Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

It's Non

29May2005 [directLink] [myth]

Well the French have called ‘Non’, currently calling around 55% +/- 2ish. EC Pres Juncker just gave a Press Conference to admit defeat; but at least tried not to be as negative as the media has been in the lead-up. The propaganda warning was that Europe would fail, France would lose its position &c, if she said Non. But Juncker admitted that the Union will not stop, and commentators on all stations are reiterating that the leaders of Europe will have to sit down and figure out why the treaty was rejected, and negotiate something new (Juncker even said that this reflected France’s discomfort with the text, but also that the wider Europe may share this discomfort).

What will be interesting is what this does for French domestic politics, the major parties having pushed the Oui line. The Socialists (PS) may struggle the most, as some see them having lost touch with their base by voting Oui while their supporters went Non. Add to that the fact that the extreme (left and right) parties were the only ones arguing Non and the National Assembly may get messy… My guess though, is that the major parties will write this as a rejection of the text rather than a rejection of Europe (which is correct, but isn’t what they were saying before the vote), and further, will rewrite their pre-Referendum positions so as not to lose contact with the people. I’m particularly thinking of the PS in this case, whose internal opponents of the treaty will probably return to favour to aid in this rewriting…

Further: am currently watching ‘La Chaine Parlementaire’ (whilst flicking channels, but this one is very in-depth political analysis, and lots of arguing) and one woman raised another point I’d noticed during the debate: the fact that the major parties and the mainstream media widely supported the Oui, while 55% have voted Non, raises the question of democratic representation - both politically and in terms of the media’s role. I touched on some of this in my media analysis from a month ago and I’m going to have to revisit it…

weird search terms 2

23May2005 [directLink] [search]

ok, making this a ?bits category, cos I’m getting so many classic search terms sending people my way….

Currently ranked 2nd on a nimemsn search for old men photos. That’s right, get your old men photos here….

also fifth for arthurian propaganda

I am also aware that posting these terms is just going to break nineMSN even more, but that isn’t my problem ;)

Update 26May: ranked first for ‘sun ufos photos’ (which is silly, but I do have that one photo at Stonehenge with weird lens flare and UFOs), and fifth for ‘medias influence on society’, which I don’t think I’ve specifically dealt with…

Updates

20May2005 [directLink] [personal]

Been doing some more coding on the site, much of it you can’t actually see, but _very_ soon I’ll have some visible stuff available - the main one being a replacement for the Flash banner which is rather boring and unnecessary (plus I’ve caught the ‘standards’ bug which is a little hostile to frivolous Flash bits ;)). The replacement consists of the ‘Wintermute’ title overlayed on a bit of a photo - at the moment it’s picking at random from about 10 photos, but I’ll add more as well. So every time you reload the page you get a new picture at random… Had a bit of trouble getting it to work in IE cos they don’t support PNG transparency, but there’s a neat little hack that works without breaking standards nor any other browsers, as long as the IE user has DirectX installed… I’ll have the details up on here soon — and on that I’m also moving the ?myth/?film/?webprog sections and currently trying to write a php/xml content management system-thingy… Hopefully will be up soon

Spent the last few days doing updates on the computer; now I’m running KDE 3.4 which is kinda cool, made perrtier by X.Org’s ‘Composite’ extension, which gives me translucent windows! I keep the ‘active window’ looking normal, but the inactive ones go half-invisible, which lets me layer them and watch a few things at once (eg, I’ll leave a chat window or a terminal on top and read through it to the web). And Gentoo have gone to the effort of splitting up the KDE installation files - one used to have to install ALL of KDE’s multimedia applications just to use one of them, but now I can pick the few proggies I use regularly. It took a while to switch the old laptop over to the new setup, but it should be easier to upgrade in future, which makes it easier to bear the fact that KDE 3.4.1 comes out in a few days (which I didn’t know before I started the days of compiling!)

Meanwhile in Reims, French classes are finished; exams finish this Wednesday; I’m in the process of sorting things for my next Carte de Sejour appointment (in July - hoping to have things ready mid-June so I can nick off to England); only have to write another methodology thing for UTS and I’m all finished till the end of September!

And finally, a rather random, but funny linky: “I like the idea that picking a parenting style is essentially the same as picking your character’s alignment in Dungeon’s and Dragon.” (check out the associated diagram in the post)

expensive habits

14May2005 [directLink] [personal]

Gonna have trouble adjusting to the different food offerings when I return home — or worse, will go broke trying not to adjust

• Making sandwiches out of spanish ham (that dark, dried yet greasy and fatty stuff) organic roma tomatoes and camembert, all on a fresh baguette of course
• Buying another cpl bags of coffee beans every week; the coffee store also offers:
• Fancy chocolates, with, eg, chopped up mint leaves or chopped cocoa beans inside
• and Expensive tea, the perfect way to end the night
• On the topic of tea I’ve discovered I like the stuff and have built myself a varied supply of black and greens
• Also built myself a constant supply of spirits and decent beers - I can’t get through wine or champagne fast enough to make a bottle worthwhile, so instead have found some decent beer (like Adelscott, which has a touch of whiskey in it) and various mixable spirits

And on the topic, I’ve also discovered cooking improv-style stir fries et al. I keep a supply of spices, light sauces, and various flavours (chopped almonds, grated coconut, pineapple syrup, &c) and mix it all up depending what I feel like

BBC backstage access

12May2005 [directLink] [webprog]

the BBC is opening up access — their new Backstage feature allows developers to access a whole lot of BBC information and reincorporate (buzzword:Remix) the info into their own work… There are already some example of how it’s being used on the site - one guy linked it in with links to Wikipedia for further info on key concepts.

