I should really leave this be, but...

What is it they say about bullies being able to give it out?

Benjanun Sriduagkaew bragging about harassing Rhianna Pratchett back in 2008

Benjanun Sriduagkaew folding up and whimpering (and lying her head off) about Spool Pidgin posts that mock her. 2014.

On a serious note though, if you're someone, especially a person of colour who's suffered online harassment from Benjanun there are ears out there for you. As this link shows, you are from alone. You don't have to keep suffering alone. Together we can build a safer, happier community without the venom and hypocrisy.

Forged Orwell: Famous Quotes He Never Made

I was struck by the quote above when I read it on the Internet. It's quintessentially Orwell:  stark, to the point, against the grain. In fact I was glad others out in Webland had memed the quote as my brain hadn't retained it at all. And the quote's had quite a life out there...

(Spool Note: Liam Neeson?)

Well I'm glad whoever got that tattoo (if it isn't just a bit of Photoshopping) didn't put Orwell's name beneath. Because Orwell never wrote it. At least, Wikipedia can't find it in the original canon (Though the earliest appearances are in academic texts from 1982 and, fittingly, 1984).

It's far from the only Faux-well. Here's another:

This one shares the same sentiment as the former and, for my money, was probably created by someone who once heard the 'universal deceit' quote but couldn't remember how it was phrased. A copy of a copy, if you will. Leastways, I haven't been able to find the source for this one either.

Both the above quotes are at least plausible (I can just about see 'The Guv'ner'* himself wishing he'd written the first). But check out this next one:

Here we have drifted into purest wishful thinking. As far as I can remember Orwell never used the term 'the media' in that sense, neither did most people back in the thirties and forties. More likely, someone with opinions on the current political landscape has replaced the term 'Big Brother' with a bogeyman of our own time. You have to wonder who the creator of this thinks George Orwell actually is.  The Smoking Man?

Here's another, similar example:

It's all over the web this one, but for the life of me I can't find a single recitation that can also give its source (a common result in this endeavor, I found out.). I've never known Orwell to use a colon so early in a sentence. He didn't have to: he wasn't in the business of making bullish memes. Even if he conveyed that idea somewhere in his journalism and this quote is a summarization you have to ask what George meant by 'liberal'. It's possible he was thinking more along the lines of David Lloyd-George than Al Gore.

OK, here a sentiment has been wrapped in new words (please note each quotation above begins differently). Orwell did say this:

"Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf"

-Notes On Nationalism (1945)


Yet in The Tribune column itself he's specifically referring to the British pacifist movement before and during World War II, a viewpoint that neither Orwell nor the general gaze of history particularly entertains (In another column he describes pacifism in the face of Nazi aggression as being more like a mental illness than a political outlook. That's in The Lion And The Unicorn I think. Feel free to look it up). If George Orwell had intended the statement to be a salute to the 21st century US marines or Duck Dynasty I'm sure he would have come to the point. He was good like that.

Also, note the faux-Orwell quote's use of 'rough men' and their opposite, the (presumably) soft men's insistence on lounging in bed. Orwell's statement has been stretched, Flanderized, pumped full of steroids. Orwell's pacifists are at least portrayed as active voices, not limp-wristed somnambulists in onesies.

The faux-quote reeks of the increasing divide in modern day US politics or at least the right wing narrative of it:  the muscular doers of conservatism--White America's survivalist Spartans--having to carry the great democrat dandy, ingrate that he is. And for lack of an Orwell they can truly use they will happily construct one.

On the other hand, my searches turned up almost as many left wing uses of fake quotes, if you count the Occupy Movement and the greater part of Wikileaks and Anonymous. And perhaps that hints toward the cause of Orwell's explosion across social media and the political spectrum simultaneously.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy are newborn sociological beasts, stumbling to walk upright. It makes sense their afterbirth-damp palms would scrabble for a post to lean on, especially one proven so dependable over half a century or more.

And that's what Orwell, or at least the image of him, is:  a dependable post, a firm-but-not-painful handshake, a neighbor whom you can lend your Black & Decker Workmate. Revolutionary movements can find inspiration in any person consensus deems a rebel.

