Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Book lists

From Tabula Rasa, my annual meme.  Based on some list of 100 popular books (or ones that people pretend that they have enjoyed in order to impress the survey-taker), the point is to bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you loved, italicise the ones you intend to read and strike out the ones you have no intention to read (or to read again, if bolded).  However, my blog does not support the deprecated strike-out tags, and I have no intention to mess about with inline css, so I've indicated these with a  "[NO]", instead.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling [NO]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [NO]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [NO]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare(well, including the sonnets but barring several of the more obscure plays: people who say otherwise are lying!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [NO]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens [NO]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [NO] (well, I could read bits again, but I'd rather read three other books!)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [NO]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [NO]
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [NO]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [NO]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [NO]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [NO]
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [NO]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [NO]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [NO]
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt [NO]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [NO]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [NO] (I'm a little old...)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks.
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [NO]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [NO]

I'm interested by a couple of patterns: I'm pretty widely-read in the "greats", but less so in modern literary works.  Thus, I have read all but six of the first thirty. This is largely because of a deliberate decision to read "the canon".  There are three books on here that I have never heard of (82, 86 and 95).

I dislike Dickens, as will be aparent from all the "[NO]" tags.  I'm also not a huge fan of the wilfully downbeat ending that so delights the ladies, and so The Handmaid’s Tale, Memoirs of a Geisha, Gone With The Wind and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin are all doomed to make one less sale each.  And I had to watch a friend, whose opinion I trust, grind her way through A Suitable Boy, and am not at all convinced, from her description, that it is worth the time out of my life needed to read it.

I was already aware that there are weaknesses in my reading, particularly among Russian and French authors, which I am remedying.  However, I suspect that TR is right to suspect that this is from the BBC's "Big Read", as English-language books are heavily over-represented.

Finally, I wonder if the list has been a little altered in transmission?  Hamlet, for instance, appears at number 98.  This despite the appearance of Shakespeare's complete works 80-odd places higher (laughably enough: even I have not read the lot, and I doubt if 0.5% of people have, even in his native country).  I suspect that an "official" list would agglomerate such entries.

And no, I have not underlined the Bible, despite my religion.  It would be mere duty that made me claim that I enjoyed much of it as a book.  Have you ever read Leviticus, after all?

But mummy it's not just a silly game you just don't get it

Like Cuppycake, I sometimes read Tobold's blog, and find it interesting from time to time.  But his recent post attacking Richard Bartle was awful, awful stuff that revealed a mixtue of intellectual shallowness and vapid foolishness that I found it hard to comprehend.

Tobold - and here we shouldn't put too fine a point on things - spends thousands of hours every year pressing keys in order to make a graphical representation of an imaginary person make numbers float above the heads of graphical representations of imaginary monsters.  Sometimes, a number increases in the top left of his screen, which in turn makes the numbers above his little person's head increase slightly when the imaginary monster does things, while also scaling up the numbers above the imaginary monster's head when he pretends to swing his imaginary sword.

Now a lot of us have played that sort of game, and enjoyed it greatly.  Some of us like to talk at length about whether the goal of making numbers bigger at the cost of thousands of hours every year is a valuable or worthwhile one.  Some of us are even excited by the technology and advances involved.  Many of us are aware of the history of the genre, can accept criticisms of it thoughtfully.  Some of us even address whether devoting too many hours to a pleasurable but unproductive pastime is truly worthwhile, especially after a certain point of discovery, learning and exploration has passed.

Dr Bartle helped invent the genre of multiplayer online gaming.  He didn't create it, but he advanced it, shaped it, dramatically redefined it and has helped to explain and advance it ever since.  He is a cantankerous, provocative, opinionated but nevertheless authoratitive, insightful and important writer in the field, who, far from resting on his laurels, continues to teach, advise and comment in the field.

In a recent interview, Dr Bartle made a number of points, some clearly deliberately hyperbolic.  None were as excruciatingly, horribly ignorant as Tobold's opening line: "Richard Bartle is the co-author of MUD, one of the ancestors of modern MMORPGs. But as he failed to patent any of the inventions he did while creating it, all he got was a Wikipedia entry."  Perhaps Tobold actually believes this to be true, but I thought I recognised a different pattern of behaviour.

Dr Bartle, as even Tobold is surely aware, is an authority figure in the genre.  Tobold was back in the position of being a little kid, being told by someone in authority that he was wasting his time with something silly. Tobold must certainly know that he is throwing away so much of his life through the unbalanced pursuit of a single pastime that he describes.  It seems he is rather sensitive to being told so.  In the time that he spends in MMOs every year he could study for another degree.  He could read every book in the classical canon, and take time to study each.  He could learn to play a musical instrument, or give time to voluntary causes.  I have no doubt that he has an argument as to why his frankly obsessive pursuits are normal and justifiable, and indeed I imagine that he is deeply in denial as to their extent.  But his blog is lengthy and voluble evidence to the contrary.  And when it is pointed out, he reacts as he did in his own comments and posts: furiously.

In a comedic note, Tobold even commented that he thought Bartle was anonymously trolling Tobold's comments pages, sock-puppetting to defend himself.  I wonder if Bartle was even aware that Tobold had mentioned him.  I seriously doubt that he was losing any sleep over it, and am absolutely certain that any responses would be signed: this is an old usenet and listserv warrior, after all.

Anyway, i am getting too worked up about this.  Tobold, as I said in his comments, is a diarist: he spends his leisure time in computer games and then writes about what he did.  His forays into thinking about the nature and characteristics of those games (as opposed to complaining about the surface impact of features) are occasional and unoriginal: they are on the level of a regular bus traveller suggesting better placement of the ashtrays or a sliding step from which to alight.  For him to dismiss and mock someone who helped give him the games in which he spends all the time he can is as ungracious as it is ungrateful, and his criticisms of an interview - one which was undoubtedly given while aware of the responses of the dedicated fanbois - are at best facile.

The funny thing is, by writing his piece, Tobold yet again proved the relevance and importance of his target.

Shame on Brown and on England

Those who know me are aware that my views are hardly those of a right-on, Guardian-reading liberal.

However, to turn on the television today and see Gordon Brown whoring out the city of London to the single most murderous regime in the world today - China - in order to run propaganda for their brutal state and its oppression of Tibet live on rolling BBC news was sickening.

I knew Dr Brown, the father of our current Prime Minister.  He was a quiet, caring and principled minister in the Church of Scotland.  And while I am sure that he would be tremendously proud of his son's achievements, I wonder just what he would have thought of Brown's decision to give his stamp of approval, grinning on the steps of Downing Street, to an oppressive state run by geriatric killers and corrupt military-industrial concerns.  A decision informed not by principle but by import-export agreements, political prestige and by mutual back-scratching over London's 2012 chance to feed at the same trough.

And useful idiot after useful idiot is wheeled out to stand against a background of dancing morons in fancy dress to proclaim that "politics shouldn't interfere with the Olympics."  No politics, please... while Prime Ministers and ambassadors for murderers bare their teeth in ugly smiles for the cameras.  And a team of tracksuited Chinese Ministry for State Security  thugs are allowed to parade throught the heart of our capital, while their colleagues round up monks and peasants in a small, faraway country of which, it seems, Brown knows little.  And cares less.  While the BBC - the BBC - tightens the focus of its cameras each time crowds of protestors would otherwise be in shot on this jolly tour of old London town.

