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

  Be warned. Copycats live among us.
  Tags: gaming business practices clones gamesindustry personality

• LENIN’S TOMB: Gangs of London – Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: “You might have 100 people in your gang – we have 32,000 people in our gang. It’s called the Metropolitan Police.”
  Tags: london police gangs britain violence crime corruption

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• David Mitchell | Give me Ryanair’s brazen villainy over the bogus compassion of BP | Comment is free | The Observer – This strategy led the Today programme’s John Humphrys to ask a silly question last week: “Isn’t the reality that so long as the oil companies are as greedy for profits and nothing else as they are, this problem is not going to go away?” he said, with reference to the issue of replacing oil with renewable energy. It’s silly because it only demonstrates Cynicism 1.0: he knows these corporations aren’t as eco-committed as they claim because they can still make money out of oil. But he implies that a time might come when plcs aren’t “greedy for profits and nothing else”. Cynicism 2.0 is realising that it won’t and that we can only properly harness the power and wealth of oil companies for developing sustainable energy sources by creating a business environment in which that activity is as profitable, or looks like it will become as profitable, as drilling for oil.
  Tags: environment ethics ryanair business comedy
• Tiger Beatdown › Unionbusting at Qantas Causes Global Travel Nightmares – Effectively, he was asking the government to crush the union for him, putting a decisive and definitive halt to worker demands for better conditions, fair pay, and long-term security for the airline. Joyce claimed that the airline has been under attack from the unions, and was under threat of closure without intervention, but it rang false from a man who was netting an absurd amount of money every year while callously locking workers out to get his way; and none of those over 7,000 workers would receive pay during the lockout. The Qantas lockout felt like the petulant action of a man who takes hostages first and asks questions later and indeed there were indicators it was retaliatory in nature:
  Tags: strikes australia classwar corporatism
• The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest – It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul’s cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.
  Tags: london economics history class democracy accountability protest
• Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke – No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. “Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”
  Tags: censorship internet china activism satire cartooning
• Tiger Beatdown › Who Exactly IS The 1%? – There’s considerable confusion circulating over who is in the top 1% in the United States, with a constant barrage of numbers that seem to shift depending on source, agenda, and timing. These are often used as derails, and it’s easy to derail with arguments about how to define the top 1% in the United States, because there are a number of different ways to look at it, all of which are valid. In all the discussion, people do generally seem to agree that the inequality is staggering, and there are a number of very colourful and stunning charts to point this out and argue about precisely how staggering it all is.
  Tags: politics ows classwar analysis
• Fest 10 Hangover: Friday – “Here is the start of the three part series recounting the weekend of Fest 10. It started Thursday at 5 pm, when we left. It would be an uncomfortable 20 hour drive, needless to say. Five people in a 4runner isn’t ideal, and it was hard to get any sleep. Every time I would wake up, I would think several hours had passed. It was usually anywhere from five minutes to an hour though. We stopped a few times for bathroom/food/coffee breaks.” Aside from this bit, I WISH I WAS THERE.
  Tags: punk music festival florida usa
• LENIN’S TOMB: OWS vs. the Octopus: On Making a Demand- The biggest and broadest social movement we have seen in this country since the anti-Vietnam war protests has begun. The anti-capitalist revolts in Seattle, the movements to establish and defend the rights of the undocumented in Arizona, the defense of organizing rights in Wisconsin, the robust and indignant response to the murder of unarmed black men by the Oakland Police Department have prepared the way, nationally, for this moment. Internationally, the revolutions in the Middle East have raised the flag of full transformation. These are our waypoints, our history, our archive of how we got here.The question we have asked ourselves, for so long now, has been: how far can they push us before something breaks?

  Something has broken. And re-formed. And billowed – radiant and heterogeneous – into existence.
  Tags: ows occupation protest democracy anticapitalism

• Local Culture – I want to write something about how Southampton is one of the most vital cities in Britain; but I can’t. In reality it has become another homogenized, identikit high-street town with Primark pavements and the trodden in gum of Tesco and Wetherspoons getting stuck to the bottom of our shoes. As a friend said to me recently: “these days ‘local culture’ means talking about the X-Factor in different accents”.
  Tags: punk zines localism community
• BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: THE GHOST OF THE COLONELS – The discussion of Greece today in the press and the political offices of Europe is almost completely ahistorical – everything is couched in utilitarian terms of economic management. I just think it is important to put the present crisis in a wider historical context. Above all the extraordinary history of the military dictatorship and the savage effects it had on the whole of Greek society.
  Tags: greece bbc history journalism democracy
• IGDA Writers Panel: Players vs. Characters, Part 1- October 26, 2011. It was time to attend another IGDA writers panel. Last year’s panel write-up on Environmental Narrative had been well-received, so I was encouraged to do a repeat performance this year.The panel’s theme this time around was “Players Vs Characters” – the games writer’s pocket incarnation of “What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object?”
  Tags: none