Why do I care? Because this is a major media organisation (well yeah they’re government owned and funded which makes this easier) that’s opening up to the web community - making them a content provider rather than a portal…

Between this and RSS we’re going to see plenty of rearranging in the ways people consume media… All of which is a good thing

(And on that topic I’ve just added an RSS feed for little ?bits onto my site — linky is on the left) For people who don’t know what RSS is nor how to use it, your best bet is to use Firefox (another linky on the left!), which has ‘Live Bookmarks’ — if you visit my site in Firefox a little icon will appear on the bottom-right, you can click it and select ‘Subscribe…’, then it adds what looks like a Bookmarks (or Favorites) folder, but inside the folder are links to the 10 latest ?bits entries on my site… This is cool enough cos it lets you check if I’ve updated without actually visiting my site, and this is only the most simple way you can use RSS…

Tribes sidebar now available

11May2005 [directLink] [personal]

OK, so I’ve finally got all the coding done on the tribes sidebar - down the right-hand side. For now there’s only a couple links as placeholders, there’ll be lots more soon once I get my head around the categories I want to use… Click the category heading and it expands to show all the available links (clicking the heading again hides it)

Update 12May05: so I’ve added a bunch of sites in a few different categories… These are sites I visit regularly, but standard disclaimer: I don’t necessarily agree with what they say…

Coolest bit is that the background div (the blue background) expands to suit as you expand the different headings…

CCD^3

09May2005 [directLink] [personal]

Yay! Just bought a camera… at last. It’s the Panasonic GS400 (3CCD) video camera. Now I can make annoying videos and stick them on the site!

search terms

06May2005 [directLink] [search]

how cool/utterly hopeless is this:

NineMSN’s google-killing search engine returns my site as the TOP RESULT for a search on “salif keita tomorrow” (only works on the australian msn site cos i’ve got the australian domain)

I’m also on page 4 of a search for “pride and prejudice script”

Just reinforces the problems we have with Search with the amount of information available online… No way does anyone want my site given either of those search terms (p&p’s not so bad, it’s a while in, but coming to my site because I mention I listen to a particular song?!)

Google on the other hand, isn’t even checking my website… Gonna have to put some work into that

Update 9May05: the same search engine is returning my site at the top of page two on a search for ‘christians view on the film harry potter’. Sure I’ve got a view, but I haven’t expressed it here yet so I’m not sure it’s a particularly helpful search result…

Update 12May05: Another One! a nineMSN search on ‘google traditional costumes for japan’ puts my site at number 2!

Also been doing some research re Google, still no hard and fast solutions though… And am thinking I might have to make a separate ‘bits’ category for absurd search terms ;)

lesser of two evils

06May2005 [directLink] [myth]

Been keeping an eye on the UK elections out of morbid fascination - no surprise that the same thing happened there as in Australia and the States - the incumbents won because they had no opposition

Must quote two things from Samizdata, because they can so easily be applied to their parallels in Aus and the States:

“Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard’s carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice”

“This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories…, it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant”

Linkies:
Samizdata before
Samizdata after

new articles up

01May2005 [directLink] [personal]

Got my latest UTS assignment finished in time… We had to select a sociological research method and do a mini-test-run thing with it… So I did a (focussed) Media Analysis on the May29 Referendum on the European Constitution… Wrote nearly 4000 words when they only wanted 2500 so had to cut one section and big chunks of the others. The Director’s Cut is available online… First half is critiquing the method (I’ve done three years of humanities at UTS, as if I couldn’t rip sociology to bits!), 2nd half is various observations on the handful of magazines I read…

Most amazing thing about this extremely boring assignment: before I started, I had no idea which way I’d vote if given the chance… Now I’m a staunch Non supporter… The ‘constitution’ (which is really a bunch of rules tacked together in treaty form) is a joke, and the way the French government has said ‘vote for this or you’re stupid’ is even moreso!!!

Mmm… well while I was updating, I also put my First Impressions project up… I wrote it on the French attitudes to local and foreign film. We were sposed to pick something about the culture that ‘stood out’ but the French really aren’t that strange (!) so I did it on film given it’s my area of study and I wanted to stay kinda connected to the scene… Didn’t do very well in the end (I’m too used to cultural studies subjects!) but I was pretty happy with it…