A great many amateur screenwriters spend a lot of time making sure their format is right, their dialogue is sharp, their script focuses on a big idea, their characters are unique and lively. And then they completely forget to write interesting, novel action-descriptions. They forget to write with a voice... the reason they probably got into writing in the first place...

-- "Fatal Mistakes: Boring Action-Descriptions"

... read the article and the comments, its great stuff. Although it made me realise how much my writing ability has degraded because I've been willingly gutless.

Follow footnote to see explanation that this storage estimate requires encoding songs as 64 kbps WMA, which bit rate is half that of Apple’s default of 128 kbps AAC, and roughly equivalent in fidelity to that of transmissions carried over tin cans and string, but which, perhaps, is not a dirty marketing trick, but, rather, a fair assessment, considering that anyone with such profoundly bad taste in industrial design who would consider purchasing this device probably also has such bad taste in music as not to notice that their 64 kbps-compressed songs sound like mush.

-- John Gruber in Rhymes With Ditty - a brilliant ripping apart of the new Dell wannabe mp3 player.

Moral of the story: The front end is important because its what your customers use, dumbass.

Moral of the story for storytelling: (Classical) cinematic storytelling has a lot of similarities with design - its about the front end. The front end is what the audience sees and hears. It should teach the audience how to read the film without them even having to think about it.

In a 1993 essay on television and U.S. fiction, David Foster Wallace suggested that irony means always having to undercut what you say by some acknowledgement that you don’t really mean what you say: “the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expectations of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (63).

-- Nicholas Rombes at Mythic Cinema and its Discontents via, of course, Digital poetics.

Around the 2004 federal election, people asked me how I thought young Australians might cast their vote. I made an educated guess that, whilst a small but dedicated group may have voted Green or Democrat, the majority of young Australians probably cast their vote for John Howard. Not because as a group they are inherently conservative. But because Howard is the prime minister they have grown up with. And because, for some time now, Labor hasn't offered voters enough compelling reasons to vote otherwise.

[...]

And Generation Y makes a vital distinction between caring about party politics and caring about the stuff of politics, the issues that matter.

While the care factor is pretty low when it comes to who is in government, young people do care about how the country is run. They have views and they have some idea about what is going on, but that concern hasn't translated into traditional forms of political behaviour, like party membership.

Rather than apathy, Y men and women project something more like powerlessness, either to change the political culture or to make progress with political issues.

-- Dr Rebecca Huntley in is Generation Y apolitical and apathetic?

Commentary: I'm undecided on this article. Firstly, I'm always wary of big bold general statements about 'generational attitudes'. That could be because being born in 1979 I'm in a limbo land between Generation X and Generation Y - and thus I find the whole idea of drawing lines in the sand over attitudes to be rather arbitary. Secondly, I wonder how much of Huntley's article is speculation rather than empirical fact or that grey-zone of conjecture [which I consider to be the half way point between speculation and fact]. That may be answered in her book which, I hope, actually draws on some research about attitudes, rather than merely quoting voting statistics. Perhaps I'm just jaded because of the experiences I had while doing my LLB. Shrug.

All that said -

I remember when Paul Keating lost the election and how angry I was. I still am angry. Yet, at the time, I was only 16 and I was was one of the few politically aware kids I knew, due to my highly political parents. So, the reality that Howard is the only Prime Minister that a large portion of our youth has even know is rather... scary. And whom have they seen in opposition as a powerful voice? Nobody.

more turtles all the way down.

But what if these very instances--the act of making and posting an experimental video on a vlog, or of writing a passage in a bestseller that manages to demythologize a popular TV show in a way far more alive and memorable than an academic paper that attempts the same thing--what if these aren't in fact minor hauntings of the culture industry? What if, in fact, they manage to constitute the very logic of the culture industry itself? What if it's not the fringes or the margins that are haunted, but the very apparatus itself?

And what if the myth itself becomes the deconstruction of the myth?

-- Nicholas Rombes on the Awful and Terrible Demandingness of Culture over at Digital Poetics

Its turtles all the way down, fellas.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the victors have cast their achievement primarily as the triumph of freedom and taken to spreading free markets and free politics as the key to universal progress. They have forgotten that justice and equality were equally important concerns for many and that what was discredited was less communism's communitarian ideals than its ability to live up to them. The emergence of a world system dominated by the United States, meanwhile, has raised people's expectations that Washington could correct economic and political injustices if it really wanted to and has ensured that they are angry with it when problems persist, even if actual responsibility rests closer to home.

If the United States fails to train itself on alleviating injustice as much as on expanding freedom, the political-economic order of free-market individualism it promotes will be discredited and U.S. influence will wane.

[Emphasis added]

-- George Perkovich in Giving Justice Its Due, Foreign Affairs Vol 84, Number 4.

Damn straight. Its a great article but sadly the full text is not available freely online - because it goes to discuss the importance of justice rhetoric's in the agenda of terorrists. Its one of the more balanced critiques I have read of the terrorist agenda and its interrelationship with the globalisation of the American market economy. For many, it won't be pretty reading because it confronts some ugly truths - but those ugly truths need to be addressed. You can't win a war if you are unwilling to engage the enemy - and, personally, I think for all their warmongering, the West has largely failed to engage the terrorists. The 'war on terror' isn't a conventional war - its a moral war. To quote verbatim from John Robb: "Victory in 4GW warfare is won in the moral sphere. The aim of 4GW is to destroy the moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist -- cohesion."