Never forget that the Chinese communist party has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since taking power.  Hitler was a lightweight pretender next to the Communist Party of China.  Even the Holocaust pales compared to what Mao and his successors have done.  Does that seem like hyperbole to you?  Then your historical knowledge is lacking.  Does it seem tangential?  Then you must love sports a very great deal to wish to banish all thought of how they are being used.

And how fitting, therefore, that the "eternal Olympic flame", like the tradition of the relay of the Olympic torch, was invented not by Greeks but by Hitler's National Socialists.

I'm a Scot, and one of my countrymen once spoke about far away trouble, using China as an example.  Read what economist Adam Smith said, and each time he speaks about an earthquake in China, think instead of state-run murder in Tibet.  And each time he talks of losing a finger, think of Brown worrying about his precious 2012 Olympics:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Playing with music - Bach, Tool and more

I listen to a lot of music, by a lot of bands.  Every now and then, every few years, a song truly strikes me, to the extent that I (with my butterfly's attention span) can listen to it dozens of times in a week, finding new twists, harmonies, intricacies of rhythm and nuances of lyric.  It's quite a 17-year-old thing to do, I suppose, but one I am glad not to have grown out of in the decades that have followed.  I think that the songs that have attracted me like this down throug the years tend towards several features: playfulness, complexity and length (never mind the quality, feel the width!)  They tend to be in minor keys, often with either a drone (it's the influence of the bagpipes, I tell you), repeated figures, or a middle-eastern feeling.

I suppose the first one I can remember was when I was 10 or 11, and was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.  Not a bad place to start, I'd say.  And yet this apparently complex piece is (while technically gruelling to play and often astonishingly modern in its use of chords and shapes bordering on atonalism) strikingly simple to understand, even if you know nothing much about music and can't read a jot of notation.

One fun way to see the trickery and complexity of this piece, without needing to read music, is to look at this version of it.  Here, you can see a visualisation of each note, of the figures and patterns Bach uses, and spot where they reappear, transposed or reversed.  You can see the shapes of the music, especially in the fugue section.  It starts at around 2:50, and then you immediately see the same figure (series or pattern of notes) repeated with the right hand (the top rows, in brown) seconds later.  Then again at 3:13 in purple, and again and again throughout.  Look at 3:46, where the bottom pattern (played with the feet, here) lies under a variation on the same shapes being played simultaneously with the right hand (at the top).

See how striking the patterns are when displayed in visual form: the human eye can see the curves, twists and sinusoidal patterns of the sounds, and understand them better: look at the flowing falls in the notes at 4:06, or the transpositions of the regular rise and fall at 4:22.  And if you ever wanted to understand suspended notes (where a chord sounds like a dischord - jarring and incomplete, then resolves itself into something complete and pleasing) then go to 8:07 and watch the slowly resolving series of chords.

The same formalism and mathematical playfulness of the music that attracted modernists like Berg to Bach also make it easier to see just what he is up to in this format.

Anyway, more to come.  I don't want to make this too terrifying a wall of :words:  Next up, Tool's 10,000 Days (Wings for Marie Pt2) and A Perfect Circle's Judith.  Can you possibly wait?

Your Ears Will Thank Me

I've paid my dues.  I've written lengthy articles often enough.  Now I get to make some nice, content-lite posts about stuff I think is awesome.  There's my justification.  First up, music.  Plus, I watch my search logs: this will easily reach 4000 direct hits in the month after I publish it, and sometimes a boy likes an audience.  So, a bunch of songs I think are particularly fine, and which I can find on YouTube.

Stinkfist - Tool.  Some of the most beautiful music I know of being made right now, tied as closely as  anything i can think of to as over-arching design element in their sound, videos, live sets and more.  I know someone who once watched a stack of four or five of these on MTV2 late one night, and says that she began to have a grasp of just what they were about.  In the morning, however, this sanity-blasting knowledge was gone.  If someone was to sit down and watch all Tool's videos in one sitting the effect would probably be not unlike reading the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Al'Hazred, with super-explanatory Cliff notes.  Why not give it a try?  Aenima.  Parabola.  Schism.  Vicarious. See the odd one out there?

FEAR - Ian Brown.  Could so easily be Golden Gaze, or the Be There [edit - fuller version now] collaboration with Unkle (who also worked with Brown when remixing FEAR).  Ian Brown has an incredible, outstanding record of work, whether it is solo, in the Stone Roses, or in collaboration with others.  I'm not a huge fan of some of his album-fillers, but he can create pure gold in singles.

An Eye for an Eye - Unkle.  Yes, I couldn't keep him out.  He is usually provocative in his videos (see Be There, above, or Rabbit in Your Headlights, with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke) but this is in another league.  I don't usually like stuff as unrelentingly sad as this gorgeous but disturbing video, but it is too wonderful for me to eschew.

Dayvan Cowboy - Boards of Canada.  I harbour more fondness than most for Leadburn and Howgate, but this beautiful, poignant instrumental piece is exactly what you don't expect to spring from the Penicuik area.  But the band are indeed based out of a refurbished nuclear bunker in the Pentland Hills.  From their Campfire Headphase album.  The first footage is from the .  The shot of the dolphin playing in the surf at around 3:15 onwards gives me a cold rush of joy every time I see it (and alienates me a little more from Japanese fishermen with each viewing).

Devil's Eyes - Buck 65.  I bet the record company begged them not to put in the first minute of this video.  As it was, almost no TV channel played the first part, skipping instead to the song proper.  And yet Michael 'Boss Cracker' Jackson gets that weird bit of him on top of the car played?  I ask you...

Call the Ships to Port - Covenant.  They used to be mad-eyed goths.  Now they are cool, techno-goths.

Another Body Murdered - Faith No More and the Boo Ya Tribe.  I honestly think that the original soundtrack from this dreadful, dreadful film (Judgement Night) nonetheless played a not-insignificant role in the rise of nu-metal with its theme of rap/metal crossover.  Each song was a collaboration between one guitar band and one rap act.  Anything that can bring the Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul onto the same album as Slayer and Cypress Hill has to be worth a listen.

My Kingdom - Future Sound Of London.  I've loved this silly, ultra-modernist video for years.  It always felt very Gibsonian.  I kinda like the imagery around the 1:30 mark onwards: it is rather like I imagine an encounter with UFOs on earth actually would be: utterly foreign and alien, incapable of interaction, unaware of any human ideas of hiding or graduality: just there.   I also always wanted to start a tribute band called Future Sound of Harthill.

The Mercy Seat - Johnny Cash.  This is one of the series of cover versions that Cash did in the last few years of his life where, merely by performing a variety of great songs by modern writers, he revealed startling new sides of each.  This is, of course, one of the more obvious of the tracks he chose.  Contrast Nine Inch Nails' track Hurt with Cash's cover: a heartbreaking piece featuring he and June Carter shortly before their deaths.

Aisha - Death in Vegas.  This is a superb song.  The voiceover (slightly accelerated in this video version, unfortunately) is by Iggy Pop, and his voice is wonderfully fitting.  The video got banned in an age when such things are very hard to achieve.

Teardrop - Massive Attack.  This is another collaboration, this time between MA and the vocalist from the Cocteau Twins, Elizabeth Fraser (another Edinburgh link in the list!).  As such it is something of a rarity, in that Liz sings in English, as opposed to the personal made-up dialect she used in the bulk of Cocteau Twins songs, and which sounded deceptively like English but, on closer examination, never was. As an aside, the "black flowers blossom" line presses quite the button with me, since it reminds me of the Gaia-explanation in Edge of Darkness, from when I was a child and a nuclear war and winter was a terrifying, entrancing possibility.  Teardrop edged out Karmacoma, featuring Tricky on vocals and a far better video.  But only just.  Also recommended: Inertia Creeps and Angel.

