2002/2/28
Game and puzzle designer Bob Abbott on why video games have become incredibly stupid; mainly due to advances in technology, the fallacy that graphic realism makes for a good game and/or the Big Yellow Shorts factor:
Not only are they incredibly stupid, they arent even game designers. They are computer programmers and graphic artists. Video game companies cant even comprehend the concept of a game inventor. To them, a game or a puzzle is of no consequence.
I think the main reason for the failure of the new video games is simply this switch from the top-down view to the 3-D view. The top-down view just gives you more information. You see where all the monsters are, you see what is travelling into your area, you see where the barriers are, and you can plan ahead. In the 3-D view, you only see what is directly ahead of you. And about all youre given to do is shoot at what you see.
Damn right. IMHO, some of the most interesting computer games were developed on ancient 8-bit computers and the like back in the distant past before the invention of the first-person shooter genre, and the confinement of the market to the carefully researched demographic of overweight teenage boys with 15-second attention spans. (via Plastic)
This is cool: Gadfly, a reasonably efficient SQL database module for Python, written entirely in Python (with optional C extensions) and using portable data files. I think Zope might make some use of it too. Mind you, I can't help but think that they could have made it more lightweight by getting rid of SQL text parsing and having a procedural interface for queries. (via gimbo)
The EFF has argued that if file-sharing software is illegal, then so is the Internet, at least in its present incarnation as an unregulated peer-to-peer network where any machine can connect to any other and transfer any bits. Interesting argument, though it could backfire; one can imagine a judge ruling that the anarchy of the Internet is actually a form of racketeering, and mandate that carriers and ISPs do something about it (such as introduce mandatory traceability and/or copy-denial technologies at the protocol level).
Massive taxpayer-funded bailout of Victoria's floundering public transport system, with hundreds of millions of dollars being given to multinational corporations to keep the system, hobbled by a problematic ticketing system and a privatisation regime seemingly designed to help the road lobby and euthanase the unfashionably socialistic institution of public transport, from collapsing. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to just tear up the tracks, replace them with roads, sell off overhead wiring for copper and stations to real-estate developers (you could build lots of car parks), and give every Victorian a car-buyer's grant or credit towards taxi fares?
Here's a new scam for you, Lev: Who Knew It Would Be So Easy To Impersonate A Priest?
The thing you have to realize is, when you dress up like a priest, people want to believe you're a priest. I recently visited a small town in Missouri where no one knew me and started walking around in my priest outfit. Within a few hours, I was invited to a week's worth of home-cooked meals. Man, did I eat good! And you know what? Not a single person asked me to show my priest ID card before serving up the roast turkey and mashed potatoes.
And in the same Onion:
BREMERTON, WA-- A head of genetically modified broccoli shrieked its numerous benefits at shoppers Monday in a Seattle-area Safeway. "I contain 40 percent more vitamin A than non-modified broccoli!" the head screeched at terrified produce-aisle customers. "I can fight off insects and disease without the use of pesticides!" Monsanto, makers of the vegetable, stressed that genetic-modification technology is still in its infancy, and that more pleasantly voiced broccoli should hit store shelves by 2003.
Obituary: Comedic legend Spike Milligan has died, aged 83. Milligan was the last surviving member of the Goon Show team (the others were Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine), and founded that very English strain of surrealistic, alternative comedy, paving the way for the likes of Monty Python, the Goodies and Eddie Izzard. Like many great comedians, Milligan suffered from manic depression and struggled with mental illness.
2002/2/27
It has emerged that aid workers have been sexually exploiting children in West Africa, demanding sexual services in return for food and other aid. Over 40 aid agencies - including the UNHCR itself - were implicated, and 67 individuals - mostly local staff - named by the children.
Newsletter of the day: The Shocking Truth, the official organ of British Conservative Catholics(tm), devoted to fighting the Atheist Movement, and exposing dire conspiracies, such as "Evil Jewish academics attempt to rubbish Jesus' carpentry skills" and the truth about Nick Cave's world-domination plot (hint: it involves armies of spiders), as well as useful advice on arranging your son's castration and "why science is wrong". File alongside Landover Baptist. (via Reenhead)
Buddy Weiserman vs. Prince Jubril Turey of Sierra Leone; or the story of how an anonymous prankster took a Nigerian 419 scammer for a ride (persuading him to catch a bus across Africa and chicken-dance in Ghana in the hope of snaring his mark). (via bOING bOING)
The Human Virus Scanner will tell you which memes you're infected by, using a simple icon-based diagnostic technique. And then there's what happens when you combine memes. (via VM, Lukelog)
2002/2/26
Did Big Oil/the MIE complex engineer the WTC terrorist attack to get carte blanche to bomb Afghanistan into compliance? A roundup fnord of details of conspiratological significance about the whole affair.
In Britain, a flight engineer has published a detailed paper asserting the U.S. took the joysticks out of the pilots' hands using a method of remote control developed by the American military in the 1970s.
Now think about this for a second: The Independent in London questions how Bush could claim in two public appearances to have seen the first plane hit the first tower long before any such TV footage was broadcast. The paper also asks why Dubya continued sitting with elementary school students after the second tower was hit and he'd been told, "America is under attack." Very mysterious, when standard procedure for such a situation is to whisk the president away to safety. Unless -- and here is the nub -- unless he knew something more than we did that morning.
(via one.point.zero)
Howard screws refugee kids; G-G turns blind eye. (The Chaser)
"So some children got screwed, did they? Ah, that takes me back to my days in the Anglican Church," Dr Hollingworth reminisced before sweeping the entire matter under the carpet.
The Null Device is back; there was a technical problem with the machine hosting it, and so it was down for 2 days, but now it's back. As you may notice, the past few days' worth of blog entries have been uploaded (apart from trivial things which everybody else is likely to have blogged). Anyway, if this site mysteriously goes offline for a prolonged period again, a backup blog-in-exile will resume here until "normality" can be restored.)
