Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year was by far the most contemporary year I've had since I stopped listening to Radio 1 - only two songs from this year's selection pre-date my living memory. This is probably because I stumbled into the "chillwave" genre and am currently consuming all the in-print material available. The lack of releases from the eighties or earlier is also because I haven't obtained any offbeat and out of print albums. Or rather, I'm not willing to shell out £30+ for an out of print album (again) and can't get it by 'alternative means'. As such, there is no now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned award this year. Since this is the year of chillwave, I will instead present the Roygbiv-eargasm award to Imprint After by Toro Y Moi. Not since said BoC track has a song withstood incessant listening and accelerated toward the top of my most played Top 50.

Waking Up And Getting Up Has Never Been Easy

Postmen in the Snow, Rupert Brun, 2010

Throughout this productive year I've maintained the post-a-week pace of writing by planning out the following month in advance. Usually there's around ten drafts in varying levels of completion If I'm struggling to bring a scheduled draft up to standard I'll postpone it a month and bring forward a more complete one. December was to be no different, only accommodating a two week gap between the first week and the Christmas week for obvious employment reasons. Unfortunately I fell ill in the first week which scratched the first post and the past two weeks has seen the Royal Mail network buckling under the strain of the seasonal post and periodic blizzards. I've been waking up early, on the streets till late and going to bed early - rinse and repeat. As such, I've neither had the time nor energy to write.

You Won't Have to Follow Me, Only You Can Set You Free

PART TWO OF A PROLOGUE TO A SERIES.

Nelson Mandela, Frames-of-Mind, 2007

The Marxism essay for politics class was a by-the-numbers 'name the core aspects of theory-x' test like most class assignments. There were a few reasons I bothered to finish and hand in that particular essay - setting it apart from all the others due at the same time. I really enjoyed the politics class - the lecturer, the free flow of the classes (compare the rigidly planned psychology class, which I hated) and the subject matter.

The essay was also an opportunity to coherently express my knowledge and ideas on the subject and perhaps gain a greater understanding through arranging it on paper. Though discussing Leninism and identifying the Russian Revolution as a keystone event of the movement were explicit requirements of the essay, I can't recall whether determining an initial cause for the eventual failure of the Soviet Union was part or something I threw in to show off. Based on the conclusion I reached, that the implementation and continuation of War Communism undermined the revolution's own internal support and led to increased centralisation of power, I wonder whether the latter was true. Having stated that Imperial Russia was still a largely feudal state, only to then dismiss the idea that this was why the Soviet Union could not make the transition to socialism by leap-frogging the capitalist epoch, I perhaps wrote myself into a corner and then wrote back out of it in order to increase the word count. The essay also got a straight A!

Q: Are We Not Men?

In the past this information has been suppressed, but now it can be told. Every man, woman, and mutant on this planet shall know the truth about de-evolution

Collage (top to bottom, left to right):
[1] (Unknown)
[2] Peacock @ Delhi Zoo, Hi Pandian [CC:BY-NC]
[3] Pulled Pork Sandwich in progress, Marshal Astor Food Pornographer [CC:BY-SA]
[4] African Lion Feeding on Horse, Luke Robinson [CC:BY-NC-SA]
[5] hypnotic, procsilas [CC:BY]
[6] gato televito, Walala Pancho [CC:BY-NC-SA]

Imprint After

unidentified compact disc, Janesdead, 2005

I hate being subjected to Radio 1. Either my tastes have evolved considerably, or pop music's standards have dropped considerably. Yes I know, I'm twenty-three so that probably puts even me far outside its tweeny demographic; but I swear we've witnessed the idea of the musical composition known as a 'song' eaten from the inside out by the refrain. The refrain - often called the chorus - has always been the catchy part of a song, often where the hook resides. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before the chorus came to form an entire song whereupon the hook ceases to be a means to catch the listener's ear and instead acts more like the little slots on a cheese grater. Coupled with a gratuitous looped sample being shouted over, the whole concoction shreds my eardrum over the course of three minutes.

Hexadecimal Genome

Eye-Bee-M, Paul Rand, 1981

I mentioned in October that my first computer was an IBM PS/1. In fact, I also had a used Commodore 64 for a few years, though I can't remember which came first; plus, I never really thought of the C64 as a computer. Like a console it plugged into the tv and it had a tape deck which to my young mind was equivalent to a game cartridge but with excruciatingly long loading times.

The interface of the 64 made it difficult for me to accidentally break it - the command for loading a game was written down on a piece of paper, and that was as much as I knew. By comparison, a technician had to be called out at least three times to reinstall Windows 3.1 on the PC. This was the same OS that came with a tutorial for using a mouse, so it was simply a case of double clicking the wrong thing. I used to explore the System and Windows folders looking for interesting hidden stuff (ooh, regedit.exe), but I only remember one particular time now in which I went into the Control Panel and decided to change the theme settings to something more Christmas-y. Unfortunately when it was next booted, Windows failed to load because my Christmas theme exceeded the video card's colour limit. You live, you learn.

The Artist Pretending It's Art, The Question is: Where Do You Pay?

