Since you read this blog you are no doubt avid listeners to Gather Around Me, the podcast I host with my associate/life partner Cam Smith, in which we discuss issues of importance to all generations in a humorous yet poignant manner. If you are NOT avid listeners, I am incredibly disappointed in you.
Probably as you have listened you have thought to yourself, "Gee I wish I could show my support of these wonderful men in a more tangible way".
Guess what?
Go on, guess!
Spoilsport.
OK, the point is, NOW YOU CAN!
Find the details here of Gather Around Me's special fundraising efforts to enhance the podcasting experience for YOU. And for us, a bit, but mainly for YOU! Basically we are looking for a bit of cash to upgrade our recording equipment and cover hosting fees, so that we can not only continue the podcast, but make it better, allowing us to go anywhere and bring in more special guests of the kind you love so well. Like, maybe one week we could interview Jason Donovan. Maybe the next week we'd have a chat with Senator Judith Troeth. The possibilities are limitless, if you support us through your generous donations!
And you'll be getting something out of it too. As the page linked to above explains, all donors of $5 and upward will get access to a SPECIAL DONORS-ONLY PODCAST! Only those who have donated will be able to listen to this podcast, which will undoubtedly be of a strange and juicy nature.
Also, donors of $15 or more have the opportunity to get a personalised poem written for them.
Donors of $25 or more can receive a personalised erotic fan fiction story OR personalised prayer just for them.
Also, donors of $50 or more can have a product of their choice plugged shamelessly on the podcast - we will shill for you, and we'll do it with a smile!
Not only that, but for the duration of the indiegogo campaign, we will be recording a short podcast EVERY DAY, to help promote our efforts. The subject of the podcast will be chosen by the Twitter follower who responds the quickest to our daily request for a topic suggestion. Thirty-one daily podcasts for the delectation of our listeners! You can't say we don't put in the hard yards right? The first daily cast is here and is on the subject of crocodiles. Mm, topical.
So there you go - we love our little podcast and we'd like to keep making it bigger and better. If you can sling some spare change our way that'd be lovely. If you can help promote the cause via social media, legacy media, telegrams, hand-written letters or shouting at people, that'd be lovely too. Thanks for your support!
Monday, July 16, 2012
Friday, July 13, 2012
How To Be Good
It is very, very easy to not be good. It's easy to slip up and let yourself be nasty, or rude, or selfish, or arrogant, or self-righteous, or mean, or unfair. It's easy to let yourself say the wrong thing, make the wrong decision, to carelessly upset someone you have no cause to upset. It's easy to forget, sometimes, that you're not supposed to be a dickhead.
And there'll always be people around to tell you when you slip up and stop being good, even for a moment. And there'll always be people who challenge your concept of what "good" even is, because I've found almost everyone has a slightly different idea of what it is to be good, and even when you think you're being good, there might be someone hanging around who thinks you're wrong. And whether they're wrong or you're wrong can be impossible to tell.
And maybe there's no such thing as "good" anyway. Maybe when we argue about it, we're not just looking from different perspectives, we're actually arguing about something that doesn't exist - an objective standard.
And I know there are people who don't even care if they're not good - who have other preoccupations and other goals and put "being good" way at the bottom of their priorities. And I kind of envy them, because it seems like I'd spend a lot less time worrying and looking at myself if I didn't think that being good was particularly important.
And I'd spend a lot less time worrying and looking at myself if I was absolutely certain what good is in the first place.
I have other goals too. I want to be rich and famous and admired and beloved and acclaimed and a great roaring success.
But those things would seem hollow if I didn't think I was good. To be a good person, to feel that you are doing good things, and that you're someone worth loving - without those things anything else I do is insignificant.
I want to be good. I think the vast majority of people walking on this earth want to be good too. It's easy to not be good. And it's hard to know exactly what being good means. But it's something we all have to keep trying at, no matter how many times we fail. And I think a good start is remembering that we're all together, tripping and stumbling through our lives, and we're all trying to be good.
