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No, the real test is whether this millennial generation will continue posting videos when they don't have splashy trips to celebrate. Will they continue updating friends with every change in their status, when the news isn't that they've gotten hired, launched a company, bought something expensive?

When their buddies can't find work, when their startups run out of money, when they start leaving town en masse, what will they do? Promise to stay Facebook friends?

The college's attempt to hold a hearing to expel Artem without telling him what he was charged with collapsed on Monday. When challenged the college was forced to admit it had no right to bully a student out of their education. The hearing has now been postponed until the college can put together a real case.

The college has given no reasonable explanation for the punitive measures Artem has suffered. Evidence of Artem's 'gross misconduct' amount to not removing a t-shirt reading "Newcastle College SWSS" questioning an Army representative and sending a text message inviting someone to join the anti-military campaign. This in the college's eyes was enough to justify punishment usually reserved for students who are accused of violent behaviour.

The college's reluctance to put such evidence down on paper is understandable - their disproportionate response is not. We are asking the college to drop the charges against Artem and lift his suspension. All students have the right to voice their opinions however inconvenient to the college management.

I was f***ing around with my wife's Spectrum Emulator today in order to play my favourite game from 1985-86 ... when I was, ahem, 13 ... Jet Set Willy. So I made a video of Willy finding the secret entrance to the rooms under the house - the Forgotten Abbey. They eventually lead to the Entrance To Hades. However, it's rock hard and I couldn't get out the first room.

The video as I made it is clear and quite funny. It is set to a kick ass song by Beijing indie rockers Hedgehog. The song is appropriately about reliving your childhood.

However, after screen recording - editing, encoding ...then further encoding by Youtube - it is tiny and exceptionally bad quality. Watch it for the hedgehog song or if you are fond of Jet Set Willy. Look closely to see Willy's lives at the bottom, dancing to the tune. By the way, it's not as bad as the screencap in the player makes it out to be.

Just a quick post to link to some writing I did which is now running at Dissident Voice. A quick warning - it's political. Maybe you guessed that from the Dissident.

Here is the article.

And here is a sample:

Whether life is imitating art or art is imitating life, mainstream society is in pretty bad shape right now. I am a self-confessed movie addict and 'nerd' and recently watched three movies that culturally literate society, and the media, have been very excited about: 300, Wanted, and The Dark Knight. What shocked me more than the movies themselves was the almost complete lack of outrage from the majority of people who saw those movies.

I am (an) expendable. What the hell does that mean?

With the forced downtime in the music scene here, I warned of some other category posts being on their way. I now they have arrived, tremble in their presence ... mwa ha ha ha.

... yes ... so ...

Something quite important hit the blogosphere today. Blogger Maxwell Black made his way up to New York City from his native DC and taped an entire presentation by radical writer Mickey Z for public consumption on the net.

So, before I get to my own ranting, you can find all five youtube videos in one place at the original post here.

Back to the expendables thing. 

Ever since I was born I have been around activism and radical thinking, we all are but we have varying levels of awareness. As I became an adult I have hung around - both in person and 'virtually' - various groups and communities who are commited to social change, justice and freedom. But I've never felt more comfortable than I have 'hanging out' at Mickey Z's blog. This is because of the difficulty people have accepting what I think of as the true radical position - constantly putting yourself outside of what you know and putting yourself in the place of others. The majority of so-called liberal spaces on the net are simply caught up in arguing the toss within the system/discourse allowed to them by the people they supposedly oppose. Did that make sense? I hope so. 

Even at Mickey's blog, I was initially cautious as other semi-regulars were sometimes too caught up in the allowed discourse and thinking, for example, trying to fight nationalism with nationalism. But after a while I saw a core of people there who, to me, appeared genuinely sane. Of course, I was jumping the gun by judging people in the first place - we are all at our own point in the journey of enlightenment and realisation, me too. This brings me to what I want to say:

Becoming more aware than before and increasing your knowledge and perception of the world around you is not actually 'enlightenment' at all and it doesn't need any external help or any kind of epiphany. Enlightenment is the natural state of the human mind, a continuous process. If you are not experiencing it then you are in a state of suppression, oppression or outright denial. Daoists in China articulated this a long time ago - to enable enlightenment you simply have to do nothing. That is - don't stop it.

Enlightenment leads to right action, and not doing that which harms others. Hence the famous paradox in the same Daoist philosophy of finding right action through inaction. But I digress ...

In our world of corporate mass media and communications, language is a battlefield where words are captured and abused. Over at Mickey's blog, the community struggled to find a word outside of this, one that could describe people who strived to stay outside of the mind games and to stay radical. They (we?) settled with ... Expendables. 

