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Linkfest: October 3rd – October 9th

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

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

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

Linkfest: September 12th – September 19th

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

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

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

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

Linkfest: May 30th – June 5th

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

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

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

Linkfest: February 7th – February 13th

Shaun CG — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:46 +0000

Del.icio.us links for February 7th through February 11th:

Katherine Butler: Europe’s betrayal of the Arab awakening – That European governments act in their own self-interest is not surprising. Mayhem fanning out from cities that are barely a time zone away is troubling. But it is even less in Europe’s interest to help perpetuate a regime that has no legitimacy, other than in Israel and among the autocracies of the Gulf. If Europe is even perceived to have helped sustain tyranny, albeit with a veneer of constitutional reform, then the temporary “stability” gained will be a hollow victory. The treachery could go a long way to radicalising many of the unemployed young people who have taken the risk of demanding a democratic process for themselves.
Tags: colonialism europe democracy imperialism eu egypt middleast
The west’s debt to Egypt | Ahmed Salah – Britain, and other western powers, must take a moral stand in support of the people of Egypt and their demand for the right to be free. This should not be mere diplomatic words: real tangible support should include measures to ensure power is passed to the people, and to put an end to the regime’s efforts to kill this revolution.
This is the least compensation our people deserve for the years of western support for these injustices. The money looted from Egypt should be returned and a democratic government should use it to resolve the huge problems this regime has been creating for decades. Dare we hope that these calls for support won’t be ignored again?
Tags: egypt revolution middleeast imperialism
Newzoo | UK National Gamers Survey – Gamer demographic statistics for the UK
Tags: gaming gamesindustry demographics statistics
The Entertainment Software Association – America’s entertainment software industry creates a wide array of computer and video games to meet the demands and tastes of audiences as diverse as our nation’s population. Today’s gamers include millions of Americans of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, more than two-thirds of all American households play games. This vast audience is fueling the growth of this multi-billion dollar industry and bringing jobs to communities across the nation.
Tags: gaming gamesindustry demographics statistics
Part 9: 1998: You’re either with Korn and Limp Bizkit, or you’re against them | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – I’ll never get Korn and Limp Bizkit. I’ll always consider nü-metal a symptom of the nihilism, self-absorption, and arrogance percolating in American culture in the late ’90s, before it flowered into something really ugly a few years later. I find nothing inspiring about this music. I feel that I am right about this. But I suspect this opinion is meaningless, because I’m just playing the role nü-metal wanted me to play. I was the adult now. The ’90s were almost over and they put me right back where I started, on the outside looking in.
Tags: numetal grunge 1990s music history
Robert Fisk: Week 3, day 16, and with every passing hour, the regime digs in deeper – Week three – day sixteen – lacks the romance and the promise of the Day of Rage and the great battles against the Egyptian Ministry of Interior goons and the moment, just over a week ago, when the army refused Mubarak’s orders to crush, quite literally, the people in the square. Will there be a week six or a day 32? Will the cameras still be there? Will the people? Will we? Yesterday proved our predictions wrong again. But they will have to remember that the iron fingernails of this regime have long ago grown into the sand, deeper than the pyramids, more powerful than ideology. We have not seen the last of this particular creature. Nor of its vengeance.
Tags: egypt protest revolution
New Left Project | The World Turned Upside Down – “What started in Egypt on January 25th quickly escalated from a Tunisia-inspired intifada (uprising) into a massive nation-wide revolution against the 30-year dictatorship of key US/Israeli client President Hosni Mubarak. Tens of thousands demonstrated on the streets of Cairo and in cities across the country. This culminated in the “Friday of Rage” on the 28th which resulted in comprehensive defeat of the riot police, exemplified by the already legendary Battle of the Qasr al Nile Bridge.”
NLP analysis.
Tags: egypt middleeast protest revolution
Short Sharp Science: Early success for universal flu vaccine – There are signs that one bid to create a universal flu vaccine that would provide protection against all strains of flu is working. And this one might pack some extra evolutionary aces up its sleeve.
Tags: medicine science health
Intense-Debate – Uninstalling, changing back author URLs and WordPress alternatives | Tech Snacks – Replacing intensedebate
Tags: wordpress blogging
Why Lefties need to change our language | Liberal Conspiracy – The radical left has a terrible image problem. It has little ability to communicate in a way that resonates with ‘ordinary’ people. As it has been swept aside by the onward march of the right, this is a problem that has only got worse.
So I want to set out a few ideas for how the left could improve its PR setup. Before I’m drowned in accusations of cockiness, these are just my suggestions. Please, add your own. And yes, I’m sure I’ve violated every single one. But this is how I think that I, and other lefties, can improve.
Tags: leftism pr image communication presentation engagement
The Arab Revolution’s effect on Saudis | Saudiwoman’s Weblog – With what’s going on right now in Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Tunis and Egypt, I get a lot of questions about how Saudis are taking it and what’s the reaction. The short answer is they are shocked and captivated but haven’t made up their minds about any of it.
Tags: middleeast saudiarabia
Robert Fisk: Cairo’s 50,000 street children were abused by this regime – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent – The cops shot 16-year-old Mariam in the back on 28 January, a live round fired from the roof of the Saida Zeinab police station in the slums of Cairo’s old city at the height of the government violence aimed at quelling the revolution, a pot shot of contempt by Mubarak’s forces for the homeless street children of Egypt.
Tags: egypt youth children crime
Our struggle for a new Egypt isn’t over yet | Mohammed Abbas – On the global front, we hope that this revolution will change many false perceptions. Governments who considered Mubarak a good friend and ally need to examine their role in cementing autocratic regimes which ruined millions of lives, and assess how to establish a positive and constructive relationship with the new Egypt. To the people and nations of the world, we have a humble and heartfelt message of gratitude. Your presence, good wishes and support was felt by us all and helped drive the revolution past the first hurdle towards a complete and total victory. Thank you.
Tags: egypt middleeast revolution democracy

Linkfest: August. Um, all of it.