One could get all cantankerous about all this appropriation and downright rapine, start screaming about he who controls the past, 2 plus 2 being 4 and all that stuff. But I don't know as if you can really fight it. Humans make stuff up. You know that.

I'm not as defeatist here as you might think. Not in the long term. I think we have to accept all the beloved writers of the modern era will accumulate spurious quotes and apocryphal tales. All part and parcel of being beloved. It was the same for Homer and the ancients, except this time round technology allows us quick access to the original material and its historical context. Orwell will remain long after our current political zeit has geisted. So I dare say all that accumulation has been rendered harmless.

Or, as Quentin Crisp once said about the state of his home, 'I find the dust doesn't get any worse after the first three months'.

Ah... classic Crisp, that. I think... 


                              ***************************************



*One bleary night me and my pals wondered why famous authors don't get rock statesmen-like nicknames such as 'The King' or 'The Boss'. The Guv'ner seemed spot on for George and it's just sort of stuck. Feel free to use it, though right wing libertarian types need not apply (not that I can stop you). To truly earn the use of 'The Guv'ner' one must have a general leaning toward democratic socialism (so we can identify each other from the tinfoil hat brigade on the web) and--and this is the inner sanctum as it were--have a dislike of sugar in your tea. 


 

Cliche Round Up: SFWA Bulletin Sexism Debate

The Love Wizard greets our photographer

 Long time spool readers (yes they DO exist. Shut up) will recall a post I did on the hapless cliches and general bullshit of the SF-lit blog community. I thought it might be a good (and popular, community-bridging) exercise to go back and check up on the state of the arse. And where better than the latest flame-war, the first casualty of which is almost always the English language.

It all began when the SFWA allowed their member's bulletin to house that golden, model T-ford of all SF fandom cliche: two hairy-belled, sweaty veteran male authors discussing women editors as sexual objects. Legendary rocketship qwertybangers, Mike 'The Love Wizard' Resnick and Barry 'Wingman' Malzberg lent us insight into the industry-as-was:

"Anyone who's seen photos of Bea from the 50s knows she was a knockout as a young woman."

And:

"During its first few years of existence CFG was populated exclusively by men. Then Bea joined. Then the members' wives got a look at Bea in her swimsuit at the 1950 Midwestcon. Then the club's makeup changed to the 50% men and 50% women that has existed ever since."

And:

"Let me tell ya, Mary Shelley was quite the piece of  ass. I was trying to give her some insight into the industry and Malzberg here--you dog!--wanted to give her insight into the industry four times a night! Wasn't to be though. Guess who got all preachy? Yup, H.G. Wells, cock-blocking us again...'

OK, maybe I made that last one up. But I'm not a member of the SFWA and I don't have a copy of the bulletin to hand. I'm told Love Wizard and Wingman refuse to put anything on the net, due to it being filled with 'Darn Lesbian Nosferatu'.

And so it came as a genuine shock to the boys and the SFWA (who tried to balance the piece with a cover of a barbarian woman in a chain-mail bikini) when people chided them for their old-time attitudes. Old hands at the game, they seized this opportunity to unleash the Ur-cliche of all those under critical fire:

 In case of emergency, smash the glass and grab the Stalin analogy. Warning: may contain hyperbole.

                                                                             *


Would a brave and reasoning knight come defend them? Well, until he arrives, Resnick and Malzberg will have to make do with ol' racist, sexist, nineties-fixated, face-like-a-hen's-egg-filled-with-tepid-vomit Vox Day in this, his sober and level-headed post, 'Seriously Fascist Women's Association'.

Day cut and pasted a long list of "the most censorious liberal fascists in the SFWA". Day (who never ceases to inform us he is  'highly intelligent... and can still out-sprint most men 15 years younger') doesn't cosplay all that much. But when he does, he does so as Senator McCarthy.

Eager for the cliche crown, Day finishes off by dropping some Tea Party beats into his general rabies: 

"It shouldn't be long before all criticism of  the Obama administration are banned in the SFWA Forum."

