Enjoying: the naughty party kids story

The story of a Narre Warren South teenager's party turned feral has been all over the news in recent days (presumably in the absence of anything more significant happening in this country) and I have to say, that I'm really enjoying the whole hullabaloo that has been kicked up.

It's your typical parents-away-invitation-posted-on-myspace-party-gone-wrong - with hundreds of loud drunken yoof turning up to a party and then turning on the police that are sent to disperse them when a neighbour complains. In this instance, police say that 500 drunken youth were in the street outside the house and threw bottles at the police car when they turned up.

The police in turn called in the dog squad and a helicopter to chase them away. (Not sure how the helicopter works in this instance).

Now the MSM (mainstream media) is all a flutter about the police commissioners statement that she thinks the boy who organised the party should have to pay the $20000 it cost to bring in the extra police (and at the price, presumably the cast of CSI).

The boy meanwhile - who seems every bit the young blonde tool loving his moment in the sun that a 16 y.o should - has been splashed all over the news for the last few days and - as is the way with the young folks, well schooled in the fine art of not-my-responsibility by the former Howard govt, doesn't see what the fuss is about.

He's also managed to come out with some pearler comments, which is why I think - meh, good on him.

When asked by the Nine Network what advice he had for other teenagers considering throwing a party while mum and dad are away, he said: "Get me to do it for you.

"Best party ever, that's what everyone's saying.''

But they (his parents) haven't had a chance to talk to their sociable son, who was still in his party clothes today - unzipped jacket, loud cap and big sun glasses.

"I haven't really talked to them because every time they try to call, I don't answer,'' Corey told Nine.

"They'll probably try to kill me.''

Corey told Nine he knew he had invited a lot of people but could not remember how the party started.

"I was just off my head,'' he said.

He refused to take responsibility for the damage.

"It was my party, but it could have been any random person walking down the street,'' he said.

I've also really enjoyed the footage taken by the tv networks trying to show the aftermath of the party - I saw the same shot of two half empty Vodka Cruiser bottles sitting in a garden bed replayed at least 3 times in one story, there was a tiny bit of broken glass on the road and that was the best they could do. I've seen worse in my backyard. Watch the ABC video here.



Actually, now that I think about it, you have 500 teenagers at a party with stuff being thrown at a cop car - are you really telling me there isn't a scrap of mobile phone video of this out there that someone hasn't wanted to sell? Now that's odd.

I also read somewhere online that the reason the party numbers swelled so much was that another large party was shut down shortly before in a neighbouring suburb. No mention of this in the msm.

All this said, I wouldn't be overly happy if this was going on outside my house but I have to give them points for being so delightfully obnoxiously young about it all.

Enjoying: Cat armour on the Internetz

The thing I like most about the web is that you are constantly finding things that you never would have thought of.

Like this cat (and mouse) armour by Canadian artist Jeff De Boer.



Check out the whole collection on his site here.

Wondering: Is good spelling just a form of social control?

Riding to work this morning past a government building known by some as Galactica, I noticed some graffiti on the side that said "gang-bang your colleages".

Now I charitably assumed that the graffitist was talking about a completely consensual act and was in fact being somehow intelligently subversive - you don't generally see the word "colleagues" in low-brow graffiti after all - and inwardly bemoaned the fact that this subversion was diminished by the fact that they had misspelled "colleagues"

Which started me thinking - sure, good spelling is a key component of communication and sharing ideas and information as it helps to avoid confusion over the intended word. But what if near enough is good enough?

It would be easy to introduce a slippery-slope argument here and ask where does it end (and this is something I don't have an answer for) but surely intent is sometimes just as important as correct use of language and grammatical structure? What are we losing out on by diminishing our view of someone's ideas because they missed a letter or two?

Is there, underlying all this, some unseen, unspoken pressure to conform? Maybe we need to have a fair degree of commonality to function better as a society but what if this stifles new ways of seeing things?

