fridgepunk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fridgepunk) wrote2009-09-07 03:35 am
fridgepunk) wrote2009-09-07 03:35 am
Interesting doodads
Stumbled across this three part monolouge by Binyavanga Wainaina (he of "how not to write about Africa" fame) who talks about a wide range of africa related subjects, from the role of foreign NGOs in the present condition of most african countries, to the context in which the violence that marred Kenya's last elections... which I'm going to have to rewatch and think about a lot because a lot of the talk about the problems Kenya's democratic process is currently facing have quite obvious western parrallels - and it's interesting to hear someone talk about a low voter turn out and blaming the politicians, for running crappy elections and crappy, money grubbing, corrupt governments that disuade voters from bothering to vote.
Which is very interesting for those who remember the unintentionally ironic and ignorant rants by whatshisface on The Now Show after the last set of local elections here in england, where that silly silly white man berated english people for not getting out the vote and at the same time held up iranians as bastions of what a responsible citizenry should be like (not aware of course that one of the major signs of election fraud earlier in the years was the inexplicably high voter turn out in a country where turn out was usually really really low). Though obviously the kenyan politicians hiring armed mercenaries to go kill ethnic groups who vote for the Other Guy was mostly unfamiliar. Only mostly unfortunately.
Here's part one of three of Binyavanga Wainaina's monolouge at Youtube:
The How Not To Write About Africa thing is also amusing because one of the things that made going into No. 1 Ladies Detective something I did with trepidation was the criticism from The Gradiuan about how it didn't show "the real africa" - which, yes, meant that it didn't primarily focus on AIDS sufferers and starving babies.
In an attempt to get some gen writing done before buggering off to scotland, I was procrastinating wildly and found this interesting online writing program called DarkCopy, and got a couple thousand words down with it in fullscreen mode, which is surprisingly effective at getting you to just sit down and type rather than opening up Pages and then going into firefox to do something other than writing.
It's not a program you download, but an broswer-based stripped own green-on-black word processor - a quick copy and paste when you've written as much as you want to write into a proper WP and poof! writing occurs.
admittedly BigHugeLabs' Writer looks like it has a greater amount of functionality, but rather than making fullscreen mode into a button that I click they decided that they'd go for the Mac-hating F11 hotkey, which for those who don't have macs is the button that makes all the currently running programs slide off to the sides and up and down and out of view so you can see the desktop (no I don't know why this is a useful thing for Macs to do either), and so Darkcopy is better for me as that fullscreen mode is the killer app as far as I'm concerned.
Which is very interesting for those who remember the unintentionally ironic and ignorant rants by whatshisface on The Now Show after the last set of local elections here in england, where that silly silly white man berated english people for not getting out the vote and at the same time held up iranians as bastions of what a responsible citizenry should be like (not aware of course that one of the major signs of election fraud earlier in the years was the inexplicably high voter turn out in a country where turn out was usually really really low). Though obviously the kenyan politicians hiring armed mercenaries to go kill ethnic groups who vote for the Other Guy was mostly unfamiliar. Only mostly unfortunately.
Here's part one of three of Binyavanga Wainaina's monolouge at Youtube:
The How Not To Write About Africa thing is also amusing because one of the things that made going into No. 1 Ladies Detective something I did with trepidation was the criticism from The Gradiuan about how it didn't show "the real africa" - which, yes, meant that it didn't primarily focus on AIDS sufferers and starving babies.
In an attempt to get some gen writing done before buggering off to scotland, I was procrastinating wildly and found this interesting online writing program called DarkCopy, and got a couple thousand words down with it in fullscreen mode, which is surprisingly effective at getting you to just sit down and type rather than opening up Pages and then going into firefox to do something other than writing.
It's not a program you download, but an broswer-based stripped own green-on-black word processor - a quick copy and paste when you've written as much as you want to write into a proper WP and poof! writing occurs.
admittedly BigHugeLabs' Writer looks like it has a greater amount of functionality, but rather than making fullscreen mode into a button that I click they decided that they'd go for the Mac-hating F11 hotkey, which for those who don't have macs is the button that makes all the currently running programs slide off to the sides and up and down and out of view so you can see the desktop (no I don't know why this is a useful thing for Macs to do either), and so Darkcopy is better for me as that fullscreen mode is the killer app as far as I'm concerned.