And there'll always be people around to tell you when you slip up and stop being good, even for a moment. And there'll always be people who challenge your concept of what "good" even is, because I've found almost everyone has a slightly different idea of what it is to be good, and even when you think you're being good, there might be someone hanging around who thinks you're wrong. And whether they're wrong or you're wrong can be impossible to tell.
And maybe there's no such thing as "good" anyway. Maybe when we argue about it, we're not just looking from different perspectives, we're actually arguing about something that doesn't exist - an objective standard.
And I know there are people who don't even care if they're not good - who have other preoccupations and other goals and put "being good" way at the bottom of their priorities. And I kind of envy them, because it seems like I'd spend a lot less time worrying and looking at myself if I didn't think that being good was particularly important.
And I'd spend a lot less time worrying and looking at myself if I was absolutely certain what good is in the first place.
I have other goals too. I want to be rich and famous and admired and beloved and acclaimed and a great roaring success.
But those things would seem hollow if I didn't think I was good. To be a good person, to feel that you are doing good things, and that you're someone worth loving - without those things anything else I do is insignificant.
I want to be good. I think the vast majority of people walking on this earth want to be good too. It's easy to not be good. And it's hard to know exactly what being good means. But it's something we all have to keep trying at, no matter how many times we fail. And I think a good start is remembering that we're all together, tripping and stumbling through our lives, and we're all trying to be good.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
An Unlikely Sequence of Events
Here is episode 103 of Gather Around Me, the podcast in which my associate Cam "the thinking woman's Nick Littlemore" and myself discuss matters of import and solve burning social issues of the day and yesteryear.
Why should you listen to this podcast?
Well just consider the ludicrous series of coincidences that led up to this episode:
1. I was born. Think about that. One precise sperm and one precise egg meeting each other at the precise time which would produce me, and not anyone else. Slightly different cells, at a slightly different moment, could have resulted in a completely different person being born. I might have even been...A GIRL! Ew, right? Vaginas and stuff.
2. I didn't die. Yes, I escaped SIDS, meningitis, measles, mumps, wayward drivers, carelessly-placed pillows, falling pianos, acid rainfalls, masked banditos, and dingo maulings, and survived.
3. I grew up. This means I was not only lucky enough to get bigger, and intelligent enough to complete a moderate education, but I gained the maturity to deal with other people in a calm and reasonable way without spitting at them. Hardly anyone does this - purest chance. What's more, as I grew up I was exposed to that unique combination of social isolation and sporadic bullying well-calculated to instil a desire to be a comedian and the concomitant sense of self-loathing.
4. I moved to Melbourne. Without moving to Melbourne I would never have become a GAMer. And I never would have moved to Melbourne if it weren't for my wife. And I never would have met my wife if she hadn't named herself Ausgirl_18 on Yahoo Chat, thus making me think, "Hello, she's in my country, here's a window of opportunity!" And I never would have been on Yahoo Chat if I hadn't become restless in my usual MSN chatroom, what with the guy who sent women wav. files of John Farnham claiming it was him singing and everything.
5. I met Cam Smith. I am not at liberty to divulge all the details, but suffice to say it involved poverty and desperation and hunger and sleep deprivation and multi-million dollar mergers and a wall of autographed cricket bats.
6. Cam didn't hate me to the point of physical violence. I don't need to elaborate how necessary/unlikely this was.
7. I began recording a podcast with Cam.
8. I kept recording a podcast with Cam.
9. Neither Cam nor I at any point during the podcast recording screamed "I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE YOU ARE SMOTHERING ME I NEED SOME SPACE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD" and rushed out sobbing into the night.
10. We kept this up for 102 episodes.
11. Neither of us fell onto train tracks before recording the 103rd.
12. We recorded the 103rd.
An amazing sequence, no? And now you realise how infinitesimally unlikely it is that we have reached this point, now you see the incredible nature of random chance and how it leads us to outcomes unexpected and delightful, now that you have been humbled by the tininess of all we cogs in the great cosmic machine...
Don't you think maybe you should listen?
Why should you listen to this podcast?
