chickenmash

OMG! The internet wants to kidnap your children…

Rowan — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:31:53 +0000

Reading todays Sunday Star Times front page headline “Kidnap Fears: Mum’s Warning over Bebo” it would be fair to assume there was some connection between the disappearance of teenager Marie Davis and the fact she had a Bebo page.

After reading the article it seems that in the mothers opinion “Bebo is not a good idea” and may be “a bit out of hand”.

No one draws any connection between contacts on Bebo that may be implicated in the situation.

It must be horrible to be the parent of a missing child. But that the Sunday Star Times would choose this mothers random and unqualified assertions about internet social networking as its main weekend headline is very disappointing.

The last two weekends I have been pleasantly surprised upon picking through the SST. Generally reading any major NZ newspaper leaves me with an unpleasantly knotted stomach and a sinking sense of the general quality of public opinion in this country.

To my amazement there had been no printed letters proclaiming the deportation of a particular race as the first step to solving “problems” in New Zealand, no beneficiary bashing and the associated low flying sense of self righteousness, and a distinct shortage of pointlessly hysterical headlines.

Stories like this do not serve to improve relationships between parents and children, they just add space to the generation gap.

Bebo and other social networking sites make a lot of the interactions of teenagers and young people more visible and traceable in the wake of a crisis. It doesn’t mean that what goes on between them has only been terrifying for parents since advent of the internet.

If a paper is going to proclaim something like this could they at least explain what they think the danger is, or at least make a small effort to point out the connection and cause for alarm?

It is easy to control who views your Bebo or Facebook page and the networks generally reflect extensions of existing personal social relationships. It doesn’t take much intelligence or education to know that you should be skeptical about dodgy messages from unsolicited contacts.

If parents turn around and irrationally try to ban their kids from using Bebo etc all they are going to get is fights and further alienation.

How about a small effort on their part to understand the technology, and extend that to a discussion of sensible behavior on the internet?

The irony of Larry Baldocks’ campaign

Rowan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:39:51 +0000

Most of the public sentiment against the repeal of section 59 of the crimes act (frequently referred to by detractors as the “anti-smacking bill”) seems to be in response to the idea that the Labour government is trying to impose its principles and values on the people of New Zealand against their will.

The irony of this is that the campaign against the bill is being led by members of church based “pro-family” organisations.

The agenda of these groups is quite openly stated. They wish for the model of family as set out by their church to be a greater part of the government of our country.

The repeal of section 59 could be said to have an ideological basis, perhaps the idea of non-violent conflict resolution.

The intention of the law is primarily to prevent children from being seriously physically harmed.

This seems to me an appropriate function of government. Where possible governments should act to protect vulnerable parties who might not have other avenues of assistance.

Something much more debatable is whether the values of a religious group should be applied to a nation by its government.

A lot of these groups attack the government for not using language that reinforces their positions on models of the family. They somehow interpret non-denominational terminology as an assault on their own right to go about their lives as they please.

Nothing from my personal experience points to the idea that the Christian model of the family is better for society than any other. I know several people raised by gay parents and they are some of the best and most well adjusted people I know. On the other hand I have known people raised in conservative families who have been very troubled. I don’t think there is any consistent or clear cut rule in either case.

The general public should be much more outraged by the idea that one religion would want to push its values through government, more so than in the case of government acting to correct a law that was allowing physically abusive parents to go unchecked.

Larry Baldock and his followers have kicked up a huge fuss by misleading the public on this bill, ultimately all they have done is shown how much resistance there is to their own cause.

New Zealanders petition for the right to hit their children

Rowan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:07:11 +0000

The responses to the the “Anti-Smacking” bill as reported by the nightly news and major newspapers leave me quite frankly gob-smacked. Now there is a petition to repeal the bill and put the motion to referendum. There seems to be a lot of anger directed towards the government around this legislation.

Here are some genuine things people should be angry about:

-There are children who live in real fear of excessive violent discipline from their parents.

-Parents who are genuinely abusive towards children are often not prosecuted because of ambiguities in the law, the “anti-smacking” bill is basically an attempt to correct this.

-The bulk of popular media outlets have accepted the blatantly inaccurate description of the bill as an “anti-smacking bill” as verbatim and turned an important issue into an anti government mud slinging fest.

The common lines of protest seem to fall into two general categories:

1:We will end up living in a draconian police state where good parents will be prosecuted unjustly for even the slightest “light smacking” (what ever that means).

This is absurd, does any sane person honestly think this would be the case?

2: The Labour government is trying to tell people how to live their lives and raise their children.

This issue is more complex, but not especially so. Through the process of law making we establish the collective rules which define acceptable behavior for our society. Deciding on the content of laws is one of the things we elect our government to do. The details and precedents for the enforcement of important laws are fleshed out through the process of trial by jury on a case by case basis. The opposition to this bill indicates two possible things in my opinion:

1: People think the use of violent force to discipline children should be considered acceptable in our society.

On this point I disagree and this is where the debate should be focussed.

