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

• MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Above Them – Step Back Release – Above Them have teamed up with Punktastic to stream another new song from their upcoming album “are we a danger to ourselves” – Yes, it irks me a little that there’s no question mark either. Anyway, the song is called “Step Back Release” starting with just Oli’s vocal and guitar then kicking in (epicly) into the pounding buvvem’s rhythm we’re all used to. It’s another great song from an album that is very special.
  Tags: band music
• The Ontological Geek: Guest Article: Skyrim is Gonzo Pornography – After 70 hours or so of play, I finished the main quest line of Skyrim. By this point I had completed the Thieves’ Guild quest line and a smattering of other quests from all over the map. I had discovered dozens of dungeons, slain many dragons, and finished more petty side-quests than I care to admit. When I decided to stop wandering the map and focus on finishing the central plot of the game, I was able to complete my remaining tasks in a couple hours, kept slow by my insistence on playing as a Bosmer archer instead of using any of the many methods of combat that render encounters trivially easy to complete. As the dragon-god Alduin evaporated in a shiny flash of elaborate death animations, I didn’t feel like a hero. I wasn’t even sure I had actually finished the main questline, there was so little fanfare. What I did feel like was that I had just finished a cheap porno, and that I should probably start playing something else before someone noticed me.
  Tags: skyrim game design gonzo pornography immersion
• Odd Partners: Videogames and Environmentalism – 
On Dec. 27, 2011, game developer Just Add Water released an HD remake of the under-appreciated Xbox game Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. Like the previous three games in the Oddworld franchise, Stranger’s Wrath is at its heart an environmental game, a quirky first person shooter with an important message about the control of natural resources and the threat of unregulated corporate practices to the natural world. If the Atari E.T. fiasco is a memorial to the gaming industry’s environmental shortcomings, the Oddworld games are a perfect counterpoint, a reminder that video games and environmentalism can coexist, however oddly, and strengthen each other.
  Tags: oddworld videogames environmentalism
• MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Watch Commander – Cheating Death (NEW SONG!) – Those lovely guys from Watch Commander have been working hard over the last few months on their debut album that should be out in the next few months. They’ve uploaded the song ‘Cheating Death’ to their soundcloud account and obviously, it’s real good.
  Tags: band music
• Solar storm of 1859 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Solar Superstorm,[1] or the Carrington Event,[2] which occurred during solar cycle 10, was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history, and the largest flare, observed by Richard Christopher Carrington, became known as the Carrington Super Flare.
  Tags: history astrophysics solarstorms
• World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary- In earlier think-pieces I discussed a very normative, predictable, conservative (in the sense of unadventurous) version of the likely shape of the next century.Of course, it’s not going to be like that.
  Tags: futurism worldbuilding society uncertainty prediction
• Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Blank Slates & Scripted Decision Making- In light of my recent thoughts on developing a new approach to dialogue systems (or, more accurately, thanks to a recommendation from the designer I’m working with on a nursing simulation side project) I was approached recently to produce a short interactive dialogue demo for a middleware firm based on some of those ideas.Their core system, though, is a traditional dialogue tree, and it got me to thinking – if we’re limited to the usual tools and can’t factor in any procedural elements then what practical guidelines can we follow to avoid the usual problems around motivation, depth of simulation and reward?
  Tags: gamedesign narrative dialogue dialogue systems
• 6 Scientific Discoveries That Laugh in the Face of Physics | Cracked.com- “As we’ve pointed out before, there are some startlingly simple questions that science can’t answer. And then there are the special occasions where the universe up and does a freaking magic trick that seems to be designed by an unjust, all-powerful entity dedicated to making scientists slowly pull off their glasses while saying, “What in the hell?” For instance …”Fun list, even if #1 has, I think, already been disproven.
  Tags: science super science physics astrophysics space
• BBC News – Exoplanets are around most stars, study suggests- Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to an average of 1.6 planets, a new study suggests.That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

  Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.
  Tags: space planets exoplanets space exploration

• It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world | | Independent Editor’s choice Blogs- It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.
  Tags: femicide infanticide gender children infants south asia