• A blunt critique of games criticism – I read Ben Abraham’s weekly summary of game criticism over at Critical Distance. Unlike a decade ago, there is now an absolute deluge of essays being written about games. I see reactions, counter reactions, and copious commentary. What is difficult to find is good writing that dreams of improving the art and craft of games.
  Tags: criticism writing gamedesign games gamecriticism
• who killed videogames? (a ghost story)- “What we’re saying,” the smaller man says, “is that the other guys are making things that people will fathom playing for three months if they play it for a week, and that we’re going to make a thing that people will consider playing for six months, if they play it for three days. We’ll generate a mathematically proofable engagement wheel. The players will come for the cute characters, and–”I’m not listening anymore. For all I care, he is probably going to say “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
  Tags: gamedesign videogames socialnetworks monetization socialgaming facebook zynga psychology manipulation evil
• Telling Tales: The Art of Videogame Stories in 2011 – In fact story telling in games is taking on more intricacy all the time. It now assumes – under the banner of “narrative design” – that there’s more to spinning a good yarn than lobbing some dialogue on top of an existing premise for conflict. This undertaking, the work of the narrative designer, is a pursuit that meshes writing and game design together in a more tightly woven form that we might previously have been used to. This is not simply slotting exposition between the action, but something more integral.
  Tags: videogames design gamedesign narrative storytelling
• The Personal Is Political – For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about—namely “therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” Another name for it is “personal” vs. “political” and it has other names, I suspect, as it has developed across the country. I haven’t gotten over to visit the New Orleans group yet, but I have been participating in groups in New York and Gainesville for more than a year. Both of these groups have been called “therapy” and “personal” groups by women who consider themselves “more political.” So I must speak about so-called therapy groups from my own experience.
  Tags: feminism politics essay gender personal quellism theory directaction
• Not Safe For Work – Although Chaud hadn’t intended to go public so early, he ran with it and threw open the doors of the Polymorphous Perversity blog. He invited the people of internet to send him private sexual material: nude images and personal fantasies. The images would be cropped and de-personified for in-game avatars; the fantasies would be used to add reality and depth to the game’s sexual tapestry. In May, Chaud’s mood was ebullient: “I had a very weird insight today: I treat my game like a girlfriend… Yeah, I know, weird. But the good thing is: it loves me back.” But his posts were infrequent and in June he made a quick remark that this special relationship was fast becoming dysfunctional
  Tags: sex gender perversity desire psychology sociology gaming gamedesign
• In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood – Well, hats off to the science fiction community, you have successfully goaded Margaret Atwood into producing a volume of SF criticism. This is a frankly bizarre state of affairs, something that just a couple of years ago I would have found impossible to believe, but Atwood’s introduction makes very clear that this is not an exaggeration.
  Tags: writing literature review sciencefiction margaretatwood
• Japanese noise-rock – The Japanese hardly invented the notion of blaring, atonal rock music, but for some reason, a number of its best-known practitioners hail from that friendly little island in the sea. There are a few speed bumps on the road to noise nirvana, however. Noise-rock, by its very nature, isn’t very popular; it consists of screeching, howling, searing blares of vocals, drums, guitars, and electronics, and few people can stand to listen to it. So its audience is pretty limited, no less so in Japan than in the English-speaking world. Many “Japanoise” albums are only available as imports, making them expensive and hard to find; the language barrier also ensures that it can be confusing to sort out one release from another. Music as alienating as this also has a built-in snob appeal, making it difficult to get good recommendations from fans who want to keep their club exclusive.
  Tags: music noise japan
• WE SPENT YESTERDAY CRYING IN THE ATHENS RIOTS – Tear gas. Fucking tear gas. I stink of it. My bomber jacket and hair are cracking from it; my nostrils are basically Dresden and Nagasaki. I hate tear gas. The Greek police though, they fucking love it. Today, in the centre of Athens, they responded to 100,000 plus protesters the way they usually do: nailing them with canisters of vile, noxious crap.
  Tags: greece athens protest directaction uprising youth police eyewitness
• Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and bloodshed – And this performative aspect can take on a whole cruel turn as well. We are supposed to “stay in character” all the time, play the role that was assigned to us and perform it well, with soul, with passion. If you were lucky enough to get the role of “recognized feminist blogger” or “recognized name within Social Justice”, you should not deviate from the scripts that “feminist and/ or Social Justice blogging” are supposed to entail. Your opinions should be carefully weighted because if you say something wrong, the pelting of rotten vegetables begins. That is, if the blogger makes a mistake, the audience of prosumers will begin the collective dance commonly known in blogging as the “call outs”.
  Tags: feminism blogging socialjustice echochamberdebate behaviour sociology internet
• It’s All For A Cause, You Know: Breast Cancer, Pinkwashing, and Objectification – October, as many readers are no doubt aware, is ‘breast cancer awareness’ month in the United States. The tide of pink-branded products, courtesy of a campaign started in the early 1990s by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, might have been a tipoff. Of course, pink branding is also spilling over into other months of the year—it really started to ramp up in September this year, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find some pink-branded products, or witty ‘breast cancer awareness’ slogans, at other months of the year as well.
  Tags: feminism cancer charity advertising branding

