All posts tagged Journalism

• April 16, 2013

  Sydney Morning Herald story: ‘How hackers can switch on your webcam and control your computer’, April 2013

  A feature story for smh.com.au, the website of the Sydney Morning Herald. Excerpt below.

  How hackers can switch on your webcam and control your computer

  A malicious virus known as Remote Administration Tools (RATs) can be used by hackers to switch on your webcam and control the machine without your knowledge. Andrew McMillen reports.

  

  The 14-year-old couldn’t believe his eyes. The virtual currency he’d worked so hard to amass in the online role-playing game Runescape had vanished. He’d lost the equivalent of $700 in the blink of an eye, after investing his pocket money into the game’s economy for months. All that remained was an instant message dialogue box: “Haha, you got RATted!”

  Sitting in his bedroom in Wauchope, on the mid-north coast of NSW, the teenager wrote back: “What does that mean?” He didn’t know at the time that his machine had been compromised by a Remote Administration Tool (RAT), an aggressive form of malware that allows hackers to access a victim’s entire computer. It was too late. The thief had disappeared. “He ran away with my money, like a girl,” laments Alex (not his real name).

  Weeks later, his desolation and rage had been replaced by joy. After researching RATs and spending an entire day spreading an innocuous link using Runescape’s in-game chat function, in the hope that someone would visit the page and run the Javascript application embedded within, Alex had his mark.

  Within a few clicks, the teenager had access to a stranger’s entire computer, without their knowledge. “I was the happiest kid in the whole entire world,” he says. “I could see their desktop, what they typed, the history of what they’d typed, stored passwords, files – everything.”

  His victim didn’t have a webcam, so Alex wasn’t sure of their gender or their appearance, although he assumes they were male. But he knew that they played Runescape, so he got straight to work on what mattered: looting their gold, just as he’d recently experienced himself.

  After emptying the stranger’s account, the teenager watched, intrigued, as his mark realised that he’d been hacked, and began trying to close the connection. Fifteen minutes later, Alex’s first “slave” – hacker shorthand for a compromised user – had disconnected himself.

  The RATted had become the RATter. “I felt unstoppable,” says Alex, now 17 and studying Year 11. “I was really insecure about myself at the time. I felt like the most powerful person on Runescape.”

  The senior security manager at antivirus software company Trend Micro has another name for RAT: Remote Access Trojan. “It’s a piece of software loaded onto somebody’s computer that allows it to be controlled or accessed from a third-party location,” says Adam Biviano in Sydney.

  “They often arrive on a computer masquerading as something else,” he says. “Just like the mythological story, you open your gates up and you allow it inside your protected walls. All of a sudden, you think you’re getting one thing, but in reality you’re getting what they call a ‘RAT’. You’re giving access to your computer to … who knows who.”

  To read the full story, visit smh.com.au.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Tech Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• March 8, 2013

  CNET story: ‘The Man Who Virtually Has It All’, March 2013

  A feature story for CNET Australia; excerpt below.

  The man who virtually has it all

  A 30 year-old Sydneysider has amassed a small fortune by trading virtual items for real cash in the online game Entropia Universe. What next, though?

  

  In game, the nearest moon to Planet Calypso sits huge in the sky, framed against a blanket of twinkling stars and space clouds. Surrounding mountains tower above and oddly bendy palm trees sway in a gentle breeze. It is beside the teleporter located at Camp Icarus, Planet Calypso’s seaside outpost for new players, that I met with Zachurn “Deathifier” Emegen, leader of the Dark Knights society and one of the wealthiest men ever to play Entropia Universe.

  With a few quick mouse gestures, Deathifier — a tall, handsome avatar clad in shiny red armour — had spawned a Quad-Wing Interceptor, an impressive and expensive-looking aircraft. He then added me to the vehicle’s guest list and invited me to take a seat inside. Our destination? Treasure Island.

  Deathifier is the owner of the 25-square-kilometre plot of in-game land called Treasure Island. He purchased it for US$26,500 in December 2004 and set a Guinness World Record for the largest amount spent on a virtual item. We had to take the long air route, though, because Entropia Universe game developer MindArk had, without notice, disabled the teleporter that allows new players to travel between Camp Icarus and Treasure Island with ease.

