Category Archives: Online Places

It’s a cliché to say that a good artist can do anything with contemporary technology, and it’s not a new idea. I doubt, for example, that the face of the Mona Lisa is exactly the image of the woman da Vinci painted. Still, large-scale, well-organized greed has a way of magnifying the worst of humanity even as it attempts to portray an ideal of beauty. A public relations campaign, of course, is complicated, and now includes a degree of self-consciousness about its methods. The video offers a critique, but also suggests that we buy some soap as a part of our migration from the artificial to the real.

This is an equally instructive example:

http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/retouch/index.html

“LineRider is a nifty little flash game released at DeviantArt.com. It is wildly addicting to some people. I myself play it obsessively.

LineRider is a basic flash game. In fact, it is not really even a game since there are no real goals or objectives.

You draw a black line on a white background and press play. A little stick figure fella on a sled pops out of nowhere land and sleds down your new line you just drew.

Seems pretty basic and silly right? True, to a point.”

Matthew L. King, October 2, 2006

King cites this amazing example of what someone (with too much time on their hands) can do with this simple idea:

And you can go make your own, here:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40255643/

“You know, the men who came to Washington in the 1980s to lead the Republican conservative revolution wound up running a racket. And Abramoff was their outside man, outside the White House, outside the infrastructure, but he was very welcome inside the government. He had very good ties with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. It was all part of an apparatus that was designed to launder money.”

Bill Moyers, Democracy Now, October 2, 2006

I wouldn’t exactly call Bill Moyers a radical or even a leftist. By any reasonable standard, he has always been firmly in the center of the spectrum of U.S. politics. Yet more and more he sounds like a muckraker ringing the alarm about political corruption. I think he is right on the money, so to speak. He’s been out promoting three new TV sized documentaries, the first (showing this week) is called Capital Crimes, and explores the ramifications of the Abramof scandal. I thought Tom DeLay was the victim of an “over zealous Texas prosecutor”!

Continue Reading →