Wondering: don't astronauts have enough to put up with.

As awesome as it would be to go into space, I can see that orbit-life would have a number of downsides. You live in a tiny container - somewhat like being in prison, you have to poo in zero gravity and there's a real prospect of some piece of stray spacejunk crashing into your home at any point and rather ruining your day.

Why then would you send up an mp3 player containing 10 songs for them to listen to, chosen by a contest winning 14 year old Norwegian girl. (Not that 14 year old Norwegian girls couldn't choose good songs - just not this one)

Here's the list:

Here Comes The Sun - Beatles
Come Fly With Me - Frank Sinatra
Rocket Man - Elton John
Up Where We Belong - Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes
Imagine - John Lennon
Flashdance - What A Feeling - Irene Cara
Walk of Life - Dire Straits
Fly - Celine Dion
Rockin' All Over The World - Status Quo
I Believe I Can Fly - R Kelly

Now I'm going to assume that there are more songs than this on the mp3 player and that the whole song-list competition thing is largely a handy hook to get media attention and spark debate because, admit it, who doesn't like a good top 10 list discussion. (Clearly I do)

That said though, there is no mention anywhere on the European Space Agency website about any other songs at all being included.

So worse case scenario - this is it - the ten songs you have to listen to over and over again while dealing with the aforementioned astronaut deprivations. Memories of my time working as a Santa photographer in a toy department come to mind at this point - looped Disney character sung Christmas carols all day. (Preceded by the like clockwork 8.55am juice-up-the-staff Tina Turner Simply the Best song playing of course)

Sure, individually there are some good songs on the list - but isn't the flying/space thing just a tad overdone. Do these people really need to be reminded that they are up in the sky - we're talking some fairly well educated scientist types here.

And where is Walking on Sunshine and the Bowie classics Space Oddity/Ashes to Ashes?

I guess it could be worse - if you were feeling mean you could have gone with a BadgerBadgerBadger, Crazy Frog and Bananaphone medley.

Admiring: the balloon tank

Click on the images for the full size version - you can check out the whole series at http://www.linkinn.com/_Balloon_Tank_pic

Wondering about: the Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG (Alternate Reality Game)

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) take a cross media approach to game play and attempt to bring the action more into the player's day to day life. Wikipedia says that

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The form is typified by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

There is a new game in the field apparently, tied in to the Terminator based tv series The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It revolves around a revolutionary new type of camera which can photograph events from 1191 days in the future.

This video that I found on Boing Boing sets the scene.



This "rabbit-hole" takes you on to the website for the company which is developing the camera - EniTech Research, where you can find more videos and presumably more ways of playing the game. (I haven't looked into it yet)

Slightly off topic, I've been thinking about other options for "real-world" gaming - having a bit of a fascination with the sport of cyclogaining (a derivative of rogaining), which is kind of like a big bike based treasure hunt.

I was thinking (having been influenced by the mobile-obsession of my friend and colleague Len :) that an addition to this might be to introduce some element of hunting your competitors by setting up a shared Flickr account and having everyone photograph the opposition on mobile phones and uploading these to Flickr. This would give a time-stamp of who got their pix up there first and thus who got the "kill".

Haven't really finished thinking that through yet but I reckon it has promise.

Enjoying: the new will.i.am/Obama video - but also raising an eyebrow

I really enjoyed the first will.i.am tribute song/video/project/whatever about Barack Obama (previously mentioned here) and I'm still finding the man (and the accompanying buzz) enthralling. I've been listening to the audio book version of his book of political views and that's impressed me greatly as well.

So for some reason I'm finding it a little odd that I have a faint nagging twinge about the latest video that will.i.am has put out as part of the campaign.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it still carries a lot of the inspiration and the hope (and it's for Barack man) - it just feels a little too slick, a little too polished and it also sparks a feeling that this is all veering a little close to the cultish for my tastes.



I guess I hope that this whole surge doesn't peak too early and hit some kind of overexposed backlash. The O-ba-ma chanting in the video just doesn't quite sit right either - what would be great would be if Barack came out and played it all down a little, made the point that he's not this guru figure but just a guy with some good ideas.

