Pete Hindle

I’ve really slowed down on writing things recently, as a lot of energy has been directed towards getting the state to pay me benefits. Unlike my friends, it seems that governance is totally unimpressed at my near-death experience, and I’ve been forced to spend a lot of time filling out forms, making complaints, and talking to call centre staff in Luton.

Which wasn’t quite how I planned to spend my recuperation.

So my apologies for not cranking out grist for this particular mill on a more regular basis. I’ve been busy. I’m probably going to keep on being busy. Here are some links to keep you busy:

Five Creepy Ways Video Games are Trying to Get You Addicted – excellent article about the tricks used to get you playing computer games from cracked.com, which I thought was just a dumping ground for brash American humour. If you read this, you’ll know why you’ve been distracting yourself from work so much.

Idle Words tackles Scurvy – a long and thoughtful article about scurvy, in particular scurvy and the Scott expedition. From Idle Words, which has a great and very long archive of interesting stuff that could keep you distracted for a while.

The Battle for Britain’s Libraries – the Guardian tackles the new library culture spring up, namely a question of if we should have super-libraries (like Newcastle’s new city-centre library) or regional branches (which don’t have gee-whiz stuff like the internet). Contains this amazing factoid – “Since 1997 there has been a 1,150% rise in lap-dancing clubs in Britain, and a 6% decline in the number of libraries”.

The Terminator’s Gun – it must be scifi gun season, as Ars Technica gives us the behind-the-scenes tail of Arnie’s laser-sighted pistol, while Boingboing gives us the making of a replica Blade Runner gun. Frankly, I stopped giving a shit about Blade Runner after the third directors cut, and would have preferred a spin-off, sequel , or TV show rather than continually re-working the same thing. The Terminator franchise might have been worked into the ground, but at least they told a new story while they were doing it.

Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…

Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is the setting for her novels, which are part of the New Weird, an extension to the fantasy genre that allows authors to escape the sword-and-sorcery crap that they’ve been stuck with by certain best-selling authors. Where fantasy had become reliant upon pastiche and re-invention of Tolkein-esque themes, writers operating within the New Weird allowed themselves to create truly new worlds.

Swainston’s books are set in a world ruled by immortals, who fight an endless war against giant insects. There is no orcish horde to defeat, but instead an unknowable enemy who seems to only operate by instinct – something we can all understand, especially if you’ve ever found a cockroach in your kitchen. Familiarity doesn’t end there though, as despite living in a feudal world, her characters wear jeans and t-shirts, know what serial numbers are, and are generally as badly behaved as us in the modern world.

Slint’s work came at a time when Grunge defined what rock was, but they weren’t working alone. Shellac and Helmet released albums around the same time, opening up rock music to a wider range of textures than the pop-orientated sounds that were prevalent within Grunge. The influence that these bands had opened up the sound of rock music in a post-modern sense, meaning that not only could things be heavier but that they could also sound different.

The New Weird is a similar movement in fantasy writing. Swainston’s work, and that of others who accept the genre, are swimming against the idea of fantasy as ‘epic’, or the introduction of vampire mythology into the humdrum present day (such as the Sookie Stackhouse series). It’s a reinvention that enlivens a creative discipline, and while both Slint and Swainston share a common theme of narrative and flawed characters, the best link between them is to see how revolutionary they are.

I love these shoes! They’re my favourite ever trainers, and I say this as a thirty-one year old man who has owned one pair of ‘proper shoes’ since leaving school. That is a lot of trainers, running the entire gamut of casual foot-covering styles, from skateboard pretentiousness to faux-classy leatherette things. What makes these shoes so good is the fact that they have a layer of goretex built into them, stopping rain from soaking my feet.

It’s that layer of goretex that makes these shoes worth buying. And I’ve brought two pairs of them, so I should know. I originally brought a pair after a rainy spring, where it seemed like everywhere I went involved getting soaked. It’s no fun going to the pub dripping wet, or leafing through books at the library in your own personal puddle, so I changed the way I dressed and started buying things that used modern fabrics. From that period, I’ve got a few things that suck, a few things that are ok, and a few things that stand out because they are excellent. These shoes stand out.

