So when Shellshock Rock director John T. Davis secured Arts Council funding to shoot a documentary of punk rock in Belfast, it is little surprise to learn that he was initially regarded with some suspicion. Fortunately he had already made some connections with the punk scene through previous work as a photographer and demonstrating his knowledge of music and his interest in 60s garage rock and proto-punk. In time he was accepted by the local scene and shot footage at a variety of Belfast shows and venues.

The production values of Shellshock Rock are low – I want to clarify this early on. Arts Council funding does not equate to large sums of money and surviving copies of this 50-minute documentary appear lower quality than, say, Another State of Mind (the ’84 tour documentary following Youth Brigade and Social Distortion on tour in their shitty yellow school bus). The budget was not great and the crew was, I imagine, John T. Davis plus whichever friendly sorts wanted to help him.

These limitations aside it’s a very interesting film. Two things leap out of it: firstly, its somewhat disconnected approach. Davies remains firmly behind the camera, letting his subjects speak for themselves, but his direction and editing also shifts back and forth, capturing not just Belfast’s punk rockers but also snapshots of Belfast itself at the time. This context helps ground the attitudes of the Belfast kids in something comprehensible. The second interesting aspect of the film is that it is deeply honest, focusing on the ordinary aspects of the Belfast scene rather than the extraordinary. This puts the film in direct contrast to documentaries like American Hardcore, which lionises obvious arseholes simply because they are ‘larger than life’ (I am looking at you, pre-clean up Jack Grisham) and spends an excessive amount of time focusing on the violence of the scene, or the miserable personality cult bullshit of The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle (the sort of total crap that leads today to John Lydon appearing in butter commercials yet still believing himself to be some kind of anti-establishment figure).

There is, in short, no pretence here, no belief that punk rockers are somehow ‘better’ than other people. Punks, astonishingly, are just people. Like most people, they band together out of common need and interests. Shellshock Rock is a very humanistic film. This is best exhibited by a series of clips where Davies shoots a few teenage punks interviewing members of the public to gain their thoughts on punk rockers. There are a couple of the usual horrified or dismissive sorts but the best of them is an older bloke who says something along the lines of (sorry – low video quality, ambient noise and a 70s Belfast accent prevent me from transcribing him accurately) never standing in the way of the young enjoying themselves: “it’s all part of the life, part of the game isn’t it, every way and any way.”

The film is also packed with video footage of assorted Belfast punk bands playing in practice rooms, bars and anywhere they can. This includes some of the popular bands of the time who would go on to become giants, such as Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones (it seems hard to imagine today that there was a time before Feargal Sharky became a total music industry prick), but also lesser-known bands such as the Outcasts and the Idiots alongside bands I’d never come across before such as Rudi, Protex and Rhesus Negative. The songs are a mixed bag, with some holding up well today thanks to strong character, energy and songwriting talent, whereas others are frankly kind of crappy. But that’s part of what you get when you go looking at old punk rock: some of these bands have members who haven’t even reached 16, most of them as using cheap and rubbish equipment, few have been taught how to play anything… they’re making it up as they go along. That’s punk rock. Even if you might cringe at the end result that sort of idealistic dedication deserves respect.

The sectarian conflict that riddled Belfast life of the time is discussed with a characteristically light touch. The punks who speak on film have a generally anti-establishment attitude that extends to a rejection of the divisions in Northern Irish society. One young man asks what 2,000 deaths have achieved, and why anyone wants a united Irelands or to be a part of the UK anyway. Generally speaking, the picture that emerges from Shellshock Rock is one of a scene which young people turn to out of disgust or disillusionment with whatever else surrounds their lives. A unity emerges from the shared experience of punk rock, and it doesn’t matter if your family are Catholic or Protestant.

I don’t want to draw too definitive a conclusion on Shellshock Rock because the documentary is deliberately broad and ambiguous enough to defy them. This makes for both an impressive and interesting piece of filmmaking as well as a unique historical record of the early days of Belfast punk rock.

[Sources: Shellshock Rock OST [unreleased], trakMARX: Brian Young on the film and his history with Davis and the 70s Belfast scene, Artists Space, Punk Music in Northern Ireland by Martin McLoone, Shellshock Rock: When Punk was Polite.]

The embedded film follows. A torrent is also available here though there aren’t many seeders. I do have an AVI of the film though at 600mb it’s too large for me to upload to Mediafire. Leave a comment if you want to get a hold of a copy via me: there may be other upload sites.

