Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Abort

25April2004 [directLink] [myth]

I’ve noticed the issue of adoption come up a few times lately, and I realised: it’s interesting that we/society tells mothers it’s OK to kill their children, but not to ‘give them up’. The grief suffered by mothers forced to adopt out their children is a driving factor, but no one worries about the mothers who had to have abortions - it’s justified (to them and to us) by saying that they’re not really human, or they’re no different from a blob of blood cells. Mothers are fooled into believing it’s just another part of their own body, making abortion a ‘routine operation’, when there are hundreds of parents around the world willing to adopt children because they can’t have kids of their own.

You’d think the grief would be easier to cope with when adopting out to a loving family than killing off an unwanted child - but the latter is denied and the former is victimised!

<i>The Passion</i> Part I

22April2004 [directLink] [myth]

Finally got around to seeing The Passion, I’ve been waiting for the right moment, then one afternoon just got up and went and saw it. More to come soon, but a few comments:

Some things I found surprisingly artistic, others were terrible! (The bits that really got to me were all the people in the background laughing - really ugly exaggerated expressions - I understand why it was done but in something striving for realism it was ridiculous!)

The violence was … interesting - I still think it was overly violent, emphasising the wrong elements of Christ, but that was a problem with the whole premise of the movie.

But anyway, given the way the media was talking about the violence, I was expecting one of those movies which were mostly intense violence with little moments of respite. I found instead that the violence was so like any other gratuitously-violent movie that it meant almost nothing, and instead acted as a respite from the really powerful moments - ie, almost all the scenes that weren’t violent. All the scenes with Mary, the scenes in Gethsemane, Pontius and Claudia. I loved the scene where Claudia came to the two Mary’s, who then mopped up Christ’s Holy Blood. But there was a little too much Holy Blood in much of the movie.

And just an interesting little aside: the Merovingians were a line of kings in France in the early Middle Ages who claimed to be descended from Christ and Mary Magdalene. Strange then that the same actress plays Magdalene as Persephone, the Merovingian’s partner in the Matrix 2 and 3!

the light in the darkness

18April2004 [directLink] [myth]

Went to John Mayer’s concert last night at the Sydney Entertainment Center. Amazing music - I was worried the show would be a bit poppier than his Hordern show September last year, but it was only slightly. It was ‘musical’ enough that some teenybopper (well, he sounded like a guy in his 20s, but still teenybopper) called out “play a song” during an amazing guitar solo…

But yeh, he played some new bits, which was good to hear, given nothing’s been released since the last show.

There was one song he introduced by talking about sunlight, and it came down to: in New York there are some people getting too much sunlight, they didn’t used to get any sun in the windows in the morning, but now they do. How poetic…

woundedness

18April2004 [directLink] [myth]

The priest in today’s homily:

Time doesn’t heal; time just helps you learn to live with the pain.

Chromies

15April2004 [directLink] [myth]

So I went and saw Starsky & Hutch last night, and during the previews there was an RTA ad - targeted (apparently, they kept using words like ‘sick’ and ‘chromies’ ??) at young people, discouraging car theft and/or speeding. Oh, and it’s animated…

There’s these 3 guys standing round and they see a fancy car (fancy because it was red and they point out the ‘sick chromies’), decide to steal it, one of the guys is reluctant, but peer pressure etc., cops pull up next to them, the driver freaks and speeds off. The audience was made up completely of the target market - who else would watch Starsky & Hutch at 9.30 on a Wednesday night - at least the marketers got that much right. Up till then we were slightly shocked by the foreign language, but just hanging in there. Then the ad cuts to a shot of one dude’s head, bleeding everywhere - and the entire cinema bursts out laughing…

And you can just see the old dudes sitting around planning this thing - while the younger animators have no control over content… So the old dudes are going “kids like cartoons, maybe we could animate it” and “our studies indicate that youth use Americanisms like sick”. You just wonder if they test screened this ad, and if the people they showed it to were too intimidated to laugh out loud.

Fortress Australia

12April2004 [directLink] [myth]

Seems like only a couple years ago (ie, the last election campaign) when the Liberals were fighting on ‘Fortress Australia’. We’ve come a terrifyingly long way when Labor is on ‘Fortress Australia’ and Liberal says it’s too soft!! (Instead we should invade foreign countries cause we don’t really like the way they’re being run)

flash gallery thingy

08April2004 [directLink] [webprog]

Putting this here for now - there’s a web design section coming, but for now…

This is a Flash photo gallery thing (hence the title) that I built for a New Media class at uni. We had to built a small gallery of images, around a common theme. I took it as a chance to experiment with Flash, and I’m pretty happy with the result. Extremely simplistic design (and primary colours too - I have actually justified that to myself). Played around with ActionScript to get the buttons flickering etc - I’ll have that code posted here once I get the new section up and running.

Click the ‘Flash Gallery’ link under Recent on the right - and you need to be allowing javascript to popup windows - otherwise, this one’ll do. It’s only 850K…

And oh yeah… It’s about McDonald’s, evil capitalists taking over the world, that kind of thing. Although it’s more about imposing logos on the environment…