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design- As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.
  Tags: futurism tacticility interaction technology
• Tiger Beatdown › You Can’t Fight Child Abuse Without Fighting Ableism- Hillary Adams defies social narratives about disability, which is often perceived as a state of helplessness and inability to act with autonomy. She demonstrated ingenuity and enterprising behaviour, two things people with disabilities are not supposed to do, when she taped her father abusing her. She communicated on her own terms, another thing we are not supposed to do, when she posted the video and started talking about it. This makes it easier to ignore the disability aspect of the case, to treat Adams as exceptional and focus just on the abuse.But abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the fact that Hillary has CP matters. Which means that it should be part of the discussion. Because any conversation about ending child abuse must include disabled children. Not just because they are children too and thus are part of the picture, but because they are particularly vulnerable to abuse and because there are disability-specific issues that must be addressed at the same time we fight child abuse as a whole.
  Tags: childabuse ableism disability
• Tiger Beatdown › Roma women in Europe: the silenced, underreported gender oppression – European countries are always praised for the strides they make towards gender equality. European nations consistently rank on top of quality of life rankings and measurements. Moreover, the EU is held as a sort of modern gold standard for the promotion of human rights and the values of “reason and enlightenment”. Gender equality and anti discrimination laws are enshrined in the European Constitution and the upholding of human rights is considered one of the measurements for admission of new member states to the Union. However, while so many paternalistic European politicians claim to want to save Muslim women from their “oppression”, there is a group that hardly ever gets the same kind of “savior complex” discourse: Roma women. Their status as “Other” invisibilized and erased from mainstream discourse; their systematic persecution, more often than not, State endorsed, a small item in the back pages of European press.
  Tags: roma racism europe prejudice britain
• Protests highlight severity of benefit cuts for disabled people | Society | guardian.co.uk – Ministers have admitted that limiting the employment and support allowance will save only £4bn, rather than £5bn originally envisaged, over five years. Neil Coyle, director of policy at the Disability Alliance, said: “The Treasury has made it clear that they do not care where the axe falls – you simply have to deliver the savings. With the disabled already being targeted we will see more cash coming from the people least able to pay and in greatest need.”
  Tags: disability britain recession benefits cuts coalition
• Men Explain Things to Me | Gender | AlterNet – When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky letter to the New York Times explaining that, though Muybridge had made improvements in camera technology, he had not made any breakthroughs in photographic chemistry. The guy had no idea what he was talking about. Both Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book on Muybridge, and I had actually researched the subject and made it clear that Muybridge had done something obscure but powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time to speed it up amazingly, but letters to the editor don’t get fact-checked. And perhaps because the book was about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
  Tags: sexism chauvinism gender
• IGDA Writers Panel: Players Versus Characters, 2 « Electron Dance- Last year’s panel was held in a lecture theatre at South Bank University which was spacious and desk-enabled. At BAFTA, the audience were not as lucky. Dinky chairs jammed us into snuggling distances with our neighbours and I had to be careful not to poke out someone’s eye with the careless flick of a pen. The panellists got to wave their arms about and express themselves with gusto, but I didn’t have enough room to swing a gnat.But every crowd has a silver lining – at least I got a free drink.
  Tags: writing videogames narrative character
• Toward a post-Murdoch age – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – In the UK, a broad coalition, supported by the National Union of Journalists, has arisen to coordinate the ideas of academics, media workers and activists as to what a post-Murdoch media could look like.  One of the major problems facing this coalition is how to explain the extraordinary gap between the press’s self-image and the reality.  Part of the explanation must hinge on the limitations of the press’s ‘apartness’ from the dominant institutions of society which Alan Rusbridger referred to.  The press may not share the aims of the government, but it does depend on governments (and police, and judges, and major-generals, etc.) for information and access, which is always more forthcoming to ‘cooperative’ journalists.  More compellingly, the press doesn’t just share the “same aims” as commerce – it is commerce.
  Tags: journalism newsinternational corruption corporatism
• Tiger Beatdown › If you protest racism during Black Face season in The Netherlands, you will be beaten up and arrested – What happened afterwards will turn your stomach. Police demanded the activists to disband and stop protesting. They were told this was a children’s event and that children had the right to celebrate the holiday without disturbances. Two men and two women were arrested (link goes to news report in Dutch) when they stated that they also had the right to protest practices that actively harm them. They were told, in no uncertain terms, that they had no right to be there. One of the men resisted. He yelled that it was his right to protest. This video here, caught by a bystander, shows what happened to this protester. He was dragged outside the Parade, brutally beaten, thrown into the ground, dragged some more. In the video, you can see this young Black man, wearing a t-shirt that states “Zwarte Piet is racism”, subject to State violence in order to protect a Dutch tradition that is clearly not open for debate. The right of the White majority to wear Black face every year should be protected through whatever means necessary, even at the expense of those who are harmed by it.
  Tags: holland racism europe stateviolence
• Is Cameron about to re-engage his “toxic constituency”?- There is also another school of thinking, positioned by a quote which may or may not have come from Fredreich Nietzsche, questioning thus: “Do everybody deserve the vote”?One might easily contend, also, that in the event of true British democracy Katie Price or Jeremy Clarkson could be our prime minister – so in a way we should count our lucky stars that our democracy is only a shadow of its full meaning.

