Missing: a day

Sorry - my head was pounding. (A bit better now though)

Enjoying: Netdisaster (on a rather childish level)

I came across this tool this morning and have been wiling away more time than I probably should but it's all a bit of fun.

It allows you to nominate a web URL and it then overlays a range of animations that virtually deface the site. I've particularly been enjoying playing with this pic of former Prime Minister Howard and Dubya.

Wishing I could see: David Mamet's November

David Mamet has been writing superbly sharp and smart plays,movies and tv shows for more than 30 years including The Verdict, the Pulitzer prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (play and movie), Speed the plow, Ronin, State and Main, Wag the Dog and a whole bunch more.

Glengarry Glen Ross has always been a particular favourite for it's astounding timing and use of language (and particularly use of swearing) - there is no wasted talent in the film version of this either, every actor (Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Johnathon Pryce and Alec Baldwin) absolutely owning their scenes.





Anyway - I was going to talk about his new play - November. All I know is what I've read but what I've read looks good.

November takes aspects of the Bush Administration — a love of God, and suspicion of foreign nations and homosexuals — and created a farce in which the president's annual ritual of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey is compromised by the threat of avian flu and a same-sex wedding in the White House.

This creates energetic and enjoyable comedy. There's also the hint of a large and serious charge underneath: Smith's attempt to remodel the entire Thanksgiving holiday (replacing turkey with another food) can be taken as a metaphor for what Bush's enemies see as a contempt for American history. But Mamet's main satirical point is the form he has chosen: his Bush-era play is a farce with a laughing stock at its heart.

Now sure, making jokes about Bush is like shooting oil in a barrel but given Mamet's extraordinary talents, I still think he'll be able to find 20 new ways of doing it.

Enjoying: Portal machinima

I've mentioned Portal a few times now here (well, it's awesome, what am I supposed to do) so I'll spare you a repeat performance of the gushing about the smart, darkly humourous writing and innovative gameplay - and the great closing song - and just show you this video I found the other day.

It's a tiny bit juvenile at some points but has some funny moments - it's a tale of a day at work for two of the robotic machine gun turrets.

Playing: Mass Attack

Mass Attack is a simple game sitting neatly in the casual games genre - games that anyone can just dip into for a quick 10 minutes of mental refreshment.

It's beautifully simple - you just click (and hold) on the other side of the scales to produce weights (balls) that balance out with those on the other side. As long as you can get them (you get 3 chances) within 3 units of each other (i.e virtually balanced), you can proceed.

Fun.

Winning: a shiny white PSP slim

Not a bad start to the day hey - the local game design school here in The Can' - the Academy of Interactive Entertainment - has an email newsletter that they put out and a few months ago they mentioned that if you go to their website and forward the email to other people (ok, it's like spam but - uh, not) then one lucky person could win a shiny shiny PSP.

And I'll be buttered and burnt on both sides if it wasn't me.

Yay.

It's an upgrade from the original model, sleeker and able to handle the upcoming Skype connectivity that is due to be released soon. Got it hooked up to our broadband testing account as well - so I can sit and my desk and - uh - access - uh - the internets. (Hmm, that's probably less beneficial than I thought :)

Their sponsors even threw in a couple of games, which was nice.

LOLing: Peter Russell Clark blooper swearing

G'day. My memories of Peter Russell Clark are of a slightly dorky, highly cheerful, slightly cheesy bloke who had these 5 minute filler mini-cooking shows on the ABC (the national broadcaster) in the 80s. He also did a range of ads on commercial telly for cheese, most famously including his catchphrase - where's the cheese?

Then he kind of just faded into obscurity - until (for me) yesterday, when I came across this awesome series of blooper clips from those ads and shows that demonstrate what a top bloke (crass, funny and seemingly genuinely decent) he really is.

Be mindful that there is a fair bit of swearing in here. (Click here to view video)



What really demonstrated his top-blokeness was a followup interview he did on JJJ a few days ago, where he's really not at all phased that the clips have made it online and manages to pull out a few more classic lines.