Well just consider the ludicrous series of coincidences that led up to this episode:
1. I was born. Think about that. One precise sperm and one precise egg meeting each other at the precise time which would produce me, and not anyone else. Slightly different cells, at a slightly different moment, could have resulted in a completely different person being born. I might have even been...A GIRL! Ew, right? Vaginas and stuff.
2. I didn't die. Yes, I escaped SIDS, meningitis, measles, mumps, wayward drivers, carelessly-placed pillows, falling pianos, acid rainfalls, masked banditos, and dingo maulings, and survived.
3. I grew up. This means I was not only lucky enough to get bigger, and intelligent enough to complete a moderate education, but I gained the maturity to deal with other people in a calm and reasonable way without spitting at them. Hardly anyone does this - purest chance. What's more, as I grew up I was exposed to that unique combination of social isolation and sporadic bullying well-calculated to instil a desire to be a comedian and the concomitant sense of self-loathing.
4. I moved to Melbourne. Without moving to Melbourne I would never have become a GAMer. And I never would have moved to Melbourne if it weren't for my wife. And I never would have met my wife if she hadn't named herself Ausgirl_18 on Yahoo Chat, thus making me think, "Hello, she's in my country, here's a window of opportunity!" And I never would have been on Yahoo Chat if I hadn't become restless in my usual MSN chatroom, what with the guy who sent women wav. files of John Farnham claiming it was him singing and everything.
5. I met Cam Smith. I am not at liberty to divulge all the details, but suffice to say it involved poverty and desperation and hunger and sleep deprivation and multi-million dollar mergers and a wall of autographed cricket bats.
6. Cam didn't hate me to the point of physical violence. I don't need to elaborate how necessary/unlikely this was.
7. I began recording a podcast with Cam.
8. I kept recording a podcast with Cam.
9. Neither Cam nor I at any point during the podcast recording screamed "I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE YOU ARE SMOTHERING ME I NEED SOME SPACE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD" and rushed out sobbing into the night.
10. We kept this up for 102 episodes.
11. Neither of us fell onto train tracks before recording the 103rd.
12. We recorded the 103rd.
An amazing sequence, no? And now you realise how infinitesimally unlikely it is that we have reached this point, now you see the incredible nature of random chance and how it leads us to outcomes unexpected and delightful, now that you have been humbled by the tininess of all we cogs in the great cosmic machine...
Don't you think maybe you should listen?
Friday, July 6, 2012
Carbon: The Weightless Killer
A lot of people ask me, "Ben what is to be done about the carbon tax?" I often express surprise that they are asking me this, since I never told them my name and they were supposedly at the door just to deliver a package. But I recognise my civic duties and thus I do my best to answer.
The short answer of course is: nothing is to be done. It is a fait accompli: Juliar "Julia" Gillard and her mob of baying leftist tree-kangaroos have put the tax in place and we will just have to deal with it until such time as Tony Abbott, limbs flailing, double dissolutions us all to a better place, which may be in 2014 or 2015 depending on El Nino.
And obviously it is a problem, as already reports are filtering through that prices are skyrocketing like directionless petrels on the back of the carbon price. In some places bread is up 36 percent, and it also tastes worse because to cut costs bakers have had to put ground-up pine cones in the dough. Are you happy now, Steve Gibbons MP?
A short list of things that are now unaffordable:
- bread
- milk
- eggs
- some more eggs
- cars
- gondola rides
- rubber gloves
- petrol
- cans to carry petrol in
- diamond rings
- heroin
- legwarmers
- love
Life as we know it is over and so we must live a life as we did not know it but know it now unlike before. Confused? Not nearly confused enough, as Aragorn might say. But the carbon tax is not all fantasy novels and wordplay. It has real-life consequences for real-life Australians.
Take the case of Terrigal's Jean-Marie Hofspeck, who came home from work last Tuesday to find her prize-winning Pomeranians had been slaughtered and her eldest son was now a rabbi. The shock was enough to cause her to immediately build an in-ground swimming pool in her backyard. Perhaps the Australian Labor "Party" sees fit to wash its hands of responsibility for this, but we battlers know better. Do we not? Or is it?
