You should believe in your frakking song

So, since I don’t watch Glee and I rarely listen to the radio, I found out only the other day that Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck you!” has a pg-13 version under the more subdued title of “Forget you”; they call it a ‘radio edit’ but, where a radio edit is usually edited for length, this one is just edited for language.
I’m not one who usually thinks it’s particularly interesting or challenging to put a ‘fuck’ right there in the chorus, but I still do wonder what’s the point of making a song with a swearword in it if then you agree to have it removed in order to get more air- and screen-play.
“But,” I hear you saying, “being on TV and the radio is the only way a song can get popular. And if to get on the radio one has to sanitize the song, well, that’s the price to pay.”
Yes, my dears. That’s the price to pay to get popular and possibly rich with the song you didn’t believe in in the first place. Because either the song needed that ‘fuck you’, and so you wouldn’t have allowed anyone to remove it, or it didn’t need it in the first place and was there just for the chock value.

I’m reminded of similar acts of puritanism during the ’80s in Italy, though for different reasons. A tumor in De Gregori’s “Alice” became a “something” in the radio version; Guccini’s “Dio è morto” (God is dead) couldn’t be aired without an extra cringe-worthy strophe with a resurrection; and, in a spectacular case of Not Getting It, when Milva sung Fossati’s “Una notte in Italia”, the bit about “her breasts aimed straight to my heart” became a contemplative “his eyes”. Dull.

Now, let me tell you about a song that came out just a few days ago. A song whose first verses are, aptly enough:

They don’t play the song on the radio,
they don’t show the tits on the video

I’m talking about Amanda Palmer’s “Map of Tasmania”, which is a song about many things:

It’s a song about Australian slang.
It’s a song about pubic hair.
It’s a song about not being afraid of showing what others would find distasteful.
It’s a song about the media, and things going viral, and about not doing things a certain way because that’s how things are done, but because they’re your way, and they work for you, and they make you feel right.

“Map of Tasmania” has no advertising beyond that of the fans, is getting no airtime beyond that of some small radios, doesn’t have a recording label behind to push it to the top of the charts. But it’s fast becoming popular on Twitter, because of dedicated fans and the power of the interwebs, but most of all because it’s a fucking good song with phat beats that is not afraid to use language and talk about lady bits and be honest about what it’s showing off.

We are the media. We don’t need your silly restrictions.

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post scriptum: since I mentioned it in the title but then failed to talk about it in the actual post, there are also several ways to swear-without-swearing that have been used since forever in both radio and television – frak, frell, yotz, and so on. Even euphemisms like ‘Map of Tasmania’. If one wants to swear, he’ll find a way.

New directions

It’s been a while since I last wrote here and that’s because D’ni hasn’t really been a big part of my life lately. I still love the Cavern and all the Ages, but my visits were becoming more and more short, and lonely, and less social, and I decided I needed some fresh air – literally and metaphorically.

Anyway, rather than letting this blog just rot away, I think I’ll just refurbish it a bit and use it a more general outlet for all those thoughts that wouldn’t fit in the 140 characters of Twitter. I still won’t post much, so I shouldn’t be a burden on your RSS feeds, but if you were here just for the In Cavern material I can tell you there won’t be much of that any more.

Greenflower updates

Interesting new discoveries from the Age, and a big headache for me. I’ll repost from the DRC thread again:

Sat Apr 03, 2010 9:30 pm

I’m in the Age, Prof, just set up camp for the “night” and hour ago and I’m writing down a report. I sprayed trees along the road with red paint to mark a sort of path (don’t worry, it won’t hurt the trees) so you can catch up with me if you want; I took it very easy along the road so it shouldn’t be more than a few hours walk.

By the way, there is some sort of creeper I didn’t notice the other day and – wow, it’s just amazing. It grows on the trees, coiling around the trunk and getting thicker on the higher branches, and it GLOWS. The color is not uniform even in the same plant, there are greens and blues and yellows, and it also sheds some kind of wooly seed that glows bright white for a while before going out.
This basically means that the whole forest turns into a softly lit canopy, which makes it very easy to walk at night even without a flashlight, as long as you stay in the forest.

Mon Apr 05, 2010 4:12 pm

the creepers (…) grow on the underside of the branches, and they get progressively thinner when going towards a clearning or opening (which I guess explains why I didn’t see them in my first excursion). My guess is they prefer to stay out of the sun.

Anyway, I walked another few miles yesterday and collected some plant samples along the way, if anyone from the DZS wants to take a look at them. Sometime yesterday ‘evening’* I found a brook running through the forest and I started following it upstream. The water is good (I tested) and very cold.
There was a lot more animal activity near the water – I could hear rustling among the bushes and some distant calls (something like a very small elephant, and some very deep short howls). I didn’t see any animals, but I kept a fire going at night for safety.

The night was fresh but not particularly cold, and monday was warm enough to walk around in a light long-sleeved shirt (never go short-sleeved in alien environments, folks!).
As they ‘day’ went on I could see the lights from the plant getting dimmer, though I could see no sign of sunrise on the horizon – not that I actually see the horizon from here.
There is very little plant-light right now, but I saw some kind of enormous stone up ahead -the first big non-plant thing I saw since I got here- and I want to try to reach it before I get back to the surface. I’ll keep you posted.

