A Busy Saturday

What a weird weekend.

Sunday I spent mostly asleep, as I didn’t feel very well for much of it.

Saturday, however:

Started off with me attending (briefly) the Small Print event, a gathering designed to sell/show off books, workshop, names-to-faces, etc the New Zealand ‘zine community. Which, okay, I am not a part of, but Annette is and she was on the organisation committee, so I went along. I bought a comic, too. Pirate Technics #1, from Chopperchick Comics. My reaction upon reading the cover was “Pirates! _Robot_ Pirates! This comic is only a Ninja away from being everything a comic should be!” .. and to my delight, upon reading it, there are Robot Ninjas AND Robot Zombies. Joygasm!

After that, off to the Anti-GE rally with Chris and Grant and a couple of Misc. Goths. My placard said “The Beliefs of anti-GE protestors appear foolish to me.” This was, I felt, a great placard, as it summed up my reason for attending – many people protesting know fucking nothing about what they’re protesting, and indeed are often unknowingly protesting something compeltely different. The nominal reason for the protest is that the government is about to lift a 5-year moratorium on field tests of GE crops. The protestors don’t think this is a good idea. HOWEVER, the vast majority of them, in fact, are protesting G.E. itself. We didn’t see a SINGLE sign that said “Extend the moratorium for another five years.” for example. We saw a lot of signs that said “Down with GE” and a lot of shouted slogans[1] that were anti-ge _as a technology_.

And so, there we were. Pro-GE techies. Five of us. Frickin’ thousands of them. As I said to Chris at the time, there was a statistically significant chance of us getting, as they say, a good kicking.

However, with the exception of one scrawny fellow taking a swing at me, and attempting to steal/tear down my sign, we were not attacked, unless you can count having stuff thrown at us. Negativity mostly came in the form of verbal abuse and boos. Ever had thousands of people booing you? It’s quite something.

We stood outside Starbucks, figuring that if we had to run, we could run there, where hippies fear to tread. It’d be like vampires and holy ground, right? Plus, they have Venti White Chocolate Mochas.

Several people came to talk to us, so that was cool. Mostly what I wanted to say was that the vast majority of their arguments were _actually_ about World Trade and tarrif fairness, globalisation, corporatisation, and such like. And that if they didn’t like _that_, they should fucking well protest THAT STUFF, and leave GE as a technology alone. Just because a corporation might be doing something sucky with a technology, that DOESN’T FUCKING MEAN THAT THE TECH IS BAD. I had that particular argument many times. The name “Monsanto” was mentioned several times.

I don’t think we made any different to anyones opinion, but we DAMN WELL STOOD UP FOR SCIENCE, and that’s what counts.

Okay, after that, off to Chris’ place to do the inital script for the MST3K version of The Fanimatrix, hopefully if good enough to be bundled into the DVD release. A fan tribute of a show which pokes fun at movies, in this case poking fun at ANOTHER fan tribute of a movie. Very Fucking Meta. Anyway, first draft of the script is complete, some funny stuff in there, too. Chris is sourcing some decent audio recording equipment so we can lay down the sound clips for the thing, then assemble them into an audio track which will also be a reference for recording the video sequences. It’s WAY fun.

JSR

[1] “G.E G.E G.E… Out! Out! Out!” [Repeat] … also, “What do we want?!” ..”No G.E.!” ..”When do we want it?!” .. “Now!” … it’s definitely time for someone to sit down and write some new goddamn slogan forms. I’m sick of hearing variants of the same old patterns. I think Haiku only from now on.

It will never fall
The G.E Cherry Blossom
Also it Glows Green

See? That’s way better!