Message Oblique Speech

PART THREE OF A SERIES.

Copyright J Michael Haynes, 2008

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or research, is not an infringement of copyright."

How do you think he'll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don't know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn't use that word.
-Malcolm X, Message to the Grassroots, 1963

The previous essay in this series details why we are sold the neoliberal system. This post describes how we are sold it. The first rule of the system we live in is you do not talk about the system we live in. The second rule is you blame the financial crisis on the previous administration. It's oft repeated that it was Huxley, not Orwell, that correctly predicted the future. Arguably Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is better known than Brave New World, perhaps considering its relevance during the cold war; however, rarely is it considered that they were both right about elements of present society. Huxley's nightmare was not that the people would be deprived of freedom and subjugated by a totalitarian state - it's they would be so distracted by a deluge of entertainment they wouldn't care. How ironic a 'reality television' programme brought that vision to life and used an Orwellian term - Big Brother.

I Thought It Was The UK, Or Just Another Country

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

Na Nož, Jaroslav Věšin, 1913

Britain isn't cool you know, it's really not that great / It's not a proper country, doesn't even have a patron saint / It's just an economic union that's past its sell-by date
-Take Down the Union Jack, Billy Bragg, 2002

At the deepest historical time-depths there is a very basic notion of identity between the self-identified civilised peoples and the barbarians. While the concept of being Greek (Hellenes) didn't yet exist, the city states at the base of the Balkan peninsula saw a commonality between themselves but not with others to the uncharted North or in the later conquered territories of Alexander's empire. The genesis of this fraternity also lies in transmission of culture as the Greek alphabet (save for some regional variations) allowed folk culture to be stored. The established alphabet may also have smoothed over the dialects as it only represents the sounds distinguished within a dialect and not the phonlogical distinctions between the dialects. That would not be unlike the unifying force that Hanzi had on the disparate Chinese languages by representing words and not the component sounds of the languages (which are as wildly different though related as French and Romanian). Indeed, language is one of the most prominent pillars of ethnic identity along with religion (historically Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, etc paganism for pre-modern Europe) and, of course, land.

New Terrain

SimCity (2013), Electronic Arts promotional screenshot

After ten years there's a new SimCity out (Societies doesn't count), but this is not an outright review of that game. At the start of March my internet connection died for several prolonged hours. After repeatedly trying to view several websites out of habit before realising they'd never load, I looked for something else to do. I hadn't played SimCity 3000 in nearly two years so I fired that up. What a good thing it is that always-online DRM hadn't been invented in 1999 because I would have been screwed as the new game even saves your cities in "the cloud". Since I last seriously played it, my city was populated by over a million sims and it had expanded almost to the limits without becoming one of those highly efficient cities designed by a player who has brutally calculated the placement of every building. My ideas about what a large city should look like are still firmly rooted in the skyline of Manhattan, hence I've kept the default building style in SC3K Unlimited. Only recently has London started racing for the clouds.

The Stars Our Destination

Star Trek Into Darkness poster

Hard to believe it's just gone ten years since Star Trek: Nemesis was released. 2002 was expected to be a great year for sci-fi: The Matrix sequels, a Red Dwarf film, a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, and the aforementioned Star Trek X. In the end only Nemesis made it out that year alongside the equally poor Die Another Day. Shatner's diabolical Final Frontier narrowly avoided being responsible for the death of the Trek film franchise in 1989 - sadly the responsibility for achieving just that thirteen years later fell on The Next Generation cast. Interesting it should happen in December 2002 at the exact time Die Another Day was doing the same for Bond. As with my Skyfall review, discussing Star Trek into Darkness requires discussing my experiences with Trek. Be warned, it's going to take a few thousand words before I get to the review...

Like Soldiers Believe They're in Control of the War

Part Three of Three.

My flag proposal for Theta Battalion, January 2007

I could have published this final part of my series looking back at the history of CyberNations at any time, however last Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the end of the Third Great War. Two months after the conclusion of GWIII I ceased being a student spending time playing a game rather than studying and exited a sixth month stint of unemployment. After that I never really knew what was going on in the Cyberverse or Digiterra or whatever you want to call it. Unable to stay up into the night when the largely American dominated game was most active I consequently fell out of the loop on events and the reason for the latest war. Last year, after I became the oldest and longest continuous member of the NPO, a fellow member working on the CNwiki entry asked me why, given my in-game age, I didn't have all the ribbons for all the wars the alliance had fought in. This is why, and a lot of time unless I'm attacked I don't really know there's a war on. Undoubtedly one of the reasons the age of players is so young is because such massively multiplayer online games require a lot of free time to invest. Until I read about the war that ended last month I'll remain completely oblivious as to the reasons my warchest was depleted by €100 million. Lately given the move toward squad based combat, the demands for greater activity, and adherence to alliance-wide development plans I've felt far more estranged from the game. Last week I thought about quitting - something I've never even considered in seven long years. Even what I think of as recent CN history is a distant collective memory now. Let's recall it...

Promised You A Miracle

Islamic interlace patterns, public domain

Elsa: What've you got there?
Jeremy: The Gutenberg Bible... it was in the Rare Books Room.
Elsa: Think God's gonna' save you?
Jeremy: No... I don't believe in God.
Elsa: You're holding on to that Bible pretty tight.
Jeremy: I'm protecting it.
-The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

I don't recall a time when I ever believed the stories from The Bible or what I was told in Sunday School - which is not to say I had somehow transcended it at the age of ten or earlier. The only bits of the Bible that ever really interested me were the maps as I had a fascination with atlases at the time, and even then I couldn't tell what I was looking at. I can remember being in Primary 5 and having to read Genesis (likely part of Religious Education). The cover of whatever children's edition we were using particularly annoyed me with its colourful depiction of Noah's Ark and a vivid rainbow. This was at least six months before the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis was published, but as a keen Horizon viewer I'd probably been exposed to discussions about the historicity of the flood myths and spending class time on that would have been far more interesting and at least factual. From Horizon and other science programming I was well versed in several theories. In the same year I recall advocating the impact hypothesis in a debate about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and in second year RE I was called on to try to explain the big bang and the Tunguska blast (interdimensional cross-rip?). So it would probably seem odd to the outside observer that I've long treasured, or at least not buried in a box in the basement, a children's illustrated book about the story of Easter.

Slow This Bird Down

Blogging, hgjohn, 2012

In 2010 I managed to drag this blog from the verge of antipathetical annihilation. It's strange that while I had heaps of spare time in 2009, as work had never been easier that year, I managed to produce not even 3,500 words. While 2011 was nowhere near as bad, it was a slump and the quality of the posts was patchy in my opinion. That's the challenge - I could be a perfectionist and turn next to nothing out, or I could pump out posts to meet quotas. 2012 was more of the former at the start of the year, though it was a case of maintaining a work rate. Blindly burning through my long-standing buffer of about twenty drafts would leave me at the mercy of current events to provide material. Luckily my trip to London provided impetus and I got awfully chatty about Gran Turismo 5 at the end of the year. From September through to February I was writing around 4,000 words a month, except in December when I wrote double that and January when I wrote a colossal 11,250 words - that's 55% of the word count of the entirety of 2011. You could say I was burnt out by the end of February.