So Videogames Are Great...

I love mainstream media. No, really, I do. They're great; the way they don't ever generalise, their even handedness, the way they always look at both sides of an argument. I particularly like the way they treat videogames and hip hop. Alright, I believe I may have reached my sarcasm quota for this particular post. So mainstream media shits me to tears. They're not the only ones though. The general uninformed-right wing-mass-of-gray-hair (URMOGH) also shits me.

Grand Theft Auto is the biggest selling series of games pretty much ever (this may not be true, but it's close enough for our purposes, it sells like a mofo regardless). It's also one of the most violent, does contain lots of morally questionable behaviour from many of the characters (especially the main character), and has been blamed variously for the War in Iraq, Sars, at least two shootings, and the degeneration of a whole generation.

It's also one of the funnest games to play ever.

There are many sides to the arguments surrounding the game, and they're not just black and white, there is a whole lot of gray. Here are a few points of interest/facts/things to remember when thinking about the game, and also games in general:

1. The average age of videogamers is now 25 and rising.

2. GTA is rated as highly as it can be in all countries where it is sold, pretty much M15+ at the least.

3. This hasn't stopped Rockstar from advertising heavily in magazines directed straight at kids.

4. Two kids got their father's rifle and shot people in their cars from a bridge over a freeway in there states after playing GTA Vice City.

5. The game is called Grand Theft Auto. Wonder what it's about?

6. A Grandmother tried to sue Rockstar because she bought the game for her 13 year old grandson without realising what the game was about.

7. The game has moments of complete hilarity and excellent social/political satire, and in it's creation of a massive simulated LA, Las Vegas and San Francisco manages to say a lot about American culture and it's failings, America's recent history and race relations.

8. It has an excellent story and great voice acting.

There is a misconception among a lot of parents that games are for kids, therefore automatically making them all suitable for kids to play, clearly this is not the case. Obviously, given the average age of gamers now, games have grown up in a lot of respects (Though they still have a long way to go).

At the end of the day, I really wish that mainstream media (Today Tonight, ACA, I'm looking at you) and parents could be a bit more informed with their opinions. I'm actually also more for strict policing of the ratings system. I'd rather see games get released with an R rating say, than just get banned. Stores must also take their jobs more seriously and actually attempt to not sell to minors. But the buck must stop with parents, surely. Don't Just go out and buy GTA because your 12 year old wants it, have a look at what the game is about, maybe even play the game yourself, make a conscious decision.

I think game makers are at a cross roads. "Cinematic experience" is a phrase bandied about way too much these days with reference to games, "adult content" usually just means the game is violent, has some swear words and maybe a naked lady or two. We've reached critical mass with the amount of violence (the realist in me says we're gonna punch straight through critical mass though); it's time for a change, though it will be hard for two big reasons:

1. Violence sells.

2. The instinct to shoot/hit things in games is almost hard wired into gamers. Even if the game doesn't call for it, if you're stuck the first thing you try will be to shoot whatever is holding you back. Switches et al

nonetheless, game makers, players and marketers all need to have a look at themselves and try and move the art form forward. (And the argument of whether it's art or not is a whole other kettle of polygons)

That's all for now I reckon.

Socially Conscious Fidace Part 2

So GNN is on point once again. Further to my rant about education, check this interview. The passage below I found particularly scary/moving/disgraceful in equal measure and directed at different people and institutions.

From GNN site:

Probably the most shocking passage in your book is one in which you speak with a student named Mireya, from Freemont High School in Los Angeles, who is moved to tears of frustration because she wants to go to college, but the only classes available to her are sewing and hairdressing courses, rather than college prep classes.
Everyone who has read the book has said that is the story that made them cry. Mireya wanted to go to Boston University. She was eloquent, and her teachers said she was perfectly capable of going to a first-rate university. She said the school had made her take sewing the previous year, and when I spoke with her, they were going to make her take hairdressing. This was a school of 5,000 kids in South Central Los Angeles, with hardly a white kid in the school. Now, it turns out hairdressing and sewing weren?t exactly required, but that students were expected to take two classes in what were called ?the technical arts.? But whereas at Beverly Hills High School that requirement could be filled by taking a class in residential architecture, computer graphics or broadcast journalism ? things that perhaps have some relevance to college preparation. At Freemont the choices were sewing and hairdressing. Mireya cried and said to me, ?I don?t need to sew; my mother?s a seamstress in a sewing factory.? That?s when a terrific student, Fortino ? he reminded me of a sort of Latino Malcolm X, because he had this look of cynical intelligence in his eyes ? said to her, ?The owners of the sewing factories need workers, don?t they?? And she said, ?Well, I guess they do.? And he said, ?They?re not going to hire their own kids for those jobs.? Another student naively said, ?Why not?? And Mireya said, ?Because they can grow beyond themselves, but we remain the same.? To me that was the most moving bit of dialogue in the whole book.

