It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has entered the public domain, which means anyone who likes can digitize the whole thing and stick it up online for you (yes you) to download.
And I’m not about to spoil a set-up like that by skipping the punchline.
No bittorrent yet.
Looking back on the Dean campaign, I was dead wrong about how effective the campaign was at turning online energy into real world results. Despite the number of people willing to go out and do things in the real world, Dean didn’t win. He did raise a whole lot of money, and blogs continue to prove effective as money-raising avenues. However, they do that by getting lots of Internet-savvy people to contribute. Even in fund-raising, nobody bridges the gap between the Internet and normal retail politics.
This matters because — back to Dean — you need good retail politics to win. This may change someday. It has not changed yet.
Until the gap is bridged, blog politics will remain an echo chamber. Sometimes it’ll be a left-wing echo chamber and sometimes it’ll be a right-wing echo chamber, but either way it’s not like anyone’s deciding to change their vote.
Counter-argument: the gap has been bridged already. Trent Lott! But Trent Lott was not taken down by bloggers, he was taken down by journalists who chose to pay attention to bloggers. Atrios did the heavy lifting; the Washington Post used the lever he provided.
This suggests that the whole concept of bloggers as pundits is flawed. Perhaps blogs are more useful as information gatherers. This whole adopt-a-journalist thing (which seems to have petered out) may well miss the effective path; perhaps the energies would be better spent feeding corrections back into the media rather than attempting to rebel against it.
The thing of it is, journalism as a field has spent quite some time establishing a reputation for reliability. A somewhat tattered reputation these days, but still. If you in the general sense want people beyond your immediate circle to believe the things you write simply because you said them or because they agree with them, you need that kind of institutional reputation.
Since there is no transitive principle of reputations — people will not trust the Internet more simply because they trust journalists less — it seems not unlikely that the best way to bridge the gap is to piggyback on the media. Kevin Drum going over to blog for the Washington Monthly is the sort of thing I’m thinking of, although that’s not so much piggybacking as it is being co-opted. What you really want is a major newspaper or TV news show identifying blogs as original sources of valid information.
Of course, this is just speculation and the gap is going to be bridged by complete accident. It’s not like Dean knew he was going to raise record amounts of money on the Internet until the wave hit him.
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere has been a novel, a BBC miniseries, and may one day be a movie. Right now, however, it’s going to be a mashup.
At the basic level, it’s a story about a fantastic world underneath the city. I personally find that the Underground puns are fairly significant, because they help link the wildness of the world to the reality of the city — without those allusions, goofy as they can be, the real London would have less meaning. It’s not just a fantastic world beneath the city, it’s a fantastic world that mirrors — perhaps echoes — the city.
What else, what else? Door is deposed nobility, which could be fun to play with. The Goblin Market is cool. The Marquis de Carabas is the kind of figure one might well like to use. Ditto Croup and Vandemar… heck, lots of cool characters.
By the by, we’ve added another gaming meme — the excellent Wednesday Weird — to the gamememe mailing list. Every time a meme from here, the Weird, or Game WISH gets posted, subscribers to gamememe get an email. It’s the easy way to keep up on your meme postings.
[More character noodling. This is for Rob’s Starchild game.]
“Is that Summer or Strummer?”
“Eh, you know, whatever…”
Kai Summer is immensely young, and the heavy overcoat he wears — down to his ankles, collar turned up to his ears — does nothing to hide this. It accentuates his slender frame, skinny like the loosely knotted tie he sometimes wears. His ragged boots swallow his feet whole. You could drop him into a Chicago winter and he’d vanish like he was just another bad poet with too much pride to work retail and not enough time to live.
I’ve never seen him without the overcoat off stage.
On stage, though, he’s someone else. He doesn’t get any bigger, but he uses his guitar to carve electric lines through the air in minor keys that owe more to madness than to music. If you squint just a little you can see a shimmering field of music around him like an aura of sound. I’ve noticed that people playing with him don’t get too close. I can’t blame them; I’d worry about getting sliced in two by a stray power chord.
It is trivial to say that he is the best guitarist of his generation because at the ripe old age of 17, he is the first guitarist of his generation. Perhaps in the end, if Mother doesn’t have her way, he will be known merely as the man who found the possibilities. Perhaps someone else will be the man who developed them.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
He is playing tonight at the Broken Metronome. He told me the other week that he hopes to jam with Mary Pagan someday. It’s the first personal confidence I’ve ever heard from him. Mary? Are you out there? Can you hear me? This critic thinks you should make Kai’s dream come true.
From Lester Shots’ “Beating the Minutes” column in the ChicaGO alternative wheneverwecan.
Sherman Cafe, in Union Square, has free wireless. The coffee is pretty good, too. Good place to hang out on a Sunday afternoon.
You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me.
OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast.
I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories…
Oh, right.
Also I liked the hard core of truth at the middle. There were moments when I worried about a saccharine ending, but not at all. One icicle in particular is perfectly chilling and painful. Kaufman and Gondry have a pretty good understanding of all the ways love can result in people hurting other people.
This happens to be that movie Jim Carrey’s been trying to make where you can forget that he’s Jim Carrey for a little while, by the by. That’s nice too. And Elijah Wood is good, and Kirsten Dunst is good, and so on. But you either like movies written by Kaufman or you don’t.
The Celestial Pictures DVD restoration of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is maybe the clearest print of a Hong Kong movie I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully vivid. The only thing that’d beat it would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I’m not sure I can count that.
OK, look, it’s this pretty:
Look at those reds and blues. They pop. In fact, my only complaint may be that it’s a little too vivid, but I’m not sure that’s not just my modern eyes watching a 70s Technicolor epic.
The first fight scene is pretty decent too, albeit a little slow for someone weaned on John Woo and Tsui Hark. But I still liked it.
And there you have it. As per my speculation yesterday, Zapatero’s threat to pull out his troops has Bush leaning back towards a UN resolution. Nicely done on Zapatero’s part.
Now I’m going to go be sick s’more. Blah. You can tell I’m not well because I’m loopy enough to bitch about being not well here.
The popular right-wing talking point of the moment: "Spain did what Al Qaeda wanted." This is all very well and good, except that Spain is not pulling out of Afghanistan and that Spain is willing to stay in Iraq under certain conditions — mainly a Security Council mandate.
This actually looks like pretty smart diplomacy to me. To the degree that Bush needs Spain to stay in the coalition, he needs to bend to their demands. This would mean giving more say to the UN than he’d like, but those are the breaks of the game, right?
Indeed, one might claim that if Bush fails to make these accomodations, he’s doing Osama’s bidding. One would be a wingnut, mind you — because it’s pretty insane to claim that a world leader is dancing on Al Qaeda’s strings simply because his sense of the right thing to do happens to be something Al Qaeda wants done. You’ve got to consider the entire picture.
Further reading: kos on the US pullout from Saudi Arabia and Josh Marshall on the whole situation.
Another mashup from Kirt "Loki" Dankmyer today: “Hotel California”, by the Eagles. Read the lyrics, remember the times when they seemed like the deepest thing in the world, and… mash!