I was somewhat disturbed recently to find my dark side laid bare for all the world to see. But, since its out in the open and more than 11,000 people have watched it, I guess I should put it here for all the world to see.
You may find this video shocking, but really, it’s a call to wake up and smell the MediaWatch. It’s the red pill. It’s reality…
For more of my underhanded trickery, you should catch Late Night Letters and Numbers at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as part of Curtin Comedy.
(With thanks to “Addled Aphorist” who created this video back in July.)
I’m sometimes amazed at the way icons of geek culture will seemingly bite the hands that feed them. “Weird Al” Yankovic, who counts amongst his biggest hits a retelling in song of the plot of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, wrote and recorded a “You’re Pitiful”, a parody of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”. The object of the singer’s pity? The classic nerd stereotype: a 40-something guy who lives in their parent’s basement, makes their own Star Trek uniforms, has no romantic prospects, a dead end job and plays Halo 2 while slobbing around on the couch. Needless to say, no nerds I know fit this bill, though mainstream culture thinks we do: games are childish, sci-fi is for those without social skills etc. It seemed like such a blatant grab for the mainstream market (“hur, even Weird Al thinks you’re a loser!”) that I stopped buying his albums. (I also think he missed a trick by not making the original song the target of the parody; as Tom Gleeson pointed out for great (if perhaps over-milked) comic effect, it’s “man watching someone with their boyfriend on a train” premise is actually kind of creepy.) It’s for similar reasons that I have a love-hate relationship with Big Bang Theory, which – while a well written sit-com – I always characterise as setting nerd-human relations back at least fifty years. It also presents appalling stereotypes of women, who are either nerds in the same mould as the male protagonists, or presented as “normal” – which translates to being traditionally attractive with great social skills and little intelligence. And yet, these “adorkable” characters are beloved by geeks and anti-geeks alike.
I had a similar moment today when listening to episode 72 of “The Talk Show”. Hosted by 5by5 chief Dan Benjamin and Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber, it’s a very nerdy beast. They don’t pigeonhole themselves in a particular topic, but given the people involved, talk usually revolves around Apple, Google and Microsoft technology and software, but also popular culture, especially films. Gruber is quite the film buff, a very nerdy fan of Kubrick, and both are devotees (though not uncritical ones) of the James Bond franchise. One of my favourite quotes about cinema is from Kubrick, and I found it via Gruber, who posted it on Daring Fireball:
The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.
Apparently, though, the affection of Lord of the Rings movie fans doesn’t really count. As they enter a chat about films, Dan mentions Gruber’s tweet describing the films as shit. (Latertweets inform us his wife would have preferred to suicide than sit through Fellowship of the Ring, and that people who consider Jackson a good director are deluded.) There follows ten minutes (from about 12:30) of talk trashing the films and their fans.
John has plenty of opinions I don’t necessarily agree with, for example he thinks Connery is the best Bond (a majority opinion, I know, but my favourite is Timothy Dalton, though I agree License to Killwas terrible). I don’t normally feel the need to respond. I’m not even a huge fan of the films; I think the first one is the best one, and I think the series has some interesting problems. My issue isn’t that he dislikes them, though even there this segment isn’t great. Do I agree with John Gruber’s critique of Lord of the Rings? I’ll never know, because all the “reasons” he gives for not liking it are unhelpful: they’re “terrible movies”, “everything looks fake” (this from a man who prefers the original version of the Star Wars films!), “everyone looks sweaty”. He says they have “terrible stories” while also claiming to enjoy the books. He spends more time describing the problem with Jackson’s King Kong – a film I publically hated – than he does on Lord of the Rings. (He also describes the The Hobbit as a tiny story, unworthy of being filmed, likening it to a small town mayoral race of someone who later becomes President. Well, maybe, John, but no small town mayoral race has dragons, trolls, giant spiders and a war involving five – count ‘em! – armies.)
So what? He didn’t like a film, he doesn’t have to justify that opinion if he doesn’t want; but if he’s not going to do so, why talk about them for ten minutes? The kicker is this: he dismisses everyone who complained about his comments. People who like Lord of the Rings “don’t like movies”. They wouldn’t list a Kubrick or Scorcese film in their top ten movies, so their opinions don’t count. In fact, deep down they know they’re terrible movies, even though they love them. Now, I know what rabid fans are like – they take attacks on things they like as personal insults and respond in kind, out of all proportion. But John Gruber isn’t just saying “I didn’t like it, I think it’s bad, get over it”; he’s suggesting that somehow no-one can think that these films are good, that people who like them are kidding themselves. That their affection, to use Kubrick’s term, is misplaced.
