Posted on 03 September 2010, 17:03

Ever since Stephen Hawking announced that the universe has no need of God – ‘It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,’ he says in his new book, The Grand Design – I’ve been puzzling over how to make a joke about it on the Ship of Fools Twitter feed. Today I found an amusing line I liked and posted it late morning…

Stephen Hawking in Ikea. Hawking: “This table easy to put together?” Assistant: “So easy it assembles itself.” Boom boom.

Just after hitting the Tweet button, I looked down the page and realised Stephen Hawking was not just trending worldwide, but at the top of the list. So far as I know, he’s been trending for two days now. Because of that, the joke collected a lot of retweets very quickly, and became one of Twitter’s top tweets of the day (we’re currently approaching 120 retweets, including old-style RTs and new style button retweets).

This is easily our most succesful tweet to date, so there’s a lot to learn from here. We’ve also collected 32 new followers and counting since the tweet was posted, which is another record for us.

Following all this gave me a chance of seeing how lucrative an issue this is becoming for Hawking (who is surely now going to see royalties of a Dawkins magnitude), and how theists and atheists were tweeting each other to death over it in real time. Here are some of the tweets which caught my eye…

RichaelGimbang: Someone oughta pray for that Stephen Hawking guy. He just bought front row tickets to catch Hell. Again.

Nnewibruv: Stephen Hawking says there is no God… that gravity helped create the Universe… errr… who created gravity??

EricStangel: Stephen Hawking says there is no God. I guess that A-Hole has never eaten at the Cheesecake Factory. [If someone knows what this much-retweeted comment means, do let me know.]

jeffward05: I wonder if I should believe Stephen Hawking or a youth group leader with a jesus tatoo, a soul patch, and an acoustic guitar.

sazzadee: Perhaps Stephen Hawking is just annoyed because the stairway to heaven has no ramp access.

And finally, some wisdom…

petsnakereggie: I feel all the inevitable refutations of Stephen Hawking should begin “Stephen Hawking, who is a way fucking smarter than me, said…”

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Posted on 01 September 2010, 0:02

If you had to choose any book of the Bible to turn into a game in the style of World of Warcraft, the book of Genesis would be a strong contender, despite stiff competition from the blood-soaked book of Judges and the warlike books of Samuel. The Bible’s first book is a natural for conversion into a game, with its heroic characters, feuding families, epic journeys, fire and brimstone.

So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that a new multiplayer game, The Bible Online, is about to open with the pre-10 commandments world of Genesis as its chapter one, titled ‘The Heroes’. The TechEye site commented today that the game is ‘unlikely to attract the wrath of the Bible Belt, in fact we think they are going to force kids to play it.’

The Bible Online, produced by new German games publisher FiAA, is a MMORTS (massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game) in which many thousands of players can play and interact simultaneously. The game features the world and story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, complete with ziggurats, camels, sling-firing soldiers, bearded patriarchs and quotes from the Good Book, and can be played through your browser.

FiAA describe the gameplay thus: ‘As the leader of their tribe, players have to construct their villages, manage recources and the budget. They will have to decide between diplomacy and warfare. However, players do not stay in one place. They will go on a quest to the Promised Land. Leading Abram’s tribe from Ur to Haran and finally to Canaan, players and their heroes will face many challenges before reaching their goal.’

The illustrations I’ve seen on the website look a bit Sunday School (and the symbol for Priests is a bishop’s mitre complete with a cross), but this could be interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing which Christian group will be first to establish a virtual church inside the game and then produce the theology to justify Christian worship BC.

AiFF are running two other role-playing games: Kalos War, launched in August, and Operation 7, launched last year – the company says it has hundreds of thousands of players. The beta launch of the Bible Online is on 6 September.

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Posted on 30 August 2010, 23:20

Had a very enjoyable and sparky 90 minutes at the Online Community discussion at Greenbelt last night. I was one of the panel members, sitting alongside the journalist Andrew Brown, who edits Cif belief on the Guardian, and episcopal priest Karen Ward, who curates several online communities, including Anglimergent. Keeping us in order was Kester Brewin, founding member of Vaux whose new book Other was published in the summer. I didn’t take any photos, but found the picture of Karen (above) on the Net.