2002/2/25
Useful: Identifont, a web-based tool for identifying fonts by answering questions. (via Meg)
Were I one of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, I'd be Basil. Though assaulted by hyperactive kittens whilst trying to sleep is probably more like it. And you? (via Lukelog.)
I went to the Cinema Nova to see Intimacy tonight; I had been meaning to see it for a while, and as its season appears to be tapering off I thought I'd better catch it soon. It was interesting; quite sexually explicit though not in the least bit glamorous (it almost looked as if they made the actors up to look less sexy than in real life; Kerry Fox looked about 10 years older than her actual age). The soundtrack was quite well done (triphoppy bits in street scenes, and a 1990s David Bowie number closing the film quite fittingly). And whilst it was set in London, in English, and based on stories by Hanif Kureishi, it had a rather French style about it (funny, that). In some ways, it was a bit like Une Liaison Pornographique, only more bleak and existential. (Hmm; may be time to track down the book.)
The Sydney Morning Herald was giving away DVDs of the Tropfest competitors, with a coupon in today's edition. Unfortunately, the offer was open only to residents of NSW and ACT. AFAIK, there is no way for Melburnians to get a copy, short of bribing someone in Sydney; even though a Victorian filmmaker looks likely to win the grand prize.
First Melody Maker went tits-up, then NME turned into Smash Hits and now Rolling Stone's 50 Best Album Covers of All Time features modern-day classics by artists of the calibre of N'Sync and Blink-182, essentials in every well-rounded record collection. Mind you, that's just the provocative side; then there are the safe choices (old Beatles and Elvis covers, and the token '70s soul, punk and gangsta rap to show that the owner of the collection is hip and with-it; basically respectable MOR predictability that doesn't go out on a limb). (via if.then.else)
2002/2/24
I went to the Tropfest short film festival on Sunday afternoon/evening; they had the Melbourne screening outdoors at Yarra Park, on a big portable video screen (with big chunky pixels). The main event was in Sydney, but there was a secondary event in Melbourne, via satellite; buth cities got their own compéres and live entertainment. (Melbourne had some live funk/groove/chill-out band I didn't see and a DJ who played upbeat reggae (in daylight) and house (after dark); all rather Chapel St., or south-of-the-Yarra at least.)
Ah yes; the films. 16 in total, and a bit of a mixed bag. Boomerang, I Can't Get Started and Wilfred were amusing, as was Lamb (in a bittersweet kind of way). (The last two ran back to back, which was thematically rather apt.) Late Night Shopper (of no relation to the Scottish slacker comedy) was a nicely tense piece of Tarantinoesque violence set in a supermarket; Murbah Swamp Beer was a lighthearted documentary about the consequences of a semitrailer full of beer crashing into a river on a long weekend, with plenty of interviews with the locals. The Thing in the Roof was competently suspenseful, a sort of minimalist horror piece, F.A., a mock public-service announcement on the addictive consequences of filmmaking, was quite amusing, and How Am I Driving was a stylishly shot critique of materialism. Oh yes, and the Tropfest trailer (done by last year's winner) was quite well done, even if it pushed the bootywhang angle a bit too hard.
On the down side, The Flying Nut did look like it had been done in a weekend in Flash (as it had been), and was (IMHO) rather feeble, both technically and conceptually. (It was meant to be a short humorous piece based on the wannabe terrorist who tried to set his shoe on fire onboard an airliner.) Matchbox (the one with the guy in a match suit looking for the girl in a matchbox suit only to find her having run off with a guy dressed as a cigarette lighter) seemed like Comedy Company-grade material, and Tragic Love also seemed a bit weak, relying on celebrity impressions as the main joke (though one thing I noticed about it was the dig at Australia's least favourite Scientologist; I wonder whether a film made somewhere where his ex-wife didn't come from would portray Tom Cruise in such an unflattering light).
Also, I wonder whether anyone from main sponsor Intel will have a stern word with the compére for thanking "the Mac operator" in the crew towards the end.
All Hail Discordia: It seems that some AudioGalaxy user has taken it upon verself to inject some chaos into the orderly organisation of searchable songs and artists on the service, and other downloaders have mirrored it, advertently or otherwise. Let's just say that I'm fairly sure that "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is not by Radiohead.
2002/2/23
I went to see Lacto-Ovo tonight at the Empress; they rocked. They started off without their regular drummer, but improvised with one guy playing with the "scratch" sounds on his Yamaha keyboard, a guitarist playing thene-from-Shaft-style wah-wah licks, and them reciting lyrics from random songs over that. Then they did their proper songs, which were in a new-wave-meets-Casiotone-indie-meets-surf-rock kind of vein; the rendition of Bingo was inspiring.
Later I found out that one of the members lives just down the road from me. That's the cool thing about living in North Fitzroy: you may well be living next door to the people whose albums you have in your collection...
Satirical site of the day: Society or the Prevention of Art Monstrosities. Their McKenzie Wark/X-Men parody is particularly inspired. (via Lukelog)
2002/2/22
A computer-generated Britneyblog. Heh.
what a lameo. oh my god like so gay! the principal is mad at me, and life is so hard. i am really pissed ok, so i lied, and i hate the internet! i got my nose pierced :) i totally want 2 sleep with my neighbour.
(via Graham)
It has now emerged that Microsoft's Windows Media Player keeps track of all CDs and DVDs played; the client also sends back a unique identifier to the CD/DVD title server when downloading track information. Microsoft currently claims to have no plans to sell the data to any of the concerns who'd be interested in something like that.
Privacy experts said they feared the log file could be used by investigators, divorce lawyers, snooping family members, marketing companies or others interested in learning about a person's entertainment habits. It also could be used to make sure users have paid for the music or movie, and have not made an illegal copy. "The big picture might be the owners of intellectual property wanting to track access to their property," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium, folks.
