Dear Nintendo

Dear Nintendo,

I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend and that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower and your older sister still has casual sex that she confides might bring back a feeling she's certain she didn't imagine. Where the plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says "I hate to fly".

Yours,

Joey Comeau 

- Joey Comeau, Overqualified (2009)

Dawn On The Avenue De Boavista

It's dawn now in Porto, and I'm the only one still awake. I first turned the data back on on my mobile phone just after 22:00 last night. I did it in a "Give it to me straight, doctor" mood, and found some positive news. It's just been announced that there's a hung parliament.

I've no idea what's about to happen, or whether the people I've given my conditional support to over the last two years will gravely let me down or lead to disaster.

What interests me, though, is how wrong all the Smart Boys who went to a grammar school, or an expensive private school , and maybe then Oxbridge were. After all, those educations made their ideas intrinsically More Serious than those of someone who went to the state school down the road, and less elite univesities. That's the natural order of things.

Don't expect to see too much discussion of that over the next few days, though.

Beagle World Record Attempt

About a month ago I went with a friend - and her Beagle - to the Beagle World Record Attempt at Capesthorne Hall in Cheshire. Here are some of my photos and videos.

Mr. Bingley making friends.

Citizen Journalist Beagle is hungry for the truth.



Hurley-Burley in the off-lead paddock.



Waiting for the world record attempt to get underway.



On the walk.

Bad Film Night No.4: Deadly Prey (1987)

In Vietnam He Was The Best...He Still Is.

A Mirror’s Temperature is Always Zero

One of his colleagues has described the haunting and profoundly revealing occasion when Heydrich came home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage he 'whipped his pistol from his holster and fired two shots at this double', the ever and tormentingly present negation of himself, from which he could free himself in liquor and in the splintered glass, but not in reality. He was prisoner of this figure of negation, he lived in a world populated by the self-created chimeras of of a hostile distrust, scented behind everything treachery, intrigue or the snares of hidden emnity, and thought only in terms of dependence - the most impressive embodiment of that vulgarized Darwinist principle in whose light the world was revealed to National Socialist ideology: life seen only as struggle. Himmler said of him that he was 'the embodiment of distrust - the "hypersuspicious", as people called called him - nobody could endure it for long'.

- Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (1963)

Like Luke and R2-D2, Me and That DVD Player Were

On Sunday I took my old DVD player to the recycling place. Mum and Dad got it me for Christmas 2000, I think, and it's been with me ever since. There are plenty of reasons to get rid of it: it's the size of a house, the SCART socket seems to have broken, and it's from the days before HDMI. Plus I have a Bluray player these days. Nontheless, if you lived with me in Nottingham, London, or Liverpool, this was what we used to watch things on.

The Year 2017

March Violets

FIRST MAN: Have you noticed how the March Violets have managed to completely overtake Party veterans like you and me?

SECOND MAN: You’re right. Perhaps if Hitler had also waited a little before climbing on to the Nazi bandwagon he’d have become Führer quicker too.

- Das Schwarze Korps, November 1935

Sol Niger

Futures, Unevenly Distributed

Mumbai in 2014. Photograph by Paul Needham.

Dreaming in Moscow

Found here.

"They've Got Nowhere to Go"

While New Labour's chief ideologues promoted the idea that class divisions were no longer relevant – part of the 'old ways of working and doing things', in Tony Blair's words – working class people of all races were feeling the sharp end of the New Labour project. Inequality of income, which had soared under Margaret Thatcher, continued to rise. In 2004, well before the financial crash, real wages stagnated for the bottom half of earners and fell for the bottom third. Disguised by the availability of cheap credit, social mobility had in fact stalled. The aspirations of many were increasingly out of reach.

Plentiful immigration, which grew further after 2004, when eight former Eastern Bloc countries joined the EU, was only one factor in keeping wages low – a 'flexible' labour market, where employers were much freer to hire and fire than elsewhere in Europe, was the broader picture – but fears about immigration were hyped by right-wing newspapers and pressure groups such as Migration Watch. Perception mattered: by the end of the New Labour era, only 18 percent saw immigration as a problem in their area, but 76 percent saw it as a national problem.

In 2009, Gordon Brown's attempt to deal with growing discontent as the economy turned sour was a disastrous speech in which he promised 'British jobs for British workers' – a slogan that could have come straight out of a far-right propaganda handbook, and one that was thrown back in his face in 2009 by oil refiners workers in Lincolnshire, who staged wildcat strikes in protest at their wages and conditions being undercut by several hundred European contract workers. Even this ham-fisted attempt to address the issue was too late. During New Labour's pomp, Hain told me, few at the top were willing to listen. Blair, along with his closest allies, simply did not see a problem. According to Hain, his warning in 1999 was met with a complacent response. 'Peter Mandelson said to me, "your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They've got nowhere to go."'

- Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (2012)

Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.

- Will Davis, "Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit" (2016)

The Story Continues

Barely Audible Intimations of His Own Murder

In 1929 the writer Evelyn Waugh came to Crete on a cruise "to admire the barbarities of Minoan culture". In the Herakleion Museum "except for one or two examples of animal sculpture", he wrote, "I found nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all". On the merits of Minoan painting he was perspicaciously uncertain, "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last 20 years". In the restorations, he detects "a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue". At Knossos, he continues, "I do not think that it can only be imagination and the recollection of a bloodthirsty mythology which makes something fearful and malignant of the cramped galleries and stunted alleys...these rooms that are mere blind passages at the end of sunless staircases". As for the throne "here an aging despot might crouch and have borne to him, along the walls of a whispering gallery, barely audible intimations of his own murder" (Waugh 1930: 136-7).

- Gerald Cadogan, 'The Minoan Distance': The impact of Knossos upon the twentieth century (2004)

Highlights From A Subtitling Failure

Netflix UK recently encountered an error in which the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth went out with the subtitles from the Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden show. Some of the resultant highlights:

Owls Disappointed By Labour Leadership Candidates #1

The first in an occasional series.

Donald Trump is a Candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America

We Can't Stop Here, This Is Snake Country!

Fieldwalking survey has its own charms, and its own perils.

I'll Let You Know When The Bodies Start Turning Up

Taken last week:

Taken today:

Top Bantz With The Ya̧nomamö

The Ya̧nomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet. One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, “Sh
aki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?” His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.

 - Napoleon Chagnon, Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People (1968)

If things had worked out differently, that guy could've been a Vine superstar.