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

• SchNEWS – Direct Action Newsheet – Brighton University’s Vice Chancellor must be kicking himself. The university was on lock-down yesterday (Nov30), not out of support for the strike, but to prevent a possible occupation. Unfortunately for him, the students waited ’til the 2nd, when the uni was wide open and vulnerable again. Thirty plus occupiers are now camped out in the very public art gallery space and more are expected as the space gets established. They’re protesting in solidarity with the public sector workers, against the increase in fees and the fact that the VC made noises in opposition to the White Paper to please students and staff  – and then signed a public letter to the government in support of fee increases. The uni is also targeted for their lack of transparency regarding links to dodgy private companies.
  Tags: brighton university education occupation
• The Making Of: Flotilla – Edge Magazine – Brendon Chung knows a lot about failure. The Californian game designer of one-man indie studio Blendo Games has whole hard drives full of his screw-ups. “Honestly, I fail like 90 per cent of the time,” he confesses. “My hard drive has all these aborted foetuses of games that are just bad, broken and not even close to looking done. The other ten per cent of the time you hit something that’s pretty ugly and terrible, but you see some potential there and you file it away, hopefully to bring it back and use it in some fashion in a later project. Overall, though, it’s very discouraging.”
  Tags: interview games development indiegames spaceopera
• Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news. – Starting almost ten years ago, Jason Yungbluth began a short backup feature in a comics anthology under the title WEAPON BROWN. It takes the tropes and beats of the atypical “post apocalyptic bloodbath”, but filling its cast with clear analogues for the Peanuts gang. The comic has become something of a sleeper hit, gaining more and more attention. I sat down with Jason to ask him how things are going in the industry for him now.
  Tags: interview comics satire pastiche postapocalypse
• Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber- What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone what shape the forces of resistance to it are likely to take. Some new form of green capitalism? Knowledge Keynesianism? Chinese-style industrial authoritarianism? ‘Progressive’ imperialism?

  At moments of transformation, one of the few things one can say for certain is that we don’t really know how much our own actions can affect the outcome, but we would be very foolish to assume that they cannot.
  Tags: history debt money finance empire war slavery

• BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: DREAM ON- The protest movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is very clear about what it is against – an international capitalism that is cruel, unfair and untenable. But the movement refuses to say what it is for. Much of this refusal comes from a belief that modern capitalist society is extremely skilful at co-opting dissent and that any discussion with the media is the first step in being reabsorbed into ‘the system’.It also has the added benefit of irritating mainstream journalists and commentators.

  I want to tell an odd, romantic, but ultimately very sad story that shows where this fear of possession on the left comes from. It is set during last the time that British, European and American students tried to be a vanguard for revolution. It shows how that fear can easily lead to a pessimistic belief that all one’s dreams for a better future are just illusions – and how that pessimism then came to paralyse the left in Britain throughout the eighties and nineties.

  But the story is not all sad – because I think it shows that the same thing does not have to happen again.
  Tags: adamcurtis history revolutionarytheory liberation politics classwar utopia

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

Del.icio.us links for September 26th:

• Ed in the clouds about ‘grown up’ markets « Though Cowards Flinch – Ed really, really does need to move on from the idea that ‘the markets’ are made up of a broadly benevolent bunch who really just want stability. They don’t. It is in the interests of a significant section of the financial elite to have instability, because our honest friend Alessio says, that’d when hedging and other techniques come into play so that those with the power and resources to play the game make big money at the expense of the powerless.
  Tags: economics recession financialinstitutions scum
• How to make history, Jane Eyre and superheroes funny – Laura Miller – Salon.com – The characters in Kate Beaton’s hit webcomic, “Hark! A Vagrant,” are familiar, and also not. There are the three Brontë sisters, checking out surly guys: “So passionate!” “So mysterious!” “So brooding!” swoon Charlotte and Emily, while Anne Brontë (author of “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in case you didn’t know she existed), retorts, “If you like alcoholic dickbags!” “No wonder nobody buys your books,” hisses Charlotte. Inspector Javert from “Les Misérables” is detailed to the Bread Crimes Division. Raskolnikov tips off his own police nemesis by penning an Op-Ed titled “Murdering Old Ladies: Not Even a Big Deal.”
  Tags: katebeaton interview cartooning funny webcomics
• Cartoonist Beaton’s “Hark! A Vagrant!” Finds Drollery in Drawing Rooms : Monkey See : NPR – Beaton is the master of comic strip pacing; several of Hark! A Vagrant!’s funniest strips feature panels with no dialogue at all, just a character (Aquaman, say, or an unamused King, or Poe) regarding the reader with a hilarious slow-burn glare.
  Tags: cartooning webcomics artists katebeaton

