Gil Fewster

Here’s a letter I sent to Tony Abbott and Michael Keenan’s offices.
Send your own by visiting Abbot’s and Keenan’s home pages.

Mr Abbott and Mr Keenan,

I am disgusted by your “illegal boats” billboard unveiled today in Perth. While I live in neither of your electorates, and therefore am of limited interest to you directly, I wish to express my opinion that the ongoing tactics of fear, vilification and victimising the vulnerable are a shameful low-point in Australian political discourse.

To put your names and faces to a blatant lie —that it is illegal to seek asylum— in order to win a cheap point over your opponents is a disgrace to you, your party and the people you represent.

Sincerely,
Gil Fewster

I watched with disappointment and revulsion as the Charlotte Dawson story tickertaped across my twitter feed this afternoon. As repellant as the abuse thrown at her is, I found myself even more disturbed by some of the responses to it.

It seems a sizeable proportion of people out there actually feel that, to a greater or lesser degree, she had it coming to her. She provoked her attackers. She’s not a nice person. She was mean to other people. She’s on a (gasp) reality tv program featuring young women who want to be models so obviously she’s a vacuous bimbo who needs to be put in her place. And hey, even if she didn’t really deserve it, this sort of thing happens all the time and it’s the internet and trolls are everywhere so why doesn’t she just harden up and hit the block button or whatevs. I even saw people accuse her of staging the whole stunt in order to sell copies of her book.

So I’m going to put this as bluntly and simply as I can:

This sort of abuse is categorically unacceptable.No matter who the target is. Under any circumstances.

The very instant you offer up some bullshit loophole excuse based on your opinion of the victim, you show yourself to be no better than the people who perpetrate it. Look at what was actually said. Read it. Wallow in the foul, misogynistic garbage that was hurled at this woman – death threats, incitements to suicide, graphic photographs of corpses – and tell me it’s even remotely defensible.

Here’s two examples of what some of you think she deserved:

I don’t even know why you continue to let yourself live, I mean, you can’t have children, and that’s all women are useful for.

 

Has anyone ever told you that you’re a fugly slut? I hope you get a paper cut in the eyeball.

 

Multiply by a couple of hundred, maybe more. Sustained and relentless, from who knows how many sources. It’s ugly, vicious stuff.

The Internet can be a cruel, spiteful playground but that doesn’t mean it should be tolerated. The trolls are not the villains of the day. It’s the people who excuse them, who side with them and give tacit approval to this muck by blaming their victims. You don’t have to like the victim, or agree with anything they say to be disgusted by the things that are said. And you demean yourself in worst of ways if you excuse it.

Be better than that. I fucking dare you.

UPDATE: this post from Erin Kissane is a far deeper, extremely thoughtful and intelligent take on the issue of misogynist attacks on the internet. I urge you to read it.

A few quick notes jotted down after watching TDKR on the weekend.

Bruce Wayne.
Balls-out crazy (rich: eccentric). Mad skillz. Not as young as used to be. Has loved and lost – bone to pick with Tennyson.

Batman.
Crime fighter, mechanically augmented. Think: Inspector Gadget but competent. Poss. emphysema (smoke bombs? Have lab investigate).

Alfred.
A patronising stickybeak with ideas above his station. If my valet sassed me the way Alfred sasses Wayne, he’d be out on his arse.

Commissioner Gordon.
No spring chicken. Sensible moustache. Unwelcome prescience re: bad shit brewing. (Sheriff Brody Syndrome)

Blake.
Starry-eyed new kid, idealist, orphan, cop. Very useful for exposition, symbolic contrast, etc.

Lucius Fox.
Benevolent arms dealer. Makes plot devices.

Bane.
Brick shithouse with own PA system (great for functions). Bastard love child of Tea Party and Occupy movement. Not good with dentists.

Selina Kyle.
Jewel thief, sassy. Robs from rich, gives to self. (but secret heart of gold? Probs). Very bendy indeed. Built for motorbikes.

One of the many things we owe to the enquiring and brilliant mind of Sir Isaac Newton is our contemporary understanding of light and colour. Up until the late 1600s white light was widely considered to be a pure and irreducible substance. The idea that it constituted in some hidden way all the colours of the rainbow was not merely fanciful but arguably heretical.

And then one day Newton jammed a needle into his eye socket.

Seriously.

I tooke a bodkin & put it betwixt my eye & the bone as neare to the backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with the end of it (soe as to make the curvature in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with the point of the bodkin, but if I held my eye & the bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye with it yet the circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I renewed them by moving my eye or the bodkin.*

Newton eventually came up with a better, safer and altogether less icky way of investigating the composition of light using a simple but ingenious series of experiments with prisms. But it began with this dramatic act -part brilliance, part lunacy- and arose from that most extraordinary creative impulse: curiosity.

Now, listen. I’m not saying you should go and jam a bit of steel into your eye socket just to see what happens. Please don’t do that**. But Newton’s experiment, as extreme as it may be, is a reminder that sometimes it takes a bold and unexpected idea, a concept with all the hallmarks of madness, to drive us forward.

