a sorta-eco-urbanist reading of flOwer.

[fitting that my first post here in a long while is batshit fannish insane, BUT HEY.]

flOwer is an unusual videogame. It's a downloadable game for Sony's PS3, costs $10, and has a novel and touching style of gameplay, in which you direct an ever-growing cloud of petals around the game's landscapes, touching flowers on the ground to 'bloom' them and alter the environment. New colours and sounds spring up as you touch things; some flowers are triggers that alter the landscape more dramatically. A cliff might crumble, a stone circle might open, or a turbine might start spinning.

There are no words in flOwer, but its six levels provide a distinct political narrative about rural and urban environments. They're the dreams of six flowers sitting in pots on an urban windowsill.


So the game starts inside the city. We see its grey horizon out of the window, and we're given odd clips of it at the start of the levels; tall towers, traffic, feral birds. (People are never pictured in focus in flOwer, and given that it's a game about human environments that struck me as potentially troubling. But it's part of the game's aesthetic). The game starts when you zoom in on a flower and are transported from the city to a rural idyll; a landscape of hills and meadow dotted with rock formations. There are no signs of human existence here - or to put it another way, there's no technology. This dualism raises its head throughout the entire game; there's nature, and then there's tech, and they might mingle to form something that's a bit of both, but they're still portrayed as being two separate poles. Explore flOwer's nature scene, and you'll change it - open up new areas, change the direction of the wind that carries you - but there's still this sense that here, at the start of all things, the landscape is virgin, the organic whole.

This is an origin story. And oh damn am I obsessed with the Cyborg Manifesto this year:

An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature.

Origin stories are never true, especially not when it comes to cities.

And yet, there's other moments in flOwer when technology seems to be framed more like something that arises from nature. It's exploring its own conceit, even if its tech tree is, at times, bizarre.


The second flowerpot introduces human design in the form of stone circles - rings of megaliths tilted inwards. (And I love this.) You continue to explore, opening flowers with a touch, and when you've opened the right flowers the megaliths draw apart and tilt outward - opening just like the flowers. Can you define the megaliths as a form of technology? Certainly it's a human working on the landscape that, because it is primitive, gets a pass at being flower-like, natural.

The third moves us on to wind turbines. Touch the flowers, and their arms start spinning.

Bit of a hop, isn't it? I don't know what the Civ beeline for stone circles-->wind power would be, but, it's all aesthetic anyway; the game's connecting rural idylls with pagan prehistory with wind turbines, like it's sketching out the interests of the hippie/new-age movement.

Turbines, see, are still Good Tech. They move with the breeze; they aren't affecting the empty landscape, but the landscape is affecting them. And in between these levels, we're still seeing the city in all its grim grey glory; the flowers are dreaming of this better way, far from reality but coming ever closer.

Part 4 was the one which touched me the most. It was set in night, swooping from sunset towards sunrise through a dark and lonely sky, and one of the ways in which my actions altered the landscape was to make light. The ground became luminous, and the central tech element, overhead power lines bearing lamps, started to glow.

Aside from the power lines, there were a few other signs of human activity; small, round haystacks, overturned carts, white-chalk paths, and some fences. The fences unnerved me. The game was gradually leading you back to the human race, and the designers had chosen to use the division of land as an icon to represent that journey - land that at the start of the game was entirely untouched and empty. Later, I could see the story they were telling there - a condensed historical narrative that shows enclosure leading us to industrialisation and industrialisation leading us to the cities - but at the time I felt like I was wandering the Ridgeway in the little hours again.

It was about light, this little nightscape level. The scene in the city before it began showed a streetlamp flickering; the city is breaking. At the start of the dream, the turbines we'd seen in the last level set the power flowing, and your actions then made the power flow towards the city - until the end of the level, where the lights began flickering like the one in the city, and the landscape changed into an industrial dystopia, full of smog and twisted pylons. It's dark here, but there's a blue flower blooming in the murk.

So cities are broken and wrong and can only be enlightened by your twee flower power narrative? Right. The snark, I can't help it, I detest rural idylls. :/ I love nature. I love human nature. There's as much of nature in the city as anywhere else.

Part 5 is the most grim, and the one that made me most sceptical of the game's ethos. We're close to the city, in a grey maze of pipelines, pylons and power lines, still lit by those dim orange lights. It's the only part of the game where the environment can hurt you, burning your comet of petals down to almost nothing if you brush against one of the spitting black transformers. And if you manage to open the flowers without touching any of these obstacles, what happens? These tech features untwist and become sleek and silver, they can't hurt you any more and - this is what really killed me - the orange lights are replaced with white CFL mercury bulbs.

*headdesk* Even the CCC (and I am no great fan of the CCC) urge people to, if they care about the environment, stop faffing about plastic bags and lightbulbs and start lobbying your government to stop airport expansion and close coal plants. flOwer is taking the other path, describing ecological problems and reducing them to the consumer question of which object is better than which other object and, oh, it's all down to you, you directing your cloud of flowers, you making little changes one by one. Even if you see the flower cloud as a group of individuals rather than as an avatar of a single individual player, it's still a horribly flawed way to talk about environmentalism, or even energy efficiency - they're not individualist issues, they're problems that start at the top and can only be tackled on a grand scale. And if you are going to do anything about it as individuals? I'm reminded of the woman who organised a disruption of Drax, the huge coal plant in northern England: she spoke afterwards about how easy it had been, and how few people it would take to inconvenience the place on a regular basis.

But flOwer is, itself, a consumer product; it might be odder if it didn't portray efficiency and environmentalism in consumerist terms. It's a beautiful picture of 'being the change', so long as you don't try to apply it to the real-world problem they're describing.

The fifth level ends at the gates of the city, so by the time the sixth began, I was already in full-on sceptic mode. We're in the city now. What we're changing with our actions is the city - filling it with colour, clearing out the wreckage, opening the gates. It seemed like that dualism again, the rural idyll entering on the urban dystopia and Making It Better. There are no people in the city. You don't have to worry about gentrification, or any of the other creepy human implications that creep in when you start Making Cities Better. flOwer's hate-on for the high-rise is all well and good, and you know I believe in a forest called London, but the elevation of the floral over the urban did not move me.


The more I think about it, the more I realise that I could have read it all in a more positive way, but the lack of people to centre that reading around makes it hard to do. I instinctively side with the city in all its dirty chaos. I'd ask for a game where the urban invades the rural, unravels its twists and leaves it sterile and overgroomed or not at all; but that game is called The Real World.

squees, lies, videogames.

Erm, okay, I may have lied about no more election stuff. I was seduced into giving more election links by this amazing photo-series. Just keep hitting 'show more images', it's lovely. But I have gamer-girl stuff to share too, I promise!


A little over eight months ago, Michelle Obama said to a crowd of her husband's supporters, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country." She took a lot of flak for that statement, and was called unpatriotic, 'ungrateful', and generally accused of being a nasty strident Sapphire who didn't know her place. Yesterday two good friends of mine each said pretty well exactly that, a third (who lives abroad) said that she no longer feels ashamed when people realise she's American, and Kyrias, a long-standing US resident, is considering filing for citizenship. A lot of people at Feministe are also echoing Michelle's remarks.


With provisional and absentee ballots to sort, the last calls are still being made; Georgia was finally settled for McCain earlier today, but I'm not sure if the Senate call (it will be a runoff election, because the Libertarians prevented anyone getting 50% of the vote) has been formalised. North Carolina went for Obama by 14000 votes, again due to those pesky Libertarians; Missouri is likely McCain but still to be called - on Super Tuesday it was prematurely called for Clinton but the final count flipped it to Obama, so I guess they're trying not to make a mistake again this time. The only other outstanding presidential count is in the city of Omaha, custodian of one of Nebraska's five votes; they're busy opening the last 15000 ballots, and it's relatively likely that Obama will eke out a tiny win. This would be the first time either of the splitting states - Maine and Nebraska - have actually split their votes; personally I think it would be more fun, and lead to more engagement, if all states split their votes by congressional district.

They're also still counting in the Alaska senate race, where seven-times felon Ted Stevens has probably pulled out a win. (Nate has a post about how Alaska skewed dramatically away from pre-election opinion polls, with the Republicans overperforming by +12% in all election races, not just the Senate). If so, he will be thrown out of the Senate and Alaska will join Georgia in having a December 2nd special; I fear the seat is Ms Hun's if she wants it. It's a shame because this was the one real chance of getting a left-wing Alaskan into the Senate. :/ The Oregon Senate race has been belatedly called for the Democrats, but Minnesota is in the throes of a full recount.