This lead on to thoughts about how people have been eternally complaining about the deterioration of language - the rise of text speak and leet-speak, Americanisation of vocabulary, the "verbing" of nouns and so on. Much of which suggests a natural evolution of language - partially emerging from the expansion of ideas that the cyber-sea of information has brought us, partially coming from a need to be seen to have new ideas and perhaps also consciously coming as a form of rebellion, a rejection of the forms that have come before. (Thinking particularly about leet-speak here I guess, with it's heavily keyboard oriented shifts and the substitution of numbers for letters and randomisation of capitals)

Is leet-speak freer or is it bound by the same rules and conformities - if you started bandying around terms like nube instead of newb or n00b, would you be ridiculed or rewarded?

Funny the way the mind wanders on a bike ride. (Personally I like good spelling but I can't help wonder if it's something I've been conditioned into)

Playing: songs for Lost Highway

Adelaide Paul Kelly A to Z master - A & B 3:53
True Believer Silver Ray This Is Silver Ray 8:14
Still Alive Portal The Orange Box 2:56
The Money Train Nick Cave & Warren Ellis The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 2:38
The Shape Is In A Trance Thurston Moore Trees Outside The Academy 4:39
Fortune Teller Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raising Sand 4:31
Gubu II Muyngarnbi Songs from Walking with spirits 2:37
Memory Lane Elliott Smith Acoustic 3 2:28
Pocket The Clouds Penny Century 2:21
Cormina The Devastations Coal 3:54
Hold on, hold on Neko Case Acoustic 3 2:41
Hotel California Gipsy Kings The Big Lebowski 5:47
Free You Art Of Fighting Runaways 4:27
I'll Fly Away Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch O Brother, Where Art Thou? 3:57
Stagger Lee Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Murder Ballads 5:15
Unguarded Moment The Church El Momento Descuidado 3:35
Helpless k.d. lang Like A Hurricane: A Tribute to Neil Young [Uncut] 4:16
The Man Who Couldn't Cry Johnny Cash American Recordings 5:01
My Heart's Reflection Yo La Tengo Electr-O-Pura 6:01

Enjoying: You suck at Photoshop tutorial

This video offers a bittersweetly funny take on the usual online tutorials that are appearing all over the web.

What starts out as a straightforward enough seeming tute descends quickly into the sad revenge fantasies of a sad, cuckolded man.

Watching: Radiohead - Scotch Mist

Ok technically I don't have time to check it out right now but I like the fact that this exists at all.

Radiohead have put a full 52 minute video up on YouTube that they did for New Years Eve which features every song from their neato new album In Rainbows.

Celebrating: Paul Kelly

RRR radio personality Stephen (The Ghost) Walker paid a nice tribute to Oz music legend Paul Kelly in his blog in The Age recently that I've just come across.

Walker describes Kelly as "the quiet achiever" and a "storyteller of timeless human tales". He goes on to say

A man, a microphone, a piano, a guitar and his harmonica. A stark reminder of his ability to create songs in everyday speech, no convoluted imagery or obtuse symbolism, his stories becoming our shared stories, attached to simple direct folk melodies that bury themselves deep in our communal consciousness. A deceptive simplicity.

I've liked Paul Kelly ever since I first came across his music in the mid 80s, when the track To Her Door seemed to be all over the radio.



I remember doing work experience in the city at the time at a lawyers - it was a quiet time in the legal calender and he'd just told me to go to court and watch cases. After a few hours of this I got bored and ended up in Myer where I dumped all the money I had on the counter for a copy of Under the Sun on cassette.

This of course presented a problem as it meant that now I didn't have train fare to get into town for the rest of the week (and couldn't/wouldn't ask Mum or Dad for the money - knowing it would never happen) so I rolled up to the lawyer and asked if I could have my work experience pay in advance. (Which was, on average, the princely sum of $15 for the week in those days.) Planning ahead wasn't particularly a strong suit back in those days.

Unfortunately, his plan was to give me some law book - probably worth well more than the money but not entirely working with my plans at the time and I ended up more or less quitting. I told the folks there was nothing to do or see at the job and I'd be better off working on some upcoming assignments.