Lord of the Rings meets Blackadder. They say Peter Jackson used this script when auditioning actors. Even if he didn't, it's rather amusing. (via www.quicklikeabunny.net)
2002/2/21
Half-baked idea: What the world really needs is themeable accents for speech synthesisers.
New research suggests that language structure shapes thinking patterns:
The word ''key,'' for example, is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. Boroditsky recruited two groups of volunteers, native German speakers and native Spanish speakers, who spoke English well. She then asked them to name three adjectives to describe objects. She found a consistent pattern of German speakers using more masculine terms to describe the key - such as ''hard, heavy, jagged'' - while Spanish speakers favored more feminine descriptions, such as ''golden, intricate, lovely.''
Some are saying that this validates the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; which is derided by many linguists (including Steven Pinker, who eviscerates it in The Language Instinct) as pseudoscience, and has become mostly the province of neo-Marxist social engineers in academe; but others argue that the effects demonstrated here are too trivial to count as proof of any meaningfully strong version of the hypothesis. (via Found)
Some cause for hope: the US Supreme Court to look at whether copyright term extension was unconstitutional. If, by some modern-day miracle, they decide that it was, copyright laws will be overturned, and Mickey Mouse and a lot of other post-1923 works will fall into the public domain, resulting in a collapse of the very foundations of modern capitalism (or so Disney Corp. would like to have you believe). If, however, the status quo and the power of moneyed corporations (not to mention the wise counsel of George W. Bush) prevails, countless films and other post-1923 media which it is not economical to restore will be lost, leaving a gap in the cultural record:
It costs several thousands of dollars to restore old movies from the 1920s and '30s that used lead nitrate, which destroys film. As a result, "Any film after 1923 is not being restored," Bromberg said. "(These films) will be irrevocably lost."
It is quite possible that nothing will ever fall into the public domain again (in the US at least), and that the period between 1923 and the collapse of the copyright economy will be seen by future historians as a "dark age" of which little record exists.
The Nigerian mail scammers are diversifying; I just found a spam in my inbox from someone claiming to be a preacher in the "Seed Harvest Ministry", needing to find some way of disposing of US$30 million left in a church by Nigerian soldiers during the Liberian civil war.
I am interested in using a small fraction of this money, much less than one percent for a re-organization of the work of God, but I do not need the rest and do not want to have any direct dealing with it, but I need someone who will be able to use the fund better maybe for charity or something universally profitable, I have thought of doing it myself but, my ministry is the apocalypse and I believe and preach the soon coming of the Lord which make me not indulgent in reliance on money or wealth in any form.
2002/2/20
The SMH has an interesting piece about the increasingly cloak-and-dagger battle against spammers.
"The SPEWS site is registered to a holiday resort in Russia. There's no email address, no telephone number. They have a number of Web sites where they mirror their list of bad boys, so they can't be shut down. And all they are doing is publishing an opinion."
Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as "known criminals".
Now there's Tinfoil Hat Linux, a Linux distribution for paranoids; some of the more esoteric features include keyboardless passphrase entry, Morse Code output via the keyboard lights (à la Cryptonomicon), and a low-contrast display mode to evade cameras. In addition, it doesn't support networking, all binaries are statically linked and temporary files are kept in a RAM disk. And remember, if they are out to get you, then paranoia's just good sense.
Horrorshow, O my brothers: The latest bestseller in Russia is the diary of two young hoodlums. Titled "Bigger than Ben", the autobiographical tome tells the story of Spiker and Sobakkaa, two podonoki (translated as "scumbags") travelling in London in 1999, and reads like a how-to guide to crime and fraud; it has also won a major literary prize as the best Russian literary début.
The book brilliantly captures the cliché of the contemporary young Russian male: hard-edged, dishonest and callous, distilling his creative flair into nefarious, if not criminal, activity.
His inspiration was his father, an honest engineer who struggled, poor and threadbare, refusing to go into small business until he could do so without sacrificing his principles. Sakin was determined not to live that way.
(via bOING bOING)
Charlie Stross' Linux columns, from a UK magazine named Computer Shopper, are well worth reading; covering things from cryptography to Zope to digital cameras. And Peter tells me that his scifi stories are worth a read too.
2002/2/19
Typical recording racket scumbaggery: first they sued Napster out of business, on the grounds that it robbed artists of their royalties, and now the official, securely locked-down recording industry download services don't pay artists a cent either. (Actually, they are planning to pay them an insulting US$0.0023 per download. Some artists are unhappy with this; to which the racket has responded by putting clauses in their standard contracts giving them the right to use their music online as they see fit.)
A firm named DSLReports.com set up a trap for a spammer; a page generating a unique IP address, traceable to contain information about the IP address of the visitor. Within 8 hours, the address began receiving spam, sent through open relays, and traced (via the address) to a cable modem on the @Home network in Arizona. All the spam (which ranged from financial scams to hardcore porn sites) seemed to be from the same spammer, though the ISP has so far not taken any action.
Scare meme of the day: Eating vegetables may cause gullet cancer, due to the use of nitrate fertilisers. Researchers at Glasgow University, who have discovered the connection, say that it is unlikely that organic vegetables are any less carcinogenic. (via Unknown News)
Economic rationalism in the news: Telstra disconnects terminally ill woman's mobile phone, allegedly so that the contract could be paid out before she died.
"When I asked and the guy went and got the supervisor and he came and said the notation on her file said she had cancer, they wanted the contract paid out before she died and it was easier for them to get the money from a living person than from an estate, they wanted the money paid out,"
A Telstra spokesdroid has denied any policy of weeding out terminally ill customers or other poor revenue prospects in this fashion.