That’s the deal with using new materials and new technologies. Sometimes, taking a little bit of something new and adding it to the familiar creates excellence. The word for this is ‘progress’, and it’s given us things like dry feet, iPhones, and liquorice allsorts. You might not like everything that comes out of the relentless march of progress, but you’ll have to admit to finding some of it useful.

Every day that I’m on “the sick” is  extremely stressful. It’s very rare that I don’t need to call up some government department related to the job centre and correct them. This involves playing phone tag with uncaring, bored people in phone centres.

I just got off the phone with Atos, the private healthcare company that assess the medical state of sick benefit claimants. They called me this morning for about two seconds, hanging up when I answered. Yesterday, I’d had a call from one of my flatmates in Newcastle, telling me that I’d got a letter from Atos. Of course, I’m not there – I had to move back in with my folks because I was too sick to look after myself back in November. This does make it hard to arrange the interview, but after being on hold for twenty-five minutes we managed it. They did refuse to give me their name though.

I’m lucky; I’m recovering from my illness. There are some people who are trapped, by ill health and poverty, in a constant battle with this bureaucracy. At every point of contact with the agencies set up to support me I’m suspected of fraud, and have to continually prove that I’m not somehow “cheating the system”. To be honest, I don’t think I have enough energy to cheat, as playing it straight is so much hard work – purely because of the lazy people behind the desks, phonelines, and Job Centres.

I doubt that this system will ever be fixed. It seems the ideas of mercy and hospitality are far removed from our society; the instinctive reaction to somebody who is on ‘the sick’ is that they are a scrounger. Personally, I can’t wait to be not sick, or at least not sick enough that I can stop dealing with the mean-spirited stupid people who run these systems. There’s no benefit to be had from them.

I originally wrote this for the back page of The Crack Magazine (hi Helen!) sometime last summer, but a series of events caused it to disappear for a while. I just remembered where I had a copy, and decided to put it up. Back when I wrote this, Tesco had just taken over the Chillingham Road site, Obama was still new and shiny, and I lived in Newcastle… the past: it’s kind of like another country, but harder to get to.

As living beings, we’re defined by certain natural urges. We need to breath, sleep, move, reproduce, and eat. Now Tesco’s have seen fit to help us out with eating in Heaton, taking over the role of local supermarket from what used to be Somerfield’s in Chillingham Road.

Somerfield was notoriously expensive, and Tesco’s are only continuing the trend, with prices raised so high you’ll find confused students wandering the store looking at the cost of pesto. On the day I visited, a can of beans and sausages was selling for over a pound, and it was hard to find a loaf of bread that wasn’t stuffed with some sort of seed. Also, I was deeply disappointed to note that they didn’t sell pop tarts.

Despite the fact that it’s always cheaper to shop at either of the two supermarkets within twenty minutes walk, this branch of Tesco’s is always busy. Most of the people shopping here have just been caught on the hop, short of those few bits and bobs we all need but forget to pick up when doing the weekly ‘big shop’, but there is the odd lazy bugger stocking up on frozen lasagne and beer.

Between the two markets of last-minute need and easy-living slackers, Tesco will be raking in the cash at this new site, but anybody living locally is going to find it more costly to do their shopping here.

(SuperAmazingDoesItForYou video link)

After a morning spent tussling with installing, then uninstalling Zotero, I’ve finally had it with those instructional videos that software designers create. I think that nothing beats the written word for communication of information, but I’m consistently finding that complex software is being explained by the use of an instructional video.

And usually, that video sucks. Seriously, what’s up with programmers making videos? Are they bored of typing all day?

So, in the spirit of the age, here’s a video for my new, forthcoming product, SuperAmazingDoesItForYou. I haven’t actually got round to writing any of it yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

I hate and love the way we browse the web.

I’m almost certainly somebody with a high degree of addiction to the written word. It’s not an internet addiction; I was raised in a family that has an unholy veneration for the written word, and the advent of the internet just allowed me a greater access to a wider range of subjects. More often than not, it’s the next link to the next interesting thing that keeps me stuck in my chair. I can get stuck into a subject, and emerge with my eyeballs throbbing and the front of my skull feeling weirdly disjointed from the rest of me. I’m sure you know what I mean – hotels in Berlin? Patagonia? The Russian space program in the pre-perestroika eighties?

