Tag: review

Crime and punishment and sensemoral

The things I’ve enjoyed most since I’ve left are just mundane things that allow me congenial interactions with people. Paying for the bus. Talking to the person you’re sitting next too. Buying a sandwich. Excusing yourself when you pass someone on an escalator. Helping people. I helped a woman get her pram off the bus this morning, and she probably walked away thinking ‘what a nice young man’ without realising I’ve just spent two years locked inside cesspool of human indignity for threatening a room full of people with a firearm.

→ Teamliquid.net, Amnesia: 2 Years In Prison – A Man’s Story

For both games, two 6 gram weights was almost too much, yet with only one weight in the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse, it felt a little whippy and I had to dial down the DPI a notch from 4000 DPI range to about 3500 DPI. If there had been a 2 or three gram weight option, it would have been perfect and I probably would have been able to boost the DPI settings even higher than 4000. In any event, my hand was not fatigued in the least by the end of either gaming marathon sessions, this is something which happens all too often for me and some mice I literally have to take a break or risk hand cramps.

→ Everthing USB, Anthony Garland: Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Gaming Mouse Review

The lesson, basically, is that a company won’t do well in the developing world simply by hawking cheap, out-of-date hardware after it’s become obsolete in places like America. Companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung spend a lot of time and money developing new phones that you and I might consider old-fashioned or odd, and with good reason: Emerging markets are huge. The 8th, 9th and 10th largest phone seller in the world, by volume, are companies you’ve never heard of—ZTE, G-Five and Huawei—which have made heaps of money selling millions of customers their first phones.

→ Gizmodo, John Herrman: The most popular phone in the world

Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren’t widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn’t include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights.

→ Wall Street Journal, Marcel Dicke & Arnold van Huis: The six-legged meat of the future

By the next morning—day six—the three were well aware that they’d made a terrible mistake. But what could they do? They sat on the benches, facing each other. They had no watch. Nothing to read. No pen or paper. They tried to distract themselves with conversation, but they had little to say. “It started to get quiet,” says Etueni. “All I was thinking about was water and juice.”

→ GQ, Michael Finkel: Here be monsters

On punching suckers

So why have we ended up here? Why Sucker Punch? Well: Movies have to make money. And risks don’t sell. After the ’90s came the backlash; Strong Women survived, but they no longer got the attention they once did. In the absence of a widespread enthusiasm for Girly Power, misogyny—as always—crept back in.

→ The Atlantic, Sady Doyle: ‘Sucker Punch’ and the Decline of Strong Woman Action Heroines

Though her name and her pigtails infantilize Babydoll, inside her dreamworld, everything is sexually charged; her skirts get shorter and her hair gets longer. Just one of the many clues that we are not actually inside the mind of a young girl, but inside Zack Snyder’s spank bank!

→ Jezebel, Dodai Stewart: Why Sucker Punch Really, Truly Sucks

Snyder’s ideas about women may be weird, and messed up, and objectifying (and I don’t think they always are, but that’s another discussion), but at the end of the day, he wants them in his lens. When he got the chance to tell an original story, he chose to tell one about women.

→ Alyssa Rosenberg: Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle: On “Sucker Punch”

But there’s more than just playing with the building blocks of nerd culture going on here. That would be fun, but Snyder is interested in something trickier, more complex and possibly just outside of his grasp – he wants to explore the role of women in culture, the impact of the male gaze and the concept of sexualized self-empowerment. That’s a big topic for a supposedly dumb action film.

→ Badass digest, Devin Faraci: SUCKER PUNCH Is Thrilling, Smart… And Deeply Flawed

If when asked, “Tell me about your character,” all that can be said is, “She is abused,” you have not told me anything about who she is. You are allowing the violence to define her and rather than showing someone rising against oppression, you are basically just perpetuating it by erasing her and leaving only what has been done in its place.

→ Cave City Sink: This movie made me feel bad to be alive: A review of Sucker Punch

Ode to Nook: Reading ebooks in an eink eworld.

My awesome mother gave me an ebook reader as birthday present, which sorta proves that if you bitch, whine and drop hints like a rabbit shits, someone will give in. I have tons of stuff which I’m slowly transferring to the Nook, and reading is encroaching on my podcast listening which is a good thing. There’s no app for organizing your documents on the computer, so I’m using the competent but ass-ugly Calibre for this. I might not be paying enough attention, or I might just have low tolerance for stupid interfaces, but using Calibre isn’t very efficient. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. I’ve found an app for syncing Instapaper articles which works like a charm though. (Ephemera)

All in all, I enjoy using the Nook. It’s easy enough to use and once you get used to reading on a computer device in broad daylight you’ll be annoyed with all the gadgets which aren’t legible in direct light. E ink is awesome and very pleasant to read — not quite like paper but miles beyond LCD screens. (Although if you spend your days in murky settings you might go for the backlit iPad.) It’ll be interesting to see how the usability will change once winter and darkness comes.

