Category: Video

Dutch Public Broadcasting Goes Fake News

Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV —the far right Dutch Freedom Party— had his campaign start today for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Spijkenisse, one of his traditional strongholds.

The eight o’clock news of the NOS (the Netherlands’ state broadcaster) opened with this and their reporter Michiel Breedveld on the scene in the video below said it had attracted ‘an unbelievable crowd of people’.

Other reporters who were on the scene today (1, 2) said the number of people Wilders had attracted was somewhere between 80 to 200 and that the ratio of supporters and press was about 1:1.

Salima Bouchtaoui: ‘Spijkenisse this Saturday morning. Lots of press. And lots of police. Few people.’

Haro Kraak: ‘There were at most 150 supporters of the PVV, probably fewer. And at least as much press, probably more.’

There seems to have been so much press that this was what it looked like most of the time.

This incident is oddly reminiscent of Trump’s inauguration where the actual number of people present was much lower than was claimed by the administration.

But the crucial difference is that Trump was the liar. Wilders could spread the lie that his campaign start ‘had the most people ever’ but why should he if the state broadcaster does it for him?

Update: Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant (a newspaper I’ve given some grief before) calls the NOS’s coverage bad and harmful.

Update: De NOS have posted a rectification on their single page hard to link they use for this.

It’s not the opening of the evening news, but it will have to do. Notably they say they have used ‘wrong words’ to describe the event and they still put the number of supporters at several hundred.

Books and movies of 2016

Like every year the books I read and the movies I watched. Recommended ones are in bold.

Books

The book situation was shameful but instead of reading a lot of books, I wrote “Designing Conversational Interfaces”, so I’ll call that even.

  • “PACE: A Small Business Owner’s Guide to Complete Cash Flow Clarity” Jesse Mecham
  • “Agile Game Development with Scrum” by Keith Clinton
  • “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • “The $1 Prototype: A Modern Approach to Mobile UX Design and Rapid Innovation” by Greg Nudelman
  • “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion
  • “The iPhone App Design Manual: Create Perfect Designs for Effortless Coding and App Store Success”
  • “Mobile Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide to Trends, Themes and Styles in Mobile Web Design”
  • “Factotum” by Charles Bukowski
  • “Mobile Design Pattern Gallery: UI Patterns for Smartphone Apps”
  • “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov
  • “Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd” by Frans Osinga
  • “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love” by Cal Newport
  • “Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • “The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics” by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Movies

This went a lot better with 72 if you count the individual installments of the Decalogue.

  • Inside Out
  • Princes Mononoke
  • Kingsman
  • Dekalog IV
  • District 9
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc
  • Edge of Tomorrow
  • Persona
  • Her
  • Dekalog V
  • Into the Wild
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  • Code Inconnu
  • The Hateful Eight in 70mm Roadshow at Zoo Palast
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past
  • Relatos Salvajes
  • Dekalog VI
  • Cave of Forgotten Dreams
  • Sicario
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
  • Knock Knock
  • Dogville
  • Tropa de Elite
  • Prelude to Axanar
  • Fast & Furious 6
  • Addicted to Sheep
  • Paths of Glory
  • Spirited Away
  • Decalogue VII
  • Fast Five
  • The Martian
  • Django Unchained
  • Annie Hall
  • Dekalog VIII
  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
  • The Assassin
  • Amy
  • Toy Story 3
  • Whiplash
  • Dekalog IX
  • Lammbock
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • Pusher
  • Like Father Like Son
  • Ex Machina
  • The Revenant
  • Burn After Reading
  • Dekalog X
  • Pusher II
  • RoboCop by José Padilha
  • Johnny Mnemonic
  • Der siebente Kontinent
  • The Wolf of Wall Street
  • Spectre
  • Easy Rider
  • Dredd
  • Show Me A Hero
  • Pusher III
  • Wild Strawberries
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Wall Street
  • Jodorowsky’s Dune
  • The Wind Rises
  • Aeon Flux
  • Copie Conforme
  • Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky
  • The Neon Demon
  • The Wailing
  • İklimler
  • World War Z
  • Thor
  • The Physician

Welt am Draht

I strolled through the massive exhibition ‘Welt am Draht’ at Leipziger Strasse this weekend. This is a selection of video art from the massive Julia Stoschek Collection exhibited in the former Czech Cultural center.

Like everybody says the quality of video art in general is extremely inconsistent. That is true in this exhibit as well. There are a bunch of works where it is not at all obvious why somebody finished it, somebody approved it and somebody paid money for it.

The works that were most interesting in this exhibition consistently were not the video ones but those created with a game engine. That may be my own novelty bias at work, but a fully digital workflow like that allows: 1. more and faster iteration 2. fully dynamic products, the combination of which leads to totally new kinds of things that can be produced.

Some examples:

I forget what this was, but despite the concept being more or less ridiculous it has a compelling internal consistency.

RMB City by Cao Fei is a rich and spectacular playground of randomness.

I can’t really argue with any of Ed Atkins’s work which stands out for the pure skill of the renderings combined with spoken word that is not trite (so rare).

Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection is an ongoing collage of elements in a dynamic simulation that looks like an edgy version of the large scale installations Theo Watson makes.

