[tortured metaphor]

Photo

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Photo

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:52:00 +0000

The Cellar

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:13:00 +0000

The Cellar

Full Circle

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:52:00 +0000

Liverpool’s historic Pier Head (above) was supposedly the inspiration for The Bund waterfront area in Shanghai(below).

Now, Shanghai’s Pudong waterfront district (above) has become the inspiration for the controversial Liverpool Waters development (below).

Full circle?

So it was that, in November 2012, I finally decided to sit down...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:49:00 +0000

So it was that, in November 2012, I finally decided to sit down and get it written.

The story was untitled — or rather, over-entitled — but, in time, I took to calling it “THE MATTER OF LUCAS”. As in: “I need to deal with…”. As in: “that brings me to…”. As in… “it doesn’t” (matter).

Now that November is no more, and fifty thousand words have been extracted like bad teeth, I find myself in a place I’ve not been before. In fact, at times, I wonder if the gas ever really wore off.

But it’s not over yet. There’s still work to be done (isn’t there always?). Pointing and sealing. Closing and finishing. Please bear with us during these essential maintenance works.

“I’ll finish this, or it’ll finish me.”

In the meantime, I will keep this blog updated with progress reports for those interested in how things are coming along. I might even post the occasional sneak peek (see above).

So thanks to everyone who’s shown an interest. I’ll never be able to repay you for your faith and your kindness, but I hope that, when it’s done, you get as much out of it as I have.

... with liberty and justice for all ...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:46:57 +0000

... with liberty and justice for all ...:

You couldn’t ask for a more obvious demonstration of double standards than this. For perspective, the $1.9bn fine is about 6 weeks’ profit (not revenue: profit) for HSBC.

Sickening.

Guitar by Aus Dyer Hat tip to Boards of CanadaYoutube

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:07:00 +0100

Guitar by Aus Dyer

Hat tip to Boards of Canada
Youtube

Every Dog Has His Day

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:07:47 +0100

Every Dog Has His Day:

An exhaustive collection of dog-related metaphors and idioms.

[via]

Game review: "Outside"

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:00:13 +0100

One of my all-time favourite MetaFilter comments, by aeschenkarnos.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely “survive”. What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it’s extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur’s Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

posted by aeschenkarnos at 12:19 AM on March 31, 2008 [779 favorites -] [!]

On Torture

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 15:21:00 +0100

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. And then I realized, like I was shot! Like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres — these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love — but they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

— Colonel Kurtz

Torture, as a metaphor, works. The tortured metaphors to which this blog’s title refers are strained, pained, and twisted. The process of extracting meaning from life can be like that. Metaphorically.

But torture is real. It happened, and it continues to happen. In my mind, it represents the absolute lowest low that humanity is capable of. The act of intentionally inflicting agonising pain in your enemies — ostensibly to obtain “information” or “security”, but in reality for raw vengeance, or to “send a message” — sickens me, physically.

They argue that it has become a necessary evil, an indispensable tactic when fighting a brutal enemy who will stop at nothing. Our restraint makes us weak. In the words of Colonel Kurtz, our judgement defeats us.

Those responsible have certainly defeated judgement for their actions. Those who wail “war criminal” are largely laughed at or at least disdained. But Obama bears as much responsibility as Bush & co. As Gerald Ford said: “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon”.

Few had more scorn for Nixon than Hunter S Thompson. But in less than a generation, something far worse had emerged. Of Bush, Thompson said: “if [Nixon] were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.” Then he killed himself.

Decisions such as these not only normalise bad behaviour: they institutionalise it. Obama has guaranteed that torture will not only continue, but proliferate. What began with terrorists ten years ago has already reached whistleblowers. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” Obama says. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”.

Well, I have been looking forward, and it’s not looking good. I disagree with Obama, and I disagree with Kurtz. Because it’s judgement that saves us.

[via]

See also: http://reckoningwithtorture.org/

The Sims as Surrogate Reality

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:24:00 +0100

Joe Writer lives in Sunset Valley with his partner, Bebe, and their five children: Jack, Jill, Junior, Jude and Job.

He is the foremost writer of parodic literature in SimNation, known primarily for his best-selling Legomenon series of novels.