What is a carbon tax anyway? Many people think it is a tax on carbon. But actually it is a tax on carbon dioxide, a colourless odourless weightless childless jobless gas which makes all life on earth possible. Fifty-eight percent of the human body is made up of carbon dioxide, and birds use it to grow wings. Scientists standing near the CSIRO estimate that a 20% reduction in global carbon dioxide levels will kill us all instantly. A dire warning indeed, and yet Julia "Vaginoplasty" Gillard sees fit to take this risk, simply to satisfy those to whom left-wing principles and Aboriginal land rights are more important than the air we breathe and steel refineries.
But what can you do to survive the carbon tax? First of all, hold your breath. Hold it...hold it...only let it out when you feel you're about to die. If you make sure every breath you take lasts this long you can cut your oxygen bills by 67% and have more money to buy solar panels, which will cut your electricity bills by 45% so you have more money to pay off your gambling debts which Labor wants to deny you the right to amass because of its nanny state agenda.
How will the carbon tax affect your everyday life? It will of course destroy it. In fact the legislation specifically mandates that life is no longer worth living. Political correctness gone mad? It seems so.
But still we must do our best. Carbon tax may crush us beneath its fragrant hoof, but that is no reason to give up hope. A far better reason to give up hope is this:
Thank you for your time.
The short answer of course is: nothing is to be done. It is a fait accompli: Juliar "Julia" Gillard and her mob of baying leftist tree-kangaroos have put the tax in place and we will just have to deal with it until such time as Tony Abbott, limbs flailing, double dissolutions us all to a better place, which may be in 2014 or 2015 depending on El Nino.
And obviously it is a problem, as already reports are filtering through that prices are skyrocketing like directionless petrels on the back of the carbon price. In some places bread is up 36 percent, and it also tastes worse because to cut costs bakers have had to put ground-up pine cones in the dough. Are you happy now, Steve Gibbons MP?
A short list of things that are now unaffordable:
- bread
- milk
- eggs
- some more eggs
- cars
- gondola rides
- rubber gloves
- petrol
- cans to carry petrol in
- diamond rings
- heroin
- legwarmers
- love
Life as we know it is over and so we must live a life as we did not know it but know it now unlike before. Confused? Not nearly confused enough, as Aragorn might say. But the carbon tax is not all fantasy novels and wordplay. It has real-life consequences for real-life Australians.
Take the case of Terrigal's Jean-Marie Hofspeck, who came home from work last Tuesday to find her prize-winning Pomeranians had been slaughtered and her eldest son was now a rabbi. The shock was enough to cause her to immediately build an in-ground swimming pool in her backyard. Perhaps the Australian Labor "Party" sees fit to wash its hands of responsibility for this, but we battlers know better. Do we not? Or is it?
What is a carbon tax anyway? Many people think it is a tax on carbon. But actually it is a tax on carbon dioxide, a colourless odourless weightless childless jobless gas which makes all life on earth possible. Fifty-eight percent of the human body is made up of carbon dioxide, and birds use it to grow wings. Scientists standing near the CSIRO estimate that a 20% reduction in global carbon dioxide levels will kill us all instantly. A dire warning indeed, and yet Julia "Vaginoplasty" Gillard sees fit to take this risk, simply to satisfy those to whom left-wing principles and Aboriginal land rights are more important than the air we breathe and steel refineries.
But what can you do to survive the carbon tax? First of all, hold your breath. Hold it...hold it...only let it out when you feel you're about to die. If you make sure every breath you take lasts this long you can cut your oxygen bills by 67% and have more money to buy solar panels, which will cut your electricity bills by 45% so you have more money to pay off your gambling debts which Labor wants to deny you the right to amass because of its nanny state agenda.
How will the carbon tax affect your everyday life? It will of course destroy it. In fact the legislation specifically mandates that life is no longer worth living. Political correctness gone mad? It seems so.