Hell yeah. Have you seen Barrack in a two piece? Bea ain't got shit on him.


A writer pal of Day's (using Morse code from her bunker) adds:  "And they have no memory of the past and want to erase it (Spool note: Say whu-?).  Which is why by keeping alive the memory of SF, Mike and Barry MUST be silenced."

 That's Sarah Hoyt, who later, (and presumably smoking Ayn Rand's ashes through a Prometheus award) has this to say about the critics:  "Maybe they feel inadequate compared to the giant women of the past, who made it big despite working in offices where pinching your secretary’s bottom wasn’t out of line."

Well, in fairness, they were Giant women, Sarah. They were probably more concerned with getting their husbands out of that oven two lost children tricked them into with magic beans.

Here, clearly, is a woman of, er, real nuance when it comes to gender politics:  

"(These people are) the sort of person who thinks “because I have a vagina is a winning argument in every circumstance, instead of just the trump card on an argument with your significant other on who is going to do the dishes."

Or how about some classic pseudolution cliche? "Women don’t like confrontations.  I think this is evolutionary, baked in the cake from when the pregnant female needed the help of the band.  Women are likely to go around, give hints, and try to solve the problem by other means. "

Not only does Hoyt achieve pseudolutionary cliche nirvana here, she does so while suffering a bout of amnesia as to the very character of  the people she was originally criticizing. Maybe, like she said,  Hoyt has no memory of the past and wants to erase it.

More Hoyt wisdom: "You want to compete?  You have a dream of making it in science fiction?  Then shut up and write.  And stop being convinced everyone is making you a victim because you have a vagina."

(On a personal note, this is singularly the best writing advice I've ever received. I've really no excuse now)

A Sarah Hoyt cover. Note the man is being patriotic and thus has no time to pinch your ass. Deal with it, socialist!

                                                                        *

So the boys and their defenders owned all the classic cliche. But their young gun critics delivered in terms of faddish, seasonal banalities.

*headdesk* and 'Teh' (as in 'the') were inevitable. I've long made my peace with that. Death and taxes etc.

Some cliches, though, seem to have mercifully gone extinct. No one, for instance, accused anyone of 'showing his/her/your ass', a chestnut that ran rampant across 2010's #Racefail. More shockingly, 'fail' (used as a noun) only appeared a measly three times, thank Baal.  The curse may be lifting. There was only one elephant in a particularly lonely room, too.

'Douchebaggery' (ie nasty, idiotic behavior), however, had a good run, in line with its current popularity. SL Huang led with: 'They’re the people who made your public face into sexist douchebaggery.' Not literally of course; that would require Resnick and Malzberg squirting cold water into their rectal cavities and firing it out into a rough portrait of, you, the reader, onto a stretched canvas (something Huang noticeably provides no photographic evidence for).

But by far and away the most overused, gawdawful, help-itself-to-your-reading-tolerence's-last-loo-roll, stock phrase was 'Old men yelling at clouds', a homage (or 'rip off') of a Simpsons episode. Reflected humor is a beautiful thing, here allowing critics to pound two chauvinists with a lump of ageism.  

 I bumped into it reeeepeatedly while searching. Oh yes. A Trick Of Light blog is typical of the genre:

 These Old White Men start yelling at clouds and suddenly (SFWA's) work doesn’t seem to count for anything. That’s not right. It’s not right on top of a whole pile of things that aren’t right.

 (readers will soon note there is indeed a pile of something alright, and FOX television want it back)

Angela Highland earned extra points for: "the same sort of cloud-yelling, cane-shaking, rampaging sexists that can’t deal with the notion of girl cooties all over their precious rocketship stories." with its ladling of emergent jejunette ‘girl cooties’ into the mix.

Girlie Jones painted us all a bleak, dystopian future:  “Old Men Yelling at Clouds” btw should become the actual term for this stuff". Clearly a boot in the face of humanity forever. Or maybe that should be an old sock.