• New Statesman – How can we change the consensus? Carry on – In Britain, the shoots of this new consensus are being stomped down upon with panicked efficiency. Students and anti-cuts activists have gone nowhere, despite being diminished in number after police crackdowns and months of insidious hatemongering in the tabloid and broadsheet press. They continue to stage demonstrations, disruptions and occupations across the country whenever a government minister or public intellectual comes forward to excuse austerity measures and mass privatisation, and they continue to be punished for doing so. They have now been joined by hundreds of thousands of union members and organisers, who yesterday declared themselves “inspired by the students”.
  Tags: protest activism resistance persistence britain
• Why Do Christian Games Suck? « Electron Dance – Amusing & interesting video, good discussion in the comments.
  Tags: gaming christianity religion entertainment technology
• Pre-Owned Mercenary Article – 3DS | Eurogamer.net – Worse yet, the increasingly break-neck pace of internet news reporting – and the feedback loop it often turns into – has turned even some of the more wacky conspiracies into an odd kind of accepted wisdom. Monday’s left-of-field interpretation of an event becomes Tuesday’s “well, obviously!” comment on a thousand blogs (each just parroting the last, but none willing to admit it), and by Wednesday it’s enshrined on Wikipedia as historical fact.
  Tags: internet conspiracy preowned retail
• YouTube – Oh Yeah I Hadn’t Thought Of That – Tagged for future use.
  Tags: video funny
• Damian Abraham of Fucked Up | Music | Interview | The A.V. Club – Fucked Up came a long way from the barely heard 7-inches of its early days with the 2008 breakthrough full-length The Chemistry Of Common Life, an artful, furiously dense modern punk epic that famously boasted more than 70 tracks on some songs. When that record garnered rapturous praise from critics—particularly in Fucked Up’s home country, where Chemistry captured Canada’s Polaris Music Prize in 2009—the band decided it couldn’t possibly live up to all the hype it was suddenly receiving in the press. So why not finally embark on a project the members had long jokily discussed among themselves: a concept record set in a fictional British town during the original punk era, about a young factory worker named David who falls instantly in love with a political activist named Veronica, only to lose her just as suddenly in a tragic accident? If the idea bombed, it was probably just part of the inevitable decline from Chemistry, right?
  Tags: fuckedup music punkrock hardcore interview
• Looking For Gold: Imants – “There are these guideposts, these pillars, that don’t change. These people that remind you about what you used to feel like when you were a kid, they remind you about why it was all so exciting, and why it will always be exciting for someone. Imants was one of those people.”
  Tags: obituary punk hardcore music scenes
• Union Dissolution Day (Norway) « Michael Greenwell – Today is Union Dissolution Day in Norway.106 years ago today the people of Norway celebrated the ending of their union with Sweden (or at least, their parliament declared its end).
  This should serve as a warning to the people of Scotland because after the Union was dissolved Scandinavia in general and Norway in particular descended into the abyss. Scandinavia (and Norway in particular) is now synonymous worldwide with crime, poverty, pollution and monolingualism.
  Tags: scandinavia norway scotland history
• LENIN’S TOMB: The Great Moving On Up Show – Though couching its pitch in a sort of traditional bourgeois humanism, promising one-to-one attention and all-round education, the college is largely trading on a far less august form of cultural capital – viz. the reputation these celebs enjoy as purveyors of middlebrow ‘learning’. Essentially, with this profit-making institution, which leeches from the resources of the public sector in more ways than one, rich parents are offered the option of sending their duller children to a sort of cross between Hogwarts and International Celebrity Mastermind. It’s the Waterstones ’3 for 2′ book deal syndrome: if their money can’t get them into Oxbridge for some reason, then in this ‘Oxbridge of London’ rich students will consort with the people whose books Ma and Pa have picked up in Waterstones from the ’3 for the price of 2′ (cheapest free) table.
  Tags: education privatisation academia academies highereducation britain elites
• 6 Glitches That Accidentally Invented Modern Gaming | Cracked.com – Half of the art you enjoy every day is probably due to some happy accident. For instance, most of the tension in Jaws can be credited to the fact that the fake shark they were using was a mechanical nightmare and too ridiculous to show on screen. You wouldn’t think video games would be subject to this, however — a mistake in the code of a game would most likely just melt your Xbox (again) rather than invent some fun new game mechanic. Yet, some of the most iconic features of games can be credited to serendipity.
  Tags: gaming history serendipity accidents
• CERN physicists trap antihydrogen atoms for more than 16 minutes (w/ video) – Trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has become so routine that physicists are confident that they can soon begin experiments on this rare antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
  Tags: science physics antimatter
• Is Kickstarter the #3 U.S. Indie Graphic Novel Publisher? – You’ve probably heard of Kickstarter, the website where people post pitches for creative projects and invite the public to contribute money to fund those projects. You’ve probably heard that comics material is a popular category on Kickstarter. If someone told you that Kickstarter funded roughly the same amount of comics material as DC Comics’ Vertigo Imprint, you’d look at them like they were crazy.
  And you’d be wrong to do so.
  Tags: comics funding self-publishing independent
• Survey ranks NHS #1 for efficiency, #2 overall | Liberal Conspiracy – A major new report ranked the British NHS #1 for efficiency and effective care when compared to other developed countries.
  Tags: healthcare nhs britain cuts neoliberalism privatisation
• What is UltraViolet™ and why should you care? • The Register – UltraViolet is the most important media service you’ve probably never heard of – a grand plan for Hollywood to get everything right that the music business has got wrong.
  Tags: media streaming cloudcomputing futurism technology
• Heavily Engaged: Grognard Guilt | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Do you reckon the makers of wargames have any responsibility to the warriors they depict beyond ensuring uniforms, muzzle velocities and armour thicknesses are correct? Is there something morally dubious about finding relaxation and pleasure in simulations of situations in which relaxation and pleasure were impossible? Did the poor buggers whose names are engraved on our war memorials die so that we could re-enact the battles in which they perished over and over again?
  Tags: war gaming history
• ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ and A Few Notes on Class < PopMatters – My point is that though several game narratives exhibit an awareness of class, race, and the intersections of those two, the games themselves as systems display an exasperatingly predictable upper middle class image of social mobility, reliant upon fantasies of self-made wealth achieved at the expense of others and the local ecosystem.
  Tags: gaming gamedesign criticism fantasy class race
• Five myths about the Royal Mail sell-off planned this week | Liberal Conspiracy – On 9 June the Postal Services Bill will have its Third Reading in the House of Commons. It will then become law. The Bill will make it possible to sell off Royal Mail, its business, its large and valuable sorting offices in all our towns and cities, to whichever buyers come forward and to whoever is cleared by European Commission competition rules.
  The rush to privatise Royal Mail – shamefully begun by the last Government – is based on a set of facts which turn out to be opinions and misinformation.
  Tags: privatisation neoliberalism britain royalmail
• What’s inspired Will Wright’s next game? | Eurogamer.net – Will Wright is making a video game inspired by a short story by science fiction author Bruce Sterling.
  The game, which The Sims creator hopes to have up and running in a year, riffs off of the Sterling short story Maneki Neko.
  Tags: games sciencefiction brucesterling willwright
• Charlie Brooker: If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore – Like a runner who fetches us cans of drink when we’re thirsty, technology has left us hopelessly spoiled. We whine like disappointed emperors the moment it does anything other than pander to our every whim. If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore.
  Tags: entitlement whitewhine firstworldproblems internet