  I, however, take a different view, being in favour of democracy on principle and not seeing it as a utility that ought to be used when it suits me. As tyrants fall in the Middle East I know full well about the possibility of there being a radical Muslim Brotherhood element to post-Arab Spring politics, but appreciate that this must be challenged with ideas and committed action.
  Tags: democracy politics britain davidcameron

• music.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object) – Guide to the history of and many scenes of TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO. Well, all electronic music, really.
  Tags: music reference history guide electronic

• 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

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

• 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” <br />
  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

• LENIN’S TOMB: Still blaming Muslims – Anders Breivik, though not a Third Reich enthusiast, is obviously a fascist of some description.  His manifesto, his activism and his links to the UK far right scene, talked down by the Norwegian police, are evidence that he didn’t seek to be simply a lone ranger.  He has made it clear that his massacres were an attack on the political system, and he clearly intended that they should be followed by others.  But the ideas that led him to fascism are not at all marginal.  The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the ‘war on terror’, the view seriously entertained by many that Europe’s Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children.  No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter.
  Tags: norway murder farright fascism islamophobia europe
• Former News Corp. Executives Dispute James Murdoch’s Testimony – NYTimes.com – LONDON — Two former News International executives publicly contradicted James Murdoch’s testimony to a parliamentary committee, saying Thursday that they told him of evidence in 2008 that suggested that phone hacking at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers was more widespread.
  Tags: newsinternational media journalism corporatism capitalism
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) – The Ambivalence of the Metallic Sublime « Ruthless Culture – Indeed, for all of their artistic accomplishment and mad experimental brilliance, Bay’s films encourage us to find the sublime in images of racism, sexism, nationalism and violence. Combine this with the fact that Bay’s experimentation is prompted by the desire to make more and more money for multinational corporations and you have a recipe for a distinctly unpleasant viewing experience.
  Tags: michaelbay film cinema transformers experimental
• Hot Water Music “The Fire, The Steel, The Tread” by Reybee on SoundCloud – New HWM tune.
  Tags: band music
• Weakness, the Catalyst of Survival | Nightmare Mode – Gamers need to know what it’s like to be weak because it’s in times of hopelessness and darkness that people have struggled and overcome adversity. The whole point of introducing peril, fear and weakness in games is so that players may overcome them through their own ability, simultaneously improving their skills and building the good kind of confidence, the kind that is aware of its faults but overcomes them, instead of the kind that thinks it’s invincible and invulnerable.
  Tags: gamedesign weakness strength fear
• Unite launches cut price membership for students and the unemployed | Politics | The Guardian – Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, is launching cut-price memberships for students and the unemployed as it attempts to boost its ranks and counter David Cameron’s “big society”.
  Unite will offer students, single parents and the jobless 50p per week “community memberships” as it focuses on neighbourhoods as well as workplaces. Trade unions are battling falling membership numbers and government spending cuts that will put their finances under further threat by eliminating public sector jobs – their most fertile recruiting ground.
  Tags: unions britain recession anti-cuts
• For News Corporation, Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel – NYTimes.com – Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.
  Tags: newsinternational media corporatism crookedcapitalistscum corruption bribery espionage
• The rape of men | Global development | The Observer – Sexual violence is one of the most horrific weapons of war, an instrument of terror used against women. Yet huge numbers of men are also victims. In this harrowing report, Will Storr travels to Uganda to meet traumatised survivors, and reveals how male rape is endemic in many of the world’s conflicts.
  Tags: war violence rape power africa gender