Penny Black Printing Press, takomabibelot, 2009

What separates entertainment from art? If "all art is quite useless" then the last blockbuster you saw in the cinema is probably more so. But it makes a hell of a lot of money for those who control the media, hence these quite useless products are copyrighted for nigh a century. Our culture is far from ours in possession. How can it be called culture if can't share it? Last month I asked Who will be the first to give it all away, and Who will be the first to take it all for nothing?

 The web was the first gift, it's architecture free from commercial claims. The second question has already been answered by the millions running torrents over the global network, and the unlucky few who have been subject to legal action (that often never goes to trial). The latter is a direct result of the disruptive innovation of the former. The buying and selling of music is a very recent development in the history of music (which is entangled with language and similarly as old) made possible by the invention of recording media in the late 19th century - only then forming a concrete object with value.

The Masses Against The Classes

PART ONE OF A PROLOGUE TO A SERIES.

The following was written for the Marxism module of Politics A class in the HNC Social Sciences course. I was up until 6AM writing this five years ago. In fact, this was the only paper I bothered to hand-in before failing/dropping out of the course by early 2006.

The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

The Void (149), Prij

One of my favourite programmes in the mid 90s was Strange But True? - one of the very few programmes I ever watched on ITV. As a child just old enough to have grown up with Ghostbusters 2, I was fascinated by the paranormal in the same way the more exotic scientific phenomena, like blackholes, captured my imagination. Because it was broadcast on a Friday night, I was allowed to stay up to watch it. I clearly remember one particular evening, The Enfield Poltergeist episode (broadcast 20/10/95) kept me awake a lot longer. I was nine years old at the time so that's understandable. I was too young to have seen Ghostwatch, but I obtained a copy last year and at the age of twenty two I was disturbed enough to sleep with the light on.

Back in July I was lying awake one night with the window open. I go to bed early on a Friday because I have to get up early on Saturday morning for work. I had already been in bed around two hours without managing to fall asleep. By now it was midnight and I was on the verge sleep when I was startled by a noise outside. What at first I thought was water running down a pipe resolved into a loud growl. I live one floor up so either it was on my windowsill or in the garden and very loud. So loud in fact that my brother who didn't have his window open went out to see what it was (as the cat had gone outside). Neither of us could see anything in the dark, though the cat appeared and was watching the far wall that separates downstairs' garden from next door. Foxes occasionally wander this far down from the golf course and cemetery, but it would have had to have vaulted two fairly high fences to get into our garden, and jump the wall to get out the other side and I've heard foxes before but never that sound. Nevertheless, the most reasonable answer is that it was a fox but reason pales to emotion in forming impressions, and that is from which the mind jumps to conclusions.

D'You Know What I Mean?

I have an admission. I... am a conlanger. I have been for seven years, but no-one knows. Tolkein called conlanging "a secret vice", though as an historical linguist he should have had no reason to hide it. It's perceived that people who make up languages are either strange twins or just strange. Tolkein went on to write one of the most popular literary series in history which gave his hobby some respect, even though hardly anyone knows the books were written as a cultural backdrop for the languages.

The Information Chase

Banksy Leake Street London, The_Magician, 2008

The Leaning Tower of Pisa. An object which would long ago have toppled to the ground, if it were not for all those counterbalanced lead weights and years of continual stabilisation work. When the Italian government requested help in saving the structure, it was seen to be more important to preserve the tilt for tourism than make it a naturally stable building as it was intended and like any other. The earth shifting beneath it put it on the cusp of collapse centuries ago. The tower is as much a symbol of man defying physics as it can be a metaphor for the copyright industries.

Reformat The Planet

8-Bit Art, ConvenienceStoreGourmet, 2010

I remember some of the first games I played when I got my first computer (an IBM PS/1) sixteen years ago. Thanks to shareware, and also rampant piracy in the local IBM factory, I had The Duel: Test Drive II, Crystal Caves, Keen Dreams, and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (all seven floppies of it). Of course, looking back the graphics were pretty awful, Test Drive's level scenery was highly repetitive, Keen Dreams' audio wouldn't work for some reason, and the dialogue in FoA lacked voice acting. I also had Wolfenstein 3D  and Prince of Persia, but they don't count because the former would never load and the latter was lacking the manual, so I had no idea how to draw the sword and therefore get past the first level. Yet somehow I managed to get a number of years enjoyment out of those few games. I've grown up in the medium as I never say 'video games'

I'll Wonder Why We Didn't Try To Do or Die

Porsche Carrera Che Guevara, f650biker, 2008

As Royal Mail heads toward becoming another target of the new depression, I recall where I was when it became apparent we wouldn't be able to afford the future. Funnily enough, I was out on delivery with my pocket radio listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. The big news of the week was the ongoing collapse of Northern Rock and the bank runs on their highstreet branches - something out of the past and decidedly out of the ordinary.

However, plenty saw it coming. It was just a matter of time before another big crash. What market goes up must come down. The good times do not continue forever, yet something like the fact that infinite economic growth is impossible is met with Wealth of Nations being thrown at you - as if Adam Smith was a proponent of magic. There are only so many resources on this planet and only so much of them.