There was a bit of yelling at me when I got back to school (hadn't quite gotten around to telling them that I'd quit) but somehow that manage to convert to what passed for street-cred at the time, so it all worked out in the end.

And I still had my precious Paul Kelly tape.

It's been hard keeping up with the man's output in recent years, he just keeps on coming and perhaps familiarity breeds a certain apathy but old Paul has dropped off my musical radar a little in recent times.

Interestingly, in December last year he did a series of concerts called Paul Kelly's Songbook - A-Z, where he played 100 of his songs in alphabetical order over 4 nights. He's now taken the best recordings of the songs from each letter of the alphabet from these concerts and is making them freely downloadable from his website - www.paulkelly.com.au - at the rate of one letter every month over the next 2 years.

Up at the moment you can check out:

• Adelaide


• After the show


• Anastasia changes her mind

Cheers Paul.

Playing: Songs on the radio - 2007 highlights

This is the selection of tracks I'll be playing today on the show (4-6pm - 2XXfm 98.3 in Canberra). It's a mixture of some of the most interesting stuff I came across in 2007 - not just new releases but also music that I managed to discover and then there are also just a few old faves for good luck.

There are a few tracks from a now perennial fave that comes out around this time of the year - Best of Bootie 2007. (The whole album is freely downloadable from their site here)

Even though it wasn't released as a song in it's own right, I've included what is possibly my favourite song of the year as well - Still Alive from the Xbox game Portal.



Sunrise Lambchop No You C'mon 4:10
Ghettochip Malfunction (Hell Yes) (8Bit Remix) Beck Guerolito 2:39
15 Step Radiohead In Rainbows 3:57
I Heard It Through The Grapevine The Slits Nouvelle Vague Presents New Wave [Disc 2] 3:50
After All David Bowie The Man Who Sold The World 3:55
Stray Dog And The Chocolate Shake Grandaddy Sumday 3:43
Still Alive Portal The Orange Box 2:56
Galvanize The Empire (Chemical Brothers vs. John Williams) Party Ben Best of Bootie 2007 3:32
WHITE STRIPES Icky thump (DJ Zebra whole lotta funk remix) DJ Zebra Best of Bootie 2007 4:08
Sympathy For Teen Spirit (Rolling Stones vs. Queen vs. Nirvana) DJ Moule Best of Bootie 2007 4:56
Falling Nick Cave & Warren Ellis The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 2:54
Challengers The New Pornographers Challengers 3:31
Snow Peas Minimum Chips Kitchen Tea Thankyou 3:33
The Shape Is In A Trance Thurston Moore Trees Outside The Academy 4:39
Rosa The Devastations Yes, U 5:10
Frozen World Angie Pepper Born Out Of Time - The Australian Indie Sound 1979-88 3:29
7/29/04 The Day Of David Holmes Ocean's Twelve 3:11
Electric Worm The Beastie Boys The Mix-Up 3:15
Last Nite The Detroit Cobras Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before... (25 Years Of Rough Trade) 2:35
In The Red Love Of Diagrams We Got Communication 3:36
Brazil Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra Ritmo Cubano: Gold Collection (Disc 2) 2:29
Hold on, hold on Neko Case Acoustic 3 2:41