• 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

Del.icio.us links for September 21st through October 20th:

• A gilded age for some… – “Public bodies whose purpose is to hold corporations to account are being swept away. Public bodies whose purpose is to help boost corporate profits, regardless of the consequences for people and the environment, have sailed through unharmed. What the two lists suggest is that the economic crisis is the disaster the Conservatives have been praying for. The government’s programme of cuts looks like a classic example of disaster capitalism: using a crisis to re-shape the economy in the interests of business.”
  Tags: disastercapitalism recession cuts ideology classwar neoliberalism
• Welfare state eviscerated – Summary and breakdown of coalition cuts.
  Tags: recession cuts britain coalition classwar
• Countering the Coalition cuts: a myth-busting guide | Liberal Conspiracy – This is the start of a simple FAQ guide to the current economic debate for people who want simple answers and stats on what is going on and why it is wrong.
  I appreciate a lot of people are starting from scratch on economic issues but are still interested in the ongoing debates. So I’ve tried to be simple and straightforward, with links that explain more.
  Tags: recession cuts britain coalition
• New Study: “Colorblindness” Reduces Kids’ Ability to See, Challenge Racism – There is an incredible new study out, which confirms the inherent weakness and actual dangers of colorblindness as a way to challenge racism. According to the researchers from Northwestern, Stanford and Tufts, taking a colorblind approach with young children — such as instructing them to “focus on what makes us similar” rather than dealing constructively with difference and challenging bias directly — actually reduces the likelihood that those young people will recognize discriminatory behavior when it occurs, or seek to do something about it.
  Tags: race racism prejudice bigotry society studies
• Why Angela Merkel is wrong about ‘multiculturalism’ – Excellent anecdotal / personal piece about “multiculturalism” and “integration”.
  Tags: politics society culture immigration britain
• The attack on public sector pensions – The claim is that changing demographics mean that a system with characteristics developed in the 19th and 20th centuries is no longer suited to the task, and must be reformed in order to reduce the cost of pensions to the taxpayer. But the cost of public sector pensions is not huge. The value of the main unfunded public sector schemes is approximately 1.7% of GDP, and it is projected by the National Audit Office not to have increased at all in 50 years time. The net public sector pension cost, defined as the difference between present employee contributions and present costs, is much lower, closer to 0.3% of GDP this fiscal year. It can vary depending on the rate of inflation, but it is still eminently affordable. According to Diane Abbott, who has been an active participant in debates emerging from the Work and Pensions Committee’s proposed reforms, the Treasury spends twice as much on tax relief for private pensions as it does on public sector pensions.
  Tags: pensions ideology coalition cuts toryscum libdemscum
• Sheepskin – I’m trying to get my head around the historical processes whereby we (the UK) got into this mess over higher education. Not the minutiae (who’s going to pay for university education) but the why of it …
  Here’s my working hypothesis
  Tags: charlesstross education britain uk ideology politics
• Punk Pioneer Steve Albini on Music Festivals, The Future of Radio and Why He Wants GQ To Fail – Steve Albini has a reputation for being a hard-ass. The mastermind engineer behind universe-altering neo-punk records like The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero, as well as lead singer/guitarist of seminal Chicago noise-rock band Shellac, has a bit of an independent streak. He loathes the mainstream music industry and encourages musicians to seize the means of production in order to escape parasitic hordes of publicists, agents, managers, and hangers-on. Shellac rarely plays live, making them the kind of rare, sought-after 45 of the touring world. The band members don’t make music their full-time job, preferring to keep their art separate from their income.
  Tags: stevealbini interview music musicindustry fashion
• 5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck – A study of personality types once found that as a group, serial killers scored highest in “superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.” The other highest-scoring group for these undesirable traits? Politicians.
  Again and again science has found that being in charge not only attracts terrifying douchebags, but creates them as well. And with that, here’s the scariest article you’ll read this month.
