My Kickstarter Addiction Hell

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I’m facing up to a behind-the-curve Kickstarter addiction which has lead me to ignore deadlines and fall behind on twerking videos, but for which I have a solution.

‘Kickin’ Kickstarter’ is a self-help book for people addicted to bad Kickstarter projects. That’s probably not bad enough to actually be on Kickstarter. It will have to be inflatable, Velcro, or a cat toy. Maybe a mix of all three. Things that do more than one thing always do well on Kickstarter.

My other KS idea is an app that takes you straight away to the poignant whacko unfunded ideas as opposed to the moderately sane projects.

Because trawling through American people’s earnest psychobabble about pointless tat and derivative art projects, it’s the palpable sense of other people’s despair that sucks me and other addicts in, every time.

It’s tempered with guilt, because at least these people are attempting to live out their dreams, not just sneering from the sidelines.

I come away from each session feeling unclean knowing that I have giggled in the face of people’s dreams, hopes and massive lack of self awareness.

And then you realize that ‘atheist shoes’ actually got $60,000, and that, as usual, it’s the universe that is actually mocking me not the other way round.

‘I really dislike having a bulky phone in my pocket’  (yet several attached to me with a velcro jumpsuit is  totally fine):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getclipless/clipless-secure-a-phone-to-new-surfaces-nfc-enable?ref=live

I would pay $50 for ‘diagonal swirl skirt made from recycled sari fabric’ not to exist:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/866530961/up-cycled-clothing-company-ohio-expansion?ref=live

‘Given the excitement surrounding TPimPAWster…’

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/690745081/tpimpawster-finally-a-toy-your-cat-wants-to-play-w?ref=ending_soon

Never be without a fish hook or an unsightly bracelet. KS connoisseurs will notice the classic of its genre ‘roped-in-slightly-embarassed-partner’ images

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/556289079/the-kodiak-re-defining-survival?ref=ending_soon

In a universe that can spawn ‘Atheist Shoes’ outside the context of a cheese dream, literally anything is possible.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1497254033/atheist-shoes?ref=live

Pssst, paste it on

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I love a revolution me but this Turkey thing is weird in my humble yet accurate opinion.

First off, Turkey, being a democracy, has an election next year so if they want a regime change it’s in the bag.

According to people like Reporters Without Borders it’s one of the least censored countries in the region (as long as you don’t mention Armenia, obv.)

This is one of the reasons why there’s so much ‘please pass this on’ stuff on social media, OFTEN IN CAPS, and ironically taking cues from an idiom which developed in places where censorship, is rife: where citizens were using social media because everything else was censored and it was a dangerous and radical act. It’s impactful for sure – gives you an apparently personal link to a world event. Human rights, innit. But it can be misleading.

I mean, if you were Peruvian, living in Lima, say,  and got a FB message from the Countryside Alliance saying ‘we are in Trafalgar Square and the media elite and police are repressing us’  you might think it was a peasants’ revolt and send some compassion, if you didn’t know that the Countryside Alliance only send messages using real pigeons which the recipient than shoots and eats.

Whilst we need to be careful about ‘I went there on holiday and it seemed fine’ syndrome,  I went on holiday in Turkey and it really was fine.

Their economy is stronger than Greece’s, for example, and whilst their current leader is a bit of a twit (er…) and their handling of the park situation has been pretty terrible, there is extensive reporting of it in their largely uncensored mainstream media [see lack of censorship].

In fact what you have in Turkey – jobs, freedom of expression, etc is pretty much what people protest in order to achieve all around the world.

I’ve worked with journalists in nearby Iran, Syria, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan and Armenia and whilst this obviously doesn’t make me more correct about anything any more  than people who haven’t,  they describe much more serious problems than those I’ve worked with in Turkey. From mafia interference to state censorship to execution for speaking with Westerners, you just need to look at a map of Turkey to realise it’s doing better than most of its neighbours.

“In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing about the it because the Twitterstorm was about something else which in retrospect was not evil just fairly bad” as fellow selective revolutionary Edmund Burke once more or less said.

Here’s a Freedom House list of *really* repressive places, debatable of course, which we perhaps should be getting upset about but from whom we buy too much stuff:

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/worst-worst-2012-worlds-most-repressive-societies

Let them have Kent

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Been thinking about the English Defence League people who burnt down a mosque recently.

All they want is a homeland, this EDL lot. England. They want to defend England.

A pure England. A land of the Angles. A truly English place. Who would deny anybody’s human right to a homeland? Let them have it, I say.

According to their website ‘The EDL believes that English Culture has the right to exist and prosper in England.’ [their caps. I won’t go into the EDL grammar right now]

They are also concerned about people who want to ‘impose non-English cultures on the English people in their own land.’

In order to make sure that this ‘New England’ is both racially and ideologically pure, the EDL supporters who live there will restrict themselves to that which is strictly ‘Anglo’.

The Angles were a Germanic people who settled in Britain in the post-Roman period. Therefore their homeland, where the Angles actually come from, is therefore Angeln, in Schleswig-Holstein, on the Jutland Peninsula. However, because there are so many Germans already there this may be problematic.

‘East Anglia’ seems logical at first, but so much of this area was reclaimed by Dutch engineers that they can’t really have that. So I’m suggesting a section of Kent, although because they will not be using modern English it won’t sound exactly like that, especially the vowel sound.

The language they will speak in this ‘New England’ is the primitive Germanic English of the Angles: of course they won’t be allowed proper numbers (which are Arabic), nor words of a Greek, Latin, Norman French origin, nor loan words from other ‘non English’ languages. This will reduce their potential vocabulary by around 80-90%.

They won’t be allowed the Saint George’s Cross, sadly, as Saint George is also patron Saint of Catalonia, Portugal and Bulgaria plus George was Palestinian and therefore possibly wouldn’t get on too well with EDL as a result.

For their homeland to be fully authentically ‘English’, a lot of things will have to go: no cups of tea, which comes from India and Sri Lanka; no fish and chips either because fish and chips was invented by French Huguenot and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Nor chicken tikka masala either. Lager wasn’t invented but they could have beer and mead and they are allowed roast beef, but no roast potatoes because potatoes are foreign.

The current Royal Family comes from all over Europe, so they can’t have the Queen any more, and Parliament comes from a French word so that’s out. The Angles worshipped a range of gods so God Save The Queen is a no no. Sadly the Angles have left little in terms of art, literature, and architecture because they assimilated with other tribes, and then the more technologically-advanced Normans basically took over their remaining lands. We know from archeological evidence that they lived in wattle and daub structures, none of which survive.

The good news is that they will be allowed to keep their misspelt tattoos – Anglo Saxon tribes were heavily tattooed – and they will be allowed simple wooden ships. But in general when it comes it comes to defence of New England the picture is bleak: they will be allowed hand-held weapons but not much more because all the really capable military hardware came much later on.

So…a doomed land of terrible food, where people with bad tattoos can use limited vocabulary and live in huts whilst being laughed at by other more civilised people. A genetic cul-de-sac.

Not Looking for New England? Then stop burning down mosques. Tell your friends and colleagues not to burn down mosques. And if you know anyone who may be tempted to think EDL could usefully stand for anything other than English Disco Lovers, remind them that pretty much everything you like about this damp lump of rock in the middle of the Atlantic comes from our relationship with things outside it, and that its successful future will be based on people getting on with each other – not an invented ideological war, between what you’ve been told ‘England’ means and what you’ve been told ‘Islam’ means and the erroneous belief that they are somehow mutually incompatible.

The bigger words may need explaining.