So, follow the link, listen to Mickey's talk and hear some sanity while the Ol*mp*cs bashes us over the head with nation states and competition.

This post is continuing from Jim's post that carries on from a comment I made in a discussion of the movie Clash Of The Titans. I want to start on my entry into the world of table-top gaming and fantasy literature through the game-book Forest Of Doom. Then I want to touch on the split in fantasy literature between the traditions of Orientalism in the English language novel and the New Wave authors. Finally, I want to rant on the merits of Dungeons and Dragons in education and how it has open-source ideals (bear with me) - a fact recognised in the industry and solidified in it's D20 movement.

... time passes as reader catches up with huge amount of background ...

It may be a bad analogy but one day in the final year of elementary school, a butterfly flapped it's wings in the life of Andy Best. Puffin Books had a 'book club' scheme. Twice a year a small catalogue of books, glossy and colourful, was passed around the class. We took it home, chose one, and returned the next week with our order forms. A few weeks later you picked up the book at school.

I had chosen 'The Forest of Doom'. It was a 'fighting fantasy game book'. Not in the tradition of the Choose Your Own Adventure, the series was created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone who were dedicated to spreading the table-top gaming hobby to the UK. This industry was based around the flagship game, Dungeons and Dragons which itself came from the fantasy literature tradition and borrowed heavily from the achievements of two major authors. Tolkien is obvious, but also H.P. Lovecraft, who wove esoteric lore into a complete fictional universe with demons and planes of existence.

As you can see already, from picking up that first book I was immediately led into reading a diverse literary canon and to playing the games each week. Importantly, this meant creating our own material and playing through it with our peers. I did this devoutly without the need of any further prompting or encouragement, ever. The seemingly living world of the book, the tower of Yaztromo on the edge of the forest, the thief stuck in the bear-trap, the talking crow on the signpost, catapulted me into the idea of other worlds that lived in an abstract dream space where you could play out scenarios and expand your experience without limits. Much like we try to achieve in educational drama.

Then I read Michael Moorcock.

Up until the age of sixteen I had absorbed a huge amount of fantasy and sci-fi literature and started to form more critical opinions but I hadn't been able to put my finger on something that bothered me. This was down to lack of awareness of the history of the world and current affairs. And that analysis of literature beyond identifying characters and narrative structure was not encouraged at school. But what I did know at this point was that, unlike most of my friends, Tolkien bothered me, along with 'hard' sci-fi, and Michael Moorcock was the man. 

What I was unaware of at that time was the split between traditionalists who were still bound by the ideologies of English literary tradition and the New Wave authors like Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. One one hand you had Tolkien, who set out to create a fantasy world that would put across his Empire era worldview to the next generation in a non-didactic manner. One the other hand you had Ballard and Moorcock, and all the authors centred around New Worlds Magazine, who saw fantasy sci-fi as an absract art form with which they could explore the world around them and ask questions of it.

From Jim's description and anaysis of the Monster Manual you can see the influence of the old-school, both in its contents and in its attitude to the other. But, the key to the game was always that the players could create their own adventures and worlds. More in the tradition of the New Wave. The rules heavily catered to this giving countless generation tables and help to get you started. Eventually, the industry, whether concious of the depth of meaning behind it or not, came to realise that the game would die with its era unless they focused on this key aspect. They identified the D20 system ... basic game mechanics that underpinned all their systems. New versions were adjusted to follow this and you now had a game split into an engine and its mods. 

Here is where it gets interesting. Firstly, I have never stopped playing some form of table-top game. I simply can't. Once I got off into teaching I realised early on that the game - R.P.G.s of the table-top variety - was an amazing participatory tool. The players create thier own worlds. Each time you play, the story expands based on the input of the group, each session naturally leads to the next. As you write and expand your gaming universe, you have to actively research it, and the act of playing through it kills dead ends and reinforces strong lines. From D20 you could go into any setting - or any course, so to speak. 

This worked immediately for me on many levels due to my background training in Drama and Education. As with drama, the D20 game provides you with many tools for participation that can be utilised in part as well as in whole. The most recent use of these tools was to play through a story/event based D&D game with some of my advanced language students and later introduce the idea of devising and improvisation in story writing. During the game play, the students had learned skills of testing work through use, rejecting weak points and running with parts that were working. This was a welcome change, they are turing 13 at the moment, from their school model of being told to write a story in isolation, then having it marked, or worse still reading it out and having it appraised (euphemism of the week).

