Numbers Have Meanings

I have spoken a few times about how important it is to remember that words have meanings.  Since they have meanings, we must be clear about what we mean when we used them, and as a writer I always aim to be judicious and accurate in the terms I lay down like so many bricks in the wall.  It will not do to throw around words willy-nilly when writing a story, otherwise the real meaning of your piece is lost, and the weight of your terms is diluted.  When a character is a 'murderer', I mean a murderer, somebody who decides to kill other human beings.  I don't mean somebody who killed a friend in a terrible boating accident.  In real life, I have pointed out that words like bigot do have an application, and you cannot simply wash the label off yourself if you make yourself sticky enough to wear it in the first place.  Try as many a homophobe might, cries of "I'm not a bigot but..." immediately negates the first four words of their own sentence.

Now, I'd like to point out that numbers, too, have meanings.  This is not a quasi-existential conundrum or any attempt at fuzzy mathematics.  I'm not very good at maths anyway, so I am not going to compound on how 2+2 can equal 5 (apparently it can, for adequate values of 2, and not only in the world inhabited by Fox News).  2 is a good number to start with.  2 is the chart position of a particular song in the UK singles chart.  2 is the number of times I can recall that the British Broadcasting Corporation has chosen to obscure the position of a song in that same chart.  The first time was when the Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen appeared, which was considered far too politically inconvenient to air.  Now such aggressive and troubling punk rock seems almost quaint, but its anti-fascist message apparently has not been heeded, as the BBC has whitewashed today's chart and allowed only a five second clip of Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to appear in the news instead.

Yes, yes, calling the BBC fascist and getting bent out of shape about a song is rather petty.  But it is no more petty than an organisation that is meant to report simple information like the position of a song in a chart deciding that, since a song's position may be embarrassing, the song must be buried.  And it is not simply the dodging of playing an embarrassing song; it is a purposeful effort to alter history.  A transparent, incompetent attempt, that makes the BBC look suspect and brings their general credibility into question.  If they will in essence cover up a song because it doesn't suit the political climate, what else will or have they obscured from the public?

The BBC is not alone.  If one were to Google "UK singles chart" right now, the results would provide info taken directly from both the BBC and the Official UK Chart.  The former mysteriously omits song number 2 from the top three visible on Google; the latter simply lies and pretends song number 2 is something else.  Of course visiting the actual sites provides the real data (though for some reason the Official UK chart does not provide a 'buy' link for the number 2 song), but if one were simply surfing on Google, one would be misinformed.  This is not an accident.  This is not important, in isolation, but if a song is enough to get these bodies so worked up they will simply lie, why should they ever be trusted?

Worse than burying information, the BBC have opened themselves up to accusations of bias as they did play I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher in full.  This has been adopted as an anthem in opposition to those who are celebrating her death, though in reality the band behind it, the Notsensibles, have said their intention was satirical.  The BBC also, in the five seconds they did air of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead broadcast the eponymous line.  If they were so concerned about offending and upsetting people they had to bury the song, why air the specific line that would be most concerning?  The BBC insists they were acting out of balance, but they appear to have fallen flat on their faces, pleasing nobody and shredding their credibility all to avoid taking a decisive editorial stance.

In their intention to avoid controversy/reality, the BBC have made this minute-long song a national issue.  Their objective appears to have been shielding a nation from its own opinion, and in their arrogance they think they have both the right and capability of doing so.  What has really happened is that people sitting in their bedrooms have clicked a button to download a song and the result is the British Broadcasting Corporation felt obliged to mangle reality. That’s power. None of these ordinary people will get state funerals, or see anything like the £10-£40 million spent on them in their lifetime, nevermind just to put them in the ground, but their simple act of defiance has rattled the halls of power. Like Toto, we have pulled back the curtain, and pay attention to what cowering and weak mortals lie behind it.

Here it is, today's moment of zen:

If a picture's worth a thousand words...