Shaun CG — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:00:46 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 2nd through August 19th:

Fabula and Syuzhet – The terms fabula and syuzhet came from Russian formalism – an influential school of literary criticism from the 1910s to 1930s. Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history.
Tags: literarycriticism history formalism
Facts about civil and public services – PCS – While sections of the media and some politicians continue to try to blame the public sector for the country’s economic problems, the truth is that civil and public servants are as much the victims of the recession as other workers.To help challenge some of the common myths and misconceptions, we provide some facts and figures about public sector pay, pensions and jobs.
Tags: recession coalition publicspending
Does social security do nothing in reducing poverty? – One of the claims in Iain Duncan Smith’s Twenty-first Century Welfare really annoyed me when I first read it, and it has been niggling away at me ever since:
The welfare system has failed to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and poverty.
I suppose the reason I find this statement so annoying is that you come across it so often – after a century of social security, we still have poverty and inequality. So obviously social security/the welfare state is a failure.
This is a claim that fails to take into account what would happen if we didn’t have the welfare state.
Tags: welfare poverty classwar statistics analysis britain
Fist City on MySpace Music – Canadian garage-punk band.
Tags: band music
SKURVI on MySpace Music – Not very interesting punk rock from Brighton. Could be fun live though.
Tags: band music
7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) – “Let’s pretend for a moment that zombies are real (as if half of you weren’t already daydreaming about that very thing). Have you noticed how most zombie movies take place only after the apocalypse is in full-swing? By the time we join our survivors, the military and government are already wiped out, and none of the streets are safe.
There’s a reason the movie starts there, and not earlier. It’s because the early part, where we go from one zombie to millions, doesn’t make any sense. If you let the creeping buzzkill of logic into the zombie party, you realize the zombies would all be re-dead long before you even got a chance to fire up that chainsaw motorcycle you’ve been working on. Why?” Zombies: kinda crap.
Tags: zombies horror funny
Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers – If you’re a singer, you should be following Claudia Friedlander’s blog. The classically-trained, New York-based voice teacher provides sage advice not only for singers for all types, but also for musicians and people in general.
Although at least one of her students sings metal, Friedlander knows virtually nothing about it. I wondered what she would think of some of metal’s most classic male singers – the foundation of the artform. It’s rare to find someone who isn’t familiar with any of these singers. Her perspective would be a fresh one, free of cultural baggage. I sent her five completely unidentified songs. Her comments are below. I have also included initial reactions she sent me immediately upon hearing the singers.
Tags: singing vocals music metal interesting

Linkfest: June 14th – June 25th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:03:20 +0000

Del.icio.us links for June 14th through June 25th:

PUNKADIDDLE: Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time (1990-2005) – But of course it goes without saying that reviewers respond to the book they have read, not to the idea in their heads of the sort of people who like the book they have just read. Apart from me, I mean. Obviously when I review, I do so specifically to mock the value-systems and worth of people who read. People like you, sir. And you madam.
Tags: reviews criticism sensitivity
The unspeakable in full cahoots with the indefensible – Most public sector workers will have a pay freeze for three years, meaning a de facto pay cut by whatever the rate of inflation is (currently 3.5%). Average real term spending cuts will amount to 25% except in ringfenced spending in health and international aid. 25% is a huge reduction, even bigger than anticipated, or advertised. There are a few off-setting measures that would in theory protect the poorest – linking pensions to earnings, increasing child tax credits – but the net effect will be a severe squeeze on working class consumption.
Tags: economics recession coalition neoliberalism classwar
Emergent Gameplay: Deus Ex Made Me Part 2 – I ponder how incredibly difficult it would be to make a game like that for a major publisher today. Reasonably advanced for 2000, today it’s clear DX’s simple environments and primitive people enabled both its scope and its depth. Our standards have risen in some ways, but are they unequivocally the right ways? [...] Optimistic or simply naive, I hope that someday we will shed our destructive addiction to technology and production value as ends rather than as means. In the Deus Ex I play today, the physics aren’t too janky, the characters not too low-poly, the environments not too boxy to inhibit the experiences: of exploring, experimenting, and imagining. I strongly believe our success as a medium depends upon our ability to rediscover and cherish these very best qualities of games; to trust in the intelligence of our players, and challenge them to learn and grow. That was the golden age DX seemed to promise us, and it may yet come.
Tags: games gaming deusex ionstorm history
Mark Weisbrot, “How the Media Mislead the Public about Venezuela: The Case of Stephen Sackur’s Interview with Hugo Chávez” – Most of the western world thinks that Venezuela is some kind of dictatorship where Chávez has made people poorer. They have no idea why he has been re-elected twice, each time by a larger majority. This kind of reporting explains why they are so misinformed; sadly, it is all too typical.
Tags: journalism interviews media bias Venezuela hugochavez
School Daze – by Liel Leibovitz – In Israel’s fractured electoral system, the ultra-Orthodox parties still wield an obscene amount of power and influence, and the laws governing aid to unemployed students were designed to benefit their constituents, the majority of whom do not work and spend their days studying Torah. But a law, Jenny thought, was a law; it couldn’t discriminate between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. She decided to appeal to the Supreme Court.
This was in 2000. She heard nothing. Struggling, taking on odd jobs wherever she could find them, she managed to complete her studies and began a master’s degree in social work at the university. She was determined to spend her life helping women who suffered the misfortunes she had had to overcome. For a decade, no word came from the court.
Until this week. The discriminatory policy, the court finally ruled, was to be overturned immediately. The ultra-Orthodox politicians called it an “evil verdict,” and promised to resist.
Tags: israel judaism politics religion segregation conservatism democracy
Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer on MySpace Music – Gentlemanly English hip-hop, squire.
Tags: band music
Hightide Hotel on MySpace Music – Warm & friendly emo/indie in the vein of Snowing, or Mineral crossed with Grown Ups.
Tags: band music
By Surprise on MySpace Music – Rough-edged indie / punk rock band.
Tags: band music
Punknews.org | Gatorface – Stream of Gatorface’s new record.
Tags: band music
Philadelphia Grand Jury on MySpace Music – Touring with JoFo later in the year.
Tags: band music
KEROUAC on MySpace Music – “where will you drink when these wells run dry?”
Tags: band music
GALLOPS on MySpace Music – V. cool experimental electronic outfit, forthcoming release on Holy Roar.
Tags: band music
don kenn gallery – Awesome drawings of monsters on post-its.
Tags: art drawing sketch monsters
That’s How I Roll – A Scientific Analysis of Dice – It turns out that I *was* rolling more 1′s.
Tags: gaming studies
The politics of budget cuts – An analysis of the forthcoming battle over public spending cuts, including examination of the role of the Labour Party in the same.
Tags: britain politics recession publicspending cuts classwar
The capitalist calculation problem – In the real world, rational economic decision making is only possible to a limited extent due to the existence of an extensive non-market sphere, socialised public bureaucracies, national statistics agencies, offices for public planning and development, local authorities with oversight, etc etc. Tellingly, their behaviour becomes more irrational, wasteful and incompetent the more they are penetrated by marketised logic, the more they attempt to behave like corporations. They accumulate high overhead costs, duplicate capacity, fail to collect relevant information, and undermine the very rationalising aspects of service delivery that they are there to provide.
Tags: economics statistics calculation methodology capitalism
KOSMOCHLOR: Umberto Eco’s Rules for Writing (Well) – “After those lists of 10 rules for writing The Guardian recently published*, I thought Umberto Eco’s rules should be on line, too, in English–I haven’t found other translations so far…”
“The rules used to be 40, but four of them bore no meaning for non-Italian speakers. As the saying goes, the worst treason to the original text is literal translation; so mine isn’t. The square-bracketed notes are mine. I have also added a few links for the curious and the brave.”
I do think I’ve seen these before but, still good.
Tags: writingtips funny writing literature
Barbaric Document: a notorious story – China Mieville on H. P. Lovecraft.
Tags: literature racism prose art prejudice video
New Statesman – War of the words – “If science fiction is no longer a viable form, it is because the humanist assumptions that underpinned it are no longer credible even as fictions. The hybrid type of writing that has evolved in recent years is symptomatic. “Slipstream”, “cyberpunk” and “new weird” blend together influences as diverse as Arthur Machen and Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Williams and William S Burroughs. What these styles of writing have in common is an absence of politics. No world-changing project features in any of them.” I don’t feel this is a correct assertion, but it’s certainly a thought-provoking article.
Tags: books reviews politics utopia humanism hope sciencefiction

Linkfest: February 3rd – February 7th

Shaun CG — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:27:08 +0000

Del.icio.us links for February 3rd through February 7th:

The rest is noise: Throats’ guide to metal – “…we turned to Alex, Thom and Mark from Holy Roar’s newest noiseniks, Throats – who are well and truly flying the flag for rage and bile with their debut EP, Throats – for the lowdown on their favourite bands.”
Tags: metal music
The Encyclopedia Of Decency: The White House Tapes – (Rush transcript – Oval Office recorder 1.4 – start time 14.29, 1/23/10)RAHM EMMANUEL: You wanted to see me, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes, Rahm. Take a seat. We may have… (Oratically brilliant Presidential pause) …a rather significant problem.