  My pilot wasn’t pleased about this unexpected change: he’s reliant on hunting tourism for much of his income, and if players can’t easily get there via teleporter, he’s missing out on potential Project Entropia Dollars (PED), the in-game currency that’s tied to the United States dollar at a fixed exchange rate of 10-to-one. (Treasure Island cost 265,000 PED in 2004.)

  In real life, outside of this vast virtual planet and its two continents, Deathifier is David Storey, a 30-year-old Sydneysider who has been playing Entropia Universe for almost 10 years. Throughout that decade, behind the screen, in-game investments and earnings have comprised the bulk of Storey’s income. With help from a handful of silent partners, whose identities he has never revealed, Storey has invested over US$1 million into the game. The $26,500 Treasure Island purchase broke even in its first year, thanks to Storey’s tireless development, salesmanship and marketing, both online and off.

  At first, this is a strange concept to get one’s head around. This man makes a good living by spending his work week inside a computer game, a space more readily associated with fun and entertainment than commerce and profit. While Storey piloted the Quad-Wing Interceptor south-west across vast oceans and jagged mountain ranges toward Treasure Island, my avatar sat in the gunner’s seat — the aircraft is armed and able to shoot down opposing vehicles if necessary — while we spoke over Skype.

  I asked him whether it’s been difficult to separate the fun from the business side of the game. “They’ve always been intertwined,” Storey replied. “At some points, it’s been more for fun; at others, more for business. More recently, I’ve transitioned more toward business, because the fun elements have declined, so to speak. The core gameplay hasn’t changed in 10 years.”

  To read the full story, visit CNET.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Tech Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• March 8, 2013

  Voyeur story: ‘Helping Hand: Modern mentorships’, February 2013

  A story for Virgin Australia’s in-flight magazine, Voyeur. Click the below image to view a PDF version, or read the article text underneath.

  Helping Hand

  To be the best, it’s said, it pays to learn from the best. Finding the right mentor is the first step to realising your full career potential.

  There’s a lot to be said for one-on-one mentoring relationships, as great things can grow from even the simplest alliances. Sometimes, this is literally the case: Alexander The Great received private tuition from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who taught his 13 year-old student about practical matters such as medicine, logic, and art, but also concepts such as self-control, honour and discipline. Clearly, Aristotle’s pupil benefited greatly from this relationship: by the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires in ancient history. Though that distinct master-apprentice relationship may not apply in all business scenarios, the broader concept of mentoring is certainly alive and well in Australia in 2013.

  “Great mentors push you to the edges,” says Wendy McCarthy AO. “They make you find that you could do things you’d never dreamt of. Great mentors do that for you; that’s the magic of mentoring.” McCarthy, who founded McCarthy Mentoring in Sydney in 1998, is also an experienced company director, and currently chairs Headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation, Circus Oz, McGrath Estate Agents and Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. McCarthy’s daughter, Sophie, came on board at McCarthy Mentoring in 2007 as general manager, and the pair now arranges mentoring programs with senior executives, corporations, emerging leaders and individuals located in Australia, the UK, China and New Zealand.

  McCarthy‘s experiences with the power of mentoring relationships began in her first career, before entering the business world. “I was the beneficiary of organic mentoring, certainly, even as a very young teacher at a girls’ school. There were older women in the staff room who took it upon themselves to help me find my way around – people whose wisdom I wanted to listen to, who were always there for support and advice.” This is an example of what she deems ‘organic mentoring’, which tends to grow in the workplace, beginning with a tap on the shoulder. “Someone senior sees someone junior, and thinks, ‘I’ll see what I can do for that person,’” Wendy explains. “It’s always a generous thing.”

  The alternative is ‘formal mentoring’. “It’s quite different: it’s more structured, and it reaches a much wider group of people, because it’s not just self-selecting,” Wendy says. In such situations, “a CEO might look at how to develop high-potential people and how to have a diverse, inclusive culture,” she says. “It makes you look at people in a different way. It’s a reward program; it’s not just somebody tapping you on the shoulder. There’s a place for that, but nothing beats the formal discipline of meeting with someone for 20 hours a year, or 2 hours a month, to talk about and clarify their plans and what they’d like to be; and to be validated, in many ways.”