* I measured things by my local time, which is KI time + 7 hours

Wed Apr 07, 2010 8:48 am

Ow, my head! well, that was an unexpected turn of events.
First of all, I’m fine and at home. Thanks for the search parties, but there’s no need to worry for me!
Second, do not touch the moss on the rock with your bare hands. I’m now going to explain why.

OK, recap. I finally reached the stone with a bit of plantlight to spare. It is indeed a big one, about 20 metres in diameter, sunk deeply in the ground, and really high. It is also there that I found the first man-made objects in the Age.
There is a staircase carved around the rock, spiraling clockwise up above the treetops. It is not a difficult climb but the steps are sometimes smooth and a bit slippery, and I had to grab the wall for safety sometimes. The rock face itself seems to be porous, and habitat to some small weeds, flowers and the infamous moss. I think what got me in the end were my fingerless gloves – the tip of my fingers must have brushed it more than once. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About what I guess was halfway of the climb I found a small recess in the rock and there, embedded in the stone and hidden behind some weeds, one of the Nexus hand devices! You know, those things you put your hand into, left to the Nexus books on the stands. I tried my luck and it did indeed react to my KI, glowing briefly yellow (that’s a new one) and saying it had added a link to my Nexus.
My curiosity was thoroughly tickled and I decided to resume the climb, but after a very short time I started to feel dizzy and my vision blurred. I linked back to Relto, and everything went black.

I must’ve slept for almost a day and I felt really terrible when I woke up. It was then that I noticed that the tips of my fingers were stained green-blue and smelled faintly of anesthetic ; I quickly washed them under the waterfall in Relto and the dizzy spell seemed to wear off almost immediately. I still felt very tired and hungry so I got back to the surface to grab something to eat and sleep off the last remnants of the drug.
By then unfortunately it was also time for me to get back to work, where I’m writing this now (just don’t tell my boss!).

My guess is that moss was placed or Written there deliberately as a security measure, to get rid of anyone who arrived there without precautions. I would not advise using that new Nexus link, if indeed there is one, without a Maintainer suit or other precautions.

‘Green flower’ exploration #1

I’ve been exploring a new Age, apparently unauthorized, that Horatio found while exploring beyond the barriers. We don’t know the Age name – I’m tentatively calling it ‘Green flower’ just for recording purposes, as the book is green with a flower design embossed on the cover.

This is my first report from the Age, reposted from the thread on the DRC site.

I managed to pay a quick visit to the place, but I’ll try to get back in the next days with proper equipment to stay overnight. My KI camera didn’t work either, which makes me believe it is either due to something in the environment or an intentional hack of some kind.

I walked for about half an hour in the forest, keeping the cliff on my left, though I lost track of it pretty quickly among the trees. I didn’t find any markers of a proper path but, as you said, there is little undergrowth so one can easily walk in every direction.
The ground is littered with dried needle leaves. The trees themselves are tall, about 10 to 50 meters high, with some occasional lower shrubs. The plants have a mix of needle and scale leaves; some have small cones, or ‘berries’ coloured red or deep blue. Now I’m no botanist but it seems to me this is some kind of conifer forest, possibly by some distant relatives of the juniper and the pine.

I heard some birds in the distance (or at least, they seemed to be birds calling) but didn’t see any wildlife.

Lighthouses and leprechauns

London is a beautiful city; just stay away from the pubs after the St. Pat’s parade, unless you want beer spilled all over your coat. Ack.
I’ll put up pics on Flickr as soon as I have them developed.

As for the book, I don’t think there was any direct connection to Habnn, but it wasn’t a total waste of time either. The tome was an old leather-bound collection of odd stories from West Sussex in the 15th century. In one of these, from a town called Haven, an apparent devilish haunting (the usual lot: weird sounds in the fields, dead people, memory losses, even one giant fiery figure floating over the local pub) was exorcised by three persons that the author describes only as coming from “the Lighthouse from the Stone Island”. Which would be nothing unusual, if not that the hamlet is nowhere near the coast and there is no record of any actual lighthouse, or islet, or mansion going by that name in the region around that time. I will need to investigate this more.

Short leave

I’ll be away for a week or so for a surface trip to London; apparently a library there holds a book which might be related to the Habnn journals. I don’t hold much hope, but I have to try.

Still alive

Far from triumph and huge successes, though. Surface life has kept me extremely busy, and I barely managed to visit Payiferen in time to get my last pod portal.

I came back yesterday with a feeling of “did I leave the gas on?” and found that, in fact, I had forgotten to turn the main power off. I expected the battery to be depleted but the pod windows were clear and there was still enough power to turn the lights on, as well as sounds. Either the windows do not consume as much power as I remembered or this pod is getting some extra juice from its solar panels.

It was night outside, and the sky was glittering with minuscule lights as usual. Some say it’s the starlight passing through the sand storms, other that it’s the sand itself sparkling with silver in the air. I pondered about that for a moment, then just sighed and basked in the view for a while before heading reluctantly back home.