What I first met your Ma Donagh Quigley & Bill Grose Tell her I was 4:01
God's Gonna Cut You Down Johnny Cash American V: A Hundred Highways 2:38
Under the Milky Way The Church El Momento Descuidado 4:51
Whenever Beth Orton Trailer Park 3:54
The Only Way Gotye Like Drawing Blood 4:49
Millay Millay Muyngarnbi Songs from Walking with spirits 3:59
New Day Of The Dead Beasts Of Bourbon Little Animals 5:17
Roscoe Midlake The Trials Of Van Occupanther 4:49
I Want You Back The Spazzys Various - Stoneage Cameos 3:17
Hoodoo You Love The Drones Various - Stoneage Cameos 2:47
Airport '99 Philippa Nihill A Little Easy 4:00
Girl And The Sea The Presets Beams 4:46
Tesco V Sainsbury's Trans Am Now Hear This! 48 February 2007 2:54
Theme From "Shaft" Isaac Hayes Greatest Hit Singles 3:19
Ladyshave Gus Gus This Is Normal 3:58
Boner Grand National Kicking The National Habit 4:20
In The Year 2525 Visage Nouvelle Vague Presents New Wave [Disc 2] 3:37
Perfectly Ordinary Rastawookie Perfectly Ordinary 4:01
Object Ween La Cucaracha 2:36
You Took My Thing C.W. Stoneking King Hokum 2:50
Pink Moon Nick Drake Pink Moon 2:06

Playing: Team Fortress 2 on Xbox Live

Having done the Portal thing, I was ready to move on to other games in The Orange Box on the weekend and given that I'd (finally) managed to get hooked up on Xbox Live, the online platform for playing Xbox games with nerds from around the world, it seemed like the thing to do was to jump into Team Fortress 2.

(Yes I realise that it was a nice sunny weekend, I was just excited about being able to connect the 360 to my computer and also the web for the first time)

So anyway, TF2 is an online only game which looks a lot like something out of The Incredibles. It consists of 6 locations (or maps) divvied up between a red and blue team of up to 8 people each. There are a few variations on the missions involved - either to capture territory markers by standing on them for long enough or to break into the other team's base and steal a briefcase full of intelligence. (All the while trying to blow nine kinds of crap out of your opposition with your various weapons.)

I had hoped to be able to play the game offline separately first, giving me a chance to wander around the maps and get an idea of where to go. This not being an option, the best bet was generally to just follow the other guys as they hare into the other base - although I did realise later than some of the maps have gigantic flashing arrows in your colour that tell you where to go. (But it's easy to miss the subtle things :)

I'd heard horror stories of people playing Halo 3 having to deal with snotty 13 year olds pouring out unimaginative streams of invective, generally involving the words fag and dick, on Xbox Live, so I was mildly wary of putting on the headset (which allows you to chat to anyone on your team) but all was fine. Given that it was daytime, I think I was mainly left with the older stoners in the U.S playing in the small wee hours, when the bratz are in bed - or maybe this game inspires a higher level of classiness.

What I got instead was mostly the usual chatter you hear in networked games - there's a spy in the base, I need a medic, I've set up a turret/someone take out their turret, etc. There were the occasional exuberant cries of "did you see that - I'm a god" from time to time as well.

Is it overly sad that this reminded me of some research into games in education that looked at the way that players help new players learn and that these kind of online gaming experiences foster the development of collaboration skills?

This is what the game actually looks like.



I had been expecting this kind of online gameplay to absolutely chew through my broadband download allowances but all up I think it only used around 70Mb for a solid 3 or 4 hour session - peanuts really.

Lots of fun - moreso now that I'm getting more familiar with the maps and actually manage to live longer than the time it takes me to walk out the door of our base.

If you're on Xbox Live and feel like a game, just say hi to me - Singo the Dingo.

Enjoying: Dune

I caught a pretty rare screening of David Lynch's 1984 film, Dune last night and really enjoyed it.

Dune was critically trashed at the time it came out after being savagely cut by the producers (including Dino Di Laurentis, famed for his work in the good and schlocky) and is the only film that Lynch is embarrassed to have worked on.

It had something of a chequered history in the leadup to it's making - Ridley Scott was attached to the project for a while and insane (but awesome - check out El Topo) Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky was also working on an epic 16 hour version of the film for a while with Salvador Dali before it all fell into a big heap and they thought David Lynch might be a saner option. (Presumably not having seen Eraserhead :)

There are evidently 3 versions of this film floating about now - the 2h17m theatrical version I saw last night, a 3+ hour version that was put together for tv which includes a bunch of prologue stuff to better explain the complex plot elements (which Lynch hated so much he took his name off the film as director, going with the popular Alan Smithee pseudonym instead) and there is apparently also a 4 hour Lynch preferred cut taken from the work print which reflects the version of the film that Lynch came up with in the first place.