• 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

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

• Cuts Are Not The Cure on Vimeo – Good little video.
  Tags: video cuts recession tax britain
• New Statesman – It’s an education, all right – Anyone who believes that knowledge has no price should look away now. For the past month I’ve been involved with an investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches that revealed just how far the market has penetrated higher education. We discovered highly paid managerial elites running universities as factories where students are little more than customers shopping for degrees.
  Tags: education business corporatism marketforces university
• SchNEWS 766 – 8th April 2011 – Sick to the Gills – Last Friday (1st), the death of a 27-year-old Belgian man after a brutal police attack a week before sparked rioting across the small city of Gilly, near Charleroi. The cops’ violent outburst took place in broad daylight in the middle of the street, and was all because the man, called Sandro, was thought to have taken a Coke from a shop.
  Tags: police murder riot belgium
• New Statesman – Willetts has reminded us that social mobility is a scam – Today, children born to working-class parents are overwhelmingly likely to remain working class. Children who go to low-achieving schools usually end up in low-paying jobs, especially in former industrial towns. Wage repression has meant that it is now nearly impossible to raise a family on a single person’s wage, meaning that most couples with children are obliged to work two full-time jobs between them. Labour has become more precarious, and structural unemployment has continued to rise. Top jobs in politics, journalism, law, management, business and finance are held in trust for the sons and daughters of the wealthy, as opportunities go to those who can afford to work as unpaid interns or, increasingly, to pay for vital work experience. In fact, like nearly every other journalist under 35, the main reason I have this platform to talk to you now is that I’m a beneficiary of the private-school-and-intern system.
  Tags: socialmobility capitalism class society britain selfinterest horatioalger rhetoric
• Eve Online: Audience With The King Of Space | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Eve Online player The Mittani is the CEO of Goon Fleet, the single largest corporation in Eve Online, both loved and reviled for its practices which include teaching new recruits to scam other players. As of two weeks ago The Mittani was also voted in as the new Chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, the player-run and player-elected body that CCP liases with with the aim of improving the game. Prior to the announcement of the election results, I caught up with him at the Eve Fanfest for a mammoth interview. Click on through for talk of warfare, intrigue, hatred, propaganda, and why he says Eve Online is a terrible game.
  Tags: eveonline interview politics psychology espionage socialnetworks
• I live sweat… – “I think it’s something that’s hard to recognize if you don’t experience it yourself” Mariel Loveland of Candy Hearts on her experiences of sexism in the punk scene – From then on, the difference became clear. It’s the male band members who don’t take you seriously, and when you get upset with how you’re treated, ask you if you’re menstruating. It’s the promoters and planners who screw you, then call you a diva when you assert yourself.  It’s the kids who don’t talk to you after your set, but talk to your male bandmates because they assume you’re only there for show.  It’s the people who think you’re sleeping with the guitarist, the people who assume you’re queer,  or the journalists who mention your weight in reviews.  It’s every single time a producer has told me I can’t play guitar on my own record because “sweetie, you’re not a studio musician” or “sing it again, but naked.”
  Tags: sexism feminism misogyny punk hardcore
• 7 Psychotic Pieces of Relationship Advice from Cosmo – Quite enjoyed this article about the paranoia and revenge fantasy periodical, Cosmopolitan.
  Tags: magazines crazy media churnalism funny
• Exclusive Stream: Teenage Bottlerocket’s “Mutilate Me” – “Check out this exclusive stream of “Mutilate Me” from Teenage Bottlerocket’s Mutilate Me EP, out April 12 on Fat Wreck Chords.” Still love this band.
  Tags: band music
• LENIN’S TOMB: Springtime for NATO in Libya – Can I just risk a modest proposition? NATO, the CIA and the special forces belonging to the world’s imperialist states are not forces of progress in this world. Does anyone disagree with that? If not, then it follows as surely as night follows day that the successful cooptation of the Libyan revolution by NATO, the CIA and special forces is a victory for reaction. It’s no good hoping that the small, poorly armed, poorly trained militias of the east of Libya, who are now utterly dependent on external support, will somehow shake themselves free of such constraints once – if – they take power. Even if they eventually get some of the Libyan money that has been frozen by international banks, as UN Resolution 1973 promises, it will have come all too late to have been decisive.
  Tags: libya middleeast imperialism humanitarianintervention nato usa
• Amazon Cloud Drive elicits pearl-clutching and déjà vu | opensource.com – I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Reading Amazon’s announcement about the recent Cloud Drive music service, I immediately thought of quite a few other moments where the music industry provoked a sense of overwhelming… disappointment.
  They just don’t get it.
  They. You know, The Music Industry. Sony. Metallica. Lars Ulrich. The RIAA.
  What don’t they get?
  Tags: cloudcomputing musicindustry technology
• 7 Basic Things You Won’t Believe You’re All Doing Wrong | Cracked.com – If you’re like us, you might sometimes have a problem with complex tasks, like trying to drive an ambulance and send a text message at the same time. But hey, at least most of us have figured out the simplest things that get us through the day, right?
  Except, you know, some of the simple things we’ve done every day of our lives, like …
  Tags: lifehacks health
• Some Stuff About Open World Games | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there’s even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I’m interested. It’s an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It’s kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it’s to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment – and its openness – implies.
  Tags: openworldgames sandboxgames illusion gamedesign
• Sons Of Anarchy, season 1 – DVD review for VideoVista – [W]e rely upon certain visual, narrative and thematic cues to guide both our emotional reaction to the text and where it is that we should place our attention as an audience. Sometimes, these cues will be contained in the text in the form of stock characters, familiar tropes or storytelling techniques common to a particular genre but they can also exist outside of the text in the form of book jackets, trailers or where in the book shop we find the book.
  All of these cues forge links between the given text and our memories of other texts and so they nudge us into particular sets of reactions based upon the suggestion that ‘this text’ is a bit like ‘that one’.
  Tags: genre reading genresignalling narrativecues