His first book was the edgy classic Seven Shades of Shite, which has been credited as giving messy birth to the now-ubiquitous “parotica” genre. Its unflinching description of WooHoo teems with cringe-inducing embarrassment, and is best read aloud, if at all. A veritable penis in the face of prudes everywhere.

Joe followed up his debut with Manfred Gubble Rides Again, a sequel to an unfinished combinovel about a hapless detective and his exposé of a conspiracy of bakers and biscuit makers. It was an undisputed typo-laden flop, but introduced the world to Anotherman, and was thus forgave.

Space Fight, Writer’s third book, helped to pigeon-hole him as High-Parodist. It featured universal myth-inspired space-histories and predictable yet cathartic character arcs.

Writer then turned to Non-Fiction, and the upsetting Sunset’s Shame; a sadness-soaked eulogy for the Sims sold into slavery to pay for trash compactors and other superfluous household gimmickry.

After a brief hiatus, Writer returned to form with what would be his masterpiece: Hapax Legomenon. It quickly became a best seller as Sims everywhere fell hopelessly for the eponymous Hapax, a singular but replicable action-professor-character who pokes the past with a pointy stick and consequently causes actual historians to come up in a nasty rash. Writer’s amazing ability to brutalise facts and sew a soiled quilt out of their skins left critics foaming at the mouth. Sarcasm had never been so sickly.

Hapax returned soon after in The Legomenon Phenomenon, which saw Writer incite incest between Science and Religion in ways neverbeforeseen, damaging both irreparably. The book was a litany of libel and almost landed Writer in court, until it was accepted in an out-of-court settlement to have been “just a joke”. Nonetheless, it made him an enemy of solemn-types and cemented his reputation as a prolific parodian.

Writer’s third in the series, The Legomenon Automaton, saw Hapax entwined with all sorts of hokey pseudo-sims, but entirely missed the opportunity to delve into what it really means to be “suman”. Instead it culminated in a crude robot sex scene and a sappy ending.

The Hunt for the Hapax Boson was his next book, and the last to shamelessly jump on the bandwagon of popular hysteria. In it, Hapax single-handedly finds solid proof for the existence of a divine creator, only to find that the creator is a hormonal teenager with homicidal tendencies. The book sidesteps all the expected existential quandaries surrounding such a subject and supplants it with gratuitous pixel-nudity and poo jokes.

Writer’s swansong, The Legomenon Armaggedon (pronounced ar-MAG-gedon) eschews traditional rhyming schemes for something much more fluid. Hapax’s final adventure was written as Writer became slowly senile, which goes some way to explain the inconsistency of character displayed within. Added to this, his attention-starved children presented a constant distraction from his all-important work. Nonetheless, this final and so-far-unfinished book was and is Writer’s funniest yet. In it, the heroic Legomenon confronts his life as a wastrel and resolves to make amends: first with his lover, then with his children, and finally with his God. As it comes to a close, it’s hard not to shed a tear for both Writer and Writee.

This truly was an event that regenerated a community, but what of its legacy?

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:54:19 +0100

This truly was an event that regenerated a community, but what of its legacy?:

It has been just over a week now since the dead cat on the pavement outside the house was finally taken away, with no little ceremony, by Hackney Council Environmental Health and already talk in the coffee shops on Stoke Newington Church Street has turned from the emotional highs and lows of its daily decomposition to the likely benefits of its legacy. Though some maggots are still visible, crawling in the gutter near where the dead cat lay, it is too early to say if they will hatch out into flies and what kind of flies these flies, if indeed they be flies at all, will grow up to be. The brown, dead-cat-shaped stain on the pavement, however, is expected to remain partially visible for decades, providing inspiration for generations to come and transforming the economic fortunes of the entire district.

Baader-Meinhof

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:01:00 +0100

Baader-Meinhof:

The other day, I heard for the first time about Ulrike Meinhof (left). She was a notorious revolutionary who took part in a campaign of bombings and other acts in the ’70s, as part of the Baader-Meinhof gang (or Red Army Faction, as it later became known). Her image was being used by trainers at G4S as an example of what a potential terrorist could look like (i.e., anyone).