But given the way the media works and the need to keep the momentum going, I guess that might not be the best strategy.

I definitely got a sense though that the conservative/redneck/Republicans are genuinely scared of the man though from the range of rather offensive comments on the YouTube video digging deep into the staples of fear and misdirection that are the flip side of the Obama approach. (Which fortunately, I think the majority of people are well and truly sick of)

And by the way, if you're taking on board the arguments that the Obama campaign is all flash and no substance, all words and no plans, there is a great analysis/comparison of the Obama/Clinton voting records and legistation supporting/drafting up here on Daily Kos.

Chuckling: at the hapless hippy

Mark Boyle, a former organic food company boss, had a grand plan - to walk from England to India without a cent, relying on the goodwill of the people he came across on his way to keep him fed, sheltered and whatever else he might need. Essentially letting "the universe" provide.

His goal was to demonstrate to the world that we don't need money to live (presumably as long as everyone else that we meet actually does have money and a generous heart).

Mark is part of the freeconomy movement, which is all about sharing and community and bartering and working together and I'm pretty well fine with all of this. You can read up about this on his blog here. I'll happily agree that big business thrives on creating an environment where it's everyone for themselves and we are constantly encouraged to overconsume. Society is generally better served when we work together as a community and this is all good.

At the same time though, I respect that people who choose to work extra hard or who have good productive ideas are entitled to be rewarded for their efforts and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a reasonable level of private property.

Where our Mark's story gets interesting is how far he actually managed to make it.

France. Calais to be precise, just outside the ferry from England.

On arriving in France (with two fellow-travellers) they found that the French weren't that interested in speaking to "back-packing freeloaders" with no knowledge of the language between them.

After a few days starving, he and his pals have packed it in and headed home, copping a little bit of stick from the media in the process.

It's worth taking a look at some of the posts on his blog and it's hard to think too unkindly of him as his heart is clearly in the right place but let's say that he comes across as a little disconnected for day to day reality.

Poor hippy.

Playing: a rather mixed bag of tunes for Monday Sunset

Not entirely sure what's in the water this evening but I think there's something as I've been drawn to this motley batch of tracks to play on the radio tomorrow (or today if you will)

We have a couple of songs about serial killers, some fairly unusual cover versions, a bit of mashup and a closing song that probably isn't entirely appropriate to play before kiddy storytime but which will hopefully prompt some hilarious innocent questions along the lines of "what does - you took my frill necked lizard and put him in a crack - mean?"

And that has to be good for everyone.

Object Ween La Cucaracha 2:37
S.L.H. (Sri Lanka High) (M.I.A. vs. The Ramones) Jay-R Best of Bootie 2005 4:28
Wonderwall Paul Anka Q: Best Of 86/06 3:34
Pissing in the wind Badly Drawn Boy The hour of the bewilderbeast 4:20
'84 Pontiac Dream Boards Of Canada The Campfire Headphase 3:50
The Killing Moon Nouvelle Vague Bande À Part 3:39
Its Worth These Days Airport City Shuffle Death Of Robot 4:01
Mrs. Robinson The Lemonheads The Best Of The Lemonheads 3:45
Waves Superette Topless women talk about their lives 3:19
Utopia Goldfrapp Felt Mountain 4:18
Quick Way To Hell The Fuelers Hot Dang 3:43
Somebody Told Me The Killers Hot Fuss 3:17
Women's realm Belle and Sebastian Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant 4:36
Gun Gil Scott-Heron The Best Of Blaxploitation (Disc 2) 4:02
Read to me B(if)tek Frequencies will move together 4:17
Islands Cat Power The Greatest 1:44
yes We Can Song will i am and friends Obama 08 4:20
Secure Yourself Indigo Girls Indigo Girls 3:37
Blue Orchid The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan 2:38
Pushing Drugs Andrew W. K. Close Calls With Brick Walls 2:41
Sexual Healing Marvin Gaye Super Hits 4:00
You Took My Thing And Put It In Your Place C.W. Stoneking King Hokum 2:51

Pondering: fear and regret

February 29 always brings me a tiny twinge of regret and reflection as it wings around its little four year cycle. It's the birthday of a girl I had a huge crush on in high school - Ferne Kohlman - not a hard date to remember given its infrequent nature (and the fact that it's the day after my dad's birthday as well).