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

• LENIN’S TOMB: Racist vengeance in Libya – There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that “African” mercenaries acted as Qadhafi’s fifth column.
  Tags: libya racism revolution rebellion imperialism
• LENIN’S TOMB: A couple of recent police killings – A lot of people showed some very nasty streaks during the UK riots. Social media was groaning with almost Streicherite hate-mongering and calls for violent repression that a Ustashe would think twice about. Bring in the army! Water cannons! Plastic bullets! Live bullets! Shoot them all!  Massacre them!  Massacre them!  And now that’s all over and the state has regained control, and the explicit bloodthirst has receded back into its usual subterranean psychic flow, there’s no need to do anything rash.  The police will simply take whatever new repressive technologies are handed to them, add them to the repertoire and continue to maim and consume bodies, perhaps at a slightly higher rate.  The intensified social antagonisms will be resolved with the carefully scripted, bureaucratic application of violence.  A few hundred deaths, a few thousands injuries, a few bad headlines, a little more fear and resentment, more CCTV, and the retooling of the state for the age of austerity is complete.
  Tags: britain police power violence authority
• New Statesman – The anti-choice minority are being allowed to dictate policy – The battle for abortion rights in Britain has begun in earnest. This week, the small, vocal, venal group of Christian conservative lobbyists working in Westminster to roll back women’s right to reproductive choice has won a victory. The Department of Health has confirmed that abortion clinics will no longer be allowed to offer counselling to women presenting with crisis pregnancies, who may instead have to go to biased religious counsellors if they wish to receive advice and information on abortion. This has been done without any debate, circumventing the parliamentary process ahead of next week’s discussions on this and other anti-choice amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill.
  Tags: abortion britain religiouszealots
• SchNEWS 785 – 26th August 2011 – Atos Shrugged – This is the third website run by disabled activists to have been forced offline after heavy legal threats from Atos, without the company ever having to have their supposed evidence tested in court (or held up to ridicule more like). Some of the things the sensitive company has found unbearble in the past include subverted logos, the website name ‘AtosRegisterofShame’ and the phrase ‘Atos Kills’.
  The only thing to do with a bully is overwhelm them with sheer numbers. The company has gone through an extensive – and no doubt expensive – corporate rebranding; online activists have been responding by suggesting a more honest corporate identity
  Tags: atos corporatescum disability benefits privatisation
• Nothing To Lose « Electron Dance – I characterise each computer gaming decade in the following way:<br />
  1970s, Genesis – The first computer game businesses appear with Atari dominating<br />
  1980s, Democratisation – Home computers enable ordinary computer users to make their own games<br />
  1990s, Corporatisation – Profitable games require the polish and resources that only big business can afford<br />
  2000s, Revolution – Game development becomes cheaper and games break out of narrow genres in a big way
  Tags: gaming history gamesindustry
• Hark! A Vagrant’s Kate Beaton on History, Comics, and Crowded Elevators | The Hairpin – Kate Beaton is the artist and mastermind behind the web comic, Hark! A Vagrant. In it, she affectionately satirizes iconic figures from Queen Elizabeth to those wacky Fitzgeralds, winning her a spot in the hearts of history and lit nerds (and everyone) everywhere. Her second book, which will feature classic strips as well as new material, will be released by Drawn and Quarterly this fall. We caught up with Kate to ask her the tough questions.
  Tags: katebeaton webcomics art interview
• Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky | The Hairpin – Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky
  Tags: books funny
• Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary – (Actually, there are several reasons I’m not on Google Plus, nor on LinkedIn or Twitter or a bunch of other social networks, starting with “attractive nuisance” and moving on through “waste of time” and “I dislike the amount of spam you’re sending me” and ending in “thank you but I don’t want you to monetize my personal information”: but this is the stuff specific to Google Plus …)
  Tags: socialnetworks design realworlduse web2.0 google
• LENIN’S TOMB: No tears for Qadhafi; no cheers for NATO – I would strongly caution against getting carried away with the prospect of permanent revolution here.  I think the US and its allies will very quickly stabilise this situation.  There will be no analogue to ‘de-Baathification’.  The old state structures will be preserved and adapted, and the new government will enjoy considerable legitimacy provided it delivers on a basic menu of elections and political rights.  Moreover, the parties that win those elections will likely be the more pro-capitalist elements allied to the ruling class factions in the leadership of the transitional council.  The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime.