RePhotoshopping: someone's cool 500 image

Continuing the naughty party boy story, this image came through the email this morning - some nice work indeed. I had one small issue with it though - the original version had the guy with a Crown Lager tucked into his waistband when I felt that a Vodka Cruiser might be more appropriate.

So voila. Thanks to whoever did the original.

Being disturbed: by Derren Brown's Waking Dead

Derren Brown is an English hypnotist/magician/showman who has made a number of tv specials in the last few years that revolve around "magic" and trickery, with a heavy emphasis on messing with people's minds with suggestion and misdirection.

(Whether it's the audience or the people involved in the shows themselves that are messed with remains to be seen - although the showman aspect suggests that it's the former)

He achieved notoriety with a show he did in 2003 called Derren Brown plays Russian Roulette live, which was touted before broadcast as being the real deal but later revealed to be set up.

This video comes from a show that he did in 2005 and involves an apparent hypnotism exercise on a random man in a pub playing a zombie shoot-em-up games machine.



Debate rages as to how genuine this is - my personal feeling is that it's all a set up (as otherwise there are some massively unethical and possibly immoral activities going on here).

Some of the issues that raise immediate questions for me are:

• how could a games cabinet induce this kind of state?


• why would his friends act so blase?


• what if something went wrong - guy flips out - massive liability issues


• what about long term psych damage?


• how does Derren put the guy back to sleep in the game building?

There have certainly been a number of scientific studies done over the years that show that people can easily be convinced to do things that they wouldn't normally do by the presence of authority figures - the Milgram experiment in the 1960s in which volunteers were convinced to administer potentially deadly electric shocks on the orders of man in a lab coat - and so it's not out of the question that the "friends" may have been convinced on this basis.

If you accept the premise however that this was a completely unscripted event, there would have been no imperative whatsoever for the "friends" to have any concern other than for the wellbeing of their mate.

It's an interesting piece of video for discussing what's ethical and what's not in science/entertainment - but overall, just a little more disturbing that I like.

(I think the whole hidden-camera/reality/documentary feel of the thing added a lot to this and it would be interesting to go over the script for the voiceover and see what kinds of neuro-linguistic programming techniques might have been used on the viewer to create certain expectations.)

This video demonstrates the use of neuro-linguistic programming - interesting that it's an actor.

Photoshopping: the PM's sideburns

In the absence of real news, the Fairfax press have decided that a minor addition to our new Prime Minister's facial hair is worthy of a report.

As something of a sideys afficionado myself (and the occasional mo-grower), it seemed to me that perhaps he should be encouraged to go the whole hog.

After all, how cool would this be?



In other news, the naughty party boy now can't be named by the mainstream media as he's been charged with creating a public nuisance and the rather vindictive seeming charge of producing child pornography.

Not knowing the details of the case I obviously can't say for certain what this is all about but at a guess the police got very very snaky about the fact that he's been lapping up the media attention in the last few days and been generally unrepentant about the whole matter, making them look/feel a little silly/powerless. This kind of charge seems like the kind of thing that might come up if he was filming/photographing himself or any of his peers at the party getting saucy , presumably on his phone which I'm guessing would have been checked thoroughly when he went in to chat to the local law enforcement types yesterday.

I'd be surprised if the charge was allowed to make it all the way to court - it seems like something designed to give the kid a short sharp shock and a major scare, after all, having that kind of thing on your record could seriously screw up the rest of your life and even he would have to be aware enough to see that. It also seems like a calculated spin move to try to knock some of the boy's larrikin appeal off him. (Are we likely to see a Free [naughty party boy] campaign now?)

Of course I don't know the story but on first glance, it looks like a rather large and rather obvious overstepping of the mark from here.

Oooohing: the Macbook Air

I'm not really a laptop type person - the video and game building stuff that I like to do generally needs a little more grunt - but watching the guided tour video of the new Macbook Air, the teeny tiny Apple laptop which is 19mm at its thickest and 4mm at its thinnest, I must admit that I was struggling to find counter-arguments to the "I want" that was welling up within.

The small hard drive and the single USB port (not to mention the between $2400 and $4300 price tag) did the trick in the end - but still, that's one sexy machine.

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.