  According to David Gonski, businessman and philanthropist, striking up a mentoring relationship is a very professional thing to do on the part of the mentor. As for the mentee, Gonski believes that it’s an “incredibly courageous and correct thing to do, because you’re investing time in thinking about yourself – which, often, one doesn’t do.” The simple fact that a mentee must open up completely, warts and all, before the earnt wisdom and experience of a senior figure is a significant gesture. “And of course you don’t know what the mentor will say to you. Sometimes it can be quite confronting,” he admits. “It takes a lot of guts to work under someone in your own profession.”

  Gonski is a fine position to ruminate on his experiences on both sides of the mentorship coin. Although he currently chairs the boards of Investec, the Australian Stock Exchange and Coca-Cola Amatil, among others, he first became aware of the virtues of being mentored around the age of 22, when he began training at the law firm Freehills. Gonski calls his master solicitor and first mentor, the late Justice Kim Santow a saint. He taught Gonski not only how to be a good solicitor, but how to be a good person. Santow was enthusiastic about displaying a generosity of spirit in the community as a whole; by sitting in his office, Gonski learned “by osmosis” how Santow ran his life, his practice, as well as the way he looked at the world.

  Ever since that first, fortuitous mentorship, Gonski has felt indebted to Santow, and has sought to give back what he got from the experience by mentoring others as often as possible. “If you can give somebody assistance, and see them succeed, it is fantastic. It is almost as good as seeing a child succeeding,” he says. Gonski says that many of his mentees are “much, much better than me, and it is absolutely wonderful to see them – as they say in the movies – ‘going for gold’.”

  One of Gonski’s mentees is Ilana Atlas, a former group executive at Westpac. The pair was introduced through a mentoring program overseen by the Australian Institute of Company Directors in 2010. Although the program stipulated that the two were to have hour-long meetings every second month, Atlas says she was delighted to find Gonski was readily available outside of these if she wanted to talk through any issues. “For someone who has his obligations, I was frankly amazed that he was always accessible to me,” she says.

  When queried on this, Gonski smiles and says he has a theory whereby, if someone asks him go to the ballet, he’s “extremely busy. But if you want me to go to a play, I’m available.” He recalls that, as a younger man, he was extraordinarily busy; at the time, mentorship was an extra to a very full-time load. Today, however, he views mentorship as part of his load, rather than an extra.

  To get the most out of such an arrangement, Atlas, who serves as a non-executive director on Coca-Cola Amatil’s board,  believes that the two most important ingredients are respect and trust. For the relationship to be successful, there needs to be mutual respect. “There also needs to be clarity about what you want to achieve, and clear rules so that each party understands what to expect from the relationship.”

  McCarthy believes that internally operated mentoring programs have a low success rate. “Internal mentoring programs often fall apart,” she says, “even if they’re formally constructed, because the two people walk past each other in the workplace and make apologies; ‘Oh, I’m sorry we didn’t make our meeting last month. We must catch up.’ Quite often, it loses its intensity. My experience is that internal mentoring programs tend to be more effective when they’re organic; if they’re short, sharp and crisp, and across portfolios.”

  Career consultant Katie Roberts advises her clients that, when seeking a mentor within their company, it’s important to look beyond their immediate managers. “It’s unusual for someone to have their boss, or their manager, as their mentor,” Roberts says. “I’d recommend that they go for someone at a higher level, who can be a little bit more objective in the advice they give; someone who is not directly impacted by the decisions they make.”

  Roberts has operated her career consultancy since 2002, and has provided services for more than 10,000 individuals and organisations. “Mentorships work best in competitive industries, where there’s a lot of people vying for the same role. For people who are not given a clearly defined career development program within their company, mentoring relationships can help give them some solid steps that will help them move forward in their company and their industry,” she says. “As the job market becomes more competitive, it’s more and more important for people to look for mentors to help them out.”

  David Gonski’s top tips for a good mentoring relationship

  1. Choose wisely

  “The mentor and mentee must be compatible. The best situation is where the mentee is keen to work at getting the guidance – in other words, they make sure to make another appointment, and make sure that they get the best out of the time they’ve got.”

  2. Meet before mentoring

  “In all the mentorship situations I’ve been involved in, I’ve always sought to meet the potential mentee first, before committing to do it. I’ve made sure that the mentee is somebody I believe I can work with, for their benefit.”

