Having attempted sleep and been rudely interrupted by a rather hideous dream about a clown with a massive erection -- and no, I'm not joking... I don't often remember my dreams but when I do they tend to be strange, like the time I dreamt I was beating a man to death with an old-fashioned Bakerlite telephone and woke up pissing myself with laughter -- I shall post some of my long overdue links of interest.
Don't worry... there's proper content coming too as I'm working on a review of Shane Meadows' excellent This is England, which I warmly recommend by the way.
So... onwards and upwards!
Firstly, as people may know, I am a Verbwhore. That is to say that I post to the forum of Chris Morris fansite Cook’d and Bomb’d. For a site devoted to the comedy of Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brasseye, Nathan Barley), there’s actually surprisingly little discussion of the man’s works. Instead it is just a forum full of genuinely funny and occasionally horrifically talented people. In recognition of this side of my life, I have decided to link to a couple of Verbwhore blogs that I am particularly fond of. The first is Seaneen Molloy’s Pole to Polar: The secret life of a manic depressive. It’s pretty much what you’d expect given the name but I find it really quite moving and candid and interesting so I recommend that people take a look. A *ahem* polar opposite to Seaneen’s blog is Alistair Coleman’s Scaryduck. Very much a traditional “web log”, Scaryduck stands out simply for being incredibly funny. Recent highlights include Alistair explaining how he is evidently catnip for nymphomaniacal septagenarians. I recommend both of these blogs and in fact, so do major British newspapers as Pole to Polar came second in the London’s Metro’s best youth blog (because Seaneen is not in fact under 19) and Scaryduck won 2002’s Guardian award for best British blog.
Secondly, an article by Geoffrey Macnab about how and why there were no British films nominated for Cannes this year. I’m not including it because it’s an interesting article (it isn’t), I’m including it as it’s a fantastic example of a nice long article on a nice subject with absolutely nothing to say. Macnab waffles on for a bit and then concludes that well... there weren’t any films nominated for Cannes this year because there weren’t many decent British films this year and those films that were decent were not going to be ready. I’m currently planning a piece about this year’s Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form and I’m now petrified that I’ll wind up sounding like Macnab.
Thirdly, an excellent piece about the career of the creator of the Playstation Ken Kutaragi by Rob Fahey. Fahey explores the rise and fall of Kutaragi from the point of view of office politics and how his tendency to ago against the flow and make ridiculous pronouncements endeared him to one Sony CEO but completely alienated him from another. One of the more interesting fact that the article brings to light is that between 1989 and 1999, the Sony corporation was run by a guy named Norio Ohga who started out in life as an opera singer until he was offered a job at Sony following a letter of complaint he decided to write about the quality of their tape machines. I didn’t think such things actually happened in the real world.
Fourthly, another videogame-related article, this time by Cory Doctorow. The article is about how online worlds tend to be really quite dictatorial places as the company running it can, not unreasonably, ban any content it dislikes as well as any people it dislikes. At first glance this is not particularly big news as it’s entirely intuitive but it is interesting how many people forget this and effectively decide to move their social lives online. Doctorow alludes to one example of why this is a bad idea in the case of World of Warcraft, which banned a “GLBT friendly” guild on the grounds that it would promote anti-social behaviour, thereby forcing GLBT gamers firmly into the virtual closet. This chimes eerily with Facebook’s recent decision to ban a GLBT-related group aimed at arab teens because the Saudi government complained. So if you’re gay and live in Saudi Arabia, you’d better stay in the closet when you're online... wouldn't want to impact upon Facebook's profit margins. Doctorow focuses on virtual worlds but the power of administrators versus the rights of members of online communities is an issue that comes up again and again all over the net, from EVE Online guilds to forums devoted to discussing cats. It would be nice if someone started an online movement that effectively did for online communities what amnesty does for states. Summary bannings? harsh moderation of what people say on the forum? rampant bullying and stalking? bad online rights rating for you!
Fifthly, a piece about John Clute’s The Darkening Garden, a small critical text attempting t lay the foundations for a theory of horror literature. The book isn’t particularly new but I have actually read it and felt the need to comment upon it. Clute makes two moves that I’m not sure I understand. firstly, he makes a distinction between horror and what he calls “affect horror”. The difference is that proper horror contains fantastical elements while “affect horror” not. So the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left aren’t horror. This annoys me as it’s an example of a theorist essentially using idiosyncratic definitions of words to suit his purposes. If you’re going to write a book about horror then write it about horror not “the incredibly narrowly defined sub-set of horror that you’re really interested in writing about”. The second thing that the book does is to effectively come up with a theory from scratch for explaining how horror works. Aside from being quite poorly conceived, the methodology at work here is bizarre. Literary criticism by and large functions by taking a text and then bringing to bear existing theories that were developed independently of the text. So you look at say Bagpuss through the lens of Lacanian or Freudian or Marxian theory. The idea being that you’re using a means of looking at the world to look at a text. It is interesting because the theory is interesting and robust. Quite what it means for a short horror story to mean something when looked at through the lens of Clute’s theory is unclear to me other than “this is what Clute thinks about this story”. I know the methodological failings of this approach as I undertook myself with my aesthetics of fantasy.
Sixthly, is 429Truth.com, a site that brilliantly parodies the 9/11 conspiracy websites by taking the fairly mundane accident of a bridge collapsing in California and applies the same thought processes and leaps of logic as the 9/11 wingnuts applied to the evidence surrounding the bombing of the Twin Towers.
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