We sat across the aisle from each other at the back of the classroom and I was hooked from the moment my angsty little hormone filled teenage self laid eyes on her in early February at the start of year 7.

Obviously I've moved on to bigger and far better things in the #cough#24years#cough# time since then but as a lesson in how events at that age help shape who you are and what you become, it's still something that pops into my head on the odd occasion.

Valentines Day came around about a week after school started and the night before I spent hours painstakingly making her a valentines card that I planned to secretly slip into the pigeon-hole/shelves that we had just near the classroom door for our books and whatnot.

In green pen I (clumsily) drew this lush fern frond (because her name was Ferne - get it) with hundreds upon hundreds of those tiny fern (uh what are they called - leaves/nodules?) thingys and agonised over the perfect combination of words.

Being a relatively private person, (or perhaps fearful), I didn't sign it, figuring I could gauge the reaction when she read it and take my cue from there.

Come the next day I scurried early to class and eagerly scanned the pigeonholes looking for her name - Fern Coleman. (Which was how I had intricately written it in fronds on the card). Logically, it would have been between the B surnames and the Ds.
But no. I scanned in a panic another dozen times - why wouldn't she have a pigeonhole - it didn't make sense.

I scanned the whole wall of pigeon holes and reached the Ks (for Kohlman) to realise to my young mortification that I had spelled not only her first name wrong but also her surname. I slipped the card in regardless and when it was discovered, proceeded to deny absolutely to all and sundry that I had had anything to do with it. (After all, if I truly loved this girl, how could I possibly not even know her name)

And that was it - for the next four years (until she changed schools at the end of year 10), I pined for her from afar - afraid of I'm still not entirely sure what but nonetheless, ruled by my fears.

The truly stupid thing is that I'm pretty sure that she did actually like me and there were any number of chances to move on but in my strange little mind, I just couldn't and wouldn't act.

I hope now that I'm less proud or fearful or whatever the hell it was that I was doing - possibly a modicum of stubborn self-destructive willfullness in there as well for all I know.

But February 29 will always remind me of the consequences of fear

Enjoying: Star Wars as explained by a 3 year old.

This is all too cute but pretty impressive at the same time - she manages to get the gist of the movie across (not sure how you would go if you'd never seen it of course) and its really interesting to get a sense of the parts of the story that grabbed her attention the most.

She spends a fair bit of time talking about how the sand-people capture r2d2 and c3po (the shiny man) and have a sort of garage sale - except it's with robots.

She steers well clear of the whole Han shot first debate too - got to love the light sabre description as well.

Admiring: Till Nowak's "Salad" (eat your vegies before they eat you)

(Click on the image to view it at full size)

This is a beautiful piece of 3D work that pays tribute to HR Gigers design work for the Alien series of films. There's a fair bit of interesting info on the website about the creation of this image too.

LOLing: Yes we can song parodies

I mentioned back here how impressed I was with the song that Will.I.Am put together paying tribute to Barack Obama which has become a bit of a web sensation.

As with most web things, it hasn't taken long for a couple of piss-takes to arise - one is the kind of video that John McCain (front-running Republican candidate) would put out in response, playing on his statements that the U.S could well be in Iraq a hundred years from now and his poor-taste Beach Boys impression - bomb bomb Iran.



The second is a more generic rich peoples version of the will.i.am song, taking a "no you can't" line.

Sharing: the Meaty Bites diet story

This story just came through the email - gotta love it.

I've got 2 dogs. I bought a large bag of Meaty Bites at Big W and was standing in line at the check-out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Meaty Bites Diet again, although I probably shouldn't because I'd ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 25kgs before I woke in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV's in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Meaty Bites and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I'd ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned by the food. I told her no, it was because I'd been sitting in the middle of the road licking my **** and a car hit me.

I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.

Stupid woman…why else would I buy dog food??

