So I saw MF Doom at the Pitchfork music festival in Chicago, last weekend I think. He pulled a Milli Vanilli / Ashlee Simpson and lip-synched the whole damn thing.
Of course, Kraftwerk has featured robot facsimilies of the band in concert for several decades.
My concept was to franchise my band... But together a kit to play our songs, use our ideas, and essentially "be" our band, use our name, etc., and just send us a percentage of the take.
Washingtonpost.com has a story about a church group from Baltimore that's going to picket the White House today because of Obama's "beer summit." They think they should be drinking lemonade and not sending the wrong message. According to the story, the Women's Christian Temperance Union is on board as well. Can't a couple guys just have a brew?
Twyman is concerned about booze as a "gateway" drug.
My oh my...they're moving up the ladder...how fortunate that there are people like this, who look out for other peoples health, wether they like it or not...
I don't get the whole supersuit controversy in swimming. Don't all the swimmers have the same access to these suits? And what's Phelps' coach doing griping about them when his swimmer was using them to smash records last summer? It just seems like an equipment upgrade, just like bicycles getting lighter, golf clubs and golf balls being better engineered, etc. Just say that Venom isn't allowed to compete, and be done with it.
Yes it is like bicycles. Bicycle inovation has been stunted several times over the years because the cycling federation or the tour have out lawed some bike that won. The first I am familiar with is recumbents which were outlawed after the hour record was set on one in 1933. That is why we are all riding less efficient bikes today.
Author writes a story with a black female lead, publisher puts a white girl's face on the cover. Magical world we live in...
As an aspiring writer with a number of non-white lead characters, I'd be shitting bricks if someone pulled a stunt like this on something of mine. I don't think I'd sign myself into a situation where I wouldn't have veto power over a cover, but I'm still an outsider - is that just how things are?
If you just got your book accepted by a publishing house, unless you explicitly set it out in the contract details, you have basically no say in the marketing of the book. Marketing usually includes things like cover art. Yeah, you can get some creative control over it, if your agent is good enough or if you already have enough of a following to justify it. But even somebody as famous as Ursula LeGuin can get totally screwed on movie rights. She basically disowned the made-for-TV version of Earthsea because of the whitewashing. (I think that was the least of its problems, but I digress).
I'm actually in a similar situation. I just applied for copyright for a fantasy book where all of my characters are darker-skinned, running from vaguely Middle-Eastern to coal-black. When I get the copyright confirmation, I'm going the self-publishing route. The only marketing guy who's going to totally mess things up will be me.
For some reason, immediately after posting my original, I got locked out of the website - I still can't get back in on Firefox, had to load up the dastardly IE. !?
"...I have always imagined her looking quite a bit like Alana Bear...."
and
"The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.
I strongly objected to all of them. I lost."
I remember the LeGuin thing now that you mention it - I think we tried to watch the first episode or so. I had fond memories of the book as a child.
Good luck with the book! Especially with the self-publishing, everything I've read advises against that - but most of those writers are probably not struggling with this particular issue.
I haven't made it to the query stage in my process yet (hopefully end of the year) - but I just won't do it without a cover approval clause. I don't care if they put something totally unrelated on there - I'd rather have that than have my nonwhite characters represented in that way.
I don't know about racialicious but TNC is the whole reason I read feministing. He linked to them a while back and reading them began to process of taking me out of my white male bubble. Not that from where I stand there was much of a bubble. If anything it was and is a male bubble.
A lady I'm dating told me that she thought that if I had dark skin and dark hair I would finally be at home with myself. Honestly, I can't say she was wrong considering how I came up. Nothing like being constantly bombarded with prejudice to make a person hate themselves.
Feh, I like them both, too. But if you check out the past couple months, there hasn't been much blog linkage, period. The blog is becoming weirdly internal.
This is the kind of thing that can really boost the sales of the book. The controversy will get more publicity for the work. The hardest part of selling a book, regardless of its merrits as a work of literature, is getting attention. So lets get outraged and sell some books! BTW is the book any good?
This happened to Octavia Butler all the time--all her lead characters that I'm aware of are black women, and the old covers showed white women. But in this century her stuff has had black females on the cover; seems very retro.