Saxby Chambliss, btw, did manage to find time to get even lower and shittier right before the election. Also, I am linking this just for one great sentence: "Nate Silver taught numbers how to fuck."


Now, gamer shit: if there's one videogame movie the world really doesn't need, it's this one.

This blog post contains a PDF file of the best gaming article I've ever read. It's about people who still play Pac-Man and other old arcade games competitively, and it contains the phrases 'meditative states' and 'gamer ontologies'. I thought I was the only person in the world who cared about gamer ontologies and I am so not. That article is very long but it made me so very happy.

The one thing I found off about it is that it framed classic gaming as being so completely a matter of male homosociality. This puzzles me because one of my housemates is a classic gamer - an obsessive Dr Mario player - and I often find myself sat drinking coffee while hypnotised by her arrays of primary-coloured pills. She is not an 'adept', and rarely squeaks past level 23, and is not part of any gamer club that I know of. And I like watching people play games, even ones I suck at (especially ones I suck at). I also know a person with a basement full of consoles from long ago - Ataris and the like. Yep, she's a chick. I don't know any men who still play classic games, only these two women. The article only mentions one woman among the many gamers it discusses, adepts and audience members both, and prefers to put women in the background caring for the gamers in their lives but not partaking. I suspect that this is an old idea at work - that what men do with their free time is serious, worthy, even sacred, but women have only their tasks and their fripperies. It's not true IRL obv, only in the media.

And here at Vorpal Bunny Ranch (which truly is the best-named website ever) is another wonderful article marred by the assumption of male homosociality. It's about the role of the dandy as a male stereotype in videogames, and it has Balthier in it just to make me happy:

It is a common stereotype that we have come to expect--if a man is not muscular and cannot save the day through his forceful body or strength, then he has to be crafty, making him either a man of questionable morals or a villain himself.

... You cannot trust the man who does not use his hands for physical labor and counts on magic and deceit to achieve his goals--how loathsome.

Is it that surprising that this happens in videogames? Not at all. Consider that, in general, the dandy is a male who is considered feminized by his opposition to the male principle of power through strength.

That post makes some great points but I think it's slightly crippled by comparing men only to other men, when electric culture is really way more level about gender; it talks about Balthier as a dandy, and yes he does have a claymore-swinging foil whose story is about grappling with the male principle of power through strength...and that person is Ashe, a chick, so there you go.


Also speaking of chicks, Nintendo have been surveying DS players in Osaka. The biggest user block of all is boys aged 10-12, but the second biggest is women in their early 30s. At most ages, women are more likely than men to use a DS.


Did any of you hear about the Little Big Planet recall? A classic case of oversensitivity at work; songwriter Toumani Diabate, a Malian Muslim, included two lines from the Koran in a song he wrote for the game - something that's apparently common in Mali's music culture. When Sony realised this they went apeshit and recalled the game. M. Zuhdi Jasser, head of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, has no idea what their fucking problem was: "The fact that the music writer is a devout Muslim should highlight that at the core of this issue is not about offending 'all Muslims', but only about freedom of expression and the free market." Tycho, meanwhile, points out that Little Big Planet is a game centred on user-generated content, which - as I said re. the Hot Coffee mod a while ago - is inevitably going to cross every line the designers, censors and raters attempt to draw. It's the end user who chooses the content, not you.

No matter what this song contained, rated by some universal standard for blasphemy, the things you could do with the included toolset would make any scholar of Islam beg for the days when the holy scriptures were merely set to a jaunty beat. [...]

No-one was watching when modding became something like a gamer's right. Now, the mainstream perches in every high corner, shifting its weight like Poe's raven, positively starved for evidence that this incredible medium bears within it the dissolution of a generation.

This is why Microsoft doesn't want to get within ten miles of this shit.

a quick note before bedtime:

CNN and other press agencies called Georgia for McCain at about 11pm; the Associated Press and Georgia's local press organs did not do so. Now we know why: roughly 600 000 early votes cast in the Atlanta area were not included in that initial count.

Whether McCain really won GA or not doesn't matter so much, but this is likely to push Saxby Chambliss into a Senate runoff or even out of the Senate entirely.

Goodnight.

For Every Five Tanks: an election link post

[Or, as one FiveThirtyEight commenter said a couple of days ago, 'We are all Fake Virginians now.']

I've been collecting shiny things to share with you all - expect another post soon, because this one is a special place for any and all election crap. I want this election over already; we already know who's won, so it's just another couple of weeks of unnecessary ugly.

First, the obvious: do you see the BotherVoting banner in my sidebar? Yeah? You can probably do it already - just google 'early voting [your home state]' and you should find out where and when it's available. Here's all the early voting info for GA. You can go vote right now if you live in Georgia - and next week, from Monday til Friday, the polls are open until 7pm. Whoever you're voting for, early votes benefit your candidate because the more people in your area have voted already, the less resources they'll need to put into it on November 4th.

Is Georgia a safe state for the Republicans? They think so - so much so that they're running their GA campaign out of an office in freaking Tallahassee and local Republican chairmen are accusing the campaign of 'leaving it to chance'. Nate isn't quite so sure. The answer is 'probably'. But that doesn't matter because Saxby Chambliss - the US Senate's gaping asshole - is up for reelection, and your vote against him most assuredly matters. Whoever you're supporting for the presidency - Obama, McCain, a third-party (both the Greens and Libertarians are running native Georgians this year - have they forgotten who the last Georgian president was?) or a write-in candidate - please get rid of Chambliss. His opponent, Jim Martin, even has virtues beyond not being Saxby Chambliss.

Wherever you are in the USA, if you have any trouble at the polls you can contact the Voter Protection Center at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Look at the Incident Tracker at Voter Suppression Wiki to check problem reports in your area, so you know what to look out for. Robert F Kennedy's written an article about voter suppression here.


Now the fun stuff: Obama bought advertising in an Xbox 360 game, Burnout Paradise. A pretty shallow move, but a smart one; it's unlikely that any frat boys are going to abruptly hit pause and run out and early-vote solely on the strength of this one banner in this one game - but the magpies in the news media all go OOH OMGZ SHINY TECH and spend five minutes of our lives expounding on this sentiment. I don't know what an in-game banner ad costs, but I'm betting it's less than five minutes of primetime. (I'm against in-game ads - once you've bought something as expensive as a game console and something to play on it, it's irritating to have people trying to eke more money out of your gaming on top of that - but hey, that's why I don't play Xbox crap). It gets game culture talking too, not that they didn't already love Obama simply for not being Hillary Clinton - here's a collection of fan-made mockups of Obama in-game ads. Portal, oh my! (And the Metal Gear one is totally an unintended and unfortunate Dar Williams injoke. God, I love Metal Gear.)


Onto the Shiny Things: Losers Edition, starting with this: The Front-Runner’s Fall, or, Joshua Green's write-up of a batch of emails, memos and minutes he was given by staffers from the Clinton campaign following that campaign's decease. He's made a good story out of it, and the material itself is online for your perusal. Much of it is unintentionally hilarious in retrospect, not least the March 2007 memo in which Mark Penn wrote, "The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun," a statement that perhaps McCain should have noted before selecting Ms Hun to be his running mate.

[One quick aside about Ms Hun, while I'm here: all the blithering yak recorded here at the Beeb about her freaking $150000 fashion budget is positioning her in the same frame as Cindy and Michelle rather than John, Joe and Barack. For the love of god, why? She's being interviewed for the same job as Joe, right?]

Also about Clinton; it's months old now, but I only just read Sean Quinn's piece about how he'd flipped during the primaries from admiring and defending Clinton to feeling completely alienated by her - and how she might yet win him back. The apology he hoped for never happened, but personally I don't think it matters - Clinton's presidential ambitions were already over anyway, and I suspect they would've been either way; an apology would've been way too much ammo. Also, Quinn mentions the Jack Thompson pontificating!


Here, if you like that sort of thing, is an incredibly classy and meticulously annotated torrid rant, hosted at FuckJohnMcCain.com:

...Does it worry anyone else that every right-wing debacle in the last fifty years involves the same twelve assholes? Need another example? Remember the fuckwads who put out a push-poll claiming McCain had an illegitimate black child back in 2000? The same guys McCain said had a "special place in hell"? Hell, apparently, is the McCain campaign, cause he fucking hired them.

