the pain with no size or shape
I read an interesting article in the Guardian before Christmas, called “A lack of physical symptoms makes depression harder to bear.”
I thought the headline was pretty accurate, and this bit makes sense:
There is a certain luxury to indulging a bout of physical illness, quite absent from my experience of periods of depression, for instance. Lying in bed, with a mug of hot Lemsip, surrounded by tissues – and sleeping dogs – thermometer gratifyingly high, cheeks flushed for additional validation. (…) There’s something unarguable about physical illness. No need for justification. You’re ill. You need to take it easy. Nobody ever asks why you’ve got flu. Flu exists and you’ve got it. End of.
With mental health problems people want to know why. With physical illness it’s different. You’re ill. It’s not a question of choice. It’s the subjective nature of mental health problems – the lack of obvious physical symptoms, the lack of a measurable temperature – that encourages self-reproach.
- - -
facebook timeline cover photos = the twibbon of 2011
a big huge space for a user to upload a prominent photo, without futzing with their profile pic proper? definitely going to see loads of charities (and let’s face it, brands) trying to convince people to put custom images up there.
i’m sure we’ll see it for meta-campaigns too…
Theories of International Politics and Zombies
Read this the other day after I saw it mentioned somewhere and just loved the idea. What do the competing theories of international relations have to say about a zombie apocalypse?
“Realism posits an eventual live-and-let-live arrangement between the undead and everyone else. Liberals predict an imperfect but useful counter-zombie regime. Neoconservatives believe that an aggressive and thorough military deployment would keep the undead menace at bay. Some constructivists would predict a robust pluralistic security community dedicated to preventing new zombie outbreaks and socializing existing zombies into human society.
However, bureaucratic dysfunction could trigger a total collapse in state authority. Public opinion and interest group pressure could make multilateral cooperation more difficult. And a norm cascade could trigger a world in which the biological distinctions between humans and zombies would be immaterial - everyone would act like zombies.”
You can read a blog-sized version of it here.
Godspeed You! Black President (The Making Of)
I made this Godspeed You! Black President streaming ambient apocalyptic audio thing. Here are a few notes on it.
Back during the 2008 U.S. election, which I followed obsessively, there was a fellow user of the Something Awful politics forum called “Godspeed You! Black President.” I thought this was a good pun (basically all my ideas are just puns) and put it in my ever-expanding list of “things that could be things.”
This is “The Dead Flag Blues” - the opening track of F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor:
With such rich, apocalyptic vocals (“I opened up my wallet / and it was full of blood” - mmm, financial-crisisy!) it was instantly obvious what sort-of-thing the pun should be made into.
Then I promptly forgot about it for two years or so, until You Are Listening To Los Angeles came along, mashing up ambient music with radio chatter. And I was like “right, I should probably get on with making this thing.” Actually I had this other item in my bucket list:
So I became seized with terror that every single idea I’d ever written down but failed to make was about to created by other people. A motivating thought! (Actually I’d never really thought about police radio scanners, and thought I’d have to write and record all these crackly radio reports; and then the conspiracy/ARG fan in me thought they might subtly imply this unfolding mystery and you’d sort of have to wait around to hear another clue through the static and so on and so forth and so obviously it was never gonna get done.) Also Leila Johnston had been writing a lot about making things really quickly, which helped things along.
Anyway about 7pm I sat down to do it, this is how I did it:
The current beta version of Audacity (3.1.3) lets you batch process MP3 files. I used the first 14-odd MP3s from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father’s audio book. Just set up a “chain” (I did “slow down” + “pitch down” + “save as MP3”, easy) and drag in the files. It spits out a folder of transformed MP3s. Nice!
In Garageband I cut out a few bits from the GY!BE album: the bits with vocals, the noisy train-station stuff, the long bits of silence between tracks, the happy-sounding bit at the end of Dead Flag Blues. Saved everything that was left to a different folder.