Vagabonds - New Model Army.  After all these tremendously expensive videos (I never knew where the money for FSOL or Unkle extravaganzas came from) here is the absolute opposite of the scale, from a band named after after Cromwellian military reforms and who in the late 80s were already standing in the ground only now occupied by today's anti-capitalist movement.  Not that I hold with all that grebo-hippy nonsense...

Robert Jordan Punchlines Life-Long Practical Joke

Robert Jordan is dead.  While that is not very funny for him, it is entirely hilarious for those of us who read the reviews of his apparently plodding, dreary, interminable* series of sub-fantasy novels and decided not to invest the weeks of our lives necessary to read them all.  Those who did, I gather, often felt they had to keep going and find out what happened, perhaps just to justify the time they had spent thus far.  It would have been all too painful to admit that all that time had been wasted.

Booyah, suckers.  Not going to happen, now.

Well, I imagine that some other low-quality scribbler will be co-opted in to write another 17 books in the series.  But there will always be the lurking knowledge that this doesn't provide real closure.  That would have been like Tolkien dying just before the episode on Mount Doom was completed, and having someone else chuck down a happy ending just to get the book published.  Well, not really.  Perhaps if Tolkien had been hit very hard on the head with a brick a few times in his late teens.  And if the good bits of Lord of the Rings had been expunged, and the birthday party scene expanded to fill 4000 endless pages.

-----

*Apparently entirely terminable, now

Why I am Unwelcome at the Party

Ticketmaster, who apparently do something magical with tickets to justify a 20% increase in price from what is printed on the bit of paper itself, just emailed me to "invite [me] to book tickets for Marilyn Manson's autumn tour of the UK".

There are two difficulties here.  The first, and most obvious, is that Mr Manson will be playing at the Braehead Arena, which has the misfortune to sit on the periphery of that drug-laden hive of scum and villainy which history will later judge harshly, simply for being Paisley.  I like every single one of the tires on my car.  I like them as individuals, and have no desire to donate a single one to Jimmy Skeng of 27a Crapheed Road, PA3 2EJ.

Perhaps more importantly, I have no desire to attend a soiree at which I would be patently unwelcome.  You see, dear reader, Marilyn (I feel I can call him that, after all that we went through together) and I share a dark episode in our conjoined lives: one of which he has never spoken, and which I only now feel able to share with the world.  I only hope that he can forgive me for breaking our bond of silence.  But the time to tell this story has, I feel, arrived.

It is necessary, gentle friend (for I look on you now as the closest of bosom-friends, in whom I can confide even this inglorious tale), for me to to take you by the hand and lead you up through the years.  Back we wander, leaving behind us the traumatic experiences of 9/11, into a gentler world concerned mainly with plaid shirts, Starbucks coffee and how to get a midi-based Spice Girls ring tone for their Nokia cellphones.  For any Americans present, this was far, far in the history of your country: very nearly in the fabled days when OJ Simpson and Tonya Harding stalked the earth.

In this one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-sixth year of our Lord, I found myself in the royal borough of Glasgow: not something of which I am now proud, but my twenties were an experimental era, and experimentation implies mistakes.  Do not judge me, please.

To be exact, I found myself in The Garage, there to hear an exciting young popular beat combo who had seen fit to name themselves Marilyn Manson.  I felt that "Marilyn and the Mansons" would have been more appropriate for an aspiring four-piece, just setting off on their musical journey, but they seemed intent on differentiating themselves from the greats, and who can blame them, flushed as they were with the exuberance of youth?  No doubt the name arose during a marathon bout os exposure to the jazz salts.

The popular press, ever in search of a simple story with which to amuse the lumpen mass which comprises their readership, had painted young Brian "Marilyn" Warner, his friend Jeordie "Twiggy" Osborne White and their various androgynous cohorts as dark lords of evil, jaded libertines of the most violently excessive sort, who would be virtually guaranteed to indulge in the most unnatural and disturbing acts in what was promoted as a nothing less than a mixture of all the most unpleasant layers of Dante's L'Inferno.  You can imagine, gentle reader, with what trepidation I approached the unobtrusive discotheque within which the evening's fateful events would be played out.  Fool that I was, I had chosen to bring with me a young lady who would, one day, become my wife.  At the time, I worried that I might regret exposing her to promised to be no less than the Book of Revelations itself played out in real-time.  I speak, of course, of the promotional tour for the musicians' new long-player, Antichrist Superstar.

Mr Warner had done little to dampen the fevered expectation which his theatrical agents had sought to provoke.  The Daily Express demanded he be banned.  The Evening Standard stopped just short of calling for his hanging (unusual liberalism on their part which I cannot, to this day, explain).  The Daily Mail devoted several pages of their colour supplement to wondering whether Prince Philip might not be planning to hire Manson to kill the Princess of Wales!  And yet Brian, when interviewed on popular music channel "MTV2" simply said "we really like it when our audiences, like, spit on us and abuse us and stuff, it really, you know, inspires us."

How often, down through the years, have I cried out in despair at those words?  "Why, Brian?  Why did you say that to me?"  For, still flushed with the excitement of the afternoon's rugby match, I found myself in exuberant mood, pondering the provocations of the man who now stood only scant yards away, crooning his touching and romantic ballad, "Angel With The Scabbed Wings".

How many seemingly insignificant occurences that week might have made things different?  If only I had not heard Brian's call to arms, what then?  If only I had not looked into his eyes as I heard him ask plaintively for audience-based abuse.  If only I had not played hooker at rugby only a few hours previous to the concert, leading not just to a well-practised throwing arm but also to an unnatural thirst, but four songs into the concert.  A thirst which was slaked by only a quarter of the litre of diet coca-cola which now, dear reader, sat in my hand, heavy, well-balanced, and at the beginning of a journey which would take it from my hand, through each and every one of the intervening points in space, curving gracefully, even spinning a little on its long axis as it spiralled towards Mr Warner's elaborately dishevelled costume.

Brian is a man of dignity.  Not for him a lunge into the crowd and a swinging fist.  No, he restrained himself to a single, high-pitched squeak of outrage, not unlike that of an unusually baritone pipistrel bat.  Then he stalked - I refuse to give in to those who call it minced - stalked from the stage, a large, brownish-black stain spreading across his chest, and succulent carbonated liquid dripping from his face.

I was dismayed!  Why was Brian not inspired?  Had I abused him inappropriately in some way?  Was he disappointed in me?  Did it have to be phlegm?  Would no other liquid do?  These and other questions (many concerned with the burly ex-servicemen of the nightclub's janitorial staff) raced through my mind, as the band finished a rare, instrumental version of the track (I am told that surreptitious recordings of this version change hands for surprising sums of money in Camden's less reputable record stalls, even to this day).  There followed a confused delay, as the mercurial Mr Warner was coaxed out onto stage, doubtless with the promise of fresh souls to devour or something similar.

In any case, our dark master did emerge, turning his baleful, slightly sticky gaze out upon the crowd..  If I may belabour an old saw, I believe that it could be said that his face was like fizz.  Yet even now, the situation could have been retrieved: a little supportive expectorating in Mr Manson's direction and the maestro, suitably inspired, would no doubt have continued in fine fettle with his malign performance.