  Tags: power politicians psychology amusing
• The Sunday Papers Gillen-y Supplement | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – A sort of best-of-Gillen compilation, including some nicely distilled ideas on Gillenesque games journalism. Interesting. FAILED.
  Tags: writing games journalism creativity criticism
• Persuasive Games: Free Speech is Not a Marketing Plan – “So let’s review. Electronic Arts made a war game about the U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but that game is not about war, not about Afghanistan, not about the Taliban, not political, and not interested in making or supporting any discussion.”
  “Instead, Medal of Honor is just another well-produced first-person shooter, one that invokes a recent war as a marketing gimmick to accompany an equally generic plea to “support our troops.” Playing as the Taliban never mattered anyway. It was just a menu item, so no big deal to remove or rename it. Just a marketing tag on the box. Just a clever hook to spin free publicity, and just an inconvenient but essentially irrelevant feature to drop when the Army brass raised its eyebrows.”
  For every story that makes you think well of the maturity of this medium, there are two stories like this.
  Tags: videogames games art commodities war controversy
• What Indie Developers Can Learn from Minecraft – Interesting piece about lessons taught by the runaway success of MineCraft.
  Tags: games indiegames
• Make Games – Finishing a Game – “As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.” Good advice for any kind of creative project!
  Tags: games creativity work ideas writing
• 6 Absurd Gender Stereotypes (That Science Says Are True) – If you’ve watched bad stand-up or beer commercials or listened to awful morning drive time radio DJs (Science has yet to prove the existence of any other type) you know about all of the supposed differences between men and women. The #1 topic of conversation among male hack comics is their nagging, chatter-box wives, and for hack females it’s… well, vibrators. But their insensitive, slob of a husband is a very close second.
  Well, it turns out there’s a reason those comics and beer companies keep making those jokes. Many of the exciting advances in brain mapping and genetic research are proving that some of the oldest, most hackneyed gender-based stereotypes are totally true.
  Tags: humour interesting gender science
• 6 Things Everyone Knows About Women (That Aren’t True) – We previously pointed out how some crude, absurd gender stereotypes are in fact proven true by science. But, in the interest of not letting 60s sitcoms have the last word on the differences between men and women, we should point out how many things “everyone knows” about women just plain aren’t true, according to science. Like…
  Tags: humour interesting gender science
• Politics of storytelling / Morning Star – “China Mieville is rather suspicious of stories for someone who makes a living writing them. “I’d advocate a certain amount of scepticism towards the healing power of storytelling or the emancipatory potential of narrative,” he says. “I think a lot of it is essentially winsome propaganda put out by writers trying to aggrandise what they do.”
  “Having won a host of prestigious fiction awards – most recently for his arcane thriller The City And The City, which received the Hugo and Arthur C Clarke awards in 2010 – Mieville perhaps has no need to self-aggrandise. His latest book Kraken has been enthusiastically received within and outside the traditional science fiction fanbase, and it is refreshing to hear a writer who makes a living breaking the rules of genre and structure call the monolithic mythology of the power of stories into question.”
  Laurie Penny interviews China Mieville.
  Tags: interview writing storytelling genre activism socialism intellectuals
• French union leadership raises white flag – Elites feel, with some justification, that they have held the line in Greece. Thus it is not even that the failure of the French popular movements to halt Sarkozy’s pension reform will only add to their overall confidence, but that it will send a signal to them that they can push through anything.The struggle in France is pivotal. The state of the struggle across Europe hinges upon what French grassroots forces beyond the trade union leadership are able to achieve in the republic in the coming hours and days.
  Tags: recession neoliberalism classwar france greece europe eu cuts resistance
• ACDSleeve – unique and custom cd packaging – Company making awesome CD/DVD packaging. Very cool.
  Tags: art design packaging cd music
• Disc Manufacturing Services Ltd – CD / vinyl pressing company (Plymouth).
  Tags: manufacturing pressing printing music
• CD Replication London | DVD Replication London | Vinyl Pressing – CD / vinyl pressing company (London).
  Tags: pressing publishing manufacturing uk music