Which I guess isn't that surprising, since McCain has changed positions more times than Jenna Jameson in a double feature. But not on important issues. Just stuff like privatizing Social Security, the Bush tax cuts, coastal drilling, ethanol, gay adoption, affirmative action, the estate tax, torture and negotiating with Cuba, Hamas, and Syria.

Okay okay, here's some genuine class from John Perry Barlow, hosted here, and yes, it too has naughty words in it. (h/t Daisy). The thrust of the piece is echoing something Sean Quinn said (implicitly) in his piece about Clinton - the internet lets you look at this sodding horserace in a close and on-the-spot way, and if you're looking through that lens you wind up liking Obama more and his opponents much, much less:

However, since God is merciful, McCain probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's watching the campaign on television where he's presented with an edit of reality that is far less damning to him and his campaign than the one I've been watching on the Internet. John McCain is blessed indeed to be spared the online version of himself.

...

If he watched the much more elaborate coverage of the campaign on the Internet, even McCain would have to be in awe of the fact that Senator Obama has shown almost superhuman dignity, humor (as opposed to sarcasm), and that quality that Hemingway defined as courage, "grace under pressure" even while being carpet-bombed, first by the Clintons and now the McCain/Palin Golem, with six months of sucker punches, lies, trivialities, the guilt of distant or even non-existent associations (often involving black people behaving ungracefully), and now, finally, the direct incitement of murderous intent in crowds spiked with many people who are insane with racial hatred, well-armed, and trained by their government in the accurate use of long-range weapons.

He would have seen the look of enlightened acceptance on Obama's face tonight when McCain fiercely declared his pride in the people who attended his rallies, including, presumably, the ones who shout "kill him" and "off with his head."

If you've time, be sure to watch the six-minute video Barlow points out - the original dialogue between Obama and Joe The Plumber. 'You will see a presidential candidate stop and take the time to explain more and in more respectful detail about his tax program to a single plumber from Ohio than McCain has ever explained anything - besides misrepresentations of Obama's resume - to the entire American public during the length of this campaign.' I think that it shows the flipside of the yay-internets line Barlow's pushing here; an intelligent, nuanced policy explanation, given entirely off the (rolled-up) cuff there, got edited into a ridiculous bogeyman about socialism. These powers can be used for both good and evil, and we should not take them for granted.

Any and all McCain rants draw from the original and greatest, that one Rolling Stone knifing. Very long and, if there's one thing the last fucking year has proved it's that you can write a thorough character assassination on anyone. Just read those 2007 Penn memos about Obama. But hey.

(It remains strange that McCain hasn't pressed what is, in pure common-sense terms, Obama's one great policy weakness - the ethanol subsidies. Dear gods, are you trying to cook our seas and starve us all to death? Are Iowa's seven EVs worth that much to you? *le sigh* I guess this is what happens when you keep having to cast votes for politicians but, as Ford Prefect said, 'if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in.')


Finally, here's that one photograph Colin Powell was so touched by. Take a look.

when he said 'rely on' he meant 'totally f*ing ignore'

I want this election to be over. It seems like the far-right limbo bar is dropping by the day; how low can they go, I ask? Did they reach their limit yesterday? No, they did not! How much further? They have, what, another three weeks in which to remain in the hole and keep digging.

So let me regale you with a quickly-buried weekend news incident, one which sank almost as fast as the Troopergate report. Its timeline goes something like this:

August 15th: in those Rick Warren religious-test-for-public-office interviews of McCain and Obama, McCain and Obama are both asked 'Who are the three wisest people that you know, that you would rely on heavily in an administration?'

McCain names General David Petraeus, John Lewis and Meg Whitman.

October 11th: John Lewis releases this statement:

As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

Here's the McCain response:

Congressman John Lewis’ comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale. The notion that legitimate criticism of Senator Obama’s record and positions could be compared to Governor George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign. I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I’ve always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track.

"I call on Senator Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America."

And the Obama campaign's response to the McCain response:

Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies.

But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States 'pals around with terrorists.' As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together. That is the kind of campaign Sen. Obama will continue to run in the weeks ahead.

I first read about this on this 538 thread. Several older commenters there said they believed that the comparison between Palin's rallies and Wallace's rallies was a valid one.

good news for geeks

Jack Thompson has been permanently disbarred from practising law in the state of Florida, and I gather that means he'll have a hard time lawyering anywhere else either. To which the world says: about damn time. Thompson described himself in his most recent news release as "nationally and internationally known by virtue of his effective and successful opposition over the last 20 years to the broadcast, marketing, and sale of adult-rated entertainment to children". He also calls himself a 'faith-based activist' and 'Christian lawyer'. (The National Institute on Media and the Family, however, which normally loves this stuff, have told him to please stop mentioning them because he has a 'negative influence' on their reputation and work).

an aside for non-gamers who read here: this is why Hillary Clinton has such a fuck-awful reputation among gamers. There are many gamers who hold as that their one voting metric Anyone But Hillary. I mention this because I've recently seen this universal antipathy gamers have to Clinton cited as evidence of misogyny in gamer culture - ffs, if you want evidence of misogyny in gaming, there is no shortage of it to be found, but a desperate wish for your special lady to never be president ever is not it. To someone who plays a lot of games and doesn't care too much for politics, a desperate wish for your special lady to never be president is a perfectly logical opinion, and telling them they should believe otherwise because she's such a nice woman will just cause them to file you in the 'stupid' folder.

Thompson's got cosy with a fair few politicians over the years, including Rick Santorum and Joe Lieberman, but it's Clinton who fell for it the hardest. It was Clinton who he sucked in to the ridiculous Hot Coffee drama, somehow making her forget that the average gamer is well above voting age and would regard her as absurd for grandstanding over something so petty, and of incredibly poor judgement for listening to Thompson at all.

We can't know what drove Clinton to listen to Thompson. A bit of background vetting alone would've showed him to be way lacking in the reasonable human being department. There is so much batshit it's hard to know where to start, but these three fantastic paragraphs from (yes!) Wikipedia convey the flavour of the man, at least:

In October 2007, Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Florida Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan on to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. [...]

In February 2008, The Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.

On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."

But his best moments have been his infamous altercations with Gabe. First, the famous phone call, then the $10000 pwning and subsequent allegation of 'criminal harassment' (second post onward), and finally he accused Penny Arcade of 'collaborating to commit racketeering' with several other gaming websites.

[edit: I totally missed this before, but Thompson's disbarment occurred on Gabe's birthday. Aaaaw.]

Everything I Just Said, But Better

...was put online by David Wong, like, the day after I posted my version. The complete title of Wong's piece is 6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now [mildly NSFW] - here are the relevant bits.

#4. Controlling What You Watch and Read:

Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks.

So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high.

This wouldn't have been possible even 20 years ago. I grew up in the 80s, in a house with three TV stations. Three. We got one newspaper, the local one. You didn't get to pick from the conservative news or liberal news, back in my day you took what you got and you were thankful for what you had, dammit.

Today, I go through that many outlets a day just to get my freaking video game news.

And now, that explosion of the 24-hour cable news stations and, later, the web and blogosphere, has created these parallel universes of Right vs. Left media outlets, complete with their own publishing arms.

And for each, their favorite topic of discussion is how corrupt and ridiculous the other side's media is. They each even have "watchdog" groups that exist purely for the reason of hammering away at each other (the left has FAIR and MediaMatters, the right has the Media Research Center).

Recently Seen:
When an MSNBC interview with candidate John McCain got tense, he responded to the question by openly accusing the reporter of being an operative for the other side:

Just days later the campaign called The New York Times "a pro-Obama advocacy organization."

This technique is relatively new, but you'll see a lot more of it in future elections. The candidate will talk right past the reporter asking the questions and says to his supporters, "These guys work for the enemy, don't believe a word they say. Their lies will only poison your mind."

#1. "Us vs. Them"

...we're hard-wired by evolution to form tribes. The more stress we feel, the more we feel love and attachment to those who look and sound the same as us, and the more we feel hatred to those who don't. It's just an old survival mechanism, since the ancient guys who didn't show that kind of blind loyalty were killed off by the fierce tribes formed by the ones who did.