Just a few personal highlights from the session, which is already available as an MP3 download from the Greenbelt site…

Talking about Anglimergent, Karen says the community requires members use their real names and give their real diocese and parish to prove they are genuine. ‘I actually investigate everyone who joins. Once you get over the 1,000 mark you become a target for all sorts of malicious, false people joining, so now I have to moderate membership, and I can pretty much spot a fake in five seconds.’

I (of course) enjoyed Andrew’s remark, when asked if there is an online community in Cif belief: ‘I wouldn’t remotely say that we had a community half as successful as Ship of Fools, for a number of reasons, but the simple reason is that we don’t have a rule against crusading, in the way that they do, so that people feel perfectly able to come in, make the same point, take no notice and bugger off.’

Karen also runs an offline church, the Church of the Apostles, which uses online tools to facilitate community. When people can’t come to their Vespers service on a Wednesday night, they tweet prayers with the church’s hashtag, which are collected for the service and read out.

Kester asked us about the positive and negative impacts of social media on us. My negative was the incredible fragmentation of attention as you keep checking Facebook and Twitter every 15 minutes to see what’s new, which Karen said could become addiction: playing Farmville all the time, or sleeping with your iPhone next to your ear.

But on the positive side, I talked about the way Facebook in particular connects us with friends who are geographically distant: ‘Being able to have a casual laugh at something they’ve said, or make some clever comment – to have this frivolous contact, which you might have if you worked in an office with them, I like that a lot. When I see them next, which might be months or even a couple of years, there’ll be a continuity of relationship happening on that level.’

Andrew responded: ‘I was struck by what Simon said about it being like working in the office with someone, because I do spend quite a lot of time in the office with people, and it’s amazing how I will be sitting two chairs down from someone and reading her twitterstream because she no longer talks to the people immediately around her.’

And he continued… ‘The really big change that technology has brought about is how much easier it is to fall in love with people that you’ve never met. We live at a time when the physical and visual image of sexual attraction is everywhere, but online, people fall in love with each others’ minds, and they find it easier to do so than ever before. And that’s a very curious fact, and probably rather a good one.’

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Posted on 30 August 2010, 15:45

I went to a pre-release screening yesterday of Africa United, a film which will get its big screen premiere on 22 October. We watched it at Greenbelt in the cavernous Centaur Hall, on a very small screen, and yet the film was so engaging that we were all very quickly sucked into the picture.

The movie opens with Dudu, the central child character, blowing up a condom, putting it into a plastic bag and tying it up with a net of string to make a decent football. And all the while he’s talking like the huckster he is to a rapt audience of street kids about the importance of condoms.

The scene sets the agenda for the film as Dudu and his friends are quickly plunged into a Quixotic 3,000 mile journey from Rwanda to South Africa. They’re determined to get their friend Fabrice – ‘the best footballer I’ve ever seen,’ says Dudu – to Football City in time for the opening of the World Cup. On the way they encounter a refugee camp, child soldiers, corrupt officials, child sex workers and a HIV clinic, and yet the movie rises above what might have been a checklist of African issues with an inspiring story of courage, sacrifice and hope.

Africa United was made in just 18 months, from idea to editing, and some locations such as the Burundi shore of Lake Tanganyika have never been seen in a feature film before. It’s directed by Debs Gardner-Paterson, her directorial debut. I’m going to write a full review of this soon.

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Posted on 29 August 2010, 17:08

I joined 60-70 people for a tramp across the Greenbelt site early this morning, foraging for natural food. I’d just arrived after a decent English breakfast in a Cheltenham hotel, but most of my fellow trampers had that ‘been living in a tent for three days’ look about them and possibly needed the extra protein.

Guiding us on a safe course between toxic mushrooms and the kind of berries you can safely turn into jam were Bruce and Sara Stanley (she’s a development chef and baker, he’s a project manager and life coach), who have recently bought a small farm in the Cambrian mountains of Wales.

Over the next hour we found a colourful (ok, mostly green) variety of plants growing unseen under our feet, including nettles, sorrel, rushes, rowan, yarrow and hawthorne, which can be turned respectively into twine, salad, loft insulation, jelly, bandages and ketchup. Bruce and Sara waded into ditches and marched across fields to pick and show us the good stuff they’d found, and then shared found-food tea and eatables which magically emerged from hampers and thermos flasks.

An eye and mouth-opening hour. Follow Bruce and Sara’s food adventures on Twitter.

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