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

• LENIN’S TOMB: 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

• 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:<br />
  1970s, Genesis – The first computer game businesses appear with Atari dominating<br />
  1980s, Democratisation – Home computers enable ordinary computer users to make their own games<br />
  1990s, Corporatisation – Profitable games require the polish and resources that only big business can afford<br />
  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.<br />
  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

• Cuts Are Not The Cure on Vimeo – Good little video.
  Tags: video cuts recession tax britain
• New Statesman – It’s an education, all right – Anyone who believes that knowledge has no price should look away now. For the past month I’ve been involved with an investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches that revealed just how far the market has penetrated higher education. We discovered highly paid managerial elites running universities as factories where students are little more than customers shopping for degrees.
  Tags: education business corporatism marketforces university
• SchNEWS 766 – 8th April 2011 – Sick to the Gills – Last Friday (1st), the death of a 27-year-old Belgian man after a brutal police attack a week before sparked rioting across the small city of Gilly, near Charleroi. The cops’ violent outburst took place in broad daylight in the middle of the street, and was all because the man, called Sandro, was thought to have taken a Coke from a shop.
  Tags: police murder riot belgium
• New Statesman – Willetts has reminded us that social mobility is a scam – Today, children born to working-class parents are overwhelmingly likely to remain working class. Children who go to low-achieving schools usually end up in low-paying jobs, especially in former industrial towns. Wage repression has meant that it is now nearly impossible to raise a family on a single person’s wage, meaning that most couples with children are obliged to work two full-time jobs between them. Labour has become more precarious, and structural unemployment has continued to rise. Top jobs in politics, journalism, law, management, business and finance are held in trust for the sons and daughters of the wealthy, as opportunities go to those who can afford to work as unpaid interns or, increasingly, to pay for vital work experience. In fact, like nearly every other journalist under 35, the main reason I have this platform to talk to you now is that I’m a beneficiary of the private-school-and-intern system.
  Tags: socialmobility capitalism class society britain selfinterest horatioalger rhetoric
• Eve Online: Audience With The King Of Space | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Eve Online player The Mittani is the CEO of Goon Fleet, the single largest corporation in Eve Online, both loved and reviled for its practices which include teaching new recruits to scam other players. As of two weeks ago The Mittani was also voted in as the new Chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, the player-run and player-elected body that CCP liases with with the aim of improving the game. Prior to the announcement of the election results, I caught up with him at the Eve Fanfest for a mammoth interview. Click on through for talk of warfare, intrigue, hatred, propaganda, and why he says Eve Online is a terrible game.
  Tags: eveonline interview politics psychology espionage socialnetworks