Hey, we all have our foibles.

For me, this love of words is so strong that I don’t bother to watch explanatory videos. If you can’t write a few paragraphs of text to explain your project, software, or website, then it’s likely that I won’t watch the video. I tell myself that the reason is for this is that my reading speed is so high, I would deal with text better – but it might be that I just love reading.

But what I dislike about the way we browse the web, this hopping between different sources, is the lack of depth that it encourages. Not in the writers, authors, and creators, but in the reading of what we see online. If a particularly good, well-researched article is published online, you’ll see a flurry of links to it within the first few days, gradually dying off over time. There’s also a major “bubble” effect, where people on the internet write about people they know on the internet, and claim that it’s important.

(Sadly, this is also part of our economy as well; it’s ludicrous to think that any of the dotcom businesses are not incredibly overvalued at the moment, including the larger companies such as Google and Yahoo! If you disagree, look at Yahoo!’s rapid fall from grace after last years attempted takeover. These companies are still as overvalued, as they have been for more than a decade.)

It’s this bubble that causes the lack of depth. Our system of search, our way we hunt out interesting things on the internet, is based on the recommendations of such a small and narrow-minded set of interests that we see only a fraction of what is available. Compare typing into Google to walking through a large bookshop, or a library; you’ll never get distracted by an interesting title on the way to your email. You’ll never linger in the economics section because you caught a glimpse of an attractive person browsing around there. And you’ll never pick up a copy of Borges’ Fictions because it has a great cover.

And that’s what I hate; the narrowing down of accidental discoveries. Because without that, we’re all reading from the same page.

Further Reading

• The Googlisation of Everything, an interesting essay by Siva Vaidhyanathan
• JPod, Douglas Coupland’s book from 2005
• The Echo Chamber, the term used to describe the internet’s effect on debate

There’s no need for Trident, the UK’s nuclear weapon delivery system. It’s an expensive waste of time – but not because of the idiotic stupidity of mass destruction.

If North Korea can make nuclear weapons out of sticky-backed plastic, empty washing up bottles, a spare pack of SCUDs, and a giant rabbit, then isn’t it time we started thinking in an efficient manner about our nuclear armament policy? And, as our government is fond of demonstrating, efficiency means paying attention to the bottom line.

Funding for Trident is staggeringly expensive. The figures are available in some forms on the internet – although obviously, not the precise figures owing to national security. Trident also requires a constantly manned submarine presence, being the delivery system for placement of these weapons within effective striking range. So, to recap: that’s one hellishly expensive missile system that requires a hellishly expensive transport system.

It’s also worth noting the size of the UK’s missile system (and it’s requisite submarines). The UK’s submarines are dwarfed by Russian, Chinese and American submarines – we simply don’t have the money or resources to put into building monsters like the Russian Typhoon class, displacing over 10,000 tonnes more than our largest nuclear-capable submarine. I’m not entirely sure what they keep on submarines, but whether it’s petrol, food, or air, I’m pretty sure the Russians have us beat there. Which means they’ll be able to stay under for longer, fire missiles of mass destruction for longer, and win whatever horrific conflagration that these weapon systems are built for.

Speaking of which, the UK’s puny selection of 130 missiles are listed as being a “first strike, counterforce, or second strike weapon”. Please pay attention at this point: if nuclear war does happen, this gives us the opportunity to be the first to kill the entire civilian population of a designated target, or we can do it in revenge for somebody killing ours, or we can do it simultaneously.

Nuclear warfare might not be mentally scarring the kids via shocking documentaries such as Threads, but the reality of the situation hasn’t changed; it’s still going to be a life-taker if put in effect. No government ever uses weapons of mass destruction in a manner that’s lawful; when the a-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese government was already on the verge of surrender. Since then, the only times that this sort of fearsome weapon has been used is most often in one of the less civilised areas of the world, by one of the more insane dictators (such as Saddam Hussein’s use of gas on his own population).