But still we must do our best. Carbon tax may crush us beneath its fragrant hoof, but that is no reason to give up hope. A far better reason to give up hope is this:
It's been a while
I have not written a blog post for a while, which has probably caused you to get all in a lather, getting all judgmental and stuff. Typical.
But the reason I haven't is that I was on HOLIDAY. And on my holiday I learned these things:
1. If you drive for long enough, your foot literally falls off.
2. Luna Park in Sydney is overpriced and contains terrifying demons wandering around on stilts.
3. On the Gold Coast it rains all the time. Constantly. Any brochures to the contrary are a sick joke.
Oh right, I had a blog post to write. Um, I'll get back to you.
But the reason I haven't is that I was on HOLIDAY. And on my holiday I learned these things:
1. If you drive for long enough, your foot literally falls off.
2. Luna Park in Sydney is overpriced and contains terrifying demons wandering around on stilts.
3. On the Gold Coast it rains all the time. Constantly. Any brochures to the contrary are a sick joke.
Oh right, I had a blog post to write. Um, I'll get back to you.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Go to Hell, Australia
Go to Hell, you preening dandies, congratulating yourself on your superior civilisation, your higher levels of enlightenment, your more advanced phase of humanity, constantly patting your own head with such single-minded enthusiasm it never occurs to you to ask yourself what you're contributing to this world.
Go to Hell, you superior preachers, lecturing away at the lower orders for their failure to think the right thoughts, read the right books, watch the right movies or know the right quotes. Go to Hell you pontificating sacks of air who'd rather spend a week scrutinising a sentence with a magnifying glass for traces of incorrect word usage than spend a minute improving someone's life. Go to Hell you sour, withered bags of bones who know nothing of life but how to suck the joy from it, and who know nothing of humanity but how to take offence from it, and who feed on moral superiority and outrage, and who measure life's wonders only in exuberance crushed, difference homogenised, and spirit extinguished.
Go to Hell you snarling halfwits who can find no relief from the sorrows of life except that comes from identifying someone to blame, whose only reaction to being spat on from above is to look downward to see who they can spit on in turn. Go to Hell you grasping trolls with your windy shrieking greed and your drooling envy and your demands that not a raindrop should fall upon the earth without a slice of it being deposited upon your doorstep, and go to Hell you hollow kleptocrats who build your own power on the sale of warning beacons to be lit whenever someone is getting something that someone else doesn't have.
Go to Hell you hidebound bubbles of self-righteous nothing, with your wailing laments for better times, times when life was simpler and folks were friendlier and the air was sweeter and your days were unperturbed by the anxiety of someone who looked different to you walking the streets without fear.
Go to Hell you savage-brained zealots whose lives are so devoid of pleasure and empty of purpose that your atrophied minds can find occupation only in the pursuit and degradation of those with the audacity to seek happiness in ways that you will decry as unnatural, out of nothing but your own tradition-gnarled loathing for anything that disturbs the slimy stagnation you've grown accustomed to. Go to Hell you slobbering apes, with your perverted sense of satisfaction at the violence you wreak on those whose species you are not worthy to inhabit.
Go to Hell you primeval thugs, who deny agency and pride to members of the opposite sex, lest they be given the unnerving impression that they might be human beings. Go to Hell you snivelling apologists for atrocity, you sniggering dogs of oppression, you sleek, grinning, gloating, hearty, human livestock, who bleat and bellow of equality and fairness up until the point at which your fellow citizen asks if you might be persuaded to share. And go to Hell you vomitous frauds who would throw a veil of dewy-eyed concern over your efforts to keep those you claim to protect in a permanent state of fear and inferiority.
And you too, can go to Hell, you hand-wringing hypocrites, who hide your cowardice and selfishness behind that weeping wall of self-righteousness, who feel the prickles of guilt upon your flesh and will not rest until the source of that guilt is nudged neatly out of your line of sight. Go to Hell, you who wail and beat your breast and dab prettily at your eyes over the tragic plight of those less fortunate, and propose as a solution that those less fortunate be made to stay less fortunate, lest they bother us any further. Go to Hell you self-sainted reptilian liars, who demand that we prevent the poor and the desperate from risking their lives on our seas, and insist that instead they risk their lives in their own countries, where we won't have to worry about them, who cry Compassion as your only watchword when proclaiming your schemes to save people's lives by denying them a life worth living, when lecturing us all on the necessity of cruelty in the service of kindness, and kindness in the service of indifference. Go to Hell you leering goblins of misery, and dig yourselves deeper with every oily, disingenuous word, with every fork-tongued proposal to build better fences to obviate the need to concern ourselves with how we treat our neighbours.