Not satisfied with letting this phrases’s once-lighthearted corpse hang from its gallows, Roqoo depot accompanied his blog post, Old Men Yelling At Clouds, with a most amusing ‘meme’, press-ganging a popular photo-meme of Sean Bean in GOT with the popular meme caption ‘______ is/are coming’ (for this one insert ‘lady writers’). The idea being Mike Resnick is a bit like Sean Bean. A sexist Bean. Not Bean the man, Bean the Meme.

No, I think you'll find geeky, overused, continually-borrowed visual humor is coming. As bloody bastard always.

Y'know, It was actually a funny episode...

                                                                      *

Despite the progressives wide platter of faddish arse, I feel one has to come down on the side of the lady-lovin', cognac-sipping forces of sexist regression, who really pulled out all the stops to bring us classic mad men-era broad-analysis swiftly followed by perhaps the most pitiful attempt to duck and hide behind George Orwell's mustache yet known. None of yer modern tat, oh no! This stuff was old when Heinlein and DeCamp were scribbling Rice Burroughs fan fiction. You know that feeling of admiration mixed with pity you'd feel whenever they wheeled WWI veterans up to the cenotaph? Exactly that.

However, individually speaking, hats off to Foz Meadows, who nobly climbed over the hurdle of being morally right to bring us a startling piece of boilerplate, cliche-blistered 'snark' (as the kids call it. Well, by kids I mean 30+ year old people with a Wordpress account. Bloody Wordpress).

In--you guessed it--'Old Men Yelling At Clouds', the author deep-fries her words in that blog bromide people are want to call 'Fisking'. 'Fisking' is when you cut and paste someone else's article (here, Wizard and Wingman's aforementioned gyno-Stalin freak out) and then intersperse it with your own 'snark'.

The upshot? The blogger gets to think they're Jon Stewart. The reader has to amble through stodge. 'Fisking' is a boom industry in Blogland.

The prose is loyal to the hallowed traditions of both 'fisking' and the more frantic end of social justice-minded posts, in which the author asks a series of rhetorical questions. A series of rhetorical questions, understand? You hear me now, Resnick? A hotdamn series of rhetorical questions, the final clause of which is rendered in italics for hardly any reason?  

Nothing wrong with the structure then. Jobsagud'un. Check also: a warning about 'explosive ranting' (Call the bomb squad!), a '*headdesk*', a 'teh womenz', an inappropriate yet increasingly de rigeur rape analogy (other similes are available, viewers!) and another 'old men yelling at clouds', though Meadows nearly scuppers the deal in the same paragraph by flirting with originality.

(A non-cliche-related note, but there's a bit where she says a Resnick story about a true messiah materializing 50 years from now is 'debunking Judaism'. Now I'm no theologian (unless you count those 20 years I spent under the tutelage of Maimonades), but surely he'd be (notionally) debunking Christianity with that one? Am I missing something here? What if I wrote this last question in italics; would that help?)

A worthy winner. But it was neck and neck with many other contenders--both defensive and critical--and, ultimately, it was the taking part that counted. Probably. I'm sending a desk and some bandages to all entrants.


(Update: The curse continues! )

Iain Duncan Smith To Receive Stern Wagging Finger

IDS to be given a good telling-off by Work and Pensions select committee

By Dan Gilbert, our parliamentary correspondent

In a landmark victory for British democracy, the work and pensions select committee has announced that it intends to question Ian Duncan Smith over his misuse of statistics sometime next month-ish.

“IDS claimed that 8,000 people had moved into work as a result of the benefit cap," one parliamentary insider told The Spool today, "in order to give the impression they had simply not been bothered to find work until Uncle Ian told them to pull their socks up.”

Iain Duncan Smith defending his statistics yesterday, before telling the committee he once beat up Saracen from the TV show Gladiators outside a nightclub in Loughborough. 

 “For such a prominent politician to behave in this manner is unbelievable. Any schoolboy aspiring to a political career knows you only bullshit people on things they don't know--that's a wide canvas when you represent this bunch of ignorant plebs--but lying about how fucked they are just won't fly,' he added. "The hapless bastards are living it, for Christ's sake!”