Here's the link to the full article: http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/5024/Apartheid_America

I promise to fix my other links soon.

The History of Popular Song

The history of popular song is littered with songs of unrequited love, heartbreak and loss. Strewn across the annals of Top Forties around the world are literally thousands, probably tens or even hundreds of thousands, of sad love songs; or, if Bernie Taupin is to be believed, Silly Love Songs. The girl leaves for another man, the man leaves for another girl, the pair of them are torn apart by geography or circumstance, the boy/girl doesn't know what he/she has till he/she looses it; the classic stalking scenario, only actually romantic in a few select songs, where the boy/girl doesn't actually make normal contact with their love interest/victim. And the slightly less disturbing variation on unrequited "love", the close cousin of the stalker, the friend who likes a friend.
The friend-with-misplaced-affection songs can end up in all sorts of places: the slow burn of the untold love, years of heartache for one of the parties concerned as they wonder if they can cross the invisible friends boundary; or the other two obvious variations: one party telling the other their true feelings, Yes or No, two very different songs.
For our purposes here, we need a closer look at the No variation of the friends song, we can dabble in stalker land for a second too, and even, briefly, the breakup song, but what I really want to get at here, what I really want to know, the question burning me up, is: Is unrequited love love at all? Has a large chunk of the history of popular song been filled with unnecessary, misleading tripe? Some cynics would say yes in more than the context we've outlined here, but let us not get sidetracked. Is it ever love if the other person does not feel the same way? Is it destined for the scrap heap of infatuation and (what a wonderfully condescending phrase this is) "puppy love", just because the other person is oblivious, stubborn or seeing someone else? As a side note, the ones seeing someone else have a whole raft of songs in their honour, the your-man-don't-treat-you-right brigade and the female equivalent, for starters. Basically, it becomes the song collection on the ins and outs of cheating and, most importantly, the justifications for it. Long side note, let's get back to business.
Are all the feelings, signs, and general shenanigans associated with love, valid if only one person sees, hears, or feels them? How can only one person think that "we have a lot in common"? Doesn't that require the ubiquitous "two to tango" or even hold hands? Excuse the bombardment of rhetorical questions, but the answers are eluding your faithful narrator, he's hoping for some help from the galleries, some sign from God (which may be hypocritical given his strong potential for not existing, at least not in any useful form), or maybe he's just hoping that he can come to his own conclusions by the end of this page. We'll all just have to wait and see.
Maybe the only flaw to be found in the lyric of the majority of these songs is the continual happy endings, or, if they don't get that far, the hope of a happy ending. Let's face it, in any medium, be it film, television or music, the Happy Ending can be a killer. Would it hurt us once in a while to have a song that has a touch of cynicism, or should I call it realism, in it? Would we all collapse in a heap if just once the hero of the song just said Fuck it and got out of the situation while the getting was good? But this leads us back in a somewhat circular sort of way; remember, I'm asking if unrequited love is real love. And to the outsider, the answer can sometimes quite easily be no. But to the protagonist in most Top Forty songs the answer is often "If this ain't love, I don't know what is!" Or, more often, the question wouldn't even register as a concern; of course there'll be a Happy Ending!
Come to think of it, there has to be more than one flaw to the average pop song (cue dry laughter from the back row). Here's another shortcoming that could be assigned to all pop songs, just by the very nature of the medium: attention to detail. I'm referring to lyrics again here. It's hard to go into the finer details of a relationship in three verses and three choruses?. When you can remove all that unnecessary crap about what is actually said between two people, when you don't have to deal with all the little signs and innuendo, the hours, days, and months that can go into the emotions involved, then optimism is an easy option, and "I know we'll be together forever" doesn't seem like the single most ridiculous thing ever to be uttered by a sentient being.
And it's those very details, mentioned not even four lines above, that are at the heart of my question. How can all those signs seemingly be there for only one person? Are they a quantifiable entity? If you're one of the brokenhearted out there, I know you're wondering the same thing. No wonder the songwriters choose to steer clear of the finer points and stick with generalisation and Happy Endings.
Confession time. If it's not already obvious, this isn't really a History of Popular Song. And I'm not just asking the question about unrequited love for academic reasons, for the common good, and certainly not just for the sake of it; no folks, I'm asking because the last few months of my life have been a roller coaster ride and I've had to try and find answers to all the rhetorical questions I've thrown your way, and I've come up with fuck all.
Hey, maybe I need to write my own pop song, show people how it's done. It'll be a beautiful, concise three-minute wondersong, complete with no Happy Ending and all the gory details summed up in thirty-two bars (that's two verses of sixteen, kids). And don't even start me on the chorus, beautiful won't cut it as a description. There'll be a catchy yet subtle electric guitar line throughout the song, working along side acoustic guitar (for that earthy feel) and a piano part that creates a tear with each tinkle. The bass won't even register in your conscious mind, you'll have to wait twenty years for a Classic Albums doco; the producer in the studio with the master tapes dropping everything out so you can listen to the bass on it's own, only then will it's genius become apparent. The drums will be so right, so on it, you won't notice them either, the snare will only step up on the sly to the mix, tapping it on the shoulder, saying "I'm here, just don't bring to much attention to me."
There'll be a guitar solo, Eric Clapton will tell us (Classic Albums, 2024) that it's nothing short of amazing: all feel, touch, ethereal (lot's of reverb to you and me). He'll be glowing; hell, he might have played the damn thing! The vocals will break your heart and bring a lump to your throat. Neil Young-esque, Richard Manuel-esque (The Band, musical heathens!!), with a touch of Van or Elvis or Marvin, or someone else who only needs one name. There'll be hilarious anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the recording, of throats in such disrepair they were almost slit, of a strange sound in the verses tying everything together, that turned out to be the bass player's mother's bra strap put through a wah-wah peddle using rubber bands and mirrors.
But who am I kidding, I'll never write it. It'll never happen. I'm gonna be stuck with circular thoughts and silly love songs for years to come. Drop me a line at http://www.whatthefuckisloveanyway.com/ if you feel like it. I'll respond, it's a soda, it's not like I've got songs to write or anything.