And go to Hell, too, you damnable bigots who cling gleefully to that map of the world that floats before your eyes, a world populated by brown puppets with strings to be pulled, and kindly white puppeteers with plans that are all for the best.
But most of all, go to Hell you lordly chiefs, who seat yourselves on high, atop hills of broken bodies and treasure piles of worldly pain, who draw power and wealth from all those mentioned above. Go to Hell you warlords who owe your position to the dissemination of fear and the force-feeding of hatred, to the fuelling of anger and the widening of divisions. Go to Hell you vampiric stormcrows, spewing darkness and terror onto the quivering masses below, because you know that without darkness and terror someone may catch a glimpse of the vacuuous toads you really are. Go to Hell you avaricious bottom-feeding insects who amass more and more at the expense of those who have nothing, who build your castles from the disappointments of those with not a hundredth your fortune, and a hundred times your worth.
Go to Hell, all of you, for your breeding of inhumanity and profiting from cruelty, your celebration of ignorance and destruction of knowledge, your contempt for the world and vendetta against those you share it with, and your lying, hateful, blustering, selfish, imbecilic rampage through life.
And go to Hell, all of us, who won't lift a finger to change a thing, safe in the knowledge that as long as we can find somewhere that's worse, there's no reason to try to make here any better.
We can all, safely and soundly, go to Hell.
Go to Hell, you superior preachers, lecturing away at the lower orders for their failure to think the right thoughts, read the right books, watch the right movies or know the right quotes. Go to Hell you pontificating sacks of air who'd rather spend a week scrutinising a sentence with a magnifying glass for traces of incorrect word usage than spend a minute improving someone's life. Go to Hell you sour, withered bags of bones who know nothing of life but how to suck the joy from it, and who know nothing of humanity but how to take offence from it, and who feed on moral superiority and outrage, and who measure life's wonders only in exuberance crushed, difference homogenised, and spirit extinguished.
Go to Hell you snarling halfwits who can find no relief from the sorrows of life except that comes from identifying someone to blame, whose only reaction to being spat on from above is to look downward to see who they can spit on in turn. Go to Hell you grasping trolls with your windy shrieking greed and your drooling envy and your demands that not a raindrop should fall upon the earth without a slice of it being deposited upon your doorstep, and go to Hell you hollow kleptocrats who build your own power on the sale of warning beacons to be lit whenever someone is getting something that someone else doesn't have.
Go to Hell you hidebound bubbles of self-righteous nothing, with your wailing laments for better times, times when life was simpler and folks were friendlier and the air was sweeter and your days were unperturbed by the anxiety of someone who looked different to you walking the streets without fear.
Go to Hell you savage-brained zealots whose lives are so devoid of pleasure and empty of purpose that your atrophied minds can find occupation only in the pursuit and degradation of those with the audacity to seek happiness in ways that you will decry as unnatural, out of nothing but your own tradition-gnarled loathing for anything that disturbs the slimy stagnation you've grown accustomed to. Go to Hell you slobbering apes, with your perverted sense of satisfaction at the violence you wreak on those whose species you are not worthy to inhabit.
Go to Hell you primeval thugs, who deny agency and pride to members of the opposite sex, lest they be given the unnerving impression that they might be human beings. Go to Hell you snivelling apologists for atrocity, you sniggering dogs of oppression, you sleek, grinning, gloating, hearty, human livestock, who bleat and bellow of equality and fairness up until the point at which your fellow citizen asks if you might be persuaded to share. And go to Hell you vomitous frauds who would throw a veil of dewy-eyed concern over your efforts to keep those you claim to protect in a permanent state of fear and inferiority.