• How to Prepare for Studio Recording with a Click-Track – Expect the click-track to annoy you. Expect to have difficulties executing certain fills, song sections, or transitions that you previously assumed were “in time.” Allow yourself time to adjust to the sound and feel of playing with a metronome, and if necessary to rewrite the parts you are playing. Whether your studio date is coming up in one week or in several months, you will benefit from designating a practice schedule and sticking to it. No matter what schedule you agree to, however, you need to allow time to set tempos, practice at the documented tempos, and slowly adjust the tempos upward until you reach the final “pocket.”
  Tags: music recording practice precision technique songwriting
• “Not Rape Epidemic”: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune – “I was struck, reading the piece — which is both moving and important — by a strange feeling of recognition. Peterson defines a new term, “not rape” — the kind of sex and sexual attention young women get from men which is, if not outright unconsenting, some measure of coerced. Not rape is every kind of uncomfortable experience you’re made to feel complicit in: for choosing to go to the party, for wanting the kisses but not knowing how to say ‘No’ to what came next, for ending up alone with someone you thought you could trust — or, in Peterson’s case, for opening the screen door a few inches to a friend-of-a-friend one summer afternoon while her parents were out. The essay made me think of all the times I’ve not been raped. And all the other women in my industry who’ve not been raped.”
  Tags: rape sexualassault gender modelling fashionindustry
• Laurie Penny, “Youth Politics and Revolution” – Not every generation gets the politics it deserves.  When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time for free to causes led by grown ups.
  Tags: youth rebellion activism politics uk britain unemployment generationaldisparity
• Rebel Frequencies: There is Power In a Boycott – “It’s not infrequent in our highly depoliticized society for an outspoken artist to be attacked for daring to take a stand. As long as profit comes before integrity, then “shut up and sing” will be the rule of the day in the music industry; musicians will be in the position of defending their views and actions. There’s a difference, however, when the denunciation comes from an ally.” Alexander Billet on criticisms of the Arizona Sound Strike boycott.
  Tags: boycott politics activism usa arizona music
• Trailer for Beijing Punk released – The first official trailer has been posted for Beijing Punk, a new documentary by filmmaker Shaun Jefford. Jefford toured China and met a number of fiercely (and legally) underground Chinese punk and hardcore acts including Misandao, Demerit, Hedgehog, The Gar, PK14, Candy Monster and Joyside.. As the trailer notes, the entire movement is forbidden by the communist government which has banned rock from television and most live performances since the 1990s.
  Tags: trailer video documentary punk china
• few points about, translations & interpretations of, & arguments with a standard exemplar of the stenchful & emetic. – Mieville poking holes in some common rhetoric employed to undercut radical writers and activists; here, a Guardian review of Chomsky.
  Tags: writing criticism reviews radicalism noamchomsky chinamieville
• Study: U.S. Pets’ Healthcare Better Than Rwandan Humans’ | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – PHILADELPHIA–A University of Pennsylvania study released Monday found that U.S. pets enjoy superior healthcare to that of Rwandan humans.
  Tags: satire healthcare wealth medicine usa rwanda
• The 6 Most Gigantic Everything in the History of War – In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “War makes people act like dicks.” We don’t want to glorify war or otherwise portray it as something other than terrible. Yet, war makes people think big, and sometimes you have to sit back and be amazed by what humans can accomplish when they really, really want to kill each other.
  Tags: war history interesting
• Twilight Makes for the Best Fanwank Ever – Apparently even “R-Patz” can’t stand the awful phenomenon that is Twilight.
  Tags: funny fanwank criticism
• Twilight | Cracked.com – Some poor bastards read the series so we don’t have to.
  Tags: funny fanwank
• LRB · Jenny Turner · Who Are They? – “I’ve been watching these people off and on for years now, since I was a student in the 1980s and they called themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party. I find them fascinating, peculiar, entertaining, a real-life soap: who are these people, what on earth do they think they’re up to?” Lengthy article about the Revolutionary Communist Party, Spiked online, the “Living Marxist network”, and the annual Battle of Ideas conference.
  Tags: politics activism lobbyists britain history marxism libertarianism socialism critique
• Picnik – Another free online image editor.
  Tags: online free software web2.0 photoshop editing design graphics
• Photo editor online pixlr free edit image direct in your browser – Free online Photoshop-style image editor.
  Tags: online free software web2.0 photoshop editing design graphics