Thanks Flyfinn

LOLing: New Matilda apology to Andrew Bolt

Andrew Bolt is a petty little man columnist in Rupert Murdoch's Herald-Sun newspaper in Melbourne who sprays bile over his favourite imagined foes of the left, climate change believers and the stolen generation. (According to him, it never happened.)

Not surprisingly he was ropable last week when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (still not tired of typing that) apologised to said Stolen Generation on behalf of the government and the parliament.

The left-leaning bloggers at New Matilda published their apology to Andy Pandy shortly afterwards.

I'm sorry we had the blazing audacity to kick John Howard out. I apologise for our flagrant ingratitude towards him for all he did for us, and to you for all you did for him. I'm sorry for that little smile we keep allowing to creep onto our faces. I am so, so sorry for the way we put you on the sidelines.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of you, your fellow Howard-boosters and their descendants, we say sorry. To Bolt and Akerman, Henderson and Windschuttle, for the breaking up of the Liberal leadership, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud right-wing people and a proud culture of denial, dog whistles and xenophobia, we say sorry.

Honestly, Andrew, I’m really and truly sorry for you.

Check it out in full here.

LOLing: De-Rez does Resident Evil

If you're at all familiar with my early video work, you'll know that I'm a fan of the ultra-low budget funnies and de-rez are my new heroes in this realm.

They poke a little fun at the Resident Evil series of games in this video - a series highly regarded for sparking the zombie craze of the last decade or so in pop-culture and also for having a few quirky aspects (although possessing great game play)

Enjoying: How to behave on an internet forum

How To Behave On An Internet Forum

Drinking: in rooftop bars

High atop stately Curtin House in the heart of Melbourne lies The Rooftop Cinema (and bar) - a funky place to watch movies when the sun goes down and drink with the cool young sorts of Melbourne. (Why they let me in I'll never know)



A few floors below is the equally groovy and highly tasty Thai/Asian restaurant Cookie, with all its done up old building stylings and tasty tasty food. (And you know they're cool because there is absolutely zero signage for the place at streetlevel)

Enjoying: Melbourne laneway art

Sneaking: in a quick post during a workshop

Just about to run out of internetz - but in Melbourne, had a top day yesterday - saw the Nick Cave memorabilia show, went to a sustainable living festival and had tasty Indonesian tucker for dinner.

LOLing: Yahtzee on Sim City Societies

Yahtzee is a very funny, very sharp and very fast talking games reviewer (and game maker) who has rapidly developed a cult following on The Escapist website.

He uses simple graphical animations to illustrate his fast rant reviews and claims the great Charlie Brooker (who I've mentioned here before) as a stylistic influence.

A couple of random quotes might start to give you a sense of his style:

Japanese RPGs and me have this little understanding: I don't play them and they can suck as much as they like somewhere far away from me.

# It's kinda like if Tim Schafer knocked up David Lynch in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and he did meth right up until the birth

The day I fork out seventy bucks for an expansion pack is the day I swallow razor wire, pull the end out of my arse and floss myself to death!

(You can find the complete index of reviews here)

This week he looked at Sim City Societies, skewering it mercilessly and pointing out that it makes it easy to see how simple it would be to set up totalitarian societies.



He has also previously done great reviews of The Orange Box (including my fave game Portal), Guitar Hero III and Halo 3, among others.

Watching: Underbelly

Not living in Victoria at the moment, I watched the new Channel 9 Melbourne gangland wars drama Underbelly on tv last night. (It's currently banned from broadcast in Victoria at the moment by Supreme Court order - for fear of prejudicing an upcoming murder trial. Evidently the legal system isn't familiar with satellite receivers or internet download)

Having seen it, I'm not entirely sure that the court didn't slap a ban on the show for more aesthetic reasons - in spite of the interesting subject matter (and prevalence of gratuitous breasts), it's a bit of a pedestrian and slightly dull affair.

Having lived in Melbourne during most of the time this "war" was going on, it was good to see familiar locations on screen and to get some insight into the back story of the news stories and names I vaguely recognised - though who knows how accurate this show actually is. (I'm not sure if I was telling the story of a bunch of people who seem prone to whacking one another whether I'd be as accurate as possible or as flattering as possible.)