Then I had to make them play in a browser. I used JWplayer - you just put some files in your home directory and then you can use a plain old <embed> tag. To get the player to play a playlist of MP3s, you need a playlist file. I made one by dragging all the related files into VLC, then doing “Save Playlist…” which lets you create an XSPF file. Then I edited the XSPF files in TextEdit to change the file location of each MP3 from a local one (e.g: Users/Guy Parsons/Desktop/GYBP/BO/1.mp3) to their future internet location. (e.g: http://www.vexappeal.com/godspeedyoublackpresident/BO/1.mp3)
I got so frustrated trying to make a <div> appear in the bottom-right-hand corner of the page I gave up, kicked it old-skool, and used a <table>. (That’s just a little trick I picked up back in 2002, ain’t no thang.)
And that’s about all there was to it - 7am the next morning, I hit publish. (The night time is really the only time to work, isn’t it?)
Crustacean, crustacean, crustacean
Kirsty & Phil’s next spin-off?
Harris Tweed Nikes
Fashion is confusing and I try to dress in the most non-descript manner possible. One exception is these rather fancy Harris Tweed Nikes that my girlfriend bought me. People I meet consistently go nuts for ‘em, it’s great.
Some people went on a field trip to see how they’re made. I liked this close-up of the fabric itself:
The first time I went on the internet
I remember the first time I ever went on the internet. It was at the “Information Superhighway” exhibition at The Science Museum, back in 1995, when I was 8. That’s right. An exhibition about the internet.
I was reminded of this formative experience thanks to a tweet the other day:
I even managed to find some photos!
And there’s a write-up of the exhibition in the TES:
Surfing has always been associated with bleached and bronzed Baywatch types, who strut their stuff on some far-off beach. But now anyone, from computer nerd to Mr Universe, can ride the big one without risking life or limb. This is thanks to the Internet where “surfing” is computer-speak for browsing on the information superhighway.
But don’t worry if you still haven’t cruised the superhighway or taken part in what has become a boom leisure industry for techno-hippies, you are not alone. And although the information superhighway was mentioned 92 times in national broadsheet newspapers in 1993 and 1,379 times in 1994, making it one of the hottest topics of discussion in the media, opinions are divided. Is the Internet the superhighway? Will the superhighway ever exist and will it make any difference to your life when it does?
I don’t know, 1995, you tell me.
I remember sitting at one of the computers, and in the bookmarks there were links to the Science Museum website, NASA website, and probably a few others. But the one that stood out was something like “Dave’s Totally Useless Website.” It was just a random bunch of jokes and trivia. Prominently featured was “The Big Red Useless Button.” When you clicked it, nothing happened.
Nothing! This was the most subversive, anarchic thing my 8-year-old brain could possibly imagine. Normal life, as I understood it, didn’t allow for intentionally useless things. But here, at Surf City, on the Information Superhighway, it seemed like you could do whatever you damn well pleased.
I thought it was crazy. And you know what? I still do!
Stretch Hummer.
“Hummer” by Foals, slowed to 1/8th the original speed = Stretch Hummer. Nightmarish soundscape ahoy!
Stretch Hummer (Hummer by Foals timestretched 8x) by vexappeal
Sun says no
The 3D wiggle effect in action. (It turns out if you want to make your own, well… there’s an app for that. I must get around to actually downloading it.)
Another one I found:
The Story 2011
I went to The Story conference in London last Friday, where twelve (or so) people told us about things to do with storytelling. It was a great day - here are some of my notes. (I’m grateful for and inspired by the notes of others in this regard.)
Best image:
…from Mary Hamilton.