• I live sweat… – “I think it’s something that’s hard to recognize if you don’t experience it yourself” Mariel Loveland of Candy Hearts on her experiences of sexism in the punk scene – From then on, the difference became clear. It’s the male band members who don’t take you seriously, and when you get upset with how you’re treated, ask you if you’re menstruating. It’s the promoters and planners who screw you, then call you a diva when you assert yourself.  It’s the kids who don’t talk to you after your set, but talk to your male bandmates because they assume you’re only there for show.  It’s the people who think you’re sleeping with the guitarist, the people who assume you’re queer,  or the journalists who mention your weight in reviews.  It’s every single time a producer has told me I can’t play guitar on my own record because “sweetie, you’re not a studio musician” or “sing it again, but naked.”
  Tags: sexism feminism misogyny punk hardcore
• 7 Psychotic Pieces of Relationship Advice from Cosmo – Quite enjoyed this article about the paranoia and revenge fantasy periodical, Cosmopolitan.
  Tags: magazines crazy media churnalism funny
• Exclusive Stream: Teenage Bottlerocket’s “Mutilate Me” – “Check out this exclusive stream of “Mutilate Me” from Teenage Bottlerocket’s Mutilate Me EP, out April 12 on Fat Wreck Chords.” Still love this band.
  Tags: band music
• LENIN’S TOMB: Springtime for NATO in Libya – Can I just risk a modest proposition? NATO, the CIA and the special forces belonging to the world’s imperialist states are not forces of progress in this world. Does anyone disagree with that? If not, then it follows as surely as night follows day that the successful cooptation of the Libyan revolution by NATO, the CIA and special forces is a victory for reaction. It’s no good hoping that the small, poorly armed, poorly trained militias of the east of Libya, who are now utterly dependent on external support, will somehow shake themselves free of such constraints once – if – they take power. Even if they eventually get some of the Libyan money that has been frozen by international banks, as UN Resolution 1973 promises, it will have come all too late to have been decisive.
  Tags: libya middleeast imperialism humanitarianintervention nato usa
• Amazon Cloud Drive elicits pearl-clutching and déjà vu | opensource.com – I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Reading Amazon’s announcement about the recent Cloud Drive music service, I immediately thought of quite a few other moments where the music industry provoked a sense of overwhelming… disappointment.
  They just don’t get it.
  They. You know, The Music Industry. Sony. Metallica. Lars Ulrich. The RIAA.
  What don’t they get?
  Tags: cloudcomputing musicindustry technology
• 7 Basic Things You Won’t Believe You’re All Doing Wrong | Cracked.com – If you’re like us, you might sometimes have a problem with complex tasks, like trying to drive an ambulance and send a text message at the same time. But hey, at least most of us have figured out the simplest things that get us through the day, right?
  Except, you know, some of the simple things we’ve done every day of our lives, like …
  Tags: lifehacks health
• Some Stuff About Open World Games | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there’s even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I’m interested. It’s an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It’s kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it’s to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment – and its openness – implies.
  Tags: openworldgames sandboxgames illusion gamedesign
• Sons Of Anarchy, season 1 – DVD review for VideoVista – [W]e rely upon certain visual, narrative and thematic cues to guide both our emotional reaction to the text and where it is that we should place our attention as an audience. Sometimes, these cues will be contained in the text in the form of stock characters, familiar tropes or storytelling techniques common to a particular genre but they can also exist outside of the text in the form of book jackets, trailers or where in the book shop we find the book.
  All of these cues forge links between the given text and our memories of other texts and so they nudge us into particular sets of reactions based upon the suggestion that ‘this text’ is a bit like ‘that one’.
  Tags: genre reading genresignalling narrativecues