That Was Then But This Is Now

A Complex Fractal Image, Public Domain

When I was in school I used to watch the BBC's Horizon, back when entertainment hadn't yet cross-bred with factual programming. Cosmology really interested me and I proceeded to loan A Brief History of Time from the school library. One thing that really irritated me was the way Hawking seemed to go out of his way to leave space for a god. Now, with his new book, he has closed the door on that - "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".

Over The Horizon Radar

I FAIL (Cropped), Prij, 2006

One of the reasons I've always advocated media studies, despite not having taken it myself, is to promote critical thinking - especially with regards to advertising and journalism. It's important to doubt what you're presented with, be it a brand of aftershave or a superbeing in the sky. Without free thought we become consumers, like farm animals fattening up to be led round the back and given a second mortgage. As a free thinker I hate to see lies and deceptions being mindlessly accepted by people. More so when it's me. In my pursuit of lucid dreaming there's nothing more annoying than not dreaming, than later remembering you did. Across three nights at the start of this month I missed three opportunities to become lucid.

In the first dream I had a false awakening and was presented with something I knew was not true and I successfully recognised that. However, I reasoned that I was being tricked into believing I was dreaming (a reverse Inception?) and proceeded to perform the finger-through-hand reality check in order to prove I was awake. It correctly proved (in narrative) that I was awake. To practise that reality check and see it fail was extremely frustrating. The following night I dreamt I was on what alternated between being a train and a plane. With obviously fictional characters present amongst the passengers, I had a conversation about lucid dreaming with the two women in the row behind. I even talked about reality checks but didn't perform one, perhaps because of the previous night's failure.

Pretending To See The Future

so happy there is INTERNET COVERAGE, irina slutsky, 2008

In a mobile multimedia multichannel world it's difficult to imagine just how centralised information and communications were in years gone by. I'm not quite old enough to have grown up with the web (online just short of a decade) but I do know from having limited access when abroad that disconnection from the hive mind is like suffocation. It's hard to understand the shared experience of millions of people listening to the radio as Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939.

I remember looking at the audience figures in What's On TV? in the 90s and the major soap operas would bring in a maximum of 9 million viewers. Only something like a Christmas Day special of Only Fools and Horses would break that and be able to claim the nation itself was focused on that channel in that hour. But to think of something with the same gravity as a declaration of war, that could only be 'September 11th'. The first global event of the modern era. I first heard it over the radio when I got in from school, then I went online to see it on every news site, and I turned the tv on to see every channel carrying US news feeds. There were probably instant messages and e-mails and phone calls all communicating the same thing to others.

In One Ear

Don't stop....no pares....., spanishgirl_in_oxford, 2006

The Spelling Bee is a curious Anglophone phenomenon. The idea of spelling out words as an academic competition is unheard of in countries that lack byzantine orthographies. I'm a long time proponent of spelling reform in English and also a long time hater of people who cannot or will not spell correctly. If I have to go back to the start and reread your sentence because you're not bothered about spelling, then I'm not going to read whatever you had to say no matter how interesting or profound it was since you obviously don't care enough to effectively communicate it. Perhaps a reform will come if we embrace the yoof's demotic - a silent letter cull at the expense of some 'sk8r boi' monstrosities and grammatical malformations.

Introductory Nomenclature

Today is World Blog Day. Unbelievably it's been four years since I last did this. Since I realised I no longer read any of the blogs I cited four years ago, and also Para deleted her blog a while back, I decided to link to the ones I read regularly.

The Shape of Things To Come

The Raven, richardault, 2008

I've never been to a funeral before and I wish I could say I'd never have to go to another.

The day began by meeting the rest of the family over at my grandmother's house before the funeral cortège arrived to take us to the cemetery. As we waited I took a seat by the window when my eyes were drawn to her chair. So jarringly unoccupied it brought to mind the shot of Tiny Tim's empty seat in The Muppet Christmas Carol - the muppets did it best. If the chair was peculiarly vacant, the room and the house were even more so. The short drive to the crematorium was quietly sombre. As a grandson I was first with the rest of the family to enter. My mind was concentrated on trying to remain composed amid the audible grief of my mother, aunt and uncle. This was not the first time for them - my grandfather died five years before I was born. Whilst the hall filled my thoughts were drifting toward understanding the situation. When the coffin itself was carried in, trying to remain detached became infinitely harder - eyes drawn front and centre, staring at it. I didn't look at the service booklet because of the picture on the back page - photographs have become too disconcerting.

The Reverse Will

Skrik, Edvard Munch, 1893

About twelve years ago my brother and I got pet goldfish. They died a number of times, probably due to our negligence; but we were unaware as our parents had replaced them, overestimating our attachment to the point of driving up the motorway to the pet shop in Renfrew one morning. To say that we were upset about this would be an outright lie, truth be told I pretty much forgot we had them - the cat was the centre of attention. Pet fish are really an entry level pet, the sort that a child can make a fatal error without having any serious mental scars. Ashes to ashes, flush to flush. Later on my cat disappeared. He was older than me by a few years so it was all but confirmed he went to find a place to die. Still, the ambiguity makes denial easier, and I wasn't as upset as I would in a more clear cut situation - as when my second cat was run over. That was much different because I had her from kittenhood. Animals do have personalities. Despite not witnessing it, her death is quite clear in my mind. That led to an excruciating post in 2005 that I'm not going to link back to.

