Those lucky Young Friends of the British Museum get the bonus treat of being allowed to attend up to 4 sleeppvers a year. Last weekend was a special Moctezuma-themed event, featuring storytelling about the Mexican Day of the Dead, warrior head-dress making, Mexican folklore from Mexicolore…and then some Mayan hieroglyph deciphering with me.
Meanwhile publicist Alex from Scholastic and I enjoyed being set free in the British Museum at night. We saw some strange stuff up in the Mesopotamian gallery, near the remains of the Temple of Ninhursag… but I won’t say any more.
What a great wheeze though! Picnic and sleep amongst one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts outside of Cairo. All this an education too.
It did bring joy to my nerdly heart to see more than 150 youngsters faithfully copying glyphs from a 6th century Mayan inscription, deciphering them and then standing up to present their translations to their fellow code-crackers. Round midnight, too!
Thanks to Claire Johnstone from the British Museum for inviting me, to Sky and Alex for helping with all four events, and to the very kind Simon Martin of Penn Museum for giving us his translation of the inscription.
If this is how stoked people can get in 2009 about a 2012 movie, what will happen in 2012?
Will we be totally over it? Can it get more hysterical?
Believe me, we’re all quite hot under the collar now. Articles are appearing from NASA, National Geographic, the BBC, the Telegraph, etc etc…and that is in addition to the squillions of twitter comments, articles on blog, Webzines and forums all over the Internetz.
The world is going to end! The world isn’t going to end!
Which could it be?
The 2012 movie crew are getting flak from some quarters for stirring the fear. Well, if they’d taken an Al Gore-style approach to a doom-laden catastrophe-scenario and produced a documentary with Science Data And Evryfin, like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, I’d be angry too. That would be lame and silly at best, dangerous and irresponsible at worst.
But – unlike a few wingnuts who’ve inhaled too much sherbert – they didn’t. They made a daft-as-a-brush-and-twice-as-fun megablockbuster, a disaster movie in which clearly at some point they’ve thought, ‘Screw it. Let’s blow everything up.’
It isn’t Bergman, that’s for sure. But you could probably tell that from the poster.
If you want to see some of these frankly hilarious wingnut films, check out the video section of mayan2012kids.com. Mainly these films are sitting on YouTube not harming anyone. I have to say that if you lose sleep over what you see ranted about on YouTube then you deserve it. Although some of the clips are from the History Channel. Naughty, smack you, History Channel!
The very best article I’ve read so far comes from Rod Liddle, a columnist for The Spectator (The UK’s equivalent of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine with intellectual, political-right leanings.) His column this week discusses 2012 hysteria as part of a general passion of hand-wringers for apocalypse, now. If it isn’t that society is going to hell in a hand-basket, it’s that we’re all doomed because of global warmingglobal cooling climate change, ancient prophecies of catastrophe or even the mysterious disappearance of honeybees. Don’t worry though. It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died.
Well if you’ve ever had to listen to a passionate Warmist over dinner, you may have had the thought ‘they’re having so much fun. What a spoilsport I’d be to ruin it with actual scientific evidence and rational thought.’
You would be a rotten spoilsport. As Rod Liddle writes, “The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe.”
We need to believe in catastrophe, like we need ghost stories, monsters and the paranormal. Doesn’t make it any more real.
Again, I’m with Liddle on the climate change thing. As Rod Liddle puts it, ‘My own view of climate change — or global warming as it used to be called, before the evangelists changed tack when they realised everything wasn’t getting warmer — is absolutely open. I am a little sceptical of man-made climate change because, for me, the raw statistics do not quite add up, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. And I also reckon that most of the stuff urged upon us in order to address climate change makes sense for other environmental reasons anyway.’
All the same, it’s eerie to watch insane notion, like 2012 doom, being taken seriously enough that big news organisations feel the need to refute it.
Hey guys, you are intruding on MY territory – the world of make-believe!
It makes me wonder how seriously anyone should take them on issues like climate change. Or politics.
Because the truth is, some clever publicists have hooked into the irrational fears of the public, into a segment of people who have by now swallowed so much Warmist garbage that choking down a bit more unscientific or New Age daftness will be very easy. They’ve made a viral marketing campaign so successful that it’s tricked all those serious news agencies into publicizing the movie.
It couldn’t have been done though, if people weren’t already primed.
If my turn ever comes to speak to the media about 2012, you know what line I’m taking. And you know what, if you listen to what Emmerich et al are actually saying in interviews, it’s the same thing. 2012 simply represents a generalised fear of the end – a fear that is pretty old.
What seems to be more of an interesting question is that NASA and National Geographic are even bothering to take time time to engage with this as a serious Thing.
