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Linkfest: January 29th

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

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

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

Linkfest: October 3rd – October 9th

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

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

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

Linkfest: September 12th – September 19th

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

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

PC Gamers Save The World, A Bit | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – “Foldit players leverage human three-dimensional problem-solving skills to interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology. Players collaborate with teammates while competing with other players to obtain the highest-scoring (lowest-energy) models. In proof-of-concept tests, Foldit players—most of whom have little or no background in biochemistry—were able to solve protein structure refinement problems in which backbone rearrangement was necessary to correctly bury hydrophobic residues. Here we report Foldit player successes in real-world modeling problems with more complex deviations from native structures, leading to the solution of a long-standing protein crystal structure problem.” Living in the fucking future.
Tags: gaming science research problemsolving crowdsourcing
Keith Stuart: Do game reviewers really understand innovation? | Technology | guardian.co.uk – The ‘better sequel’ mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don’t want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I’m willing to blunder through if I’m going to get an experience I never had before. I felt the same about Killer 7 and Shenmue and the mobile game, Nom – flawed every one of them, but I don’t begrudge the creators a single second of the time I spent toiling with imperfections.
Tags: games criticism reviewing gamesjournalism
FightingFantasist: The British OSR Starts Here… – Right then, let’s out with it. Form ranks, King’s Colour to the fore. We don’t recognise much of the American-led OSR. The Brit experience looked something like this…
Tags: gaming rpgs britain history 1980s
COD XP: The Bug and the Windscreen Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – While nobody will say how much this all cost, one spokesman admits the two-day event has a budget comparable to a US television advertising campaign. A conservative estimate would put that at $15 million. So this is an event, a game, that is all about establishing hierarchy. Sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windscreen. COD: XP is a 28-acre, $15 million windscreen.
Tags: gamesindustry activision callofduty hierarchy
BMJ – A Blot on the Profession – Interesting BMJ article about institutionalised prejudice in the assessing of applications at a medical school.
Tags: discrimination prejudice institutionalracism medicine study statistics system:filetype:pdf system:media:document
Optimizing WordPress – Tips for Speed | Three Wise Men – Handy.
Tags: wordpress web
Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn’t Work | Economy | AlterNet – We have a choice: Americans can continue to accept large-scale unemployment as “natural” and permanent, even — a truly grotesque development — as a basic feature on a bipartisan road to “recovery” via austerity. Or we can follow the lead of the jobless young in the Arab Spring and of protestors beginning to demonstrate en masse in Europe. Even the newly minted proletarians of Ventura, California, sleeping in their cars, may decide that they have had enough of a political and economic order of things so bankrupt it can find no use for them at any price.
Tags: history usa unemployment reservearmyoflabor government publicworks protest uprising
The health reform Bill moves one step closer – Telegraph – It is worthwhile remembering that the Commonwealth Fund report last year placed the NHS top for equity, efficiency, safety, effectiveness and patient satisfaction. It was also cheaper than France, Germany and the US. That is not to say that there is not room for improvement. It seems utterly perverse, however, to open up our system to providers in other countries, such as American and German health-care companies, which, as shown by the Commonwealth Fund report, have a track record of providing a more expensive and inferior services in their own countries.