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

• Interview – Hugo Mudie (The Sainte Catherines) – As we ramp up for Death to False Hope’s 2nd Anniversary Fest, Punknews has teamed up with the label to bring you a series of interviews from some participating artists. First up label and Fest founder, Scotty Sandwiches, talks with Hugo Mudie of The Sainte Catherines about their departure from Fat Wreck Chords, the fate of Yesterday’s Ring and how to be DIY in Montreal.
  Tags: interview punk saintecatherines
• The 5 Ballsiest Acts of Undercover Journalism Ever – As brave as undercover cops have to be to rub elbows with mob bosses and murderers, we submit that there is one group with even bigger balls: undercover journalists.
  After all, they wind up in the same terrifying company, under a cover that can be blown at any moment, only without having a van full of fully armed cops who can burst through the door at any moment.
  So let’s pause to salute …
  Tags: journalism media courage bravery
• Digital: A Love Story; Nostalgia, Irony and Cyberpunk | Blasphemous Geometries – Look beyond the retro stylings, the dodgy music and the revisitation of old game-play mechanics such as making you scribble down important pieces of information, and you’ll see that Digital: A Love Story is a game that is fiercely nostalgic for the idea of the internet’s lost frontier.
  Once upon a time, the internet was seen as a kind of digital Wild West, a wild and woolly frontier just outside of the embrace of civilisation where you were liable to encounter all kinds of things, both pleasurable and horrific: a cultural shatter zone outside of the purview of government.  However, just as new settlers brought civilisation to the American West, the popularisation of the internet and its gradual integration into every aspect of our daily lives has brought civilisation to the online world.
  Tags: nostalgia internet history culture society games jonathanmccalmont
• A hypocritical frenzy over the Camilla ‘attack’ – What should outrage us is the fact that we now live in a country where symbolic acts carried out by angry teenagers who have just had their futures vandalised are considered criminal “violence” worthy of national witch hunts, while battering peaceful protesters to a bloody pulp for daring to speak out is considered “reasonable force”. If we truly believe in social democracy, such special pleading for special breeding should appal us.
  Tags: classwar protests media rightwingbullshit
• Is Burlesque Dead? Or Just Boring? Kitty Stryker investigates… – When the revitalization of burlesque began in the mid 1990′s, parody, politics and playfulness were as important if not more so than pasties and peacock fans. Being thought-provoking was equally the goal as just being provocative. My girlfriend told me of a great performance she did involving her and her confrontation with a scale, stripping off clothes to try to weigh that bit less, til she finally kicks the scale over and, I think, smears herself in cupcakes. Or there’s the Living Dead Girlz, zombie dancers who rip out the hearts of their admirers and spew blood over their audiences. Or Miss Lolly Pops, who did a fantastic routine about voting that was both sexy and persuasive.
  So then, what happened? With the release of the film “Burlesque”, that garish showcasing of Christine Aguilera’s flesh-I-mean-voice, has all subversive value been, dare I say, stripped from this particular bawdy performance type?
  Tags: burlesque sex eroticism plays satire subculture
• The Nice Ma’am Cometh « Bad Feminist UK – We here at Bad Feminist UK have enjoyed some rather nice invitations from rather nice people; from the wonderful women of the Feminism in London conference, from drag kings wanting their books reviewed by us, from Parliament.
  But none so nice as an invitation to attend a Sensual Spanking Salon in the prettiest sex shop in London, to meet internationally adored bondage and sexuality expert Midori and her alliteratively alluring spanking models Dangerous Dolly and Lady Lorelei. It would have been churlish (and indeed, highly unlikely) of us to refuse….
  Tags: feminism eroticism sex education
• Gazan youth issue manifesto to vent their anger with all sides in the conflict – “Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed,” reads the extraordinary document. “We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even can’t think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage!”
  The text ends with a triple demand: “We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?”
  Tags: gaza palestine israel middleeast youth activism manifestoes
• Villareal on Myspace Music – Self-described alternative / indie / pop band from Brighton, fronted by Simon who does Lowlife promotions.
  Tags: band music