  Tags: libya proxywars middleeast africa
• Gamasutra – Features – Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics – Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation. We need to stop looking for answers, whether those answers would come from a technical innovation whose arrival only renews obsession with the next breakthrough, or from the final exploitation of the true nature of our medium by means of a historical discovery so obvious that it will become indisputable. The answers lie not in the past or the future, but in the present, which is all we will ever get in any case.
  Tags: gamedesign historicalaberrance
• Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds | Liberal Conspiracy – Each year, approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested and prosecuted in military courts, the majority on charges of throwing stones. These courts can and do imprison children as young as 12, even though Israeli civilian law prohibits the imprisoning of a child under 14 years of age.
  According to B’Tselem’s latest report, 60 per cent of the children jailed for stone throwing between 2005 and 2010 were aged 14 or under. Prison terms range from a few days to over a year. One 14-year-old boy was sentenced to 20 months, while nearly a third of minors aged 14-15 are locked up for four months or more.
  Tags: israel humanrights children youth
• Analyst Breaks Satire Barrier, Become Parody | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Pachter also attacked the idea of unions within game development, saying that people who earn a lot of money don’t need any protection, apparently because money provides them with a cloak of impenetrable entitlement: “I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair labor practices. Sweatshops should have unions but games studios, which tend to pay people a lot of money, shouldn’t. I just don’t think people who make over $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection cause they might have to work overtime.”
  Tags: employment unions gamesindustry bullshit
• What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then? | Liberal Conspiracy – I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.
  Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.
  That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?
  Tags: rightwingbullshit farright islamophobia racism terrorism britain
• Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement | Liberal Conspiracy – Islamic ideology had questions to answer after 7/7 and the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now.
  The Anders Breivik of this world do not emerge from nowhere, just as the English Defence Leagues of this world do not emerge from nowhere. They are fostered by an ideology legitimised by screaming tabloid headlines and the fear-mongering of politicians who really should know better.
  And unfortunately whilst Breivik’s actions were the actions of a nutter, he is not the only nutter out there.
  Tags: farright rightwingbullshit britain norway terrorism
• Deborah Cohen: Amy Winehouse’s battle with addiction « BMJ – Her celebrity status meant every painful twist in her chaotic lifestyle was played out in lurid detail in the press— blood soaked ballet pumps, arms razed with scratches, slumped in a corner at parties. Hardly glorification.
  I’d been to several festivals where she’d played—or tried to. Incoherent and stumbling, close-ups on large screens beamed out a small pale girl whose wrinkled skin belied her age.
  People turned, tutted, walked away. Some jeered and booed. Others stood and watched wide-eyed in horror. (Some wide-eyed from ingesting a similar cocktail of class As and booze—their drug consumption not having turned bad.) You have to question the wisdom of thrusting such a vulnerable person onto a stage—trial by rather hypocritical festival going crowd. Sympathy, one the whole, was notable by its absence.
  Tags: addiction drugs death britain popculture popstars
• Punknews.org | Hot Water Music: “Up To Nothing” – New HWM song. Mighty fine.
  Tags: band music
• Journalism; when is it justified for a writer to work for free? | Funambulism – The Controversial Bit: yesterday morning, I posted on Twitter the following: Hypothesis; people who write for free are using their secure financial situation as an unfair advantage. Any antitheses?
  Tags: journalism writing freelancing gamesjournalism
• искра/iskra: The Big Issue – So it seems David Cameron is to edit the next edition of the Big Issue.<br />
  This should come as a surprise to none. The Big Issue is perhaps one of the most foul and conservative institutions working in homelessness in the UK. Its liberarian fuckwittery is summed up exactly in its tagline, “Working Not Begging”.
  Tags: homelessness britain libertarianism bigissue

• 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