Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Episode 49 Tiny Wings, False Teeth, Electric Cars

Episode 49 Tiny Wings, False Teeth, Electric Cars


Tiny Wings iOS game for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Finding the False Teeth of a Slaughterman, Electric Cars = Veganism, Hydrogen Cars = Welfare Reforms by Vegans… kinda, and plenty of fun along the way!

Listen now by downloading directly from here or, better yet, subscribe in iTunes to get each episode automagically!


http://itunes.apple.com/nz/podcast/coexisting-with-nonhuman-animals/id334206335


Hello and welcome to the 49th episode of Coexisting With Nonhuman Animals.  Hopefully we can cover some vaguely interesting stories, bash others in the animal rights movement by misinterpreting clips from their podcast, and generally have fun.

First up, Elizabeth Collins of NZ Vegan podcast put out another episode recently, its always exciting to see the little "1" circle in iTunes podcast section.  Lets see what Elizabeth had to say.

<1 dont trust organisations>
Well at least the Invercargill Vegan Society is upfront about being corrupt to the very core.

<2 auckland only a million>

Ok, well, ONLY A MILLION!?!  Really Elizabeth?  When our whole country has a population of FOUR Million, and you think ONE MILLION isn't a large number? :-) 

Auckland, our largest city BY FAR has 1.3 Million odd people.  Give or take a few hundred thousand, they like driving their Audi SUV's to starbucks, a "small number" like a hundred thousand might have been away during census taking.

Even if a whole MILLION Aucklanders suddenly got laser beamed from space, they'd still be 300 odd thousand… thats six times the population of my city Invercargill… and the second and third largest New Zealand cities are actually around 300K….

So uh, a million people is kinda a lot Elizabeth!

<3 pong>
Yeah, I've kinda heard of that one, maybe I'm not a "youngie" anymore :-)  And it probably IS basic Elizabeth, HA, I'm sure a few people would have picked up on that, PONG, BASIC, 20 go to 10 ha.  Randy, you got it, right?

I'll let you all in on the number one game all the kids these days are hooked on, its called "Tiny Wings", and its blazed up the App Store charts.  I'm sure in a year or two those Open Source nutjobs will have ripped it off for that little Android thing they're always muttering about, beneath their beards.  Ever noticed how everyone involved with Linux has a beard?  And tends to be male?  Now, to be fair, I'm sure there are Women with nothing better to do that make buggy software that crashes on my iMac, "but its free Jordan!  And its open, and you can view the source code!"  Yeah, well how about making the damn thing work?  Now that sounds like a great idea.   AND, if they HAVE decided to shave their facial hair, then they're just trying to follow Steve Jobs yet again, no good copycats.

If you're one of those individuals who sport coke bottle lens glasses, half a metre of shaggy hair from your neck, and would like to rail about the need to "fork" my show into something better, you know, being "divisive", please email me at not-a-real-address-you-open-source-bozos@gmail.com. 


So where was I?  Oh yeah, Tiny Wings. 




Boy, wouldn't it be great if I could somehow share the wonderful musical score?  But I didn't have a 3.5 mm to 3.5 mm jack cable, so I had to hold my lovely iPhone 4 up to a cheap Logitech mic.  Any errors in reproduction are due to the non Apple hardware doing its usual substandard job. 



Did anyone else listening hear the click sound and recognize it as being the unlock signal on an iPhone 4, running iOS version 4.2.1, build 8C148?  Just me?  Ok.

Its a great game, a two dimensional side scroller, kind of like, uh, what was it called, lightning bolt, thunder clap, boom, soni…SONIC!  With gameplay similar to Sonic the Hedgehog games, you play the role of a pretty little bird, a Hen if my confirmation bias isn't acting up again, who dreams of flying.  Very Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.  Great book.  Well, she has, you guessed it, Tiny Wings, so she needs flying help from some gentle hills.  You have only one control, to tap and hold the screen or not.  Doing so makes you "heavy", by tucking your wings in, so you can slide down hills, and then let go as you near the peak, having gained the speed to bound over the top.  You build momentum as you go, until you can move at ridiculous speed, and even touch the clouds.  You bound from island to island, each with more difficult hills and cliffs to slide over.   Its a terrific game, for all ages, its a whopping 10 MB in size, and costs about 99 US pesos, 1.29 of that strong New Zealand Dollar.  An example of the thought thats gone into it, each day the colour scheme changes, so each island is always different than the last, and each day they are different stripe combinations, and colours.

