Boing Boing is featuring a great audience-funded piece of feature journalism here from Josh Ellis:

"Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age."

He asked folks to pay for his trip to Alamagordo on one of the two days a year that they open the site to the public.

As a former visitor to another nuclear weapons test site (though univited!) I can relate to the totally weird vibe these places attract. In 1983 four of us drove and hiked across 50 miles of desert to get to Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site -- the first incursion by activists into the nuclear test zone. It was a cratered moonscape of apocalyptic weirdness in itself. But to get there, we had to pass by Area 51 -- beloved of UFOlogists the world over. And damned if we didn't in fact see something strange there...

Continue reading "Trinity, Nuclear Craters, UFOS, and Elvis..." »

Posted by Brian at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My 7-year-young son is up with the birds, and his Dad, this morning. He's at the PC next to me, googling Pokemon and endlessly asking when I'll be done so I can tell him a Pokemon story. (Which is actually a call-and-response kind of narrative in which I lay down a basic storyline and he fills in the Pokemon characters and what they do, as I'm clueless about the intricacies of Chowazar training issues.)

Which brings me to games and activism.

Any aging digerati out there remember the first Whole Earth Software Catalogue (1984)? I think I've still got mine kicking around in the basement somewhere. It was the dead-tree Tucows of its day, listing cool stuff you could buy on 5 and a quarter inch floppy disks to run on your (in my case) 286 Compaq Sewing Machine portable with 10 megabyte hard disk monster rig.

Chapter One was games.

Stewart Brand made a compelling case for why, at a time when the PC was infesting accounting departments all over the planet and becoming something that every office had to have, he chose to lead with fun, saying that games are the way we first learn as children, and playtime learning remains one of the best ways to master a complicated new task like DOS-based Personal Computing. And indeed, the early adopters I knew in the days of the Kaypro II, where I cut my teeth, all had a child-like streak of curiousity and gee-whizzikers-ness.

I'm reminded of that every time I look at the stats over at the Greenpeace website and see that among the many fine 50-page studies and painstakingly researched information, it's still the Games section which rules the mousepaths. Which has been driving some thought about how we can bundle campaign messaging into fun-filled delivery packages. Top on my list: How to inform kids today that all that stuff about how the nuclear weapons threat is not simply a matter of rogue states or a bygone of the Reagan era, and that thing called Chernobyl and what it was all about.

So I'm happy to provide you with a sneak peak of our latest Painless Activism Education Device: Duke Anti-Nuke.

We bundled a hundred Fun and Fearsome Facts about nuclear weapons and nuclear power into a platform game featuring our hero, Duke, as he strives to convert nuclear power plants into windmills and solar farms and disarm those pesky WMDs before the evil terrorists get to them. The facts about all things nuclear have been shredded by a smarmy Nuclear Industry publicist, and it's Duke's job to gather them up.

Rich Salter and Denise Wilton put this together. I'm really lame at platform games, so in order to test some of the higher levels and see the win screens, I needed somebody who could actually get past that nasty place in screen three where the radioactive waste starts leaking and you have to dodge guards, falls, AND radioactive drops.

So I sat my son down, (he could mouse around by the time he was 3) and we went head to head on our two pcs in the basement in a weekend-long Duke challenge. I haven't had so much damn fun in ages.

But while at 7 years old Doon could appreciate the gameplay, he certainly missed the message. The son of a peace activist had one improvement suggestion: Duke should have a gun, so he can shoot the guards.

We didn't implement that particular change request.

What's *your* favourite game with a message?

Posted by Brian at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Top topic today in the Attack of the killer Tahoe Ads story (which is now officially mainstream: New York Times, NPR, Nightline, and, of course, all over the blogosphere.)

Network-Centric Advocacy has a nice post about how advertisers are trying to spin what a really good idea it was for Chevy to bare themselves to criticism.

They're applauding the openness of the company, with such typical true falsehoods as "Since when was allowing people to express themselves about your company’s products and activities a bad thing?"

Of course opening yourself up to criticism is a good thing. If you're prepared to RESPOND AND CHANGE as a result of that feedback. Otherwise it's a simple sham. And Chevy didn't set out to open themselves to criticism -- they set out to sell cars. In a hamfisted, "we'll let you control the message but we'll control the message" sort of way that utterly backfired.

What's a bit scarier about some of the commentary is the suggestion that by "toughing it out" and "taking a barb or two" and rolling over the opposition with all four wheels engaged, Chevy is actually presenting itself as a model for the kind of person who will buy a Tahoe.

So this runs: Chevy doesn't give a damn. About kids dying in Iraq. About Greenland melting. About polar bears starving. About kids being born today seeing a world in which Bangladesh, Manhattan, and Amsterdam slip into the sea. About the extinction of a quarter of the world's species. I don't give a damn about that either. Therefore, I'll buy Chevy.