How many lives are worth a barrel of oil?

As a Scot and a curmudgeon both, I would be remiss if I didn't mark the passing of one Margaret Thatcher, former UK Prime Minister and good friend of the morally handicapped.

Words have power because, in spite of our relativistic bent, words have meanings.  We like to think of ourselves as a society where words constrain and control us: we write laws and statues, enshrining them with the ability to tell us what to do.  Imagine, beings of flesh and blood and power, but we give ink on a page the capacity to stop us from doing something rash, or compelling us to something for the greater good.

But then, we are still people, and sometimes people just don't care what laws say or what words mean: they want what they want and they will step on everybody else to get it.  People, with their squishy brains and hypocritical natures, can easily find themselves arguing from both sides of their mouth and proudly declaring that black is white.  And what's worse, people can convince themselves that they mean it.  While words written down do not change, minds do, sometimes because they learned something new, often because it becomes politically expedient.  Sometimes the same people who railed against abuse of power, excess in business and punitive poll taxes suddenly find themselves scrambling to find nice things to say and wagging their finger at those who do not meekly hide their hard-earned hate.

In short, fuck off BBC and the rest of the quisling media with your bullshit fawning over a murderous thief who wrecked the future and ended the lives of so many for the sake of her own vanity and the power and pocketbooks of her flying monkeys in business suits.


Now here it is, your moment of zen:

The Sim City That Never Sleeps

 I've been an advocate of the indie gaming scene here before, as well as indie publishing.  This is as much about the quality work they put out as the satisfaction gleaned from sticking it to 'the man', whomever that man may be.  In gaming, we all know who the man is: he's the soulless corporate suit whose medic-alert bracelet reads he is allergic to generosity and whose social security number consists solely of 666.  His driver's license lists his eye colour as green and his tongue as forked.  His initials are E.A. - Electronic Arts.

Normally I talk about the great sense of story to be found in indie games, but Sim City is different.  Sim City is, obviously, a city simulator.  You build your city, you watch it grow, you put out fires and you manage budget crises.  You can create a socialist paradise full of libraries, solar panels and hemp shops, if you balance things just right; or simply rest on your laurels and watch your city descend into a crime-ridden, polluted dystopia that's every libertarian's dream come true.

Speaking of not caring about the consequences of an entirely free market, Electronic Arts have released a new version of Sim City, and if you're remotely interested in the gaming world, you will have heard by now that it has had its share of teething troubles.  I say "its share" because it is the share that everybody saw coming, and then some.  It is resolutely the share of troubles that were inevitably allotted to the game from the moment EA announced in their raspy, Emperor Palpatine voice that this game where you build a city would require you to be always connected to the Internet to play it.  Specifically to their servers, which crashed on release, because lots of people who paid $60 for a game had the temerity to want to play it.

Things got so bad that at one point Amazon withdrew the game from sale because for a large portion of customers it simply didn't work.  When retailers pull your product from the shelves because of a defect, you screwed up big time.  This is lead paint in Chinese toys territory, for the games industry.  So naturally EA responded by refusing refunds for their defective product, and all hell broke loose online.  They later made the more accommodating gesture of offering a free game, though of course this still has the effect of keeping Sim City's sales buoyed, allowing them to pretend on paper that the launch was a success so they should keep doing things like this.

You've probably seen the arguments somewhere.  You might even have been caught in the fallout as it spilled across the vastness of social media, as disgruntled customers fume over not being allowed to use a product they paid for due to the publisher thinking they should control access to your own possessions.  Or you might be here because you like writing and be really bored with my occasional off-topic ramble, but bear with me.  This does tie in to the publishing industry.  I won't bother rehashing the ins and outs of the situation, I'll simply offer this point: when you try to control new media using draconian measures from the old media world, you are playing with fire.  Publishers in particular should try to avoid that, because they are surrounded by lots of dry paper.

Now here it is, your moment of zen: