Pao obituary | World news | The Guardian – Reality soon dispersed that dreamworld. Vang Pao later admitted that his Hmong soldiers suffered appalling losses fighting around the Plain of Jars, in Xieng Khouang province. He put the figure at 17,000 dead by 1968. But his CIA controllers urged him to keep on fighting. US sources, including the historian Alfred McCoy, have noted that younger and younger fighters were forcibly enrolled. By 1968, 30% of the new recruits were only 14 years old.
Tags: laos usa vietnamwar secretwar history childsoldiers
It’s the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones – Eight charts that explain everything that’s wrong with America.
Tags: usa economics classwar
American predators in Pakistan – Like everyone else I knew, I’d heard the stories about large numbers of armed Americans in Lahore, staying at such-and-such hotels or working out at such-and-such gyms. Maybe I became more sensitive to their presence after the incident at my house, but suddenly I began to see them all around town. To be precise, I didn’t know if the men I was seeing were armed. But they looked like Americans, and they didn’t look like rock guitarists or maths teachers or irrigation specialists or heart surgeons. They looked, to my unschooled eye, like what I’d expect trained killers to look like.
Tags: pakistan cia statemurder
Cruel. Vainglorious. Steeped in blood. And now, surely, after more than four decades of terror and oppression, on his way out? – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent – So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.
Tags: libya middleeast imperialism dictators revolution
Part 10: 1999: By the time we got to Woodstock 99 … | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? | The A.V. Club – “In late July 1999, I found myself in the midst of a temporary civilization, a new land with its own laws and mores. It was formed by pilgrims seeking refuge from an outside world that couldn’t comprehend them. These people had traveled hundreds of miles to arrive at this place. For them, months of eager anticipation had finally culminated. It was my job to make sense of it all for curious onlookers, and it wasn’t going to be easy. I was now an outsider among outsiders.” The final part in this superb series.
Tags: music history festivals
LENIN’S TOMB: A regime in mortal freefall – These people, the caretakers, intellectuals, politicos and lackeys of empire, have spent more than two decades telling us that they were outraged by every drop of blood spilt by dictatorships, that they were if anything overly eager in their solicitations for democracy and human rights, messianic to a fault. This never had a moment’s plausibility, but it has never looked as vile and sinister as it does now, amid a genuinely heroic revolutionary democratic struggle.
Tags: middleeast libya imperialism usa uk
What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator – As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.
Tags: science weird history
Minecraft: The Movie – Mojang Documentary – A new documentary by 2-Player Productions went online today, focusing on the story of Minecraft. Visiting Sweden, meeting with Markus “Notch” Persson, they have created a 20 minute short, which they hope to expand to a feature-length film if they can receive the Kickstarter funding they’re after. The full video is available to watch on GameTrailers today, and everywhere else from tomorrow.
Tags: minecraft gaming video
David Cameron Pretending to be Common – Loving the proliferation of comedy/snarky Tumblr photoblogs.
Tags: blog funny davidcameron
New Statesman – In defence of squatting – Do you believe that, in a country where 650,000 households are overcrowded, where the government has declared that it can no longer afford to help the landless sick, disabled and poorly paid to sleep safely because it needs to give tax breaks to bankers, it is right that so many commercial buildings are vacant, boarded up and patrolled by private security firms?
Do you consider it fair that there is less than no room for the young, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised in this society, whilst the rich control more space than they know what to do with?
It is manifestly in the interests of those who own and hold all this disused property, including the millionaires who make up the Cabinet, to misrepresent Britain’s 15,000 squatters and occupiers as — in the words of the Times — a “dangerous scourge”. Otherwise the hundreds of thousands of people paying 90 per cent of their salary for poky rooms hours from their places of work might start getting ideas.
Tags: squatting occupation politics activism directaction
Valve’s Gabe Newell talks sales, experimentation – Here’s something you don’t see every day. It’s a 40-minute-or-so video conference between Valve co-founder Gabe Newell and a high school sports/entertainment marketing class.
Tags: video gamesindustry valvesoftware

Linkfest: February 14th – February 20th

Shaun CG — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:26:30 +0000

Del.icio.us links for February 14th:

Recy Taylor: A Symbol of Jim Crow’s Forgotten Horror – After her brutal gang rape, Recy Taylor became a global symbol of American injustice and helped inspire the civil rights movement. So why has nobody heard of her today?
Tags: rape racism history usa
Arab youth: the tipping point – The Arab world has high proportions of young people – and high proportions of youth unemployment – making for explosive levels of discontent from Morocco in the west to Syria and Yemen in the east
Tags: middleeast youth
‘President Saleh is not the problem, it’s the corrupt people under him’ – In Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, a group of friends in their 20s discuss a leader they call ‘father’ and bemoan an outdated education system that hinders their job prospects
Tags: yemen middleeast
‘Tunisia’s revolution isn’t over, but the fear has gone’ | World news | guardian.co.uk – Tunisia’s polyglot youth, at the forefront of the street protests that toppled the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, is one of the most highly educated in the Arab world. With a 78% literacy rate, and 40% of the 10 million population aged under 25, the regime’s propaganda machine used to love boasting about its bright young things. The official unemployment rate is 14%, but in reality, more than a third of graduates have no hope of finding a job unless their parents can pay heavy bribes to corrupt officials with connections in the ruling party.
The curse of unemployment and the young generation’s disgust at corruption were key to the protests that ousted the dictator and led to contagion on the streets of Egypt.
Tags: tunisia africa revolution
Forbes says Valve’s more valuable than Apple and Google – A recent Forbes profile of Valve founder and gatling gun blacksmith Gabe Newell noted that Valve, thanks to its Steam digital distribution platform, was “tremendously profitable”, with an estimated 2010 revenue in the “high hundreds of millions of dollars”. Though it doesn’t release financial reports, Valve itself is allegedly valued at two to four billion dollars.
Tags: gamesindustry valvesoftware
The Very Important List Of PC Games, Part 1 – Here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun we take the business of PC gaming entirely seriously. There is no smiling, or making rude noises at the back of class, there is only important gaming fact. So when it came to compiling an exhaustive list of the greatest, most important PC games of all time, we realised that the only way we could articulate the importance of the various titles was to present them as a five-part series of important lectures, explaining their importance. Over the next four articles and related appendices, you will discover why the various Great Games are great, and what their meaning is to you as a PC gamer. Follow this list, and play these games, and you will find yourself with very little spare time. But also, you will understand what it truly means to be a PC gamer.
Tags: gaming games pcgames history
Punknews.org | Sundials – First full length from the most excellent, happylovelyfuntimes Sundials.
Tags: band music
Punknews.org | The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Short, scrappy single/EP from a US band. Emotional punk rock, pretty upbeat.
Tags: band music
5 Myths About the Military You Believe (Thanks to Movies) – Hopefully, if you’re reading this article, your upbringing was relatively free of war. If that’s the case, you probably got all of your information about the military from movies. But even accounting for what you already assumed was Hollywood bullshit (obviously war is not a nonstop action explosion festival), if you’re like most people, you still have a grossly skewed idea about what life in the military is like. For instance, many of you think …
Tags: military armedforces myths
Saturday’s Kids ON TOUR 16th-31st OF JULY | Free Music, Tour Dates, Photos, Videos – Scuzzy hardcore / postpunk band from Wales.
Tags: band music
The Very Important List Of PC Games, Part 5/5 | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – As a retired don in the great university of the bedroom, I wasn’t expecting to be aroused by Professor Rossignol. Later, I was also disturbed when he woke me up, demanding that I spout some waffle on the importance of some games none of the current faculty really felt able to talk about with confidence. Of course, with my famous arrogance, I felt confident to talk confidently about anything, and damn the fellow who says otherwise.
Tags: games gaming pcgames history
5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously) – Seriously, some of this stuff is kinda amazing.
Tags: animation comics manga history science art film
Listing Ships – First demo track from a mate’s new band, pretty damn good.
Tags: band music
Video: Rachel Maddow and Kate Sheppard on the Yes Men’s Chamber Prank | Mother Jones – Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the Yes Men’s Chamber of Commerce press conference stunt and the recent controversies surrounding the Chamber’s stance on climate change.
Tags: comedy satire pranks climatechange usa
Deposing dictators is just the start of a Middle East transformation | Soumaya Ghannoushi – This clash between a wounded old regime fighting for survival and a new order being formed painfully and arduously under popular pressure is the story of Tunisia today.
These developments serve as important indicators of what could lie ahead for Egypt, its heavyweight Arab sister, now that Mubarak has gone. The containment policy that has been pursued in Tunis is already under way in Cairo. There is a stubborn will, internal and external, to salvage a system that has failed to preserve its figurehead. That is precisely what Barack Obama means by “managed change”, and what Cameron intends by “orderly transition”.
Tags: middleeast egypt tunisia revolution democracy
Robert Fisk: Three weeks in Egypt show the power of brutality – and its limits – It’s an instructive lesson. Bahrain, Algeria and Yemen are all following the identical policies of brutality that failed Messrs Ben Ali and Mubarak. That’s not the only strange parallel between the overthrow of these two titans. Mubarak really thought on Thursday night that the people would suffer another five months of his rule. Ben Ali apparently thought much the same.
What all this proves is that the dictators of the Middle East are infinitely more stupid, more vicious, more vain, more arrogant, more ridiculous than even their own people realised. Ghengis Khan and Lord Blair of Isfahan rolled into one.
Tags: dictators despotism revolution democracy middleeast brutality stateterror
Sukey – A tool for non-violent demonstrations. – Mobile tool for tracking police presence during demonstrations.
Tags: protest demonstration activism
New Statesman – Revolts don’t have to be tweeted – The internet is a useful tool, but it is just a tool. HTML does not cause mass uprisings any more than a handgun causes mass murder – although, for people of a certain mindset, the mere proximity of the tool is enough to set dangerous thoughts in motion. The internet isn’t the reason people are getting desperate and it isn’t the reason things are kicking off. Things are kicking off for one reason and one reason alone: there is a global crisis of capital.
Tags: protest revolution capitalism imperialism socialmedia technology
rejectamentalist manifesto – The major monstrosities of imperialism are things like expropriation & mass murder. Among imperialism’s minor crimes, to which an appropriate response might be not so much rage as a gasp of epochal irritation, is that it treats humanity as if it is truly, epically, boundlessly thick.
Tags: egypt revolution imperialism
The Very Important List Of PC Games, Part 2 – Yesterday, as you may have noted, Dr Rossignol began our lecture series on the most important PC games of all time. Much like The Christmas Lectures, The Reith Lectures, and the TED Lectures, this definitive series has been a part of our institution as long as the Earth has borne stones. In this second part Professor John Walker explains the varying importanceness of a second collection of the most important games to have graced the PC in the last 150 years. Read on for one fifth of the elements necessary for enlightenment. And doffs of hats to Intel’s AppUp developer program for sponsoring this most critical of series.
Tags: games gaming pcgames history
Egypt’s army calls for end to strikes as workers grow in confidence – “Egypt’s new military government has appealed for an end to the strikes sweeping the country as workers use their new-found freedom to demand pay increases after years of rising food prices.
Transport, bank and tourism employees were joined by steel, oil and gas workers in stoppages that undermined the army’s attempts to return Egypt to normality after the three weeks of unrest that toppled Hosni Mubarak.” Keep on ‘em!
Tags: protest revolution democracy socialdemocracy egypt middleeast
Green groups targeted polluters as corporate agents hid in their ranks | Environment | The Guardian – “Special report: After revelations of police spying, the focus turns to firms paid to infiltrate protesters”. Pissmidgets.
Tags: espionage corporatism police spies environmentalism greenpolitics