I jailbroke the Nook but had little use for it. Using Internet over 3G would be useful if there was a good RSS app and/or syncing with a desktop app like Evernote, so jailbreaking might become more interesting once the proper Android apps are adapted for the Nook LCD.

The battery only lasts some 400 page turns over three days, but Barnes & Noble seem to consider it within acceptable levels. I concede that it’s not an undue burden to charge the thing every other night, but it galls me that they’re advertising it as lasting for 10 days with “normal use” without mentioning that “normal use” is “up to one hour per day.” Their support personell is quick to respond but are writing straight from a flowchart — I don’t know if it’s corporate culture or unmotivated kids, but if they replaced them with scripts they’d still improve on service and “the human touch.”

Because I’m a positive and creative person I express my disappointment through poetry in odd meter. If you can get someone to read this with a deep voice and British accent I will send you a present. Until then, imagine Ian McKellen doing a dramatic reading:


Quite a device, my Nook
it’s swell in the sun!
People stop and stare,
it fails to impress no-one.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So I’ve grown quite fond
of this Nook of mine.

But compared with your ads,
“foul!” ring my cries,
the sparkle and shine,
mostly mirrors and lies
“go to page” is a “feature”
we got with point four.
as if skipping pages
was unheard of before.

Browsing books is a pain,
all’s one big directory,
Sorting Gutenberg documents
like colon endoscopy.

No apps for the desktop
is vexing indeed
While non-standard USB
make hairlines recede.

I don’t mind that it scratches,
dulls or is slow,
But wish your support wasn’t also.
They read from a sheet,
and not my complaint,
perhaps y’all lay off the lead paint?

Quite a device, my Nook
it’s nimble and fun!
People stop and ask,
and I recommend it to some.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So despite Barnes and Noble
I’m fond of this Nook of mine.

Crooked little vein – a few thoughts.

Ever since I found Warren Ellis‘ Transmetropolitan in the Reykjavik library, I’ve kept an eye on him. I know I’ve linked his blogs often enough, and he’s long ago reached critical mass when it comes to finding odd things online – I don’t think he has to do any lifting these days, but rather have all the disciples of Whitechapel scouring the web for wrong.

My copies of Transmet were bartered for food a couple of years ago, but I still hit his blog a couple of times a week and follow him on Twitter. The persona he’s built around himself is charming — an alcoholic misanthrope with a heart of gold and a twinkle in his glass eye — and he’s a very prolific writer and blogger and whatnots.

I’ve had it in my mind to buy his novel Crooked little vein since I heard of it. Plodding around Stockholm I found it as a small paperback, and bought it along two other exculpations for illegal downloading. Took less than a day to get through the 260 pages, including the recipe for roasted garlic at the end.

I know exactly who I will give this book to now that I’m done reading it; Someone who hasn’t trolled Ellis webpages for the past couple of years. Because it reads like a very long and rambling blog post, or a bunch of 3AM tweets; The story and the characters are cardboard cutouts on which to hang bizarre phenomena and amusing word combinations. It reads like a Spider Jerusalem rant, and those were fine because they didn’t stretch longer than a spread and ended on a full page panel of someone shitting themselves, which is always good for closure.

Some of the scenes are well written, but they are few. The saline injection bit is one of only two moments where the narrator actually feels present in the moment. The rest is scenery and posturing. There’s never a feeling that anything really matters. I don’t mean this in the bleak oh, nothing matters everything is gray let’s cut ourselves way, but rather that nothing that happens in the novel has any real consequences. There’s one sympathetic character who actually seems to have an internal struggle going on, but Bob Ajax doesn’t show up for more than a couple of pages and is then dispatched by alcohol and cops.

There’s one central idea that I take away with me after reading, and that is how the concept of “mainstream” has changed. It’s how I understand the long tail discussion, but from a cultural point of view rather than an economic: If you bundle together all the disparate “minority views” on any issue, being in a minority then becomes commonplace. It’s the otherness that we have in common, not the quality that make us other. This is a concept that is worth repeating. It’s something that those of us steeped in the postmodern vat might take for granted but that a large number of humanity would shit upon.

The argument for a shifting mainstream is presented nicely enough, although it’s barely made before the novel ends on a romantic note with an action/noir finale. Most of this book reads like a parallel universe story – as if the main character is hallucinating all the time. Actually, imagining that the story is an illusion, that the Mick McGill is merely a fictional character in a deranged storytellers mind, makes it more readable. It would explain the non sequiturs and manic view of the world. Read it as a alt.usenet version of the movie Identity, and you’ll have more fun.

So. This book will be presented to someone who doesn’t know what Bukkakke is. In this day and age it might seem hard to find such people, but I know a few and they will receive a gift.