• Abused, humiliated and abandoned. What really happens when the UK deports failed asylum-seekers – “[F]lights are being used by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) with increasing frequency to return failed asylum-seekers. They are shrouded in secrecy, but an investigation by The Independent has put together details of the process, including the companies and airlines involved, the conditions on board, the techniques permitted, and the contracts of those paid to escort deportees. Though the records of activists, charities, befrienders, and the testimony of deportees themselves, it is possible to build up a picture of chartered and scheduled removal from Britain.”
  Tags: immigration asylumseekers britain deportation humanrights abuse
• Bastards Of Young – A stream of their debut album… at last!
  Tags: band music
• Le pré où je suis mort (download EP for free!) on MySpace Music – Wicked French emo/screamo band. Recently toured the UK with La Dispute.
  Tags: band music hotdamn!
• ‘Hollywood Accounting’ Losing In The Courts – If you follow the entertainment business at all, you’re probably well aware of “Hollywood accounting,” whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically “profitable,” even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the “film corporation” a huge fee (which creates a large part of the “expense” that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money “loser” — which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
  Tags: accounting economics profit hollywood filmmaking
• RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales – “We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies “lose money” on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they’re pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.” Good article, rounds up and quotes some other famous ones too.
  Tags: musicindustry riaa economics marketing music accounting
• 18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site – On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.
  Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)
  Tags: archaeology history usa new york
• Tory shock therapy for the NHS is an attack on democracy – “Coming alongside cuts, these [neoliberal] reforms mean that the NHS as a service free at the point of delivery, providing quality all-round care for all, is under serious attack. This is being promulgated alongside Michael Gove’s attempt to roll back a public, comprehensive, democratically accountable education system. This isn’t happening because of the deficit, it isn’t happening because people want it, least of all is it happening because of the result of the 2010 general election – please let us be spared that insult. It’s an attack on the welfare state, it’s an attack on the working class, and it’s an attack on democracy.”
  Tags: NHS healthcare britain coalition tories classwar neoliberalism
• Bill Hicks – a romantic out of time – “Kurt Cobain once called grunge the last wave of rock. Around the same time Bill Hicks became the first rock and roll comedian.”
  Tags: comedy standup iconoclasts culture politics
• All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online – Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online – for free. Each film is listed in our Free Movie collection, but here you can access each major film in the order in which they were made.
  Tags: film andreitarkovsky free video stream
• Britain Rolls Out Own Unmanned Killer Jet – “Tired of not having their own manless killer plane, Britain just rolled out the $216 million Taranis, a flying deathbot drone named after the Celtic god of thunder. Or misspelled dinosaur (Taranisaurus Rex).” Oh good, we need unmanned drones more than 2.5 million jobs.
  Tags: war unmanneddrones weapons britain

This weekend at WisCon I was explaining to people at the Dollhouse panel that there are many levels to privilege and understanding and such. Down on the bottom level you have the folks who are just racist or sexist or whatever and haven’t ever examined anything and don’t want to for various reasons.

But then up higher is the level where people agree that racism is bad and wrong, we’re all equal, and everyone should just stop being so mean. Na’amen helpfully labeled this the Kumbaya level, because it’s that kind of surface, touchy-feely non-racism that doesn’t actively engage with people of color or any oppressed people.  Nor does it work to change things for the better because, hey, aren’t things just great now?

While the Kumbaya level is much better than just plain racism, people on this level often really frustrate us because they are resistant to acknowledge that they still have work to do. They don’t wear white hoods so they can’t ever say or do things that have a basis in racism. Not that they are racist, but they aren’t helping, which is bad enough.

[Full post.]

I thought that this excerpt succinctly articulates the complexity of privilege and reactions to / acknowledgements of it. Obviously as a hetero white male of Anglo descent living in the UK I’m about as privileged as can be, so it is important to remind myself of this as often as possible. There is always work to do, understanding to reach, attitudes to amend, recognition to achieve.