• 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

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

It’s a strange fish, it really is. It mixes the shakycam style of JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield (and umpteen other naturalistic films of that style post-Blair Witch Project), the talking heads expert opinion/interview approach of District 9 married to the educational style of a made-for-TV documentary, and the subject matter of fare like The X-Files and the interest in fake-moon-landing and MJ12-style conspiracy theories that exploded into popularity contemporaneously with that show. Stylistically its influences are more recent than its thoroughly 90s thematic material, but style always did go out of fashion quicker than substance. Overall it’s an an odd mish-mash of techniques and these components do work quite well.

The film stumbles a little in how it integrates these disparate styles, tending to clump them together. The film opens with an exciting fifteen minute exploration by independent filmmakers and conspiracy chasers Matt and Sonny (director Matthew Avant and producer Hal Mayor playing almost-themselves) of what appears to be a hidden underground base. It’s a thrilling sequence that sets the mood well. Subsequently the talking heads begin to pop up, alongside scenes where Matt and Sonny dabble with an odd device retrieved from the base and experience run-ins with a mysterious and intimidating group of G-men. The pace is maintained well enough here, too, with the growing sense of mystery proving compelling.

The middle of the film, alas, is choked with exposition; Matt and Sonny meet a man who claims to have escaped from the world’s masters’ base on the moon. He fills in all of the gaps in their knowledge and despite his character’s easy charm there’s a strong sense of the absurd about the information being conveyed, which detracts from the film. Previously the film had drip-fed most of its information, often in a tangential or unexpected way, as in 2004′s superb Primer.

The film does subsequently pick up its pace but, having laid most of its cards on the table, it never really regains the same level of suspense. The conclusion makes up for a lot of this, throwing two unexpected twists at the audience. The first, a plot twist, works nicely, particularly thanks to some skilful foreshadowing, but the second, a character twist, unfortunately recalls the antics of hapless z-movie Timecop and the increasingly tedious doppelganger antics of recent seasons of Fringe.

Happily the writing helps to lend this barmy and convoluted story a strong coherence that keeps the focus keen – infodumps aside. The presence in the film of the Church of Lunology – a growing religious cult supposedly formed by an immortal prophet who intends to fight the despotic efforts of the moon goverment – is presumably intended as a loose satire on Scientology, although it falls short of that through a lack of anything to say other than cults tend to believe in strange things and are often driven by charismatic but troubled leaders. Still, Lunopolis manages to include just about every major conspiracy motif without making them appear forced, and this lends it a sort of textural density that makes it a much more enjoyable experience than it might otherwise have been.

It’s not great SF, alas, despite its love affair with conspiracy mythos. Even a basic understanding of science or political history will have you picking at bobbles in the loose, woolly fabric of the film’s conceit. The best advice here is to switch off the part of your brain that would criticise things like adherence to Great Man Theory or magical moon crystals or time travel paradoxes.

The film’s core cast are another pleasant surprise, offering solid performances that do a great job of lending the film some of the gravitas its premise needs in order to function. The supporting cast is unfortunately weaker. The film features quite a few ‘heavies’ who convey little sense of threat, for example, and the film’s low budget is betrayed most obviously by the lack of wardrobe details like matching suits and standard-issue shades. These suited G-men look more like attendees at a small Californian business conference than agents of a shadowy world conspiracy.

All said Lunopolis is an entertaining piece of film and aside from the saggy Basil Exposition nougat at its centre is a reasonably well-paced film. It’s also thoroughly oddball whilst played dead straight, which is the best way the material could have been handled. If you’ve an affinity for the tall tales of famous conspiracy fare like Atlantis, faked moon landings, shadowy world governments and the like then you’ll find Lunopolis a lot of fun. You may have to work a little to maintain your suspension of disbelief, and you may laugh inappropriately at times, but it’s an independent film with plenty of ambition and the talent to execute most of what it attempts, and that earns it my respect.