With the ever thoughtful Apple taking a 30 percent cut of each App sold through the totally open and not censored App Store, a Walled Garden of Pure Ideology, patrolled by shuffling white ghouls being addressed by some mantra chanting dude on a big screen, that means, well, Apple have made a healthy sum of money with Tiny Wings.  There are over 200 Million iOS devices out there, about 200 million iTunes Store accounts, and Tiny Wings is currently at the top of the charts worldwide, I believe.  As with all beliefs, that doesn't make it true.  If just one million from those 200 million customers have bought it, then the basically one guy who made the game in a trivial period of time will have had 700,000 USD thrown at him.  Not bad for a month or week or weekends work, right?  And Apple, since they have to go to such great lengths to list an app in some online store, that costs big money you know, they would have totally earned 300,000 dollars.



It sure should make those open source guys wish they'd put a dollar pricetag on their code, right?

One of my favourite things about Tiny Wings is how gentle the game is, you're a hen who dreams of flying.  You fly all day, making happy sounds, and the game ends when night falls, when its bed time for this Ms Hen.  I like the night time music best of all


Watching that little Hen sleep on the title screen, or before you tap to begin, with the Zeds, not Zees, Zeds floating from her beak, sitting on her nest which serves to multiply your bonus…  She looks just like Ms Hen, the black adult hen friend I used to have.  She's been dead some time now, but I still miss her.  I sometimes look at the last videos I had of her alive, I have two from the day before she was killed, sleeping in a green plastic bucket filled with dirt, in the Southland sun.  She didn't want much in life, to sit on my knee and eat bread, which is totally ok for Chicken Friends, peck at Apples, drink clean water, be with her family, and to sleep in the sun every now and then.  Each part of New Zealand has a different ball of gas providing light you know.




Ok, last clip bashing the NZ Vegan Podcast, for this episode anyway,

<4 natural disasters…>



"natural disaster" huh?  Easy to blame MEN and their MAN MADE disasters eh?  But the big earthquake was caused by MOTHER Nature,  with her tectonic breast plates!

I'm always the Mr Burns to Elizabeths Lisa:





I've got an interesting story to share, boy, I sure wish there was some kind of show where people could leave a voicemail and share their stories from the past week, sounds like a great idea, right?

Next episode of Coexisting With Nonhuman Animals will be a pilot episode of my new show idea, where you can do just that.  I hope to slap an intro, outro and smalltalk around stories people send it.  I'd aim to have about five people per episode of this show, in clips ranging from about a minute in length to a hard limit of five minutes, talking about any particular experience they'd like to share.  It could be a great Vegan T shirt they bought, a protest they took part in, the last episode of their own podcast they'd like to share, an upcoming guest on their chat group or a letter they've written to a local newspaper.  You know, before they go out of business. 

That show wont be about me, it will be for anyone who'd like to share with the group, Vegans from around the world having a chance to share their adventures.

If it were about me, heres an example story that might be fun to have shared.

A while ago I was walking home, and before I got to stroll past the Cows breast milk processing facility, where you can plainly see the softcore porn calendars the workers have hanging on inside walls, and then the butcher shop, advertising body parts for 3 dollars a kilogram, I found the bottom plate from a set of false teeth.  It was sitting on an electrical box, for all to see.  What an odd thing, I thought!  So, like anyone would do, I took a few photos of them on my phone, and carried on my merry way.  I uploaded the photos to my Flickr account, and one or two people "liked" my status update on Facebook. 

Each day as I would walk home, I'd notice they were still behind the concrete box, where they'd fallen down.  I had hoped the owner would remember where they lost their teeth, on the corners of Ettrick and Nith Streets in Invercargill New Zealand.  Apparently getting your two front teeth for that religious holiday on the 25th of December is considered a pretty good gift:




Not on this show mister, we're running a secular organization here buddy boy, we're trying to take the fun out of everything, and delete public holidays, ha!