EMMANUEL: Yes sir. Can I take it you’re referring to the column in today’s London Observer?
Tags: funny nickcohen satire decentism
British Newspapers Make Things Up | Psychology Today – In April 2008, I wrote that British journalists interpret “freedom of the press” to mean that they can make up anything they want and publish it as fact in British newspapers. Now another evolutionary psychologist has learned the lesson the hard way.
Tags: britain journalism newspapers lies news science media
Mass Effect 2 editorial « The Cynical Brit – When is an RPG, not an RPG? This is what it boils down to. There are certain people that believe Mass Effect 2 sacrificed too many RPG elements from its predecessor and became at best a fancy cover-shooter and at worst, a Gears of War rip-off. Hyperbole and enraged, impotent screaming aside, is there any merit what-so-ever to these accusations? Let’s take a look at the so-called ‘RPG elements’ of the original Mass Effect.
Tags: gaming rpgs masseffect2 review
The Myth of Meritocracy – Of course, there is no culture large or small which is able to hold a purely unbiased view of the people who participate in it. Gamer culture is no exception. Personal characteristics that count against you in the real world and its dominant, mainstream culture carry over into the virtual world. Gender is one of the largest biases which skew the meritocracy most gamers try to abide by, leading to a culture where hard work and practice pay off – but they pay off much less for some people.
Tags: gaming gender sexism
Overton window – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after its originator, Joe Overton, former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue.
Tags: politics psychology theory propaganda society marketing rhetoric
Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF – So here’s what I think. RaceFail was a good thing. In fact, I think it was a necessary thing — not just for me and other writers/fans of color, but for the SFF field as a whole. Bear with me; I’m going to have to put on my psychologist hat to explain this.
Tags: racefail09 race writing genre fandom sff
McGOP: The Virtues and Vices of Sameness – I’m not going to comment too much on the topline findings of the Daily Kos / Research 2000 poll, of Republican identifiers, which many others have written about extensively. What I found more striking, actually, were the cross-tabs. On just about every question, the results showed essentially no difference based on age, gender, race, or geography — once we’ve established that you’re a Republican, these differences seem to be rendered moot.
Tags: statistics analysis republicans usa rightwing conservatism
Daily Kos: State of the Nation – As I’ve mentioned before, I’m putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world. But I found myself making certain claims about Republicans that I didn’t know if they could be backed up. So I thought, “why don’t we ask them directly?” And so, this massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans, was born. The results are nothing short of startling.
Tags: usa republicans rightwingbullshit batshitcrazy
Kid Pix: The Early Years – Ben: Dad, what have you been doing upstairs?
Dad: Writing a short history of Kid Pix.
Ben: Do you really think anyone is going to want to read that?
Tags: software history computers childhood parenting education mac
Dirty Scavenger on MySpace Music – Dirty Scavenger are a grungy 3 piece band, based in England, performing songs written by Jo Maultby about her experiences of life on the streets, protesting, and other adventures. (She has a pretty awesome voice.)
Tags: band music
Brighton Pavilion: A Green leap forward? – John Harris voyages to the seaside seat where Caroline Lucas could become Britain’s first Green MP
Tags: politics electoralpolitics greenparty labourparty conservativeparty britain brighton sussex carolinelucas
No cops, no parks, halted economic activity: conservative paradise – We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs—home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family—has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. Unfortunately, it seems less paradise to have much-slashed government, and more stinky, ugly, boring, and scary.
Tags: taxes publicservices civicplanning business industry economics usa
LEATHERFACE on MySpace Music – New song from Sunderland’s finest!
Tags: band music hotdamn!

Linkfest: October 19th – January 3rd

Shaun CG — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:43:56 +0000

Del.icio.us links for October 19th through January 3rd… sorry, I forgot to do these posts for AGES AND AGES. It’s a huge morass of links o’ interest; sorry for not sorting them.