Shit at Lying

Our anonymous source went on to highlight the Conservative party's concerns regarding IDS' competency in general:

 “When it came to implementing technology in the DWP, Ian was a visionary. He devised a system making it impossible for well-meaning individuals working in a job center to help anyone by limiting the information they have access to; departmentalizing all processes and decisions to the point no one can give a dole-dosser any meaningful advice. Or even reasons as to why a given decision had even been made.

 "Indeed, his recent change to council tax benefit--where a late payment of a tenner or so will see your whole benefit mis-allocated and the bill hiked up by 10 times or more--was, to quote Sir Norman Tebbit, fucking inspired. 

"Don't get me wrong," our insider continued, "we know we can't build any of the things we'd like to see while in power, so we're settling for shanking the life out of something we detest--namely, poor people. Ian has undeniably delivered in that respect. But the problem is he's shit at lying, and that's a serious issue for any Tory. It's that whole £53 a week thing all over again...”

(IDS recently came under criticism after claiming he could live on £53 a week, the amount a job seeker could now expect to receive after IDS' reforms).

 “It's like he doesn't get the whole concept of plausibility," our insider said. "Never mind the fact he's probably never spent less than three figures on a pair of shoes in his life, many of the people he's saying this to will have tried to live on that kind of budget. They already know it isn't possible without living like some character in a particularly shabby Kafka novel stuffed with dog hair and 10p cans of beans. You can't piss right in someone's mouth and call it lemonade. You just can't.”

Denial

IDS faces a second rebuke over his decision to lie about the fact he had been caught lying. When questioned by MP Rushanara Ali over the select committees decision to question him, IDS denied that any such decision had taken place. 

“It's like he can't stop,” the Shadow Minister for international development told us earlier this morning.  “He knows he's lying, you know he's lying, he knows you know and all that, but he carries on anyway. We've taken to calling him 'Bullshit Smith' around The Commons. I overheard him talking to David Heath the other day about when he used to jam with Trent Reznor and how they built a rocket-powered skateboard together in his shed. What a wanker.”

Rancid Hopeless Bullshit Merchant 

Little hope is held that IDS will change his ways.

 “When you misrepresent statistics to demonise one section of the populace in the eyes of another there have to be consequences, and we'll be giving him a right dressing down, never fear” Dame Anne Begg MP, Chair of the Select Committee said yesterday.

But few in parliament believe this stringent measure will have much effect, our insider told us:

 “I've tried sitting him down in private with a drink and saying 'Look mate, you've got to stop lying all the time, it's making us look like a pack of arrogant privileged arseholes'. He just gives you this glazed look and denies it all. I caught a peep at an address he's been putting together for the Commons, something about 60% of all benefits being spent on rum, ganga and trance music. 

"We'll probably have to drop him like he was a cat-shit and napalm burrito before the next election. After all, if there's one decent lesson he has taught us it's to shoot the wounded the  moment things get tough. It's only fair we honour him by taking his wisdom to heart.”

It's Clear These 'New Atheists' Are Biased Toward... Er...

This post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the New Atheism of the 1990s and 2000s, (with a) strange indifference--except at the margins--to all religions except Christianity. 

-Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense


A bizarre and wholly irrational fixation on Islam, as opposed to the evils done by other religions, has been masquerading in the dark under the banner of rational atheism for way too long. 

-Glenn Greenwald, columnist 

Open Email to Adnan Oktar: I claim my Trillions (of Turkish Lira)!

Dear Adnan Oktar (or Harun Yahya, whatever you prefer),



As Turkey's foremost anti-evolutionist, back in 2008 you offered 7-10 (accounts vary) trillion Turkish Lira to anyone who could prove the existence of a 'transitional fossil' and therefore evolution. You don't seem to be currently offering it (that'll give the evolutionists the wrong impression, surely?) but, given I haven't seen David Attenborough with a diamond-tipped walking cane recently, I thought I'd try my hand.

One word for you, Mr Otkar- Archeopteryx. I can only surmise you haven't seen one of these prehistoric creatures, but they are as-near-as-damn to what you call a transitional fossil. Archeopteryxi are exactly somewhere between dinosaur and bird. A birdosaur, if you will, or Tweet-Rex.