So, it’s worth avoiding if at all possible really. I mean, we can’t trust our governments to use them rationally, we can’t afford to keep the damn things, and we can’t survive if anybody uses them. So we’d be much better off having a distinctly more low-key approach to blowing the shit out of our civilisation. I think we need to follow North Korea’s approach, and build them when we need them.

What I suggest is some sort of home-guard of nuclear power. The minute some nuke-happy nation starts flinging ICBM’s around we’re all doomed anyway, so why not apply the Maker mentality to the end of the world? This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, but it’s still pretty crazy.

I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking your emails, or going shopping for obscure electronic parts.

Avatar is, as I’m sure you know, the latest film from James Cameron. His previous works are mostly massive hits, with a strong sci-fi flavour, and Avatar just happens to be his most sci-fi flavoured yet. It’s about blue aliens on another planet, but it also happens to be in 3D.

Most of the computer animated films that have come out recently have been available in 3D and regular 2D, so it’s not so unique for a film to be in 3D. And, at the start of the showing (after the trailers, so you knew it was important), there was an advert for Sky TV, which promised to deliver 3D television to your living room, starting later this year.

Take away the uniqueness of being in 3D, and Avatar becomes a slightly silly retelling of Pocahontas. The film is designed to be seen in 3D, almost as a textbook of ‘filmography using 3D techniques’, and thus we have a lot of very crass shots that utilise the new techniques for changing perception of depth.

Cameron’s previous sci-fi work used urban locations in a sinister way, reflecting the future from darkened streets, giving us paranoia about the urban and suburban surroundings of everyday – but Avatar’s computer-generated forest removes any skill needed to compose a shot using existing locations. Between the lack of mise-en-scene and the need to force three-dimensionality into every shot, this film become the most visually boring blockbuster that I’ve seen in a long time.

This isn’t the first time that Hollywood has become obsessed with 3D filmmaking. The late seventies and early eighties saw a bunch of movies made in three dimensions using the old red/blue glasses technique. And then, later on, all those movies were de-3D’d, so that they could be released on video and DVD, because people didn’t want to sit around and watch Amityville 3D whilst wearing stupid glasses.

The new technique for 3D also requires stupid glasses, which come in different styles depending on what cinema chain you go to. Mine were uncomfortable, and gave me a bit of a “Buddy Holly/Hoxton twat” look (see above). After about an hour I started occasionally slipping them off to relieve the pressure building up around my eyes – badly designed glasses give me weird face-ache – and found that watching Avatar without the 3D-enabling devices wasn’t that bad. Not great, but not that bad.

The idea of this new wave of 3D is to make watching a screen an unbelievable experience, but it’s misguided because it’s just a a screen. When you’re in a cinema, you might be happy to wear an odd pair of glasses to get that special effect, but at home? With the kids and the dog and the dinner on your lap? If you do invest in the ultra-swish home 3D cinema system, at some point you’ll be bound to end up watching 3D programs without the special glasses.

And that’s when you’ll find out that it’s not that much different. A little less focused, a little less worth watching – the fuzzy backgrounds of 3D films without the special glasses on make the craft of cinema inaccessible.

Avatar’s great failure is that it thinks 3D is important enough to overcome plot and pacing, and whilst it is visually impressing, it’s not visually stunning. But it was a film that could not fail – too much money had been poured into it. Perhaps backing was secured because 3D films would be impossible to pirate, or because the new technologies would sell thousands more flat-screen TV’s. The film obviously lies at a pinnacle of complex capitalist network, with layers of merchandising, advertising, and even advances in technology behind it. It is a great spectacle to behold.

But it’s failure is it’s function as entertainment – it’s so slick, so perfectly presented that there’s almost nothing for you to wonder over, after you leave the cinema. And I literally mean wonder, in the sense of wonderment, because the crass materialism at play behind Avatar leaves nothing fantastical in the film.

Endnote: While I was deeply disappointed in Avatar, I have managed to sneak in two SF references in this blogpost. There’s no prize, but feel free to drop me a line (or leave a comment) if you spot one.

Genevieve Valentine is a writer and essayist, working in the SF area. She also has an obsession with Catherine Cookson TV movies, where high levels of snark are to be found – although this mainly seems to come out on her Livejournal blog.

Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.

Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.

The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.

The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?