This has interesting implications. I think of the Keaton family, of Family Ties, where Alex, Andy, Jennifer and even ditzy Mallory were raised to love PBS because their father worked for the station, unlike Jennifers bitchy friends who doted on MTV.

In this day and age where many of us download our tv, the single uniting voice, which dictates to us how we think what we think if we think. We may find the digital divide becoming greater than ever as the PBS families ensure their children are widely educated, and everyone else placates their child with at first Wiggles and then, later, Jersey Shore.

It’ll be a choice. more than ever.

Do I want to watch the news and care what’s happening, or do I want to watch re-runs of Wonder Woman? In the death of the Newspaper, our only other didactic voice of politics, we may find ourselves entirely apolitical with little idea of who the candidates even are.

‘Idiocracy’ depicts a world where people are so brainwashed by their televisions they believe Gatorade is better than water – even for their crops, and they choose presidencies in WWF arenas.

I always felt that while television does have an inherently desrtuctive quality, these depictions of dystopia built on the evils of television were a pure fantasy because the tv also holds us together (while isolated) into a community, with a community of finite knowledge.

But if we are choosing our knowledge much in the way that we choose the genre of music we follow, then society could become ever more disparate. Teenagers would literally have no idea of where their teachers, their parents, even other teenagers are coming from, isolated in a world of media unique to their own tastes the internet only consolidates this isolation. so much of what i google, or question or think about comes from what i see on my television (see Idiocracy and the Keaton family). Whether right or wrong much of what I frame the world against is something i saw on tv. but what if, like being in another country, your neighbours tv is showing radically different messages to mine, or even your sisters?

Would I even have heard of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy if it hadn’t been for my television?

1. Be Brave and Shave for the Leukaemia foundation – because it’s really a creative and fun way to raise money and awareness for sufferers of blood cancer and their families.

2. Become a redhead. as any redhead I’ve met should well know from the way I fawn over them. I mostly blame @mscobina

So after 8 seasons of Charmed where Piper Phoebe and Paige change their hair colours every other week, I became brainwashed and brave enough to do both!

Here is the photodoc(mock)umentary.

SO this is what we started with! nearly black hair, a total trauma to get any lighter than a dark mulberry.	this is the colour(s)!
many many expensive foils!	good look?
so first time round, she didn’t want to use peroxide, and uhh.. you can see it’s still pretty much black. I couldn’t come to work like that after all your kind sponsorships I had to do something dramatic!	So out came the peroxide!! shocking!! heh… i was getting pretty nervous at this point and regretting using a picture of Rose McGowan as a model!
and 4.5 HOURS LATER the result! the girls made me model this one while it still resembled what the hairstylist had created!	quickly the curls started to give me a christina hendricks kink, very mad men!
all in all an amazing new look and something to tick off the bucket list. Best yet, we raised over $200 which provides counselling and many other services which can continue to be provided free by the Leukaemia Foundation! if you didn’t get a chance to sponsor me, it’s not too late! or you can chase me up in person and i’ll give you a hand written receipt! http://my.leukaemiafoundation.org.au/lushr

cover of The Notwist’s Consequence. just a quickie done on the iPhone/cancermaker with moog, yc25D. 29 yr old acoustic guitar and my dumbass voice.

||:.::.Consequence cover.mp3 (2.2mb)

The book begins:

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to sat that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

So there’s always a better way, a more efficient, more sustainable, more suitable solution as long as we keep searching. I think this is why ‘designers’ are such a desirable bunch in this age, because this potential is recognised, though not often realised.

This inspiration must be what keeps me thinking there must be a better way a new way to make things usable. The answer that keeps popping into my head is ‘Communication’. It’s such a buzz word I know, to communicate, to network, social networking blah… But I’m thinking more about the power of the grapevine and how it’s made my job so much easier.

The simplest example recently was when yet another returning student came into the library with their old student card asking how to get the printing money onto their new 2012 card. Well… the money is on both cards… and to make matters more complicated, the old card can still borrow books etc… which is why by June-July we’re still getting student cards from the previous year even though we’re not supposed to accept them.