So imagine what it would be like to lose a whole bottom row!

What was I to do?  Add it to my Facebook status, like when I get told a few hundred words about each dog and cat on the otherside of the world who's going to die tomorrow unless I drive to the shelter in New York state in my SUV and take them home to my Manhattan apartment? 

With no real hopes of anything, I actually sent the link to my Flickr set to a journalist I'd been in touch with, yes, with the Mainstream Media, The Invercargill Eye, a free weekly newspaper…you know, those things using paper?

It was to be a wacky story, woah, look what this guy found!

And, they were run as the front cover!  I was mentioned as "a reader took this photo in South Invercargill".  Within a day of running, after they'd been left waiting to be taken home for over a week, the owner contacted the paper.  And then he came around and picked them up from my house.  But not before the reporter had told me what his job was.

The man who lost these false teeth was a slaughterman, someone who killed other animals for a living.  Being a part of a "chain" where each worker earns less than a dollar for each life they help end, where they are dressed in white, and are covered in warm blood before the bodies are cold frozen for export.

Sarah knew I was Vegan, that I ran the prestigious Invercargill Vegan Society, but I was not as shocked as the reporter might have thought.  I said to her that its to be expected living in a society where 99% were not Vegan, and that I didn't HATE people for what they did to other animals, that violence was the problem, and that it wasn't the solution.  Not very original, I know, but I was walking home, in my work overalls with "I'm Vegan and I love you" badges, carrying my Invercargill Vegan Society bag past the cows breast milk processing facility, about to go past the shop with muscle tissue on display through the glass, and a smell of…dank, blood, guts, body parts being "smoked"… and worst of all, actually using my phone as a phone!  Who does that?  Walking down the street in a phone call, I looked like a jerk, like I was all important with my little iPhone and canvas shoes.

I had in my possession the bottom half of a pair of artificial teeth, that were no doubt used to rip and chew and bite and swallow the body parts of other animals.  Its pretty gross, right?  I took a photo of the teeth on the newspaper cover, and had my Chicken Friends eat oats from on the page, to get them in the picture too.  Those teeth no doubt helped someone eat other Chickens bodies. 

Talk about weapons of mass destruction.  What could I do?  I wasn't going to break the guys teeth, "ha, now you're stuck to a life of tofu soup, well, until you can buy another pair of dentures, or figure out how to put body parts in a blender…"

That would be "declawing the cat"

<"declawing the cat" clip>

I met the man, and he was genuinely happy to get his bottom teeth back.  I had left them in my letterbox, in a plastic bag along with some pamphlets and business cards about Veganism.  He came in and said hello, shook my hand and gave me forty dollars.  I didn't want to take his money, but I was also very nervous about meeting the guy.  He'd told me about how he had been out drinking, how he lost his car here, lost his car keys there, and along the way was physically sick, and lost his teeth.  Wonderful, just wonderful, I'm glad I didn't touch the teeth with my hands, instead using the plastic bag to pick them up as you would, so to speak, "clean up after a Dog".

I wanted for him to be happy, to have his teeth back, and to forget about the whole thing!  So I didn't fight with him over the money.

What are the chances this man who kills other animals for a living will seriously read the information about Veganism?  Not very likely?  Perhaps he'll take them into his work, and the crew will all laugh about those Vegans and their emotions as they kill and cut up other animals.  What did I have to lose?  That someone might throw away the bits of paper I spent a whole few seconds of my life putting in a plastic bag, joining the bottom part of his false teeth?

Its always good to have an opportunity to talk about Veganism.  The newspaper is apparently running a follow up story in the next issue, perhaps I can be mentioned, more importantly, the fact that I'm Vegan could be mentioned, and that I helped someone who kills animals have his teeth back.  Of course I don't agree with what he's going to use them for, but what should I have done?  Snapped the teeth in half, took to them with an angle grinder, set them on fire?  Should I have beaten him up, and spray painted "meat is murder, you animal exploiting scum" on his shirt? Yeah, it might be easy to talk tough online, or when you're out dressed in black in a farm after hours with a gang of your mates.  I was face to face with an emotional guy who goes on benders, loses his car, his keys, his lunch and his teeth, or at least the bottom half.