Good news for public transport activism: Transport Victoria Association, which is sort of the Melbourne public-transport-advocacy equivalent of the Sozialistiches Patienten Kollectiv of the late 1960s, finally has a web page. Unfortunately, they've only put their relatively sane policies up, leaving out the charmingly psychoceramic flights of fancy such as elevating the Geelong railway line to give passengers better views.
Bogotá, Colombia, can be a rather rough place; so much so that even the local Goths mug people for their blood, to drink with brandy. (Brandy? Wouldn't absinthe or Chartreuse or something be more goth?) (via Lev)
Telltale signs of Hollywood villany: black hats, English accents, and now using Wintel PCs instead of Macs.
2002/2/18
An interesting, if somewhat old, interview with Ken MacLeod, where he talks about his political background and the common ground between socialism and libertarianism.
A linguistics professor believes that space colonists' language would mutate rapidly, possibly becoming unintelligible to their Earthbound kin within decades, due to the different environment.
"This single, relatively homogeneous dialect will be noticeable with the first generation of children born on the space vehicle and will surely result in a dialect that differs from all the parents' dialect, and from every other dialect of English spoken on Earth," Thomason said.
(via Plastic)
Stephen Cummings on the passing of the Punters, and a history of the Melbourne live music scene. And if you have RealPlayer, the Age has a video report on the last night at the Punters. (Funny how they call it a night even if part of it was during the day.)
Last drinks, everyone:
Today was the end of a Melbourne institution, the Punters Club; the last
day of the venerable pub/band venue's operation, and they chose to go out with
a bang. The doors were open for free, and they had bands all day, from 3PM
until late in the night. And many people rocked up to pay their respects to
the Punters, to have one last pot (or several), tread the sticky carpet for
the very last time and reminisce about all the great bands they have seen there,
among them your humble narrator.
As it was the last ever day at the Punters, and entry was free, the venue was packed soon after 3PM; after that, a long queue formed outside the door, with people being allowed in only when others left. Inside it was pretty tight.
I have seen many good shows at the Punters; I remember when I lived out in Ferntree Gully, driving down to Brunswick St. in my mum's car (I must have known the
back streets of Fitzroy quite well then, or at least in terms of parking spots) to see The Paradise Motel there, and a number of bands after that. And now that era has come to an end. It's somewhat sad to have walked out that door for the last time, knowing that it's not a doorway I will pass through again in this
lifetime.
To paraphrase one graffito in the Punters, Brunswick Street looks likely to die now that its heart has been ripped out. The street's cultural authenticity is in decline, and Brunswick St. is looking more like Chapel St. with each day that passes. (Even in the queue I noticed a difference between the people lining up to enter the Punters and the people walking down the street; the latter were wearing more designer-logo T-shirts, of the sort that sell for $70 in Prahran.) Oh well, now there's one fewer reason to get off the 112 tram on Brunswick St.
Oh yes, the bands. The first one I saw was some country outfit; then came Ruckrover (some of whose members worked at the Punters), who were very tight and energetic, with perhaps a slight Northern Soul feel to some of their numbers. Then came Disaster Plan, who played (as promised) quietly enough to be drowned out by the crowd, and ended with some rants about the inferiority of the other pubs (the Evelyn, for example), and then was Gaslight Radio, who were also quite good.
2002/2/17
It's a twisted world we live in when you get spam for an online horse auction and your first thought is one of relief that it's not another ad for a bestiality porn site.
A few days ago, Meg posted an entry to her blog asking people for their lists of classic albums. So here's mine (with a few liberties taken):
- This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears Beautiful in a heartfelt, introspective sort of way, with songs like Song to the Siren and Another Day, not to mention the various evocative instrumentals.
- Slowdive, Souvlaki (or perhaps Just For a Day, or Pygmalion.. aw, sod it, everything Slowdive ever recorded.)
- Dead Can Dance, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun. A work of transcendent, enrapturing beauty; the last track, "Persephone (the gathering of flowers)", just says so much to me about the human condition and the fleeting intensity of life, all without words in any known language.
- The Paradise Motel, Left Over Life To Kill and Some Deaths Take Forever. The former being their first Australian EP, not the UK rerelease album; the latter being the remix EP for it, which is much more original and groundbreaking that anything described as a "remix EP" has any right to be.
- And a few classics: New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies, The Cure, Faith and Disintegration, Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, Radiohead, OK Computer (with honourable mentions to Kid A and Amnesiac), Massive Attack, Mezzanine, and one or two random Depeche Mode albums between Some Great Reward and Violator inclusive.
Any comments?
An interesting piece about MacOS X's internals, from a Reg reporter at BSDCon.
(MacOS X is a curious blend of elegance (Cocoa and Interface Builder, and the rendering model) and awkwardness (mostly to do with how MacOS was grafted onto NeXTSTEP/UNIX; the fact that the two layers of the system have different character formats and concepts of timezones, for example, and that devices such as sound are not represented in the POSIX layer (without linking to Carbon libraries, which is cheating), and the fact that Classic applications run essentially with root privilege, bypassing UNIX file protections entirely, makes it look a bit like P.T. Barnum's Fijian Mermaid in places. And then there's the still immature UI. But other than that, it's a nice OS.)
Scare meme of the day: Getting too much sleep can shorten your life. A study has shown that people who sleep for eight or more hours a day tend to have a higher mortality rate than those who sleep six or seven hours. (via Reenhead)
Sobering thought of the day: I realised, a few days ago, that the kitten I was given for Xmas will probably see me into my mid-to-late 40s.
2002/2/16
Via Lukelog, this piece about typographical anachronisms in films, from newspapers being set in fonts which wouldn't exist for 20 years to bloopers like building sign in Tim Burton's Ed Wood which is made of great big metal TrueType Chicago letters. (That's the old Macintosh System 7 screen font.) Reminds me a bit of Kibo's USENET rants about typography and bad films.
And then there's this piece about the scourge of Arial, or how the ubiquitous font originated (designed not for its original charm but as a third-party drop-in replacement for Helvetica), how it got everywhere (on the back of the Beast of Redmond), and why it's more evil than Helvetica.