So today we get that petty dehumanization of everybody outside of our group ("hippies," "rednecks," "fundies," "geeks," "douchebags," "libs", "cons," "fags," "breeders," "infidels," "towel-heads," "honkies," "darkies," "players", "haters").

They can play on those old, primal urges for even the most retarded of results, such as fierce brand loyalty (the PS3 vs. 360 vs. Wii flame wars will make you claw your eyes out).

But to really make this one work, They can't just define your group, but have to define your group as the elite group, a shining beacon in a world full of weak-minded walking turds. The items on this list work best in combination, and you'll see in that the element of mockery and insulation from opposing viewpoints we talked about earlier (why listen to the viewpoints of those lesser sheeple?). Often this is combined with siege terminology ("The whole country has gone to hell, but we've got to stand up for common sense, folks! It's us against the world!")

Recently Seen:

Watch five seconds of an election stump speech. Every side does it.

In Sarah Palin's convention speech she talked about how people from small towns are totally the best ("We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity"). Earlier in the primaries the Clinton campaign did the same thing, talking about small towns as being the backbone of America where real, honest people are found. Always there is the unspoken reminder that these honest rural folk are under siege from those scary, phony freaks in the city.

When speaking to those city folk, on the other hand, Barack Obama made the infamous reference to those same small town types clinging to guns and religion, talking about them like they were savages to be studied through binoculars from a tower, with some peasant disease that needs cured by the enlightened.

Not only is "Us vs Them" the first and most important one on the list, it's the culmination and end goal of all the others. Drawing you into the right tribe is what They want most, because they can accomplish nothing without tribesmen.

(One thing Wong missed is that the 'small towns' line isn't original to Palin, but is a quotation from a long-dead American facist, Westbrook Pegler. Robert F Kennedy Jr wrote about this on HuffPo. Pelger was talking pretty explicitly about the whiteness of small towns, as opposed to cities inhabited by black Americans, by Jews and by other immigrant groups that were considered less than white at the time he was writing).

the divided states.

So. A few months ago I found that my USian family thought it highly socially inappropriate to talk about atheism. There being variety in the family between the devout and the rest of us, one that was upsetting to one of the Catholic children, meant the best course was for the non-Catholics to not speak of it and to distract non-Catholic young'uns if they tried to bring up the subject right before lunch.

It probably shouldn't've taken me so long, but it took the Palin trainwreck to show me that yes, really, this is how America works: you don't talk to people about your religious and political differences. Shortly after the Palin selection, a family member and I were talking to a family friend, someone who naturally she knew way better than I did. I said something about been creeped-out by Palin asking Alaskans to pray for a $30 billion gas pipeline. Caesar. God. It's creepy, that.

Family member says to me, warningly "He's a Republican."

Um, and...?

If I'm telling someone that I think a politician has said something obnoxious, why would it matter what their partisan views are? I mean, isn't that how you have conversations rather than echo chambers? Maybe there's some sort of upside to praying for gas pipelines that I hadn't seen but Republican Guy would know about and could tell me of. I got a conversation; he said that he thought Palin would make a good advocate for disabled people in the Whitehouse, and that's something he really cares about. I asked if he knew her record in that regard - none of us did, at the time - and suggested he check up on it, just because records are firmer than narrative guesswork. (Thanks partly to Kyrias, I later did, and guess what, she halved educational funds for disabled children in Alaska).

A few weeks on, and the trainwreck has seemingly run its course; lots of flying emotions and everyone's made their mind up - her favourability has fallen to near-zero.

Last night M watched Bill Maher's TV show and I saw a little of it too. I had never seen it before. There's no analogue to the US political media in Britain (reason #3515 why everyone hates the film version of V For Vendetta, that); the best comparison I could think of was if Private Eye was a TV show rather than a magazine. Or it's a bit like Newsnight but intentionally both partisan and humorous, rather than merely misanthropic. (I have a habit of describing US TV hosts entirely in terms of how they differ from Jeremy Paxman [vid, first 20 seconds contain NSFW language]. In that regard, watching Jon Stewart softball Tony Blair on Thursday night was quite painful).

Maher, to great applause, announced that many Americans support Palin because they are too stupid.

Two bloggers I read who've posted a lot of election stuff lately are saying the following:

The frightening part of this is that everyone thinks she’s so great, so much so that it seems like more people support SP than support McCain.

For crying out loud, she’s, if not a total psychopath who is incapable of speaking the truth, a total fake. She is not compassionate, the girl next door, or someone who will look out for the average citizen.

And for those people who posted on Salon.com saying that they’re going to vote for her because her husband is hot and because she proves that women can have it all…I think you should all be taken out of the gene pool, pronto.

from Kyrias. (Admittedly Kyrias is a permanent resident of the USA rather than a US citizen. It is kinda funny that we talk about this crap so much when neither of us can vote here).

Well you know what America? You get what you deserve. I hope that when you're all cowering down in your fallout shelters after the nuclear exchange with the Russians, I hope then that you take a moment to question what your fault in all this is. I hope you ask for forgiveness.

from Combat Queer.

None of these were talking about extreme factions in the US, but about an alternate mainstream that really isn't much different in calibre from their own mainstream. As I said to Kyrias over IM later, some people have dumb reasons for voting for Obama too, such as the fact that everyone on his ticket is be-penised. Or that they believe some conspiracy theory about the US right. There are bad reasons on both sides.

So I. Do Not. Get It.

I don't get how you can assume that no one in your entire nation honestly disagrees with you - that no one simply has different priorities to you, or different feelings, that aren't any the less of yours. That their reasoning can be as good as yours and yet add up to a different result. That it's worth your time to degrade people, but not to engage with them.

It's the nonengagement that spooks me. Funny, I expect it on the internet, where everyone filters themselves via the path of least resistance into groups that are supportive and productive for them, where you don't have to constantly justify your 101s. I can understand nonengagement as a consequence of social behaviour. What I don't understand is why USians seem to hold it as an end goal of social behaviour. Why other views must be dismissed, shunned, or simply avoided just because discussion would be bad.

(Nora and Kyrias say there is no culture war. I can take their point on definitions, but what the hell is this, then?)

I got on this train of thought because of exchanging comments on my last post with Daisy, about the lack of deference for religion in the UK, and the expectation that such things are private. Yet in spite of that, it feels like crossing the floor to talk about God is far more common in the UK than the USA. Maybe the lack of deference means that no one is expected to be defensive about their personal opinions. (As ever, politically secular countries can be more religiously fervent and deferential than those which have established churches. The US and France have that in common).

And politics? People disagree. People are apathetic. There are partisan splits between rural areas and cities, between the English and the rest of 'em, between the rich and the poor. Some people pick a side and keep to it, others don't. There is a dinky yellow safety valve for when your side pisses you off. But everyone is equally subject to question, and all politicians are equally targets for mockery, having their record examined, and Jeremy Paxman. Brad Hicks thinks that there is some fundamental difference in terms of how moral codes are applied between the US right and the US left. I can't imagine such an idea being voiced in the UK.

And the idea, the one that Bill Maher was applauded for on the TV, that the people in your country who don't vote the way you think they should are just inferior to you? It's just plain ugly. What's really crazy there is how the US is so up its own ass about patriotism, and yet wont to applaud the degradation of half its people. Either half, any half, depending on the situation.


[fact: I totally did not understand some of the attitudes about presidents and the presidency in the USA until I read something, perhaps on CiF - CiF! - that said it's easier if you pretend that Obama and McCain are competing to become the Queen. That works. Totally. In a 'this place is on crack' way. It explains why no one pied the Shrub when he went to the Olympics, for instance. And maybe why Stewart wimped out on Blair.]


Finally, a few words I read on LJ earlier, related to that study that said that people disagree with each other because of their PHYSIOLOGIES, ohnoez!:

A moment to rant, because I'll never let something like this go by without a comment:

When you are part Cherokee Indian, and have German Jews in your bloodline, you get a bit sensitive when people start tossing about studies that show a genetic difference, an inferiority, in the people that they don't like.It's been used too many times to justify genocide. I don't buy the excuse, that it's a REAL study, with REAL results, or that you were doing it in all innocence. People have been known to FIND whatever they are looking for, if they skew the results enough.