• 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

• Punknews.org | The Traders – Album stream for this French melodic hardcore outfit. I dig!
  Tags: band album stream
• The Ghost Is Out There from Pedals by Rival Schools | Listening Party – New Rival Schools album stream.
  Tags: music stream
• Libyan Rebels Capture British SAS Unit — News from Antiwar.com – That’s what the British military learned today when, after a solid week of Libyan rebel leaders insisting that they didn’t want any foreign intervention in the ongoing efforts to oust long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi, they decided a great idea would be to dispatch a unit of their special forces, the SAS, to Benghazi to “offer help.”
  But the rebels’ troops spotted the plain clothes troops and hauled them away, worrying that public support would be damaged if they were seen as a Western-backed coup against Gadhafi, one of the chief reasons they have repeatedly spurned US and British offers of military help.
  Tags: libya middleeast revolution military humanitarianintervention
• No Rock And Roll Fun: Coca Cola to use music to target teens, destroy teeth, ultimately ruin music – So, the plan is to spume out the Coca Cola Music project. Coke and music go together like Ross and Rachel, in that it’s a relationship that nobody really quite believes works, but they keep returning to it because the people in charge don’t really have any other ideas and hope we all join in pretending it’s a good thing and a plausible pairing.
  Coke’s previous run outs in music included The Moment When Everyone Realised Jack White Was Just A Hack For Hire; that Robin Beck single; the expensive flop of MyCokeMusic and setting Michael Jackson’s hair on fire.
  Tags: corporations musicindustry bullshit funny
• Gaming, rape culture, and how I stopped reading Penny Arcade – Lifestyle Features – Tea-bagging is common, and it’s not about homosexuality — it’s about power. Shoving your virtual jock-strap in your powerless enemy’s face is just a way to assert dominance. So tell me again, my fellow gamers, what does the word “rape” mean when you use it? You’ve managed to completely divorce the word from its actual definition? Right.
  Tags: rape respect gaming power analysis
• Seeing Like A State: Why Strategy Games Make Us Think and Behave Like Brutal Psychopaths | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – What all of these games have in common is a tendency to make even the most liberal of gamers behave like brutal tyrants. For the player of strategy games, little computer people serve only as a means to an end. We do not care about whether or not our little computer people are happy, we only care about whether or not they are productive. If they are not productive then they are in our way and little computer people who get in the way of their players tend to wind up brutalised, enslaved and dead.
  Tags: gaming strategy politics psychology
• BC ruminates – Achievements – The Badger Commander – At first, Achievements weren’t important to me. Whether I got them or not did not matter, that all changed when I hit around the 8 thousand mark and discovered that a co-worker had 11.
  It became a healthy competition between friends but quickly devolved into an unsavoury obsession for me. It took 2 years, 100 games and 30 thousand achievement points for me to finally realise that I was tired of constantly chasing those meaningless points.
  Tags: gaming achievements
• The revival of imperialist ideology – Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, those ambassadors security experts, all seem to worry about what will happen in the ‘vacuum’ (which, significantly, depicts Libyan people, the revolutionaries who are bravely undertaking this historic struggle, as a mere absence). Are Arabs ready for democracy? Will the ‘disorder’ allow ‘al-Qaeda’ to ‘reappear’? What will happen to oil prices? And this seems to be the point. It is precisely because they know that Qadhafi will not survive, and are desperately worried about what sort of independent political forces may follow (it has nothing to do with ‘al-Qaeda’), that they are anxious to ‘help’.
  Tags: imperialism humanitarianintervention libya
• Richard Peppiatt’s letter to Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond | Media | guardian.co.uk – “Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt resigns in protest at what he says is the newspaper’s anti-Muslim propaganda” Hell of a way to quit.
  Tags: journalism journalisticstandards racism islamophobia
• Clarissa Explains It All | TV | Memory Wipe | The A.V. Club – “The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth-oriented entertainments of the not-too-distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half-forgotten toys. YouTube compilations of long-lost TV-show intros. Countless blogs playing “Remember when?” with movies and videogames whose rose-colored recollections aren’t always properly earned. With Memory Wipe, The A.V. Club takes a look back at some of our formative favorites with clearer eyes and asks that all-important question: Were they really that great to begin with?” I used to love this show. Great retrospective!
  Tags: television history
• YouTube – …Of Death – This Shit Is Fucked – Ridiculous screamo song.
  Tags: screamo skramz music video
• The Steez of Skramz – Screamo is dead. It is the Fiddler’s Green of liberal arts college dropouts who now screenprint merch for Warped Tour side-stage bands and smell like their cats. Where the sky is the color of test presses, the pots of vegan chili are never-ending, and apoplexy, histrionics and veiled earnestness mix to create that ambrosia of nostalgia: skramz. A place where all conversations begin “Have you heard (Funeral Diner, The Kodan Armada, Yaphet Kotto)?” and the answer is always, “Oh man, I love ‘em! Do you have their split with (Welcome the Plague Year, Gospel, Envy)?”
  Over the achingly wistful yet exhilarative hours of reminiscence, you’ll find you’ve mated for life, like a male anglerfish latching on to a female to become a living sperm sac (you’re both the sperm sac, forever supplying the other with Mediafire links to discographies of broken-up and long-inconsequential acts).
  Tags: screamo skramz emo music history funny
• Costumes: the Wearable Dialog • Indistinguishable From Magic – I mentioned before some of my favorite character designs in the world of comics and have been meaning to tackle this subject again.  I came to realize, however, that “character design” is itself a fairly massive subject, and that it would be best to break the topic down into separate installments.  Today, true believers, we’re going to talk about outfits and costumes, which are often a pivotal part of a character’s design.
  Tags: comics art design
• Figures: They Speak For Themselves (mildly NSFW) • Indistinguishable From Magic – Continued from the last article about costume design, today we’re going to talk about those wacky things you hide underneath clothing.  Figure drawing is a pivotal tool to any artist, but being able to effectively render humans and creatures is only part of the equation.  Even if your draftsmanship is solid, you won’t get far if your designs are uninteresting.  Effective and dynamic figures are the cornerstone of having compelling characters in pretty much any comic.
  Tags: comics art design
• Angry at the banks? Of course we are! | Bill Nighy – I’m an ambassador for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which calls for a tiny tax of just 0.05% on every casino-style financial transaction in order to help poor people, reverse public service cuts at home and abroad, and tackle climate change. In this role I’ve seen how people’s sense of fairness has been stretched to the limits by the continued spectacle of huge pay increases and bonuses in big companies while ordinary people suffer.
  Tags: banks progressivetaxation equality uk
• Concerned neighbours warn against foreign intervention in Libya | World news | The Guardian – Arab states have warned against any foreign intervention in the Libyan crisis and pledged to support the unity of the country even as they struggle with the implications of the unrest sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
  Tags: revolution resistance activism protest strikes democracy
• Egypt’s revolution has been 10 years in the making | Hossam el-Hamalawy – “Mubarak’s iron-fist rule and the outbreak of the dirty war between the regime and Islamist militants in the 1990s meant the death of street dissent. Public gatherings and street protests were banned and if they did take place, confronted by force. Live ammunition was used on strikers. Trade unions were put under government control.” Potted history of Egyptian resistance to Mubarak’s regime in the 90s and 00s.
  Tags: middleeast egypt protest history resistance activism strike
• The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist – One great way to briefly turn the conversation toward myself at a party is to answer the question, “So, what do you do?” with, “I’m a writer.” Not that most of the people I’ve met at parties have read my novels or short stories or feature articles; when they ask, “Have I seen any of your stuff?” I shrug and the conversation moves on. If I want attention for an hour or so, however, I’ll tell them my horrible secret — for several years I made much of my freelance income writing term papers.
  Tags: writing freelancing nickmamatas essays
• How To Stop The Anger About Video Games, From Outside And Within – Video gamers have had a weird past month or two. Fans who follow the culture closely online, whether that’s through the Twitter feeds of their favorite personalities, the comments sections on their daily blogs or in the threads of the forums they haunt, might’ve noticed a certain degree of cultural friction happening.
  Tags: videogames gamingculture immaturity
• How can we achieve development goals if we ignore human rights? – At a talk at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton on Thursday, a member of the audience explained how, while doing some recent work for a major development agency, he had been told todo a search-and-replace for all references to human rights in policy documents.
  It was, he said, a typical example of how human rights were being steadily eradicated from the language of development organisations and donors.
  Tags: humanrights poverty aid development internationalaffairs liberalism reformism
• 6 Terrifying Ways Crows Are Way Smarter Than You Think – Mankind has a long and checkered past with crows and ravens: They have been feared as symbols of death, because they’re all black and scary, revered as creators of the world because, well, it was either them or the seagulls, and worshiped as trickster gods, because of their baffling intelligence. Intelligent enough, in fact, for us to start worrying …
  Tags: wildlife birds interesting animals intelligence
• 6 Important Things You Didn’t Know We’re Running Out Of – When we talk about a shortage of “resources,” most people immediately think “oil.” But the only reason oil is the most famous of the dwindling resources is because we feel the spike in prices, since we have to go buy the stuff ourselves on a weekly basis.
  But other resources that are key to keeping our society operating are running out just as fast, but much more quietly. Pretty soon, you may turn on CNN to hear about wars being fought over something ridiculous, like …
  Tags: resourceconflict resources scarcity
• Mary Ann Sieghart: Nobody likes quotas, but they work – Every battle for women’s representation goes the same way. Women complain and men take no notice. Next, independent evidence is produced that the organisation would win more votes/make more money if there were more women in it. Most men shrug their shoulders, but a few take note. Finally, some enlightened men start making the argument. Ah, at last! Maybe there’s something in it.
  It’s like the old cartoon in which five men are sitting at a boardroom table, with a woman at the far end. The chairman says: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men would like to make it?”
  Tags: sexism quotas representation feminism
• nihilistic_kid: The Truly Stupid – We are all bedeviled by the stupid. Some people are just simple, or easily distracted, or willful in their disengagement from their own minds. And, of course, there are the social stupidities of racism and sexism and national chauvinism, along with other foolishness, which are extremely common because they are so useful for political and even psychological reasons [...] Then there are sophisticated disagreements [...] Finally, there are the various supernaturalisms which certainly seem stupid [...]
  There are, however, a handful of red flags out there—people with these positions are just stupid, and their stupidity is pretty obvious because nobody who ever thought about the topic actually agrees with them. There’s no real disagreement, just people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t on these topics. Understanding and agreement are one; to disagree really does just mean that you’re stupid and likely not worth talking to.
  Tags: stupidity people socialisation
• Remembering Ghassan Kanafani – Kanafani was living in exile in Beirut with his wife and young children. He stepped out of his house in the company of his 17 year old niece Lamees, his sister’s daughter. They climbed into the family car. When he turned the ignition key the car exploded. All the windows of the house were blown out. His wife Anni ran outside and saw the wreckage of the car and the corpse of her niece. She cried out her husband’s name but couldn’t see him. But then she saw a body part: his left leg. She stood paralysed. Behind her, their nine year old son, traumatized, banged his head repeatedly against a wall. Their daughter sobbed her father’s name repeatedly.
  The Israeli secret service, Mossad, had put a bomb in the car. It was retaliation for a massacre at Lod airport, perpetrated by Japanese terrorists. Kanafani had nothing at all to do with the massacre, but as a prominent Palestinian intellectual and spokesman for Palestinian nationalism, he was deemed a suitable target for a revenge killing.
  Tags: novelists palestine israel statemurder