Today, I came across an article about a strange phenomenon, which I’ve thought about before, but never had a name for. It describes the way that we often come across references to obscure people, places or things which we had only recently learned about. It’s related to the concepts of coincidence and synchronicity, whereby apparently meaningful connections are made against extremely slim odds. The reasons for this are many-fold, but to me, it boils down to humans being over-eager pattern-recognition machines.

Which brings me back to Ulrike. Because another name for this is (drumroll please): The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

[via]

A poster/card I made for Barbara’s birthday. Created...

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:05:33 +0100

A poster/card I made for Barbara’s birthday. Created painstakingly over the course of one very unproductive day at work. Built entirely in the state-of-the-art graphic design suite, Microsoft Excel 2003.

"Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally..."

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 23:23:00 +0100

“Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.”

- Guy Forsyth, Waking Life

"Everybody seems to think I’m lazy / I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy / Running..."

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:32:00 +0100

“Everybody seems to think I’m lazy / I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy / Running everywhere at such a speed / Till they find there’s no need”

- The Beatles, I’m Only Sleeping

The 'Busy' Trap

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:27:00 +0100

The 'Busy' Trap:

“I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day.”

NYT op-ed on the importance of being idle.

[via]

a cancer eating our democracy

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:08:10 +0100

a cancer eating our democracy:

Another must-read.

In 2006 (when figures were last available) James Dyson contributed the bulk of the income tax paid by the 54 billionaires then resident in the UK. Out of £14.7m paid by all 54, he contributed £9m. That’s a whopping 61 per cent of the total tax take from billionaires. Current figures are not available, but it is widely agreed in the tax accounting community that JK Rowling and James Dyson are the only UK billionaires who pay a tax rate even remotely proportional to their income. So, on average, your grandma pays tax at a rate roughly 250 times that of the richest people in Britain.

But really, what does this mean to me? I mean, I might do it if I was minted.

It does affect you, because the more money that leeches out of the state in avoidance, the more you have to pay. Britain’s most affluent determine where most of their earnings go, while we ordinary taxpayers often pour a much larger chunk of our cash into the communal pot. Nicholas Shaxon puts it brilliantly in his book, Treasure Islands:

“Imagine you are in a supermarket and you see well-dressed individuals passing through a special checkout. There is also a large item added to your bill, extra expenses, which subsidises their purchases. Sorry, says the Supermarket manager, if we didn’t charge you more they would shop elsewhere. Now, pay up.”

[via]

TL;DR: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:30:00 +0100

TL;DR: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit:

My favourite academic, anarchist, and anthropologist, David Graeber, asks why we don’t have flying cars yet. A long article, but worth it.

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

…and this bit in particular struck a chord:

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work on my jet shoes.

Afterthought

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:37:00 +0100

I never thought I’d see this day. I still cannae believe I’m here. Somebody pinch me…

Life is exciting, and worthwhile. We start off scared, and then we grow a pair. We realise that we’re all making it up as we go along – and that everyone else is doing the same thing. Basically, life is fleeting: there is no dress rehearsal. The show goes out live.

And here we have a fine example: USERS. An original play, inspired by Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. A collaborative effort by Liverpool’s finest community theatre group: Tell Tale.

The cast. A talented group of individuals, always ready to rise to the challenge. They are all wonderful – or, they would be, if they’d only SHUT UP for five minutes.

The techies. Often unappreciated, always modest. They think they’re six years old when someone shows up with a cherry picker.

The production team. They may not be stood at the front, but you know they’ve got your back.

The audience. You entertained us, and I hope that we entertained you.

And last but not least. The proud directors. The honest, hardworking directors. Generous. Loyal. Dependable. Emma & Leanne!

Give it a go, they said. You might enjoy it, they said. You won’t regret it, they said.

I remember when I used to sit in the audience, and think, “not me”. I used to just laugh at you crazy people. Laugh and cry.

Then you convinced me to go for it. And I did. “Fuck it”, I thought. I’ll try anything once. Never just the one though… is it?

Life’s boring and futile, eh? Well, I wouldn’t know about that.

This is pure brilliant … ah’m fuckin buzzin here!