Personally, I don't see what's so complicated about the plot - it's really just a standard 102nd Century space prince becomes messiah on a planet of space freaks that mine a drug called Spice that's made by 400 metre long giant worms. Simple really.

As a Lynch fan, it's always enjoyable seeing actors from the Lynchiverse crop up repeatedly in his work. The late great Jack Nance (Henry from Eraserhead and Pete from Twin Peaks) has a minor role as one of the evil baron's weird sons and Everett McGill (Ed from Twin Peaks)is the leader of the aforementioned space freaks on the drug planet. Of course, the hero/messiah Paul Atreides was played by Kyle (Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks) MacLachlan

There's also a host of other acting (and geekdom) notables including Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap), Patrick Stewart (Capt Picard in ST:TNG), Sean Young (Bladerunner) and the list goes on. Sting even ponces around a little in a highly odd way.

As you're watching the film, you can sometimes see the creative battles between Lynch and the producers playing out - big sudden lurches in storyline that you can still accept if you just let the movie flow over you but which you know must have had scenes and scenes of set up and explanation originally and big sprawling, slightly cheesy Di Laurentine battle scenes versus some classic Lynchian wierdness (which at times took me back to Eraserhead more than any subsequent film has - more in tone than anything.)

Stylistically it's magnificent, pure Lynch all the way. Dealing with a story set so far in the future gives you so much license to do whatever the hell you like and the look and feel of the thing - most of all the massive sets is just out there. The guy doing the introduction before the film mentioned the Steampunk quality of the thing and he was so right. The good family (the House of Atreides) and the Emperor's pad had this particularly end of the 19th century Edwardian feel to them and the technology matched.

There were moments of genuinely weird, scary behaviour - the evil Baron Harkonnen pulling out some young pretty boy's heart plug and drinking the spurting blood with homoerotic overtones was up there, as was Paul Atreides doing the burning hand in the box pain test.

It was pretty interesting seeing a tale told about war in the desert too - jihad was mentioned specifically - I'm sure if you had the time you could make this into a whole, massively prescient parable about the current crises - but really, who does these days? :)

I hadn't seen this film for at least 10 years and I'm really surprised at how much I remembered - which I suspect helped the story to make more sense - but honestly, nothing really seemed that complicated.

I'd love to see the Lynch approved version. This is well worth seeing if you get the chance and don't mind the odd cheesy 80s special effect. (Some of the primitive computer graphics effects come up surprisingly well, all things considered).

Oh and music by Toto - how could I forget that :) (Actually, it was pretty good)

Here's the trailer



and here's a fanboi tribute



Update - I just read that around the time this was being pre-produced, Lynch was offered the gig directing Return of the Jedi - how fracking awesome would that have been.

Watching: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men, the newy from the Coen Brothers, is appearing on the top of best-of-2007 film lists everywhere at the moment - not that I didn't already want to see it anyway.

It tells the relatively simple story of a man (Josh Brolin) who finds a big bag of money at a drug deal in the Texas desert gone wrong and his attempts to keep it, pursued by all and sundry including awesomely, disturbingly calm and evil killer Javier Bardem and disillusioned old local sheriff Tommy Lee Jones.

The Coens make great use of the Texan environment in telling their story (just as they do with most of their films) and weave a twisting tale that features their usual blend of distinctive dialogue as well as tough people behaving as you might think they actually would in reality. There's a feeling of grim determination to this film and a slightly bleak sense at the end that captures the mood of the best of the film noir genre.

It's a little more violent than the average Coen bros film (but never gratuitously) but at the same time you kind of drift through it a little.

Critically it's been hailed as a return to their Fargo kind of form and I can see the parallels though as I say, this is a tougher film (not to watch, more in the characters in it).