Stories as constraints. Matt Adams quoted Edmond Jabes as saying “A story limits the life of someone to what someone else can say about it.” Adam Curtis talked about how we’ve become suspicious of the journalistic “story,” a format that constrains reporting of real events to a certain narrative and discards the detail that doesn’t fit. Karl James actually credited his storylistening ability to ”not being a journalist looking for a story.” He described how the stories people tell themselves about their lives can harden through habit, preventing newer, more surprising stories from emerging. Mary Hamilton talked about how including fewer pre-scripted events in her ZombieLARP actually helped surprising stories come about in the game. Lucy Kimbell played with the absurdity of reducing herself to a set of statistics and metrics, a story limited to a single number. And Mark Stevenson fretted that a pessimistic view of our technological, environmental and economic future as “a mere damage-limitation exercise” meant we were setting our sights too low, and argued for a more optimistic narrative about human progress in order to maximise our potential.
The story in the details. Archival footage of an interview with a Taliban commander revealed it as a bizarre farce. A recorded interview with the father of a sick child drew more power from the agonizing pause in conversation than the words that followed. The yearly putting-up-of-curtains at a quaint northern church was a synecdoche for an entire set of customs and a culture in decline. Sculptures told stories about churches ablaze. A Nerf gun turns a civillian into a hero. And maybe the I.T Crowd is just a thousand hours of procrastination artfully compressed.
Listening and not-listening. Karl James talked movingly about the importance of listening, and how listening well helps people be articulate and tell their own, surprising stories. Powerful stuff. Conversely, Matt Adams presented an interactive SMS drama called ivy4ever. This involves the reader following the story of a maybe (?) pregnant teenage girl via text message, and occasionally offering advice to her by texting back. The keenly-felt distinction here is that Ivy’s responses are completely unaffected by whatever you say to her - she’s not listening at all. I’m usually sceptical of this kind of gr8-txt-spk-4-t33ns project, so I was surprised to see some of the humane and genuine responses teenagers gave to Ivy. But it was only afterwards I felt a slight sadness about all these kids talking… to nobody at all. Perhaps it’s just a harmless outlet for what we all do when we watch a TV show - think about what we’d do in the protagonist’s situation. (“DON’T RUN AWAY *UP* THE STAIRS!”) It just sat uncomfortably alongside the intense intimacy of a person-to-person dialogue.
Adam Curtis gave a really great talk. The thing about Adam Curtis is, he’s never very happy with how things are going. Things are always going from bad to a new, more appealing kind of bad. Typically something like: “…and so the yoke of conformity gave through to something new - the cult of individualism.” His basic schtick is that while society may seem to undergo structural change, power always finds a way to use the new structure as a means of control. I see his point, although I don’t actually agree that’s why we all have iPhones. I think it’s because iPhones are pretty good!
I liked his point about the internet allowing us to engage directly with the chaotic and contradictory material behind the news. He suspects, in his own sceptical way, that we’ll stop trying to follow convential journalistic “stories” about events - finding them suspiciously simplistic - and instead just be satisfied with the visceral, emotional impact of the primary source. But I actually think it will give a larger number of storytellers the opportunity to create stories about the world, and I think that will ultimately result in better stories.
I do see a danger, in that I’m reminded of 24hr news’s obsession with “being there” - always stranding a correspondent right at the scene of some breaking news, even though nothing is really happening, and the actual newsgathering would be more effectively done from a newsroom. In the same way, “being informed” might become a bit too much about seeing the very latest cameraphone upload from a protest, rather than understanding the history behind it. But I think the far greater risk (in terms of “power being exercised”) is leaving the job of constructing social narratives to a small elite. Adam Curtis has several terabytes of archival footage from the BBC’s reporting in Afghanistan, and surely hopes to use it to tell a challenging, original story about the conflict there. If more people had access to those terabytes, what other stories would end up being told? (Aren’t people doing more interesting things with and around Pepys’ Diary now Phil Gyford’s given people the resources to do so?)
Conviction. One final thing. The day really benefited from the quality of the speakers and their passion for their respective topics. I think it’s trendy to be a bit self-effacing these days. “Oh, here’s a little thing I’ve noticed, no big deal really, kind of neat I guess.” And it’s certainly not a bad strategy to avoid being arrogant and hyperbolic. But done live, it can make me wish that I’d just read the blog notes afterwards. Conversely, The Story had an energy that made attending in person priceless, and I put that down to speakers who, whether they were being serious or playful, really stood behind what they were talking about.