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World – “Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.”
Tags: satire comedy funny creationism youngearthcreationism religion
Aspects of a racist diatribe – What are the precise dimensions of a ‘culture’ that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as ‘culture of dependency’, ‘culture of blame’, ‘culture of violence’, etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or ‘culture’, rapists, robbers and murderers.
Tags: racism rightwing media journalism journalisticstandards hatespeech language
Dunning–Kruger effect – The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
Tags: psychology incompetence competence people studies
My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads – we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.
Tags: majorlabels musicindustry money accounting transparency bullshit riaa music recordlabels business
What Really Happened in Rwanda? – Halfway into our presentation, a military man in a green uniform stood up and interrupted. The Minister of Internal Affairs, he announced, took great exception to our findings. We were told that our passport numbers had been documented, that we were expected to leave the country the next day and that we would not be welcomed back into Rwanda — ever. Abruptly, our presentation was over, as was, it seemed, our fieldwork in Rwanda.
Tags: rwanda history research studies unpopular+conclusions africa ethnicity civilwar
What happened in Rwanda? – Some statistics and citations from a study of killings in Rwanda.
Tags: statistics rwanda history politics genocide distortion justice
The shade of Labourism – For the last decade or so, much of the far left at any rate has shared a perspective that there needed to be a drastic realignment on the left, and that the window for this was provided by disaffection with New Labour’s right-wing rule.
Tags: labourparty leftism farleft socialism politics UK britain activism strategy electoralpolitics
Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World. – “Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones.” Paul still wins at pulling out the best quotes.
Tags: peterwatts science academia peerreview climatechange globalwarming politics debate internet bullshit obfuscation
Eco-malthusianism – What is driving ‘climate change’ is a particular kind of economic activity, not population growth. Lifestyles are important too. Those sported by the richest tend to exploit and run down our environmental life support systems the hardest. The carbon footprint of a multi-billionaire philanthropist is certain to be dozens of times higher than that of an African labourer. To put it one way, Bill Gates will emit more CO2 jetting to conferences on population growth than a coltan miner in the DRC will in is entire lifespan. So maybe Bill and Melinda shouldn’t have any fucking kids. And, by the way, Bill needs that coltan miner, and the genocidal armies who ensure that the ore is delivered to western corporations such as Microsoft, so he shouldn’t really get lippy about population growth.
Tags: populationgrowth overpopulation climatechange philanthropism resources poverty classwar capitalism media
Matt Taibbi – Sarah Palin, WWE Star – It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.
Tags: politics personality sarahpalin republicanparty fringepolitics rightwingheroes partisanry
The Bitch is Back: Books: GQ – 2009′s most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault
Tags: objectivism aynrand USA article philosophy economics humour utopianism ideology
THE FLATLINERS on MySpace Music – Yes yes yes yes yes
Tags: band music hotdamn!
LENIN’S TOMB: The graveyard of the Russian empire – What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: “I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too…” Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the ‘Saur revolution’, support womens’ rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship. But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity.
Tags: history war invasion occupation USA USSR afghanistan communism capitalism
LENIN’S TOMB: A few points about that ‘age of austerity’ – The economic crisis has thrown that ideological hegemony into disarray. In a recent poll, only 11% of people questioned in 27 countries approved of the way that free market capitalism is working. While the majority of people feel that the system can still be saved and made to work with adequate reforms and redistribution of wealth, sizeable minorities say it is totally unworkable and “a different economic system is needed”. That minority is 20% in the UK – smaller than many others, but still a massive number of people questioning the basic running of society. That is the basis for a social movement. If that questioning, and the anger that underlies it, is not articulated by the left then it will be appropriated by the far right. Actually, forget ‘will’ – it is being appropriated by the far right.
Tags: politics leftwing rightwing reformism capitalism polls UK
Noam Chomsky – War, Peace, and Obama’s Nobel – The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned — not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama. The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
Tags: nobelprize politics war nuclearweapons IAEA USA iran afghanistan iraq india pakistan israel middleeast
Pseudo Nippon on MySpace Music – Weird Japanese pop/beat/experimental music, sounds like pretty good fun.
Tags: band music
OX_BOW on MySpace Music – Experimental avant-garde group combining grinding noise with minimalism and throttled screams.
Tags: band music
T ∑ ∑ T H on MySpace Music – Rad noisy punk ‘n spazz throbbing electro thing.
Tags: band music
A Lesson In The Abuse of Information Technology (The Menzingers) – Rad rad rad
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst – One of the awkward aspects of modern physics is that its two most successful fields, relativity and quantum mechanics, are fundamentally incompatible, as things happen in the quantum world that relativity says should not be possible. That’s left physicists looking for a way to harmonize the two, with two primary contenders: string theories, and quantum gravity theories. Testing either of them has been a bit challenging, but researchers have now managed to use a single, intensely powerful photon detected by the Fermi Telescope to significantly limit the number of viable quantum gravity theories.
Tags: astrophysics science research technology space stringtheory quantumtheory theoryofrelativity theory