I don't buy it. It's going to get harder and harder to challenge public awareness of the soup we're in as the soup keeps getting hotter. Global Warming will start to shape people's purchasing patterns as surely as the concern over the Ozone hole in the 70s and 80s shaped the public aversion to CFC aerosols.

Chevy have probably made the Tahoe the poster child for global warming. In a highly scientific study conducted this morning at 5am over cappucino #1, I charted the presence of the Chevy Tahoe in that global consciousness we call the blogosphere. Now Chevy is probably only looking at the graph on top and going Yee Haa, what a success -- we've got brand placement all over the place.

But previous to the Attack of the Killer Tahoe Ads, our old pal wasn't all that closely associated with the terms "global warming" or "gas guzzling." Look at that spike following the March 29th launch of the ChevyApprentice campaign. Whoops. (And we'll proudly note that Eco-Geek posted the ad attack on March 30th, following a tip from Internet Radar Unit Gillo.)

Thanks to HeavyontheChevy for posting this cool rating system for ads.

It's all ending April 10th!!! If you haven't gotten your friends and loved ones to create a Killer Tahoe Ad, what are you waiting for?

Posted by Brian at 06:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Dang. I've used up the morning blog time I have (between 6-6:30- when I rise to 7:50 when I need to get my son Packed off to school) posting over at WorldChanging.

I'll cross post what I said over there in response to an open question about what NGOs are doing worthy work on Climate change.

(Chevy Apprentice still going strong -- see the links in the comments to my previous post for some cool stuff!)

Continue reading "Worldchanging" »

Posted by Brian at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Martha and Doon in MY idea of a sports utility vehicle

Woo hoo... the Chevy Apprentice anti-ad campaign crosses over into "the news." Here's an article from CNET. Calls to Chevy for comment were not returned. I bet.

At the moment there's probably a real conflict going on over there of the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" kind -- do you keep running this competition when it's getting used to tarnish your well-funded brand, or do you figure the more the merrier and all that "Tahoe Tahoe Tahoe" mantra going out on the ether will make consumers forget they have any environmental ethics when it comes time to plunk down the ready for the ride?

The Detroit Free Press, in a piece about the ad campaign before it was launched:

"Because the aversion to advertising seems to be growing, consumer engagement is a key way advertisers are trying to get people to interact with their brands. From sponsoring major sporting events to airing ads ordinary people create, companies are finding ways to make the their pitches less like ads and more entertaining."

But seriously, is letting even a hard-core Tahoe fan stitch together an ad from a pre-assembled set of puff pieces going to be any fun unless you're spoofing it? I am *definitiely* not the target audience here given my primary means of transportation is my bike and my bad-ass, two-kids and groceries truckin' "bak fiets," but I just can't imagine anyone of sound mind getting a kick out of considering with a straight face where to stick the promo about how the seats fold back.

Then again, I haven't lived in the United States for a long, long time. And you know how these things are, you miss out on a few brainwash sessions, you cut a couple imagination labotomies, and before you know it, you just can't keep up.

(By the way, the sample ad they post at CNET is pretty good, but I see better below!)

In other SUV news -- who says slapping a sticker on an SUV isn't an effective form of action????

"THANDIE Newton, the British star of the Hollywood hit film Crash, has become a crusader against gas-guzzling cars after a Greenpeace activist slapped stickers on her vehicle accusing her of adding to global warming."

--b

Posted by Brian at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Ahhhhh. Every now and then you just have to take a moment and give thanks for the stupidity of your adversary.

Chevrolet is introducing a brand new, gas-guzzling Tahoe SUV which gets "an amazing 20 mpg." Yep, in an era in which other cars are making more than twice that figure, Antarctica is melting and the Greenland Ice Sheet is about to fall into the sea, that's amazing alright. What's MORE amazing is they've created an advertising contest in which anyone can make your own tv ad. What? They just never considered that they'd be set upon by a howling pack of outraged eco-hacktivists bent on culture jamming their little power-truck lovefest? Golly! That wasn't very smart! Let's all toddle over to Chevy's House and put some tiretracks in their fun. We're calling it the HeavyontheChevy campaign.

(Thanks, Gillo!)

Eco-Geek's Tahoe Ad

Total Tactics:

• Heavy on the Chevy #1

Grist:

• Heavy on the Chevy #1
• Heavy on the Chevy #2
• Heavy on the Chevy #3

Network Centric Advocacy:

• Heavy on the Chevy #1
• Heavy on the Chevy #2
• Heavy on the Chevy #3
• Heavy on the Chevy #4
• Heavy on the Chevy #5
• Heavy on the Chevy #6

Richard Hanson

• Heavy on the Chevy #1

Live Journal

• Heavy on the Chevy #1
• Heavy on the Chevy #2
• Heavy on the Chevy #3

Posted by Brian at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)