It runs like this-

Dinosaur-----Birdosaur-------Birdie!

Or backwards through time-

Birdie------Birdosaur-------Dinosaur!

Pretty watertight, I think you'll agree.

(Addendum: I also have many pictures I've cut out of various magazines. A few of them concern this 'birdosaur' theory of mine. I can produce them upon request) 

Honestly though, I'm flabbergasted no one has sent you this evidence before so as to get their (fluctuating) trillion lira reward. I'm laughing my face into a likeness of Yoda and Lionel Ritchie's bastard child here! To think I will soon rub shoulders with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Chris DeBurgh. Squeeee!

(Squeeee is a thing we say on the internet, BTW. You've legally banned a few websites in your own country so I wasn't sure if you'd know that one.)

I can't come to Turkey to collect my reward (unless you can wire me some of it), but if you email me I'll happily meet you at Leicester Train station. There's a cash machine nearby.

Finally, despite your evidence of 'Darwin's fraud' being, erm... a bit too freestyle for some tastes, I'd like to thank you for making me a trillionaire. I can't begin to tell you how it'll improve my life- no more shopping at Aldi for this lad, no Siree! The first thing I intend to do is splash out on a party of surreal proportions, in which every single person I know (and their mates) gets a uniquely tailored cupcake.

But the true centerpiece of this happy new trillionaire's dingdong will be an ice statue of you, Mr Oktar Sir, riding a Diplodocus with Kim Kardashian.

Yrs,

James Worrad

Guest Blog!!! Dan Gilbert: The Future Has Neither Hook-Hand Nor Copyright: Of Piracy and Distribution

High time 20th century-style mass distribution took a hit from the reality-pipe, says Dan Gilbert in this, his second Spool invasion! (BTW- If you Ctrl+C+V this, I will personally hunt you down and skin you. Seriously.).

Piracy on the High Paddling Pool

Piracy is always a fashionable topic in the piss-ridden paddling pools that make up online forums, and the blanket block on the Pirate Bay that came into effect last week sparked a fresh round of flame wars, 'I reckons', and caps lock rants. You can always tell when you're faced with a knotty problem- people will split into two polarized camps before flinging shit at one another, a form of ammunition neither side is ever short of.

The two camps in the piracy issue are equally loathsome. We have the shrill indignant types who tell you piracy will destroy art and media as we know it, and that those who download are stealing from the pockets of producers and genuine consumers alike (bullshit).

Opposing them are the digital freedom fighters, claiming they’re sticking it to The Man and attacking the establishment by watching dodgy copies of The Matrix in their Mum's basement (also bullshit).   

As easy as it is to pour scorn on both sides- and in an effort to make this guest rant at least look like an article- I'll have a stab at highlighting the actual issue, and what we can do about it.

Death to the Unskippable Finger-Wag!

The thing we have to accept is that the internet, and technology in general, dashed ahead of society before most of us even noticed, much less adjusted to it. When I was at school, computers were 'the future'; everyone told you they were going to be huge, and everyone nodded sagely, but most people didn't really give it any more credence than any of the other world-changing things you'd see on Tomorrow's World. 

Computers were the preserve of weird-looking terminal virgins; noisy, clunky, ugly things more likely to piss you off and end up in the bin rather than take over the world. Twenty years later, we have stuff that makes many SF imaginings look quaint.

As far as piracy goes, this has caused two big changes. Digi-swag is now easier and more convenient to get hold of than going to a shop and buying it legitimately, and the end product is often superior to the legitimate one. Previously, a dodgy copy of a film had to be obtained through a mate in the pub or a car-boot sale, and was usually a grainy mess copied VHS to VHS. That, or filmed from the back of a cinema with a pre-digital camcorder; you couldn't see half of the screen and you still had to suffer the noise of some popcorn-munching halfwit one row behind, asking his girlfriend what was going on every ten minutes.

