Peter Pan – pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Definitely the best panto in our grand-daughter’s four years of panto-going. At her first panto it was clear that most of the budget had been spent on a 3D film insert (that was back when 3D was all the rage), leaving not so much for costumes and sets, or even a decent script. This year they’d spent the budget much more wisely: on music rights (so every song was a hit), and on a good cast, including streetdance company Flawless (who did an astonishing dance-in-the-dark, only their body outlines visible picked out with flashing LED lights, worth the price of admission on its own) and a tremendous sulky Tinkerbell (the dwarf Francesca Mills, working on roller skates as well as wires).
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
Thursday 8 January 2015
Saturday 3 January 2015
Cuttings December 2014
What should we do with private schools? - article by David Kynaston in The Guardian. "Are we sure that the systematic pursuit of social mobility is necessarily such a good idea? ... There is the argument that to bang on about social mobility is, whether out of naivety or pragmatic calculation, to be choosing the soft option. Or put another way, that it may in its own terms be justified to pursue greater equality of opportunity, but that what matters far more to the welfare of most people is greater equality of outcome – a far tougher policy objective, but one almost entirely written out of the script during the New Labour years and now only falteringly returned to."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
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