Has anybody successfully gotten a USB ZipCD CD-RW writer working under Linux? I'm having problems with it. When I run cdrecord, several seconds pass between the different pieces of data that are printed at the start, and it gets an SCSI error when starting to write the disc (which suggests that something is buggered at the USB link level.) (The same unit works perfectly on a MacOS X machine, but I need to get it working under Linux.) Any suggestions?
Business model of the day: A staffing company in the UK is offering hookers who double as office temps, from secretaries to web designers and project managers. I suppose one could call them a full-service temp agency. Though one gets the feeling that they missed the mark by a few years.
2002/2/15
The show at the Punters was OK. Love of Diagrams was a guitar/bass/drums
outfit who played a really tight, energetic instrumental set.
Then Sir came on, doing a number of songs (topically enough, they played Handsome first); they were good, though let down a bit by problems with the sound.
Anyway, they played their new songs, which was good.
Finally, on came Ninetynine, who rocked. They played various old and new songs
(including the old one with the Casio VL-1 drum loop; a real touch of class,
that), with tremendous energy (as usual, Cameron went berzerk on the drums),
swapping instruments between songs as they usually do.
They also mentioned that they're supporting Stereolab when they tour, though I
think that's at the Prince of Wales show, not the Corner one
(to which I'll probably be going).
Pity I couldn't be in two places at once, because Partition were doing a support set at the Dan O'Connell at the same time. I really wanted to hear what their Field Mice tribute song was like...
2002/2/14
A piece on video games and depression: are they therapeutic, do they exacerbate it, or are they just a safe way of topping yourself over and over again? (via Plastic)
Meg and Dave have a selection of fine Anti-Valentine's cards you can send online to people you don't particularly fancy all that much.
Destroy everything pink and fluffy: The FBI has warned of a possible Valentine's Day terrorist threat after a man, "possibly of Arab descent", was detected buying 14 gas canisters, 12 packages of lead gun pellets and nine white Valentine teddy bears in January. Perhaps this is Saddam's follow-up to his dastardly plan to steal American childrens' Christmas PlayStations a year and a bit ago?
Today is F14, the international day of protest against the oldest and most cutthroat form of Darwinian capitalism, the sexual marketplace. Today is a good day to listen to your Smiths records. (Even if you are happy wherever you are, you can surely remember a time when you weren't, perhaps in your distant youth; or in the immortal words "and when you're dancing and laughing and finally living, hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly". So spare a thought today for poor old Moz, sitting alone in his Los Angeles home with an album's worth of songs nobody will give him money to record.)
Tonight, however, I won't be spending the evening alone with my Smiths records; I'll be going to the Punters Club, to see Sir, Ninetynine and some outfit named Love Of Diagrams. (Sir and Ninetynine are not to be missed; both of them together, and at the fourth last ever gig at the Punters, even more so.) If that's not enough, the show is subtitled "Love in a Casio World". (What is it about the humble Casiotone keyboard?)
The latest eating disorder: orthorexia, or an excessive dedication to following increasingly strict diets:
Amid a cacophony of competing menus, Bratman quickly forged his own dietary regime, eating only vegetables just plucked from the ground and chewing each mouthful 50 times. "After a year or so of this self-imposed regime, I felt light, clear headed, energetic, strong and self-righteous," Bratman wrote in an account of his experience. "I regarded the wretched, debauched souls around me downing their chocolate chip cookies and fries as mere animals reduced to satisfying gustatory lusts."
(via bOING bOING)
Thank "Bob", I'm well clear of the Dido demographic, the latest lucrative market segment (which seems to be essentially smug, superficially fashionable thirtysomethings who consider themselves much more hip and with-it than they actually are, and/or are in denial about their comfortably bourgeois, alt-MOR tastes).
20 Protection by Masssive Attack Yes, you know that Blue Lines is really the one to have, but you got this because you've heard of Tracey Thorn. You wanted something edgy and hip hop but with the reassuring Marks and Spenceryness that was Everything But The Girl. And you got it!
Anyway, I've got only three titles from the list (Dummy by Portishead, Play by Moby (which I have since found too bland to be worth listening to, and which is probably a candidate for the next CD-liquidation sweep), and OK Computer by Radiohead (though I think that Kid A and Amnesiac are doovy)).
2002/2/13
New code fragment posted to the Code section of this site: iffdigest, a very lightweight library for decoding IFF/RIFF files in C++ (which will make its way into the audio tools I'm working on). if you need to pull apart IFF files of some sort, are already using C++/STL and don't want to depend on any heavyweight file-format libraries, you may find it useful.
Tanya sets her sights on the recent meme of ironically mixing together two songs (one of which is usually by Missy Elliot, for some reason).
Forget all that nonsense about CoolEdit and ProTools - all you need to be a master bootlegger are a pair of decks with a broken crossfader stuck in the middle: the results will be the same, to wit a grisly mess. And boys in bakers hats will stare at you while you are DJ-ing as if you are the cleverest man alive for supergluing an REM and Maddonna track together and calling it "Losing My Virginity"
Did the era of human rights end on September 11? It looks a bit like it, with the preservation of Empire taking precedence over feeling warm and fuzzy about doing the right thing, western countries diplomatically shutting up about their new allies' human-rights problems and everyone from Australia to Zimbabwe using "terrorism" as an excuse to dismiss human rights issues as a holdover from a softer, more decadent era.
But, as the Cold War should have taught the US, cozying up to friendly authoritarians is a poor bet in the long term. America is still paying a price for backing the shah of Iran. In the Arab world today, the US looks as if it is on the side of LouisXVI in 1789; come the revolution in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, American influence may be swept away. The human-rights movement is not in the business of preserving US power. But it should be concerned about stability, about moving strategically vital states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia from closed to open societies without delivering them up to religious fundamentalists.
