Category: General

My Media Empire (Part Something Or Other)

This week I am a prize-winning article writer, although the how and why of that is a bit weird. Basically, I wrote up a few thousand words in response to a series of questions the editor of Craccum (the University of Auckland’s student magazine) and that act has won me a free meal in a swanky restaurant.

Truly, I live the life of Riley (and, to quote “The IT Crowd,” I know Riley and the resemblance is uncanny).

The interview is in issue number 15 and can be found on pages 16 to 17. José Barbosa supplied the picture, which I think I might use for all my media-related ballyhoos in future. Since some of you won’t have ability or the want to pick up a copy of Craccum, I’ll let you in on a little secret; if you click here you can see a PDF of the interview.

You are now in on a conspiracy. Good luck.

08/02/2010

A Conspiracy Week of Tweets 2010-08-01

  • New(/old) blog theme, new post and the like at https://www.mrxdentith.com/allembracing/allembracing/ #
  • Just finished Cass Sunstein's "On Rumours." Short review: reads like an old man complaining about the things kids get away with on the net. #
  • New "Scissor Sisters" album. That's the day wasted for me, what with the dancing and all. Hope the other cubicle dwellers cope. #

08/01/2010

Film Festival Hiatus

If my paltry number of regular readers have been wondered what I’ve been up to, well, the answer is this.

I’ve been festivising with the hoi polloi.

I have also been working, but the segments I have been working on are not ready for human consumption. So, let’s skip past that, shall we?

More quick news that fills up a blog post: I am currently reading Cass Sunstein’s book on Rumours (or “Rumors” as he calls them), which I’ll review in the next week or so. It’s a bit of a weird booklet; very early on decides not to define what a rumour is (and then, a sentence later, seems to define what they are quite happily). A lot of the things he finds problematic about the presence and transmission of rumours in the world seem like issues that could be easily addressed if he had a full definition to work with.

Also, I’m also moderating a debate on the nature of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Pink Unicorn for the University of Auckland’s Atheist Week. More news on that as it comes to hand.

Finally, the Rumour paper, the one I gave at the Singaporean conference, is getting published in a book. I know this because they want to give me an honorarium for submitting the manuscript on time and in a publishable form. Apparently the honorarium is “substantial.” Given that you usually don’t get honorariums for publication, substantial could mean anything between fifty cents and a trillion dollars. I’m hoping the later, although if it’s enough to buy a coffee or two I’ll still be happy.

Back to work. Well, off to see the final film of the festival.

Trah/Cher.

07/25/2010

It’s All A Narrative Structure, Dammit!

Five years ago today I wrote the very last revision of my short story “You Must Be.”

I haven’t really written any fiction since. Whilst I have written a few short short stories, mostly to keep a little practice in, fiction writing is something I’ve given up on; my energies are meant to be going into thesis writing and lecture prep.

I miss fiction writing; it’s a lot more enjoyable than my academic work. I tend to write material which could be considered existential in nature; I like to deal with fictions about what it is to be an individual, which is mostly because my intuitions are (and this is odd, given my behaviour) vested in notions of group identity and the primacy of the social organism over the discrete entity (that sounds very pretentious, I know). I keep meaning to go back to it, but the thesis… Well, it gnaws at me.

Anyway. Today, whilst browsing twitter and not doing any real work, I found out about I Write Like. After being told that my blog posts are in the style of Dan Brown (which is oddly appropriate and very displeasing) I decided to try parsing the last bit of long fiction I had written; that, I was told, was in the style of Oscar Wilde (very much a step up, one feels).

Opening up “You Must Be” and scanning through it made me realise just how much I’d like to get back to fiction writing. It also revealed to me that it was five years to the day since I had last done anything to the story. I now really want to do another pass at it.

Anyway, I present it here (as a PDF) in case anyone is interested to read it.

I’m not sure Oscar would recognise it, but he’s dead so it doesn’t matter.

07/13/2010

Still Crazy After All These Years

Maybe it’s my wounded professional pride, but I came to the Sunday programme’s segment on conspiracy theory magazines with the thought that “This will be a bit rubbish.” I mean, really, they had to go to Australia for an expert? I’m right here in Ponsonby/Grey Lynn.

So, with that egotistical bit out of the way, “Sunday,” this last Sunday, featured a segment on Jonathan Eisen and “Uncensored” magazine (the internet for people who can’t afford dial-up), as well as the chap who runs “Nexus” over in Australia. You can watch it here.

The thesis, as put forward by the publishers of “Uncensored” and “Nexus,” is that the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) only appeases vested interests and doesn’t fulfil the remit of informing the general populace. This wasn’t questioned by Ian Sinclair, the reporter for the piece, which was strange because he works for the MSM and thus… Well, it’s not really clear what the piece was about. It wasn’t about debunking the claims that magazines like “Uncensored” put forward, because whilst there was some very casual debunking ((For example, Clare Swinney asserted that some fairly innocuous cloud cover were actually chemtrails. Sinclair showed said chemtrails to a scientist, who said they were perfectly normal cloud cover, which then caused Jon Eisen to say that the scientist must be a minion for the “Man.” Hardly award-winning journalism.)) most of the piece seemed designed to allow the publishers of “Uncensored” and “Nexus” to say ‘You aren’t getting the whole truth from the media,’ as if a) most people don’t already know that and b) the publishers of “Uncensored” and “Nexus” would give you such truths.

All fairly predictable.

I really can’t think of anything particularly interesting to say about the piece, really. The segment had nothing new to say; it didn’t exactly paint Eisen as a crackpot or as a serious journalist but rather as… a man who prints a magazine. I’m curious as to what “Sunday’s” mostly middle-class audience thought of the piece. I could understand if they had brought Ian Wishart into the discussion, because Wishart, in “Investigate,” talks to the concerns of the white middle-classes but this?

Consider me bemused. And obviously not doing any work of substance if I can spend an entire morning trying to write this post.

07/07/2010

The Plato Code [Updated]

So, Dan Brown has been pipped to the post by a science historian, one Dr. Jay Kennedy. Kennedy has discovered a code in the works of Plato that reveal that Plato anticipated the scientific revolution long before those blasted Enlightenment figures, yadda yadda yadda.

The paper he has published contains such gems as:

Stichometric analyses find unexpected evidence for Pythagoreanism in the dialogues themselves, and thereby develop a pregnant argument made by Sayre.

and:

Since intentions are, strictly speaking, inaccessible, we can at best enumerate candidate motivations.

Finding codes in ancient works is a, well, not respected activity, but a common one, especially when people want to confirm a certain hypothesis they hold dear. Most researchers fail, in these circumstances, to attempt to falsify their hypotheses. They find enough relevant similarities between the work they are decoding and the explanatory hypothesis that such a code should be present to bolster their claim but, and this is important, they often ignore (by simply not looking for) the relevant dissimilarities.

Now, admittedly, I have not read the paper fully and it may well turn out that Dr. Kennedy has actually found proof of a deep and hidden Pythagorean code in the works if Plato, but even if he has, the Burden of Proof still rests upon him to provide further evidence of his extraordinary claim.

I really must get back to work. Really.

Update: I’ve now had a chance to look over the paper and it’s not quite the breathless argument that, for example, the University of Manchester and Slashdot made it out to be. The methodology looks good and the analysis is interesting. I’m still suspicious about the explanatory hypothesis at its heart, if only because the claim that codes exist in texts is easy to claim but hard to ever properly substantiate (without an admission from the texts’ author) and, thus, I await the reply articles I suspect will be published in the wake of Kennedy’s paper to see what the rest of his peer group thinks of his novel thesis.

06/29/2010