The Bill now passes to the House of Lords, where it will be debated. We can only hope that they have the sense and independence of mind to put the interests of the electorate first and put right this tragic wrong that has been done to our health-care system.
Tags: nhs britain healthcare privatisation coalition toryscum
How the Murdoch press uses misogyny to attack Julia Gillard – He’s right: News Limited is picking a tacky, misogynistic, and utterly transparent fight with the Prime Minister, and they’re doing it so that the very wealthiest people in the country can stay so. She may not be making the sort of moves that appeal to the left, or being the sort of person who appeals to the right, but her party won the election fair and square. There’s something else going on. I’ll put it bluntly: if Gillard were a man, the media landscape in Australia would be looking vastly different right now.
Tags: australia politics newsinternational media misogyny
Debate: GOP Crowd Cheers Dying Uninsured Man, Ben Bernanke Treason Claim | Mother Jones – A round-up of recent Tea Party / GOP scummery.
Tags: usa rightwingbullshit
A Legal Defense Fund for Climate Scientists | Mother Jones – A pair of scientists is trying to rally public support—and funding—to help other scientists fend off attacks from climate deniers. They’ve launched a legal defense fund to help individual scientists like Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann deal with the sizable legal fees that have resulted from attempts to gain access to their emails and other correspondence.
Tags: climatechange capitalism legalfunds science
Mad Men, and the new crop of retro sexist TV shows – In a show where everyone is a bigot, you end up liking some of the bigots. A smart show will use this against you; I’m of the opinion that Mad Men is a very smart show, luring you in with its beautiful surfaces and pretty people, then making you scream when you see the horror they take for granted. But very few shows have that sort of scalpel-like grace; in fact, this new breed looks to use mainly blunt implements, battering us relentlessly with awfulness toward women and other living things. And if people can watch a show as finely calibrated as Mad Men and come away with the message that it is somehow desirable to act like Roger Sterling, it’s foolish to think that these other shows aren’t attracting a viewership that is more turned on by the awfulness than the “critique.”
Tags: television criticism retro sexism racism
Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps) – Charlie’s Diary – My take on horror is that it’s a tone; you can add a tint of horror to any other genre. Horror goes well with SF (“Alien”), with fantasy, with crime, with thriller, with romance, with literary realism, with just about every flavour. It’s the monosodium glutamate of fiction. We add it because it’s a contrast-enhancer.
Tags: horror genre fiction writing criticism
Ex-MI5 chief says Tony Blair got it wrong…a lot | Liberal Conspiracy – The Guardian reports today on a speech yesterday by the former MI5 Chief Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller. In earlier lectures she criticised the invasion of Iraq, said the term “war on terror” was unhelpful and said 9/11 was “a crime, not an act of war”. Yesterday she said it was important “to try and reduce terrorism by talking to its advocates” and that many anti-terrorist laws passed by the Labour government were “unnecessary” and “unproductive”.
Tags: intelligence mi5 waronterror iraq britain foreignpolicy newlabour
NHS ‘watchdog’ will be a “bloated monster” | Liberal Conspiracy – Monitor – the government’s revamped organisation to regulate competition in the NHS – is set to become ‘a bloated bureaucratic monster’, Unite, the largest union in the country, has warned.
Unite said that Monitor’s running costs were set to soar from £72 million-a-year to £82 million – with a 600-strong staff being paid twice the national average wage of £26,000.
Unite said that ministers were creating a bloated, old fashioned bureaucracy which would be responsible for handing over lucrative NHS contracts to the ‘government’s friends’ in the private healthcare sector.
Tags: nhs privatisation britain corruption
Book Review: Consuming the Congo – WSJ.com – Those seeking to distill this morass into a less murky essence risk oversimplification. It is true that minerals have played a crucial enabling role in the conflict, making it easier to finance the fighting and at times forming a strong motive for individual actors. But politics, even in the Congo, cannot be reduced to profit maximization. Nor would removing minerals from the equation quell all of the fighting—some groups are fighting for more than money and some have diversified into timber, cannabis and palm oil.
Tags: resourceconflict conflictminerals congo DRC africa analysis
Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
Tags: identity goodness morality ethics
Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
Tags: identity goodness morality ethics

Linkfest: September 4th – September 11th

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

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

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

Linkfest: August 8th – August 21st

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

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

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

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

Linkfest: July 26th – August 7th

Shaun CG — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:50:10 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 26th through August 2nd:

House Boat – Stream of the new House Boat album.
Tags: music band stream
Tottenham: bloody good hiding revisited | Liberal Conspiracy – The argument will go that the way to change this state of affairs is through the democratic process rather than the petrol bomb. But such is the degree of disconnect between all the major parties and the street that the chances of positive engagement are next to zero. There is instead the recourse of riot.
The depressing thing is that nothing has changed since the violence in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth and, of course, Tottenham, that scarred the Thatcher years. New Labour had 13 years in which to address the multiple problems of areas that consistently return Labour MPs. Despite some useful initiatives, its essential commitment to neoliberalism meant that it was unable to do so effectively.
Tags: britain labourparty riots
LENIN’S TOMB: Tottenham calling – The Metropolitan Police shot dead a young man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday. As soon as the news emerged, albeit in the rather coy presentation of the television media, it was obvious that something would kick off. The circumstances of the killing are not entirely clear. It is known that the police were from an Operation Trident unit, which deals with gun crime ‘in the black community’ (because black people need extra special policing, you know). It is known that they pursued Mark Duggan while he was a passenger in a cab, stopped the cab and, during the arrest, shot him dead on the scene. From what I can gather, they seem to have pulled him out of the cab and shot him four times on the spot.
Tags: britain police racism riots statemurder
LENIN’S TOMB: Still not good enough, apparently – So, we have an astonishing spectacle. The political leadership of the dominant capitalist states is now trying to shred the public investment that has hitherto acted as a lifeline to their economies. They are talking about savagely reducing labour costs, ostensibly to compete with China or India. And they’re being urged on by the banks and business federations despite their awareness of the tremendous peril involved. This is actually going to undercut the conditions that led to their dominance in the first place. It’s as if they’ve given up on the idea of having a relatively stable economy with a productive, educated, healthy workforce, and have decided instead to jack up the absolute rate of exploitation, take as much as possible until the economy crashes again, and then raise the flood barriers, hoard their capital, let others take the pain, and allow governments to police the inevitable fall out.
Tags: us economics rulingclass exploitation capitalism
LENIN’S TOMB: A few observations on Israel’s protests – There have been mass protests and strikes in Israel recently. There’s even an attempt to replicate the Tahrir effect, with protest camps being set up in Jerusalem. Some on the Left are naturally very pessimistic about these events. After all, the Israeli left has very rarely shown any sign of wanting to seriously overcome the colonial/racial injustice at the heart of the Zionist project. The current protests show no sign of developing an anti-occupation stance, much less an anti-apartheid stance – far from it. For all sorts of reasons, the colonial issue is not even mentioned, even though it reaches right into the problems galvanising their protest.
Tags: israel palestine protest occupation racism colonialism
LENIN’S TOMB: The market and class power – I could kiss Oliver Letwin, if he weren’t so physically, intellectually, and morally repellent. Marxists could spend weeks, months and years trying to prove that the Tories, the party of the ruling class, are trying to restructure British capitalism in the interests of capital; that the extension of markets across the board is at least partly about improving the class power of employers; and that everything they say about trying to ‘free’ public sector workers from bureaucracy and central targets is so much cant when they actually mean to enslave them. Save your breath. Here’s our Oliver:
Tags: capitalism exploitation recession austeritymeasures toryscum
New Statesman – A summer of scapegoating – The Metropolitan Police have made their priorities extremely clear. Up to 200 officers have been devoted to hunting down students and anti-cuts activists, knocking on the doors of school pupils and arresting them for their part in demonstrations against education cutbacks that took place nine months ago. Thirty UK Uncut protesters are still facing charges for their part in a peaceful demonstration in Fortnum and Mason, footage from the police recordings of which shows some dangerous anarchists waving placards in the foyer and batting a beach ball over a stack of expensive cheese. Up to 300 activists have been arrested so far, in a joint operation that has already cost the taxpayer £3.65m. By contrast, only eight man-hours were spent in 2009 investigating the allegation that feral press barons were being permitted to run what amounted to a protection racket at the Met.
Tags: police britain protest crimininalisation
Tomorrow’s Promise « Electron Dance – Lucasfilm hired UNIX system magician Peter Langston to establish the Games Group. He was hired for more than just his technical skills, as Langston had created well-known games in the text-only UNIX environment (a notable example, which continues to evolve since its conception in 1972, is a title called Empire).
As Atari was expecting something special from the Lucasfilm brand, Langston put the Games Group on a research footing. He set out to find “boy wonders” who were “a little bit visionary” [1], eschewing experienced game programmers for talent that was more academic in nature. One of Langston’s first hires was David Fox, who had just co-written a book called Computer Animation Primer on Atari graphics techniques.
Tags: gamesindustry history lucasarts
I live sweat… – On Hevy Fest, branded festivals, and why I don’t go near them. (now with 200% more edits!)) – So, tomorrow marks the first day of Hevy Fest, a four day festival in Kent, apparently aimed at people who want to see live performances by punk and hardcore bands, but would prefer that experience to be mediated by barriers and branded stages.