Violence wouldn't solve anything, if I am mentioned, I hope it can be another positive example of Veganism, of Vegans helping others.

And what you just heard would be an example of what I'd like to include on my next show, if I go ahead with it.  A quirky story about promoting Veganism, of a run in with a slaughterhouse worker, and his false teeth.  Or else my story about Tiny Wings, a little review that finds a nonexistent Vegan message in a popular video game.  Just imagine how revolutionary it will be when you can hear five such stories per episode, that'll get you skipping the Drupal show, right?

 I'll try a pilot episode as the 50th episode of THIS podcast.  If you're interested in appearing, please email me, uh, any linux users, hell, ok, any Non Apple cultists, please fastforward past my actual email, people-who-dont-use-apple-products-are-too-silly-to-realise-this-is-another-false-address@yahoo.com , thanks.  Either that or jaywontdart@gmail.com, j a y, w o n t, d a r t, just like how I use jaywontdart everywhere else, on Facebook, Twitter, on my birth certificate, you know, everywhere.  But that would be thinking logically.

I hope to have the pilot out in a week or so, featuring five different Vegans from around the world, talking for over a minute, under five about something they'd like to share.  I think it would be great, it would show that Vegans are everywhere, and that we all have something to talk about, to show, and to learn from each other.


We need more positive Vegan rolemodels, to get it out there that Vegans do NOT promote larger cages, or having drugs injected into the brains of quote "farm animals" so they are killed with a smile on their beaks.  We need some kind of Vegan superhero, who goes about helping children stuck down wells, and helping older Chickens cross the road.

The shocking documentary "Living with Michael Jackson" showed more than the side of Michael Jackson that laughed at British accents:



Its a mortal sin to cut off Billie Jean, but I'd better, people complain if I have too many good songs in an episode. 

Not only did we learn that the most famous man in the world, who claimed to have earned billions of dollars, liked driving mobility scooters about hotels in the dead of night for fun, and liked mocking our English friends, no, he also liked collecting mannequins.

We need a Vegan "Jolly Green Giant".



What 5 year old child wouldn't want a terrifyingly large man spray painted green ordering their parents to buy his branded frozen vegetables? 


It wouldn't make sense to have "The Free Range Friendly Rooster" advertising Chickens flesh, or the "Small Scale Slaughtered Seal" advertising marine animals bodies.  What child wants that?  "Mummy, Daddy, I can rest soundly tonight, knowing the animals we kill had XX square centimetres of living space, and that they were killed in the Temple Grandin approve method in the same shed they'd lived their lives in!"  "oh, bless my angel, such a conscientious omnivore!"

A few days ago I watched the excellent documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car".  I'll save you some time, Big Oil, the car companies and incompetent US presidents.  The editing suggested that President Carter was on the right track, with his many "hey guys, lets reduce our consumption of everything, and maybe aim to work for alternatives, rather than being reliant on grabbing black, smelly, explosive and FINITE resources from an unstable region of the planet, eh?"  No wonder that idiot is commonly said to be worst president ever!  Thank heavens for Lord Reagan throwing the solar panels off the Whitehouse roof, we're conservative, but we don't need to conserve!  We're a super power for crying out loud!  Lets get rid of regulations, who cares about giant vehicles and smog throughout our major cities?  Throw out stressed out air traffic controllers, and boot out the mentally ill while you're at it!  Best president ever.

There were probably just as many incompetent Democrats responsible for the death of the Electric car, the EV1, although the movie is kinda set up to have you believe its to do with obese rich Republicans on the take from huge multinational oil corporations.

In a supposed "effort to do something practical in the short term", an alternative fuel was suggested, why, hydrogen. 