• GOTY 2010 – Call of Pripyat | Gaming Daily – Call of Pripyat is my game of the year because playing it is to experience something unpredictable, something of an unknown quantity. You don’t get that too often these days, especially in a game of such quality and magnitude.
  Example:
  Entering the Jupiter Research Complex, a mass of derelict office blocks and gaping rooms filled with rotting technology.  It’s perhaps one of the most impressive locations in the game.  I creep through its corridors.  Strange sounds hum and echo from all directions.  I shoot a few wild dogs that threaten me.  I reach my objective, a crashed helicopter that has fallen through the roof of one of the larger buildings, and retrieve the black box.  Nothing happens.  I creep out.
  NOTHING HAPPENS.  There’s no set-piece, no explosive boss fight.  This game is so cool, so assured, that it just leaves me to absorb the atmosphere it so skilfully creates – it allows me the space to become absorbed.
  Tags: games gamedesign stalker
• Part 6: 1995: Live, Bush, and Alanis Morissette take the pop path | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “When my journey through the past of popular ’90s alternative rock began two months ago, I had a not-so-simple goal: I wanted to reconnect with my long-lost teenaged self, and in the process rekindle the passion I once had for the music of my youth. Pure, unadulterated myopia aside, I hoped that readers would relate to my experience of looking back and realizing that sizeable swaths of my adolescence didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. I wanted to recover that history by playing old, dated albums and trying really hard to hear them as I did back then, no matter how poorly some of my former alt-rock heroes had aged. Because while opinions might change, the past doesn’t. The record is set—I liked what I liked in the ’90s, and I wanted to remember why.” Part 6 of 10 of ‘Whatever happened to alternative nation?’
  Tags: music criticism history grunge altrock 1990s
• Inside ‘Anonymous’: tales from within the group taking aim at Amazon and Mastercard – My guide pointed out that the Anonymous group is conflicted from its core, because it’s an outgrowth of people who themselves have come from /b/, which means that many aren’t that interested in morality. They’re in it for the lulz – or they’re into whatever Anonymous and its associated scenes are doing for the money. Which means that the idea of attacking Amazon, or PayPal, or Twitter, over a moral or ethical issue is something of a new experience for the group. Usually they’re into tormenting people.
  Tags: anonymous hacktivism hackers web generationaldifferences onlineculture internet
• Punknews.org | House Boat – EP stream from the excellent pop-punk supergroup HOUSEBOAT.
  Tags: band music stream
• Generation Wiki’s web savvy – We are Generation Wiki. We are interconnected collaborative creatures, and we like to share. We link and like, comment, post and poke. We Yelp when we’re hungry, Skype when we’re lonely and Gchat throughout the day. Our cell phone bills are light on minutes and long on data almost every month.
  We are the first of our kind. A computer has sat comfortably in some nook of our home for as long as we can remember. We grew up trying to find Carmen Sandiego, and came of age to the beeps and cackles of a 14k modem connecting to America Online. Before we had our own car, before we had our own cash and before we had a fake ID, we had chat rooms, instant messages and inboxes. We had an entire world wide web of possibilities with which to explore beyond the confines of our bedroom walls. Our rebellion was data-driven, a battle cry of zeros and ones where power grew out of the results of a search engine.
  Tags: internet wiki generationaldifferences society culture technology cyborg
• Student fees protest: lawyers launch legal challenge to kettling | Education | The Guardian – “Lawyers have launched a legal challenge to the police tactic of kettling during recent student demonstrations, claiming a breach of human rights.
  The lawyers, acting for five of the thousands of demonstrators penned in by police last Thursday, have written to the commissioner for the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson,arguing that kettling breaches European human rights legislation.”
  Check out the quotes at the end as well – banning protest, use of water cannon, don’t misbehave or it’ll go on your permanent record… shut up, sit down, do what we tell you.
  Tags: protest civildisobedience kettling police
• The Mathletes – Fuck Death / Part One / Trees – Neat album stream from… THE MATHLETES. Featuring that guy who writes a sarcastic blog about the comic Marmaduke, yeah?
  Tags: band music stream
• Robert Fisk: Qatar’s the star – and Washington is worried – Despite the leaked US diplomatic reports on Qatar and their claim that it is a major source of “terrorist” funding, Washington would do well not to mess with the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.
  He is the only world leader to march out of an American vice-president’s office in fury after just seven seconds. And his Al-Jazeera television station – for truly it does belong to him – has revolutionised reporting in the Middle East. Qatar may be tiny but in the region, it is very, very big indeed.
  Tags: qatar middleeast internationalaffairs
• Israel faces tougher line from EU after former heads call for Palestinian state – Twenty-six European grandees have urged the EU to adopt a tougher stance towards Israel including taking “concrete measures” and exacting “consequences” over continued settlement building on occupied land, which they say is illegal under international law.