The video is pretty cool and fits the tone of the song really well in my view. Enjoy! It’s embedded below but you may want to click through for an embiggened version, yes?

That Fucking Tank: ‘Mr Blood’ from JakoMat on Vimeo.

• With unpaid overtime, we’re giving our employers £29bn worth of free labour | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – You’re being exploited in more ways than you know. The TUC reports, not for the first time and surely not for the last, on a form of exploitation that rarely gets attention in the media. Workers are contributing £29bn worth of free labour to British employers every year simply by working unpaid overtime. This surplus is being squeezed out of workers through market discipline – the threat of unemployment or reduced prospects.
  Tags: work employment exploitation economics
• Wisconsin police join up with anti-Walker protesters – Wisconsin – Salon.com – The Wisconsin police have entered the fray at the State Capitol building in Madison — and in dramatic fashion. More than a hundred police officers entered the Capitol today and joined up with the hundreds of protesters who have waged demonstrations in the building for a week and a half.
  Tags: police protest usa
• On Magazines and Conversations « Ruthless Culture – In an example of what can only be called postmodern irony, one of the recurring themes of the discussions I have over Twitter is the near-impossibility of online discussion.  Sure enough, the internet is filled with bloggers, reviewers, commentators and critics all furiously opining on one issue or another but conversation implies give-and-take or call-and-response whereas most blog posts tend to be lengthy monologues bellowed into a storm of utter indifference.  We write about the arts but we seldom actually converse, ‘the conversation’ is not something that people have, it is an abstract entity that exists half-formed between dozens of blog posts, reviews and articles.  Like the world, it is everywhere and yet impossible to locate.
  As a result, I thought I would make a few announcements and post a few links that have recently helped my thinking about online discussion.
  Tags: criticism blogging reviews dialogue internet
• Vang Pao obituary | World news | The Guardian – Reality soon dispersed that dreamworld. Vang Pao later admitted that his Hmong soldiers suffered appalling losses fighting around the Plain of Jars, in Xieng Khouang province. He put the figure at 17,000 dead by 1968. But his CIA controllers urged him to keep on fighting. US sources, including the historian Alfred McCoy, have noted that younger and younger fighters were forcibly enrolled. By 1968, 30% of the new recruits were only 14 years old.
• Tags: laos usa vietnamwar secretwar history childsoldiers
• It’s the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones – Eight charts that explain everything that’s wrong with America.
  Tags: usa economics classwar
• American predators in Pakistan – Like everyone else I knew, I’d heard the stories about large numbers of armed Americans in Lahore, staying at such-and-such hotels or working out at such-and-such gyms. Maybe I became more sensitive to their presence after the incident at my house, but suddenly I began to see them all around town. To be precise, I didn’t know if the men I was seeing were armed. But they looked like Americans, and they didn’t look like rock guitarists or maths teachers or irrigation specialists or heart surgeons. They looked, to my unschooled eye, like what I’d expect trained killers to look like.
  Tags: pakistan cia statemurder
• Cruel. Vainglorious. Steeped in blood. And now, surely, after more than four decades of terror and oppression, on his way out? – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent – So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.
  Tags: libya middleeast imperialism dictators revolution
• Part 10: 1999: By the time we got to Woodstock 99 … | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? | The A.V. Club – “In late July 1999, I found myself in the midst of a temporary civilization, a new land with its own laws and mores. It was formed by pilgrims seeking refuge from an outside world that couldn’t comprehend them. These people had traveled hundreds of miles to arrive at this place. For them, months of eager anticipation had finally culminated. It was my job to make sense of it all for curious onlookers, and it wasn’t going to be easy. I was now an outsider among outsiders.” The final part in this superb series.
  Tags: music history festivals
• LENIN’S TOMB: A regime in mortal freefall – These people, the caretakers, intellectuals, politicos and lackeys of empire, have spent more than two decades telling us that they were outraged by every drop of blood spilt by dictatorships, that they were if anything overly eager in their solicitations for democracy and human rights, messianic to a fault. This never had a moment’s plausibility, but it has never looked as vile and sinister as it does now, amid a genuinely heroic revolutionary democratic struggle.
  Tags: middleeast libya imperialism usa uk
• What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator – As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose.  Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition.  He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.
  Tags: science weird history
• Minecraft: The Movie – Mojang Documentary – A new documentary by 2-Player Productions went online today, focusing on the story of Minecraft. Visiting Sweden, meeting with Markus “Notch” Persson, they have created a 20 minute short, which they hope to expand to a feature-length film if they can receive the Kickstarter funding they’re after. The full video is available to watch on GameTrailers today, and everywhere else from tomorrow.
  Tags: minecraft gaming video
• David Cameron Pretending to be Common – Loving the proliferation of comedy/snarky Tumblr photoblogs.
  Tags: blog funny davidcameron
• New Statesman – In defence of squatting – Do you believe that, in a country where 650,000 households are overcrowded, where the government has declared that it can no longer afford to help the landless sick, disabled and poorly paid to sleep safely because it needs to give tax breaks to bankers, it is right that so many commercial buildings are vacant, boarded up and patrolled by private security firms?
  Do you consider it fair that there is less than no room for the young, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised in this society, whilst the rich control more space than they know what to do with?
  It is manifestly in the interests of those who own and hold all this disused property, including the millionaires who make up the Cabinet, to misrepresent Britain’s 15,000 squatters and occupiers as — in the words of the Times — a “dangerous scourge”. Otherwise the hundreds of thousands of people paying 90 per cent of their salary for poky rooms hours from their places of work might start getting ideas.
  Tags: squatting occupation politics activism directaction
• Valve’s Gabe Newell talks sales, experimentation – Here’s something you don’t see every day. It’s a 40-minute-or-so video conference between Valve co-founder Gabe Newell and a high school sports/entertainment marketing class.
  Tags: video gamesindustry valvesoftware