We think we know stuff, don’t we? We’ve held our jobs for a while; several years, maybe a decade or two. We call ourselves professionals, experts and (God help us) gurus or ninjas. We’ve earned our stripes through hard-won experience, through formal training, from practical doing, from getting things right and wrong. But over time experience can become an obstacle, not an asset, for innovation.

We start to talk about best practice. We fall into habitual ways of solving problems. We think we’ve seen it all twice before and know how to solve it when it inevitably swings around for a third time. Problems become predictable, solutions rote.

The world that we think we’re so familiar with is in truth made up of countless “white light” assumptions. We think we know how things work, the best way to do something, the efficient path to travel. But so much of what we is self-evident is really just habit. All that experience and expertise you’ve built up may just be conspiring against you to make you complacent.

Experimentation, by it’s very nature, won’t always yield the results we want. But if we never question what we believe to be true, if we don’t dare to be inquisitive, if we let our experience become our safety-zone, if we lack the courage to take risks once in a while…well, we may never see the rainbow of new ideas concealed within the white light of routine that daily surrounds us.

I used to be a programmer.

Wait, come back. I’ll try to make this interesting.

Over the past decade I’ve coded websites to sell things both useless and useful. To matchmake lonely hearted singles, educate university students and deliver workplace training. I’ve coded spy games for children, sprawling eLearning systems, dinky little novelty sites. And (sorry) countless advertising emails.

These days I’m more of what you might call a dabbler but I still like to dive in and write some code when opportunity arises. Whenever I do, I’m reminded of just how wonderful it is to be immersed within the buzzing, humming universe of an evolving computer program. People who don’t code rarely expect this but for all of its technical rules and structural discipline, programming at its heart is a richly creative activity.

It’s a common misconception to think that programming and creativity are worlds apart. The assumption is grounded in a fundamental but incomplete truth: A computer program is an exacting set of instructions for a very dumb machine. This, or something like it, is the standard definition. There is no room for imprecision in software. No place for double-meanings or subtext.

But the way coders develop these precise systems is not a direct one. No two programmers will ever produce identical code, not even if the final software appears from the outside to be the same. Give ten novelists a plot summary and they will each write you a different story. Give ten programmers a functional specification and each one will produce something unique, an expression of their own voice as a programmer.

It helps if you forget about the purely functional definition of software as an end product. Instead, consider programming as a process. An architect may ultimately produce a set up blueprints, but to arrive at them requires consideration of space, harmony, light, materials, purpose, environment. The blueprints, as unflinchingly technical and mathematically precise as they may be, are the result of a deeply creative process. In the same fashion, programming is not really the practice of writing lines of code. It is the art of taking big, intractable problems and breaking them down into ever smaller ones which can be understood, explained and then carefully assembled into a living, breathing work of art.

Software is poetry. It’s the expression of ideas in the most elegant form a programmer can devise. Like a writer who chews the texture of words, rolls them against the tongue, seeks out the just-right way to tell each part of their tale, a programmer creatively employs structure and syntax of language to address problems, to arrange the sequence in which they are solved, assemble them into a story.

When you’re programming there are moments of sublime focus. At a practical level you’re writing a list of instructions, stepping line-by-line through the solution for a single current task amongst the thousands which collectively make up a computer program. The syntax rattles off the keyboard as easily and automatically as your lips and tongue shape words in conversation. But while this mechanical, mundane act is happening there is something magical, something wonderful, taking place deeper in your brain. You can see the system you’re building, the scope of it. The relationship between each piece of data, the functions that process information, the flow of information as your code corrals it down this pathway here, assesses its value at that intersection over there, re-routes it for processing in a factory you’ve purpose-built. It’s not lines of code on a screen, it’s as real and physical as a sprawling city.

The thrill of this is hard to explain. It’s an act of creativity that ignites you. You’re holding dozens of threads simultaneously in your mind, like a writer simultaneously juggling the broad macroscopic concerns of plotlines, character arcs and pace with the minutiae of sentence structure, the rhythm of three syllables vs two, weighing the beat of a comma against the finality of a full stop. The largest and smallest of scales collide and you are lost within it, completely absorbed by it. And it’s electric.

This is why I programmed for so long. Why I still return to it now and then. To find each time those same fizzing sparks of magic that i get when I compose a photograph, write a satisfying sentence, disappear inside a book or close my eyes and let a piece of music fold itself around me. It’s not because I’m a geek (although, let’s be honest, I am). It’s because I find no greater joy in the all the world than to create or lose myself in something beautiful.

Today’s Herald Sun article, Choose To Say I Do* is a triumph of wilfully misunderstood, possibly invented, statistical figures masquerading as news and social observation.

Apparently there’s a “huge decline in the number of available men.” Not that the article tells us what the original number is but it was definitely hugely greater than the current tally.  What it does tell us in no uncertain terms is that things are pretty bloody desperate right now.

So ladies, quit being so picky and marry some average blokes already.

The Herald Sun breathlessly warns us that 1.3 million Australian women aged between 25-34 are forced to do battle for men from a pool of only 86,000 eligible bachelors. ZOMG, that’s a ratio of one man for every 40 women. This is clearly the end of days. According to the church and Kevin Andrews it’s because of all these sinful, godless fornicators who choose to live together unwed as (cover your eyes, children) de facto couples. Oh, and that old chestnut about how women these days are so outrageously greedy that they actually have the bare-faced nerve to covet both a career and a family. The cheek of them.

But wait. Women don’t outnumber men by 40 to 1 in Australia. I walk the streets, I see men everywhere. Some of my best friends are men. We’re not, so far as I can tell, in danger of disappearing. So what’s this all about?

Well, it’s about people being disingenuous with statistics. You see, “eligible” according to the statistics quoted by the Herald Sun means men who are single, not gay, not a single parent (what the utter fuck is that about, by the way, as an exclusionary criteria?) and earning more than $60,0000 per year. The actual source of these figures is not revealed, nor is the methodology by which the were collected, although a demographer’s name is mentioned more or less in passing.

So 1.3 million women IN TOTAL, not filtered through any criteria other than age, are matched against a very restricted criteria for the subset of men.  The article does not mention how many women in Australia are aged between 25-24 and are also straight, single, not single mums and earning over $60k per annum.

Meanwhile Kevin Andrews, Minister For Getting His Name In The Paper**, has chimed in to assert that it’s better to get married before living together by declaring that only “about half of people cohabiting go on to marry the person they are living with and the other half separate.”

Hang on Kev, why does that mean cohabitation is bad? Doesn’t it mean that if they’d all got married first, “about half” of the marriages would have ended in either divorce or desperately unhappy people?

Of course the article doesn’t bother itself with wondering, even in passing, about the success rate of the actual marriages that come out of cohabiting relationships. Do people who marry after first living together have a higher divorce rate than those who simply jump straight in? Do they have a lower divorce rate? Who cares! Why bother to investigate when we can get all silly with a handful of stats that tell us nothing out of context.

In fact, the article does’t trouble itself to question any of the statistics raised, examine why the numbers don’t add up or apply any kind of rational analysis at all. Hell, it doesn’t even bother to question why the obvious solution to this man-drought is for women to MARRY! MARRY NOW. DON’T FUCK ABOUT WITH COHABITING even thought this will actually just further reduce the pool of available men and leave 1.214 million women  (1.3 million minus the 86,000 eligible men remaining) without any hope of man-based married happiness for the rest of their lives.

Additional: A shorter version of the HS story is online at http://www.news.com.au/national/grab-a-man-or-miss-out-church-warns-girls/story-e6frfkvr-1226348223822  but the print verion is like the Director’s Cut with extra bonus nonsense.

———-

*Kudos, Damien Currie and Brendan Lucas

**Apologies/thanks to John Clarke

disclamimer: i’m a bit drunk, and kind of angry

Here’s why I like Instagram: It’s fun.

It encourages people to play with their camera. To experiment with the photos they take and the images they produce in a simple, playful way.

Its sole, joyful purpose is to encourage a bit of extra fun around the humble practice of taking a happy snap on your phone. Frankly, any piece of software which asks nothing more of its users than to take pleasure in an act of creativity gets my admiration and approval.

Do I care that the filters tend to reduce things to a relatively repetitive collection of colour palettes, dynamic ranges and ‘grain’ textures? No. I don’t.

Does it matter, as I’ve heard some people claim, that it can make mediocre composition, mundane subject matter or amatuerish technique look far better than it really should? Fuck no.

Anyway, let’s think about that – the idea that software is somehow cheating because it can sometimes, through luck or skill, make an average photo look good.

What the fuck?

The result is what counts, not how you get there. If the result looks appealing, interesting, arresting, provocative, or just plain pretty then it’s a good photo, regardless of the process that got you there. Never mind the tools – does the photo capture a moment? Does it move you? Is it interesting? That’s what counts.

So let’s get few things straight.

Instagram does not denigrate, cheapen, or harm in any way Photography with a capital P or Art with a capital A. If anything, it encourages people who may not have previously done so to think about things like colour, texture and composition. It makes taking happy snaps fun. And fuck you if you have a problem with that.

I was planning to write something much more eloquent but, frankly, i’m a but pissed. So to conclude:

Get over it. Instagram encourages people to be playful with phography in the same way that Twitter encourages people to be playful with language. The very limitations of the form inspire some extraordinary creativity. Sure, you get a lot of nonsense in there as well, but nobody ever promised any different.

It’s too easy to be cynical, dismissive, snide. To decry popular culture as some sort of lowbrow wannabe impersonation of real art. To say Instagram is fauxtography for hipsters, or Twitter is conversation for the socially retarded, or Justin Beiber makes songs for people who can’t handle real music.

If you want live in that world, go for it. Personally I’d like to try once in a while to be less cynical, and just be grateful for the fact that people seem to take pleasure from acts of creativity, no matter what tools they choose to employ.