John: imagine someone said this about Star Wars. I think you’d rightly take them to task for being ridiculous. Sure, Star Wars and its sequels (let’s leave the prequels out of it for now) are flawed: the dialogue is terrible, the style and story and mythology are cribbed from a dozen other sources, some of the acting is hammy as hell. But those films took people somewhere they wanted to go, they resonated with an audience who loves them, who has a deep affection for them that remains strong despite decades of better films that have come after. Some people – I bet John Gruber is one of them – would list Star Wars or maybe The Empire Strikes Back in their top ten films alongside the work of Kubrick and Spielberg and Wells. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films are one of a handful of series which have garnered an affection even close to that of Star Wars – maybe Back to the Future managed it in the 80s, and for a younger generation the Harry Potter films now occupy a similar space. Why is your love for one better than someone else’s love for the other? Why treat them with such derision? Why not tell me what you actually thought was wrong with the films, if you’re going to fill ten minutes of your podcast with talk about it?
Oh, and then they finish off with a crack about there being no “girl Hobbits” because they have hairy feet, and who would want to see that? That managed to combine a whole bunch of sexist business into one tight package: marginalisation of women in cinema (it’s even worse in the fantasy genre, though Jackson has arguably has a few attempts at redressing the balance), infantilisation (they’re Hobbit women, not girls) and conventional ideas of beauty (body hair isn’t automatically unattractive).
Maybe Gruber doesn’t think his audience really cares about Lord of the Rings or his opinion of it. Maybe he figures if he loses anyone over this, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish. I don’t know. But come on, guys: you know your audience are nerds. By all means disagree with us, argue with us, tell us to lift our game where it counts, challenge us, but don’t engage in this sort of “my opinion is right, your affection doesn’t matter” kind of stuff. It just smells like clickbait.
When I was a younger man, imagining where I might be in 2011, I thought I might be on my way to becoming the next Dr Karl, auditioning to play an elder Weasley brother, or perhaps starring in a YouTube Doctor Who fan film as the first ginger Doctor.
I never considered I might be in a musical about a killer robot travelling back in time to kill Jesus before He’s born.
The Terminativity is easily one of the greatest things I’ve ever been involved with. First, it’s been super popular: I’ve never before sold out an entire (short, and not including the preview) run before opening. So a big thank you everyone who came along! Second, the response has been great. Cameron Woodhead in The Age gave us four stars (not 40, as the Google search result suggests). Wonderful talented people I admire came to see it and liked it and wrote about it on their blogs and told me so on Twitter. And so many friends have come as well and laughed and said lovely things! (Mostly, it’s true, “I didn’t know you could sing!”, to which I want to answer “I’ve been in five musicals!” but I understand that very few people saw the last four.) I love you all. I even got the chance to sing on the radio – and you might get to see a bit of the show online in the future. (I’ll keep you posted!)
But most importantly, The Terminativity is a great experience as a performer because it’s a great show. The cast – Aurora, Mike, Gatesy, Lawrence, Andy, Tegan, Adam, Rebecca, Scott and of course Richard – are amazing. I’m working with friends and peers and people I admire, all putting in professional effort out of all proportion with the amount of time we’ve had to prepare. The band – Casey, Matt, Ben, Ross, Enio and Vincenzo – are amazing: we sound good because they are all top notch, and similarly have put in hard work to sound so amazing. Our production team – Catherine, Jacky, Jackson, Julz and Lara – have done an incredible job with props, costumes and lights; we don’t just sound good, we look good. Nick Caddaye (with a little help from the cast, it’s true, but not too much) has crafted some of the finest Christmas/Terminator mashup gags you can imagine. And Casey Bennetto…well, I’ve used the term musical genius before, but that’s because I’ve now met about half a dozen people who really deserve the title. Casey is king of the bunch; when people tell me they love my song, I reflexively deflect that praise onto him. After all, he created it, and was kind enough to let me be the one to sing it.