Lunopolis website | Media Savant

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

Del.icio.us links for May 9th through May 29th:

• SchNEWS 773 – 27th May 2011 – No Spain, No Gain – We’ve got the Arab Spring – what about a European summer? It’s a week since thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators pitched up in central Madrid (see SchNEWS 772) – and revolution fever is spreading across Europe like nits in a playground. With the Spanish sit-in still going strong – and intending to remain until at least the 29th – street demonstrations have also hit Greece, Georgia, and, er, Bristol. Protests are spreading to Italy, France, Portugal, Austria even German – could it be that last year’s initial protests against austerity measures are maturing, one year on, into a broader demand for political reform?
  Tags: democracy protest recession europe
• I live sweat… – “My gender role, as defined by me, is an equal one. I can do anything a man can and I can’t imagine it any other way.” – Lisa Garelick from Kind of Like Records on women in the independent music industry. – Some people may argue that more women aren’t involved behind the scenes because there aren’t a lot of women into the music or who go to shows. I’d cite the bigger shows (Bouncing Souls, whatever passes as The Misfits these days) as a prime example where I’d look out at a vast crowd and see an even ratio of men to women scattered throughout. A few days later, I’d go to a DIY basement show and see those numbers tip drastically. I’d be one of three girls in the room and I would be so upset. Why was it that the other girls didn’t want to be a part of this? Was it me? Was it them? What was the problem?
  Tags: punk feminism empowerment diy
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor | Cracked.com – Cracked comedy, obv., but also a fair few reasons why being poor isn’t just a case of inadequate bootstrapping.
  Tags: poverty economics classwar richpoordisparity usa
• Kill Screen – From Chalks to Blocks: Minecraft in the Classroom – Joel Levin plays Minecraft. That would be an unremarkable fact, considering that he’s one of about two million people that play the indie sandbox game. But instead of constructing 1:1 replicas of the Starship Enterprise or functioning 16-bit computers, Joel has crafted an entire class curriculum in and around a Minecraft world. Levin documents his radical approach to teaching computer literacy at a private school at The Minecraft Teacher.
  Tags: minecraft education learning children
• LENIN’S TOMB: The Tories and (the ideology of) crime – The Tories, we know, are the party of order. They stand for decent, law-abiding tax-payers, and would like a little less solicitousness toward the criminals if you don’t mind. But not these days – or at least not at this precise moment, for our affairs are highly volatile. The Tories are allowing themselves to be out-flanked to their right by Labour on this issue. How could this be?
  Tags: recession crime liberals racism reactionaries tories
• Counterpunch | MySpace – Glossy Chicago pop-punk.
  Tags: band music
• THE HUMAN PROJECT | MySpace – Leeds punk band with a good sense of fun.
  Tags: none
• RADICUS | MySpace – Awesome Peterborough punk group, could be ones to watch!
  Tags: band music
• YouTube – Fucked Up – “David Comes To Life” – Trailer for Fucked Up’s forthcoming concept album.
  Tags: band music video
• Darko – Sweet throaty UK punk band.
  Tags: band music
• Laughing in the Face of – Birmingham punk on Lockjaw records.
  Tags: band music
• TURN AND RUN | MySpace – Another Peterborough hardcore band.
  Tags: band music
• WE ARE FICTION | MySpace – Peterborough rock band.
  Tags: band music
• WITHOUT FIRE | MySpace – UK pop punk band.
  Tags: band music
• The Spanish Tahrir – There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 2011 has come to mark a turning point: from the web to the street, from conversations around the kitchen table to mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from outrage to hope. Tens of thousands of people, ordinary citizens responding to a call that started and spread on the internet, have taken the streets with a clear and promising demand: they want a real democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people. They have been unequivocal in their denunciation of a political class that, since the beginning of the crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and obeying the dictates of the euphemistically called “markets”.
  Tags: spain protest cuts recession europe resistance directaction occupation
• The Bakersfield Sound | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Country music conjures up an unfortunate set of imagery for many: pick-up trucks, Confederate flags, mullets, and tallboys of Bud Lite for starters. The intelligentsia has historically found the genre easy and fun to ridicule, dismissing it as the soundtrack of ignorance—hillbilly idiocy in musical form. Country can be a daunting field for neophytes to get into because it brings so much cultural baggage with it, most of it negative, and because the homogeneous pabulum you hear on contemporary country radio doesn’t provide much incentive to go beyond the stereotypes or preconceptions.
  Tags: music country history
• War is Over Article | Eurogamer.net – Towards the end of this year, the PlayStation 3 will celebrate its fifth birthday, with the Xbox 360 blowing out six candles on its cake about a week later. By this stage in the lifespans of their predecessors, these consoles would already be well on the road to replacement – five years after the launch of PlayStation 2, Sony was talking openly about the PS3, while five years after the launch of Xbox, Xbox 360 was already on shelves.
  Tags: gaming hardware consoles