[Kracken, qwp.]

that campaign finance graph in full:

The Beeb has all the numbers, but the key facts are:

a) Obama has raised over twice as much as McCain; $401 million to $171 million. It's very rare for a campaign to lose with such a huge funding disparity, though it has happened - the UK election in 1997 is an example, but it's notable that the rich losers in that election were long-term incumbents.

b) almost half of Obama's funds came in small packages, under $200. McCain raised only $50 million in that smallest category of donations and a comparable $50 million in the largest, $2000-and-over; at $75 mil, Obama's proportional gains from this group are notably smaller.

c) Obviously Obama far outstrips McCain in most professional categories, because he has twice as much money. This is not true of retired people, the oil/gas industry, the insurance industry, real estate or 'misc finance' (and he's only just ahead in 'misc business' and 'commercial banks'). The truly vast gaps in Obama's favour are among medics, educators, the entertainment and tech industries, and lawyers. Yep, lawyers. There's a detailed Black Agenda Report article expressing bad feeling about this, which is interesting but includes a lot of weasel words and no mention of the fact that the same people are McCain's second biggest donors (the retired are by far the biggest, and are narrowly Obama's second biggest).

d) In spite of lots of recent wittering about the real, 'small-town America', the non-coastal states are not actually giving McCain a lot of money. Even Texas is even-handed in its donations. (538's state profiles mention fundraising, and they've covered four so far where McCain has raised more money than Obama, but these are usually tiny margins and they just aren't giving nearly enough to add colour to the Beeb map. Incidentally, 538 disagree with the Beeb about Florida being a 'key battleground'; see their 'Tipping Point' list).

[addendum: I've just discovered OpenSecrets, which has some wonderful break-downs of data. If you love graphs as much as I do, check out their donor demographic and industries/selected sector breakdowns.]


I've not seen a whole lot of public politics in GA. The day we drove to South Carolina we saw an abundance of signboards, I guess because they had a lot of local election stuff going on at the time. I've seen no signs in our neighbourhood, though there's someone up the road who has a Gavel bumper sticker; one home on the route between here and the nearby highway has a McCain sign, and no one has driven over it yet. We laugh when we pass Ron Paul signs. There are some Senate and Congress signs by the highways, but not a vast number (that the Democrats only picked a Senate candidate a couple of weeks ago might be part of the reason for that). Disturbingly, I've seen more ageing Bush/Cheney04 bumper stickers lately than ones relating to the current election. (Still not many though. The most common political identity emblems you see on cars in GA are firstly the icthos, secondly the Confederate flag).

on privacy: a comment I made elsewhere.

[Elsewhere being Alas, specifically. I'd wondered about making a post about the whole Palin circus, leaned towards 'no' simply because I believe that Bristol Palin, though she is breathing for two, is not a valid recipient of media oxygen other than when the McCain campaign decides to start lighting matches, which I am sure it will. But then Mandolin posted that roundup about privacy and its connection (or lack thereof) to reproductive rights, and I found it a good topic for some thinking out loud.]

One thing I’d say is that Bristol Palin’s privacy is not a reproductive rights issue; she deserves privacy because she’s a young woman who has never asked for the world’s media to be on her doorstep. She deserves privacy for the exact same reason all the other candidates’ children deserve privacy. We do not need to interrogate Bristol Palin, ever. Whenever the McCain campaign makes propaganda use of her, talks about what a wonderful choice she made, we need to interrogate the McCain campaign and slam them for their hypocrisy and their inhuman anti-choice values.

It is interesting to see who gets the privacy and who does not, though. The Obama daughters have been regularly paraded on stage because so many people in the media, and allegedly in the US at large, had a nervy, perverse fascination with the idea of a black first family, and the Obama campaign felt forced to respond to that. Because America is a racially unequal society those young black girls don’t get the right to privacy.

And now there’s a young mother-to-be in the spotlight; I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard the name of her fiancé, nor read anything related to him. I also don’t know the names of any male children of anyone involved in this election. That Obama and Clinton don’t have any skews that, I’m sure - but I don’t even know if McCain, or Edwards, or most of the VP-possibles have children at all. The only people whose children have been talked about are Obama, Palin, and (to a much lesser extent) single father Biden (and there’s Chelsea Clinton, who was known to us from her father’s time in office. Quick, Britons, what’s the fastest rail route between Bristol and Chelsea?). I haven’t heard the names of Biden’s children. I don’t know anything about McCain’s children, not even how many he has, other than that he has at least one adopted child.

In other words, if you’re a white guy, your family gets more privacy. (Barring extremely odd circumstances like Biden’s - and if I may make an aside, I feel that the single father family I grew up in got too much privacy rather than too little; as Amanda wrote, privacy can be a shield for abuse, and also just for plain poor parenting. Single father families are far interrogated far less than single mother families, even given that they outnumber us by 10 to 1).

on dickwads:

I'm a bit late on this one, but Ren and Belle are spreading word about Kyle Payne, who is a blogger - a man who both blogs and does IRL conference stuff against pornography - who has pleaded guilty to breaking into a woman's bedroom, assaulting her and taking nude photographs of her in her sleep. He is still merrily blogging away, and presumably will continue to do so until he gets put away. What. As Belle reports, he is facing an open sentencing at Buena Vista County Courthouse, Storm Lake, Iowa on August 11th. If you live nearby, you might want to show up and have your word on that.


Someone else is being a dickwad lately: Obama and a supporter of his, comedian Bernie Mac. Lisa K is just plain mad about this. Gina brings the context:

Most Black women know that the standard fare for African American comedians is anti-Black woman attacks. It is always acceptable to make us the butt of their jokes. They usually get a pass however by the Black community, because the people they are insulting are Black women and nobody really cares about us anyway. No Black woman is immune from the anti-Black woman musing of these Black comedians, not even a potential Black First Lady, afterall, she’s a Black woman, and nobody really cares about us anyway. The only people that get into hot water for disparaging Black women are White people.

[...]Let’s be clear, Bernie Mac didn’t get shouted down because of his sexism, he got shouted down because he embarrassed Barack Obama. Sexism and misogyny by Black entertainers is permitted and even rewarded. It was refreshing to see someone confront it, whatever the reason. They were right, implying that Black women are inherently unsuitable to serve as First Lady of the United States of America is not funny to me.

I am avoiding most threads about this one; my fee-fees, they are slighted. (Yeah, pass me a hanky). But ultimately I'm reminded of Obama's early ties to gay-bashing preachers - something that put me off a lot at the time but later became a 'teachable moment', and also a tool with which to extract promises and declarations of tolerance. (Promises. Declarations. Yeah.)

My fee-fees. But get down to blood and bone and there's something that matters far more; Iraq, and the continuing and consistent commitment to getting out. A commitment to not continuing, or repeating, such massive bloodshed and extortion. I'm going to c/p from a MoveOn mailing here, even though I hate their tone, because it has all the important bits in it:

Iraqis want U.S. Troops out. No one was expecting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to speak up in favor of withdrawal—after all, he's close with the Bush administration. But with elections in Iraq coming up, and a great majority of Iraqis opposed to a prolonged U.S. occupation, Maliki can't afford to toe the Bush line. So he's surprised everyone by standing up this week for a timetable for troop withdrawals and a date certain to end the war. The LA Times headline reads, "Iraqi prime minister advocates withdrawal timeline."

As a result, the "endless war agreement" Bush has been pushing fell through. Since January, hundreds of thousands of us pushed Congress to stand up to President Bush's proposed treaty with Iraq, which would have tied the next President's hands and made it much harder to get out. This week, the Washington Post reported that that agreement has fallen through—Iraqi leaders are putting their feet down and demanding a much shorter agreement.

And now even the Pentagon is considering faster timelines. According to reporter Michael Hirsh at Newsweek, "a forthcoming Pentagon-sponsored report" will recommend a big drawdown of troops—suggesting "that U.S. forces be reduced to as few as 50,000 by the spring of 2009, down from about 150,000 now."

In other words, it's now clear: Most Americans are for a timeline, and so are most Iraqis. And even experts in the Pentagon agree.

For his part, Barack Obama is using these developments to hammer home the point that John McCain and President Bush are now isolated in their resistance to any kind of timeline for withdrawal. He wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday that reaffirmed his commitment to a timeline that would have all combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months.

It concludes, "Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea. . . [F]or far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender. It's not going to work this time. It's time to end this war."