What the situation did not need was a high-pitched, slightly querulous voice to emerge from behind the coke-smudged make-up, proclaiming that "I'd like to start again, unless anyone out there wants to throw else anything at me?"

Why?  Why Brian?  I have asked myself that so very often since then.  Dear, dear interlocutor, I am sure that you - such is the esteem in which I hold your intelligence and insight - can imagine just what happened next.  The offer, flung at the feet of a boisterous Glasgow audience, many of them (I am sorry to say) I suspect of having been in their cups, was too much for the denizens of that dark place to resist.  Helpful to a frankly exuberant degree, they swiftly set about picking up everything in the place that was not actually classifiable as structurally integral to the building and hurling it in the direction of poor Brian.  A miscellany of items ranging from furniture to small audience members was soon arcing through the air in the direction of a dismayed, would-be Beelzebub.  Wielding a microphone stand for defence, Brian half ran, half crawled from cover to cover, using speaker stacks as temporary refuges behind which to plan each leg of his escape from what had become less a stage and more a treacherous sea of broken chairs, spilt drinks, and ricketts-stunted, buckfast-drinking midgets.

I cannot pretend that I felt welcome, as I atempted to blend in with the crowd, and trudged towards the doors.  I had misread Brian's signals.  I had gone too far.  And, since Brian has never called or written to suggest that any sort of forgiveness had occurred during the long years since that night,  I am sure you will agree that it would be entirely inappropriate for me to attend.  I am not even sure that I should send the customary note, apologising for my absence and citing a previous engagement.

Edit: I just remembered that the surreality of that night did not begin with Marilyn Manson.  The support act were an all-girl band called Fluffy, but their act kinda fell apart after their bassist had to be carried from the stage, projectile-vomiting in spectacular fashion as she went.

MMOs and Morning Storytime Hour

One of the great things about flying with Goonfleet is not having to work in the mornings.

By which I mean that I get into work, fire up the pc, and get to read compelling stories authored collaboratively by scores of people on the GF forums.

Of course, there is rarely a single, cohesive post anywhere that tells the story of what has happened.  You can cheat, and skip to the end of whatever ALL CAPITALS IMPORTANT FLEET OP thread has grown to 10 pages and 500 posts overnight, but even that will only give an insight into the mood at the thread's conclusion.  Actually deciphering what happened is a different matter: forum threads, especially those which grow so rapidly, see substantial assumptions about contextual knowledge made by those who are collaborating in the events described in real time.

So the story has to be read start to finish, from page one, skimming the brief flame-wars and nerd-rage between acrimonious neighbours and browsing past the detours and cul-de-sacs of off-topic diversions.  The narrative is built jointly, rarely more than a paragraph at a time, by those participating in the events, and this happens in real-time. Some posts are aimed at fellow participants.  Some posts are aimed at observers: the "at work crew", most often, furiously F5ing as they read and begging for updates when the postrate slows.  Occasionally, most often in a moment of extreme triumph, a post will be explicitly aimed at the other: those spies who read our forums to report to their masters amongst our enemies. The result is a curious mixture of description and conversation

Like any historical record made up of primary sources, care needs to be taken when reading the narrative.  Much of what is written is speculative or precipitate, and turns out to be incorrect.  Some authors are notably trustworthy; some are notoriously not so.  Some people are not there, but are repeating as fact what they have misunderstood from participants.  This is goonfleet, so some will be downright lying for comedic value, and the wording of those trolls- which would seem indistinguishable from actual, factual claims to the inexperienced reader - are the keys to knowing they are intended humourously: at least three times last night posters claimed that the enemy leader Shrike was tackled in his titan (an uber-boat that we kill when bored).  Each of these reports was clearly intended to give the message "you should get here quickly" while not intending to convey the meaning "Shrike is actually tackled".

The overall shape and mood of the story is the primary indicator of current success or failure, shaped by occasional, blessed reports from high-value posters.  Then, sometimes, will come silence.

If you notice that posts suddenly stop for half an hour or more, then something big is happening.  Usually, it means something big and good is happening.  If we are getting slaughtered, some people will usually not reinforce their failure, but will come to the boards to say "welp".  If something wonderful happens, then even those who die jump back into ships and get right back out there, and don't have time to post about what happens.  This happened last night at about 12:50 GMT, and I read on eagerly, quickly reaching the mass ululations of delight posted an hour later as we discussed our victory.  Note that I say "we": these tales build our group identity.  It is the "we" of Goonfleet who killed Shrike, defended Detorid, cleansed 9-9, reclaimed Tenerifis and are siezing Omist and Feythabolis, even if no single Goon was there for all of these acts.  It is not surprising that one of the posts on the GF site is an adaption of Beowulf: stories and history make up a lot of the alliance wiki, and what better than the epic tradition?

NOW Sesfan Qu'Lah bode in the system of the Goons,
leader beloved, and long he ruled
in fame with all goonfolk, since his father had gone
away from the world, till awoke an heir,
haughty Remedial, who held through life,
sage and sturdy, the Goons glad.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM THING

You may think I am exaggerating when I say that some GF posters are unreliable or hard to read.  Perhaps you think that you've read enough forums to be able to effortlessly discard the chaff.  Well, allow me to quote Arghy, who it so happens is the single best poster in Goonfleet.  Imagine you are trying to piece together an engagement and you come across this, without even a hint of a clue what provoked it:

Hate to tell you this man BUT DINOSAURS ARE FAKE!! well not really but i do f***ing hate the idiots who speculate any further then 10000 years then say i cant make up my own story when its got just as much proof(guess who dident get along with the dino man at the museum?). I love f***ing with guys who believe science is an absolute haha shoulda seen how flustered i had this astronomer, he f***ing strongly believed that blackholes exsisted when i told him they dident because we have never seen one beyond some darkspot on a blurry camera.
How about the guys who think they know how big the universe is? HAHAHA man what the f*** is at the edge of it dude? you cant even f***ing FATHOM THE DIAMETERS YOUR TALKING ABOUT SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE MR PROFESSOR! I can tell you how old the earth is because i measured the radiation released from this thing! what did the radiation thing come from? what?! thats not important!

I suspect that you see what I mean a bit better, now?

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition

OK, I've held off on writing about the newly announced Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition for as long as I can.  I can't help it: I'm interested in this and that's that.  As Nate would have it, this post is suitably captioned, and you non-gamers whould consider yourselves waved-off.

Pen and Paper games companies have had a bad time of it, recently.  The hobby as a whole, aftet the great growth of the 70s and early 80s, has tailed off greatly in recent years.  There have been a couple of rennaissances in the last fifteen years: the launch of White Wolf's Vampire line added a lot of new people to the hobby, and then the launch of D&D 3rd Edition brought a lot of the older players back to the game, as well as prompting a spurt of growth in the industry itself through the D20 "open" ruleset.

But P'n'P gaming faces a challenge to its existence which is drawn from its very nature: it is pen and paper in a digital age.

Computers offer many of the elements that the pen and paper hobby lacks.  The computer provides a GM and opponents (or partners) who will always be there on time when you want to play.  And many of us now play Massively Multiplayer Online games in order to achieve the social aspect which single-player games lack.  The adventures are richly detailed and narrative structure is, at least, better than that which some GMs come up with.

Add to this the changing demographic of the core, veteran customers: we have plenty of cash but are encumbered with many other demands on what leisure time we have.  Wizards of the Coast can no longer afford to sell simply to a shrinking, school-and-college-based, cash-constrained market.