Yeah, I just had to have the conversation with my son :(
We don't get to many games but I won 2 tickets at a school auction and took him for his birthday last year. He used his birthday money to buy a Big Papi T-shirt. Sigh.... (On the bright side, we saw John Lester pitch a no hitter that night!)
The 2004 World Series trophy came to my son's school and each class got to hold it and take their picture with it. How come I feel I should draw in an asterisk by the trophy?
Logically, as an adult, I get the argument that sports is big business, athletes are entertainers, what's the big deal about steroids, blah blah. But yeah, I hate for my daughter to see this. She was already heartbroken by Manny. Ortiz is a little easier to take only in that it is less shocking since he has sucked so bad since Manny left and he lost his supplier. But kids want to have real heroes. They wanna believe it's all about dedication and talent, not performance enhancers.
Yeah. I've expected this for a while. And I don't like it.
When a whole sport is riddled with doping, you have to expect that the winning teams will have plenty of it. After all, to win the World Series you have to beat a lot of dopers.
I've also wondered for the last couple years if Manny and Papi's unusually streaky numbers might be explained by the drug testing cycle. (My understanding is that people are tested twice a season, at random times. I've wondered if the terrible, sluggish springs followed by fiery Augusts aren't about when the man had his second test and knew he wouldn't be checked again.)
There's a couple things to say about the suits. The shark skin-like suits that he and lots of folks used over the past few years were notable and beneficial because the texture reduced drag in the water. the difference with the new suits is that they are not permeable, and that rather than texture is the benefit. Not being particularly permeable means that they are like a floatation devise and allows them to have a higher more beneficial position in the water. That kind of means they swim through less water than other swimmers, encounter less drag, work less hard throughout race, tire less, and thus its not work that wins but technology.
Why doesn't everyone use them? I think his sponsor doesn't make them. but that is just one facet of it. He'd have to swim differently. He'd be condoning the innovation and the transformation of a sport he is uniquely equipped to dominate.
Triathlons in warm weather areas typically ban wet-suits from competition for this reason, what you're explaining is otherwise known as a wet-suit. I'm surprised you're allowed to wear a wet-suit in a swim competition, but the big controversy is that they will be banned next year.
Ya know what if this is true, then this cop is a piece of work. Put aside the race issue, and it’s obvious that this asshole arrested Professor Gates for “contempt of cop”. He should justifiably be in trouble for that alone. Now he gets an invite from the Prez to the WH, which is no small thing, for him and his family along with Professor Gates, and who does he decide to bring along?
Union brass, lawyer to accompany Sgt. Crowley to White House
Gates is already a friend of Obama’s, so here’s hoping he brings along his lawyer Ogletree who is also a friend of the Prez, and let’s see how Crowley & his crew handles a united front.
Asshole. I can see the lawyer, but WTF is the point of the Union Brass being there.
Man, is karma is real, I hope it's truly a B(&^%, cause this Crowley guy sure has a lot coming his way.
My guess is that it's some sort of half-assed insult. He didn't want to flat out refuse, but he also didn't want anyone thinking he was going to accept the invitation in the spirit it was intended. Remember the grin when he said "I didn't vote for him"?
I am strongly on the side of Gates in this incident, but I wouldn't rule out that maybe the lawyer and the union rep came up with any excuse for telling Crowley they needed to be there too, because they want to meet the President and get their "fifteen minutes." I wouldn't just assume that Crowley asked them to come.
You act like a dillhole and you get to pound beers with the President. Hope my daughters aren't watching the news tonight. Who the hell is paying the fare for all these guys? If I were in the union, I would hope my dues aren't going for my boss to get drunk.
Also, Crowley gets to drink the beer of his choosing. He should at least be punished by having to drink PBR or Rolling Rock.
hey gamers, I don't play them so I could use some insight on the debate about Six Days in Fallujah. Some families of dead vets of that battle are upset by the game for obvious reasons but the soldier that speaks for company that sells it is claiming that by playing it people will come to realize that "war is not a game." Does this defense bear any scrutiny?
dmf, I'm really not sure. I think war occupies a very weird place in our sense of morality. We have good and evil tangled tightly together. On the one hand we hate war itself, but we also honor the individual soldiers who actually make war. I guess that goes in with the "necessary evil" thing.