Well worth a look. A good friend lent me another book by the writer of the book that this film is based on, Cormac McCarthy, called The Road. Think I might have to read this one first though.

Playing/Loving: Portal

I went out and treated myself to an Xbox 360 during the week and based on the growing mountains of praise, the first game I bought was the Valve bundle The Orange Box. This includes Half-Life 2, a couple of extra HL2 episodes, Team Fortress 2 and most importantly of all, the game I've been hearing oodles about, Portal.

This is quite simply one of the most brilliant, entertaining and enjoyable games I've ever played. It's not a long game - I got around 8 hours of gaming out of it but every moment is better than the last. It's set in a slightly futuristic lab complex where you are asked by a friendly sounding computer voice to complete a series of puzzles using a portal gun that you use to move between otherwise unreachable areas.
If you complete the tests, there is the promise of cake at the end.

This video should give you the gist of how this works.



The writing of this game is simply superb - your only interaction (as it is) is with the computer voice running the tests and some other robots along the way. There is a bitingly dark and funny edge to the whole experience which grows the further through the tests you get - a very corporate "you're very important to us but this test will probably kill you" kind of thing. The strength of the computer character goes to show how important this is in making a good game.

The puzzles themselves get progressively more mindbending and force you to think about using space and physics in your environment in ways I've never had to before in a game. (Not that you need to be a science nerd or anything).

Most of all, it's just a lot of fun and even the end credits are entertaining, with a specially written song by the computer that sums everything up nicely.

It's not surprising that this game is popping up at the top of best games of 2007 awards all over the shop.

Best of all, I haven't done the bonus levels yet.

Returning: to the Interwebz

After close to a week of no internet (many thanks to the fucktard chunts at Telstra who assured us it would be back within 48 hours - I'm a little blase about it all to be honest but the PC is gropable), I'm down at the folks and back into the blogosphere.

Coming soon - a special insight into my family (take note that the PC thinks I shouldn't be doing this - but I think it's funny and the world has a right to know)

Playing: Skyrates

Skyrates is a web-browser based game that plays out in real-time and is designed to be something that you pop in and out of during the day - somewhat like email checking - rather than immersing yourself in.

It works somewhat how I imagine World of Warcraft works (never played it to be honest, just not that interested in fantasy characters) - with quests, earning money, trade, fights and undertaking missions. It's more single player although there is in game chat and I think (but I'm not sure) that you can fight other players.

You can find out more about the ins and outs of the game in the Flight Manual and there was also a very interesting game design post mortem on the GameCareerGuide.com website.

That's my avatar up the top there - I'd normally go with a cat but for some reason the boar just seemed more appealing this time around. (Maybe because I was born in the year of the Pig)



Here you have my plane - it's early days yet so it's a little primitive but I've been able to whizz around the sky and fight off a fair few thieves so far. The idea of levelling up as a motivator in games like these is kind of interesting - it keeps you engaged, as you are rewarded for your time/work and it also gives you little praise/success hits as you go. Is it just propaganda designed to keep us happily plugging away as little worker elves or is this just a consequence of the system we find ourselves in?

(Personally I'm happy for people to be rewarded for achievement, hard work and good ideas but I would like to see some other models used occasionally in games for success)

The style of the game is quaintly cartoony, a quick trip through the tutorial is enough to get you going and it seems as though the people chatting on the radio are relatively friendly and helpful (though I haven't said hi yet)

The gameplay itself is pretty enjoyable and you can plot out a series of trips (which occur in real time - roughly an hour per flight) and subsequent trades and refuels which can then just run in the background on your web browser.

Hope to see you there :)

Enjoying: arty stuff

Aaron pointed me towards this very cool, ultra stylised video that shows how much visual information (both in advertising and other signage) we are exposed to on a daily basis. He found it on an interesting blog about alternative advertising practices. (They got it from a New York artists collective site - theWooster Collective, which has a wealth of awesomeness on there.)