And you too, can go to Hell, you hand-wringing hypocrites, who hide your cowardice and selfishness behind that weeping wall of self-righteousness, who feel the prickles of guilt upon your flesh and will not rest until the source of that guilt is nudged neatly out of your line of sight. Go to Hell, you who wail and beat your breast and dab prettily at your eyes over the tragic plight of those less fortunate, and propose as a solution that those less fortunate be made to stay less fortunate, lest they bother us any further. Go to Hell you self-sainted reptilian liars, who demand that we prevent the poor and the desperate from risking their lives on our seas, and insist that instead they risk their lives in their own countries, where we won't have to worry about them, who cry Compassion as your only watchword when proclaiming your schemes to save people's lives by denying them a life worth living, when lecturing us all on the necessity of cruelty in the service of kindness, and kindness in the service of indifference. Go to Hell you leering goblins of misery, and dig yourselves deeper with every oily, disingenuous word, with every fork-tongued proposal to build better fences to obviate the need to concern ourselves with how we treat our neighbours.
And go to Hell, too, you damnable bigots who cling gleefully to that map of the world that floats before your eyes, a world populated by brown puppets with strings to be pulled, and kindly white puppeteers with plans that are all for the best.
But most of all, go to Hell you lordly chiefs, who seat yourselves on high, atop hills of broken bodies and treasure piles of worldly pain, who draw power and wealth from all those mentioned above. Go to Hell you warlords who owe your position to the dissemination of fear and the force-feeding of hatred, to the fuelling of anger and the widening of divisions. Go to Hell you vampiric stormcrows, spewing darkness and terror onto the quivering masses below, because you know that without darkness and terror someone may catch a glimpse of the vacuuous toads you really are. Go to Hell you avaricious bottom-feeding insects who amass more and more at the expense of those who have nothing, who build your castles from the disappointments of those with not a hundredth your fortune, and a hundred times your worth.
Go to Hell, all of you, for your breeding of inhumanity and profiting from cruelty, your celebration of ignorance and destruction of knowledge, your contempt for the world and vendetta against those you share it with, and your lying, hateful, blustering, selfish, imbecilic rampage through life.
And go to Hell, all of us, who won't lift a finger to change a thing, safe in the knowledge that as long as we can find somewhere that's worse, there's no reason to try to make here any better.
We can all, safely and soundly, go to Hell.
Monday, June 18, 2012
How To Fairfax (and WIN!)
A lot of people have been talking about Fairfax and where it went wrong and where it can go right and what needs to be fixed and how far back in time we have to travel in our magical time-fridge to fix it.
Now, I am in a unique position to address this issue, because on the one hand I am a Fairfax columnist, which means I am a moribund dinosaur just begging to be put out of my misery, but on the other hand I am a blogger, which means I am an agile, exciting citizen journalist taking my rightful place at the peak of the media mountain and set to make a fortune in promoting nappy rash cream. And on a freakish third hand, I have a keyboard in front of me, which means I am a seasoned expert in the media industry and corporate governance.
As such I, like everyone else in the country, know exactly where Fairfax failed, and exactly how it can succeed.
First of all, it needs to invest more in quality journalism. People want to read quality journalism and it is only by investing in quality journalism that money can be made. Nobody ever made money in Australia by not investing in quality journalism - just look at Solomon Lew. Look at him! Weirdly out of proportion, isn't he? You see me point.
Secondly, engage with readers on social media. This might mean "logging in" to do twitters, or getting a Second Life account, but the important thing is to engage. News is better when it's engaged. A good way to engage with readers is by saying "Thanks for your feedback!" or "That was a good joke about how I'm losing my job! LOL!"
Thirdly, be bloggers. Bloggers are the people who report the news nowadays, not journalists, and being a blogger is the best thing to be. Bloggers are more flexible and intelligent and they are not straitjacketed by old-style notions of what reporting means, so they are free to tell the truth. If you stop being journalists and start being bloggers you will tell more of the truth and less of the not-truth.