Greg Egan on the refugee situation: (via Stumblings)
That's what it's like, though...: working relentlessly to create a society so vile that no one in the world would choose to be a part of it. It takes a lot of effort to poison a calm, civilised, prosperous democracy to the point where people would rather eat grass or live under a dictatorship than attempt to come here, but if we keep it up, we'll get there.
I just found in my referer logs a hit from Google, searching for "phenylethylamine in illicitly produced amphetamine". Sounds nasty; taking some speed to get sharpened up and finding oneself developing intense crushes on people and things instead or something. That's the problem with illicit drugs; no quality control...
In Europe, Philips asks Customs to seize DVD players made by unlicensed factories, on grounds of patent infringement. This may include players which do not enforce region coding (such as the Apex/Hiteker players so popular with scofflaws), as apparently the DVD patent licence was tightened up a while ago closing loopholes around the region-enforcement issue.
The BBC plan to make a TV series based on Fungus the Bogeyman, the somewhat odd children's book by Raymond Briggs. I loved that book when I was 10 or so; where else would one, for example, learn what "crepuscular" means, or that "hodmandods" are snails. Anyway, the new TV series will be a combination of live action and 3D computer animation. Should be interesting if they pull it off well.
The sexual marketplace: The greatest love letters in history have used the same techniques used by direct mail marketers.
In advertising, we must remember, honesty is a commodity that can be traded freely against expectations; since Henry (VIII) clearly didn't need Anne (Boleyn) as a repeat customer, he could afford to promise her more than his final cutthroat offer.
(via onepointzero)
It's good to run into people who appreciate brilliant, long-forgotten bands few others have heard of. I went to the Empress Hotel this evening to check out the bands. The first up was a touring English indie duo named Partition; two guys with a guitar and a drum machine singing slightly humorous indie numbers, with a subtle Sarah Records feel in places, only a bit more punk in others. (Among the songs they did was one about thinness obsession to the tune of Billy Bragg's New England, and a slightly punky yet touchingly heartfelt rant-over-guitar-strumming piece about having fancied some girl for 10 years and then finally going out with her for two disastrous weeks, which reminded me a bit of The Cure's So What), finally ending with a funny little dance to a drum machine pattern. Whilst on stage, they wore white T-shirts, reading "APART" and "APRAT".
Afterwards, I noticed that one of the members of the group (Martin) was wearing a T-shirt with the Field Mice soundbite "CHOCOLATE LOVE SEX" printed on it; I asked him whether it was a Field Mice reference, and it was. It turned out that he used to go and see many of their gigs when they were around (late 80s/early 90s), and was into the whole Sarah scene. Anyway, we ended up talking a bit about bands and such. He also mentioned that Partition have written one Field Mice-inspired song, but they didn't play it tonight, as it's not finished yet.
Anyway, Partition seem like a fairly interesting outfit; with any luck they'll record something soon.
2002/2/12
To protest biotechnology patent laws, which often give multinational corporations absolute rights over basic foodstuffs (even if they had been grown for centuries), a development charity is planning to patent salted potato chips. By patenting a new pre-salted chip, ActionAid are hoping to own the rights to the concept of salted potato chips, which in theory could be used to levy license fees from chip shops under threat of patent infringement lawsuit.
Scientists in Adelaide have discovered that organ music reduces Christmas-related stress. It did not matter whether the organ in question was a pipe organ or an electronic organ; however, commercial Christmas carols did not reduce stress. So when December rolls around, if you wish to avoid Xmas Rage, ditch the Mariah Carey Christmas album and put on some Bach. (via Jimbob)
Software patents are bad, mmmkay? An article on how restrictive licensing killed MPEG-4; pity, as technically it was quite a doovy scheme; still, that's greed for you. Fortunately, the W3C has ruled out endorsing royalty-bound technologies, a scheme it had been mulling earlier. (via bOING bOING, EFF)
2002/2/11
This looks really interesting:
Alphabet Soup, a Python program which generates randomly strange-looking
letterforms from elements and a grammar.
Currently it works with fragments of bitmaps, but a vector-based version is
planned.
(ta, Toby)
Psychoceramic figures: Ann "invade them, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" Coulter is at it again. After advocating a new Crusade in the Middle East and war against France (for being too soft on terrorism), she has now addressed the American Conservative Union Foundation calling for the use of the death penalty to intimidate dissenters.
"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."
(There you have it, folks: the Taliban, one of the harshest Islamic Fundamentalist groups in the world, are "liberals", or their ideological kindred.) (via FmH)
Are we hardwired for religion? An article on the evolutionary psychology of religion, speculating on how the human tendency to religious belief and supernatural explanation may have evolved. (via FmH)
For readers in Sydney: Prop are playing at somewhere called The Basement, in Circular Quay, this Friday, along with post-rock outfit Ukiyo-E. Prop are a mind-blowingly good band, and well worth seeing.
The latest craze among hip young Germans: 1970s terrorist-themed T-shirts, bearing designs associated with groups such as the Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof in a "1970s glitter look". Sort of like an edgier version of the Che Guevara merchandise consumed en masse by teeny-bopper Nu Marxists.
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: A Catholic high school in Pennsylvania has awarded students extra credit for picketing an abortion clinic. More than 50 students of a religion class earned extra credit for picketing outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. The clinic also offers counselling, cancer screenings and contraceptives.
2002/2/10
A few years ago, 15-year-old Norwegian Jon Johansen wrote code for decrypting DVDs, allowing them to be played under Linux. Now he is being prosecuted under computer-crimes laws under pressure from Hollywood. If convicted, he faces 2 years in prison, and a draconian legal precedent will be established in Norway, restricting what individuals may do with their own property much as the DMCA does. Here you can donate to the Jon Johansen Legal Defense Fund and give Hollywood a much-needed black eye. (via the EFF)
Sony sues to ban PlayStation mod chips in Australia (as they have done successfully in the UK), Allan Fels and the ACCC stand up to them, in the interests of consumer choice (specifically, the right to play imported titles). Bravo, ACCC.