• Public sector pay – the myths exposed | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – According to a Policy Exchange report highlighted by the Telegraph, public sector workers are 40% better off than their private sector counterparts, if wages are taken on an hourly basis and pensions are included. This is a longstanding claim on the right, used to justify attacks on public sector pay and pensions. The problem is that neither the numbers, nor the narrative, are on the level.
  Tags: economics rightwingbullshit mythbusting pay employment
• Fucked Up for Spin – Drawing of Fucked Up for Spin magazine… totally awesome.
  Tags: band artwork fuckedup system:filetype:jpg system:media:image
• Punchbag Artists | Resolution Magazine – Now it’s no big surprise that on the internet anyone can be a critic. While professional reviews can be brutal and punishing, down at the anonymous, anarchic end of the scale, criticism can mutate into public humiliation and denouncement of not just a game but also its architects. APB is not an isolated case. Zombie Cow’s Privates is a “game for perverts”. Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV is a “faux 8-bit piece of crap.” 2K Marin’s in-development XCOM is “like wanting a puppy for your birthday but getting dogshit.”
  But what does this do to the developers on the receiving end?
  Tags: angryinternetmen criticism gamesjournalism
• Amateur Dramatics « Electron Dance – The audience of our game theatre, though, is not the same as that of literature and film. They are a vital piece of the theatrical puzzle, the ones who get to play the lead in the drama. The problem is that every player is different. We each have a different twist to our imagination, a different fantasy to fulfil.
  Tags: gaming videogames playeragency immersion
• I live sweat… – “…we fall woefully short in practice.” – Aaron Scott, aka. Attica! Attica!, on punk, sexism, and how men can help. – I am a straight male who loves punk music. By pure chance of my sexuality and gender, I am a person of immense privilege. I am also a member of the demographic that comprises the majority of the punk scene. I’m writing this in the hope that fellow members of our demographic will take a deeper consideration of our role in sexism within the scene. While we supposedly value ideals of inclusiveness and egalitarianism, we fall woefully short in practice. And we, as males who love punk music, can and should take an active part in dismantling sexist norms and coming closer to realizing those ideals.
  Tags: sexism punk maleprivilege
• I live sweat… – “I didn’t want to be the weird muslim kid, I wanted to be the weird punk kid.” Donna Ramone on Islamophobia in punk. – I didn’t want to be the weird muslim kid, I wanted to be the weird punk kid.
  Tags: muslims punk racism
• Screen Machine – “According to a lot of film writers Scott Pilgrim was made for one or all of the following - gamers, comic book fans but, worst of all, for misogynistic (if geekier inclined) males. The misogynistic tag is what troubled me the most because even though I call myself a feminist – I really liked Scott Pilgrim a lot. I loved the pacing, the gags and thought the soundtrack was stellar. So I had another look.” Good review looking back over the accusations of sexism & MPDG-ism in SPvTW.
  Tags: review criticism sexism feminism scottpilgrim
• YouTube – Tropes vs. Women: #1 The Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Good video on the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ cliche.
  Tags: film cinema writing characters cliches feminism
• China Miéville leads radical SF’s invasion of the mainstream – The radicalism inherent in the best science fiction is at the heart of Miéville’s work, and makes it perfect reading for our troubled times
  Tags: chinamieville sf fantasy radicalism
• Apple’s Chinese workers treated ‘inhumanely, like machines’ – An investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers has revealed the shocking human cost of producing the must-have Apple iPhones and iPads that are now ubiquitous in the west.
  Tags: technology capitalism manufacturing offshoring employment
• Were the Anti Iraq War Demonstrations of 2003 Too Good to Be True? by Paul Street | ZSpace – The marches of March 2003 were organized as much by the televised images of the boorish Bush and his loathsome, transparently arch-authoritarian Vice President (Darth Cheney) and Defense Secretary (Donald Rumsfeld)as by any sophisticated, impressive, in-place, and battle-steeled peace movement. And, as I worried at the beginning, it was all too partisan and Democratic, insufficiently able and/or willing to grasp the imperial and militaristic nature of the Democratic Party in connection with the Iraq War and more broadly. It was opposed not to much to criminal militarism as such as to the clumsy and boorish, translucently blatant cowboy imperialism of a Texas Republican president, leaving one to suspect that many off its members would be far less likely to be hitting the streets if the wars they claimed to oppose were being conducted by supposedly kinder and gentler imperialists like Al Gore or John F “Reporting for Duty” Kerry.
  Tags: electoralpolitics reformism war antiwar protest usa democrats liberalism
• Unusual software bug – Wikipedia – Unusual software bugs are a class of software bugs that are considered exceptionally difficult to understand and repair. There are several kinds, mostly named after scientists who discovered counterintuitive things.
  Tags: software testing
• Defend The Right To Protest – Defend the Right to Protest was launched in response to violent police tactics and arrests at the student protests of November and December 2010, with the support of activists, MPs, trade unionists, student groups and others. We campaign against police brutality, kettling and the use of violence against those who have a right to protest. We campaign to defend all those protestors who have been arrested, bailed or charged and are fighting to clear their names.
  Tags: protest activism police britain justice

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

• Wanker – Charlie’s Diary – Meanwhile, purely in the interests of asserting my freedom of expression, I think it would be jolly amusing if as a result of his censorious superinjunction Fred Goodwin somehow became the top google hit for the search term wanker.
  Tags: bankers fucktherich fredgoodwin
• Radical squatters: Taking back what’s theirs | Laurie Penny | Comment is free | The Guardian – What does a dictator’s house look like? In a leafy Hampstead cul-de-sac, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi owns a £10m mansion. The London base of the Libyan dictator’s son is held by a company based in the British Virgin Islands for tax reasons, and boasts a swimming pool, a private cinema – and, now, a dozen activists squatting in the living room.
  Tags: activism squatting
• Little Ease – Friend’s new band, sounding purty good.
  Tags: band music
• FT editorial: call City’s bluff to move abroad | Liberal Conspiracy – While everyone pays lip-service to the need for a safer system, not everyone’s commitment runs very deep. In recent months the financial sector has been lobbying ever more fiercely against structural change or higher capital requirements, arguing that the banks are pretty much safe as they are.
  Institutions have warned that further regulation would simply result in defections to less onerous jurisdictions. HSBC is talking to its shareholders about whether it should move its domicile to Hong Kong. Standard Chartered has hinted that it might do the same.
  Such threats should be faced down, not just because they are unreasonable but because they are of questionable credibility.
  Tags: finance business economics recession banks tax
• Duo launch the first Marxist iPhone app | Liberal Conspiracy – ‘Situationist’ connects you to random strangers to “help you snap out of the routine of contemporary capitalist life”. It is an application based on your geo-location. It alerts members to each other’s proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”.
  These situations vary from the friendly (“Compliment me on my haircut”) to the subversive (“Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station”).
  Tags: mobileapps technology socialmedia situationism
• New Statesman – Violence against women in Tahrir Square – Right now, thousands of Egyptian women who gathered to commemorate the centenary of International Women’s Day in the newly-liberated Tahrir Square are being assaulted, harassed and brutalised. Not by Mubarak’s thugs, but by the men who lately stood beside them as equals on the barricades. As I write, images and reports are coming through on Twitter from women fleeing male aggression in the symbolic heart of what is already being called the Arab Spring. Speak it aloud, let it ooze over your tongue: how bitter does it taste?
  Tags: revolution egypt feminism sexism patriarchy
• Five year retrospective – Charlie’s Diary – Five years ago I more or less finished writing “Halting State”, although it wasn’t published until mid-2007. Around that time, MMOs were getting an increasing amount of interest, and a startup forum/social site called GuildCafe commissioned me to write an article about the next 25 years.
  While I linked to it from my blog, the original article stayed on GuildCafe’s site, but GuildCafe have apparently been through some changes, and the original article has succumbed to link rot.
  So I’m reprinting it below. And my question for you is, what’ did I get wrong in 2007?
  Tags: gaming futurism sf prediction mooreslaw hardware computing
• BioWare RPG Cliche Chart – Heh.
  Tags: gaming gamesdesign cliche system:filetype:png system:media:image
• Bird Calls – s/t Tape | Art For Blind – Shouty indie punk band from Leeds.
  Tags: band music
• A Day In The Life Of Minecraft Creator Mojang | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Something occurred to me during my time with Mojang that I’d not thought about before. Minecraft taps into something on a really primal level – it’s about the very most basic human needs. It addresses the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, focusing on the need for homeostasis and shelter ahead of the subjects of most other games, that appear higher on Maslow’s pyramid. Friendship, family, respect, morality, problem solving and so on are the subjects on which most games will centre their narratives, even if they’re just about shooting soldiers in the face. But Minecraft gets at what lies underneath. Persson sees it so much more clearly. “If you base your game on reality, you don’t have to design – you can just copy.”
  Tags: gaming gamedesign philosophy psychology
• F A X 2 1 – Today, nobody believes in reality. Fiction remains stronger than fact. All stories are true – satires in particular. Imaginary heroes are more dependable than the other kind, living or dead. Whatever you need is unavailable, so choose the brighter new tomorrows that you want instead. FAX 21 is a muse (news) blog-fest of science fiction concepts and fantasy ideas for genre enthusiasts. Paradox free since next year!
  Tags: genre fiction sf fantasy slipstream meta pastiche

• Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process | World news | The Guardian – The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
  Tags: middleeast israel palestine fuckingunbelievable
• No Rock And Roll Fun: Something else to remember when the RIAA starts heading for the moral high ground – We hear a lot from the RIAA about stealing and right and wrong. It’s already pretty hard to stomach – what with the proof that the major labels rigged markets; the way they used their punishment for that as a way of offloading unwanted catalogue; the numerous artists who have proven in court that they were bounced into signing unfair contracts and so on.
  Add to this Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Junior, who has just been convicted of making millions of dollars through insider trading.
  Tags: musicindustry crooks riaa
• Did coal fires contribute to biggest extinction ever? – Ash from burning coalfields, sparked by massive volcanic eruptions, may have added to the volley of crises that led to the biggest extinction event in Earth’s history.
  Tags: history prehistory massextinction
• Met admits to lying about plain clothes police at G20 demo -
  Tags: police lies bullshit
• New Statesman – Bread, circuses and tea towels can’t stifle dissent – Over the next two and a half years, a full calendar of bread and circuses has been scheduled to keep the British public happy and obedient while the government puts its economic shock doctrine into effect. This year, it’s the Wedding of Mass Distraction; next year it’s the Diamond Jubilee and after that the Olympics. The timing is a gift for any government attempting to push through punitive and unpopular reforms – the chance to smother dissent with a dampened commemorative tea towel of pomp and circumstance. This is the highest function of what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle: not just to distract popular attention from the machinations of government, but artificially to invoke the imagery of a national consensus that doesn’t exist. In David Cameron’s Britain, respect for the popular mandate is in no way important. All that matters <br />
  is the iconography of public ritual, just enough to make everybody shut up and shout hurrah.
  Tags: situationism societyofspectacle politics bread&circuses britain
• bloggy foreigner: ranty mcrant – got asked by rock sound to do a little soapbox piece about the guardian article that informed its readers how rock, as a genre, was fading out. just a few sentences. got a bit high and went on a bit too long, i think in the end they used the last paragraph. preserved here for the small minority of people who like music-related ranty polemic
  Tags: music musicindustry journalism media
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  Tags: none
• Apple’s Latest ‘Innovation’ Is Turning Planned Obsolescence Into Planned Failure « iFixit Blog – We’re accustomed to planned obsolescence. New models come out every year—faster, shinier and just plain better. But before the iPhone, cell phones without user-replaceable batteries were almost unheard of. Apple realized that they could sell more phones if they built the phone with an integrated battery, prompting users to upgrade once the battery wore down. A phone isn’t very useful once you can’t take it away from the charger for more than an hour—which is guaranteed to happen with every iPhone. We’ve written extensively about Lithium-Ion batteries in the past—they’re wonderful technology, but they have a finite life of 300 to 500 cycles. If you’re like me and use up your battery completely every day, it’ll only last a year or so. Once the battery is worn down, it needs to be replaced. Until the iPhone, all consumer product designs included a way to replace consumables. Apple’s consumer-hostile approach has turned product design on its head.
  Tags: design technology plannedobsolescence apple
• Colonial CHROME – Ben’s website.
  Tags: 3dmodelling SF
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  Tags: none
• The brutal truth about Tunisia – Robert Fisk – The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn’t meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.
  Tags: tunisia middleeast revolt despotism democracy

• The 6 Most Insane Cities Ever Planned | Cracked.com – Crazy cities from history!
  Tags: cities urbanenvironments crazy history kooks
• PRONTOINTAVOLA – Menu for recommended Italian restaurant in Hove.
  Tags: food restaurants italian
• Rebel Frequencies: A King For Our Times – As folks know, Martin Luther King Day is coming up on Monday. This means two things. One: RF won’t be posting that day. And two: we are bound to go through the same sanitized run-around witnessed around this time every year, the one where the good doctor is re-hashed as a moderate, establishment-friendly preacher who somehow managed to win progress without struggle.
  Tags: history martinlutherking usa protest
• The ‘new normal’ of unemployment | Dean Baker – The fact that the overwhelming majority of economists in policy positions failed to see the signs of this disaster coming, and supported the policies that brought it on, did not seem to be a major concern for most of the economists at the convention. Instead, they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models.
  Tags: economics recession unemployment
• SchNEWS 754 – 14th January 2011 – Keep It Civil – Dishevelled cigar-chomping fatty Ken Clarke’s first foray into the world of swingeing cuts resulted in the surprisingly liberal plan to cut the prison population. In case anyone thought the old Tory rogue was going, err, rogue in the twilight of his career though, the ‘No’ Justice minister’s latest swipe with the spending sythe, is aimed squarely at the poor and unfortunate. Clarke’s plans to reform civil legal aid will leave hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people facing destitution, debt, homelessness and miscarriages of justice with no access to legal recourse.
  Tags: law uk britain cuts fuckingtoriesfuckofffuckoffdiediedie
• Vacuum of space no match for the mighty radish – IMAGINE this: you are on an outpost on Mars, and the pressurised greenhouse that is supplying your food and oxygen springs a leak. As its precious contents are exposed to the harsh vacuum of space, starvation beckons. But all is not lost if the leak can be plugged in time. It seems some plants can survive half an hour in a near-vacuum.
  Tags: plants science space
• Is first life-friendly exoplanet an ‘eyeball’? – space – 13 January 2011 – New Scientist – Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago examined the range of climates that Gliese 581 g might have and found one that would have a pool of water on one side, making it look like an eyeball. Even if further observations disprove the existence of Gliese 581 g, the work could help determine the habitability of exo-Earths still to be discovered.
  Tags: science planets
• “None of your damn business” – Bad Science – Sometimes something will go wrong with an academic paper, and it will need to be retracted: that’s entirely expected. What matters is how academic journals deal with problems when they arise.
  Tags: journalism studies science research retraction
• Radical Philosophy – Commentaries – The biggest cuts in absolute terms will be to welfare and council spending. Lower housing benefits will drive most of the poor out of the south of England by 2025. Reductions in social housing funding will triple the cost of rent for new council tenants. Libraries will be closed, street repairs stopped, and services for the young and elderly terminated. Already, the NHS, supposedly spared cuts, is feeling the strain with fewer staff working longer hours. Schools will have 40,000 fewer teachers. With tuition fees potentially rising to £9,000 a year, higher education is finished for many working-class children. Half a million jobs will be shed in the most unionized sector of the economy. We will have longer working lives, less money to live on, fewer educational opportunities, and less support when we are ill or unemployed.
  Tags: coalition cuts tories classwar neoliberalism thatcherism strategy history electoralpolitics
• 1996: Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the living dead | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – Sublime & Alice in Chains: bands characterised by being kept alive by the spirit of dead frontmen.
  Tags: music 1990s history biography
• New Statesman – Our disgusting appetite for anorexia chic – The anorexia industry, for which poor Caro was briefly the mascot, is cynical idolatry masquerading as public concern in order to sell magazines. The anorexic has become the famished saint of late-capitalist femininity: beautiful, vulnerable and prepared to risk everything to conform to society’s standards. Hers is a self-defeating rebellion against the sexist surveillance of patriarchal culture.