- If “a story limits a person to what other people can say about him” then how does a game limit a person? To the achievements they’ve unlocked?
- What matters, gets measured - the idea of the quantified self, what we choose to measure or track about our lives is similar to how we choose to tell different stories about ourselves. Gamey/gamification relevance. What data do we have that tells stories we might be better off not telling? What if Google Reader didn’t tell me how many unread items I had? If we didn’t know how many Twitter followers we had? Is LK right that putting numbers on things can get a bit absurd?
- Losing the fear of awkwardness seems to be an important part of listening well.
- What’s the digital version of an exploded shed? Those “my year in status” things??
That was 2010
I created a rollocking multimedia review of 2010, and then accidentally deleted it.
What I listened to in 2010. From Lastgraph. Top artists: Why?, Jay-Z, The Hood Internet.
I buried my last grandparent, became an uncle and watched 86 episodes of The Sopranos. I watched 34 films, discovered the meaning of life twice, and forgot it twice.
Films: Star Wars I, II & III, Up, Up In The Air, Sherlock Holmes, Inglourious Basterds, The Warriors, Metropolis, Inside Man, Annie Hall, A Serious Man, Kill Bill I, Kill Bill II, My Girl, In Bruges, A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures, Water Lilies, Waitress, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Superbad, The Departed, Dirty Dancing, Boyz in the Hood, Away We Go, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Eegah, The Social Network, The Insider, Cloverfield, A Single Man, Sweeney Todd, The Education of Charlie Banks, The Informant!
I went to Oxford and Bath and Minehead and West Wittering and Barnstaple and Falmouth, to BLOC and ATP Matt Groening and Truck and End of the Road. A man tricked me into thinking I’d met Matt Groening. But the man I’d really met was just an old American who had never created a globally successful television show.
Some photos I took this year. From my (newly revamped) Flickr photostream.
I signed on. I claimed housing benefit. A bureaucratic error meant that I now claim neither; David Cameron cannot cut me, I have cut myself preemptively.
In 2011 I will try and do better at making stuff. Case in point: I have managed to post this before the end of January!
Protests are cathartic but useless
UPDATE: I would like to give credit to the fine citizens of Tunisia & Egypt, who have exposed the post you are about to read as the poorly conceived and clumsily argued bit of claptrap that it really is. Cheers guys.
Turn on the television news at the moment, and you’re likely to encounter some breathless reportage on the latest anti-cuts protest. I know lots of people who feel strongly about these issues and have protested accordingly.
But I think protests are mostly useless.
Protests are acts of catharsis for their participants. “We have to fight these cuts,” say protestors. But they aren’t fighting anything. They are walking from place to place, and shouting a lot.
Protests are the fever, not the flu; the symptom, not the cause. Protests will only “succeed” when they represent a level of public support that poses a threat to the government, but it is the support that is the threat, not the protest. Protests don’t help build the support that they need.
Protests steer conversation away from the cause they represent. In the case of the recent student protests, countless pages were dominated by competing narratives of under-prepared police vs. militant anarchists vs. police brutality vs. earnest campaigners. Amidst all this, the political point quickly gets lost. Who turned on the news and thought: “I used to think raising tuition fees was a good idea, but now I’ve seen these kids getting kettled, I’m starting to rethink my position?”
[Let’s leave to one side the predictable outrage over incidents violence and vandalism. If there is a point to protest - thousands of angry people marching towards the geographic heart of the state’s power - it is the implicit threat of violence. It’s like complaining that people have sex after flirting.]
The latest tuition fees bill may have passed by a much-reduced majority, but they still passed, and I don’t believe that’s due to insufficient protesting.