Can you think about a word thats two letters longer than "hydrogen"?  Hindenburg.  The blimp that went BOOM, from, you guessed it, the hydrogen gas doing that little thing it likes to do, you know the one, EXPLODE?!?!  Just like how The Gimp photo editing software always has a Memory-gen leak, or something, explodes, and then CRASHES on my lovely Job's blessed hardware.  Yeah.


Oh the stupidity of Hydrogen cars!  Who could be for such an obviously backwards  idea?



Yuh, thats right, once you go hy-dro-gen, to petrol, you will not be going baaaaaack>

I think I was channeling Yoda near the end.

The correct alternative was always there, Electric cars, running on cheap, efficient, able to be generated from renewable resources (like in that crappy little country, New Zealand, where those idiots get 70 percent of their total power through hydro schemes and other basically unlimited sources).  Na, we cant have that, it sounds wacky, far off, gotta be practical, gotta promote something with no real chance in solving fundamental issues. 

Yes, sorry to use old cliches, but Hydrogen cars really are "improved welfare" animal corpses and bodily secretions compared to the Vegan Electric cars.  I know you hear that one all the time, sorry.

And for some reason, the sensible answer is seen as difficult



Oh gawd, live like a European, who would want that?



Naming all those individual countries, thats divisive, somebody should think of a way to swallow them all up into one giant unified behemoth, possibly european. 

Think of what it would be like growing up with electric cars, I'm 23, I was born in 1987, the earliest cars I remember commonly seeing were from the early nineties.  New Zealanders most commonly drive secondhand Japanese cars, "Jap imports", as in Japan you get a new car every five months, sort of like a hermit crab, and then the parasitic New Zealanders get sent the discarded waste.  We both drive on the correct, LEFT side of the road, which isn't right, but our Hands sure are, Right Hand drive, the right way to drive.

The EV1 came out in the latter 90's, if it had been on the market, and done well, which it very well could have, then other electric vehicles would be brought to market too.  My friends who are a few years younger might have remembered always seeing electric cars near silently accelerating all about the place.  Its not some wacko dream, it really was happening. 

One of the people responsible for selling the EV1 program spoke at a mock funeral for the electric cars



Thats what it would be like if we promoted Veganism too, once there are more Vegans, more Vegan restaurants, its all uphill from there.  Um, its good to be "going uphill", right?  You know, like when a line diagram is increasing over time, the hill is going up, rather than going down, going downhill?  Great.

We've invented Veganism, it took many years, millions of man hours, millions of woman-hours, and countless lives, but we have Veganism.  Its not Animal Ri-fi anymore.  Instead of inventing some wholly unreasonable new fuel, or a new idea that wont work, "hey, its wrong to kill animals, but lets tell people its ok, its good, they are good to buy animals killed THIS way!"



Veganism is real, it works, requires no tailpipe, and its renewable.  Its not unreasonable to promote Veganism, its here, all around us, if only the big evil Animal Welfare groups wouldn't try and squash any  uprising, any "up hill" movements for Veganism.

You know one of my favourite things about movies?  Of course you do.  The ending.  Especially if its a bad movie, its great for it to be over.  But if its a GOOD movie, with a good ending, then that can be memorable.  I've seen that old movie where the dudes like "rosebud", real low production quality, ha, "is it in 3D?" you ask?  Nah, not even colour.

Sometimes a song will get stuck in my head, annoying, but it could be worse, I could be Elizabeth and being bashed over the head with ping pong balls all the time. 

I love that movie, the one I'm not allowed to talk about.  Maybe I can talk about it if I don't name it, thats the first rule, I think.    The one where we learn why we should be projectionists, to have fun making our own extended cuts of Childrens movies



Great stuff.  I love the song at the ending of fightc, I mean, the movie that is most certainly not called fightclub.  At the top of a skyscraper, watching all the other ones blow up through home made explosives, made with the fat of humans too, showing , hey, we have animal fat too!   It makes me want to pick up my air guitar and play along.



Who Killed The Electric Car had a great end song too.  I'll play it, but not until I've played an open mic performance about Veganism, they remind me of each other, of introspection, of a social cause.  Of Electric Cars and Veganism. 





I liked them both.