In short, I’m in the kind of show I would be in the audience watching if I could be, and really that’s the best possible thing any of us can ask for, isn’t it? It’s like a Christmas present that we all get to do this again. Now I understand what the cast of Doctor Who mean when they go on about it being like a family.
So thanks to everyone involved in, watching or even just talking about The Terminativity; it’s only halfway through our brief run of four nights and it’s already been a rollercoaster.
And if you wanted to come, but you didn’t get in quick enough, don’t worry: I’ve a feeling you haven’t seen the last of us.
As excitement was building the other day over the imminent announcement from CERN regarding the Higgs boson, the incomparable Simon Pampena wrote a topical tweet rewriting of a Bette Midler song: “God is watching us from a Planck distance.” I was inspired to write my own tweet:
Perhaps the discovery of the Higgs boson will prompt a new Internet fad, “Plancking”: standing the minimum possible distance from things.
I’ve been on Twitter for three years, I’ve gathered a modest army of followers, and I’ve had a few good gags in that time. But for some reason, this tweet really took off – it’s been tweeted over 100 times according to the Twitter site, though it’s proving quite hard to discover exactly how many people have seen fit to pass it on. I just wanted to mention it here for posterity, since Twitter is fleeting, rather than eternal – and to give Simon his due as my inspiration. He’s a funny guy. You should follow him.
I’ve a feeling that the average person in the street would guess that Ada Lovelace, with a name like that, must have been a cabaret singer, poet or actor. They wouldn’t be entirely off the mark, either, since she did do something beautiful and artistic to become famous: she was the world’s first computer programmer.
On Ada Lovelace Day we celebrate women working in technology and science who have inspired us. I have been definitely been inspired by women in science, from the famous like Ada herself and Marie Curie, to more recent heroes like student astrophysicist Amelia Fraser-McKelvie. But I’d like to talk about some of my friends, and in the wake of my participation in a discussion about feminism and games at Cherchez la Femme this month, specifically those working with computers and technology, like Ada did. All are inspiring to me, for their drive, their outlook, and their success, so I thought I would ask them a few questions to find about about them, and their inspiring women, in their own words.
Moran has over a decade of experience in the games industry; now living in Melbourne, she builds and designs video games, and teaches others to do the same. To spend even a few minutes talking games with her is to uncover an incredible depth of knowledge and passion for games in every facet of their existence, from code to controller.
How did you get into the games industry?
I studied mixed media practice at uni in London, originally planning to be an investigative journalist. I got hooked on animation at school and managed to land a job as an animator at a small indie studio when I graduated. Since then I have worked professionally as a games developer at companies like Sega and THQ, and have now come full circle to back to my independent roots. I also teach at RMIT University on the Games Graphic Design course where I lecture in maths and games design theory.
Why video games? What do you love about this work?
I love the technical and creative challenges that making games presents. They are multilayered digital puzzles, and there’s this cycle of figuring out what you want to do, and then figuring out how to make it happen. They are fractal beasts. The more you explore them the more there is to find. Plus, the technology is always evolving, so you have to keep up with it, and that pushes you. I love exploring the boundaries of what is possible, and finding new ways to tell familiar stories. Oh, and it’s also hella fun.
Who would you be writing about for Ada Lovelace Day?
Obviously Ada! She wrote the worlds first computer program for a then theoretical analytic device. Her work is the basis of modern computing, and she deserves to be better known. Similarly, it was a group of women who built and programmed the ENIAC, which was the first electronic computer, not that you’d know that from most of the histories. Coding used to be considered women’s work, until it became high value. Now it’s perceived as a masculine pursuit. Women in tech have been made invisible for too long now. We need to break that pattern.
Leena is a freelance writer, both for and about games; though she only started eighteen months ago she’s already written for MMGN.com, The Age‘s Screen Play blog and a whole bunch of gaming sites, and is co-host of the GamePlayPodcast and the games correspondent for Tech Talk Radio. The first game to be released with her name in the credits will be the seventh Gamebook Adventures title for iOS, Temple of the Spider God.
How did you become a games writer?
I started with a blog, just quietly doing my own thing until people seemed interested in hiring me. I then cast out a net and worked for anyone who would let me, paid or unpaid, for the experience to then make it into a proper job. I went to as many industry events as I could find and talked to as many like-minded individuals as humanly possible. Much scotch was consumed. Oh the scotch. From there I’ve been offered amazing opportunities to work in a field I’m quickly falling head over heels in love with.