Xerox develops silver ink to usher in new era of low cost printable electronics – Integrated circuits are made up of three components – a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric element – and currently are manufactured in costly silicon chip fabricating factories. Printable electronics promises to make the mass production of thin, cheap and flexible electronic circuits a reality, but researchers have been faced with the difficult challenge of developing conductive electronic inks that work in an ordinary, everyday environment. By creating a silver ink to print the conductor, Xerox has developed all three of the materials necessary for printing plastic circuits.
Tags: technology computing electronics futurism
Crisis and recovery: myths about China – “Any talk of global recovery needs to start by looking at two key places – China and the USA. The two countries are locked together in an unwilling but interdependent dance from which neither can escape. The USA is China’s largest trading partner with 21 percent of China’s exports going to the US and almost eight percent of its imports coming from there. In the US, China is now the USA’s number 1 trading partner, representing up to 19 percent of total trade vs Canada’s 14.5 percent.” Fascinating post about economic policy in China, the US and Europe, the effects of the recession upon strategies being followed, the dangers China’s elite face and what changes there might mean for the rest of the world.
Tags: economics growth development capitalism investment production exports politics china USA europe
Winterval watch: Here we go! – I had been a bit concerned, given that it’s getting towards the end of October. But here we are at last. Hooray! The first “Christmas is being called something else for fear of offending terrorists or something” quote is IN – and it’s been found by the BBC, of all people.
Tags: bullshit idiocy funny christmas holidays britain christianity are+people+really+this+thick?
Noam Chomsky on the Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire – Today, a conversation with one of the most important dissident intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky, on the global economic crisis, healthcare, the media, US foreign policy, the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resistance to American empire. Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, social critic, and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tags: noamchomsky politics USA geopolitics barackobama afghanistan war southamerica neoliberalism economics capitalism protectionism
Noam Chomsky on US Expansion of Afghan Occupation, the Uses of NATO, and What Obama Should Do in Israel-Palestine – To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.
Tags: noamchomsky politics USA strategy resourceconflict geopolitics barackobama afghanistan nato europe russia history isreal palestine
The Encyclopedia Of Decency: When I Called It “Human Rights Watch,” I Meant “Watch The Baddies, Not The Goodies” – As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join a militant wingnut circle-jerk with a mealy-mouthed and disingenuous hissy fit of epic proportions.
Tags: amazing funny humanrightswatch israel palestine bias bullshit warcrimes decency
thefuckinEDC on MySpace Music – Pretty rad histrionic punk/indie/emo outfit. Remind me of La Dispute.
Tags: band music
Laura Stevenson – 3 tracks from Laura Stevenson & the Cans. <3
Tags: band music
Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human Girl – We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.This isn’t science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.
Tags: corporatism law conservatism business rape
Exclusive Interview With Ashok Banker! « The World SF News Blog – Ashok Banker is the best-selling author of the Ramayana series, and a prolific novelist, short story writer, journalist and blogger. An outspoken critic of Western publishing, he has refused interviews in the past with the New York Times,Salon.com and even a feature cover for the Washington Post Book World, and so we were delighted that he’d agreed to this interview. Here, Banker speaks candidly to Charles Tan about his difficult childhood, his views on US and UK genre publishing, and his role as India’s “self-appointed poet laureate without a license.”
Tags: interview writer author genres genrebending genreghettoes
Twenty questions for the BNP – I’ve suggested a few issues Nick Griffin could be asked about when he appears on Question Time – have I missed anything?
Tags: bnp fascists racists politics interviews
How Safe is the HPV vaccine? – I’ve been reading a lot about the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine and the risk of serious side effects and even death. I thought I would seek out the numbers and put them in context. Especially given headlines claiming the HPV jab is “as deadly as the cancer” it seeks to prevent.
Tags: vaccinations diagram statistics medicine health information hpv
They don’t get it – It’s not just Jan who doesn’t get a lot of its. A lot of people don’t get a lot of its. But we should forgive them their ignorance, their lack of understanding of these new social media phenomena. They have been brought up in a didactic world of media, where newspapers tell you what to think and why to think it; not in a world where readers give back as good as they get, want to correct inaccuracies and don’t stand for being lied to.
Tags: media news newspapers printmedia dailymail homophobia prejudice racism commentary socialnetworks
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, can Carter-Ruck ban all mention of the sound? – Super-injunctions raise a worrying question: what else don’t we know? Hitler could be alive, and in negotiations to present the Radio 1 breakfast show
Tags: charliebrooker funny law censorship freedomofspeech UK corporations carter-ruck trafigura media news
The Fall Of Boss Koala on MySpace Music – Probably the best of the (all good) Scottish screamo / post-hardcore / indie bands I’ve listened to today. Hot damn indeed!
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Archive on MySpace Music – Electronica / trip-hop outfit from London.
Tags: band music
Kaddish on MySpace Music – There is a pattern to these Scottish screamo bands, which is that they are good. Kaddish are from Dundee!
Tags: band music
Black Channels on MySpace Music – Why, it’s another Glasgow screamo band! Also pretty damn good.
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Mesa Verde on MySpace Music – Rad screamo from Aberdeen!
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Carson Wells on MySpace Music – Aberdeen indie / post-punk / screamo band. Rad!
Tags: band music hotdamn!

