Today is going to be some sort of video fest I’m afraid.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Job hunting 2.0
Funny because it’s true. Via Joy of Tech.
Things to click (and read)
Sometimes I need to clear the thirty tabs I have open in my browser and I can’t be bothered posting them separately. This is one of those times, and it reflects on me, not on the content of these links that you should read.
There’s a rumour that floats around the Internet every now and then that Facebook is responsible for one in five divorces these days as people rediscover old flames. This rumour is just that. A rumour. The Wall Street Journal kills it.
“The 1-in-5 number originated with an executive at an online divorce-service provider in the U.K. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which allows Britons to file uncontested divorces at low cost, had just launched the company’s Facebook page and wondered what role Facebook has in precipitating divorces. After determining that the word “Facebook” appeared in 989 of the company’s 5,000 or so most recent divorce petitions, he had Divorce-Online issue a news release in December 2009 stating “Facebook is bad for your marriage.”
Mr. Keenan acknowledges that his company’s clients aren’t necessarily representative of all divorces, and he adds that his firm never claimed that Facebook actually causes 20% of divorces. “It was a very unscientific survey,” Mr. Keenan says.
Elsewhere, Clayboy (a newie for me) has two must read posts about the new atheists – the first about the conformity of “free thinker” thinking, as demonstrated by a magazine called The Freethinker, the second about whether Christians can value atheism.
“I might even ponder whether the award for secularist of the year (apparently a “prestigious” one – who knew?) reflects this. The winner is not Salman Taseer, the nominee who was assassinated for opposing the Pakistan blasphemy laws mainly aimed at Christians, but Dutch Euro MP Sophie in ’t Veld who, er …, bravely organised a protest against the Pope.
I am somewhat underwhelmed in my admiration for such a courageous achievement advancing the cause of rational civilisation.”
Slate says the lack of looting in Japan is down to the Yakuza. Which is pretty cool.
“Organized crime. Police aren’t the only ones on patrol since the earthquake hit. Members of the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicate, have also been enforcing order. All three major crime groups—the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and the Inagawa-kai—have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur,” writes Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, in an e-mail message. “The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of [humanitarian aid] supplies nationwide and I believe that’s a conservative estimate.” One group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public transportation. “As one Sumiyoshi-kai boss put it to me over the phone,” says Adelstein, ” ‘In times of crisis, there are not Yakuza and civilians or foreigners. There are only human beings and we should help each other.’ ” Even during times of peace, the Yakuza enforce order, says Adelstein. They make their money off extortion, prostitution, and drug trafficking. But they consider theft grounds for expulsion.”
Elsewhere, I’ve been taking part in an increasingly lengthy discussion about gay marriage on the solapanel.
Five Senses Coffee offers a great diagnosis guide for figuring out what is wrong with your espresso. Well worth a read if you think your coffee could be better.
First Things has a good list for engaging with people in the online world. Especially for responding to people you don’t know who disagree with you.
“The manner of your answer will affect your inquirer more than its content. You are often, as far as you can tell, trying only to encourage him to hear the answer, to open a crack in his defenses that might over time open into a door. Hope and pray that you are only one—perhaps the first, but perhaps not—in a series of encounters that will bring him to see the truth. You do not need to win the argument to change his life.”
You should be reading Things Findo Thinks – I haven’t linked to it for a while, but Findo seems much more interested in engaging the nu-atheists than I presently am, so if you want your fix of fallacy busting, head there. Try this post about arguments from authority on for size. It’ll help you avoid bad arguments about your arguments.
It’s iPad 2 week this week. And luckily my wife is going to let me buy one. Unlike this guy in the states, who allegedly had to return his iPad because his wife said no. At least that was the reason he gave on the post-it note that went to the store, that was passed on to Apple Corporate, who may or may not have sent back the iPad with a note reading “Apple says yes”… brilliant if true.
Sin within Video Games: Is it sinful to break the ten commandments in a game?