Why the love affair?
I love having an opinion. It was always a negative growing up. The over-opinionated only child stereotype was in full flight and it was always treated as a personality flaw. Once I grew up and mellowed a bit I realised I could temper it to be a powerful force – and one that could be capitalised on, at that. Taking what was once considered a flaw in my personality and turning it into a positive, constructive “thing” I had to offer was extremely rewarding, and mirrored my feelings about my favourite pastime. Playing games was always either a little bit geeky, or something only the boys in the street did, or something I was scared to talk about at school for fear of scorn. I love the fact I’m “out” now as someone who loves games so much, and that I can embrace my voice and my opinions about them. The thought of utilising those strong feelings to help make great games one day is something that inspires me immensely. Working in this industry makes me feel less broken.
Who would you write about for Ada Lovelace Day?
Brenda Braithwaite is a powerhouse of a woman – a stalwart of the games industry – who inspires me greatly. She stood up when people were saying that consoles would ruin the games industry and said “That’s bullshit”. She’s now standing up when people say games on social networks will kill the games industry and says “That’s bullshit”. She’s paving the way for many great game developers to come after her and to me that’s a lasting legacy that will stick and is something to be truly proud of. We need people to stand up and say when something is bullshit. Our industry is still in its infancy, and despite that there are many issues ingrained deeply into it. The only way we’re going to move forward and improve on our weaknesses is for people to stand up and say “That’s bullshit” and stop accepting the mediocre. She inspires me to want more from the industry and ask “Can’t we do better?”.
Catriona Wimberley
Catriona is a PhD student in medical physics at the University of Sydney, currently working at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). Though studying science, her career has been heavily entwined with technology, from computer programming to electronic engineering. She’s travelled around Australia and the world to present her work, and was featured in the Cosmos Ultimate Science Guide 2011 for prospective science students.
What are you working on for your PhD?
I’m working on kinetic modelling and parameter estimation in PET (positron emission tomography) imaging. In a nutshell, I take the images/data from scans and do some interesting mathematical modelling to find information about how the body/brain is working, or more importantly, not working, so that we can study how different neurodegenerative disorders (eg. MS or Alzheimers) progress.
How did you reach this point of your career?
A winding path where every opportunity was taken to explore exciting areas of research!
Before finally settling on the area of research I am currently in, I had worked in a biomedical engineering division (doing repair and maintenance of medical equipment), in a cardiology lab, a respiratory lab and a sleep lab (all doing clinical work). These placements helped me realise that I need more than a clinical or repair and maintenance job – I need to be able to think, create, analyse and innovate!
In final year uni, an opportunity came up to do a placement at the Bionic Ear Institute and I jumped at it. It was a great placement, gave me a taste of the research life, I was able to find out how part of the brain works using the computer and programming! But still… before I settled, I knew I needed to explore my other science love: physics.
I applied for the Nuclear Futures graduate program at ANSTO and was accepted into it. This program was what helped me decide that I truly did want to be a researcher. It was a rotational program so I got to work in an engineering project management role creating devices and upgrading safety systems, in the maintenance team for the OPAL research reactor; I wrote computer programs for physicists to interpret their data, I wrote reports about nuclear power for the Australian Government, I designed equipment to improve the quality of medical imaging – and from all of these adventures, I decided I wanted to specialise in medical physics – where else do you get the combination of physics, computing, maths and the end result is figuring out how the brain works?
What drives your passion for science?
I do it because I love finding patterns and meaning in data. I do it because I love programming and I love making programs that work and make life easier for people or elicit information. I do it because I get to think and discover new things about how the world works. I do it because it is fascinating and I couldn’t not do it.
I do it because I am curious and I need to figure things out. I love that I can lose myself in thinking and designing and analysing and interpreting.
Who would you write about for Ada Lovelace Day?
Marie Curie, for her ideas, her hard work and her drive to never give up. My PhD lineage can be traced back to her! Marie’s daughter Irene Joliot-Curie was also a chemist, and won a Nobel prize in 1935. Irene’s son Pierre Joliot is a biologist and was the PhD supervisor of Marie-Claude Gregoire, who is supervising me.
Also Elizabeth Blackburn [winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine], for showing people that it is possible to have a highly successful science career and have a family.
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