Linkfest: September 20th – September 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:21:38 +0000

Del.icio.us links for September 20th through September 27th:

Revealed: the hidden army in UK prisons – The number of former servicemen in prison or on probation or parole is now more than double the total British deployment in Afghanistan, according to a new survey. An estimated 20,000 veterans are in the criminal justice system, with 8,500 behind bars, almost one in 10 of the prison population.
Tags: britain armedforces veterans crime prisons law imperialism
G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon – Only a few hundreds protesters took to the streets of Pittsburgh to mark the opening day of the G20 summit of world leaders, but the police were taking no chances.
Tags: police protest activism g20 USA technology
G20 Protests – One of the better comments I’ve seen about the repression of the G20 protesters points out that when the ‘Teabaggers’ inspired by Glenn Beck turned out to protest over healthcare reform, they could bring a gun and cite the second amendment, without being harrassed. G20 protesters get beaten up and exposed to top notch military technology if they just cite the first amendment.
Tags: police protest activism leftwing rightwing USA
LRB · Roy Mayall: Diary – According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false.
Tags: britain royalmail publicservices bureaucracy privatisation politics management lies statistics
There will be no ‘invasion’ from ‘jungle camps’ – At a moment when the Labour home secretary, Alan Johnson, expresses his “delight” at the pitiful sight of hundreds of French police rounding up mainly Afghan asylum seekers in a makeshift camp in Calais, it is time to defend the right to claim asylum in Britain. Johnson, in language that seems more concerned about the Daily Mail front page than the wording of the 1951 Geneva convention on asylum, pre-judges the issue by talking about protecting “genuine” refugees but insisting they should not be allowed to come to Britain to have their claims decided.
Tags: immigration britain france europe asylumseekers racism xenophobia rightwingbullshit war refugees imperialism
Blurred boundaries for teachers – Following the jailing this week of Helen Goddard, the teacher who had a sexual relationship with a pupil, Jon Henley looks at how texting, emailing and social networking sites are radically changing the teacher-pupil relationship
Tags: britain schools education teaching relationships profit
The very British values of John Enoch Powell – Enoch Powell is the subject of reactionary encomium wherever the issues of race, integration and post-colonial Britain arise. They say that he wasn’t a racist, just a decent English patriot who was saddened by the dilution of national identity. They say that he was right. They say that the current multicultural situation is intolerable and perverse, and that this was foreseen by Powell. ‘They’ talk an incredible amount of rubbish.
Tags: britain history racism patriotism xenophobia nationalism farright immigration rhetoric
Sabra and Shatila – To destroy the basis of Palestinian nationhood, Israel had to crush every manifestation of civil society, political and military development among the Palestinians living in border areas and miserable refugee camps, from 1949 onward. Repeated incursions into Jordan, including the bombing of Irbid, and the ethnic cleansing of one and a half million people from the Suez Canal area in 1970, was a logical corollary of this. The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan had been the Zionists’ key ally in the originary purge of 700,000 Palestinians that enabled the Israeli state to come into being.
Tags: israel palestine jordan lebanon middleeast politics genocide stateterror
Alas, poor Trotsky – When neoconservatives perish, do they share the same circle of hell as Leon Trotsky, or that of Joseph de Maistre? Is their sin one of revolutionary hubris, or militant reaction? It is a staple of both liberal and right-wing critics of neoconservatism that it is a mutation of Trotskyism, a ‘foreign’ revolutionary doctrine overthrowing classically American conservative discourse.
Tags: neoconservatism trotskyism politics ideology history
Wicca Lies (conclusion): An Unsupportable Pack of Lies – You see, there isn’t much actual magic in Wicca 101. There’s not much psychic development, just basic grounding and centering, maybe a few breathing exercises and some chants. There’s not much on group dynamics, on working with a group and managing the needs of such a group. And there’s certainly no push to encourage students to study primary source material. So given these deficits, it’s obvious that these should be the agenda for any classes beyond Wicca 101. However, there’s an intractable problem that any would-be Wicca 200 (and above) course developer faces. If such a class were to be in any way honest, then class 2, lesson 1, sentence 1 would have to be this: “OK, all of that stuff we taught you in Wicca 101? Forget it. None of it was true.”
Tags: wicca paganism religion spirituality belief politics history
Gin, servants and bloodlines for royalty’s Alf Garnett in a tiara – It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy – selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they emerge – produces warped and dim people and demands that we scrape before them. What’s a poor monarchist to do? They can only lavish a thick cream of adjectives – “dignity”, “charm”, “majesty” – over the Windsor family in the hope that some of us are fooled.
Tags: britain monarchy aristocracy class imperialism racism royalfamily
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam – Three years in the making, this feature documentary follows the progression of the Muslim Punk scene: from its imaginary inception in a novel written by a white-convert named Michael Muhammad Knight to a full-blown, real-life scene of Muslim punk bands and their fans.
Tags: punk music islam counterculture USA muslims rebellion
The Decade Of Custom, Made To Order Products – Me and DIY go way back. Through running Big Scary Monsters Records, a label born, bred and sustained through ‘do-it-yourself’ ethics and ideas, I’ve taught myself the ropes and learnt lessons the hard way over the past 7 or 8 years.
Tags: DIY music labels musicindustry business
Rory Henderson (American Steel) – American Steel are in full on support mode for their most recent Fat Wreck Chords release, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Tonight we bring you an interview between our own John Numbskull and American Steel’s Rory Henderson.
Tags: band music interview
‘Let Them Know – The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records’ by Various Artists – The compilation for the LA punk label’s 25th anniversary features some of the best in the genre covering each other’s songs, including one of Pennywise’s last recordings with their original lineup. (Full album stream here!)
Tags: music stream
Apologies, I Have None – A stream of the excellent London punk duo’s latest EP.
Tags: band music
Black Wine on MySpace Music – Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Videos – 80s-style US alt-rock band feat. ex-Ergs! guitarist.
Tags: band music
Burning Love on MySpace Music – Ex-Cursed! Dirty rock & roll combined with crushing hardcore.
Tags: band music hotdamn!
DIE EMERGENCY [2006-2009] on MySpace Music – Awesome ex-ANOTKTWR punk band.
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Why are we the naked ape? – RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. “No one supposes,” wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, “that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.”
Tags: evolution biology paleontology humanity history research studies theory
Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, and the Strange and Difficult Path of Feminist Dudes: Some Thoughts – Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent. It’s built around an organization – the titular Dollhouse – which erases volunteers’ personalities and memories and renders them childlike and passive, in order to implant them with new, built-to-order personalities custom made for wealthy clients who wish to order the “perfect” person for a specific job.
Tags: television review criticism analysis identity rape power control society politics josswhedon
Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, and the Strange and Difficult Path of Feminist Dudes: Some Thoughts – Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent. It’s built around an organization – the titular Dollhouse – which erases volunteers’ personalities and memories and renders them childlike and passive, in order to implant them with new, built-to-order personalities custom made for wealthy clients who wish to order the “perfect” person for a specific job.
Tags: television review criticism analysis identity rape power control society politics josswhedon
Asking the Wrong Questions: Alpha and Omega – Hey, you know what show could really use a bit more online discussion? Dollhouse! “Echo,” the original, unaired pilot for Joss Whedon’s by no means triumphant return to television, and “Epitaph One,” the shelved thirteenth episode of its first season, are now viewable through various and sundry means. Taken together, they paint a very different picture of the show from the one arising from the first season. Not simply because they are both well-written, engaging hours of television–hardly stellar on either count, but certainly head and shoulders above most of the season’s conventionally aired episodes–but because they illustrate how wide the gap is between the show Whedon envisioned and tried to create and the show he was allowed to make.
Tags: television criticism review analysis josswhedon rape identity
Strange Horizons: Two Views: Dollhouse, season one, reviewed by Bernadette Lynn Bosky and Gianduja Kiss – Dual review of season one of Dollhouse from Strange Horizons. Worth a read if you’re interested in the show.
Tags: television criticism review
5 Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy – “We all understand that action movies are cheesy escapism. After all, could one commando really take out a whole compound full of bad guys? Actually, yes. It turns out the history books are full of stories of soldiers doing things so badass they’d hesitate to put them into a film for fear of killing the realism. Like these five, for example.” Insane.
Tags: soldiers military war history heroism insane
Hark, a vagrant: 213 – Jules Verne <3 Edgar Allan Poe.
Tags: comics literature history funny

