>>Nostalgia For Infinity » reviewing

Linkfest: November 15th – November 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:18:31 +0000

Del.icio.us links for November 15th - November 27th:

Game Logic vs Choice & Consequence | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – If the next five years of big-title gaming development can focus on closing that disparity of what we want to do in a world and what developers can afford to let us do, rather than pushing technology to add complexity to raw assets, we can end up with environments that are more interactive, manipulable, intelligent and alive, rather than just prettier. It’s important to empower us, as players, to do whatever we want in games and, essentially, to make the choices and options worthwhile by having the game react in the most interesting ways it can.
Tags: narrative gameplay storytelling emergentgameplay branchingnarratives criticism
Modern Warfare 3 Isn’t An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK) | Kotaku Australia – So this is what I ask of you, and of all videogame critics and players alike: stop using “freedom” as a metric for a game’s quality or, even worse, for a game’s gameness. Every game is a dance between player and code, but that doesn’t mean the player always gets to lead. A game that leads the player can be just as meaningful, significant, intelligent, stimulating or exhilarating as a game that lets the player do whatever they wish (within the games confines). The player is not the centre of the equation, and neither is the game. It’s the interrelationship between the player and the game that matters most.
Tags: games criticism narrative gameplay storytelling reviewing
Modern Warfare 3 Is ‘An Un-Game With A Core Of Nastiness’ | Kotaku Australia – I’ve just this minute finished the singleplayer campaign for Modern Warfare 3. It leaves a very bitter taste at its climax. But perhaps not the same bitter taste that flavours it throughout. It is an enormously high-achieving action FPS, on a scale like nothing before it, turned to 11. And it’s a bloodthirsty, bombastic and clumsy un-game, with a core of nastiness.
Tags: gaming narratives war pomposity jingoism ideology gameplay
Sexy Videogameland: Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common- Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting — “it’s just like a movie,” was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn’t a negative. We felt awed.The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.
Tags: cutscenes games history narrativedevices
Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Stories in Ulikely Places: SWAT 4 – SWAT 4 is a game that tells engaging stories without the schoolboy reliance on a grand overarching narrative. Who says games should be about a ten hour story and not ten one hour ones? It’s a game that intelligently combines scripted narrative (in the mission briefings and level layouts) with procedural content (in the random enemy positions and emergent scenarios), and presents it all through gameplay that reflects the both.
Tags: games narrative storytelling writing
LENIN’S TOMB: Occupy Tahrir Square – it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers. We needn’t deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play. They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation. But, where they have supported progressive political struggles – for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship – they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations. The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation. In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists. The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.
Tags: egypt protest strike occupation resistance middleeast islam revolutionaryanalysis
Passive Incoherence and How to #Occupy The Moral Highground « Ruthless Culture – The truth is that the Occupy movement stands for all 100 of these answers and none of them. The movement’s political power flows from its capacity to serve as a semantic sponge for the inarticulate rage that most people feel about the current economic and political climate. By refusing to elect leaders and put forward a binding manifesto, the Occupy movement appears incoherent but this incoherent simply strengthens its moral authority. No matter how informed you are and no matter what your precise economic and political views might be, you can look at the Occupy movement and see something for you. They are a raised fist and a raised fist has all the meaning in the world.
Tags: ows occupation resistance protest
LENIN’S TOMB: Egyptian revolution – Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests. Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria. Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, “huge crowds” are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir.
Tags: occupation resistance revolution egypt middleeast imperialism
Tiger Beatdown › What’s Your Slavery Footprint? – The United States Department of Labor has a list of items produced with the use of slave and child labour, but even it admits this list is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t address the use of slave and child labour in the United States, and some nations are overrepresented in the list, while others aren’t present at all. What it does highlight, however, is that slavery touches almost every consumer good imaginable, and that slaves tend to be people most vulnerable to exploitation, like women, indigenous populations, and people living in poverty.
Tags: slavery labour globalisation globalcapital ethics consumerism
Kill Screen – Review: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon – “As far as I can tell, aside from this insect’s uncanny ability to ruin a day spent lounging in the grass, there are two reasons we may find the above scenario appealing. The first, of course, is that ants are communists. Biologist E. O. Wilson was fond of vindicating Karl Marx’s belief that socialism works, by saying, “He just had the wrong species.” Sterilized worker ants are biologically hard-wired to live their lives in total interest of the colony because their existence cannot extend beyond the queen’s ability to reproduce. The lifestyle they promote is anathema to the kind we idealize and are genetically predisposed to.” Only Killscreen could write this in a review of an EDF game. :D
Tags: gaming criticism reviews edf

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: May 1st – May 8th

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

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

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

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

Linkfest: January 3rd – January 10th

Shaun CG — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:46:40 +0000

Del.icio.us links for January 3rd through January 10th:

Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival – The Big Picture – Boston.com – In frigid northeastern China, in the city of Harbin is hosting its 26th annual International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. Massive buildings built of ice from the frozen surface of the nearby Songhua River, large scale snow sculptures, ice slides, festival food and drinks can be found in several parks in the city. At night, visitors who endure the bitter cold will see the lights switched on, illuminating the sculptures from both inside and outside. This year’s festival opened yesterday, January 5th, and will remain open until some time in February. Collected here are several photos from just before the festival, and of the opening night.
Tags: photos sculpture amazing china cool
Giuliani: Terrorists Never Attacked When Bush Protected Us – Wha? Mister 9/11, Rudy Giuliani, went on Good Morning America this morning to bash President Obama for weakly handling his precious “war on terror.” Obama, you see, has been going about this all wrong—for one thing, he shouldn’t be giving terror suspects civilian trials or closing Guantanamo.
Tags: politics usa republicans bullshit
The top 20 most annoying book reviewer cliches and how to use them all in one meaningless review – “The purpose of reviewerspeak is to force every free-thinking book, movie, and art reviewer into the submissive parroting of only a handful of approved reviewer words to describe any item that may come their way. Call it laziness, call it the incessant demands of the ever-wakeful internet, call it fear of the wrath of Harold Bloom, but reviewers — particularly book reviewers — spew out these same, tired old clichés with the force and regularity of Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist.” I am guilty of a few of these.
Tags: books reviewing criticism writing language

Linkfest: June 15th – June 20th

Shaun CG — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:57:12 +0000

Del.icio.us links for June 15th through June 20th:

Neither a Contract Nor a Promise: Five Movements To Watch Out For – It’s been a while since we’ve had some red-hot literary-movement action. Part of the problem is that the declaration of such movements, schools, salons, moments, manifestoes, sets, etc, tends to be a post-facto thing. Someone–a participant or otherwise–notices a bunch of writers and artists doing some stuff through which the observer considers there to be some shared thread(s). Give it a name, and boom: performative taxonomy complete.
Tags: literature criticism funny chinamieville writing genre fiction
“God, that’s a merciless question”: China Mieville’s Interview From Weird Tales – Last year, I interviewed China Miéville for Weird Tales’ 85th anniversary issue. I’m posting the full interview now, on my blog, because I think it’s relatively unique, in that China was between books and the point of the interview was more about discussing “weird” fiction. So the emphasis is a little different than in some of his other interviews. And, because it was conducted via IM, there’s an interesting flow to the conversation. Besides, you gotta love an interview that mentions not only Cloverfield and Vin Diesel but the aesthetics of the weird, and ends in a face-off between reptiles and mammals.
Tags: fiction writing prose literature criticism chinamieville fantasy weird monsters deathoftheauthor politics
British Newspapers – 1800-1900 – One century of archived British newspapers.
Tags: history britain newspaper media UK resources reference archive
Diary of a Defiance: Iran un-Interrupted – This nation, as always, can take care of itself. It needs nothing but the active solidarity of ordinary people around the globe to be a witness to their struggles and demand from their media an accurate and comprehensive representation of their movement. So please, hands off Iran! No “democracy project,” no sanction, no threat, no military attack, no regime change.
Tags: Iran electoralpolitics democracy middleast
The Angry Arab News Service: Iranian developments – Typically, I support neither side in the Iranian situation: but I support those Iranians who are struggling against both sides. I have worried before about the impact of Ahmadinajad’s stupid rhetoric on the Iranian public attitudes toward the Palestinian question. I am in no way sympathetic to Moussavi. He is a man who suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy. When he was prime minister back in the 1980s, he presided over a regime far more oppressive than Ahmadinajad’s.
Tags: Iran electoralpolitics democracy solidarity middleeast
Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It. – Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud. They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The “Iran experts’” shock at Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.
Tags: Iran electoralpolitics electoralfraud middleeast democracy USA pundits
These are the birth pangs of Obama’s new regional order – “They have elected a Labour government,” a Savoy diner famously declared on the night of Britain’s election landslide in 1945. “The country will never stand for it.” From the evidence so far coming out of Iran, something similar seems to be happening on the streets of Tehran – and in the western capitals just as desperate to see the back of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Tags: Iran politics electoralpolitics electoralfraud middleeast USA democracy coups
What can the opposition win? – If the protest movement were to die down following a recount in which Mousavi won, the result would probably be a few blunted reforms coupled with a more aggressive neoliberal policy. If a dozen deaths are to mean anything, the movement must surely acquire an independent organisational backbone to sustain it when the inevitable disappointments come.
Tags: Iran electoralpolitics democracy middleeast solidarity
SchNEWS 679 – Well Unfair Reform – With unemployment in Britain passing the two million mark and steadily rising, the government is seemingly still clinging to a fantasy that they can boot everybody off benefits and into non-existent jobs. The Welfare Reform Bill received its first airing in the House Of Lords this Wednesday, proposing a dismantling of the welfare system on a scale Margaret Thatcher would be proud of if she still had any marbles left.
Tags: welfare britain newlabour policy government reform
Italian government to legalise vigilantes… – The Italian government has just issued a White paper on law and order that gives the go-ahead to private vigilante groups. While the paper states that such groups will have to sign up to a licensing scheme, it’s interesting to take a peek at those who are enthusiastically jumping at the opportunity.
Tags: vigilantes rightwing paramilitaries italy europe fascism oligarchiccapitalism stateterror silvioberlusconi
Andrew Humbled By Hungry Kids Of Hungary – Some good advice on reviewing music.
Tags: writing music reviewing musicjournalism
What’s in a booking fee? – Despite the best efforts of Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen, Ticketmaster still rakes in millions in ‘service fees’ for concert tickets – but where does all the money go?
Tags: music bands gigs livemusic corporategreed
Conversing with myself and another: DiS meets Future Of The Left – Future Of The Left’s Andy Falkous is a man with a lot to say. If you’ve seen their titanic live show, you’ll no doubt be aware of his sardonic wit; the between-song banter is something which – for better or worse – they’ve become renowned for, as well as putting on one heck of a rock show. But what, exactly, makes him tick?
Tags: music band interview futureoftheleft
Shut Up, Bands – because bands say the stupidest things.
Tags: bands music funny blog

Linkfest: March 16th

Shaun CG — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:04:50 +0000

Del.icio.us links for March 16th:

Interview: Alan Moore talks about Watchmen, Hollywood and pornography – Novelist, magician and “guru of the graphic novel” Alan Moore talks to Steve Rose about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography.
Sexy Videogameland: Tunes For Thought – I continue to believe that games have far more in common with music than with any other media, in terms of how the biz is experienced and discussed — regardless of how useful the film and game connection can sometimes be.
Nostalgia for the Future » Sleep Dealer – Trailer for a Mexican independent film. Looks like a cutting-edge post-cyberpunk SF tale.
Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? – Interactive Graphic – Nearly every occupation has the gap — the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job.
i wanted to be a junkie but Buffy wouldn’t let me « the m john harrison blog – “Urban fantasy: the domestication of a few images & behavioural tics which were barely unacceptable in the first place.” … “Every generation invents a threat posture which has to be acknowledged & made safe.”