Heaven's Night

Silver Falls 19, emperley 3, 2010

Early Friday after midnight I was reminded of the Perseid meteor shower. I spent nearly an hour standing still looking straight up into clear skies. The first I saw flashed across half the sky. I saw perhaps half a dozen. One of the brightest left an afterglow in either the atmosphere or my eye. Stood in the garden without sign of another, I could have been the only one watching.

After a while I couldn't crouch out of the streetlights anymore and lay down on the stairs, like an uncomfortable recliner. I lay there staring through space. I stared through it and at it. I started to move through it. As the stars rolled over I had to call it a night before I fell asleep. The night sky was probably the view our ancestors woke to on first watch. Unobstructed by skyglow, they would have seen the milky way and the enshrined heroes pivot on the celestial sphere.

You could feel the sky.

Heard From Telegraph Lines

Back at the end of last year I gave the blog a new layout when I realised I had been using an ancient template the whole time. The labels gadget prompted me to get the post tags in order whereupon I noticed there was a gap in the more academic topics between mid-2006 and the end of 2008. Interestingly enough, that was the period this blog lapsed into diary mode. I managed to get back on track in October 2008 when I laboured to produce five whole posts, but it wasn't until this year that I regained motivation by inverse resistance to the rise of microblogging. Since I've mastered Goggle Docs' spreadsheets, here's some illustrations:

(Dream A Dream A Trance As You Dream) In Trance As Mission

The Listening Room, René Magritte, 1952

More than a decade ago in a hot and stifling home economics class each pixel in my eye went out one by one until my vision faded, my inner ear lost track of balance, and the last thing I could feel was my head painlessly colliding with the floor tiles. I woke up in bed, got up for breakfast and went about the morning routine for school. Then I woke up again in the recovery position on the classroom floor. As I woke I said to the teacher 'I was dreaming' - What I meant was, I thought collapsing was the dream, and the dream was reality. She figured I had dreamt Scotland won the World Cup. I always found dreams interesting like my own personal bizarre little narrative-defying films, which is why I used to keep a dream journal off and on between 2004 and 2008. A few years ago I read about lucid dreaming but largely forgot about it until seeing Inception. Since the start of this month I've been trying, though to no avail as of writing.

Overdose Delusion

Screenshot from Inception, 2010

I said I'd write up an analysis of Inception after another viewing and I've now seen it thrice - twice on the big screen, and once on the small screen *cough*. I've already pre-ordered it. Here I've tried to reign in my branching interpretations...

Dreams Never End

I really hate it when films are described as a cross between two renowned films. The cover of R-Point features a quote from 'Front Magazine': "Blair Witch meets Full Metal Jacket" - not even close. Inception has been summarised as The Matrix meets Ocean's Eleven.

All Together Now

Alex Song: Cameroon 2010, tsevis, 2009

Before the South Africa finals, I hadn't watched any football since the 2006 World Cup. Somehow I managed to completely miss Euro 2008. As Scotland failed to qualify as usual, I wasn't hindered by great expectations, dreams of glory or any other kind of emotional high. Unlike England. Despite thirty-two teams competing in the 2010 tournament; the one we have to hear about again and again is of course, that team that won it once a very long time ago. Any time England qualifies for the World Cup the national media (being mostly based South of the border) will drop 1966 into every possible topic or story. Only the Welsh and maybe Northern Ireland could also understand how irritating that is. Though only one thing could be more annoying that having to hear about a missed penalty for a week - England winning.

Extrinsic 5: Cities, Buildings Falling Down, Ideal Homes Falling Down

My photostream "Cyprus"

One of the day tours on offer in Cyprus is a trip into the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC)- the highlight of which is the 'abandoned city' of Famagusta where we were told you could 'see' the long out-dated clothes on display in the shops. Or at least that's how it was sold. As I was in the last divided country in Europe; the chance of crossing through an armistice line into a place with its own zone of interdiction, like a tame North Korea, appealed to me.

I went on this trip on July 14th 2007 and intended to write a post the following day. For whatever reason, I didn't. I dug out the old notepad I had on holiday at the time and the entry for this consisted of the date, title, and a blank page. Here's what I would have written had I not scrapped the post two years ago...

As always these bloody trips require getting up at 0700 when the only thing on offer in the restaurant is fucking sandwiches. Our hotel was in Paphos which is conveniently on the wrong side of Cyprus. After a mind-numbing eternity on the motorway, during which we picked up our Greek Cypriot Guide, the bus eventually reached the Green Line which we followed to the Eastern Sovereign Base for the crossing into the North. The Green Line seemed to mostly consist of open field, warning notices and lookout posts. Our Southern guide mostly spent this time covertly denouncing the Ataturk, only to do a complete about-face on that topic when the Northern guide boarded at the checkpoint. As tourists in the South, you could be forgiven for slipping into the perception of the Turkish side as a muslim East Germany. Both guides had stories about how the invasion and division of the island had affected them and their families. Both hoped Cyprus could be reunited.