As someone who thinks that the 2012 threat is suitable only for fiction, (much like the wicked witch and her gingerbread cottage, Voldemort, his Death-Eaters and the Priory of Sion), it’s quite baffling to me that serious, proper people like NASA and FAMSI etc need to actually dispute this.
What’s next – a sober article in Nature about how vampirism doesn’t exist? (And I mean an article. News and Views doesn’t count, they put any old gossip in that.)
What a credulous bunch we all must be. Not you, reader. If you’re a young person reading this because The Joshua Files made you anxious, be assured that the threat of 2012 is no more real than vampires, werewolves and wicked witches. It’s the stuff of nightmares and stories.
But you knew that already, didn’t you? Whatever thrills you enjoy from a bit of fictional threat, deep down you have Common Sense.
Everyone else, shame on you! How could the ancient Mayans possibly know the date of the end? Unless, like in The Joshua Files, (SPOILER ALERT – highlight the following text!) they had time travel…
I don’t know about you, but I’d need more than the possibility of t(spoiler) -time travel to persuade me to lose a night’s sleep thinking that the world is going to end. I would need cast iron proof of t(spoiler) -time traveland a LOT more.
All the same I’m still going to enjoy seeing 2012 – Emmerich’s apocalyptic vision of mayhem. Some people like movies about virus-infected, flesh-eating zombies taking over a ravaged planet; I enjoy doomy eschatological fantasy.
Quite an interesting novel opening! Also – search for the title ‘Farewell Atlantis’ on IMDB and you’ll see that there’s already an entry. It’s not what you think though…
Makes me wonder if I should tidy up the 85,000 word manuscript for “The Descendant” and give it away for free like Cory Doctorow did with ‘Little Brother’.
Maybe one day. What do you think, blog readers? Would you like to read about cute action guy Jackson Bennett and his encounters with Melissa DiCanio and the Sect of Huracan?
Seriously I love all of this blurring-the-lines-of-reality stuff. If this kind of thing has existed when I was a kid I would have disappeared into a fictional world and probably never emerged.
(Well I kind of did that anyway with BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.)
I’ve decided to devote a whole week of blog posts to the Big Movie Event this week – the release of Sony Picture’s 2012 movie.
I’ll be taking some time each day to play on the many 2012 apocalypse websites that have been created by the imaginative team behind the ‘2012 Movie Experience’ (basically, an Alternate Reality Game or ARG, not unlike the one we created for Joshua Files – THE DESCENDANT.)
And on November 13th I’ll go see the movie and post my review. Yesirree.
Only, 2012 is a Massive Great Disaster Movie from the king of the disaster movie genre, Roland Emmerich. (THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, INDEPENDENCE DAY). Whereas The Joshua Files is a puzzly, twisty, young adult fantasy technothriller about one teenager’s role in an ancient secret to protect the world from a global catastrophe in 2012. The final book, Joshua#5, will be published in 2012. So I’m not going to say whether it ends up in a big disaster scenario or not. Except that that wouldn’t be terribly original, would it? Not after 2012 – the movie.
So – 2012 the movie! Will it be any good? I hope so. If Emmerich blows the whole 2012 doomy gloomy excitement for Joshua Files, I shall be Very Cross. Let’s hope that that it will be STONKING.
(If this all sounds eerily familiar it’s because I have already blogged about this back in March 2009 Let’s Play 2012 Movie Virals.)
The IHC site was set up to inform people of the serious dangers of 2012 and to enter people in the 2012 Survival Lottery to be one of the lucky survivors. Coolio! I myself entered the lottery. Still don’t know if my number has been picked. Fingers crossed!
The whole 2012 thing is of course terribly controversial. If we’re being serious about it. I doubt that Emmerich et al are about any more convinced than me that there’ll be any actual disaster on 21 December 2012. It makes an exciting premise for an adventure story though.
But some people really believe this! And some people were actually taken in by the IHC site. Not that it was real, but that it was part of a global conspiracy to blah blah blah. You know, the usual They Are Out To Control Your Life crowd. For example, check out this earnest debunking of the IHC website. It isn’t real? You don’t say. We couldn’t tell.
It can be hard to distinguish fact and fiction on the Web. For example, one of the sites we created as part of THE DESCENDANT ARG, the Joshua Files Alternate Reality Game, is archaeologyconspiracies.com As part of the game, I wrote an entirely fictitious article about how the ancient Sumerians had knowledge of advanced biochemistry. Now archaeologyconspiracies.com is getting lots of traffic – around several hundred visitors per day. And the number one story on the site is guess what? Yep – one former biochemist-turned-novelist’s crazy and totally invented story about ancient Sumerians burying a code in amino acids. Yet there’s a clear disclaimer on the site which says that it’s part of the Joshua Files ARG – THE DESCENDANT. Are people reading that? Hmmm.