Fair Warning

Good morning all, forgive the fact that these particular ramblings are not nocturnal. Sometimes one has to do day shift and deal with other humans in a more personal manner. Yay. This is fair warning that I'm about to unleash a blog opus of a size unseen in thse parts. . .well, ever. It's actually a bit of writing from 2004 B.B. (Before Blog). As they say, "Here's one I prepared earlier..."

Socially Unconscious Fidace

Anyone who's worked in any sort of customer service profession knows the special hatred it is possible to gain for your fellow humans. I thought I'd reached my peak for human hatred working in retail. Oh, how wrong I was. Control rooms, that is where the real pain lies.

I work in a parking/security control room, looking after a whole bunch of car parks in the city (there's whole bunch of other stuff we do, none of it pertinent to this blog). The pure, unadulterated hatred I have gained for people from watching and hearing them deal with car parking is quite staggering. I have to take a step back on occasion, and remind myself that I'm generally a fairly placid, chill kinda guy. And that I also, generally, like people (Some of my favourite people are people). I'm writing this now at the tail end of a hellish shift, this particular blog was to be about fun stuff and how much I like people, I had a fun little Birthday partay last night and was feeling rather good, with the presence of good friends and all.

But the joys of customer service in the wee hours of the morn has beaten that nice blog out of me for the moment. I'm really only writing this because I said I would to a friend of mine last night.