Obviously, D20 products are not free and there's a nice big semantic debate out there as to whether it's open source in the way a wiki is. However, the game is written to be modified and customized by the players and offers huge scope. It is a platform for open participation that contains many tools. And opening that first book turned me onto art and helped me eventually get out of the ideological maze I was been run through at school. And lets not forget, it's a social activity in which people happily come together with their peers and think and create - without any kind of prodding or educational structure or goals.  

I decided not to blog about media stuff too much here as I usually write in contribution to other blogs and sites as part of direct action campaigns. But this recent story has send me scrambling into my other category.

Medialens.org is a site that discusses the broadsheets in the UK. That is, the intelligent free-press such as the Guardian or even the BBC, and not the tabloids. They analyse articles and write them up on the site, encouraging readers to engage the journalists in debate. The site has two editors, one of which is a committed pacifist and Buddhist. The site does not tolerate abusive E-mails sent out by readers and is the model of non-violent resistance through dialogue.

Just this week though, there was a chilling development. The latest alert on media performance in the build up to a possible conflict with Iran has provoked legal threats by Alastair Brett, head of legal matters at News Corp's UK wing. News Corp is a huge corporation that owns the Times, the UK paper in question, and is run by Rupert Murdoch. Legal action that would surely crush the site has been threatened if the site's article doesn't remove all quoted material from their writer Bronwen Maddox and Medialens readers must stop writing in to the Times about it.

This is an unprecedented attack by corporate media power on indymedia sites, basically to enforce non-accountability in the face of their involvement in oiling the war machine. So extreme is this incident that reaction is appearing within other corporate media bastions:

Here is the Guardian write up by Peter Wilby: Publish and be Damned

And here is the original alert by Medialens: Selling the Fireball

I had a few words with Jim Groom over at Bavablog via the comments after following up on his Glass Bees post in which he coined the term Edupunk. We realised, via some of the more negative replies, that some points are not clear. That is, the ideas and theory of the Edupunk discussion have been around a while and are not controversial at all. Labelling it Punk has just thrown some distasteful associations at the conservative element among us.

While studying drama at university I was pleased to find out that my long list of complaints and criticisms of secondary education were not simply adolescent tantrums. They had been covered by groundbreaking educators such as Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed and in Paulo Freire's landmark work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Through student centred work in these models I found that I could learn drama in a non-competitive atmosphere gaining real skills and awareness that all seemed relevant to what I wanted to do.

How does this help us understand Edupunk? Let's start with some Paulo Freire. The following is from his analysis of our 'banking system' of education where students are filled up by the teacher and must reproduce for tests or in jobs - the goal is to order the students in a big ladder to see how they fit into society.

The reason d'etre of libertarian education lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught

(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing

(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about

(d) the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly

(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined

(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply

(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher

(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it

(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which he or she sets in opposition to the students freedom

(j) the teacher is the subject of the learning process while the pupils are mere objects

It is not suprising that the banking concept regards men as adaptable, managable beings. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend to simply adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Whew! A lot in there and that's just one page out of 180 in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So ...

Edupunk seeks to see the world and transform it - not to learn its system.

Edupunk teachers have equal human relations with their students, they exchange experiences.

Edupunk classes are democratic communties, that is - the true meaning of anarchy; small self governing community untis who shape their own destinies through freedom.

Edupunk groups do not enforce discipline - they explore their relationships and dynamics.

Edupunk teachers value the ideas of their group and listen to it, together they form the path of the course.

Edupunk groups are not afraid to improvise and explore without a pre planned end goal or pay-off such as a test or a piece. They grow as humans throughout the process and do not need judgement.

Edupunk respects human dignity, not authority.

Edupunks are seeking to build lives not choose one.

Still got no idea where this is going? Try this amazing book - Games for Actors and Non-actors by Augusto Boal.

I just got back from a hectic VISA run in Hong Kong. I got my VISA with relative ease and from the CTS branch right in the train station, however, people around me were getting knocked back or restricted to one week single entry.

The Hong Kong papers are reporting a 40% drop off in business and tourism in Beijing already as a direct result of the new policy. This more than cancels out the expected revenue from hosting the olympics in the first place, leaving it as what it is - a bunch of boring non-spectator sports used to rouse a bunch of patriots.

Also, the whole trip made me miss three QF games in Euro 2008 and the Demerit gig at Logo in Shanghai. What's more, I've a sneaking suspicion the immigration official entered me on my old VISA by accident (it's still got three days) as there's a large slash drawn through my new L visa - perhaps to show that its single entry has been used? I'll find out Tuesday when I go for my upgrade in Pudong.

Banyan Trees on Nathan Road