  The former EU leaders said that in the face of “the ongoing deterioration of the situation on the ground”, the EU, in co-operation with other international bodies, should put forward a “concrete and comprehensive proposal for the resolution of this conflict”. A deadline of April 2011 for progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians should be set, after which the international community should intervene.
  Tags: israel palestine eu internationalaffairs pressure peace
• Part 5: 1994: Kurt Cobain is dead! Long live Soundgarden! | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “By the “Where were you when?” standard, Kurt Cobain’s suicide either doesn’t qualify or my memory is truly fucked. I know I remember finding out about it on a Saturday morning at school while waiting to get on the bus for a forensics tournament. (Extemporaneous speaking—yeah, I was pretty good.) Cobain’s body was actually found the day before, along with a can of Barq’s root beer, some towels, the shotgun with which he killed himself, and half of his $100 supply of Mexican black tar heroin. (He injected the other half before pulling the trigger.) I must not have watched any television the night of Friday, April 8; if I had, I would’ve known where he shot himself (in the greenhouse behind his home), who found his body (an electrician hired to install security lighting), and which CD was playing on the stereo when he died (R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People).” Another in the Onion AV Club’s alternative nation series, this one exploring the death of grunge’s most famous proponent.
  Tags: music grunge history nirvana kurtcobain suicide
• CLUB UNICORN – Tropical Girl on SoundCloud – Electro track made by my flatmate (and sung on by a bunch of other friends).
  Tags: music stream
• The true cost of your new Christmas laptop? Ask the eastern Congolese – Eastern Congo’s hell is an instance of how globalisation generates ungovernable spaces. Where there is a collision of desperate poverty, plentiful guns and a world greedy for natural resources, a brutal chaos results. To combat that, it takes a very tenacious sort of global campaigning – bringing to attention each element of the system and the part it can play in leveraging change – and mercifully, that is what is now finally starting to happen.
  Tags: globalisation capitalism powervacuums africa electronics conflict
• Lost civilization under Persian Gulf? – A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published in Current Anthropology.
  Tags: history science geology anthropology archaeology
• the soft kettle – Hard kettling is the sadistically ironic punishment of people who felt trapped enough to demonstrate in the first place; it says, “If you complain that you are restrained by our wonderful democracy here, we will only restrain you more & harder. That will teach you.” It makes material the soft boundaries by which the demonstrator has already been traumatised.
  Soft kettling is really quite hard to fight. It comes from the left (or what’s left of it) as well as from the right and centre. Writers like Benjamin Barber sold a core message which went, essentially: “Things are fucked but when we say that we must be careful not to offend anybody, or actually catch their attention.” Any pushing anyone does now is always going to be described, by someone in the soft kettle walls, as a “thoughtless”, “juvenile” or “irresponsible” step.
  Tags: kettling society socialisation politics normalisation
• Murderbullets | ORC STAIN – The bulk of this was done sometime between Wonton Soup 2 and Orc Stain, starting out as a entry for an anthology. The theme of the anthology was “The last comic you would ever draw”, so I took it rather literally and did 8 pages of a cracked out character drawing a book in a post apocalyptic wasteland that would grant him entry into the afterlife. Also, for some reason a moose was chained to his toilet. I got wrapped up in figuring out how this situation came to be and developed an elaborate back story involving time travelling, mutants, knife fights and cybernetic dolphin street gangs. Of course none of this would fit into an anthology, so I decided to take a stab at a full length book. (Amazing gonzo post-apocalyptic comic. Brilliant art!)
  Tags: comics postapocalypse gonzo art
• YouTube – Police vs protesters Benny Hill style! – Posted without comment.
  Tags: video funny police protests students
• The student movement evolves – Sitting on a fountain in Trafalgar square, slurping a nice hot cup of tea in the freezing rain and snow, watching the children’s crusade brave the elements and police lines to chant for the downfall of a government it sees as corrupt and illegitimate, I have never felt prouder of my generation.
  Tags: students recession protest activism coalition cuts education
• Disco Wasteland – Fallout: New Vegas gets dance mod – Cannot stop loving this. <3
  Tags: games fallout dance funny
• Tom Gabel On Against Me!’s Future – No Label, New Drummer – I’ll roughly summarise the career ofAgainst Me!: they’ve been through a lot of shit, a lot of good times and written some staggering music along the way. Over the last couple of months a lot seems to have come to a head for them – drummer George Rebelo left to rejoin Hot Water Music and they found themselves dropped by Warners, the major label they’d made their home for the last two albums – but the mantra seems to be onwards, soldiers.