United States of Whatever

Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator! [Cropped], br7tt, 2007

What came first: idiots or misanthropy? I never fail to be amazed/depressed at the sheer ignorance people are capable of. The general public seems mentally in the pre-Galilean age
in which the stars are fixed, a burning ball of coal revolves around Earth and the Moon only comes out at night as everyone knows, whilst smugly proclaiming that simpletons in the middle ages thought the world was flat. Safe in their own delusions they watch reality television where they indulge in more delusions about their superiority over the trash who appear on screen. There is something seriously wrong in a world that turned Orwell's warning of totalitarianism into a yearly wet t-shirt contest.

It used to be you could laugh at those silly colonials on the other side of the Atlantic, with their god and guns and poor understanding of world geography. But then I noticed stupidity was a universal not tied to a specific state. I can lambaste an American for calling me English or confusing Slovakia and Slovenia, only because I know the difference between Washington state and Washington DC. I have done the research - I have the high ground. I've bothered to read about the latest models of quantum mechanics even though the mathematics is beyond me and I failed Higher Physics. Therefore I took exception when people were talking about the Large Hadron Collider going on-line and possibly creating a blackhole that could destroy us all, because they read it in a column in The Sun written by some celebrity who probably still thinks atoms are indivisible. Indeed, mass ignorance of the LHC's purpose was rammed home earlier this week when I realised I hadn't seen Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe in a while.

I'm a DJ and I've Got Believers

cue, danmachold, 2005

A few weeks back I was in the barber's and I was watching BBC News in the mirror - I think this was the same day Gordon Brown stood down as PM. One of the employees then changed channel to the Radio 1 feed. I stopped listening to R1 at the end of 2003. As the Radio 1 Festival was around the corner, the presenter decided to play an "oldie" from years gone by. It was Avril Lavigne's 'Sk8er Boi'.

Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up

2AM Eternal, Prij, 2008

In the heat there is a light in the North that defies sunset. Airlanes are pink against the blue airglow. That light is the relief from the winter dark that hangs so low overhead for so long. Sure enough it will return again.

Summer gives way to winter, gives way to summer. Our existence disappears in the cycle. Waves breaking on the shore die for more still behind them. The gears of the orrery crush stone. Imagine what it will do to you.

But for now in the blithe dawn chorus, all possibilities remain ahead. If your soul could explode in ecstasy, it would form the ethereal light on my horizon. She is still rising, stealing the stars from the sky.

Fleeting rhodon touch.

(Deeper Underground) I Get Nervous in the New York City Streets

9/11, marc_buehler/NBC, 2001

Yeah, again. After publishing my analysis of Cloverfield last month, I continued thinking about the film's relation to September 11th. What I have written below is really pushing the limits of the narrative as I highly doubt the producers, being American, are communicating the message that I think could be extracted from it.

»Spoilers Throughout«

In my previous analysis I argued Clover (the titular monster) was a personification of 9/11 and as such, the instigator of the character drama. The origins, motivations, and purpose of Clover are ultimately unknown. The only clue is the brief shot of an object strike the ocean in the final scene before the credits (the promotional material offers a scant back-story). Despite Rob's camcorder perfectly capturing that brief glimpse, Rob and Liz are entirely unaware of it. When Clover starts wrecking New York, no-one understands what is going-on nor why it is happening.

Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions of Pounds, Billions of Pounds (Corruption, Corruption)

jump-you-fuckers, matthewnstoller, 2008

It's World Cup time, not that I've seen much so far. It seems whenever I go to BBC iPlayer to watch a game it's audio only because fucking ITV have the broadcast rights to that particular fixture. So I had the misfortune of enduring commercial television for the first time in quite a while. I already knew the rampant commercialism of sport is sickeningly omnipresent, but it's still aggravating to see product after over-priced Chinese slave-laboured product so-tenuously linked to the World Cup being hawked as if there's no tomorrow.

Lineman for the County

Endorsing the Returns, Prij, 20/03/10

This week marks my third year working for Royal Mail and, coincidentally, another operational change has taken place. Even in this short time there have been noticeable changes, all of which are driven by the mantra 'mail-volumes-are-down-and-people-are-emailing-and-texting'. Roy Mayall has tackled these claims several times, so I needn't repeat his rebuttals.

When I started, weekday working hours were 0800 to 1300 with deliveries starting at 0930. In October 2007, despite union resistance, this shifted an hour back. The next initiative was 'summer lapsing' in June 2008. This involves dividing a duty amongst surrounding walks during the easy summer period. With the exception of Christmas, 'summer lapsing' now occurs Monday to Thursday using the 'starburst' delivery method. That knocked me off the walk I was on at the time (Hallmark Fount) exactly a year after starting. I didn't appreciate that present.

Window Washer's Dream

NYEastRiver_From_WTC, Fanghong, 1992

At the end of the 90s I was getting a bit old for Lego. There's an old camcorder tape somewhere from the early 90s of me giving a tour of my attic-based sprawling Lego city. When I moved out of my old house in July 2000 the Lego was packed away and it's still in boxes in the basement because this house is substantially smaller. A few months prior to moving, a friend had given me an old copy of SimCity 2000. Along with Pokémon Red/Blue, it was the cause of my first exile from television - even from then-still-good The Simpsons. By my first exams in May 2002 I had a copy of SimCity 3000. I would get up early and play it all day, which in hindsight could have been used for studying but I coasted that year's exams anyway.