I’ve been pondering my relationship with video games since the infamous Mark Driscoll incident. I also happened to be playing my way through the morally open world of Red Dead Redemption – where one is constantly faced with the option to choose right or wrong. To be villain or hero.
While disagreeing passionately with Driscoll’s “games are stupid because people want to rescue a princess” caricature – I’ve been pondering the deeper question about my approach to ethical decision making within the games I play. Games are different to other types of culture because there’s a sense of agency. We choose the path the entertainment takes. We place ourselves in the centre of the narrative. So the immoral actions of a protaganist come down to our choice. So if I choose to do wrong in a game – is this a wrong in the great game of life? I don’t think so. But I think it can be. And it’s certainly a reflection of the wrong in my life. Games, like anything, can be harnessed and abused by our sinful natures. That doesn’t make them wrong inherently. Wrong use does not negate right use.
Christ and Pop Culture raise for me, what is a much more nuanced approach to video gaming as a Christian than Mark Driscoll’s… is it sinful to choose a sinful action in a game, or does it simply express our sinful nature… the article also touches on John Marston of Red Dead Redemption, which I’ve just finished. And I chose to be good.
“Artistic mediums that ignore the reality of sin are sentimental at best. Thomas Kinkaid may paint a lovely cottage, but there is very little richness and resonance to his work because it lacks an acknowledgement of this key truth. Videogames, on the other hand, tend to acknowledge our inherent sinful nature without even trying. In fact, videogames’ biggest strength is that they illuminate our nature and force us to come to terms with it. In a videogame we are, simply put, selfish jerks.
When I am given a blatant moral choice, I may make the outwardly righteous choice, but my inward tendency still remains. I do what it takes to progress, not because it’s right, but because it alleviates my boredom and allows me to feel good about myself. “
I like the quote below. But I disagree a little. Because I think, at some point, the decisions I make – be it through bloodlust or seeking some sort of thrill that would be sinful were I to actualise the desire rather than virtualising it – I’m not acting out of faith, but rather out of the desires of the flesh, and I reckon that might be an expression of the brokenness of my fleshly side, I’d be comfortable calling it sin. But I’m much more confident that Christ’s blood is sufficient to cover all the brokenness of my flesh.
“As a sober exploration of my sinful state, many of these experiences are incredibly valuable, not harmful, as many have charged. It’s just a videogame. These worlds, these people, and these choices are not real. I’m not truly sinning in these games, as much as I’m exploring the concept of sin. But I know one thing: I am not a good man.”
Selling up the content farms…
Content farms are the bane of the content creator’s existence. Other people flooding the Internet with cheap mass produced content has the same effect on the content market that any mass producing of something once good and pure has… it cheapens the experience for everybody, big companies make all the money, and then eventually something shifts in the market. It happened with beer. It happened with coffee. Now Google is stepping in to stop content farms leeching off the Internet with their search engine snake oil.
If none of this makes sense to you – then don’t worry – this infographic and accompanying post from techi.com is here to help.
The best things in life cost more than petrol
Good has an infographic of stuff that costs more by volume than petrol – so stop your whining.
Introducing Jesse Heiman, the world’s greatest extra
Somebody, somewhere, described the extra good extra I posted the other day as a human Wilhelm Scream. If you don’t know what the Wilhelm Scream is you can read this post (or watch the video).
I did a little bit more digging. Turns out his name is Jesse Heiman. And he has more than 56 pretty awesome TV and movie credits to his name.
Here are some articles at Salon, Slashfilm, and the Daily Mail that will help you come to terms with just how incredible this guy is.
He’s a modern day Vic Gallucci – the extra on the Bill who became so much a part of the furniture that he became DC Tom Baker. The Bill used the same group of extras so often they called them all TREV (Totally Reliable Extra Veteran). But more awesome because of the string of titles on his resume. This sort of dedication deserves recognition.
