Why be stuck with a stupid blog name...

...when you can change it to a different, but also stupid blog name. From now on, this blog will be found at:

The Roar Of The Masses Could Be Farts

All posts etc from this place are migrated over there.

Violating the Geneva Conventions from the comfort of your own living room

As a sort of follow-up to this:

Two Swiss human rights organisations have conducted a study analysing video games in terms of how actions carried out in the game are or aren't in accord with the relevant humanitarian laws. They, not at all surprisingly, found that "The practically complete absence of rules or sanctions is... astonishing" and "the line between the virtual and real experience becomes blurred and the game becomes a simulation of real life situations on the battlefield."

As I was playing Modern Warfare 2 yesterday I was thinking as I was storming the White House, now occupied by the Russian invaders who have taken over parts of the United States as a reaction to a CIA operative working under deep cover shooting up an airport, and the only place in DC with electricity after Captain Price in the eastern parts of Russia launched a nuclear missile from a submarine and detonated it somewhere in the atmosphere over DC creating an electromagnetic pulse shorting out all the electricity and electronics in the city how this is an accurate depiction of real life on the battlefield.

Also been thinking that probably everybody should read Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes to better understand how audiences receive culture. It would prevent an awful lot of nonsense.

States behaving morally

Apologies for flogging a dead horse, but after reading the following article about the Harper government's cover-up of Canadian complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees and its subsequent attempt to discredit and destroy the diplomat who made this public, even though the Conservatives passed a law in 2007 to protect whistleblowers, I thought of Norm's post from a couple of months ago about how Canada was providing a "moral lead" to the world.

LOL

Due to extremely careless wording, a gay-marriage ban in Texas has banned all marriages.

The best sentence I've read in a while

The priest poked his head out between the threadbare curtains and peered through the sepia dusk at the stranger, and then he stepped out of the confessional and the woman with Indian features also stepped out of the confessional and the three of them stood frozen watching the stranger who was moaning faintly and kept urinating, wetting his pants and loosing a river of urine that ran toward the vestibule, confirming that the aisle, as the priest had feared, was worryingly uneven.

From this.

NME names "top 50 albums of the decade" and reveal themselves to be racists in the process

Nevermind boring and insufferable twats.

I won't call Jason Kenney a Nazi but...

...promoting martial values is a keystone of fascism.

The Conservative government has re-written the book on what it means to be Canadian.

No longer will prospective immigrants learn that Canada is a strictly peaceful nation. Instead there will be a greater emphasis on Canada’s military history and on the poppy as a symbol of remembrance and of Canada’s sacrifice in the First World War.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney will reveal a major overhaul Thursday of the booklet given to all citizenship applicants. The current booklet, A Look at Canada, was written under a Liberal government in 1997. In the past Mr. Kenney has said he can't believe the booklet, intended to help applicants study for their citizenship tests, includes a lengthy section on protection of the environment but barely makes mention of the Canadian Forces.

Maryanne Amacher, 1938-2009

Photo by 'thisgig', taken from here.

Maryanne Amacher, described in her New York Times obituary as a 'visceral composer', died aged 71 in Rhinebeck, New York on October 22 following a stroke. The obituary covers all the necessary information, from her early collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, to her sound installations and more recent work with Thurston Moore. The website maryanneamacher.org is becoming an archive of her work. I especially like this piece from there, by the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky:

I see her work as exploring a number of important issues an the boundaries of contemporary perceptual psychology, exploring the ways that subtle environmental changes affect how we see the world from moment to moment. Amacher's work is very concerned with what happens after you see and hear: the after images and after sounds. In fact. although she works in several media, her main concern is with understanding and manipulating the perception of space and duration, with finding ways to make people feel that they are in a different (and usually more desirable) place. As she uncovers these influences she translates them through her art into ways to use the media to make changes in the local world of the watcher/listener.