Now I can download a film quicker than it takes to watch it, in DVD quality, and without the unskippable finger-wagging ad claiming piracy is akin to stealing a tank and driving it through an orphanage.

I find myself downloading cracked copies of games I've paid for legitimately because they'll work without the soon to be scratched up/lost/indefinitely borrowed CD. Other times I've downloaded stuff I couldn't afford to buy, and would have just borrowed off a mate anyway. It's not that I don't want to support the people that make the products I love; I just don't want to use antiquated, demonstrably inferior means of acquiring them.

The Future Arrives in Micro-Payments

Many in the gaming industry have demonstrated it is possible to embrace this new technology and still get paid. Turbine, responsible for Dungeons and Dragons online, was looking at shutting shop on the RPG a few years ago due to lack of customers. In a final attempt to keep things going, they switched from the traditional monthly subscription model to a free-to-play one. Essentially, they gave the bulk of the game away, and made cash through 'micro payments', where people could unlock game features quicker than they could through play. How? By throwing cash in Turbine's direction.

The end result was a 500% increase in profits, and a player base that doesn't exclude people who can't afford it. This model can't be applied to all forms of media (or even all genres of games), but it does suggest the problem lies more with our increasingly out of date business models, rather than a desire to get something for nothing.

Another example is 'Barely Political', which started out as one chap and a few mates posting parody pop songs and comedy sketches on You Tube – now they have a budget, access to studios and still maintain complete control over what they do.  No TV contract or DVD sales required (though they do sell T-shirts and other tat if that's your thing).

Down Sails, Up Periscope.

While I don't have all the answers as to what these new models will be, the one thing we can say for sure is a lot of people in-between the producers of media and their audience will no longer be required. I can't help but suspect this is the real reason for resistance to abandoning the old ways of doing things. 

It's no different from any other industry that's become obsolete, and while I don't relish the idea of putting people out of a job (most of them, anyway), if we can put more control in the hands of  people actually creating the stuff we like- and make distribution cheaper, more convenient and less demanding on resources- shouldn't we give it a go?

As for Pirate Bay, the unsinkable ship has become a submarine, and a quick search on Google will show you how to circumvent the block with about as much tech know-how as it took you to log on in the first place, a fact that has seen Pirate Bay's number of users increase since the ban. If that doesn't make you think we need to find new ways of doing things, well...  you probably manufacture and distribute DVDs for a living.

And you thought Spool Pidgin was piss-poor blogging!

An almost hypnotically cringeworthy article from the Huffington post. Grace Ellen Jones--a good fashion expert, something she should have kept to--seemingly hasn't learned from The Wire's Omar Little when he famously said- 'You come at the King, you better not miss'. I don't think she even tried to aim.



If you're gonna (very publicly) critique one of the most undisputed pieces of science ever, at least have the decency to actually read about it, not listen to what you're pals are mumbling at weed parties.



Quote- 'we are not actually the apex of human evolution, as Darwin's linear theory would have us believe.' 


Evolutionary theory does NOT claim this, not even slightly. There is no 'apex', no 'pinnacle' to evolution.



Then there's a bit about Neanderthals being our direct ancestors (Not true), 'incontrovertible' evidence human civilization is older than science say it is (Why let carbon dating get in the way of things, eh?), the generous use of the words 'quantum' and 'consciousness' (Bullshit's 'Get out of Jail Free' cards) and, before you know it, the Mayans and their bleedin' calendar arrive.



Now I'm not having a go at her lack of credentials, not at all (I don't have any either regarding evolution, just a classics degree). But if I had to write a critique about Alexander McQueen I'd at least have the decency to read his Wikipedia article, wouldn't you? It'd be the sensible thing, not to mention that it might just prevent me showing my ass to the internet at large.



I guess it's the Huffington Post I'm mad at. They should be more responsible than this, or at least tell Jones to do more research. I hate to say this, but even The Sun or The Daily Mail wouldn't print this. Is The HP simply incompetent, or might it be that putting 'Darwin was Wrong' as a title guarantees loads of irate comments, in turn generating revenue from advertising?

Precisely why I'm venting here and not over there. Apologies...