Channel Nine has gone the absolute hack in promoting their new flagship show (and are no doubt loving the court injunction sick for the notoriety it offers) and you can see that in the above trailer. Shame that all of their splash quotes (one helluva show, landmark drama, showcases Australia's best talent) really don't say anything much in particular. (And two of those come from Melbourne's newspaper of the lowest common denominator, the Herald Sun)

Aside from a few (admittedly talented) key names - Vince (Lantana) Collosimo (already killed), Marcus (Good guys, Bad guys) Graham and Simon (Phoenix) Westaway and Frankie (every channel 9 shit-com in the last 2 decades) J Holden, the majority of the cast for me was a who's-he rather than a who's-who.

But that's neither here nor there really as the proof is in the pudding - sadly, with relatively cliched writing and plotlines, the best a good actor can do is not look like a complete goose. The story is pulled together with occasional scene-setting voice-overs but if you are going to use voice-overs to tell your story (generally a lazy strategy), they need to be smart and punchy.

Gyton Grantley put in the best consistent performance of the show with his slightly unsettling, slightly dopey seeming and fairly chilling Carl Williams, creating a real sense of someone who will get darker and more interesting as the show progresses.

Vince Colosimo did the best with what he had to work with , Frankie J played a template harried cop and the women were almost entirely in the background.

I've just noticed on the Underbelly "the biggest all-star cast on Australian tv" photo page - which doesn't actually offer bios of any of the "stars" that Dan Wyllie (below) is in the cast, which gives me some hope - he's done a lot of interesting work, though generally always as a petty crim.



The Sopranos or Phoenix (gritty Melbourne 90s cop show) it ain't - it might bear some comparison to Blue Murder over time and in fairness, it's usually a good idea to give shows a few weeks to get settled so I guess I'll keep watching.

Interestingly, one of the stories in The Age today mentioned that hundreds of Victorians were skirting the Supreme Court ban by hitting the file-sharing sites but some had found downloading slow because so many people were trying to access the files at the same time. (Not quite appreciating that the more people downloading the file at the same time, the faster the downloads are due to the shared distribution nature of these sites)

Watching: the apology

Update: Here is a link to the text of the formal apology.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd just finished apologising to the Stolen Generations - a symbolic event that has been a long time coming.

It's hard to go into a lot of detail - both his speech and the reply from Brendan Nelson (leader of the opposition) were lengthy - but here are some impressions.

Overall, a beautiful, powerful and worthy speech from Rudd that teared me up a little when the "sorry" words actually came out. He didn't dance around the subject or quibble with the matter, just copped it on the chin on behalf of parliaments and governments past and set forward to make a new and better path.

Rudd generally kept things statesmanlike, just occasionally aiming the odd jab here and there at the former Howard Government's refusal to apologise and on the odd occasion he tried throwing in a little, relatively irrelevant humour when he talked about the way the post-reformation Christian issues were resolved in the way Aboriginal children were assigned churches on the basis of which line they were in.

Brendan Nelson on the other hand started well but then had a total mishmash of a speech which seemed a little laden with dog-whistle politics and slightly lessened the whole day and its focus. He made telling points about how wrong and damaging the child removals were and how important it was to make things right but then insisted on throwing in a series of qualifiers about how the people doing it thought they were doing it for the right reasons and that children were being removed from lives of squalor.

He then went on to imply that many of the problems are their own due to alcohol, language issues, corruption, nepotism and choosing to sit outside the economic mainstream. He also banged out about how we shouldn't condemn the white folk of this age because many of them went to fight in the war?!? Rather missing the point of the whole thing. Throw in a hearty, heavily political defence of the Howard NT intervention and a call for the PM to continue that and you have something that the more you think about it sounds less and less like an apology as you go on.

Chunt.

Oddly enough though, his last line sounded almost like he was putting forward an apology not just on behalf of himself but on behalf of all Australians, so who knows what he's on about.

All in all though, about bloody time.

(I'll try to put video up when I can find some)