What I'm getting around to is that art about war is similarly conflicted. There's a theme of "war is hell and so terrible" inserted into every war movie/photograph/video game. But few artists want to present that theme by making art which the audience doesn't like, so that message is typically undermined by a sense of glory, decency, even beauty.
Games have the same right to depict war, but the juxtaposition of a game with a specific, recent conflict makes this weirdness more explicit. We haven't had enough time to emotionally insulate ourselves from the horrors in Iraq, and at the same time, the game sounds like it could be a lot of fun. We can stand around and loudly proclaim that killing people is NOT fun, but at least some of our soldiers will admit that they do enjoy killing people.
It probably doesn't help that American society as a whole still feels unsure about Iraq and is strongly aware of the possibility that all this killing was not useful at all. With WW2 games we can tell ourselves that it was all for a good cause.
Ultimately if you're against a game like Six Days in Fallujah I think you also have to be opposed to any war movie which is any "good", that is, an enjoyable experience to watch. Maybe that IS the right answer. I've seen the work of a photojournalist who took honest shots of the aftermath from bombings in Iraq -- horrible stuff I certainly won't look at again.
thanks all. I'm just trying to work the implications of this thru so sorry if I'm missing the point, like I said don't know what it's like to be absorbed by a 1st person shooter game, but when I see a "good" war movie like say the remake of a Thin Red Line or Full Metal Jacket I don't really want to experience it again. But it seems that video game are different in that they are made to make you want to do it over and over. Does that make sense?
Sure, it makes sense. Though individual reaction is variable, it's certainly common for war movies to have individual scenes which make you feel disgust, make you want to turn away, make you not want to see the movie again. I'm just not aware of one that makes you feel that way all the time; mostly they are mixed in with things that make you feel good, like excitement, or acts of honor, moving music, stuff like that.
There's been a lot of experimentation (in my opinion successful) with morality in games lately, and even with shooters. In my experience you can feel a lot of different things in parts where the game is easy -- shooting cultists who maybe have a legitimate beef with the government but are also plotting bioterrorism is very different from shooting bug-eyed aliens. When the game gets really hard something different kicks in, and possibly this is what people object to but it is also part of the human experience of war.
I'm glad to hear about the moral development of/in gaming, and thanks for being my "native" guide. I was always amazed by little kids who coulnd't sit still in class and yet could tell you every combination of fingerings needed to get through endless levels of games. I could see that some part of their brains was lighting up but because of the violent content I could only associate it with their love of pro-wrestling and horror films. I don't believe that all technologies are neutral but I try not to prejudge them.
There's a ton of video games based on past wars and battles, I'm not sure why this one is any different. Were the WWII vets mad when the WWII games all started to come out?
Assisted living centers. Seriously though their generation is not the ones who complain about every percieved slight. That did not come into fassion until the boomers. I am hoping that stoicism will come back in.
well there weren't alot of siblings and parents of WWII soldiers around to complain when those games came out so that may be part of it, but I'm guessing that the controversies (http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?id=1503) that particular battle, and this war, make this different.
It sounds like they are trying to stress some admirable values. You get points off for hurting civilians, for example. And I think they want to show how complicated it is to make decisions in war.
But it's hard to imagine anyone making a game as traumatic as actual war--and why would you want to?--which is probably the only way to really show it's not a game.
(Btw, dmf, I saw your query re my handle last week, but never had a chance to respond. Yes, I'm from NOLA originally, but moved to NYC pre-Katrina. Not that it didn't hurt from a distance.)
For once, I'm going with the ad hominem: the participants that support the production of the game should be respected in their decision to do so even though they don't seem to be articulating a strong justification for doing so by the standards of public reason. If they had written -- or had ghost written -- a book instead of a game there still might be some controversy (after all, the Stop the War Coalition would still be accusing them of war crimes) but I think there would be more general acceptance of what they had done, so people seem more outraged that they are using a less conventional artistic mode than in what they are actually expressing, which seems unreasonable.