2: Historically New Zealand’s politics tend to swing towards change every two terms or so, the Labour government has been elected for three and counting. What ever they do is going to be subject to a negative public backlash no matter how irrational.

Popular news outlets seem very comfortable riding this trend and are irresponsibly airing the opinions of all sorts of extreme (and probably of partisan political motivation) quacks who fuel the debate in no helpful way.

I would have assumed most people desire to live in a society where they do not have to worry about being physically injured by another person.

There are plenty of effective ways to keep a kid in line without giving them a whack. Watch Super Nanny if you are really short of ideas.

Violence breeds violence and kids who get hit by their parents are more likely to go out in the playground and hit other kids.

Trying to break the cycles of violence from previous generations can only be seen as a positive thing. How is this view not mainstream?

The bill is not about smacking. It is about belting and beating.

What is it that is so special about children that should make it legal to hit them when it is not legal to hit anyone else?

We have assault laws to prevent this sort of behavior between adults and we do not see the law running wild and prosecuting people who do not deserve it.

What is it that the people who oppose this law are really trying to say? Could they please get to the real issue and leave kids out of it?

Open Source Cinema

Rowan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:44:31 +0000

Dan from Stray Cinema talked to our class today at Vic. Stray Cinema is based around a website (straycinema.com) which allows people to access film footage shot specifically for the project. The footage is freely available under the creative commons license to be used for Stray Cinema projects (or in outside projects with credit to the original producers).

One of Dan’s points was that the ideology behind open source thinking could be applied to a wider field than just software development. This is an idea I am keen support as I (like many) see open source as one of the best political/ideological developments of our generation.

One of the key ideas of open source is that by opening up access to your material you create communities of interest, people are drawn to a project by their own will to participate and create something of quality. The openness leads to greater overall development potential than closed circles working in competition with each other. The emphasis is on quality rather than commercial imperatives or limitations.

This has proven itself well in the area of software development where peoples ideas and time are the main necessary resources. Other production requirements are fairly basic (unless I’m mistaken it doesn’t take especially high powered or exclusive hardware to write and compile software). How then can this be translated into film where the production requirements and economics are potentially far more complex and demanding?

In terms of film as a narrative medium it seems problematic. At the high end of production so many factors come together, collaboration, communication & co-operation between heads of departments and crews is challenging enough. The economics of a shoot don’t leave much time for community based decision making.

Of course, open source cinema is not proposing itself as a replacement for auteur style cinema, or studio driven narrative films, it is suggesting itself as another alternative with potentially different forms altogether.

Accordingly most of the examples I saw on the Stray Cinema website were non narrative mash ups or very loose experimental narratives.

What I would like to discuss here though is how the principles of open source could be applied to narrative cinema with a potentially mainstream appeal.

I think for now I would consider the production phase itself as off limits. Be interested to hear differing opinions on that point.

The script and concept development phase seems wide open. It is still hard to imagine this working with the current culture of idea ownership and associated financial reward system. But practically at least open source style script collaboration is imaginable.

Take one concept for a movie. Set it up like a wiki. People who are excited by the idea/genre can contribute plot and character possibilities. These can be debated and the idea would potentially break into distinct factions which could become entirely separate movies. Characters and themes could be defined and expanded in separate areas of the wiki. The merits of different peoples writing for scenes could be rated against the idea of the character and their potential for action.

You could possibly have pools of characters that could be developed distinctly and drawn from for further script ideas.

People could hone and develop other people’s scenes and dialogue with only minimal wiki style moderation.

Would these writers be able to be financially rewarded for creating such a movie? Maybe not, but there would be reward in seeing the results on screen which might just be enough for many dedicated cinephiles. Edits and authorship can be quite accurately tracked within a wiki so there could potentially be some form of distributed reimbursement.

Like for open source programmers open source screenwriting could become an access point for contract based writing and project development.

There would be some issues in terms of studio or production company rights to produce these movies. Maybe if anyone was potentially able to produce a script without having to bid for the rights it might naturally fall to the company who seemed likely to produce the best and most successful result (although it could also just as easily turn into an ugly race for potential first release, and lets not even talk about the studio side fear of instability and unpredictably).

Editing is another process which could function well collectively. Offline quality raw material could be made available for download, EDL’s or project files are then relatively small and easily traded via online communities.

An edit of a film could quickly evolve with many scenes being cut by different editors simultaneously. Fine cutting and tuning could also proceed as people built on each other’s work. There would again be the potential for completely separate branches of the film to develop, with people either grouping around popular story and performance choices or splitting off in their own directions. It would be interesting to see multiple versions of films released (even just on the web) and the sorts of debates that would inevitably follow.

Would it destroy interest in the release of a film if all raw material could be watched in advance? Or would the interest in the possibilities for the final project just grow?

Of course post production is not without it’s own financial constraints. Post-production finishing of shots can be more expensive than actually shooting, especially if much of the shot is computer generated.

In the near future this sort of process might be best applied to films that are not heavy on complex digital effects. There is plenty of scope in this but it is a shame considering the sorts of existing online film making communities that surround films like Star Wars for example, which are also intensively computer generated.