• GOTY 2010 – Call of Pripyat | Gaming Daily – Call of Pripyat is my game of the year because playing it is to experience something unpredictable, something of an unknown quantity. You don’t get that too often these days, especially in a game of such quality and magnitude.
  Example:
  Entering the Jupiter Research Complex, a mass of derelict office blocks and gaping rooms filled with rotting technology.  It’s perhaps one of the most impressive locations in the game.  I creep through its corridors.  Strange sounds hum and echo from all directions.  I shoot a few wild dogs that threaten me.  I reach my objective, a crashed helicopter that has fallen through the roof of one of the larger buildings, and retrieve the black box.  Nothing happens.  I creep out.
  NOTHING HAPPENS.  There’s no set-piece, no explosive boss fight.  This game is so cool, so assured, that it just leaves me to absorb the atmosphere it so skilfully creates – it allows me the space to become absorbed.
  Tags: games gamedesign stalker
• Part 6: 1995: Live, Bush, and Alanis Morissette take the pop path | Music | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “When my journey through the past of popular ’90s alternative rock began two months ago, I had a not-so-simple goal: I wanted to reconnect with my long-lost teenaged self, and in the process rekindle the passion I once had for the music of my youth. Pure, unadulterated myopia aside, I hoped that readers would relate to my experience of looking back and realizing that sizeable swaths of my adolescence didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. I wanted to recover that history by playing old, dated albums and trying really hard to hear them as I did back then, no matter how poorly some of my former alt-rock heroes had aged. Because while opinions might change, the past doesn’t. The record is set—I liked what I liked in the ’90s, and I wanted to remember why.” Part 6 of 10 of ‘Whatever happened to alternative nation?’
  Tags: music criticism history grunge altrock 1990s
• Inside ‘Anonymous’: tales from within the group taking aim at Amazon and Mastercard – My guide pointed out that the Anonymous group is conflicted from its core, because it’s an outgrowth of people who themselves have come from /b/, which means that many aren’t that interested in morality. They’re in it for the lulz – or they’re into whatever Anonymous and its associated scenes are doing for the money. Which means that the idea of attacking Amazon, or PayPal, or Twitter, over a moral or ethical issue is something of a new experience for the group. Usually they’re into tormenting people.
  Tags: anonymous hacktivism hackers web generationaldifferences onlineculture internet
• Punknews.org | House Boat – EP stream from the excellent pop-punk supergroup HOUSEBOAT.
  Tags: band music stream
• Generation Wiki’s web savvy – We are Generation Wiki. We are interconnected collaborative creatures, and we like to share. We link and like, comment, post and poke. We Yelp when we’re hungry, Skype when we’re lonely and Gchat throughout the day. Our cell phone bills are light on minutes and long on data almost every month.
  We are the first of our kind. A computer has sat comfortably in some nook of our home for as long as we can remember. We grew up trying to find Carmen Sandiego, and came of age to the beeps and cackles of a 14k modem connecting to America Online. Before we had our own car, before we had our own cash and before we had a fake ID, we had chat rooms, instant messages and inboxes. We had an entire world wide web of possibilities with which to explore beyond the confines of our bedroom walls. Our rebellion was data-driven, a battle cry of zeros and ones where power grew out of the results of a search engine.
  Tags: internet wiki generationaldifferences society culture technology cyborg
• Student fees protest: lawyers launch legal challenge to kettling | Education | The Guardian – “Lawyers have launched a legal challenge to the police tactic of kettling during recent student demonstrations, claiming a breach of human rights.
  The lawyers, acting for five of the thousands of demonstrators penned in by police last Thursday, have written to the commissioner for the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson,arguing that kettling breaches European human rights legislation.”
  Check out the quotes at the end as well – banning protest, use of water cannon, don’t misbehave or it’ll go on your permanent record… shut up, sit down, do what we tell you.
  Tags: protest civildisobedience kettling police
• The Mathletes – Fuck Death / Part One / Trees – Neat album stream from… THE MATHLETES. Featuring that guy who writes a sarcastic blog about the comic Marmaduke, yeah?
  Tags: band music stream
• Robert Fisk: Qatar’s the star – and Washington is worried – Despite the leaked US diplomatic reports on Qatar and their claim that it is a major source of “terrorist” funding, Washington would do well not to mess with the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.
  He is the only world leader to march out of an American vice-president’s office in fury after just seven seconds. And his Al-Jazeera television station – for truly it does belong to him – has revolutionised reporting in the Middle East. Qatar may be tiny but in the region, it is very, very big indeed.
  Tags: qatar middleeast internationalaffairs
• Israel faces tougher line from EU after former heads call for Palestinian state – Twenty-six European grandees have urged the EU to adopt a tougher stance towards Israel including taking “concrete measures” and exacting “consequences” over continued settlement building on occupied land, which they say is illegal under international law.
  The former EU leaders said that in the face of “the ongoing deterioration of the situation on the ground”, the EU, in co-operation with other international bodies, should put forward a “concrete and comprehensive proposal for the resolution of this conflict”. A deadline of April 2011 for progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians should be set, after which the international community should intervene.
  Tags: israel palestine eu internationalaffairs pressure peace
• Part 5: 1994: Kurt Cobain is dead! Long live Soundgarden! | Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? – “By the “Where were you when?” standard, Kurt Cobain’s suicide either doesn’t qualify or my memory is truly fucked. I know I remember finding out about it on a Saturday morning at school while waiting to get on the bus for a forensics tournament. (Extemporaneous speaking—yeah, I was pretty good.) Cobain’s body was actually found the day before, along with a can of Barq’s root beer, some towels, the shotgun with which he killed himself, and half of his $100 supply of Mexican black tar heroin. (He injected the other half before pulling the trigger.) I must not have watched any television the night of Friday, April 8; if I had, I would’ve known where he shot himself (in the greenhouse behind his home), who found his body (an electrician hired to install security lighting), and which CD was playing on the stereo when he died (R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People).” Another in the Onion AV Club’s alternative nation series, this one exploring the death of grunge’s most famous proponent.
  Tags: music grunge history nirvana kurtcobain suicide
• CLUB UNICORN – Tropical Girl on SoundCloud – Electro track made by my flatmate (and sung on by a bunch of other friends).
  Tags: music stream
• The true cost of your new Christmas laptop? Ask the eastern Congolese – Eastern Congo’s hell is an instance of how globalisation generates ungovernable spaces. Where there is a collision of desperate poverty, plentiful guns and a world greedy for natural resources, a brutal chaos results. To combat that, it takes a very tenacious sort of global campaigning – bringing to attention each element of the system and the part it can play in leveraging change – and mercifully, that is what is now finally starting to happen.
  Tags: globalisation capitalism powervacuums africa electronics conflict
• Lost civilization under Persian Gulf? – A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published in Current Anthropology.
  Tags: history science geology anthropology archaeology