Obviously there’s a breakdown in communication… the Information Office issuing the cards don’t seem to know that the old cards should really be destroyed so students aren’t being issued with multiple cards that can be lost and misused. A short walk over to the Information Office and a quick chat with the most experienced staff member there and the problem is solved (we hope). The old cards will be destroyed when students re-enroll and are issued with new cards. Students will still access printing money from their new cards, pay old library fines and borrow books. The solution took 10 minutes to resolve but more than the three years to act on, because we relied on upper-management (who have better things to think about) to relay these messages between departments rather than breaking down the barriers ourselves.

With friends in different departments, I catch up with all kinds of news, problems, solutions and general offers for help just by going to the canteen and bumping into people. This kind of help/gossip/confiding never happens by phone or email.

And it most certainly never happens in User Testing.

User testing is supposed to be the holy grail which solves all problems in my job. If i just sit 3 students down, set them some tasks on our website, and record their every thought and movement, I’ll find out every flaw in my website and learn everything the students need from our site. The idea frustrates me no end, sure there’s lots you can learn from formal interviews, games, tasks, surveys etc. but nothing beats experience, and if you can’t be ‘on the ground’ where the action is, then you need to make friends who can. The real world flummoxes all expectations, assumptions and critiques. So any way you can get into the real world – watch people actually using your website, be customer service and listen to their needs, earn the confidence of users so they will confide in you their biggest problems- gives you a chance to help, to improve, to streamline and to connect the right people.

The grapevine might be discarded as an old ‘piano-top solution’ but I think it’s part of what knits us all together, and can be a great help to developing more useful tools, websites, intranets and networks in our future.

the big combo organ was a real treat. I’ve wanted one since is saw minimum chips play (their stereolab phase not their garage band phase) the Yamaha YC-25D is a musical monster which gives the warmth and drones I love so much and. cuts through with it’s sharp bright melodies. and it’s red!!

my latest acquisition is a drum machine so simple and intuitive its like playing a casiotone. it looks like one too! the Roland TR-606 is a brilliant quick and easy accompaniment.

and of course I’ve drooled about the moog and it’s floor throbbing bass a few times now!

the guitars and pedals are separate. they float about the house. you can see there’s not much room here. id make you some music now but it’s really damn hot. I can barely think!

But i’m confused because there seem to be two films from 2011 with a nearby planet incidental in the story.

I’m sure I saw Margaret and David on At The Movies talking this year of a film where a woman wins a lotto ticket to move to this other planet and get away from her past where she had killed someone in a car accident.

Only her neighbour turns out to be the husband of the person she killed and in their isolation they must come to terms with eachother.

The performances by the actors in the snippets i saw were incredible…

so it confuses me that TWO DIFFERENT films seem to have planets nearby as part of the story? please contact me if you know the name of this film.

EDIT: Hanney has figured out that the film is Another Earth which doesn’t seem to be on At The Movies review site so I’m not sure how I heard about it, but I’m looking forward to chasing this movie down!

overwhelming afternoon! come back from amazing singing lesson (accidentally stole her guitar pick *guilt*) to find my Yamaha YC-25D (its a combo organ from the early seventies, think Stevie Wonder) has arrived with Dad in tow to help me get the 900+lbs bugger up the stairs.

after much huffing and puffing and trying to find new homes for furniture that no longer fits… and keyboards that no longer fit… she’s up and working and sounding good, even through my cheapest of amps. Finally recorded a long lost instrumental, almost no mistakes! casiotone as drum machine of course.

//:.:..Buffalo song 1.8mb MP3 this recording didn’t work out very well, going to redo it tonight. sorry folks.

just wish the neighbours hadn’t told me as i was moving the organ in, that the building has been sold… has put an insecure damper on the evening.

My brain hasn’t been fully functioning for the last 6 months or so, it’s needed a full diet of television to keep it from thinking too much or just going catatonic, you’d think those would be opposing symptoms, not for me.

But the clouds are slowly parting, I have just seen Professor Noam Chomsky speak and I have a few observations of my own to share with you about why Ming the Merciless is such a persistent idea in our culture.

I’ve talked in the past about the NSA wanting to destroy the free web, they want a walled web so they can more easily monitor us. And our government seems to quite like the idea as well.

This kind of thing seems almost Arch Evil, ridiculous World Domination idealism, straight from the cartoons. It doesn’t make sense to us mere mortals.

World domination has been infantilised by the media, if anyone seriously suggests it exists, they look like a consipracy nut, or some idiot that watched WAY too much TV.