Anyhoo, so I reckon the point is, if you're stuck dealing with people at their worst, think of all your friends, who should be people at their best, and remember we aren't all bad, and that retail/customer service/arsekissing isn't necessarily who you are. Stay tuned for a nice birthday Blog this week.

Socially conscious Fidace

So I watched Coach Carter the other night. It's not a bad film, heavy on the preaching, but it's heart is in the right place, and hell, the Basketball is pretty good. Off topic (not that you know what the actual topic is yet), but I was in pain watching all the dudes do suicides.

Anyway. So it's not a bad film and a true story, and one of it's big messages concerns the education, or lack thereof, of African-Americans, particularly in poor areas. In one of those strange coincidency type things that life throws our way I was perusing GNN and reading an article caning Dubya Bush about Katrina reaction times that happened to also cover (albeit briefly) a history of Black oppression in the states. It covered a lot of similar topics to the film, and put them nicely in a wider historical perspective. There are scary figures (the link to GNN is on this page) re illiteracy and education in the States.

Not that we're much better off here, literacy levels here are declining as well, I have no figures to back this up, but am positive I've read about it. Although I'm not so sure there's any racial angle to illiteracy here, just a typical Australian Malaise in the face of a large social issue.

The film and the article really got me thinking about our attitudes towards education, books, teachers in particular, and the fact we're going to hell in a hand basket.

For a start, why the fuck aren't teachers paid more? And why aren't they (in particular primary school teachers) put through the ringer a bit more at University. If I could be bothered researching I would put up a graph showing the poor educational requirements needed to be a teacher then place them next to those required to be, say, a Doctor. If I did, you would be scared, and rightly so. Surely, the teacher's job is important enough to warrant stricter educational qualifications and a pay packet to match, we're talking about children's minds here!!

I think back to my schooling and my different teachers and the effect they had on me, and the difference between good and bad teachers must surely impact in a major way a child's development. I remember loosing interest in Maths almost immediately the year I had a bad Maths teacher. It wasn't even her fault, she was just a small lady, quietly spoken, with no control over the class and a strange smell. I remember from my basketball days the year I got good, I went from barely scoring to 14 points a game almost overnight, largely due to a coach with a Yorkshire accent and a belief in my ability.

I think, in general, adults can sometimes forget the impact they can have on a child, the smallest remarks can have lasting effects.

I'm always amazed how many people I know who haven't read a book, or barely ever; then, again, I think back to the way books were studied at my high school, and I'm not so surprised. I watched many a good book decimated by a "learn-by-rote" style of teaching, which sucked out any life that may have been in the texts we were studying. Books can be an uphill battle at the best of times for a young mind with many quickfix distractions, they don't need to be bludgeoned to death by poor teaching.

Which is not to say I have all the answers. Teaching methods may need to be looked at. Teachers attitudes as well, parents, especially parents. Maybe there needs to be a bit more reading for the sake of it. Just let kids read what they want, if they have a book in their hand, don't worry if it's not a "classic" or "literature", encourage them to read. Maybe discuss the book, but as regular Joe's, not as academics trying to break down every last sentence.

To be continued....

(ps. Pete secretly loves my lack of good referencing.)

This post is purely for the benefit of Pete. I'm working on a recurring theme for this blog... But nothing is springing to mind just yet. I can promise some entertainment this evening though, as I've had 3 hours sleep. Anyhoo, Back to the grind, stay tuned for socially conscious fidace..Coming soon...

Why

Why are things like adding links to my blog so hard to do? I'm a simple soul, who's been dragged into the modern world, kicking and screaming, well, moping and complaining really, but either way: Why is it so hard? Why can't I have a nice shiny links page with a box saying "add link name here"? Is it so much to ask? Boy, you sure get maudlin at this hour!
I find it amusing that the Blogspot spell check doesn't recognise blog.

The First Post

Could this be the start of something beautiful? Probably not, but surely it can't be all bad. I'm currently on night shift at what I'm turning into a dead end job. That implies two things: 1. It is not necessarily a dead end job for someone motivated to do it. And 2. I'm clearly not motivated to do it. Apparently, shit happens, so what are you gonna do?
This does seem a rather egotistical thing to do. Blogging I mean. Everyone assuming they have something worth reading. But enough of my cynicism, to infinity, and beyond!!!