This is probably a major breech of etiquette, and feel free to delete this, but I couldn't help myself, and I had to throw my own two cents in on the unending Gates debate:
You seem to hold that deliberating about health care is less interesting but more important than Gatesgate, but I would counter that the Gates Affair is a facet of the larger concern, the American police state, which, to me at least, is actually the matter of greater import.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
So I saw MF Doom at the Pitchfork music festival in Chicago, last weekend I think. He pulled a Milli Vanilli / Ashlee Simpson and lip-synched the whole damn thing.
So disappointing.
That might have been a doombot. Doom's been known to send impersonators to shows. Which, of course, is what you might expect from a supervillain.
I didn't know anyone else was doing this. Man or Astroman did this a while back, and I just loved the idea of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_Astro-man%3F#The_Astro-man_Genome_Project
Of course, Kraftwerk has featured robot facsimilies of the band in concert for several decades.
My concept was to franchise my band... But together a kit to play our songs, use our ideas, and essentially "be" our band, use our name, etc., and just send us a percentage of the take.
he's a talented guy, but he's given to stage fright.
Wow. Quiet in here today.
Washingtonpost.com has a story about a church group from Baltimore that's going to picket the White House today because of Obama's "beer summit." They think they should be drinking lemonade and not sending the wrong message. According to the story, the Women's Christian Temperance Union is on board as well. Can't a couple guys just have a brew?
Ha. It's the "Pray at the Pump" guy.
I can't seem to find the article, but I did come across this there:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/susan_brooks_thistlethwaite/2009/07/how_to_be_white.html?hpid=talkbox1
Here you go:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/07/30/demonstrators_want_lemonade_at.html?wprss=44
Bask in the crazy.
My oh my...they're moving up the ladder...how fortunate that there are people like this, who look out for other peoples health, wether they like it or not...
Maybe they're worried about Obama smoking after too! Heavy drinking makes me want to smoke, I doubt I`m the only one.
I don't get the whole supersuit controversy in swimming. Don't all the swimmers have the same access to these suits? And what's Phelps' coach doing griping about them when his swimmer was using them to smash records last summer? It just seems like an equipment upgrade, just like bicycles getting lighter, golf clubs and golf balls being better engineered, etc. Just say that Venom isn't allowed to compete, and be done with it.
Phelps has a contract with one company that makes suits. Another company make the magical suit. So, Phelps can't wear it.
Yeah, Phelps' suit is last year's model of magic suit. He no longer has l33t gear and is lucky they still let him raid the top end swimming instances.
Win.
Yes it is like bicycles. Bicycle inovation has been stunted several times over the years because the cycling federation or the tour have out lawed some bike that won. The first I am familiar with is recumbents which were outlawed after the hour record was set on one in 1933. That is why we are all riding less efficient bikes today.
My wife sent me this link this morning:
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/07/29/lying-on-the-cover/
Author writes a story with a black female lead, publisher puts a white girl's face on the cover. Magical world we live in...
As an aspiring writer with a number of non-white lead characters, I'd be shitting bricks if someone pulled a stunt like this on something of mine. I don't think I'd sign myself into a situation where I wouldn't have veto power over a cover, but I'm still an outsider - is that just how things are?
I really like Racialicious too! I wish TNC would link to it more, that and feministing.
If you just got your book accepted by a publishing house, unless you explicitly set it out in the contract details, you have basically no say in the marketing of the book. Marketing usually includes things like cover art. Yeah, you can get some creative control over it, if your agent is good enough or if you already have enough of a following to justify it. But even somebody as famous as Ursula LeGuin can get totally screwed on movie rights. She basically disowned the made-for-TV version of Earthsea because of the whitewashing. (I think that was the least of its problems, but I digress).
I'm actually in a similar situation. I just applied for copyright for a fantasy book where all of my characters are darker-skinned, running from vaguely Middle-Eastern to coal-black. When I get the copyright confirmation, I'm going the self-publishing route. The only marketing guy who's going to totally mess things up will be me.
Good luck, Tel! Be sure to pimp the book in an open thread when the time comes. ;-)
For some reason, immediately after posting my original, I got locked out of the website - I still can't get back in on Firefox, had to load up the dastardly IE. !?