(Deeper Underground) But I Got To Go Much Deeper

»Spoilers From The Outset«

B0000609, ghackettny, 2001

Looking for something to watch on Sunday night, I put on Cloverfield again. Last year I wrote a short review after first seeing it, in which I thought it was underrated. As I was munching through a packet of crisps the Brooklyn Bridge collapses killing Jason and many unknown others. People are screaming names and fleeing in abject terror, and I suddenly felt uncomfortable. Indeed, some reviews criticised it as September 11th pornography - making entertainment out of tragedy as the horror genre does with fear. In my mini review I saw it as a contemporary framing of the monster/disaster movie genre but lacking depth or social commentary. That unease prompted me to question whether it really was without merit, leading me to watch it yet again on Thursday.

Prior to 2001, the most destructive act of terrorism in the US was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 - as referenced in the opening scenes of The X-Files Movie (1998). That incident is well known but largely restricted to that city in terms of impact. September 11th, on the other hand, was a game-changer, broadcast live as it unfolded - its effects on American culture are profound and long-lasting. Before it, the American public was only familiar with terrorism on the evening news. It had never struck home on such a large scale. With the thousands of people who died on that day, how could Hollywood ever make a disaster movie again? To make a popcorn disaster movie with a massive body count would be grossly insensitive.

Persuading You That Monochrome is Dayglo

NOPE, Tom Edwards, 2010

There is now a new government in Westminster, not that I can tell. I still find myself thinking Blair is Prime Minister and Bush is President. The climactic shift that these brief windows of participatory indirect democracy (elections) are supposed to produce never arise. Round we go, like a zoetrope: Labour in power, Conservatives in power; Democrats in power, Republicans in power. The illusion of movement. It's hypnotic.

I hate to be the cynic, but I guarantee the 'new politics' will come to remind you of the old politics. How many months was it before fresh-faced Tony was caught accepting money from F1 autocrat Bernie Ecclestone? I was ten at the time and I can remember hearing how the Labour landslide was the rebuke of Tory sleaze. Remember the icons of the mid nineties meeting Blair at No. 10? How many of them were in sight of Downing Street ten years later? Politicians have been heralding change more times than the boy who cried wolf, and yet even I was swept along by Obamamania.

Somebody Up There Likes You

Frakk em all!, Don Solo, 2009

As someone raised on Star Trek I've been reluctant to leave the comfort of the Roddenberry universe. Perhaps because Trek is the oldest standard for serious (by 60s standards) sci-fi television, all other shows come across as re-costumed copies. I was too young to see The Next Generation during its original run, but BBC2's tea-time repeats in the 90s made me a fan. When Deep Space Nine was imported I was probably too young to appreciate its breaking of the Trek mould - war, questionable ethics, the Federation losing for once. I preferred Voyager at this point but as it went on I became convinced Star Trek was losing steam. Voyager in particular was either repeating itself or TNG or pulling a deus ex machina every time they walked into the Borg. Despite that, the Doctor was and still is a great character, but his story arcs with Seven of Nine (and her own character development) would have been so much better if Seven wasn't visually the epitome of fan service.

In The Waiting Line

Still Life with a Skull (Vanitas), Philippe de Champaigne, 16xx

I have a very good long term memory. If I say I don't remember it, it's probably because I want to forget it. Despite this, I always feel highly disconnected from the past. My room is littered with little mementos of various places and times because I tend never to return after leaving: I have a safety box-cutter from my ten days working at Amazon, a phonetic alphabet chart for pinning to a monitor from the telephony course I was on in 2007, and I have the old frame labels of my old delivery. Each of those is a concrete object that proves the past happened. I have a much harder time with the future.

I'll Bet You Five You're Not Alive If You Don't Know His Name (GA-Slag -1)

Seven and a half years ago I had written a satire of the school's Remembrance Day service and constructed a website for it on my NTL webspace. In the retrospective I quoted the original creators (Martin and Stephen) who were originally going to write The GA-Slag about individuals they wanted to have a go at. They abandoned the idea out of fear before I picked it up in November 2002. I can't remember how I got hold of the concept, but I do remember talking to Stephen about covering the service as a piece for his site. We were pissed off about having to attend, so why not entertain ourselves? The original idea was obviously a legal minefield best avoided, or navigated with pseudonyms at least. As I said in the retrospective, slagging people off would have just segregated things even more in fifth and sixth year. By that point most of the really irritating types (the neds) had already left during fourth year.

It occurred to me that there was one character ripe and deserving of abuse I had neglected to write about. One person we could all agree on...

Architecture and Morality

BM093 New York Skyscrapers, listentoreason, 2005

Back when I was studying social sciences at college one of the classes would assign reports on an issue of our choice relevant to the course. Possibly overreaching into doctorate territory, I repeatedly tried to investigate religion and morality, or more correctly disprove the correlation between them. In fact, one of my lecturers told me it was a good idea but way beyond my means and the scope of the course. I later threw in some swear words and just published my opinion on this blog.