Let me make one thing abundantly clear: I’m only focusing on Hevy Fest here because that’s the one plastered all over my Twitter feeds at the moment. Other uber-branded haircut conventions are available. If Warped Tour saw fit to do a UK date I’d be writing about that. I’m eternally thankful that Warped Tour, it’s misogynist hair bands, and it’s Army recruitment booths have mercifully remained on the other side of the Atlantic, along with the Tea Party, and Charlie Sheen’s fanbase. This is England. We’ve got all the tea parties we need.
Tags: livemusic festivals
Xbox creator: games have defeated Apple News – iPhone – Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – Apple hasn’t conquered the established console gaming industry, as some might have you believe, rather it’s gaming itself that has defeated the iPhone pioneer, according to Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley.
Tags: gaming gamesindustry technology
Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie Mckelvie – Stripp’d – Why should this be? Why should the gods that people the world of today be the same gods that peopled the world of our ancestors? Why must magic always come from the past when there is so much magic surrounding us right here and right now? Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s series Phonogram can be seen as an attempt to answer all of these questions.
Tags: mythology magic music comics criticism
We’re just not that kind of newspaper – FT.com – It is a well-worn observation that even respectable newspapers like to illustrate their coverage of A-level results day with pictures of delighted and pretty (usually blonde) girls. This year August 18 is the nervously awaited date when hundreds of thousands of English 18 year-olds get their exam results. But judging by the photos used by Fleet Street, one would be forgiven for thinking that boys (and brunettes) receive their results on another day.
Tags: uk media newspapers education yet-more-tawdry-depressing-degenerate-bullshit
rejectamentalist manifesto – Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?
Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.
Tags: islamophobia racism europe media
Remember That “Eurabian Civil War”? – So in most of Europe, there was no terrorism. And where there was terrorism, the trend line pointed down.
As for who’s responsible, forget Islamists. The overwhelming majority of the attacks- 237 of 294 – were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA.
Tags: terrorism europe islamophobia racism clashofcivilizations punditry
The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of “Terrorism” – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know — by definition — that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant — also by definition — that it was an act of Terrorism.
Tags: racism islamophobia mediabias medianarratives
LENIN’S TOMB: Mainstreaming fascism, again – Even setting aside the arguments about ‘no platform’, there is a perfectly excellent reason why the BBC should not host racists and fascists. They’re no bloody good at it. They always claim that they’re ‘exposing’ the fascists, showing them up, letting people know what they’re really all about. And they never deliver on that promise. Time after time, BNP and EDL members have been brought on television in what are often the most cosy circumstances and permitted to ventilate lies, misrepresentations, slanders and threats without serious challenge. [...] This thug, this violent racist at the head of a gang of violent racists and Nazis, is being normalised. His ideas are being communicated to mass audiences without serious rebuttal or challenge, and are thus being normalised – and this is happening in a situation where the EDL and the BNP and all the thugs in their periphery should be languishing in utter disgrace.
Tags: racism britain edl
LENIN’S TOMB: Ruling Britannia III – “I now want to move to a slightly more detailed argument about the media’s role and the position of the Murdoch clan within British capitalism.” Final piece in a three-part series exploring the British ruling class and the reproductive strategies of British capitalism.
Tags: britain capitalism history media analysis

Linkfest: July 18th – July 24th

Shaun CG — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:23:56 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 18th through July 24th:

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

Linkfest: July 11th – July 17th

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

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

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

Linkfest: July 4th – July 10th

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

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

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

Linkfest: May 30th – June 5th

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

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

Bissell, Braid, and the Use of Words | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling – This is a key passage in a much lengthier discussion that left me with increased respect for Braid and for the other things its creator was trying to say. Blow’s ideas, elicited and then elaborated by Bissell, made more sense to me than Blow in his own words.
And all at once there crystallized for me what I find problematic about Braid.
Tags: games writing indiegames art
Alice Launch Trailer Is Messed Up, Amazing | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – They are not wrong.
Tags: games trailer video
New Statesman – Human cost of welfare reform – There used to be a liberal consensus that it was the government’s responsibility to provide employment and ensure that those unable to work were entitled to a minimum standard of living. As the Welfare Reform Bill oozes unchallenged through the Commons, the real scandal is not that the government is lying through its teeth in order to justify its evisceration of the welfare state. The scandal is that no one in Westminster is prepared to make a moral case for welfare provision as the honest heart of social democracy.
Tags: employment work britain cuts coalition
LENIN’S TOMB: Class and common sense – The ‘Chavs’ phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a ‘pramface’, there a ‘Croydon facelift’, and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The ‘chav’ is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade’s repeated moral panics about the ‘underclass’: nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on.
Tags: chavs classconsciousness workingclass underclass bigotry neoliberalism britain
Punknews.org | David Combs (Spoonboy, Max Levine Ensemble) talks sexism in the punk scene – “In a punk context, I can say with certainty that the scenes I’ve visited that were the most gender inclusive have always been the most exciting and thriving music communities. There’s nothing to be gained for men in maintaining the boy’s club.” Excellent essay on sexism in punk. The comments even show some signs of brane which is pretty unusual for PunkNews.
Tags: sexism punk music scenes
The Keepers Of All Games Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – The National Archives, Kew: home to records, documents and other ephemera of cultural importance. It may be a short distance from the grime and bustle of Westminster, where Britain’s future is cut and shaped daily, but to enter its leafy grounds is to press pause on that work. Instead, it offers a chance to reflect upon and study the notable detritus of our past, a national Wikipedia made of bricks and mortar, where history is held and filed in neat, curated rows.
It’s here that Iain Simons and James Newman, co-founders of the National Videogame Archive project, have called a meeting to discuss their efforts to preserve the digital heritage of the interactive entertainment industry. It’s a poignant choice of venue. For all the great many things preserved at The National Archives, not one is a video game.
Tags: gaming history documentingthepast
Egypt: Gene Sharp Taught Us How To Revolt! · Global Voices – “Last February, Sheryl Stolberg of The New York Times wrote an article about the political science professor, Gene Sharp, whose ideas were credited by her as being an inspiration for the Egyptian revolution, as well as many other uprisings in the region.” Western media claiming credit for the Egyptian revolution? Never!
Tags: media revolution revolutionarytheory funny mockery
Twitter won’t bring down Ahmadinejad – Mike Madden – Salon.com – The crackdown by Iranian authorities on traditional journalism means Twitter and Facebook updates — at least the ones by people who are actually there — are providing a real service; the more widely the message is spread, the more the world can be outraged by the government’s oppressive reaction to the protests. Still, the Internet isn’t causing a revolution — it’s documenting it. That’s plenty to be proud of, without needing to exaggerate things in the name of solidarity. So keep the Tweets coming. Just don’t forget that the real action — and the real risk — isn’t happening anywhere near a computer.
Tags: socialmedia socialnetworks revolution activism iran democracy protest
5 Reasons Twitter Isn’t Actually Overthrowing Governments | Cracked.com – “During the recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing a comment about how important Twitter or Facebook was to the protesters. By the time a former national security advisor suggested nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize, you probably got the impression that social networking was saving the world. Sadly, the reality is that Twitter was about as important to the revolution as Bill Paxton was to the marines in Aliens. Why?” This whole ‘social media as a revolutionary tool’ thing has always rung false to me, so good to see more writers taking the myth apart…
Tags: socialnetworks revolution protest activism socialmedia twitter facebook
LENIN’S TOMB: Not saving the Liberals – Dan Hind makes some astute observations here, on the need to break the coalition before the next election. He argues for a strategy designed to split the Liberals, and in so doing save them from historical oblivion. A few observations, then.
Tags: liberaldemocrats neoliberalism economics britain politics strategy radicalism
Poll: everything more popular than Daily Mail | Liberal Conspiracy – When asked whether they regarded various things as “positive or negative aspects of Britain today”, the Daily Mail came out bottom, viewed less positively than “membership of the European Union”, “the TUC”, “ethnic and religious diversity”, “civil partnerships for gay couples” and “the BBC”. The NHS was viewed most positively, then the BBC, then the Royal Family.
Tags: polls statistics britain
I live sweat… – “…I needed an alternative to mainstream society – the space to be who i want to be.” Lou Hanman of Caves on strict gender norms and their impact on punk and hardcore. – It was really great to be asked by Andy to contribute to his series on sexism in punk. When he said he’d been trying to think of someone from a band in the UK punk scene, to write something from a UK point of view, it sounded like he couldn’t think of many people.
This makes me feel sad and reminded me of a question I recently answered for a zine – “What it’s like for a woman in punk – do I feel outnumbered?”
Tags: caves bristol punk sexism feminism
‘Call of Duty’ Targets a Monthly Fee – WSJ.com – “Consumers are used to paying $60 each for videogames that run on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now the publisher behind the industry’s biggest videogame franchise— “Call of Duty”—is about to find out whether it can get them to pay a monthly bill, too.” So, Activision are actually going for this. I am kind of hoping for egg on their faces.
Tags: videogames callofduty activision exploitation puregreed
ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS – Viceland Today – Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.
Tags: metal africa scenes botswana
Kill Screen – 5-10-15-20: Bryan Lee O’Malley – As you may know, we’ve partnered up with Pitchfork to do a variety of things, big and small. One of those is borrow! The 5-10-15-20 format is something they dreamed up more than two years ago to ask musicians about music that moved them at five-year intervals. We’re doing the same for videogame people. First up—Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, who’s been blessed with the trifecta of comic, film, and game for his cast of pugilistic outcasts.
Tags: bryanleeomalley scottpilgrim videogames biography