Anyway, here's what I tried to post right after:
Addendum to my own post - I hadn't followed all the links yet. Evidently the author indeed, had no say over the final cover. In her words (from here: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/07/23/aint-that-a-shame/):
"...I have always imagined her looking quite a bit like Alana Bear...."
and
"The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.
I strongly objected to all of them. I lost."
I remember the LeGuin thing now that you mention it - I think we tried to watch the first episode or so. I had fond memories of the book as a child.
Good luck with the book! Especially with the self-publishing, everything I've read advises against that - but most of those writers are probably not struggling with this particular issue.
I haven't made it to the query stage in my process yet (hopefully end of the year) - but I just won't do it without a cover approval clause. I don't care if they put something totally unrelated on there - I'd rather have that than have my nonwhite characters represented in that way.
I don't know about racialicious but TNC is the whole reason I read feministing. He linked to them a while back and reading them began to process of taking me out of my white male bubble. Not that from where I stand there was much of a bubble. If anything it was and is a male bubble.
A lady I'm dating told me that she thought that if I had dark skin and dark hair I would finally be at home with myself. Honestly, I can't say she was wrong considering how I came up. Nothing like being constantly bombarded with prejudice to make a person hate themselves.
Anyway sorry for the side trip.
It's a favorite of my wifes, so I wind up reading a bunch there too, lots of quality work, also seems to have a good commenter base.
Feh, I like them both, too. But if you check out the past couple months, there hasn't been much blog linkage, period. The blog is becoming weirdly internal.
This is the kind of thing that can really boost the sales of the book. The controversy will get more publicity for the work. The hardest part of selling a book, regardless of its merrits as a work of literature, is getting attention. So lets get outraged and sell some books! BTW is the book any good?
I think so-- I've heard excellent reviews of Liar and her earlier work.
I'm conflicted though - do we really want the sales of the book boosted? Wouldn't that just bear out the "white cover" hypothesis to the publishers?
The author said somewhere that she thinks all the controversy may help her get the cover changed, I think that would be awesome.
You should check out How to Ditch Your Fairy, then. Same author, better cover.
I will have to check it out.
This happened to Octavia Butler all the time--all her lead characters that I'm aware of are black women, and the old covers showed white women. But in this century her stuff has had black females on the cover; seems very retro.
test
It's working.
Now it's not! I've gotta contact TNC about my screenname again...
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4366335
Sad day for us red sox fans - we knew it was coming, but still...
Yeah, I just had to have the conversation with my son :(
We don't get to many games but I won 2 tickets at a school auction and took him for his birthday last year. He used his birthday money to buy a Big Papi T-shirt. Sigh.... (On the bright side, we saw John Lester pitch a no hitter that night!)
The 2004 World Series trophy came to my son's school and each class got to hold it and take their picture with it. How come I feel I should draw in an asterisk by the trophy?
Logically, as an adult, I get the argument that sports is big business, athletes are entertainers, what's the big deal about steroids, blah blah. But yeah, I hate for my daughter to see this. She was already heartbroken by Manny. Ortiz is a little easier to take only in that it is less shocking since he has sucked so bad since Manny left and he lost his supplier. But kids want to have real heroes. They wanna believe it's all about dedication and talent, not performance enhancers.
Yeah. I've expected this for a while. And I don't like it.
When a whole sport is riddled with doping, you have to expect that the winning teams will have plenty of it. After all, to win the World Series you have to beat a lot of dopers.
I've also wondered for the last couple years if Manny and Papi's unusually streaky numbers might be explained by the drug testing cycle. (My understanding is that people are tested twice a season, at random times. I've wondered if the terrible, sluggish springs followed by fiery Augusts aren't about when the man had his second test and knew he wouldn't be checked again.)
I expect nothing less form men who have been trained since childhood that nothing they do matters as long as they perform well on the field.
There's a couple things to say about the suits. The shark skin-like suits that he and lots of folks used over the past few years were notable and beneficial because the texture reduced drag in the water. the difference with the new suits is that they are not permeable, and that rather than texture is the benefit. Not being particularly permeable means that they are like a floatation devise and allows them to have a higher more beneficial position in the water. That kind of means they swim through less water than other swimmers, encounter less drag, work less hard throughout race, tire less, and thus its not work that wins but technology.