They added a thing Obama said today:

George Bush and John McCain don't have a strategy for success in Iraq—they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down. They refuse to press the Iraqis to make tough choices, and they label any timetable to redeploy our troops "surrender," even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government—not to a terrorist enemy. Theirs is an endless focus on tactics inside Iraq, with no consideration of our strategy to face threats beyond Iraq's borders.

few things: urbanisation, politics linkies, and Metal Gear.

Allison at Economic Woman is writing about this neato site called Walkscore. You give it your address, it checks its maps and it gives your local area points for how much cool stuff there is within walking distance. Both of the last two areas of the UK I lived in score in the 60s. My Georgia neighbourhood rates a 15, which is not the worst I've put up with; the Pennine hole I used to inhabit gets a 9, and some of that is new since I was there.

Lessons: a) the more the merrier, b) it's interesting what they can't see - pavements and lack thereof, steep hills, snakes, the presence of other people, and c) that site totally needs to have sex with mapmyrun.com and make internet babies.

Allison quotes someone citing Friedman on how sprawl, while always harmful to everyone, is particularly hard on women because they're more likely to get trapped at home. She could've gone to the SCUM Manifesto, which she didn't, but I did. We must forgive Solanas her typos and her 60s social map and her blessed batshit:

Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community: Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual nu becoming a 'rugged individualist', a loner, equating non-cooperation and solitariness with individuality.

There is yet another reason for the male to isolate himself: every man is an island. Trapped inside himself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate, the male has a horror of civilization, people, cities, situations requiring an ability to understand and relate to people. So like a scared rabbit, he scurries off, dragging Daddy's little asshole with him to the wilderness, suburbs, or, in the case of the hippy -- he's way out, Man! -- all the way out to the cow pasture where he can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute.

Suburbia is something Americans seem to think is universal, and non-Americans seem unable to even imagine. I was. The car is the biggest difference; American urbanisation assumes that the basic unit of humanity is the car, and European urbanisation assumes that people walk on two feet, and like to resort to cars as little as possible. I don't yet know how to drive a car. Anxious.


I often don't like Cath Elliot's CiF posts. But this one is awesome. It's about some wank I almost missed hearing about - an MP who used her Commons expenses allowance to pay for her children's nanny.

If Tory chairperson Caroline Spelman's defenders are to be believed, it's perfectly reasonable to use taxpayers' money to pay for a nanny. "Of course she should have been allowed to do it," they cried when it was revealed last weekend that she'd paid for her nanny out of the public purse: "She was a busy woman with an important job." Well in that case, what about the rest of us? If an MP can have a state-funded nanny, when can I expect to find Mary Poppins standing on my doorstep, carpet bag in hand?

[...]

Note how there's been no mention of her husband's role in any of this, and no questions asked about how much involvement he had in the children's early years. The assumption being made on all sides is that male MPs have wives to look after the kids so they don't need childcare allowances, whereas women MPs are stuck with husbands, so of course they should get extra help. And yet David Cameron has small children, as does Gordon Brown, so why haven't the same voices been calling out for a childcare allowance to help these men juggle work and family life? Who's been looking after their children when they've been going about their important business?

Brad Hicks has done some good stuff lately, especially this about the Clinton campaign debt:

What could possibly justify asking guys like me who make less than $20,000 per year, living on fixed income in a Section 8 housing complex, to donate money so that a multi-millionairess doesn't have to get by on "only" her last five million dollars? Please, somebody, for the love of all that's holy and good, explain this to me?

Consensus from comments there; rich folks should not suffer for their miscalculations and errors of judgement, because they are rich folks, but poor folks deserve to land on their asses every time they misstep.


You've probably seen this already, but: MichelleObamaWatch. Lately the feed of fluff-news pieces about Ms O seems more positive than not, but when there is shit you can read it there first. And often it is shit beyond belief.


Tycho on game reviewing in general, and MGS4 (OMG) in particular:

Even if you could measure games with numbers, a point I do not concede, there's no universal Goddamned basis for comparison - there is no "unit" of measurement. We measure things so we can compare them to other things. The trouble is that everyone is performing a kind of mental arithmetic, cramming their own internal symbologies into this or that frame and stripping out wisdom in the process. Editorial voice is a fallacy. They're all conversions of interpretations of moments. And we lose crucial data at every step.

Tycho usually has impeccable taste, but he is not fond of Metal Gear. My feeling is that Metal Gear is one of those fandoms that can only be enjoyed if you take liberties with it, and grant it liberties in return. It's flawed, it jumps the shark towards the end of each game, it disappears up its own ass every so often, it is cryptic, and it occasionally warrants a cringe. It is also brain-eatingly brilliant and so packed with inspirations that it's spawned an equally diverse pack of rabid fans, of which I am one. But I grant liberties to canon, when a good canon needs it, and not everyone likes to do that, you know?


Five other current things about Metal Gear:

a) My favourite webcomic, the mighty MGS fanwerk Last Days Of Foxhound, just wound up after 500 strips. Much hilarity - and uncanny insights - for any MG fan. [Also spoilers for MGS1, MGS3 and Portable Ops].

Its most famous page is from four years ago: One Mantis, One Vote, in which Psycho Mantis took a step out of the comic to give a big queer political shoutout. (I saw that on scans_daily sometime afterwards, and fell in love from there. Although that page is offcanon unless you assume MGS1 took place in November or December - I thought it was the spring of 2004). My favourite page is Ocelost, the snapshot from inside Revolver Ocelot's mind. Hostage Negotiation is win for anyone who's played MGS, and double triple badass win for anyone who's played MGS3.

b) Some assclown has decided to make a bloody film out of this franchise.

c) ...and the folk on IMDB have pegged David Hayter as the scriptwriter. I am not at all sure that this is true, only that if it is not true, the foundations of the world will splinter and sink.

d) Either way, the film idea has a significant capacity for epic fail.

e) and I'll probably not get to play MGS4 til Christmas anyway. Stupid console wars.

My Pokemons, Let Me Show You Them.

I have no idea who made this animation. Props to them, anyways!

the devil in the details

From Churches unhappy over father figures: sadly the Beeb doesn't say exactly who or what they're quoting - I would have liked to know the name of this person, to better say that they're a moran.

But the Church of England has reserved its greatest ire for the decision of MPs to allow single women and lesbian couples to seek IVF treatment without having to consider the need for a father for their children.

Its verdict is stark.

"This vote sends a signal that fathers don't matter," it said.

[...]

The Church of England focuses on how children end up without a father.

"There is a huge difference between a child who finds themselves in a single-parent family through bereavement or breakdown of parental relationship, and those who find themselves in this situation by design, for which this bill allows."

So:

-single parents=single mothers. No exceptions.
-no father at time of gestation=single parent. No exceptions.
-this law says 'fathers don't matter' but saying 'parent' when you specifically mean 'mother' is not a sign that you believe fathers don't matter. (If fathers mattered to you, 'mother' and 'parent' would not be synonyms).

Well fucking done.

*cheers new law*

i'm blogging this!!

teraninse says:
I mean, if your own wedding can't be a highly individualistic, idiosyncratic affair, I don't want to know what can be.
teraninse says:
that's not to say...break out the furries for bridesmaids....but..

So, um, yes. The things that were said by, and to, Kyraninse/Seraninse/Teraninse (with occasional comments from Chris, who I gather was in the same room as her at the time), related in bits and in the wrong order because I can, and edited for brevity & to protect the guilty.

teraninse says:
and when are you getting married?
(and I'd do it again) says:
oh, we got married on February 29th.
teraninse says:
......*boggle-eyed*
teraninse says:
that's...a good anniversary, IMO
(and I'd do it again) says:
*shrugs* it took all of thirty seconds. we picked the 29th because we hate the world.
teraninse says:
*snicker*
teraninse says:
I'm horrified that I didn't know though. @@
(and I'd do it again) says:
no one knows except a few people on my deadjournal list, and a few members of his family, and the two friends who came along with.
teraninse says:
chris: I think that's pretty shabby, for her not to tell me, even for someone who doesn't think marriage counts for much.

This is entirely true, especially in Chris's case. As with many young things (but worse, because I'm such a flybynight floozy), the people I've met have come along in blocks associated with different locations & different educational institutions & different internets fads; Chris has been my friend for roughly 6 years, an extraordinary length of time - outside of my siblings and the blue and purple people, there might be no one I've known longer.

