WALL•E and idealisation of labour

We watched WALL•E at a Jam movie night tonight. It was notable not for its cute characters or the bizarre character development of robots with AI who follow orders, against the backdrop of recent dystopian visions of AI as spawning Skynet-like futures, but rather in its portrayal of a future humanity wherein consumer culture and obesity/space-induced osteopenia have led to an overly pampered humanity, locked in repetitious existence.

Yet, despite this, the Captain comes to a realisation that humanity has a duty to care for the earth, regardless of whether or not that is a pleasant proposition. It would, the ship’s computer says, be much easier to leave things as they are… but that, to the Captain, is not the point. Humanity’s duty to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28-31) is almost in accord with this idea that it is our responsibility to care for the earth because that’s what God has given to us as our duty. That was in very-good creation before our world was even remotely sinful. However, we see the curse of sin at work as our rebellion against God leads to hard work: “By the sweat of your face will you eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:19)

“Return to the ground” there means death, by the way — it’s not talking about a return from intergalactic exile! Wikipedia informs us that, in 2007 screenings, “Stanton (lead writer) felt half the audience at the screening believed the humans would be unable to cope with living on Earth and died out after the film’s end.” Certainly the optimism at growing “pizza plants” is misguided and such illusions are likely to be quickly remedied! However, the right state of humanity, according to the the first instruction received, is to ‘subdue’ the earth and depend upon it for our sustenance. Even rebellion against God, the one who gives all life on earth, does not change this intrinsic human need for work.

It is not enough to exist as consumptive, passive beings. We are made for work. Indeed, we are made for worship, which is a kind of work (and all work, rightly enacted, serves also as worship of the Creator and King of the world). To suggest that utopia is personal transportation, liquid meals, rapidly changeable fashions, personal servants, and even the abolition of economic concerns, is to ignore an important part of our nature as humans. Sin has corrupted this, and we now idolize work to the detriment of other things more important, and embrace laziness (not rest) as a social norm and even an aspiration. The earth, upon which we were set as caretakers, groans under the curse of our rebellion (Genesis 3:17), and yet still the hunger of billions is not satisfied.

Thank God that because of Jesus we can hope for a future that is much greater than space travel, liquid lunches, freedom from financial concerns, and robotic assistants and personalities! Because of what Jesus has done on the Cross, we’re able to come freely to our creator, sustainer, and king, without fear and with a hope for eternity.

Google’s Website Optimiser

I’ve been having a play with this service tonight. This stuff is inestimably powerful, but strangely simple — for the A-B testing at least it’d be pretty trivial to roll your own. The Google Website Optimiser blog is worth a gander if you’re new to this stuff.

Three years for the sake of plywood

Traveled over to Shanghai Scrap today (h/t Danwei) to a post entitled “Plywood Infernal“, written following a visit to a large factory in a northern Chinese city. The author, Adam, writes: “I don’t know much about the plywood industry, and not much more about what drives a young person from a village to a deadly factory in a town without a future.”

Essentially, the manufacturing processes continue to use a carcinogenic chemical in quantities and with exposure to workers such that, if what Adam was told by other residents in this village is true, employees in this factory can expect they have less than three years to live before contracting a terminal illness.

Ours is a messed up world.

Outlook 2010: The nightmare continues

As per a posting I made to the WSG list earlier this afternoon:

We have a problem! Outlook 2010, according to Campaign Monitor, is going to continue to use the crippled MS Word layout engine. They adopted this as the status quo for Outlook 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a number of years, and are showing no great sign of diverging from this path. However, there is hope! Campaign Monitor have started a website in conjunction with their “Email Standards Project” — essentially a standards advocacy website. They need your support now more than ever.

FixOutlook.org aims to collate the community’s discontent with this decision using Twitter to change Microsoft’s policy decision on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of inferior email authoring!

If you’re a Twitter user, it’ll take two seconds to retweet and show your support.

Thanks!

Josh

This is a really important issue for anyone involved in email marketing, and well worth taking the effort to make some noise about. Essentially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is possible to drop support for these inferior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be dealing with sub-par mailing authoring, cross-compatibility, and display issues for a while to come.

Get tweeting! :)

The Wanderer and The Ruin: Two Old English Elegies from the Exeter Book

I stumbled across this document, Two Old English Elegies from the Exeter Book: The Wanderer and The Ruin (PDF) when hunting for a public-domain English translation of another Old English poem, Vainglory. The author of the linked document has also translated this, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it made the cut for any of his courses published online.

For reference, there is a translation of the poem, it’s just not the one I was looking for. R.M.Liuzza’s Beowulf: a new verse translation (2000) has a pretty mammoth series of appendices including a translation of Vainglory on page 209-211.