Why doesn't everyone use them? I think his sponsor doesn't make them. but that is just one facet of it. He'd have to swim differently. He'd be condoning the innovation and the transformation of a sport he is uniquely equipped to dominate.
Triathlons in warm weather areas typically ban wet-suits from competition for this reason, what you're explaining is otherwise known as a wet-suit. I'm surprised you're allowed to wear a wet-suit in a swim competition, but the big controversy is that they will be banned next year.
Union brass, lawyer to accompany Sgt. Crowley to White House
Ya know what if this is true, then this cop is a piece of work. Put aside the race issue, and it’s obvious that this asshole arrested Professor Gates for “contempt of cop”. He should justifiably be in trouble for that alone. Now he gets an invite from the Prez to the WH, which is no small thing, for him and his family along with Professor Gates, and who does he decide to bring along?
Union brass, lawyer to accompany Sgt. Crowley to White House
Gates is already a friend of Obama’s, so here’s hoping he brings along his lawyer Ogletree who is also a friend of the Prez, and let’s see how Crowley & his crew handles a united front.
Asshole. I can see the lawyer, but WTF is the point of the Union Brass being there.
Man, is karma is real, I hope it's truly a B(&^%, cause this Crowley guy sure has a lot coming his way.
Wow. Clearly Crowley imagines "having a beer" in a very different way than the rest of us do.
Why treat a goodwill gesture as an adversarial process? And what can possibly come out of that?
My guess is that it's some sort of half-assed insult. He didn't want to flat out refuse, but he also didn't want anyone thinking he was going to accept the invitation in the spirit it was intended. Remember the grin when he said "I didn't vote for him"?
I wonder how long until the inevitable Joe-the-plumbering of this guy... Argh!
I am strongly on the side of Gates in this incident, but I wouldn't rule out that maybe the lawyer and the union rep came up with any excuse for telling Crowley they needed to be there too, because they want to meet the President and get their "fifteen minutes." I wouldn't just assume that Crowley asked them to come.
You act like a dillhole and you get to pound beers with the President. Hope my daughters aren't watching the news tonight. Who the hell is paying the fare for all these guys? If I were in the union, I would hope my dues aren't going for my boss to get drunk.
Also, Crowley gets to drink the beer of his choosing. He should at least be punished by having to drink PBR or Rolling Rock.
I think Brooklyn Chocolate Stout would be an appropriate punishment, on several levels.
PBR is a fine beer you elitist jerk!!! ;-)
Jesus H. Christ on a cracker what a douche. I hope the bar snack that the President is providing is a bag of dicks.
I think you just used all my favorite swears in one sentence! Now I am going to try to eat lunch and not think about a bag of dicks.
hey gamers, I don't play them so I could use some insight on the debate about Six Days in Fallujah. Some families of dead vets of that battle are upset by the game for obvious reasons but the soldier that speaks for company that sells it is claiming that by playing it people will come to realize that "war is not a game." Does this defense bear any scrutiny?
dmf, I'm really not sure. I think war occupies a very weird place in our sense of morality. We have good and evil tangled tightly together. On the one hand we hate war itself, but we also honor the individual soldiers who actually make war. I guess that goes in with the "necessary evil" thing.
What I'm getting around to is that art about war is similarly conflicted. There's a theme of "war is hell and so terrible" inserted into every war movie/photograph/video game. But few artists want to present that theme by making art which the audience doesn't like, so that message is typically undermined by a sense of glory, decency, even beauty.
Games have the same right to depict war, but the juxtaposition of a game with a specific, recent conflict makes this weirdness more explicit. We haven't had enough time to emotionally insulate ourselves from the horrors in Iraq, and at the same time, the game sounds like it could be a lot of fun. We can stand around and loudly proclaim that killing people is NOT fun, but at least some of our soldiers will admit that they do enjoy killing people.
It probably doesn't help that American society as a whole still feels unsure about Iraq and is strongly aware of the possibility that all this killing was not useful at all. With WW2 games we can tell ourselves that it was all for a good cause.
Ultimately if you're against a game like Six Days in Fallujah I think you also have to be opposed to any war movie which is any "good", that is, an enjoyable experience to watch. Maybe that IS the right answer. I've seen the work of a photojournalist who took honest shots of the aftermath from bombings in Iraq -- horrible stuff I certainly won't look at again.
thanks all. I'm just trying to work the implications of this thru so sorry if I'm missing the point, like I said don't know what it's like to be absorbed by a 1st person shooter game, but when I see a "good" war movie like say the remake of a Thin Red Line or Full Metal Jacket I don't really want to experience it again. But it seems that video game are different in that they are made to make you want to do it over and over. Does that make sense?
Sure, it makes sense. Though individual reaction is variable, it's certainly common for war movies to have individual scenes which make you feel disgust, make you want to turn away, make you not want to see the movie again. I'm just not aware of one that makes you feel that way all the time; mostly they are mixed in with things that make you feel good, like excitement, or acts of honor, moving music, stuff like that.
There's been a lot of experimentation (in my opinion successful) with morality in games lately, and even with shooters. In my experience you can feel a lot of different things in parts where the game is easy -- shooting cultists who maybe have a legitimate beef with the government but are also plotting bioterrorism is very different from shooting bug-eyed aliens. When the game gets really hard something different kicks in, and possibly this is what people object to but it is also part of the human experience of war.
I'm glad to hear about the moral development of/in gaming, and thanks for being my "native" guide. I was always amazed by little kids who coulnd't sit still in class and yet could tell you every combination of fingerings needed to get through endless levels of games. I could see that some part of their brains was lighting up but because of the violent content I could only associate it with their love of pro-wrestling and horror films. I don't believe that all technologies are neutral but I try not to prejudge them.
There's a ton of video games based on past wars and battles, I'm not sure why this one is any different. Were the WWII vets mad when the WWII games all started to come out?
Assisted living centers. Seriously though their generation is not the ones who complain about every percieved slight. That did not come into fassion until the boomers. I am hoping that stoicism will come back in.
well there weren't alot of siblings and parents of WWII soldiers around to complain when those games came out so that may be part of it, but I'm guessing that the controversies (http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?id=1503) that particular battle, and this war, make this different.
It sounds like they are trying to stress some admirable values. You get points off for hurting civilians, for example. And I think they want to show how complicated it is to make decisions in war.
But it's hard to imagine anyone making a game as traumatic as actual war--and why would you want to?--which is probably the only way to really show it's not a game.
(Btw, dmf, I saw your query re my handle last week, but never had a chance to respond. Yes, I'm from NOLA originally, but moved to NYC pre-Katrina. Not that it didn't hurt from a distance.)
I hope to get down there this winter and see what's become of it I'll let you know if I do.
I go back a lot (family). Things are much better than that first year after, but it's a long struggle.
I alsways said the only realistic war game is one where you only get one life, and when you lose it, the game shuts down and bricks your console.
For once, I'm going with the ad hominem: the participants that support the production of the game should be respected in their decision to do so even though they don't seem to be articulating a strong justification for doing so by the standards of public reason. If they had written -- or had ghost written -- a book instead of a game there still might be some controversy (after all, the Stop the War Coalition would still be accusing them of war crimes) but I think there would be more general acceptance of what they had done, so people seem more outraged that they are using a less conventional artistic mode than in what they are actually expressing, which seems unreasonable.
Here is a good blog you should all check out. Posts today on Michael Vick and Fox News. I am sure you would have something to say about that.
http://countykids.blogspot.com/
Earth life caring about other earth life is not a fantasy.
This is probably a major breech of etiquette, and feel free to delete this, but I couldn't help myself, and I had to throw my own two cents in on the unending Gates debate:
http://thefastertimes.com/nonsensenews/2009/07/30/lets-stop-talking-about-gates-and-obama-and-the-cop-okay-please/
You seem to hold that deliberating about health care is less interesting but more important than Gatesgate, but I would counter that the Gates Affair is a facet of the larger concern, the American police state, which, to me at least, is actually the matter of greater import.