(and I'd do it again) says:
honestly, I didn't put it around much because I'm not proud of it in the least.
teraninse says:
because it was a purely political/practical move?
(and I'd do it again) says:
it's playing a system I hate in a blatantly unfair way.
teraninse says:
...I'm all about manipulating an unfair system to suit me, but then I'm horrible like that.
(and I'd do it again) says:
*nodnods* yeah, I wasn't THAT wary of doing it, but I feel queasy about bragging about it. My siblings knew I was marrying, but I didn't actually tell them about it afterwards - I hope my father doesn't know at all.

There was some talk about the age problem - how young marriages are so not okay in the UK, but pretty normal in the US. (Average age at first marriage in UK: 29 F / 31 M. US: 26 F / 27.5 M. I am twenty-freaking-three). Hint: I am not from the US, so this is generally not okay with me.

teraninse says:
*pokes gently with a poker* it's not bragging just to let people know you got married
(and I'd do it again) says:
but what WOULD I be telling them, if I told them I got married?
teraninse says:
btw, I thought you might want to know, M and I are getting married?
teraninse says:
*spreads hands in shrug*
teraninse says:
Chris was still thinking that you were "going" to.
teraninse says:
I mean, you could have it come out casually over dinner conversation sometime ten years down the road, but.
(and I'd do it again) says:
no, I mean, what would I be conveying to them? that I support Georgia's hetero-only, perk-ridden marriage system?
teraninse says:
oh
(and I'd do it again) says:
that I am into the whole 'marriage' thing with the nice long history of women being property and stuff?
teraninse says:
I'm the chinese immigrant here, no stealing my lines.
(and I'd do it again) says:
that my sex life is now sanctioned by Jesus?
teraninse says:
...you would be conveying that you're getting married to M, who I'm assuming you adore?
(and I'd do it again) says:
yes, I do, but I keep the adoring fairly private...I'm just like that.
teraninse says:
...sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
teraninse says:
even if it has a bit of marijuana in it, it's still a cigar

And now it all gets political, as if it wasn't already:

teraninse says:
I dunno, that's like saying, I'm never willing to go through an affirming ceremony with the man I love -- just because he happens to be male (which isn't PC) and because I get some perks out of it.
teraninse says:
which -- to be honest, smacks of silly to me, on some level. I wouldn't marry chris even for the perks unless I loved him, and so what if it's easier for us just because we happen to be sanctioned by the government? that's...like wanting to chop of your limbs in sympathy of the beggar down the streeet. *bad analogy*
(and I'd do it again) says:
no, it's not because he's male that I have an issue with it, it's because I supposedly could not do this if he wasn't.
(and I'd do it again) says:
if something's restricted to heteros it can't fit with my relationships/my life because I am not hetero and never will be.
teraninse says:
yes...and no
(and I'd do it again) says:
there's no sort of relationship I could have with a man that I couldn't also have with a woman, I'm pretty sure of that
teraninse says:
yessss....
teraninse says:
but I'm assuming you don't want to have the same kind of relationship you have with M with another woman.
(and I'd do it again) says:
not any woman I know currently, no, but that doesn't mean I never will and certainly doesn't mean I never would.
(and I'd do it again) says:
so it's not about sympathy for the beggar down the street, it's about sympathy for MYSELF.

Slightly related; Belle has a shiny new post on the subject of passing, which is more or less what this is about. And I feel upset just copypasting all this, right now.

(and I'd do it again) says:
oh, i didn't even mention how annoying the actual marriage bit was; the judge sprang fucking Jesus on me.
(and I'd do it again) says:
I swear that's not even legal
teraninse says:
this is why you don't want to be in the SOUTH!
teraninse says:
amirite???
(and I'd do it again) says:
it would've helped if the ceremony itself hadn't been so yuckmaking. I'm convinced it didn't HAVE to be - he MUST've had a secular script in a drawer somewhere, surely - but about two lines in I nearly interrupted him to say 'waitwaitiwait who said anything about JESUS?' I should have, really. :/
teraninse says:
hahaha.
teraninse says:
that's...icky indeed.
(and I'd do it again) says:
i didn't want to make a scene. i was having such a nice morning up until then.

The South part seems relevant; now, I'm a n00b here, and I'm also a pretty obnoxious and socially inept human being, but the area seems to have a higher density of totally annoying men than anywhere else I've ever been. The Bookworm tells me that this is part of why her mother had the family move up to New Jersey when she herself was but a small bookworm.

From my Deadjournal at the time: Btw, I totally got married last Friday - yes, on leap day. This is only worth mentioning because the judge was a jackass. (Nakki and M say he wasn't, that he was just a 'traditional southern guy'). He ignored me the whole time and never used my name - M had a name, but I was 'the bride'. He asked (empty-handed) M for the certificate, then gave the fresh copy to M once he'd got it ready, even though I'd given it to him in the first place and I was standing there with a GIANT PURPLE HANDBAG. He even sprang fucking Jesus on me. Bitchface could've asked if we liked Jesus - I didn't feel like I could stop him at that point... (Yes, we must be the only people in _______ County who don't like Jesus, but, dude, that first amendment thing?) *le sigh* I'm not an atheist - if I was, I imagine I'd've been rather madder about it than I am. I believe in god, just not your poxy god who likes his prayers and amens laid on inch thick with a trowel, at my bloody thirty-second no-fee leap-day courthouse wedding. That was just rude, offensive and just maybe illegal. This is not holy matrimony - see, if it was holy, you wouldn't be fussed about whether I was doing it with a boy or with a girl.

There is negative problems - ie, all the above - and then there are positive problems, like this one:

(and I'd do it again) says:
and that's another problem - I don't know any married people and barely ever have done. My parents had a pretty miserable marriage for the first 11 years of my life; M's father's now living in Alabama with his 5th wife, and M's brother and aunt are divorced too...
teraninse says:
*nodnods*
(and I'd do it again) says:
i don't really know my extended family at all - just my uncle and aunt in Preston, who are very Christian and...generally not people who inspire me. So all I see is the big-media-weddings on TV, which are just cringeworthy
teraninse says:
...uck
teraninse says:
yes.
teraninse says:
I think...I'll blog about this at some point.
(and I'd do it again) says:
clearly there should be a WEDDING DRESS with 'I'm blogging this' stitched on the veil........
teraninse says:
CLEARLY!
teraninse says:
there's some slogging through icky-making weddings of both the pagan variety and the x'tian variety. haha
teraninse says:
and...oh darn...but...chinese wedding dress or european? @@
teraninse says:
ack! cultural identity strikes again!
(and I'd do it again) says:
oh, I went to an icky Pagan handfasting once. felt like a big dressing-up game, the couple split up three weeks later
(and I'd do it again) says:
OOOH, what a question!
(and I'd do it again) says:
(I do know another pagan couple who married - in Edinburgh, so I missed it - but a few months later, the wife ran off with my ex-boyfriend...)
teraninse says:
...*sigh*
teraninse says:
...
(and I'd do it again) says:
(the happy couple had been together ten years before that. *sigh*)
teraninse says:
just..no comment.
(and I'd do it again) says:
mm.
(and I'd do it again) says:
so, yeah, there's NO ONE i can look at and say 'I want what they have!'
teraninse says:
nothing wrong in creating your own
teraninse says:
I mean, what's fanfic, after all?
(and I'd do it again) says:
indeed not, but feels like I'm starting with nothing

The elephant in the room, do you see it? No? Good. It shall not be spoken of, for all I am leaning on one of its exploding pink feet. But I will say this of it; I came here - here being everywhere it's taken me - to get away from gender. I hate gender, remember? It's repugnant. Like most of us (of either designation), I could make a long list of all the times I was told UR DOIN IT RONG when I was a girl-child, but that would just make me feel shittier. I cannot tell you how glad I was to find out that there was a way to do this whole love crap without it being about gender roles. (This is still a huge part of why I love slash so fucking much - because I am a big old sop, but I despise gender. It's also why I find lesbian romance a zillion times easier than the hetero variant, and why I've basically wound up wanting to strangle all-but-one of the guys I've ever had a thing for, but I persevere. Being queer gives me a way to do straight).