Linkfest: July 27th – August 3rd

Shaun CG — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:23:45 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 27th through August 3rd:

Do Manga Characters Look “White”? – I have given presentations on manga to Western audiences many times, but regardless of the particular themes of my talks, when the floor is opened up for discussion I am invariably asked the same question: “Why do all the characters look Caucasian?” You may have asked yourself the same question. [...] Considering the wide range of variation in the features of persons of both European and East Asian descent, and the fact that these line drawings fall nowhere remotely within that range, it seems odd to claim that such cartoons look “more like” one people than another, but I hope you will see by now that what is being discussed has nothing to do with objective anatomical reality, but is rather about signification.
Tags: art comics Japan manga anime race culture
Jello Biafra and on MySpace Music – Two songs from Jello’s new project – Jello Biafra & the Guantanamo School of Medicine.
Tags: band music hotdamn!
Dirty Projectors & The Curse Of Brooklyn’s Hipster Ephemera – “They’re this summer’s most talked about group in certain post and zip codes, but the Dirty Projectors stand for everything that’s wrong with the hipster mentality.” Good counter in comments, too.
Tags: band music hipsters article
Interview with Benny Horowitz (Gaslight Anthem) – Q: So it is hard to sometimes connect with the audience – when you have that separation?
A: It definitely is. But honestly it shouldn’t matter. If there are six kids watching you and their eyes are on you and they’re there to see you – those six kids should get the same shit that a thousand kids should get. That’s like – one of my mantras for playing and touring is something I read in Rollin’s Get in the Van. There was one show in particular – there were two or three kids in the audience and Rollins was fucking around with the show and he didn’t really take it seriously. I’m not sure who in the band, but somebody straight up threw him into the wall and yelled in his face “I don’t give a fuck how many people are here — they get everything. I don’t care if it’s one!“ And that’s true man.
Tags: music band interview thegaslightanthem
World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns – New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics.
Tags: climatechange globalwarming ecology environment statistics studies
The Elders of Hizbollah – “The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews, according to a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces soldiers.” Original story from liberal centre-right Israeli paper Ha’aretz.
Tags: Israel palestine racism occupation oppression colonialism holocoast nazis religion
Punknews.org | Frank Turner: Part 1 – First part of a neat little interview with Frank Turner.
Tags: band music interview
THE SINGULARITY on MySpace Music – I dig these guys, they play great gruff melodic punk rock. Awesome name too!
Tags: band music
Charlie Brooker says jokes are funny but picking them apart isn’t – There are countless types of joke, but only two ways of constructing them. They’re either improvised – downloaded from nowhere in the blink of an eye – or “solved” like puzzles. That’s why most topical gag writers also enjoy crosswords and Sudoku. Their job consists of unravelling brainteasers. It’s like appearing on Ready, Steady, Cook: you’re presented with a limited range of surprise ingredients and expected to whisk something up against an ever-ticking clock. And said ingredients are often dry and unappetising to begin with.
Tags: comedy humour analysis writing
UK Music Industry Economists Admit: Music Industry Getting Bigger, Not Smaller – “…despite all of the whining and complaining about the state of the music industry, some of the music industry’s own economists are admitting that the market is growing.” There are some provisos and possible arguments to note, but this is very interesting.
Tags: music musicindustry economics business
In China And India, Stronger Intellectual Property Is Unnecessary – China and India are countries of enormous internal economic differences, primarily stemming from productivity gaps. The technologies that enable world-class economic efficiency in some parts of China and India need to be diffused throughout the country, but the monopoly pricing associated with IPR limits the ability of the poor to access empowering technology.
Tags: intellectualproperty china india developingworld economics innovation
Reformist gains in Kurdish vote shake Iraq’s quiet north – The surprisingly strong showing by a reformist party in Kurdistan elections is shaking the power structure in what has long been the most stable part of Iraq.
Tags: iraq middleeast politics electoralpolitics