Twoism

I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy.

- Marko Ramius, The Hunt for Red October

Captain Ramius was an old submarine commander who had spent too many years at sea waging a pointless and inglorious pseudo war to maintain the balance of power. This has next to nothing in common with what I'm about to say. I miss the peace of delivery on a Saturday morning. It's now eight months since the Delivery Methods Revision and this week marks five years since I started the job.

Risky Ride

Peugeot 908 on Ligne Droite des Hunaudières

Last summer I was busy catching up with Gran Turismo 4 and wrote that the endurance races offered there represented the apex of the racing simulation. Well now I've caught up to Gran Turismo 5 and there's a new apex. I'd actually been waiting for the price to drop but the PS3 was sitting idle for weeks at a time and I had a week off coming up, so I decided £15 wasn't really that much - the original GT cost me (read, parents) £40.

Drive Forever

Drive By Shooting : Electric, drp, 2004

I should be writing - I'm off work for a week, but it's the same old. This time three years ago I remember just driving for hours on end. I had completed San Andreas for the nth time and would leave the disc in the PlayStation for months on end. I used to put it on around midnight when everyone had gone to bed and blast down the country roads in an Infernus for three to four hours just listening to music. Unlike Two Lane Blacktop, the sound never cut out and the film never disintegrated. The endless road provided endless opportunity to glance in the rear view mirror until I became bored of being bored. Then a realisation hit me and I scribbled a few hundred words. I never published it because I didn't like that realisation. So I picked up the controller and just kept driving.

I'm currently seven and a half hours into Gran Turismo 5's rendition of 24 Heures du Mans. For now I have a goal, but I'll be searching again when the clock comes full circle. Open road. Let's just go. Drive forever.

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You Spin Me Right Round

Rear cover art (G, Garbage, 1995)

The final track of the album fades out. The laser assembly returns to its starting position with a whir and the disc slows to a halt. All that remains is the faint hum of the speakers. The disc ejects and you place it back in the case, glancing at the artwork before slotting it back into the rack.

The older generations oft pine for the crackle of vinyl and the large elaborate cover art, and I sympathise as someone who has undergone the rite of digging through parents' vinyl collection. Our attitudes to distribution media are more tied up with memory and nostalgia than any qualitative superiority as some audio enthusiasts are always attempting to prove. Whilst technological progress enables me to carry one and a half thousand songs on my old 8GB iPod Nano, which is a hell of a lot more than the 8 track decks my Dad remembers, my own musical experiences in the 90s bind me to the compact disc.

A Design For Life / The Messerschmitt Twins

Electron micrograph of Bacteriophages, Public Domain

Today is exactly a decade since I finished my first play of Metal Gear Solid 2. Or it would have been if I had finished this for the 17th of March.

To begin with, we're not quite what you'd call human.

Back in the 90s I had a lot of shareware and (unbeknownst to me) pirated games. When the PS/1 was replaced with an Aptiva in 1998, I set about porting my stuff via floppy disk. The instant A Drive engaged the screen cut to a blue and red DOS prompt warning me that a virus had been detected. To put it mildly, this was not the most encouraging thing to happen with the brand new computer, as I had a legacy of breaking the old one. This was my first experience with an anti-virus programme and I had never even considered that all those dodgy floppies might be riddled with anything other than the files I put on it. The particular viruses that were detected by Norton (of cross-armed fame) are long forgotten, but in the following years I was captivated by the idea that there's something almost alive in the digital world - unseen technological analogues to our organic processes.

And The Money Kept Rolling In (And Out)

PART TWO OF A SERIES.

Corporate (red)washing, jonathan mcintosh, 2007

Some have never had it so good. You might be mistaken for thinking there was an economic crash not four years ago and that we are living in a recession, but that's because you aren't the 1%. As we saw abroad and now domestically, a leaderless movement has now come to prominence. If successful in nothing else, Occupy has brought home the message of wealth inequality through the 'We are the 99%' slogan. The extreme inversion of the scales in the economic clout of the top 1% versus the remaining 99% betrays an uncomfortable truth about our egalitarian and meritocratic societies - that we are actually living in plutocracies. The egalitarian and meritocratic principles of western society are what comprise The American Dream, and yet like a dream we think we're awake. Eisenhower may have warned us about relations between the state and private contractors during the heights of the New Deal society, but Franklin D Roosevelt spoke in 1938 of a more elementary danger that "among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing". If some members of society have greater private power than others then it logically follows that others have less power. This is the very basic fact that underpins the subversion of liberal democracy.

The Street Parade (Rock The Casbah)

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

President John F. Kennedy, The COM Library, 2009

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793, but regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951

2011 was by all accounts the most unpredictable year since 1989. A revolutionary wave began sweeping away the Western puppets, just as the Eastern Europeans sent the Soviet puppets to the ash-heap of history. Stability for stability's sake was once the mantra that subjugated the Middle East until the suicide of one man seemingly instigated what neither international free trade nor exiles or internal opposition could persuade. I originally intended to examine the preconditions of these revolutions, but that continues to be a work in progress if not a mystery for future historians. What I have noted, however, is that this wave that has rippled through the Middle East, and other regions to varying degrees, has for the most part been leaderless. When I last wrote a political post in November 2010, the eve of events in Tunisia, I specifically rejected cadres as essential or desirable to revolution. The absence of commanding individuals in Tahrir Square or elsewhere appears to have shown spontaneous and leaderless movements are possible - though the effectiveness of these versus the militarised rebellion in Libya or Syria is yet to be settled.