Whether I feel this way because I'm queer or because I'm me is something the jury is still out on. But I am reminded of a Slate article I read two years ago;

Of course, some opponents of same-sex marriage are just anti-gay. But to dismiss all opposition to gay marriage as pure bigotry is to miss an important point. The key to evaluating the real stakes here is to think of gay rights in terms of two major categories: gay marriage and everything else. [...] And polls show consistently growing support nationwide for gay rights other than marriage. Gallup found that 90 percent of Americans support equal employment opportunities regardless of sexual orientation. And 79 percent support the idea of homosexuals serving in the armed forces, a profound change in public opinion since the 1990s, when President Clinton thought it politically prudent to abandon his push for nondiscrimination in favor of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

But somehow same-sex marriage is a different story.

[...]

Many people get married because they want the established sex roles the institution provides: a blushing, beautiful, white veil and miles-of-lace bride set off against her dashing, handsome, chivalrous groom. Same-sex marriage seems to undermine these very sex-specific statuses, leaving everyone a sex-neutral "applicant." Sure, we could say same-sex marriages involve two brides or two grooms, but something really is lost in this translation: At that point the terms do not describe distinctively gendered roles but are merely gendered descriptions of the same role.

...Dear god, does that last paragraph make me feel ill. I can barely believe that there's anyone alive who wants that, let alone a whole bunch of people who equate it with what your genitals looked like when you were born.

So Kyraninse gets on to the rewriting of affirmation (which is something she posted about yesterday too - and ooh, look, a Punkass post on the topic):

teraninse says:
and as a friend, I wanted to know because I wanted to add my congratulations for affirmation and blessings to the pot, regardless of what the federal system has to say about it. not that congrats and blessings have to be specifically time-tied, but...
teraninse says:
well, sometimes it is. superstition and tradition and all that.
(and I'd do it again) says:
can i ask what the congrats would be FOR, though? it's not like the relationship's changed at all because of it
teraninse says:
I'm working within my paradigm, in which if I ever married chris, I'd essentially be formally announcing to the world that I'm taking this man to be mine and I vow to honor, cherish, protect, and succor until death do us part. [In her blog post she amended this to 'until life do us part']
teraninse says:
and this would be an affirmation that would resonate, for me, within the spiritual realm also, since I believe in intent, spirit, and magic.
(and I'd do it again) says:
*nodnods* I grok that.
teraninse says:
and so...if I weren't willing to say those things, I wouldn't want to get married, even for practical purposes. I'm assuming that you also meant those things when you said them.
teraninse says:
which, to my belief, is, regardless of society and law, a very powerful thing.
(and I'd do it again) says:
yes, but I would've meant them with or without the marriage part. that's just what the relationship is like.
teraninse says:
*nod* marriage is a nice convenient excuse to have a affirmation ceremony, in my eyes. maybe this is just me, but for me it's not binding unless it's been ceremonialized.
teraninse says:
partially because of the paradigms of intent and magic that I work with.
teraninse says:
so -- in my eyes, if I congratulated you on your marriage, I'd be happy for you that this affirmation happened and was now binding, so to speak.
teraninse says:
which is NOT to say, you should advertise your marriage when you don't want to, just to make people happy.
(and I'd do it again) says:
I think I get you now - I guess my main problem is that the affirmation ceremony is coupled (hurr) to a raft of legal benefits that fucks over a huge number of people *of whom I am one*
teraninse says:
that makes sense.
teraninse says:
lots of it.
(and I'd do it again) says:
but I believe in intent, and this relationship is one of the reasons I do.
teraninse says:
but -- I don't see a reason to be ashamed of your marriage per se just because it is supported by a corrupt system.
teraninse says:
or not the marriage itself, but the ceremony of it.
teraninse says:
btw, none of this was supposed to be "chastise chastise, bad, bad thene" -- I just wanted to hash out the why and wherefores.
(and I'd do it again) says:
nah, I get that and thanks, I kinda think I needed to get it out with someone...
teraninse says:
*nod*
teraninse says:
Do you feel like the marriage ceremony is just ...well, not empty ritual -- but can have, can do without, as the chinese would say?
(and I'd do it again) says:
I don't know, because I don't know of one that would be appropriate for me, so I feel like I'm comparing 'can do without' with...nothing. Dunno what 'can have' would be like.
teraninse says:
I've talked about wedding ceremonies at great length with my friends -- one of whom's mother and father got married on a hill top somewhere with witnesses and that was all.
teraninse says:
I also attended a wedding this past summer where ...they exchanged vows they wrote themselves and that was it.
teraninse says:
If you like, and only if you do, I'd be happy to talk with you about what you might like for a possible affirmation ceremony if you feel like the yuck-making should just be ignored on the metaphysical level.
teraninse says:
and ONLY if you feel it's something you want.

Do I? I don't even know. I have too much pride to be any good with bindings, or gods for that matter. I am happy with what I have flung myself into; but I am at my most happy when not putting words to it, when just being here, words and symbols bedamned. Feck. Must hit 'publish post' now.

*pokes head up*

Yep, I'm here, I have my blogging hat back on, I've just not blogged yet, though there's no shortage of things to be blogged at. Here are some of them:


Isn't this fun? The Serious Fraud Office politely drop their enquiry into corruption in the arms trade between the UK and Saudi Arabia because of blackmail from the Saudis. The High Court now tells them that ending the enquiry was illegal, and it has to reopen, now. (In a rare moment of win, the US government said the same thing a few months back). So have they got the spine? Is Gordy going to get over his reliance on the arms industry and grow a pair of bollocks over this one? He bloody well better do.


Paula. Oh, Paula paula Radcliffe, who has this to say about the torch relay:

A peaceful protest on the sidelines - fine. But don't try to stop the torch, because the torch is about more than the Beijing Olympics. It's about the Olympic spirit and the importance of the Olympics in teaching youth, and teaching the world, what sport can do - how sport can bring people together, how it can overcome suffering, how it has overcome even wars in the past.

It's a very powerful thing, and trying to stop the torch was trying to stop that message, so that was wrong.

Everything I could possibly say about this turned up on political_macros.Is she even hearing what she's saying? That this thing is important and powerful and can overcome? If that's true, why the fuck is she trying to stop that process by taking part when she knows damn well what the case against is? This is the powerful moment, and she's picked the side of the spineless.


Michael Chertoff, a charming chappie from Homeland Security, is worried that his internets might not be safe:

He told the world's biggest IT security conference that serious threats to cyberspace are on "a par this country tragically experienced on 9/11".

Such attacks can hit financial bodies and a government's powers, he said.

"We take threats to the cyber world as seriously as we take threats to the material world," Mr Chertoff added.

...So, yeah, he's stood up and said it. 9/11 wasn't tragic because of the loss of thousands of lives, or because of the threat it represented to democracy, freedom and peace - it was tragic because it threatened financial bodies and a government's powers.

In other internets news, the EU has decided, by a narrow vote, that civil liberties really are more important than stopping music/film piracy. Also: I turn my back for two months and you look what happens. (Though I feel that the Beeb has failed to get to grips with this whole phenomenon).


There have been many great threads at FSF lately. See this one on rape in s-f/f, which I derailed by talking about r&r and h/c themes in slash; a cool thread about how crazy Allecto inspired some non-crazy talk about Firefly...in which Allecto shows up [@ April 2nd, 6.01am] and asks the internets to apologise for calling her names, exactly as if she isn't dehumanising and full of contempt for all women who don't do as she'd like them to, Kai Cole included; and Laura Q on the religious indoctrination of children, about voluntary withdrawal from the world and about things SFnal - I didn't comment there, not so much because I thought she crossed a line as because I think a line exists in a place where she's not seeing it.


And yes, this. Not smart, Ms Self-Appointed Expert On All People Everywhere. Not big, not clever, and, sadly, not even original. [if we're doing citations, I totally stole that link from Holly at Feministe].


The break did me good - I sifted through old notebooks, played videogames and thought. It's kinda good to have so much backlog of stuff to type; feels so bountiful that throwing out the rotten bits doesn't hurt. I've tentatively decided to put fiction first until the 8th of every month from now on, at least if there's something I want to work on. But now I'm back to other things - taking walks; making clothes and shit; and, that thing I keep not mentioning - my tarot blog. I hope the usual Living Room Theory of Internets (it's my space, and if it's not your kind of space I can throw you out whenever I like) can be presumed; so if you want to see the family shrine, do not be Ellie. (Do Not Be Ellie isn't a bad rule in general...)