  Frontman Tom Gabel has always been a good person to interview – he doesn’t give too much away and makes you work for an answer, but get him talking and he’s engaging, funny and honest. In this extensive interview we talked everything from what’s on his mind today to how he feels revisiting his past.
  Tags: interview againstme tomgabel punk
• The Cautionary Tale of a Short-Lived College – Government – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Founders College, in rural South Boston, Va., was pitched as a sort of Great Books college for devotees of Ayn Rand. And while the for-profit college was never accredited, it operated with authorization from Virginia to issue degrees.
  At the time the college was approved, it had no official faculty, no facilities, and, it turned out, shaky finances. “I’m stunned that the state would register a place like that,” says Ray Weiss, the onetime enrollment director. “What did we really have going for us when they registered us?”
  (More hilarious objectivist failure!)
  Tags: college usa education objectivism capitalism funny failure
• Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest – The prison protest has entered the wireless age.
  Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.
  Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.
  Tags: prisons capitalism indenturedservitude protest
• Cancún agreement rescues UN’s credibility but falls short of saving planet – The modest deal wrangled out by the 200 countries meeting at the Mexican resort of Cancún may have done more to save a dysfunctional UN negotiating process from collapse than protect the planet against climate change, analysts said today.
  “The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them.”
  Tags: climatechange unitednations diplomacy internationalaffairs environment
• John Pilger: Why are wars not being reported honestly? – Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.
  At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.
  Tags: war journalism media compliance wikileaks democracy news reporting journalisticstandards
• An Open Letter From The Arthur C Clarke Award – Read this if you’re at all interested in UK science fiction!
  Tags: sciencefiction britain uk books fiction awards
• LENIN’S TOMB: I am the mob – Inevitably, the ‘mob’ – the subject of official invective – is depicted as an opponent not merely of a policy, but of “democracy”. But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy. Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
  Tags: democracy britain cuts protest mob
• How do you make an audience of MPs laugh? Well, the story about where their Ugandan aid money went is pretty funny | Jane Bussmann | Comment is free | The Guardian – I landed from New York last week to find Britain in meltdown. London hasn’t been this much fun since the poll tax riots. I had to drop in on the Houses of Parliament to do a tech rehearsal for my show there tomorrow, Bussmann’s Holiday – the first X-rated comedy to be performed inside the Palace of Westminster. Its subject is WikiLeaks’s best exposé yet, combined with aspersions cast on the cause of Kevin Spacey’s late-night injuries, and the thought: “Imagine if Bob Geldof wasn’t such a Jeremy Hunt.”
  Tags: comedy satire uganda internationalaid africa
• YouTube – Mitchell & Webb Nazis – Genius skit.
  Tags: history comedy satire nazis ww2
• “why you say I shoulda went to school”: 14 awful celebrity Twitter feeds – Oh dear.
  Tags: celebrity fame exposure web2.0 terrifying+psychological+insights
• LENIN’S TOMB: Tea parties, old and new. – The ‘Tea Party’ has its origins in a particular ideology of American capitalism which comes from the South. We hear about the ‘southern strategy’, in which the Republican right has used race and ‘culture wars’ to build support in the formerly Democratic South, and used the Christian Right to mobilise a mass base from the South behind policies that favoured elites. But in fact, it would be more accurate to think of this process not as a cooptation by a traditionally Northern Republican Party, but rather as the successful bid for national political hegemony by the southern right.
• Tags: capitalism neoliberalism usa americansouth whitesupremacism
• The 7 Most Horrifying Cost Cutting Measures of All-Time – Money is tight, and everyone is cutting costs. But it’s all about knowing where to cut; the family will skip the vacation, but doesn’t try to save on clothes by turning the neighbor’s cats into loincloths.
  Unfortunately, when large organizations try to cut costs or figure out new sources of revenue, they tend to take the kitty loincloth approach. We’re talking about…
  Tags: funny costcutting capitalism
• Editorial: Panorama – Addicted To Games? – Timed to coincide with tonight’s release of World Of Warcraft’s Cataclysm, BBC 1′s Panorama tonight covered the topic of videogame addiction. I have always approached the subject of gaming addiction with great seriousness, because it’s my belief that if gaming is inherently harmful, I want to know about it, and I want to warn others who game. And I want to approach the subject with appropriate scrutiny, and with evidence-based understanding. It’s something I expect of others when they approach the subject. It was not present tonight. It was astonishing. An openly ignorant series of anecdotes and half-truths, forming a dangerous, lazy treatment of a serious subject.
  Tags: gaming games addiction scaremongering tabloidmedia television