Whether in a pre recorded episode of your show, or an open mic night, we can promote Veganism creatively, and non violently.  Lets not sell silly Hydrogen powered cars, pretending that its somehow the best option, knowing its going nowhere, but that you'll make money and feel good along the way.  To go along with industry, and make them more efficient, to give them a new way to sell a fuel and make money.  Where were these hydrogen cars to refuel?  At Shell service stations, among others.  It was the old industry with a new face, pretending it was up on the future.  No, it wasn't. 

With electric stations, new companies come into play.  Not "welfare approved flesh from the New Zealand Pork Board".  New entities, and organizations, the Auckland Abolitionist Vegans Association, the Invercargill Vegan Society, The Emmy James house of Vegan clothing design.

Who needs those silly history books, written by the conquerors, we have Wikipedia.  Sure, "The Books" tell you those idiot WRONG Brothers flew the first plane, bah, of course they ignore brave Richard Pearse, the New Zealander who flew before them, in a plane of his own design, made by himself at the bottom of the world.   He didn't have no fancy pants organization behind him, no team of bicycle repair persons.    New Zealanders are also doing a great job with Electric Cars, the Wrightspeed X1.  Engineer Ian Wright was an early employee of Tesla, the company named after the wonderful Serbian Tesla, who's far more deserving of accolades than the comparatively dim Edison.   Telsa invented just about everything to do with light, sound, radio waves, remote control, wifi, probably…

And carrying on my sickening patriotism, New Zealands also doing a great job with podcasts too, promoting the good word of Veganism.  We're absolutely plagued with one man Vegan Societies, and two person Abolitionist Associations. 


And Veganism is all about "ripening people up to the idea", of claims making, isn't that right PROFESSOR Roger Yates of the University College of Dublin?



Yes, thats right PROFESSOR Roger Yates of the University College of Dublin, theres no "poverty of ambition" in the animal rights movement here!

Stay the podcasting equivalent of tuned, um, subscribed in iTunes I guess, next episode I'll run a pilot for my new show idea, This Week in Vegan.  Lets see if I get sued by Leo Laporte.  "Screw you Jordan Wyatt!".  I'll need plenty of friends to pull this show off, so please, if you are interested in appearing in a short voicemail style clip, please get in touch.  Once more, any non OSX UNIX users, well, I don't have to hope they ignore the next address, whatever program they use to convert AAC to FLAC or OGG Vorbis will have crapped out by now, or else they used VLC, and its crashed.

I'd love to have anyone on.  If interested, please contact me at
jaywontdart@gmail.com, j a y, w o n t, d a r t @gmail.com




Thank you for listening to Coexisting With Nonhuman Animals.

You can find the script for this episode, as well as downloads for every episode of Coexisting With Nonhuman Animals at coexisting with nonhuman animals . blogspot.com .  To show off how fancy I am, I've been using Bit Ly links for each episode, a shortcut to each episodes script and sources.  Just go to www.bit.ly/coexist49, for episode 49.  Episode 48 was bit.ly/coexist48, 47 was bit.ly/coexist47, and so on.

If you want to contact me, even just to say you listened, send an email to jaywontdart@gmail.com, or on Twitter, twitter.com/ j a y w o n t d a r t,  I'd appreciate it.

Thank you for listening.









Sources
=======

NZ Vegan Podcast, Elizabeth Collins



Veganacious, Barbara DeGrande


On Human Nonhuman Relations, Roger Yates


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrightspeed_X1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_New_Zealand

2 comments:

  1. Did they say in the projection clip that the cues were called "cigarette burns"? That's news to me and I've been around cinemas since the 1960s, including running one in the 1970s.

    Might sound boring but, in Britain at least, we called them "change-over cues" - the first was the motor cue and the second the actual change-over. Complicated stuff I'll tell ya!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Roger, thank you for your clip :-)

    I believe I've heard them called "cigarette burns" before, "cue mark" seems to be the universal term

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark

    the article mentions "cigarette burns" as being popularised by Fight Club, however I'm quite sure I've heard them elsewhere, and before I saw the movie.

    They certainly look like burns caused by a cigarette to me!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for posting a comment :)

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.