Stop with the stupid statii: things that get my online goat
The plural for status is statii. Right? Anyway. I was talking to my buddy Mike. I have many buddies named Mike. And I won’t tell you which one he is. It’ll be more fun, and safer, that way.
There are two types of status updates on Facebook that are guaranteed to raise my ire, three types that I will respond to in anger. Well, passive aggressive snarkiness. Four that make my ears steam. Let me count the ways. Oh Facebooker.
This post should not be read as a personal indictment if you are the sort of person who does this. And if you’re reading this thinking that I’m writing about you specifically, I may well be, but I do love you, and I only want what’s best for you. Think of it as a Public Service Announcement that will hopefully help me to keep on liking you.
My hot wife says this post is a preachy know-it-all rant that makes it sound like I’m some sort of social media guru. I’m not, I’m just Joe Average. Your typical Facebook friend. But I have a blog. A voice. A platform. And I’m happy to use it to tell you what Joe Average is thinking, or at least what I’m thinking. And that’s loving. Isn’t it?
Here are the types of Facebookers that get my goat. And if you’re one of them – feel free to come back at me in the comments.
1. The “Facebook is out to get you” Rumour Miller.
Facebook is a company that makes money by selling its user base to advertisers. Deal with it. If you want to use the platform then you need to get with the program. You are the commodity. You are not the customer (unless you buy ads). Sometimes Facebook will change the way they do business. Businesses do that. They announce these changes. It’s not hard. If you hear a nasty rumour about how Facebook is out to get you and exploit you – it may well be true. But please go to google.com or snopes.com and do a little research. Just copy and paste your chain-letter style status update into google and see what comes up. Chances are it’ll be a hoax. 90% of the time it is. 9% of the time its something that some conspiracy nut has blown out of proportion – and the other 1% of the time Facebook is doing something to make a bit more money. That’s its job. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Two friends, possibly connected by mutual friends, who knows – posted the same status update tonight about a change Facebook made two years ago. A change that wasn’t even really a change, and certainly wasn’t the kind of change this conspiracy laden status suggested it was. Sure. Facebook is going to show you if your friends like or interact with a particular brand or advertisement. Newsflash. This is a social network.
2. The Megachurch Wannabe.
I get it. You are the minister, assistant minister, or student minister at a fantastic church. And you want your church to get Facebook attention. We all do. But this stuff sounds better if other people are talking about it. Not the person who is paid to. Here are some secrets. Nobody likes the overly pious memory verse machine. They get hidden. Nobody likes the walking church bulletin who advertises an event every time they open their mouth. You are not Mark Driscoll. You are not John Piper. You are you. Be you. Let Piper be Piper. Let Driscoll be Driscoll (or point out how bizarre his stream of status updates can be and get lots of hits on your blog). A stream of Piper imitators in one’s status feed is annoying and it dilutes the effectiveness of the original.
Don’t talk too much about your awesome prayer life, sermon, Bible Study, worship session, Bible reading, quiet time, anything a bit jargony that is going to make others feel inadequate or your non-Christian friends and family think you’ve joined a cult. Sure. We all want our non-Christian friends to read our statii and know we are ruled by the Lord Jesus. But not posting drunken pictures on Facebook will help with that impression, as will myriad other things. And a couple of updates per day or week, in proportion to updates about what you are actually thinking or doing would be fine. Thankyou.
There are a few subsets of the megachurch wannabe that almost became special categories in this rant. Don’t spread Christian chain status updates about how we want a million people to like Jesus on Facebook, or how if you don’t make something your status for an hour it means you don’t love God. I won’t copy your status. Almost ever. As a general rule. I don’t want to be some sort of status quoting robot. And I love God. I’m sure there are others like me.
The Christian superparent/superspouse. I get it. Your wife is hot. Your daughters are amazing and daddy date worthy (there’s an incredible cringe factor to that term). Your sons are growing up to be real men of God. That’s great. Show us some photos. That’s what Facebook is for. Tell us you’re proud of them. But don’t keep telling me how hot your wife is, or about your plans for an amazing daddy date (seriously. Creepy). We know you love your family.