So they have decided to focus far more in this upcoming version on an attempt to incorporate online tools.  You can see a demonstration of some of these in this video on youtube.  View the linked videos in youtube's side-panel to see more detail.  At first, I was very dubious.  WotC have tried, before, to incorporate digital tools, rulebooks and products into the D&D line, and the results have been less than stellar.

However, at least the ideas are right here.  The target marketplace for which WotC are aiming are time-constrained and not many potential players know the three or four others within a reasonable travelling distance with whom to play.  So Wizards have decided to offer a virtual tabletop, so that distant groups - the college buddies who now live hundreds of miles apart, perhaps - can play online.  Some tools to do this have been available for years - IRC clients, messageboards, dice-rolling tools and more - but Wizards (as seen in the youtube link) are offering a 3D, graphical version more in-tune with the expectations of modern media consumers.

The service is to be a subscription one, priced competitively ("it'll cost more than a cup of coffee but less than an MMO" according to WotC's Bill Slaviscek).  While subscription services do present a mental barrier to many people, providing that the service is technically successful, I suspect that they will find themselves with decent MMO subscription numbers of 20k: if the other tools succeed then, given the add-ins like online subscriptions to both the flagship D&D magazines, I wouldn't be surprised if that grows five-fold over time.

Given the major time constraints mentioned before, help in speeding up preparation will be a big draw.  If I can more quickly build an adventure for my ongoing, 20-year-old campaign using the online monster generation and book-keeping tools then I will undoubtedly do so, even without using the virtual tabletop.  If the latter is comparably quick then I'll find a use for my 44" TV, instead of scrap paper for cack-handed on-the-fly mapping!

Long-distance gaming, done right, really has immense potential.  Going back to the networking issues mentioned above, I know a lot of gamers.  But I only know half a dozen or so who can make it to my house in Edinburgh every week on a Monday evening.  That is the fundamental chokepoint on growing the hobby: the network effect.

There are caveats.  When Neverwinter Nights was released a few years ago for the PC (not the earlier online version) there was a rush of enthusiasm from a great many people for the idea of running their friends through adventures in exactly the same manner as is portrayed in the Virtual Tabletop video.  In the end, virtually every attempt seems to have ended in failure.  The effort required was huge and the learning curve too steep for the average GM, who does not tend to dabble in scripting encounters or trying out virtual world software.  The minimalist approach will be best: draw a quick map (or, even better, seed a random one with style and size) and drop in some encounters, then  off you go.  The ability to fudge on the fly when the GM realises that he has grossly miscalculated an encounter's difficulty will also be important.

There are, as well, issues with the sort of conferencing experience that the virtual tabletop represents, and I experience those in the distance-conferencing that we do in my work.  It is important, in a performance medium like collaborative gaming, to get feedback from the audience.  Each player (particularly, but not exclusively, the referee or "dungeon master") is effectively playing to an audience of each of the other gamer in a group.  To perform without any feedback at all is not an easy skill.  Ideally, I would want video thumbnails of each of the other participants in a corner of my screen, but that level of penetration of video-conferencing is several years away, yet.

Anyway, this looks fun.  I worry that it may be a couple of years early, measured against the advance of both technology and consumer attitudes, but i doubt if those two years of delay were available.  The potential upside is huge, both for Wizards and for the gamer.  Just what the effect on the rest of the gaming industry will be is more questionable.  White Wolf have CCP's online expertise o back them up.  There is not another company in the entire nidustry who have the capital or the expertise to provide anything similar.  Trickledown, or rising tides floating all boats, may work as it did with D&D 3rd Edition.  But the key result of a successful implementation would be enhanced market dominance for the industry leaders, and a solid lock on that dominance caused by greatly increased barriers to entry.

Ach, some people...

I got three comments posted via the contact form on this site today, which is a rarity: most people use the comments page.  What made it even more unusual is that all three were about a post from the best part of a year ago, discussing a concert by the Teenage Fanclub I'd attended.  One was a friendly, if anonymous note, pointing out a thread about my review on the Teenage Fanclub fansite, and warning me that one or two posters were out for my blood.  But the other two were a bit more unwelcome.  Clearly both by the same person, the first one was a short string of badly-spelled insults.  The second said (edited by me to remove unimaginitive swearing and correct personal details):

oh look what i seem to find out
Mr xxxxx xxxxxxxx
23 xxxxxxx xxxxx
Edinburgh
EHx xxx

why don't you make it easy and just take doon that p**h you call a review

Now, our friend may have the technical skills to be able to do a whois 9or the tenner to pay to have it done for him), but he isn't smart: uttering threats is a serious business in Scots law, made more serious for the offender when he forgets that, like most self-hosted sites run by professional devs, I log all IP addresses of my tiny readership on this site, which would enable the police to issue an order to the ISP (Virgin Media, in Newcastle, so we have an emigre, folks) to reveal the offender's details, and a second order to the site he came from to do likewise to provide evidence that he had recently viewed the thread on the Teenage Fanclub boards, which would themselves be held liable for continuing to host a second series of threats of physical violence by one of their more committed posters.

Of course, luckily for our militant muso, I am old-school internet, still living in the days of free speech, fond of those libertarian principles, and rather resentful of the legislation that Blair introduced to make such convictions easy.  But I admit that, when the address is that of my family home, I was very tempted for a second...  And you have to love the faux-gangsterism of asking why I don't "make it easy on myself?"  Someone is over-compensating a touch.

I registered on the site, thinking that it would at least be a laugh to have an argument about this with the more sane denizens who were clearly a bit :rolleyes: about the whole thing.  But music is about pleasure and personal taste - one of the few areas where I find relativism an arguable proposition. The discussion of why the review was read as so negative (the review was actually hugely favourable, but I couldn't help but be interested in the personal dynamics on-stage) would have been dragged into a flamewar by the few.

The odd thing is that these are fans of the teenage Fanclub we're talking about, here.  If I'd posted a review saying that Slayer sucked I would have anticipated such a response.  But one saying that an excellent gig by the Bellshill Beach Boys had an odd ambience?  Every band, every book, every football team, I suppose, has those who just invest too much in it.

===============

Edit: In the end I did post on the site: Goons don't back down from such internet buffoonery.  It was fun to enjoy such fleeting notoriety, and I now feel able to empathise with such great martyrs of the internet age as Paris Hilton and Jade Goody, upon whom I have always modelled myself.  Everyone should, at least once in their lives, experience viewing a messageboard full of angry, pitchfor-wielding strangers with a big picture of oneself (rather a good shot, I felt) under the words "DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?  AN ENEMY OF THE FANCLUB!"

It has certainly given a very good laugh to my colleagues at work, a couple of whom I have had to reluctantly dissuade from stirring up further fan-based musical lynchery.  One actually had an account there already, and it would have been fun to see his reaction if he had simply stumbled upon it.  There have been strong suggestions that I should dob the offender in to the constabulary anyway, but I fancy that in a fight bbetween rugby-player and basement-dwelling internet troll (I'm the first one, thanks for asking) I suspect I'd have a fair chance.  It certainly wouldn't measure up in tension to the last time I had a bunch of people cruising Edinburgh, high on speed and wielding baseball bats, pretending not to know my address (now that was a concern).

Young Stalin

I've just read Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin's early life and career, Young Stalin, and it is not often that one is forced so radically to alter one's entire view of someone so famous.

I am not saying that I came away from the book struck by how Stalin was actually just a regular guy, or that he was deeply misunderstood and not at all a monster.  Anything but: the Stalin presented to us is quite clearly a case of the boy as father of the man.