The year in culture

I have a personal log of culture consumed going back to 2003. This year was a particular low on many counts. I have been busy and I don’t ascribe the same value to consuming culture pure for the goal of consuming it anymore. Been there, done that.

I’ve read eleven books (see my Goodreads) which is more than I had expected but nothing compared compared to the bookwormy prowess of people like Hans or Kars.

  • The Peripheral by William Gibson
  • Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams & Joris Dormans
  • Play Matters by Miguel Sicart
  • Surface Detail by Ian M. Banks
  • The Hydrogen Sonata by Ian M. Banks
  • Between the World and Me by Ta-nehisi Coates
  • Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch by Leo Tolstoy
  • Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Certain to Win by Chet Richards
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Bold is recommended. It looks like this year I especially enjoyed non-fiction maybe because my fiction was limited to fairly mediocre genre stuff. I’m resolving that reading should not be painful (Russians were a good attempt, but too boring) and that it should also not be trivial (so no more genre fiction crap for me).

In movies I fared slightly better but did not manage to hit the one movie per week baseline with a meagre 23 of which only two in the cinema. I’m playing catchup now over the christmas break with eleven these views happening in December.

All are in my Letterboxed diary but since sites disappear I’m archiving them here as well. I am immensely pleased with almost all of the movies I have seen except for the two marked as shit.

  • Caché
  • The Imitation Game
  • Oldboy
  • Moonrise Kingdom
  • The Raid 2: Berandal
  • Sonnenallee
  • Citizenfour
  • Before Midnight
  • Straigth outta Compton
  • Grizzly Man
  • The Fantastic Four 💩
  • Frances Ha
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • Gravity
  • Pacific Rim
  • Elysium
  • Frozen
  • The Princess Bride
  • Slow West
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron 💩
  • Snowpiercer
  • Inherent Vice
  • Dekalog, trzy

I managed to avoid going to theater plays and went to one opera “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” in the Komische Oper which was delightful.

I guess I can in part explain this shift by my consumption of games. Even without owning a console there is more than enough stuff to play. Here are nineteen games I played for the first time in 2015. Some of them were played only once and some of them were played for dozens of hours.

  • Borderlands 2
  • Nuclear Throne
  • Panamax
  • The Westport Independent
  • King of New York
  • Bang!
  • Cobra Club
  • Fallout Shelter
  • Her Story
  • A Dark Room
  • Sage Solitaire
  • Let’s make Chaofan
  • Panoramical
  • Mouse Guard: Swords & Strongholds
  • Downwell
  • Fightin Words
  • Counter Strike: Global Offensive
  • Galaxy Trucker
  • Sunless Sea
  • Codenames

Deutschland ’83

I was tremendously hyped for Deutschland ’83 after hearing about it and watching the first episode. Now that it is finally airing in Germany it turns out that it is not doing that well. Viewership started out low and has been declining over the first four episodes.

IMG_0181

People are attributing this to the fact that the average RTL viewer is stupid and only used to watch plain episodic series. That may well be true, but the decline of the series’s ratings closely mirror the decline of my appetite for the show itself. By episode four Deutschland ’83 is a slog and the only thing that got me to the finish line was an empty Sunday and stamina.

The plot devolves and loses whatever internal logic and coherence it had. The characters which are enigmatic to begin with become increasingly hard to empathize with and start doing random things. Worst of all, Deutschland ’83 tries to put a neutral spin on one of the most polarized conflicts of the last century which of course fails.

The one message that does come through is that everybody on the East side was evil and psychopathic and that the people on the West side were basically decent chaps. This is a laughable depiction of the world as it was back then (or as parts of the world still are). The violence and surveillance enacted by the Soviet bloc is hardly different from the stuff the Americans did and still do around the world. The only reason we get to ridicule the East Germans in the series is because they lost.

Mann/Frau

The idea that German television is necessarily terrible has to be reconsidered. I’ve recently started watching Deutschland ’83 which is amazing (more on that later) and yesterday I finished season two of the web series Mann/Frau by BR PULS.

Mann/Frau is a mirror format byte-sized episodic where each installment details the interactions of a man and a woman their relations and lives. It treats most of the themes occupying people around my age living in Berlin but manages to do so drawing more from slapstick than from cliché.

The series is helped enormously by the fact that each episode concludes somewhere under five minutes. Brevity unfortunately is a rare commodity in Germany. The benefits of it here are that it forces them to get to the point quickly, cut rapidly and finish. Episodes of this length also greatly facilitate binge watching. I had never considered you could make a traditional format series with episodes this short, but it works fine.

Halfway through I did develop an intense distaste for the man (Mirko Lang) and the man episodes. This isn’t just because the man character is a huge doofus, but also because it turns out that the man and woman episodes are written and directed by a brother and sister respectively. The woman episodes are more punchy, contain less whining and more action.

In this interview with the brother and sister directors the problem becomes painfully obvious. During the entire interview the brother does most of the talking but doesn’t say anything of substance.

I will keep watching when the next season comes out but I might just fast forward through most of the man’s episodes.

These series may have a catalytic effect on the German television landscape. By their very existence they educate the tastes of an audience that might not have known or expected something like this to be possible. And actually creating something good in turn makes it so that other tv makers can’t hide behind the excuse that the whole landscape is mediocre. Who knows what more may be possible.