If you do want to plant a megachurch just follow these ten steps to success.
3. The Oversharer.
I’ve been over this before. But it just keeps happening. Let me state this clearly. As clearly as possible, and with as much love as I can muster.
I DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT THE POO YOUR CHILD JUST DID.
Ever. And your child doesn’t want to google themselves one day and find out that their potty training produced wonderful shapes. Nor that they had a poosplosion on the carpet. In fact. Nobody wants to know. Especially if one day they are going to visit your house and sit on the chair that was once covered by infant defecation. We get that you love your child and that parenting can be a funny and frustrating process. But you don’t need to rub our virtual noses in it.
As a general rule most people don’t want to read about the minutiae of your daily life. There’s a point where enough information crosses over into too much information. Why straddle that line? Why not stay metres away from it. But try not to be so vague you’re completely boring too. That’s too far.
4. The Grammar Pest.
I’ve saved this one until last because it’s actually the one I find most annoying. I cringe at bad grammar, and bad spelling. I don’t understand how, with the advent of the in-browser spell check, anybody can post gibberish in their statii anymore. It’s not that hard. Come on people.
But. To publicly correct somebody, unless they are a professional proof-reader and you are their colleague, is just mean spirited and almost only ever designed to make the one doing the correcting look good. And it doesn’t. Nobody is buying what you’re selling. Nobody. We all see through it. People hated you as a child and scribbled on your face with red pen. We get it. Now there’s a grammar sized chip on your shoulder and you feel the need to make your contribution to every conversation a comment about somebody else’s mistake. Good for you. You will die alone. But your will will be immaculate. Error free. Leaving everything to your 18 cats.
People make mistakes. If you love them you should tell them in private. Not shout it out for the world to see. And if you do that – you better make sure that you cross every t, dot every i and catch every rogue apostrophe before hitting enter. Because if you don’t – I’m watching you. And I’m coming for you. Don’t be a grammar hypocrite for a moment. Grammar Pharisee is probably a better name for these people than grammar nazi – communication is about the spirit, not about the law. Shakespeare taught us that. As did anybody else who deliberately broke a rule for the sake of better writing. Because everybody likes to see a bully get their comeuppance.
Judging a book by its cover: Raising Rowdy Girls
I can’t take a book seriously if it uses Papyrus (the font – a cover made from papyrus would actually be classy) on its front cover. Sorry.
I’m less likely to take a book seriously if the banner ad on its web page features a guy smoking a cigar hugging what I presume are his daughters. Looking every bit the pimp.
I’ll take it even less seriously if it features the following chapters:
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Give a Flip Factor
Chapter 1. Strong Words for Weak Dads
Chapter 2. Teach Your Daughter How to Fight
Chapter 3. Teach Your Daughter How to Shoot Guns
Chapter 4. Teach Your Daughter How to Sense BS
Chapter 5. Teach Your Daughter How to Rebel
Chapter 6 . Teach Your Daughter How to be Classy
Chapter 7. Teach Your Daughter to be a Visionary
Chapter 8. Teach Your Daughter to Despise Anti-Intellectualism
Chapter 9. Teach Your Daughter How to Party
Chapter 10. Teach Your Daughter How to Hunt
Chapter 11. Teach Your Daughter How to Avoid the Date from Hell
Chapter 12. The Ten Commandments for My Daughter’s Potential Boyfriend
Chapter 13. An Application to Date My Daughter
Chapter 14. About My Dad: From the Author’s Daughters
What is a blog: trying to bridge the generation gap
It is becoming more and more apparent to me, as I talk to people from the pre-blog generation, that there’s a bit of a genre problem when it comes to blogs, and what they are. For me this means I need to tread a little more carefully, lest I say something, under my own brand/name/banner that’ll come back to bite me. This post is going to become part of my disclaimer. Have you read it? You should. Because at some point if you’re going to engage with a text (and blogs are texts) you should be doing it on its terms as well as your own. Context is king.