People have already taken it on themselves to re-edit those movies as they were released and there are multitudes of effects libraries and tutorials based around recreating some of the trademark visual effects using consumer equipment.

There seems little reason why the raw material of these films couldn’t be released to fans following their official cinema release. Whatever would be done from that point could only serve to grow the culture and fan base.

These are just a couple of ideas, I am sure there is far more potential. And imagine if the conception and finishing of movies was driven by people’s collective desire to witness something amazing, rather than a studios idea of a concept that would sell well and have mass audience appeal.

Audience participation and reaction to filmic product would be quite different if the focus groups were made up of fans who were dedicated enough to invest their time, be involved, and develop a sense of ownership of the product, rather than say an end of the line critique by the people in shopping malls with nothing better to do.

Netscape Nostalgia

Rowan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:08:34 +0000

Today it was announced that development of Netscape Navigator was officially over.. To be honest I thought Netscape had handed the torch over to Firefox a long time ago and that Firefox was actually the continuation of old Navvy old chum. Obviously not. Maybe someone can fill me in here.

It seems like a good opportunity to reminisce about first experiences with the internet, and a very early version of Navigator.

My Dad worked at University of Otago and there were some old Macs set up. The search engine of choice back then was Alta Vista. It was really slow… Who knows what the connection speed was but by default my browser was set not to display images in order to keep things ticking over. If you were really convinced one of those funny little image substitute icons was hiding something worthy you could wait 30 seconds or so for a speckly gif to load.

I think I was supposed to be working on an essay for art history class. I found a juicy site with the sort of layout you can only get when you haven’t yet figured out the code (or the will) to turn frame borders off, and repeated background textures with a selection of 256-bit colour pallette text were the in thing.

I hastily plagiarised a few paragraphs safe in the knowledge it was very unlikely my teacher had had a chance to play with this hyper inter web thingy yet, or possibly didn’t even know it existed.

Not that I was even really that much of an early adopter, as some other much nerdier people will be able to spot. I’m sure someone will read this and scoff that their first memory was when it was called the ARPANET.

To be honest I wasn’t even that faithful to Netscape, for some stupid reason I preferred Internet Explorer on the Mac. I think it had prettier icons back then. I didn’t then fully understand the look of scorn from the department IT guy when I told him I didn’t like Netscape because it didn’t automatically submit my form when I hit “enter”, for some reason in Netscape on my computer I had to actually click the button instead.

I knew nothing then of the anguished experience of developers everywhere as they tried to negotiate Internet Explorer’s “differing opinions” on web standards. I had no idea back then that Internet Explorer did things like use its own special way of measuring the CSS box model. I didn’t know that it would stumble and trip on even the slightest bit of unclear or erroneous code where other browsers gracefully leapt. I didn’t know that Internet Explorer lacked support for handy web developments like png images with proper alpha channels. I didn’t know then how frustrating it was to have to accomodate and work around something so poorly made, so unelegantly patched together, so horribly disfunctional, simply because the majority of people used it and didn’t know otherwise.

Is it futile to hate a computer program so deeply? Probably. Of course I don’t just hate the program, I also hate the entire culture of dumbness that it originates from. It gives me great satisfaction to write in the footer of this blog the following message “ps. if you are looking at this in Internet Explorer and it sucks then bad luck for you… Use Firefox or suffer…”

I have spent a lot of time dicking around for the sake of IE in all its mutations, and will continue to have to do so. But here I really don’t feel the obligation. And sure, other browsers have their quirks and imperfections too, but we all know who the dunce of the class is, and they have Microsoft sewn into the elastic of their undies.

So thanks Netscape, I’m sorry if I didn’t properly appreciate you in the early days, but now I’m glad to know you were there and paved the way for better browsers come.. Alta la Vista baby…

p.s. if you feel the same way as me I would suggest you visit the Netscape archive page, download the oldest version your system will run, and spend one minute waiting for it to load up in silence, at which point it will possibly crash and then you can talk again.

p.p.s. It is of course unfair to use a very old program on a very new system.

When you move I move, just like this Yeah.

Miho — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:39:45 +0000

That’s me being my bad gangsta self trying to pull of a Ludacris line, but this ain’t about no hippiddy hoppiddy rappin’, it’s about whickidy whack track audio visual interactive styles from UnitedVisualArtists…(Although, if you define the beauty of their interactivity as the symmetry and mimicry of two sensory mediums then in some ways you could call their artform an audio visual rhyme, which isn’t all that unconnected from rapping is it, really.) http://www.uva.co.uk/archives/32

Anywho, UnitedVisualArtists, definitely my highlight of SemiPermanent 07. Well worth checking out their work.

Newsflash: Hover car brings new dimension to parallel parking.

Rowan — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:51:14 +0000

The trick is to line up the view out your triangle window and the heat haze from your left rear thruster. Use their bubble dome to help guess your correct axis for pivot. Relax, and remember - just trust your moto-neuron-coretx!

More good retro utopian type images at Dark Roasted Blend and on Flickr