Which might sound a little bit dry and academic, though judging by the one time I saw her perform in Glasgow in 2006, Minsky's description of Amacher's music (somewhat accurately described by a New York Times critic in 1988 as "buzzing tones wrapped in sandstorm textures, rumblings like faraway thunder storms late at night, an idling motorcycle, jets swooping by") as making "people feel that they are in a different (and usually more desirable) place" gets it exactly right. When I saw her she was the final performer on the last day of a three-day experimental music festival and I was tired and my capacity for challenging music was about as its limit. I didn't know anything about her before she got behind the mixing board and played what was apparently a very stripped-down version of her usual installations, but it was completely unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. How the music itself sounded wasn't nearly as important as how it felt--I think this gets to the essence of her work, which is about the experiential dimension of sound. And it was fun--people were dancing to the stuff! What Maryanne Amacher did in terms of psychoacoustics, cognitive science, structurally-borne sound, and whatever else was going on in her music, was a massive achievement in itself, but that this was actually pleasurable made her a giant. The world of experimental music--fuck, of music generally--is poorer for her death.

Pressing moral issues of our times

It isn't released until tomorrow, but Infinity Ward's new shooter Modern Warfare 2 is already recieving rave reviews and is generating no small amount of controversy over a leaked sequence in which the player guns down civilians in an airport. The Daily Mail reported on the outrage and noted that Labour MP Keith Vaz (according to his wikipedia entry, he led a protest in 1989 against The Satanic Verses) was going to "raise his concerns" about the game in Parliament.

Keith Stuart in The Guardian has a far more nuanced take on the matter here, asking questions about interactivity and morality in gaming:

Interactivity itself brings in complex moral questions. If a movie were to depict a terrorist outrage, the viewer takes no active part. But in a videogame, you're engaged and complicit. The participation is the entertainment, and that's always going to be problematic. Activision's argument about seeking to portray the depths of the terrorist cell's immorality in order to stir the player's emotions is sound to a point – it's an established narrative device. But is it necessary for the player to throw grenades? And wouldn't similar revulsion be elicited if the player were placed into the shoes of one of the victims? This would, after all, reflect the wonderful opening sequence to the original Modern Warfare, in which the player takes on the perspective of a prisoner who is bundled into a car and later executed...The scene portrayed may well represent a statement of intent: this is what games are capable of now – unsettling us with their powerful imagery, backing us into difficult situations, toying with our moral certainties. It is an 18 certificate game. We must be trusted to test ourselves against this.

I'm not sure that Stuart is right about this, and this is maybe a topic for a later blog post (that I will never get around to writing). There does seem to be, however, something deeply hypocritical about the outrage here.

The first Modern Warfare game--which doesn't involve killing civilians--was widely acclaimed (Metacritic's aggregation of 70 critic reviews gives it a 94/100), won many awards, and the game has sold over 13 million copies to date. It's a superb game, though for all the plaudits the game earned for its realism (the game is so detailed that they even got the tread pattern on the bottom of the soldiers' boots right), there is the fundamental unreality that even though in parts of the game you are fighting your way through built-up urban areas--that actually look like they were inhabited--that there are no civilians present. So you can blow up cars or throw grenades into cafes or unload magazine after magazine into apartments without worrying that you'll kill anybody other than the baddies. There is one section in the game with a civilian: in this stage you play an SAS operative stranded in hostile territory and trying to flee to an extraction zone. You and your squadmates come across a farm where Russian seperatists are shaking down an elderly farmer trying to find out your location. You are then supposed to shoot the enemies and carry on with the level. Once, however, I shot the farmer instead. Game over for me for that, with the message that "Friendly fire will not be tolerated". So not realistic at all then.

Or there's the scene where the aforementioned SAS guys track down and capture a terrorist leader, torture him (the screen goes black for this, though you hear it) and finally execute him. No outrage from the tabloids or politicians at this. It doesn't even really warrant a mention in most reviews, who are more concerned with AI modelling and polygon counts than they are with the moral, ethical, and political issues that games can raise.

The point of comment forms

Can we just give up the ruse that comment forms on the websites of newspapers are there to stimulate debate and conversation when it's patently obvious that they are in fact there to generate hits and therefore more advertising revenue?