But there is a lesson here for non-bloggers too – the onus isn’t entirely on the blogger to take people who don’t understand blogs into account. We have to consider such an audience, but we’re not writing to that audience as a primary audience.
Blogs are, by nature, opinionated, personal, and sometimes controversial. They are, by nature, quickly produced, biased, and not peer-reviewed. The more people fail to take this into account the harder life will be for bloggers.
But, on the blogger side of the fence, posts are permanent, googlable, searchable on RSS feeds and site searches, and available to the public.
If we want people to stay accountable about what they write (ie write under their own names), and we want to read what they write, then we need to not hold words that in the past would have been quickly forgotten against people. Or, at least, we need to make some attempt at understanding the genre before we impose our own anachronistic cultural readings on a situation.
Nothing I’ve said has come back to haunt me yet (except maybe one time where I mouthed off a bit about why a particular ministry wasn’t for me). I’ve been pretty careful with what I’ve said, and I’d stand behind it. But that doesn’t mean words can’t be twisted, misunderstood and abused – and at some point, the onus is on the reader not to do that.
That is all.
Black’s Friday and the future of the Internet
This song is awful. Just awful. Many people are calling it the worst song in the world (Dave Miers isn’t). I wish Autotune technology would become sentient and eat all the awful autotuners out there. And Justin Bieber. That’s a singularity I could get behind.
But the story behind this story (the music video has had more than 27 million hits and the single is roaring up the charts on iTunes), is that this 13 year old girl’s parents paid a company (Ark Music Factory – here’s Rebecca Black’s Profile on their website) $2,000 to make a viral video. That’s $2,000 well spent. Except for all the hate. TechCrunch’s wrap up of the viral side of the story is worth a read. Gawker’s coverage is also pretty good (here’s another, and a story about the company behind the video), and here’s a C-Net wrap up.
Her story has gone mainstream media – where she responds to all the hate and reaches out to Justin Bieber…
Here’s a parody…
Now, if only the Old Spice man would weigh in on a Bieber/Black duet we’d have some sort of viral perfection.
Sydney Calling
So peeps. We’re heading to Sydney for a wedding in a couple of weekends. And we’ve got a couple of days to kill either side of the wedding. Robyn wants to go to the zoo. I want to go to a bunch of awesome cafes, and Gould Books.
Manly are playing on the Saturday night in Cronulla. Which is a pain.
Does anybody have any recommendations for other things we should do? Churches we should check out? Amazing cafes?
I’ve been to Sydney before. I was born there. It’s not like this is my first time. But places change.
I’m really looking forward to the break too.
Tumblrweed: Sad Etsy boyfriends
This urlesque post about sad etsy boyfriends turned into its own single serving Tumblr pretty quickly. Because that’s how the Internet works.
For those scratching their heads trying to figure out what the nouns in that sentence mean, here’s a quick reference glossary…
urlesque – a blog collecting bits of the web.
etsy – a “sell your handcrafts” service where makers can sell their creations to the world.
sad etsy boyfriends – the male partners of etsy users who are, by appearance, forced by their other halves to model said creations.
tumblr – a blogging platform that lets you create and share content very quickly.
Tumblrweed is a series of posts where I share some of my favourite, or newly discovered, single serving tumblrs.
The Oxford Comma, it’s a serial…
A while back I paid homage to the Oxford, or serial, comma. The comma that comes between something and and and when the and is followed by something else in order to add clarity to a list.
For example. I like planes, trains, and automobiles.
That last comma. That’s it. Turns out it’s popular (see the comments on that post).
I’m posting now because I found this graphic – and I think it’s nice.
Nice like an Oxford comma.
Vampire Weekend also wrote a song about everybody’s favourite comma (with a slight language warning).