Fourthly, stop being bloggers. Blogger don't know anything because they don't wear leather shoes and never hang around in bars with Paul Howes. Bloggers are fine for sitting around in their pyjamas and putting stupid captions on a photo of Tony Abbott in a shower cap, but if you want someone to break into the Watergate you need a good old-fashioned alcoholic, and bloggers will never be that, so stop being bloggers.
Fifthly, don't put up paywalls! What is the first rule of business? Give the customer what they want. Customers don't like paywalls - they will not pay for them. What customers want to pay for is free content. If you give readers free content they will pay through the nose - believe me, the minute you start charging for things, customers will stop paying for them. If you REALLY want to make a lot of money, you have to stop expecting anyone to give you any money. This is an Ironclad Law Of The Media
Sixthly, get a Kickstarter. Kickstarters are a way for Clever People in the Digital Age to make money by asking people to give them money for things. This is different from a paywall because it is crowd-sourcing and is the democratisation of information. What you do is, you set a certain limit that has to be reached, for example "If we raise $2500 I will tell you what the Police Commissioner said at his press conference" and everyone who makes a donation of over $50 gets a t-shirt reading "Journalists Do It Till You're Accountable". In this way everyone feels they have gained Ownership of things, and the media industry thrives in a post-factual world.
Happy Fairfaxing!
Now, I am in a unique position to address this issue, because on the one hand I am a Fairfax columnist, which means I am a moribund dinosaur just begging to be put out of my misery, but on the other hand I am a blogger, which means I am an agile, exciting citizen journalist taking my rightful place at the peak of the media mountain and set to make a fortune in promoting nappy rash cream. And on a freakish third hand, I have a keyboard in front of me, which means I am a seasoned expert in the media industry and corporate governance.
As such I, like everyone else in the country, know exactly where Fairfax failed, and exactly how it can succeed.
First of all, it needs to invest more in quality journalism. People want to read quality journalism and it is only by investing in quality journalism that money can be made. Nobody ever made money in Australia by not investing in quality journalism - just look at Solomon Lew. Look at him! Weirdly out of proportion, isn't he? You see me point.
Secondly, engage with readers on social media. This might mean "logging in" to do twitters, or getting a Second Life account, but the important thing is to engage. News is better when it's engaged. A good way to engage with readers is by saying "Thanks for your feedback!" or "That was a good joke about how I'm losing my job! LOL!"
Thirdly, be bloggers. Bloggers are the people who report the news nowadays, not journalists, and being a blogger is the best thing to be. Bloggers are more flexible and intelligent and they are not straitjacketed by old-style notions of what reporting means, so they are free to tell the truth. If you stop being journalists and start being bloggers you will tell more of the truth and less of the not-truth.
Fourthly, stop being bloggers. Blogger don't know anything because they don't wear leather shoes and never hang around in bars with Paul Howes. Bloggers are fine for sitting around in their pyjamas and putting stupid captions on a photo of Tony Abbott in a shower cap, but if you want someone to break into the Watergate you need a good old-fashioned alcoholic, and bloggers will never be that, so stop being bloggers.
Fifthly, don't put up paywalls! What is the first rule of business? Give the customer what they want. Customers don't like paywalls - they will not pay for them. What customers want to pay for is free content. If you give readers free content they will pay through the nose - believe me, the minute you start charging for things, customers will stop paying for them. If you REALLY want to make a lot of money, you have to stop expecting anyone to give you any money. This is an Ironclad Law Of The Media
Sixthly, get a Kickstarter. Kickstarters are a way for Clever People in the Digital Age to make money by asking people to give them money for things. This is different from a paywall because it is crowd-sourcing and is the democratisation of information. What you do is, you set a certain limit that has to be reached, for example "If we raise $2500 I will tell you what the Police Commissioner said at his press conference" and everyone who makes a donation of over $50 gets a t-shirt reading "Journalists Do It Till You're Accountable". In this way everyone feels they have gained Ownership of things, and the media industry thrives in a post-factual world.
Happy Fairfaxing!
Saturday, June 9, 2012
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