The claim of ownership on morality by religion in general is without substance. The Archbishop of Cantebury, Rowan Williams, in particular irritates me. Softly spoken, every time he pops-up it's to say things would be nicer if we'd just listen more to that swell fellow upstairs (but don't expect him to lift a finger). The Abrahamic religions have spent centuries now claiming that armed with their unique truth and moral compass, the ills of the increasingly secular world can be cured (secularism being equated with materialism). Problem is, this moral compass has been spinning around for millennia. What may have been permissible then is not now, and vice-versa.

Something to Sing About (The Spell We Cast With Buffy)

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards
-Kierkegaard

Willow Rosenberg promo photo, Trekkie Gal

Whenever I watch a film trilogy or a tv series boxset, I reach the end and want to start over again. A good test of the quality of the material would be whether it could stand up to an immediate repeat viewing. I've never done that - when I've finished watching Back to the Future, for example, I always leave at least a few weeks before watching it again. It is possible to ruin a good thing and I hate to spoil BTTF like Jurassic Park. Considering most films have a runtime of roughly 100 minutes, you'd need to set aside close to five hours to revisit a trilogy on DVD, easy enough. Now consider revisiting a long-running tv show on disc: nearly forty-five minutes for American network productions with twenty or so episodes a season comes to fifteen hours. Now you need to justify watching all the way through an old series.

Words Can Put You On The Run

Russians were here, quinn.anya, 2007

I've been making my way through the Battlestar Galactica series boxsets recently, and coincidentally there's a moral panic over the film Kick-Ass. What the two have in common is bad language, if there is such a thing.

The quote the BBFC's
rating of Kick-Ass (link may contain spoilers):

The film contains multiple uses of strong language. [...] KICK-ASS contains one use of very strong language. The word is spoken by a young girl who, like Kick-Ass, has become a makeshift superhero. Although some people might be offended by a child using this type of language, the predominant effect is comic. [...] The remark is delivered in a throwaway fashion rather than aggressively directed and the unexpectedness and incongruity of the use provides a comic justification for its inclusion.

Then Your Children Will Be Next

There are 58,789,194 people in the UK at the last census in 2001. Along with 92.1% of that number I have classified myself as white. Specifically, White British, and only because I'm not White Irish or White Other. I'm obviously white and since I live on this island called Great Britain I suppose British is a suitable enough adjective, so what is it I have in common with all those other white people? Some sort of racial heritage? Some sort of national identity?

The Bitterest Pill

Royal Mail Success - This Letter Reached the Right Person, Neil Boyd, 2009

I've been working at Royal Mail for nearly three years now, but I've never really written about the job. I could swear like a sailor about management and the way RM is being intentionally driven into the ground, but I really like the job and wouldn't want to risk it over a bunch of rants - hard to believe this is from the man who wrote this at school and deliberately got suspended twice.

Actually, when I say I like the job what I mean is my walk, and the reason I'm writing this is because I've been moved off that delivery after 21 months and today was my last day on it. If I sound bitter it's not only because of my reputed early finishes (during the summer! Was I the only one who had a lull during the summer?), but because I had actually got to know a lot of people in the area. I greet the same faces each morning, residents say hi to me in the streets, one lady gives me an apple and a mars bar every Saturday, I see Mrs ABC nearly everyday for her sign-for packets, and so on. In fact, so long was I on that walk that I became less focused on finishing as early as possible and began to chat with Granny Smith.

Where Do I Start, Where Do I Begin?

Part One of Three.

The Flag of The Polity of Star City

Since I last wrote about NationStates four years ago, I've noticed that the governments of many regions ceased to function and slid into informal gerontocracy as the numbers of residents declined. Well, as I write this on January 30th, my nation Star City is just over seven years old. When this is published my home region The Proletariat Coalition will also be seven years old - though the exact date in March is long-forgotten, it was contemporary with the invasion of Iraq; as such I tend to set the anniversary on the 20th. To mark this, I'm republishing my memoirs from five years ago. You can read the currently outdated history of TPC at NSwiki.

Magic Window

Parabola tree, am4ndas, 2009

Having suffered through a three year long mild writing-block, I've suddenly found myself back on a roll. Maybe it was my brief experiment with Twitter that did it: that whilst you can throw any old combination of 140 characters together on Twitter, there's a satisfaction that comes from turning your thoughts and ideas into actual sentences and paragraphs that communicate those concepts. Also I'm a contrarian.

Rejuvenated, I've got through a number of long standing drafts that were featured in a filler-piece from two years ago. So here's another filler telling you what ended up where:

Computerwelt

Lego Technic 2/2, MiikaS, 2008

The "mainstream-media" is always producing these pieces about internet addiction and challenging people to live without the internet for X amount of time. At no point have I seen the media challenge people to live without writing or the wheel - the preceding most important technical revolutions in history.

The greatest danger is viewing an innovation as a toy. The Classical Greeks had steam turbines, but elected to power spinning-tops instead of factories, or at least viewed it as a curiosity. The wheel was absent from the pre-Columbian Americas except for stone proto-wheels on children's toys. Despite how the internet/web has demonstrably revolutionised the dissemination of information, old media treats it like an amusing sideshow. Which is why they continue to flounder in the post-scarcity digital world, railing against progress and demanding someone stop the children.