I really hope there's some kind of CC (Creative Commons) thing going on with it as I'd love to use it for something else (or at least work out how it's done - lots of frame by frame hard work at a guess). I have one problem with it though - there's a point at which the guy enters his PIN at an ATM and now I can't for the life of me remember what mine is. (Hoping that muscle memory comes to the rescue next time I need to take money out :)

LOLing: Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker is a fast-talking, acid witted observer of modern English pop culture, going right back to a hilarious serious of mock tv guide pages he published on a website called tvgohome.com around the turn of the century.

It's certainly crude but hilariously so and with a healthy dollop of insight as well.

You can check out the entire tvgohome archive (be prepared to wile away the odd hour or two there) here

This is just a sample (minus the world-class swearing common to many of them) from the site.



He's since moved on to do a fair bit of very funny and highly edgy work on TV - very little of which has made it here although you can find a fair slab online, including the notorious Brasseye episode about paedophiles called paedogeddon.

His latest effort is called Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.

If you've ever made snide remarks about the tools appearing on tv - on ads in particular, you might be able to relate.



My choice gag from this was

Ad - Who says you can't lose weight and enjoy yourselves?
Charlie - Bobby Sands? (Bobby Sands was an I.R.A member who died on a famous hungerstrike in a British prison in the 80s)

Reading: JPod by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland has been revered in parts of the MSM (mainstream media) as a chronicler of the zeitgeist for the last 10 or 15 years, starting back in 1991 with his novel Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture.

While I always had a certain curiosity about what the man had to say, there was something that slightly riled my born-and-bred Gen X 90s flannelette shirt wearing slacker sensibilities about having my culture dissected and demographised. So I left him and his subsequent works on the shelf.

I noticed his new book JPod the other day though and there was something about the backcover blurb that grabbed my attention - maybe because of my growing interest in game design or maybe I was just in the mood for a bit of zeitgeisty po-mo pop culture.

In brief, it's the story of a bunch of young folk working as game designers in Vancouver - all smart, oh so cool and all with far more interesting lives than you or I. One guy is trying to live the perfectly statistically normal life after growing up on a lesbian hippy commune, another's mum has a major hydroponic grow-op in the basement and on it goes.

Coupland cleverly mixes in some interesting text/graphical snapshots of modern life into the pages (e.g whole page text blocks of the ingredients in a pack of corn chips) as well as getting the characters to mix up the styles a little by having them write eBay postings of how they would sell themselves and saucy letters of seduction to Ronald McDonald.

He even brings himself into the story, which doesn't turn out as wanky as you'd think. It's an entertaining look at modern life that doesn't take itself too seriously and I think I may even go back and dip into the man's earlier works.

Here's an extract, taken from the rather funky book website at http://www.jpod.info/

(Evidently, this book is also in the process of being made into a tv series)

Never Mess with the Subway Diet

"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."

"That asshole."

"Who does he think he is?"

"Come on, guys, focus. We've got a major problem on our hands." The six of us were silent, but for our footsteps. The main corridor's muted plasma TVs blipped out the news and sports, while co-workers in long-sleeved blue and black T-shirts oompah-loompahed in and out of laminate-access doors, elevated walkways, staircases and elevators, their missions inscrutable and squirrelly. It was a rare sunny day. Freakishly articulated sunbeams highlighted specks of mica in the hallway's designer granite. They looked like randomized particle events.

Mark said, "I can't even think about what just happened in there."

John Doe said, "I'd like to do whatever it is people statistically do when confronted by a jolt of large and bad news."

I suggested he ingest five milligrams of Valium and three shots of hard liquor or four glasses of domestic wine.

"Really?"

"Don't ask me, John. Google it."

"And so I shall."

Cowboy had a Jones for cough syrup, while Bree fished through one of her many pink vinyl Japanese handbags for lip gloss—phase one of her well-established pattern of pursuing sexual conquest to silence her inner pain.

