video

Thomas the Propaganda Engine

funny, geekdom, video
Published on 3 Comments on Thomas the Propaganda Engine



My eldest nephew is crazy about Thomas the Tank Engine. He can spent hours watching Thomas videos on Youtube, but best not to let him watch this one. Meanwhile, Drew Magary explains what makes it an awful, awful tv show:

Thomas and his friends live on Sodor and spend their days toiling endlessly, “shunting trucks and hauling freight.” (Shunting, by the way, sounds like a great Urban Dictionary term for silent fucking—”We shunted while his parents slept next door!”) The engines are only happy when they are being “Really Useful,” which suggests to me that they have been brainwashed by fearsome tuxedoed railway overlord Sir Topham Hatt to accept the bonds of slavery without question. These poor engines have never known freedom, and so the very idea of it is alien to them. The whole story could have served as an allegory for life under the Russian czars before the rise of the Bolsheviks. But I bet the Rev wasn’t that subtle. I bet he was just a man who thought trains were bitches.

On the whole though the show has an useful message for all kids: shut up, you’re not special, do as you are told. If you don’t we’ll brick you up in an abandoned railway tunnel:



Thomas the Tank Engine: propaganda to get kids used to the awful conditions of the UK railways, or just to get them used to being happy cogs in the capitalist machine?

Bubblegum Crisis

Anime, geekdom, video
Published on Leave a comment on Bubblegum Crisis



Back in the late eighties/early nineties, before the internet, when we had to rely on the local videostore to supply us with anime, Bubblegum Crisis was one of the first series to be widely available, through good, old Manga Video. I sort of knew something about anime, through scraps in American comics zines, but it wasn’t until Manga Video got going in the early nineties, that we got a regular supply of anime videos. Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, Appleseed, Dominion Tank Police, Wicked City: that first wave of videos was very cyberpunk influenced and they provided a vision of the future that was just around the corner for us, slightly too young to have seen Blade Runner at the cinema or have read Neuromancer and Schismatrix when new.



Rappers delight

geekdom, video
Published on Leave a comment on Rappers delight



Did you know rappers are not just people singing hiphop, but can also refer to a traditional English dance originiating from the coal mining villages of Northumberland and Durham? The rappers in this case being flexible swords used in the dance? First described in 1715, it’s one of those dances that was slowly dying out until a group of students, under the leadership of Bill Cassie, a professor of mechanical engineering at King’s College in Newcastle decided to revive it for their rag week in 1949. Over sixty years later and the Newcastle Kingsmen are still going strong:



One of those things you just have to share with people when you stumble across it on Youtube…