[The web] is a full-duplex, two-way medium, more like the telephone than the television. Entertainment is experienced as doing, not just watching. Old Media types might think that the Web is filled with empty eyes and empty heads [...] There is no audience anymore: the Web's eyes are active and in search of actuality
-Steve Baldwin

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Cries and Whispers

Fire Under Centralia (2 of 4), Cartographer, 2006

Eight years ago on Friday I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 which came with a bonus DVD that also included trailers of other forthcoming Konami releases. Amongst them was the E3 2001 trailer for Silent Hill 2, which was a work of art in itself.

Regrettably, I put off buying it for a long time because survival horror is not my thing (though, speaking of which, I did play halfway through the The Thing game), and it took three years since putting it on my Amazon wishlist for me to summon the courage to play it.

Alone in the Town

(Untitled), Prij, 25/12/05

It's happened again. Whenever I've got time off work I quickly slip into nocturnal mode. A while back I slept through three consecutive days of daylight, which is probably why I can't remember how long ago it was. It must have been during Winter, my curtains were never opened.

There's nothing like the solitude of the night. An extended run of quiet hours, you and the words, the music, or the film uninterrupted - a closeness that cannot be achieved in the light and air of the day, but after a while you must come up to breathe. The intimacy of the night can also smother you. The only colour in the dark is the infernal monochrome of the street lamp, like dead stars too weak to shine. It's often during these nights I sit and think, sometimes deliberate.

There is nothing to avoid in the night but sleep, for in my dreams I have fought backwards and see the old faces but speak new words. Accept the past or spend every sleeping moment trying to change it. It was once her face, then another's, and yet more from memory. Did I even know any of them? All I really want is someone else to catch this drift. Otherwise, I might have to consider I'm the only extant.

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Turn On, Turn On, Turn On The News

Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997

For the past few months Rupert Murdoch has been tilting at Google accusing them of stealing his 'content' - that is, linking to it. One gets the impression he hasn't a clue about the interwebs, which has become increasingly apparent since buying MySpace in 2006.

If you look to the Financial Times, it's true that readers will pay for real quality content. Murdoch's best-selling "newspaper", on the other hand, relies on jingoism (Gotcha!), xenophobia (Swan Bake), outright lies (Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster) and tits. If the dead-tree version is worth only 10p to the masses, who are you going to find willing to cross a paywall to access this moronic bullshit online?

Film For The Future

Victor Vasarely outdoor work, Váradi Zsolt, 2005

Despite the hype, I refuse to see Avatar. I can see through it. People keep talking about how amazing it looks, they even admit that the story is hackneyed. I can't quite understand why Avatar is up against The Hurt Locker for awards. No, that's no true. It's pretty obvious Avatar is the big 3D revolution tentpole release - what better way to cement that, than by showering it with psuedo-critical praise. The phrase you are looking for is 'circle jerk'.

Most won't know this by name - L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. It's the short film with the train coming towards the camera. Cinema goers in 1896 may not have scrambled out of their seats to get out of the way, but they were impressed by the lifelike images on the screen. That's really what Avatar is - a glorified IMAX demo. The Hurt Locker on the other hand concerns its main character and his motivations. Long after the special effects of Pandora are superseded, The Hurt Locker will offer its narrative for continued contemplation.

If You Tolerate This

For about a decade I've politically identified myself as a Marxist. That happens to coincide with my existential crisis at the age of 14, so naturally I'd find revolutionary upheaval appealing in a world of shit. I read 1984 at roughly the same time, which I understood as a very obvious criticism of Stalinism, which makes me a Trotskyist, though my own thoughts about the failure of the Soviet Union (which I'll be posting later in the year) align me closer to Council Communism than any Leninist strand.

Brothers, Sisters, We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang

Public Domain, 1945

The final episode of the European Civil War is a safe harbour for many films and games. The Third Reich was probably the most unambiguously amoral belligerent in history, and because of this no-one objects to massacring entire Wehrmacht divisions in Medal of Honor ('the acceptable face of war'). It's probably the war that least needed a series of films entitled Why We Fight.

Nearly everyone has played soldier against the Nazis in some MoH clone, as shooters tend to outnumber games on the other forms of combat - naval and air power. One of my favourite games is B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th. I find the gameplay very appealing - training as a navigator and trying to figure out if we're on target by which of the Frisian Islands we're passing over, or being the bombardier and desperately trying to spot a steel works in Essen through nine tenths cloud cover, lest we have to restart the bombing-run and go back through the flak - I love that kind of technical roleplay.

A Suicide/The Kiss

I've always been interested in space and astronomy. Unfortunately, the sense of proportion that comes with that is a form of torture. I had what can only be described as an existential crisis at the age of 14, bad enough that the school contacted my parents.

Whilst I may not be as acutely mind-fucked a decade on, I've never actually exited the crisis, just attempted to ignore it. It popped up again in 2006, as a large bulk of posts will testify, and now and then since but the lack of posts mostly hide it. I was thinking a lot, however, and I happened to be reading this article:

A particular way of breaking through the sense of isolation is through touch.

when it struck me like a diamond bullet through the forehead, that I already knew this. Nothing could more be described as transcendent than the random hug the girl in my chemistry class once gave me. It sounds so petty and laughable a saudade, but it just could keep me going. Somewhere out there is a connection to be made.

Art: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Extract), Georges Seurat, 1884
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