Good news everybody, it’s bad news!

There’s a saying: “no news is good news” which, in the days before telephones and e-mail, was used when a lack of information (“no news”) indicated that nothing bad had happened (“is good news”).

A while ago now, I was discussing (free registration required) an exposé on Mercy Ministries that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. The journalist implicated Hillsong Church, and I argued that the paper often used these kinds of opportunities to speak negatively about them. I evidenced my point with a list of search results for the keyword “hillsong” taken from smh.com.au, demonstrating how the majority of articles that mention the church are unfavourable. (Do not fear! This isn’t going to be a religious discourse.)

One respondent was unconvinced, saying “you do realise that most articles in the news aren’t positive, right?” As much as I don’t like it, he’s probably correct. The saying from the top of this post could, in today’s world, be more accurately parsed as: none of the information presented (“no news”) is an agreeable report (“is good news”). In other words “all news is bad news.”

The News industry wouldn’t survive if they weren’t able to supply a constant stream of compelling information, and it seems the topics people find most interesting are stories of miserable things happening to other people. Is it possibly because it makes our own miserable lives seem less so? (Why am I talking so much about miserable things lately?) We live in an age of cheap, instant communications, but this only seems to help propagate more bad news (and bad jokes).

I think that’s why my online reading list doesn’t contain any news feeds. For me, no news is good news.

Singing in the rain

Ah… what a gloomy day it is in Sydney today. The weather’s been funny – one day it will be hot as hell, then the next cold and wet. It’s almost like we’ve turned into Melbourne!

It’s been a while since I last wrote about music lyrics (here and here) so today I’d like to write about one particular lyric from a song called ‘A little fall of rain’ from the musical ‘Les Misérables’.

Éponine:
Don’t you fret, M’sieur Marius
I don’t feel any pain
A little fall of rain
Can hardly hurt me now
You’re here, that’s all I need to know
And you will keep me safe
And you will keep me close
And rain will make the flowers grow.

Long story short: Éponine loves Marius, Marius loves Cossette, Éponine dies to save Marius – your typical love triangle slash unrequited love scenario.

The beauty here is in the lyric ‘A little fall of rain / Can hardly hurt me now’. On the surface, one could take it to mean that because she’s dying, Éponine is simply saying that Marius’s efforts to keep the rain off her is unnecessary, because all that matters is that he’s holding her. But I like to think that ‘rain’ is Éponine’s metaphor for his tears – in that moment, she comes to the bittersweet realisation that he’s not crying for her because he loves her, and because she’s dying, it no longer ‘hurts’ her to know it. She’s comforted by the knowledge that because of what she did for him, she will forever have a special place in his heart.

Short, sharp and sweet

Maybe I’ve got it wrong and short posts are the way to go…

Card humbug!

Is the Christmas card dead? It seems as if people are becoming less and less inclined to send bits of flattened wood pulp all over the place in order to express their season’s greetings. It’s probably due less to do with environmental concerns than the fact that in today’s world it has just become plain cumbersome to have to go and buy the damn things, write in them, and then put them in the post or hand them out. Why go through all of that when one can simply put one’s thoughts into an e-mail and send it off in an instant?

Me, I wasn’t able to find the motivation to do even that. Most of my friends and family received a cold, unfriendly silence in lieu of a card (virtual or otherwise), or even a generic mass e-mail. Now I have this guilty feeling for not making the effort to keep in touch with people, so I suppose you could consider this blog post as a weak attempt at restitution – a cyber-repentance of sorts.

So an extremely belated merry Christmas, and a happy new year! Keep in touch. Feel free to send me a card to let me know how you’re doing :-)

An open letter to Rich Burlew

Dear Mr Burlew,

I am a regular follower and fan of your Web comic The Order of the Stick. Although I don’t have a Role Playing Game background, I have been exposed to just enough of it to understand most of the humour relating to desktop gaming, and find the comic very funny and charming overall.

As a Christmas present, my wife bought me On The Origin of PCs, and it is concerning this that I wanted to write to you. Specifically, I noticed that after the first introduction to the book by the character Redcloak, you included “second introduction” as yourself, explaining some of the background behind this book.

While it is a funny piece overall, it was towards the end when I became a little bit sad that the behaviour of some “fans” must have made it necessary for you to explain why you did or didn’t include certain things in the book. In another time and age, an artist might have had to defend his work, but to explain it so plainly would have been unheard of – the interpretation is as significant a part of the piece as the piece itself. Nick Usborne wrote in his book Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy along the lines that the Internet has enabled the consumer to become an active participant for the first time in history, and maybe some simply cannot resist the temptation to make their own personal interpretations heard, and to force it onto others (including the artist) hoping to influence future outcomes for their own personal gratification.

Therefore, I admire you for your choice in continuing to use the Internet as your preferred medium for OotS; salute your commitment to your art in spite of whatever setbacks you may face with your health, demanding fans, Intellectual Property theft and other issues unique to the Internet; and thank you for your integrity in creating the comic purely as a product of your own wonderful imagination.

Sincerely,
Caesar Wong