And it’s true, I watch a lot of shows like La Femme Nikita and Spooks, in which puppet dictatorships are installed and the CIA treats the UK like it’s kid sister, to be occasionally brutalised and never told the truth.

Noam spoke about the Changing Contours of Global Order… I wish I’d taken photos when I arrived, there were huge crowds outside, of #occupyMelbourne protestors and other randoms who had no hope of getting one of the 5000 free tickets which sold out within the day. The talk was promoted only using social media, which pissed off many loyal Noam followers who are too dignified to tweet or FB.

The majority of the crowd was hipsters, twenty somethings from Deakin who’d heard Noam was the place to be, you could tell because they’d make jokes about Chomsky’s “Socialist friends” outside, and frankly Noam has always spoken against Socialism.

Chomsky surprisingly gave a talk (we were given the impression it’d be a Q&A via twitter) and at first everyone was bored out of their minds, Noam on American Foreign Policy – well he reigns supreme, but what the hell does it have to do with us in Australia? not much. But actually Noam spoke about The American Empire’s downfall, and how it began post WW2 and how Roosevelt et al. had openly documented plans for world domination at the height of their power in the 1950s. They did indeed install Dictators in countries to prevent actual democracies which might waver from the US political agenda. They actually did believe they ‘lost’ China to communism, as though they ever had China to begin with. The way Noam puts it, the clues are there for all to see, and have been since the inception of America’s independence.

America wanted World Domination.

In many ways it’s not surprising at all, the anti-american rhetoric we’ve grown up with over the last 15 years is proof. On the other hand, to think that ‘great leaders’ like Roosevelt, Kennedy and so on, were actively part of this ruse against the world is shocking. The Media has always told the story their way.

They truly are the 1% against the 99%. They crusade against Cuba despite the majority of the US Population including the corporations wantiing the embargo torn down. Purely because Castro was one of the few dictators not under their thumb, he had defied their World Order, and they could not tolerate it. Noam goes on to cite many more cases such as Guatemala and Chile, examples of varying success.

It does all sound conspiracy theorist. But then the Sunday Age reported yesterday that the Baillieu State Government has a written down plan handed secretly to the Cabinet, to destroy the Nurses working conditions and union. And you realise, this happens all the time, and we knew this, but we kind of dared not believe it, and frankly wouldn’t the media be jumping up and down if all this evil were true?

And then we remember who owns the media.

I now understand why Noam’s essential collection of works is titled Understanding Power it’s not some myth, it’s not just corporate CEOs, it’s pretty much all the people in power. They are seduced by it and they do not serve us democratically, they do what they can to control our opinions, primarily through the media – Manufacturing Consent.

I have a secure job, so I don’t want to be camping out in the streets with the #Occupy movement, but I can see the necessity of the movement to grow, to get its message across, to make people understand we need to take back our voice, for so many reasons many of which I haven’t even touched on. We all think that American Elections are a crock, and we’re all starting to believe Australian ones aren’t much better. Governments go ahead and do whatever they want despite the promises they make. The government I voted for still wants to censor the internet.

My point is that powerful people, people who were voted for, sat down and worked out, and put on paper a plan for World Domination. Just as I’m sure the Kennet and Baillieu governments sat down and worked out how to crush all the unions one at a time. Fortunately, much as Ming the Merciless could have told them, things don’t always proceed as planned. I’m no longer going to perceive these Arch Evil plans as conspiracy theories, coincidences or mere flights of fancy. I’m going to be watching very carefully, and so should we all.

I have been playing a bit with various musical toys, not the least of which is my Monotribe, which is a little dusty, like everything else in my house.

../::. monotribe.mp3 (3.1mb)

But I’m inviting you, the unsuspecting viewer into the process, as I start to build them up into something more finished, from their current super basic 4 chord/2 chord infancy.

Aside from that this is a celebration because I haven’t written this many non-joke/trash songs in i don’t know how long.

.//.. learn something new mp3 [1.51mb]

..//. rum n raisin mp3 [1.37mb]

Chords are in the file names for those interested, yes they really are that simple. I was trying to write a 3 chord song a few weeks ago, so I get a 4 chord and a 2 chord song instead. irony. These songs came out fairly easily, which I think you can tell from lack of complexity.