The only quiet member of our group of six was Kaitlin, new to our work area as of the day before. She was walking with us mostly because she didn't yet know how to get from the meeting room to our cubicles. We're not sure if Kaitlin is boring or if she's resistant to bonding, but then again none of us have really cranked up our charm.

We passed Warren from the motion capture studio. "Yo! jPodsters! A turtle! All right" He flashed a thumbs-up.

"Thank you, Warren. We can all feel the love in the room." Clearly, via the gift of text messaging, Warren and pretty much everyone in the company now knew of our plight, which is this: during today's marketing meeting we learned we now have to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle. Yes, you read that correctly, a turtle character—in a skateboard game.

The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone's nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees. Then I wondered if Leonardo da Vinci had ever inhaled any of the oxygen molecules I was breathing, or if he ever had to sit through a marketing meeting. What would that have been like? "Leo, thanks for your input, but our studies indicate that when they see Lisa smile, they want a sexy, flirty smile, not that grim little slit she has now. Also, I don't know what that closet case Michelangelo is thinking with that naked David guy, but Jesus, clamp a diaper onto him pronto. Next item on the agenda: Perspective—Passing Fad or Opportunity to Win? But first, Katie here is going to tell us about this Friday's Jeans Day, to be followed by a ten-minute muffin break."

But the word "turtle" pulled me out of my reverie, uttered by Fearless Leader—our new head of marketing, Steve. I put up my hand and quite reasonably asked, "Sorry, Steve, did you say a turtle?"

Christine, a senior development director, said, "No need to be sarcastic, Ethan. Steve here took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."

"No," Steve protested. "I appreciate an open dialogue. All I'm really saying is that, at home, my son, Carter, plays SimQuest4 and can't get enough of its turtle character, and if my Carter likes turtle characters, then a turtle character is a winner, and thus, this skateboard game needs a turtle."

John Doe BlackBerried me: I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS

And so the order was issued to make our new turtle character "accessible" and "fun" and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: "{101, 100, 103, 121}"

Watching: Prometeus - the media revolution

This is an interesting video about the possible future of media and experience that I found on Jenny Weight from RMIT's blog. It looks at where communication has come from, where the Internet is taking it and then goes on to hypothesise about how virtual worlds might be able to represent more and more of reality and what this means for our understanding of it.



It also reminds me a little of this movie, though doesn't get quite so detailed in it's examination of the possible evolution of the media in general and how information and knowledge might be managed.

Causing: concern

Well I just learnt a lesson about not taking micro-naps at the radio station console - nothing bad happened but because there's a window that goes out to the hallway, a couple of passing people from the Men's group down the hall were concerned that I'd collapsed or something and quickly roused up the station manager to check on me.

Which is a bummer because it's rather warm and cozy in here and I could really just go for a nap about now. (Still, it's nice that people care about strangers)

Reading: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most interesting writers around, cramming his books with all manner of ephemera and ideas, making subversive observations about society and weighing up the mainstream by focussing on subcultures. Best known for writing Fight Club, there's also a movie version of another of his novels, Choke, coming up at the Sundance Film Festival soon.

It's hard to tell too much of the story of Rant without giving the whole thing away but let's say that it's an oral history of a man who likes to be bitten by poisonous spiders and rabid animals, who sets up a tooth museum and who joins a bizarre team sport called party crashing which involves people decorating their cars and crashing into each other in night time traffic.

There's time travel, full sensory input media, a weird city system that revolves around a day/night curfew to ensure better use of public facilities (you're either a daytimer or a nighttimer)and Rant's girlfriend, a deformed hooker who clients pay not to have sex with.

It gets a little confusing at the end - I have to admit that as much as I love the man's work, he does seem to have a problem coming to satisfying conclusions. Perhaps this is how he likes it - why should everything be wrapped up with a tidy bow and explained and resolved? Still, when you've enjoyed the first 95% of the story, it sometimes feels a little rushed or something.

Anyways, this book is still well worth a look - I might even go back for another try to see if I can make more sense of the ending second time around. (Don't get me wrong, generally I got it but there's this whole layers on layers thing)