Rhinocrisy

My brother-in-law suggested that interactively produced fiction (i.e., à la Wikipedia) might be interesting and even productive. It seemed to me that such a thing must surely exist already, and of course it does. Wikia.com hosts “Novelas“, a collection of collaboratively-edited stories. It also exposes the principle flaw in this type of endeavor, which is that it appears to be an efficient net for aggregating dross. The main categories of fiction there are “fantasy” and “science fiction”, two genres which have only rarely in their history managed to ascend to any level of respectability. If that’s not alarming enough, the actual text is even worse. Some of the prose is so purple it’s amazing it doesn’t fall off and die, and there’s a good deal of inventive structure that collapses because there’s nothing supporting it. E.g.:

Master Fung: Dear Mastah Fung, hoo are yah, anyways, let me cut tae the chase. If it’s awrite wae yoo, I’d like to come to visit fer a week. Please reply if you hink ah should, your best student. Scottie McCrimson.

Kimiko: Scottie McCrimson? Would he by any chance be Scottish?

Or try this truly astonishing first paragraph:

It is rather strange how the Alkali Metals react to water, if one small chunk of Cesium falls into water, then the entire city can blow up. So imagine what could happen if Francium, an element much larger and more powerful then Cesium falls into water, let’s just say, good by to the state. However, Francium is radioactive, that is to say, it breaks down into smaller, less harmful elements. But what would happen if there was a way for Francium to stop its decay? What would happen if Francium, was evil, will the Alkali Metals destroy the world?

Most of this disaster is forgivable, since it probably originated as scribblings on napkins in high school cafeterias. But I, always on the lookout for ways to dismay myself, must take a tragic lesson from this, which is that there is an unfortunate lack of correspondence between perceived ability and actual skill. Self-criticism is a conundrum for any creative individual. Art must be communicated; private meaning is fine and even valuable, but our lives are brief, and our mental space is narrow. If creation is more than an exercise in self-correction, it’s the judgement of others that becomes the primary determinant of its worth. Thus, I should know whether I’m making something others might see as beautiful or ugly, a difficult task when I am unable to appreciate the work divorced from the scaffolding that I used to assemble it. Probably this is why, my friend Claudio would say, we believe the Creator wants us to worship him - surely even he is insecure about his creation without critical acclaim.

1. Spam.

2. Logging in to random websites to post comments.

There is no reason why I should have to register on your dickhead blog or news site if I want to make a casual remark. Other than to allow you to sell my email address to spammers.

3. ‘Social networking’ sites.

Probably this is because I don’t have any friends. Nevertheless it strikes me as criminal to call the sort of activity that occurs on such websites as ’social’.

4. Attention span.

The fundamental unit of entertainment has been broken down further by the advent of the video clip, now averaging less than ten minutes. (Adult Swim demonstrates that this breakdown is creeping back into other media). The half-life of memory is now probably less than a week.

5. Invisibility.

In the internet, our solopsistic nightmare grows deeper and more pervasive. Here you can be anyone, and so you are no one. Are you shouting into the void? Into a hollow bag? Into a packed amphitheater, or an empty box canyon? Does your voice have reach, and influence? Does it move anyone or anything? Are you whispering in your own ear? Who knows? But watch that hit counter go up!

6. Pretension.

On the heels of the former comes the latter - I might be anyone, and therefore I am Siegfried and Enoch and Nestor in one body. And we, collectively, are an invincible army - our words and deeds will change the fabric of history, both past and present.

7. Isolation.

It’s actually just me and my keyboard alone, here, and this unseeing eye that glares back at me.

We are (as of this posting) apparently still only the #5 google hit for “dinosaurs with lasers“. There is much to do.

Doomu went to the trouble of translating a “message in a bottle” from Le Monolecte, in La France, to the people of Iran, expressing the sentiment that we are not our governments, that “these conflicts they are trying to seed in our minds are not our conflicts.” The least I can do, I think, is help it along on its way. Possibly this is the wrong direction to reach Iran from France, but long journeys are strange ones.

I’m stealing this from Bob Harris, because it is awesome and makes my soul sing. The female newscaster (the hero of this piece) is Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Zbig. The cocksucker next to her is Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s conservative commentator and former House Representative.

My god, there really are human beings out there. Fuckin’ A.

All the comments on the subject you could ever want.

Due to popular demand, the poll is back. A probatory poll is to the left. If it proves stable, we’ll replace it with something more robust and full-bodied.

Strange. I was reading about the Venezuelan terrorist just freed on bail when I saw this Google Ad at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Coffins for everyone!” I had to click. It was for these mass-casualty coffins, easily folded and stacked and then assembled and stacked again. Clever! Too bad they are 100% tropical hardwood. Boo hiss. What’s wrong with a pine box?

But on the topic of the terrorist, it’s sad to see liberals agitating against Posada’s bail. I agree he should face murder and terror charges at least, if not extradition to Cuba or Venezuela. But bail is ok. I don’t support the hypocrisy of letting a CIA asset right-wing nutjob off the hook for terrorism. But I do support bail for all, even those facing terror charges. Prisons suck.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.

OMG i hav 2 tell u abt this thing i found out its a nu way to talk!!! seems like every 1 on da internet is doing it lol lmao. actually u no it is not ez it is like a dialect even! altho i havnt dun any kindof linguistic analises(sp??) so i dunno if its rely tru… probably its just a pidgin(?). ne way wut do u think??? i used 2 thnk since kidz were online all day they wud b reeding more n also riting bt seems like they dont lmao!!! i mean did u eva see ne1’s my space page no 4 real they are so gay i mean no 1 can spell its like they neva red ne books or ne thing. makes me sad o well cud just be im old and its like youth culture?? but then y is it so dumb?? cud b now ne 1 can rite online even if u r an idiot so we get more idiots riting?? i dont think thats it i think it is anti-intelectualism cuz if u dont spell rite and form complete sentences no 1 will think u r a nerd lol!!! 2 bad u wud think ppl wud want 2 b smarter n rite gud bt seems like frivolity is da rule 2day. goddamn i hope wen i hav kids they can rite gud cuz i wud be ashamed if they rote like an illiterate person… yo where is da pride??? ^_^ ne way l8rz much luv!!!!

I’m pretty excited about the Halo movie, which is being produced by Peter Jackson. In an interview with “Aint It Cool News” he insists that the movie is not getting made until he’s satisfied it has a really good script. Right on.

Anyway, the director he chose for the film is a dude named Neill Blomkamp, who has never directed a feature-length film before. The only thing he has directed is a 6-minute short called Alive in Joburg, which “depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa.”