But I - like just about everyone else in the West, I should say - had always fallen for Trotsky's version of events.  I thought that Stalin's early life was that of a grey, dour, methodical man who ground his way to the stop through scheming, opportunism and a mastery of the processes of bureaucracy.  I had a view of him as the methodical counterpart to Hitler's sub-artistic, charismatic leader of men: an impression gleaned in large part from Allan Bullock's great study of the pair.

In fact, it transpires that the young Stalin - or Soso, as he was known by many at the time - was by far the more glamourous, artistic and even charismatic.  While Hitler daubed postcards, Stalin wrote poetry.  And not doggerel: Stalin organised a huge bank robbery in Georgia - one reported around the world at the time - thanks largely to having someone on the inside.  That insider helped Stalin because of his love of the young revolutionary's poetry: poetry written as a schoolboy which, nonetheless, was published widely long before Soso became Stalin.  He was a beautiful singer, a dedicated and brilliant student, and a talented (if sometimes mercurial) teacher.  The later cult of personality had much to work with.

This Stalin - despite the pockmarks of childhood disease, a limp and a crippled arm - leaves a trail of lovers and illegitimate children behind him.  He is adored and feared.  Ominously, he already has an obsession with betrayal by the time he is a seminarian training for the priesthood.  In his teens, he beats and organises the ostracisation of a former friend who betrays one of his circle.  By his early twenties, a police spy is murdered after Stalin (correctly) guesses at his pretense.  He has potential recruits lead past him in the street, while he stands behind a window and watches.  Some, he chooses.  Others, he rejects as traitors.  He believes he can tell a spy at a glance.  And in Georgia, agents of the police are everywhere.

Was Stalin one of them?  Montefiore certainly leaves us with the impression that Stalin played a double game, using the police to get rid of rivals and enemies.  He was ruthless: that much is no surprise.  He got a job at the Rothschilds' refinery in Batumi, and almost immediately had it set ablaze.  The workers fight the fire, which entitled them to a bonus.  But, as Stalin surely knew, the bonus was not paid, due to the suspicion of arson.  So Stalin then uses that to call the workers out on strike, despite knowing that the managers' suspicions are right!  Similarly, he organised a May-Day rally, personally encouraged the workers to attack, assuring them that the Cossacks would not shoot them, clearly despite knowing that the soldiers certainly would do just that.  Then he uses the resulting deaths to his own ends.  Stalin was already casual with the lives of others, in order to promote the cause.

He was also, unlike Hitler, a young man of repeated and successful action.  Raising funds for the cause, he joins a pirate gang.  Much successful pirating later, he kills his colleagues, takes the money, and takes it back across the Caucasus on donkey-back, quoting his own poetry as he goes.  This Stalin appealed greatly to Lenin, who saw Stalin as a direct man of action, long before his rise to prominence in 1917.  The directness Lenin meant can be seen in Stalin's right-hand man - Kamo - who would beg Stalin to let him slit the throats of victims, and who would literally cut out the heart of an enemy.  Stalin was able to control such men and women - bandits, revolutionaries, psychopaths and conspirators alike - because they wanted to follow "the young man with the burning eyes".  This is very unlike the Stalin I thought I knew.

All Hail Xenu!

BBC reporter John Sweeney has, for some time, been filming an investigative piece on famed sci-fi role-players Scientology, a group of dedicated hobbyists who pretend to live inside the fictional creations of child-kidnapping yachting enthusiast L.Ron "I'm going to invent a religion that's going to make me a fortune" Hubbard.

The piece will be shown this week on Panorama, and will doubtless be available for download from both the BBC site and youtube soon thereafter for those of you unlucky enough to live in heathen climes. That programme will no doubt show the usual, pretty hideous aspects of Scientology: families "disconnected" (Scientology members told by their organisation that they are not allowed ever to see their concerned relatives again); security guards, suborned police officers, undercover investigators and aggressively lunatic officials all sent to harass those who criticise them.  Here, for instance, is another reporter who took an interest in Scientology.  Note the police officer breaking the law, the provocation and aggressive crowding and intimidation from followers and so on.  The reporter is accused of being a wife-beater, a child-molester and more by some fairly vicious scientologists: "we're so much bigger than you, Mark...".

That reporter dealt with it well.  Sweeney, on the other hand, actually snapped at one point: within hours the Scientologists had disseminated the video of the event.  Frankly, I'm just glad to see he cares that much about his subject.  I'd have done that far sooner, myself, rather than after months of provocation.  Sweeney himself discusses the incident on the BBC's own site. He has said that "while making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."

Scientologists in Clearwater were and are particularly aggressive, and have gone a long way towards infiltrating the local police department and local governmental departments..  At the moment there is a copy of fairly good piece on it on youtube, complete with court testimony, although I imagine they'll push to get it removed, so if the link is down, search youtube for "Clearwater Police Scientologist".  Some of the footage is deeply disturbing (like at 7:34, for instance).  More disturbing yet is the fact that the man who runs the organisation that made that film, Bob Minton, spent about ten million dollars down through the years fighting against Scientology.  Then, one day, during a court trial about the death of a young Scientologist under the care of the Scientology organisation, he called the lawyer in that case, saying "Ken, you have to help me, they've got me this time. If you don't drop the case Monday morning, the blood and death of my daughters, my wife and myself will be on your hands."^***

Scientology is a massive pyramid sales scam: members pay huge amounts of money - literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases - for access to a mixture of "treatment" (being hooked up to a machine that does nothing* and asked standard psych 101 questions, and oooh, do they hate the real psychiatrists!) and fairy stories.  Let's have a look at a story that, were you a Scientologist, you would pay a great deal of money to discover:

"one of these slaves suddenly got the big idea of mass" and Arslycus "broke to pieces and scattered around in that particular part of the sky as being of too great a mass to sustain itself". This was, apparently, "about the point where you got the law of gravity coming in strongly. And after that the law of gravity began to affect itself on the universe more and more and more and more and you started to get all kinds of suns and planets and the most fantastic array of things." (Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, L.Ron Hubbard)

Hubbard was a huge drug user and addict himself, and that influence on his loony followers really shows through in works like "Have You Lived Before This Life?", which is a collection of past-life experiences as recounted, presumably with a straight face, by Scientologists in "auditing".  These experiences included:

• A past life as a robot working in a factory in space, which had gold animals hanging around it which "appeared solid but periodically imploded or exploded". It ground up discs to make small animals, which were then "inflated after blowing up through a totem and a cat devil" before being sent to other planets. A planet blew up, and the robot was blamed. He was drugged and forced to work the grinder.
• A past life "55,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago" in which the being had to do outside repairs on a space ship. He suffered radiation burns and fell off, plunging into an ocean on the planet below. A manta ray killed him and he in turn inhabited the manta ray.
• A past life as a trouble-making free being on Mars "469,476,600 years ago". He tried to inhabit a "doll body", but he was captured and beaten up. The being was zapped with a ray gun by a Martian bishop in front of a congregation chanting "God is Love", before being run over by a large car and a steamroller. He was then frozen in an ice cube and dropped on Planet ZX 432, where he took another robot body and zapped and killed another robot. He took off in a flying saucer and died when it exploded.
• A past life in which a being went to a planet where the forces of good were fighting evil black magic forces. After 74,000 years of battle, implants and hallucinations, he lost the fight, and joined the black magic side. He went to another planet on a space ship, where he was "deceived into a love affair with a robot decked out as a beautiful red-haired girl."
• Being transformed into an intergalactic walrus which perished after falling out of a flying saucer.
• Being "a very happy being who ... strayed to the planet Nostra" 23,064,000,000 years ago.**

An intergalactic walrus.  Classic.  I'd say that you just can't make this stuff up.  But you can, if your name is Hubbard.

Here is what Hubbard said about facing up to investigation into Scientology:

(1) Spot who is attacking us.
(2) Start investigating them promptly for felonies or worse using own professionals, not outside agencies.
(3) Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
(4) Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.

Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way. You can get "reasonable about it" and lose. Sure we break no laws. Sure we have nothing to hide. BUT attackers are simply an anti-Scientology propaganda agency so far as we are concerned. They have proven they want no facts and will only lie no matter what they discover. So BANISH all ideas that any fair hearing is intended and start our attack with their first breath. Never wait. Never talk about us - only them. Use their blood, sex, crime to get headlines. Don't use us. I speak from 15 years of experience in this. There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out. -- Attacks on Scientology, "Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter,"

Have a look at some of the more revolting elements of Scientology here on Wikipedia.

Hubbard is best summed up by Mr Justice Latey, a judge in the English High Court:

"... he has made these, among other false claims:
That he was a much decorated war hero. He was not.
That he commanded a corvette squadron. He did not.
That he was awarded the Purple Heart, a gallantry decoration for those wounded in action. He was not wounded and was not decorated.
That he was crippled and blinded in the war and cured himself with Dianetic technique. He was not crippled and was not blinded.
That he was sent by U.S. Naval Intelligence to break up a black magic ring in California. He was not. He was himself a member of that occult group and practiced ritual sexual magic in it.
That he was a graduate of George Washington University and an atomic physicist. The facts are that he completed only one year of college and failed the one course on nuclear physics in which he enrolled.
There is no dispute about any of this. The evidence is unchallenged"

Of course, it's not really funny.  People actually buy this stuff.  Apparently naughty Xenu collected 178 billion excess-to-requirements people up, froze them, flew them through space to Earth in exact replicas of DC-8 airliners with the engines taken off, packed them around volcanos and blew them up using nuclear weapons around 75,000,000 million years ago.  That, in 1997, would have cost you $17,500 to discover.  Leaving aside this tale's obvious nature as a dangerously seductive philosophy, we are left wondering why our Xenu didn't get a few hundred miles out of his atmosphere, strike his head with his hand, say "duh, how stupid am I?  Just jettison them here in space and save ourselves a journey of hundred of light-years!" and head back for tea and Thetans.  Come to that, just why the volcanoes were not, themselves sufficient to the task is not satisfactorily explained.

I'm off to watch a pirated version of Battlefield Earth.

---------------------

*"...the E-Meter has no proven usefulness in the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease, nor is it medically or scientifically capable of improving any bodily function." - 1971 ruling of the United States District Court, District of Columbia (333 F. Supp. 357)

** Hubbard, L. Ron [1950] (October 1977). Have You Lived Before This Life?, 1977 edition, Los Angeles, California: Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization.

*** O'Neil, Deborah. "How Scientology turned its biggest critic", St. Petersburg Times, 2002-07-07

Declension narrative

Tobold, en passant, makes a great point:

We live in an age where people write as much as never before in the history of mankind: text messages, e-mails, blogs, game chats. And it turns out that one of the reasons why many people didn't write so much in previous ages is that they don't know how. They still don't know how, but somehow the social inhibition ... has become lost.

They simply claim that "u" and "r" are just socially acceptable short forms of "you" and "are", mix in some newly invented slang like "roxxor" and "pwn", some acronyms like "lol", and soon the phrases they're writing looks so unlike correct English that nobody even notices that they just spelled a couple of words wrong, and have no idea of the correct use of punctuation.

I hadn't considered the hugely increased use of the written form amongst a wider section of the population.  I was aware that i conduct a lot of my interactions in writing, mainly through emails.  Those, however, merely replaced the letters I used to churn out in the eighties and early nineties (when enough of my friends started getting email addresses to make that viable).  But people who, after leaving school, only wrote in Christmas cards and official forms now communicate widely in textual form.

And they're not very good at it.  Partly through lack of practise; partly because of an unwillingness to read widely enough to absorb correct use of language.  But Tobold is right: at the heart of the matter is a reluctance to accept that there are good and bad ways to use language.  Depressingly many people claim that "r u rdy" is as valid a form of language as "are you ready?"  I have heard that the subjunctive is making a small comeback in some quarters: I would that it were more obvious.  In the main, written language is devolving as those perfectly capable of writing well are disinhibited by constant exposure to sloppily-constructed emails and 10-character, verb free text-messages, and become drawn into the habit of using abbreviated terms and discarding or abusing potentially vital punctuation (not least the comma).  The resulting inexactitude will lead to misunderstanding.  That's all very well when arranging where to meet that night, but rather less excusable when stating user requirements for a civil-engineering project.

Not to mention that it's horrible to read.

300, seen at last

I finally saw 300 on Sunday.  It was just as good as I expected.  And my expectations were high.

There are a few idiot reviewers showing off their ability to read an encyclopaedia article on Thermopylae and decrying the film for this or that inaccuracy.  The point is that this is a story elevated to the level of myth, of heroes doing awe-inspiring things.  And we are so jaded, seeing miracles with every visit to the cinema, that "merely" showing the courage, bravery and discipline of the Greeks over those three days wouldn't satisfy viewers who think that of course heroes can beat hundred-to-one odds.  So we see rhinoceroses and elephants; Xerxes becomes a towering, androgynous Latin American; arrows truly do blot out the sun; the earth really does shake beneath the feet of the eastern armies.  The pedants are like art critics in 1874 complaining that Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" didn't look realistic enough.  This is cinematic impressionism.

There are small weaknesses.  The old Vietnam-war-movie problem of "who is who under the helmet" means that the enemy tend to be signalled by making them as foreign from the Greeks* as possible: The Persian Empire thus ends up very African in character (insert western-centric tinfoil-hat theory here).  Delios' (Faramir's) accent is awkward and stilted.  In such a battle, brutality and blood must be represented, but a couple of decapitations are lingered over for too long.  And the director decided that the ladies needed more time with Queen Gorgas on screen, which means several utterly unnecessary cuts back to Sparta.

Fortunately, the bit at home is utterly unrelated to everything that goes on in the rest of the film, so, when watching on DVD, it will be a matter of pressing the skip button once and you're back to the battle.  Since the rest of the movie is basically a shot-for-shot filiming of the book, the sub-plot about Gorgas that is tacked on has not managed, through some hideous process of angiogenesis, to infiltrate and corrupt the "proper" movie.

The other bit that annoyed me in a purely pedantic way is that the Spartans only fight "properly" - in a phalanx - once.  The first fight is amazing, with the clash, the press of spears and co-ordinated movement of the Spartans immensely atmospheric.  The other fight scenes degenerate into one-on-ones that the Persians could only have dreamt of them engaging in.  Greek hoplite battles against lighter opponents were sometimes unusual in that the enemy's rout could be the time when most Greek losses occurred.  This happened at Marathon.  But I admit that a film full of grindingly realistic phalanx warfare would have been tedious.

And, putting that aside, the way that the battle scenes use variable speed of playback to present very beautiful recreations of forms from friezes and from black- and red-figure pottery is spectacular and moving, barring only the odd gratuitous decapitation.  The placement and poses of the actors in the scene of Leonidas' return with the wolf is like seeing a scene from the Elgin Marbles come back to life.  This evocation impressed me more than anything else about the brilliantly exquisite cinematography.