You’ll remember the million-strong Stop the War protest in March 2003…
And though we often think of this brave guy as an icon of civil disobedience…
…we should remember that the column of tanks ultimately spelt the end for China’s pro-democracy movement.
Fighting for your political goals involves reaching out to the unconvinced, persuading them that you’re in the right, and building truly formidable public support that any official would be crazy to ignore. Marching with placards, however cleverly sloganned, is not a hugely effective way to do this.
And although in some ways it’s sad that highly-motivated groups with passion and conviction can’t win victories against the state, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing our democracy. This coalition government has made a risky but legitimate bet that, in five years, a majority of the public will have begun to see the wisdom in their approach.
Maybe they’ll lose their bet, but perhaps not. Just ask the Countryside Alliance…
On Wikileaks
“When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once, when I was six, I did.”
My view is that the arguments of Assange et al are really opportunistic disguises for the baser human pleasures of gossip, nosiness, curiosity and destruction. I think it’s a particularly modern, digital, post-everything mindset, and it’s no surprise that Wikileaks’ mission resonates so well with the geekier clans of the web. It’s a hack of the diplomatic system, poking it with a stick to see what happens.
“I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die.”
It’s this damn-the-consequences mischief-making that really drives Wikileaks. (Which has become quite the misnomer - the State Department surely wishes that, like Wikipedia, it was “the free database of leaks that anyone can edit.”) This makes it a perfect match for Anonymous, the internet’s most cause-deficient rebels. Their spirited counter-attack against those who would deprive Wikileaks of hosting, domains, and cash is far from an act of principled hacktivism, but rather a successor to their DDOS attacks against blogging platform Tumblr (“they steal our memes”) and harassment of 13 year old girls.
“Leak ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.”
Anonymous loves Wikileaks because, cloudy arguments invoking freedom and democracy aside, it embarassed the powerful and created chaos where before there was order. More significantly, it was a reckless demonstration of a novel form of power, amplified through technology. Here, Anonymous and Wikileaks find true common ground - Wikileaks has no clear political aims other than to create chaos by undermining secrecy, while Anonymous has literally no aims other than to create chaos through technological sabotage.
“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
But what of the consequences of all this? Are we to believe the White House, who condemned the leaks as “reckless and dangerous… putting at risk the cause of human rights” or the more measured take of Secretary Gates, who described their impact as “fairly modest?”
There is only one way to know for sure. This time next year, Wikileaks must leak the flurry of classified State Department memos tracking the fall-out from this year’s leaks.
FROM: LONDON, ENGLAND
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: DECEMBER 12, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED, NOFORN
= = = = = = = = = = =
1. SHIT IS FUCKED UP
= = = = = = = = = = =
Following the recent release of all the shit I wrote to you for like two fucking years straight, I’m writing to tell you that nobody is fucking talking to me anymore. Well fucking done. Recent meetings with high-level Foreign Office officals have revealed concerns that our “ongoing pillockry in the field of secure communications” may jeopardise “fucking everything,” although some positions of the British govt. were not entirely disclosed thanks to my “half-wit, smart-alec commentary” on the “obviously fucking pointless discussions” that “completely missed the fucking point of what [they] were fucking getting at.”
It was suggested that, to improve the security of our discussions, we ought to consider “just fucking making policy by ‘tweeting’ each other” or, failing that, “leaning out the window with bloody megaphones and shouting negotiating positions at each other like a bunch of complete twats.”
Finally, hi to my mom, for when she reads this.
Minimal cereal packets
On the internet, everyone likes minimal things, like these muppets. I might have dropped out of art school before I learned to use Illustrator, but that’s not enough to stop me joining in the fun:
RICE KRISPIES (Snap, crackle & pop.)
COCO POPS
FROSTIES
CHEERIOS (Cheery corn, cheery oats, cheery rice and wheat)
I made this last one by pouring a bunch of cereal onto my scanner. It looks really horrible.