• the soft kettle – Hard kettling is the sadistically ironic punishment of people who felt trapped enough to demonstrate in the first place; it says, “If you complain that you are restrained by our wonderful democracy here, we will only restrain you more & harder. That will teach you.” It makes material the soft boundaries by which the demonstrator has already been traumatised.
  Soft kettling is really quite hard to fight. It comes from the left (or what’s left of it) as well as from the right and centre. Writers like Benjamin Barber sold a core message which went, essentially: “Things are fucked but when we say that we must be careful not to offend anybody, or actually catch their attention.” Any pushing anyone does now is always going to be described, by someone in the soft kettle walls, as a “thoughtless”, “juvenile” or “irresponsible” step.
  Tags: kettling society socialisation politics normalisation
• Murderbullets | ORC STAIN – The bulk of this was done sometime between Wonton Soup 2 and Orc Stain, starting out as a entry for an anthology. The theme of the anthology was “The last comic you would ever draw”, so I took it rather literally and did 8 pages of a cracked out character drawing a book in a post apocalyptic wasteland that would grant him entry into the afterlife. Also, for some reason a moose was chained to his toilet. I got wrapped up in figuring out how this situation came to be and developed an elaborate back story involving time travelling, mutants, knife fights and cybernetic dolphin street gangs. Of course none of this would fit into an anthology, so I decided to take a stab at a full length book. (Amazing gonzo post-apocalyptic comic. Brilliant art!)
  Tags: comics postapocalypse gonzo art
• YouTube – Police vs protesters Benny Hill style! – Posted without comment.
  Tags: video funny police protests students
• The student movement evolves – Sitting on a fountain in Trafalgar square, slurping a nice hot cup of tea in the freezing rain and snow, watching the children’s crusade brave the elements and police lines to chant for the downfall of a government it sees as corrupt and illegitimate, I have never felt prouder of my generation.
  Tags: students recession protest activism coalition cuts education
• Disco Wasteland – Fallout: New Vegas gets dance mod – Cannot stop loving this. <3
  Tags: games fallout dance funny
• Tom Gabel On Against Me!’s Future – No Label, New Drummer – I’ll roughly summarise the career ofAgainst Me!: they’ve been through a lot of shit, a lot of good times and written some staggering music along the way. Over the last couple of months a lot seems to have come to a head for them – drummer George Rebelo left to rejoin Hot Water Music and they found themselves dropped by Warners, the major label they’d made their home for the last two albums – but the mantra seems to be onwards, soldiers.
  Frontman Tom Gabel has always been a good person to interview – he doesn’t give too much away and makes you work for an answer, but get him talking and he’s engaging, funny and honest. In this extensive interview we talked everything from what’s on his mind today to how he feels revisiting his past.
  Tags: interview againstme tomgabel punk
• The Cautionary Tale of a Short-Lived College – Government – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Founders College, in rural South Boston, Va., was pitched as a sort of Great Books college for devotees of Ayn Rand. And while the for-profit college was never accredited, it operated with authorization from Virginia to issue degrees.
  At the time the college was approved, it had no official faculty, no facilities, and, it turned out, shaky finances. “I’m stunned that the state would register a place like that,” says Ray Weiss, the onetime enrollment director. “What did we really have going for us when they registered us?”
  (More hilarious objectivist failure!)
  Tags: college usa education objectivism capitalism funny failure
• Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest – The prison protest has entered the wireless age.
  Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.
  Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.
  Tags: prisons capitalism indenturedservitude protest
• Cancún agreement rescues UN’s credibility but falls short of saving planet – The modest deal wrangled out by the 200 countries meeting at the Mexican resort of Cancún may have done more to save a dysfunctional UN negotiating process from collapse than protect the planet against climate change, analysts said today.
  “The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them.”
  Tags: climatechange unitednations diplomacy internationalaffairs environment
• John Pilger: Why are wars not being reported honestly? – Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.
  At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.
  Tags: war journalism media compliance wikileaks democracy news reporting journalisticstandards
• An Open Letter From The Arthur C Clarke Award – Read this if you’re at all interested in UK science fiction!
  Tags: sciencefiction britain uk books fiction awards
• LENIN’S TOMB: I am the mob – Inevitably, the ‘mob’ – the subject of official invective – is depicted as an opponent not merely of a policy, but of “democracy”. But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy. Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
  Tags: democracy britain cuts protest mob
• How do you make an audience of MPs laugh? Well, the story about where their Ugandan aid money went is pretty funny | Jane Bussmann | Comment is free | The Guardian – I landed from New York last week to find Britain in meltdown. London hasn’t been this much fun since the poll tax riots. I had to drop in on the Houses of Parliament to do a tech rehearsal for my show there tomorrow, Bussmann’s Holiday – the first X-rated comedy to be performed inside the Palace of Westminster. Its subject is WikiLeaks’s best exposé yet, combined with aspersions cast on the cause of Kevin Spacey’s late-night injuries, and the thought: “Imagine if Bob Geldof wasn’t such a Jeremy Hunt.”
  Tags: comedy satire uganda internationalaid africa
• YouTube – Mitchell & Webb Nazis – Genius skit.
  Tags: history comedy satire nazis ww2
• “why you say I shoulda went to school”: 14 awful celebrity Twitter feeds – Oh dear.
  Tags: celebrity fame exposure web2.0 terrifying+psychological+insights
• LENIN’S TOMB: Tea parties, old and new. – The ‘Tea Party’ has its origins in a particular ideology of American capitalism which comes from the South. We hear about the ‘southern strategy’, in which the Republican right has used race and ‘culture wars’ to build support in the formerly Democratic South, and used the Christian Right to mobilise a mass base from the South behind policies that favoured elites. But in fact, it would be more accurate to think of this process not as a cooptation by a traditionally Northern Republican Party, but rather as the successful bid for national political hegemony by the southern right.
• Tags: capitalism neoliberalism usa americansouth whitesupremacism
• The 7 Most Horrifying Cost Cutting Measures of All-Time – Money is tight, and everyone is cutting costs. But it’s all about knowing where to cut; the family will skip the vacation, but doesn’t try to save on clothes by turning the neighbor’s cats into loincloths.
  Unfortunately, when large organizations try to cut costs or figure out new sources of revenue, they tend to take the kitty loincloth approach. We’re talking about…
  Tags: funny costcutting capitalism
• Editorial: Panorama – Addicted To Games? – Timed to coincide with tonight’s release of World Of Warcraft’s Cataclysm, BBC 1′s Panorama tonight covered the topic of videogame addiction. I have always approached the subject of gaming addiction with great seriousness, because it’s my belief that if gaming is inherently harmful, I want to know about it, and I want to warn others who game. And I want to approach the subject with appropriate scrutiny, and with evidence-based understanding. It’s something I expect of others when they approach the subject. It was not present tonight. It was astonishing. An openly ignorant series of anecdotes and half-truths, forming a dangerous, lazy treatment of a serious subject.
  Tags: gaming games addiction scaremongering tabloidmedia television