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*To those who complain that the Greeks didn't look anything like Greeks: do they really believe that 2,500 years of population movements, of invasions and occupation by Macedonians, Romans, Goths, Bulgars, Ottomans and more have left the Greek appearance untouched?  Leonidas looked damnably close to typical Greek black-figure pottery heroes.

Raphcasting and Areae

Everyone, but everyone, is (fn1) playing along with Raph Koster's teaser-ad campaign.  Genius.  Lum's "Raph Koster decloaks off the starboard bow" is the best of the post titles, but hardly anyone with an interest in virtual worlds has remained aloof.  And I am no different: I, too, wish to play at guessing what his product actually will be.

So my guess, influenced by what I'm doing with Multiverse, is that it will be a browser-based product that draws, for its inspiration, upon LambdaMoo (heavily so), The Sims (oh mention not The Sims Online), Habbo Hotel and a touch of those furry freak brothers, Second Life.  You'll be able to build your own private pocket dimension within the larger metaverse provided by Areae, who will provide easy-to-use content-creation tools (as opposed to Second Life's kludgy nonsense).  The Koreans and Japanese are already mad for this kind of mySpace meets my space type of thing, and they only have terrible, sprite-type graphics and single screen/"room" spaces.

I think that users will be able to do the Sims thing and design and sell objects - so microtransactions will be there for sure - and I think that money will be made by Areae by, amongst other things, selling items themselves.  They'll be able to do this despite a mushrooming market for third-party items by being able to supply functional objects: as the keepers of the code, they can make things do extra stuff, in the way EA can supply a pet instead of just a chair.  They will probably also supply third places: the public spaces where socialisation will occur.  In what will probably be a single world on the Eve model rather than sharded like MMOs (in a social world, barriers are the last thing you want) I don't envy them the task of load-managing as certain spaces become Corellia starport(fn2).

Pets: there's a point.  I'll bet those will sell well.  There's a DS-style minigame to begin with.  A sticky one, too,  Though I doubt if you'll be able to buy a Frenzied Graul, sadly.

If they're not doing all this, then they should be ;)  Maybe I should be!

This business model would not be a huge threat to middleware providers: if you want a highly customised, tailored world you need to code, and will do for some time.  But it would be a huge kick in the teeth to Second Life.  And done well, it would be a real threat other social networking spaces, too: Areae could well see their competitors as mySpace, the Sims, Yahoo and MSN.  I certainly don't think that World of Warcraft or Everquest II would be much more than a source of customers (in that many will be customers of both, since they share wider social networks that are exposed to to the Raphaelites). I've often said that Second Life should be looking to get bought by one of the big messenging clients.  Of course, that was before I understood just how incompetent their server architecture was...

PS I suggest that Raph should counterbalance the vowel-count by naming the product syzygy.  It's a word with spatial and locative meanings, and it deserves more of an outing.  It's obscurantist, pretentious and unpronounceable, but we've already seen that those are no barriers... nyuck nyuck.

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1 - Hurt and upset at being relegated to the word "is", Amber is right to point out that her interview with Raph deserves so very, very much more... So here is a nice, long link instead.

2 - In virtual worlds with easy movement, the real-world tendency for certain popular spaces to become extremely well-frequented is exaggerated.  In Star Wars Galaxies, the central node of the travel network between worlds was just in front of Corellia startport, which would become horribly overloaded as people congregated there for trade, socialisation, gouping and the like.  It was, while very laggy, extremely vibrant: while technically a problem, it was, socially, a huge success.

Then we will fight in the shade....

I'd not been aware that a movie based on the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae (in fact, based on artist Frank Miller's retelling) was due out in March, but I saw the link over at Tabula Rasa, and am extremely grateful that I did.  Now, it is true that you could stick Nine Inch Nails' music as the soundtrack to a trailer for Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe and I'd be tempted to see it*, but after seeing the promo (here, for the best version, or here and choose the top-left of the three, and select at least "alta" for resolution) I am looking forward to this more than any movie for years.

One useful thing about filming just about anything to do with the Spartans is that they write their own scripts.  The term "Laconic" - meaning a terse statement - comes from the Spartans' famous one-liners.  Thus, in the trailer, we hear a phrase uttered by Dienekes when told that Persian arrows were so numerous as to blot out the sun: "Good, then we can fight in the shade."  In another conflict, when Phillip II of Macedonia threatened the Spartans by saying "If I win this war, you will be slaves forever", the Spartan embassy returned with the response "If".  Another example from the Thermopylae battle was that Xerxes offered to let the Spartans live if they would surrender their weapons, only to receive the response molon labe: "come and get them."

It is interesting to see yet another historical movie about the conflict between East and West being made, following as it does recent films such as Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander and others.  This is reminiscent of the Godzilla movies of Japanese cold-war years (large, lumbering, uncontrollable, violent outsider who alternates between attacking and defending the Home Islands), or of the westerns and alien-invader movies of post-war United States, although modern audiences, raised with a more developed form of movie criticism (Mark Kermode, Roger Ebert and all) are probably more aware of the intended allegory.

Thermopylae, a stand by 300 Spartans (together with some almost-as-heroic Theban volunteers and some this-was-your-idea-you-only-had-to-do-one-thing-and-you-couldn't-even-get-that-right Phocians) against a huge army - almost certainly somewhere between eighty and two hundred thousand Persians and allies -  is one of the formative tales of the Brave Free West against the Threatening Despotic East.  It, together with the larger tale retold by Herodotus of the Persian wars, has shaped much of our politics, our culture and our language in the millenia since. Undoubtedly, the conquest even of Greece up to the Corinthian isthmus by the Persians would have had huge consequences: as it was, the Persians sacked Athens.  Had they held it, what would have happened to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides and the rest?  Modern philosophy, comedy, tragedy, history, medicine and more sprung from that remarkable century-and-a-half or so following the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, Marathon and Plataea**.  The 300 could be said to have defended us all.

The Spartans held a pass which was at that time about 14 metres wide, and their fitness, training (they were raised to war from childhood) and drill (they sang in order to keep exact pace in their evolutions) were unmatched.  Their heavy armour and specialised weaponry (large shield for protection from blows and arrows, long spears which could be used in mutual support by well-trained men, and short swords for close work) meant that, so long as their rear was secure and their morale high, they were far the superior of their foes on the first day of the battle, both the Medes and the elite Persian Immortals.  As wave after wave of attackers was forced towards the Spartan lines, the process of clambering over a literal wall of dead comrades and facing an unbroken line of iron and spear-points must have been spirit-crushingly terrifying for the men involved, quite apart from the effect on their ability to maintain cohesion as units.

Frank Miller's adaptation is liberal in its adaptation of the historic version - Ephialtes the traitor, who betrayed the Greek cause, is portrayed as a hunchback, for instance - but it looks gorgeous.  Having been a bit disappointed by Troy, and bored out of my skull of Alexander the Great, I would like to be cautious, but even if the film is great I can just keep watching that gorgeous trailer: the scene of the Persian arrows in flight is stupendous.  Those who know me are aware that if I know a film has a sad ending I will avoid it.  But this one's is so glorious as so make me avoid that rule.

 

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*Here, I use "true" in the sense of "not true"

** There might have been no Alexander the Great, but my own feeling is that the Romans would still have risen, and that the Persians would then have been over-extended and forced to retreat into Asia in any case.  But the cultures that followed would surely have been substantially different, not least that of Byzantium.