Canada's Globe and Mail held an unofficial poll to select the nation's first poet laureate. And melancholist songwriter Leonard Cohen won by a landslide, getting 59%. His nearest rival was Margaret Atwood, with 19%. Unfortunately, as he lives in Los Angeles, he is probably ineligible for the post. (via bOING bOING)
Creepy link of the day: The White Supremacist guide to dating, or how to be the psychopath women can't resist and win over the Eva Braun of your dreams (attributed to one "Elizabeth Bennett", who I think is named after a Jane Austen character; go figure):
Many people have pondered and scratched their heads, wondering what the connection is between sex and violence. The answer is, sex IS violence and women want to have sex with a violent man... The fact is, women experience sex as a delicious form of violence. What is more violent than losing control of your body for nine months, swelling up like a tick? I know it's hard for you to understand (because you aren't a faggot who wants to be dominated) but if you don't understand how women feel about sex -- the mixture of pleasure and pain, fear and excitement, melting in a haze of pleasure and degradation -- then you can't be a good lover.
(You know, parts of this read like a neo-Nazi version of Ayn Rand, or perhaps Houseplants of Gor...) (via NtK, bOING bOING)
2002/2/9
An interesting analysis of boy/girl bands, allegedly from an (unnamed) US study.
Percentage of unique words in lyrics. Average word length. Frequency of "love", "heart" and "baby". These were the criteria used by a US study of boy, girl and teen bands. The researchers picked albums by four of the biggest pop acts around - Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and 'N Sync - and pitted them against an album by Pink Floyd, their musical opposite.
"there is a scientifically proven relationship between how bad a band is and the number of times they sing the word 'baby' "
(via gimbo)
A copy of the out-of-print first Minimum Chips EP, Swish, just fell into my hands (ta, B.!). It's quite Minimum Chips; not quite as Krautrockish/Stereolabesque as Freckles, though still lots of Casiotone goodness, bleeps and such. The artwork is rather techno-retro as well, looking like something from an early 1980s home video game package. And it's interesting to note that they were apparently based in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley at the time; I didn't know that.
(Btw, I wonder who will be supporting Stereolab when they play in Melbourne. Myself, I'd nominate Minimum Chips, Ninetynine or possibly Lacto-Ovo.)
2002/2/8
Meme of the day: Enron as the U.S. Al-Qaeda. (via New World Disorder)
(And yes, I know this is isn't an online personality quiz or anything; look up "meme" in a dictionary sometime, or read The Selfish Gene.)
We. Are the robots: A bar staffed entirely by robots has opened in Berlin. Everything in the Automaten bar is automated, and the jukebox only has electronic music.
A piece on the decline of music journalism, and in particular papers like NME.
Q is now a glowing example of all that is wrong with the music press. It's the pop industry's answer to Hello!, a glorified fanzine that gains access to big-name musicians because of its bland non-critical approach. This is a magazine that is just as happy to have Robbie Williams on the cover as it is REM, where Sting is afforded the same levels of respect as Kurt Cobain. With Q dominating the monthly market, it's no wonder that readers are losing faith in music journalism.
I'm not surprised; looking at the NME website, full of tabloid celebrity gossip and adulation at the "brilliant" new releases from various cookie-cutter R&B/pop groups, it's hard to reconcile this new Smash Hits with the legendary paper that set out to challenge the status quo and instigated things like the C86 compilation. (via VM)
2002/2/7
A list of what are claimed to be the 100 worst movies of the 20th century. Not surprisingly, the likes of Ed Wood and Menahem Golan take multiple honours. I was disappointed, though, that the list doesn't include anything by Donald G. Jackson. His film Return of the Roller Blade Seven is genuinely awful, and the others (with titles like Lingerie Kickboxer and Hell Comes To Frogtown) cannot possibly be much better. (via Lukelog)
This is interesting: data compression as a technique for analysis. Taking advantage of the pattern-finding nature of data-compression algorithms, some researchers have found that compression (such as gzip) can be used to analyse the language of a text file, and even to provide clues as to authorship.
What does spam say about spammers' opinion of netizens? Well, according to the content of spam, most net users are short on cash, after a fast buck, grossly overweight, sexually insecure and obsessed with particularly depraved hardcore pornography. and are not unlikely to be aspiring spammers themselves. Oh, and needless to say, they're also very, very gullible. (via Techdirt)
Which brings to mind the following quote:
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections." -- William Gibson, Idoru
You find out the oddest things when searching Google for "bogans". For example, that there's a Swedish pop band called The Bogans. They seem to be more Britpop than AC/DC though; still, some of their hairdos look rather bogan. Most of the links are to news articles about some basketballer whose surname happens to be Bogans; though there's a web design firm called bogan.com. Apparently they had a family reunion page, but that seems to be gone; perhaps because it was inundated with posts from actual bogans as opposed to Bogans?
2002/2/6
Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner says that conditions in detention centres breach UN conventions; in particular, the culture of despair among the children detained there. Though, then again, Australia doesn't need no stinkin' UN conventions; we're the America of the South Pacific, after all. Don't fuck with us or we'll have a talk to Uncle George, and see if he can lend us some daisy-cutters to drop on your ass. Yee-haw!
The process of justice: Potential Nobel laureate George W. Bush has united his love of baseball with the War On Terrorism, with a scorecard of Al-Qaeda members. Every time someone on the scorecard is killed, Bush crosses them off. Lucky thing that the ban on assassinations has been lifted, too.
Wonder whether he'll upgrade to an expanded card of other enemies of America, with people like Gaddafi, Castro, the North Korean president-for-life, and anybody else who doesn't like America on it. Perhaps he can put those Europeans on it if they keep criticising the war too.
Oh dear... Goth Trailer Park, two concepts that usually aren't mentioned in the same sentence. (via Quiddity)
(Actually, I heard that they do have goths in the Deep South, only they're all worshippin' Satan, stagin' ritual vampire killings or shootin' up their high schools with Pa's shotgun, or else merely en route to New Orleans from somewhere else.)
2002/2/5
There was an interesting interview with Bernard Sumner on 3RRR this evening (on Bec Hornsby's programme). He talked about the early days of experimenting with an electronic sound, mentioning how New Order were inspired by the sound (though not the lyrics) of the old Giorgio Moroder records and how he was experimenting with building his own synths; about how the most recent album was written and recorded (apparently Crystal was originally programmed on a computer as a house/dance number); and about the upcoming film 24 Hour Party People, about Factory Records, which apparently is due out in the UK in April. He also mentioned that there is a film in the works about Ian Curtis, based on his widow's book Touching From A Distance, and that the band have more to do with this film.
Make your own joke here: George W. Bush nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. That's almost as funny (in a not particularly funny way) as the thing about him being "pro-life".
Culture jamming: A group of the militant unemployed calling themselves the Dole Army have hoaxed Australian tabloid TV current-affairs shows into running a story about the unemployed living in drains, emerging only at night to scavenge for food. The Murdoch papers and radio talk show hosts are undoubtedly outraged. The Cave Clan could not be reached for comment.
The Chaser has more articles online. Of particular note: "Harry Potter fans warn against dangerous effects of Bible", "CAMP X-RAY 'INHUMANE': Ruddock asks for brochure".. and don't tell me that Ratcat have reformed. (If so, wonder what they would sound like; would they just playing their 1990-vintage skater-pop hits on the nostalgia circuit for all the mortgaged new parents who used to be into them when they were kids, or have they jumped on the mook/rap-metal/big-yellow-shorts bandwagon and tried to reach out to a new crop of suburban teens?)
2002/2/4
A psychological experiment recently performed in Scotland has shown that people are sexually attracted to sex-changed images of themselves, without realising that the images were of themselves.
A few prank-related items: Via Jimbob, an interview with SubGenius Paul Mavrides from the Re/Search Pranks book (which is recommended; in particular, the Boyd Rice interview is most inspiring).
A SubGenius friend named Janor was watching a TV Preach-a-Thon. The preacher was taking phone calls from people who needed "the healing help of the Lord," so Janor put on his "hick" accent and called him up, impersonating a totally paranoid man who had been driven crazy by Jesus. He said something like, "Jesus scares me to death -- I'm sure Jesus is the Devil in disguise. Isn't Jesus like a vampire, because he rose from the dead and all his followers are supposed to drink blood and eat flesh?" The host immediately got sucked in, saying, "No, son! You're confused!" Janor continued (in a quavering voice), "I tried to go to church, but they said I was possessed by the Devil. Then they stood around in a circle and _beat_ me with their Bibles, and now I can't even go _near_ a Bible! I get scared just thinking about it!" He wasted the preacher's entire show taking in circles. The more the guy tried to help him, the worse it got!
And then, via the Law of the Playground site featured here earlier, there's an account of a prank performed on a Melbourne train line sometime in the 1970s; it reads like something out of How To Make Trouble and Influence People.
2002/2/3
Alternative authors' versions of Lord of the Rings. Ever wondered how Tolkien's masterwork would read, had it been written instead by, say, Ian Fleming or Oscar Wilde? (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Women-haters vs. baby-killers: Bush administration reclassifies foetuses as "unborn children" in a prenatal care plan. This move has alarmed some observers, who suspect that the reclassification is an attempt by the notoriously theocratic administration to undermine women's reproductive rights.
An article about the state of Cocoa support under Python. In short, some progress is being made with pyobjc (and Python 2.2's improved object system), but it's not there yet.
2002/2/2
Barbarism begins at school: A marvellous compedium of playground lore, the pranks, minor rebellions, mad teachers, scatologies, sadisms, and the odd moment of comedic brilliance, of generations of schoolchildren. (via Meg)
If curiosity beat your common sense, and you showed an interest in finding out where the blue goldfish was, your head would be flushed in the toilet. However, at least you now know where the blue goldfish is, and you can teach other people. (Jimbo)
Walking cautiously home from school behind some big fat year nines, I overheard one say to the other, "You're a cuntstack!". I gaped, wide-eyed, thinking I had stumbled across an ingenious new insult with hilarious origins. I later found out the bloke was called Kevin Stack, and his mate was therefore merely calling him a cunt, but this didn't stop me using 'cuntstack' at every possible opportunity. (Anna)
"don't go near him, he's psycho": A self-fulfilling prophecy, when repeated often enough. The victim will be so starved of human interaction that they will, eventually, become psycho. (Stephen Barker)
By quietly repeating the words of the teacher a moment after they say them it is possible to have the poor bugger sitting next to you become so disorientated they start to write down what you are saying, and not the teacher. Once they are hooked, to their surprise they suddenly find they are not writing about the properties of oxygen, but a blue monkey with a huge penis. (Keith Arnold)
2002/2/1
The RIAA has requested a temporary suspension of its case against Napster; some are saying because the case would challenge their supremacy over copyright and their hitherto unquestioned control of the means of music distribution. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Goldstein to fight the DeCSS ruling.
DISSENT = TREASON: SWAT team raid teenage anarchist's home, seize computers used for running web site raisethefist.com (now offline). He allegedly had cracking and bomb-making information online; wonder whether he will be charged with any of the new homeland-security offenses.
Physicists look at the physics of wealth concentration and corruption. In short, corruption happens when a class of the super-rich arises, having more than a certain level of wealth. However, the problem of corruption is more likely to afflict socialist economies (i.e., those that attempt to restrict wealth) than liberal ones.