  Tags: sexism anorexia illness fashion eatingdisorders media
• Mark Steel: We owe it to bankers to feel their pain – Already Bankers’ Rights activist Lord Jones of HSBC has protested that bankers who received smaller bonuses last year received “not one jot of praise”. Isn’t that always the way? It was the same with Ronnie Biggs. Everyone goes on about the year he robbed a train but no one gives him credit for all the years he DIDN’T rob any trains. So is it any wonder the bankers have reverted and taken £7bn in bonuses this year? Because last year they received the much more frugal sum of £7bn, which may look the same but that doesn’t take into account the higher remorse rate and the punitively high apology index.
  Tags: satire funny banking bonuses
• Robert Fisk: The forgotten martyrdom of Algeria’s reporters – A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been sitting here above the Algiers Casbah. A French colleague of mine was murdered less than a mile away on 1 February 1994. In those days, four minutes was all we allowed ourselves in shops – five gave the watchers enough time to call the killers of the Islamic Armed Group – and lingering on the streets to read a newspaper was suicidal. But we could retreat at day’s end to the few heavily guarded hotels in this beautiful, morally damaged city. Algiers is safer now. But Tahar Djaout’s face brings it all back.
  Tags: journalism media reporters algeria
• The new spirit of armed combat – This is not the follow-up to the previous post that you may be awaiting, just an excursus on war stories. Those of you who are interested in SF/Fantasy may already have come across Adam Roberts’ attempt to give literary expression to the swarm, in New Model Army. In it, the reader is told about future social struggles waged by democratic armies, swarms organised by principles wholly different from those of traditional armies.
  Tags: sf swarm networks decentralisation anarchism war futurism
• The new spirit of social movements. – Mrs Thatcher’s jibes against the idea of class and society were met with differing degrees of mortified outrage at the time. But in the academia – including the humanities departments that the Thatcherites tended to disapprove of – the idea that such metanarratives were inherently absurd and oppressive was gaining currency.
  In practise, what tended to happen was that the metanarratives based on class, agency, power, social determinants, and so on, tended to be replaced by metanarratives based on informational flows, networks, autonomous processes, choice and flexibility. Sometimes this went under the heraldry of ‘postmodernism’, but not always. The emergence of ‘globalisation’ as the master-concept of the 1990s was accompanied by a blizzard of academic work on informationalism, the knowledge economy and so on. Signs and symbols, more than matter, were the determinants of life on earth. It’s relevant to stress how widespread this anti-materialist turn was, and in how many fields.
  Tags: society sociology culture history britain protest activism materialism networks technology futurism
• Public Women, Public Words: A … – Google Books – Angela Y. Davis – Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist (1981)
  Tags: racism rape sexualassault sociology studies
• New Statesman – The myth of the “myth” of gender equality – It’s time we all stopped obsessing over the glass ceiling, not because it doesn’t matter,but because there are tens of millions of women huddled in the basement, shut away from power and public concern. Focusing our attention on the glass ceiling distracts us from the fact that the basement is rapidly flooding, and the women who have to live there want more than “choice” – they want real control over their lives.
  Tags: feminism britain employment work exploitation

• Sound Performance – The UK’s leading CD and DVD Manufacturer – Eva Tomassi recommended these folks for CD/DVD/vinyl needs.
  Tags: music labels pressing
• How to start a review « Torque Control – Ten ways to open a review. Niall is writing about books but these ideas are applicable elsewhere too.
  Tags: reviews criticism writing
• Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury – I am behind the times with this one but it’s a pretty funny song.
  Tags: music video sf funny