  3. Mutual enthusiasm

  “As a mentor, it’s important to be both listening and remembering. They have to work at it, too, rather than just taking it as a comfortable hour to listen to the mentee’s story.”

  No Comments / Feature Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• March 8, 2013

  Rolling Stone story: ‘Hungry Kids of Hungary Get Serious’, February 2013

  A story that was published in the March 2013 issue of Rolling Stone Australia. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

  Hungry Kids Of Hungary Get Serious

  Personal tragedies and isolation inform the Brisbane band’s second album

  A band that writes a debut album brimming with sunny indie pop songs can be reasonably expected to write more of the same for their follow-up. Such was the situation in which Brisbane’s Hungry Kids of Hungary expected to find themselves following 2010’s Escapades, which hit a sweet-spot between classic Sixties-era pop and their modern take on the form. Real life has a habit of intervening, though.

  In March 2011, the four-piece – Dean McGrath (lead vocals, guitar), Kane Mazlin (lead vocals, keys), Ben Dalton (bass) and Ryan Strathie (drums) – were booked for a three-week tour in North America, including showcases at South By South West and Canadian Music Week – great opportunities to extend the band’s growing reputation overseas. Then, suddenly, all shows were cancelled and the band was homeward bound.

  “2011 was a pretty full-on year for me,” says McGrath, whose experience triggered the return journey. “A lot went down. Naturally, that really coloured the songs I was writing.” He won’t be drawn on specifics, but notes that a “personal tragedy that affected someone I was close to” meant that he had to catch the next flight home.

  “That incident echoed throughout the whole year for me,” the singer/guitarist continues. “It was an ongoing ordeal. It’s funny; writing songs for this band, we’ve always been fairly carefree, but after that [experience], these songs started coming out that were fairly intimate and personal. I was like, ‘shit, how are people going to react to this when they hear it?’”

  The result is You’re A Shadow, a collection of songs somewhat divorced from Escapades’ brimming optimism. Kane Mazlin’s contributions were coloured by a sense of isolation and melancholy, too, in part influenced by a stint in Denmark while his girlfriend took an internship. “She was busy during the day. I was by myself: I didn’t speak Danish, didn’t know anyone,” he says, over a beer in late December. “That had a huge impact on two or three of the songs that I wrote.”

  It wasn’t all bad news internationally, though: footage filmed at the Dutch festival Pinkpop in May 2012 shows the band performing before a crowd of thousands. “The Netherlands seems to be the area where it’s taken off, which is weird,” says McGrath. “When we started talking about doing overseas stuff, that’s not really the area that we imagined we’d be delving into.” Mazlin chimes in: “I think Nirvana started there, didn’t they? It’s a goldmine!”

  After the rush of Pinkpop, though, it was an abrupt comedown in Belgium. The band played that show – “a giant blur of fun” is how Mazlin describes it – and then drove half a day to Antwerp. “We played a tiny show there, where no-one knew who we were,” says McGrath. “We were like, ‘what the hell? We only drove for a few hours, why don’t people know us here if they know us there?’ You forget that it’s a different country! We crossed a border, and they don’t get the same radio [stations]. Touring Australia has conditioned us to think that it’s natural to drive a few hours to get to the next big city!”

  When it came time to choose which tracks made the new album, the four tended not to argue too much about what made it past the rehearsal room. “We do try to keep it to four equal votes, but if two of us feel really passionately about something, then the other two will probably either give it a go, or scrap it,” says McGrath. “Song-wise, we haven’t had to do that a lot leading up to this record, because we’ve seen eye-to-eye on most things without any need for debate – which makes life easier.”

  Five things that influenced You’re A Shadow

  Classic pop

  Kane Mazlin: “I listened to a lot of Camera Obscura, The New Pornographers and The Shins; really nice, classic-sounding pop records with great guitar sounds.”

  Live quintet

  Dean McGrath: “Knowing that there’s a second guitarist during live shows drastically affected the way that I write my parts – it’s not so chordal, busy and strummy.”

  Debut co-write

  Mazlin: “We were on the same wavelength this time, to the point where we were able to co-write a song, ‘When Yesterday’s Gone’ – something we’d never done before.”

  Deerhunter

  McGrath: “I listened to Halcyon Digest on repeat for months, and it heavily influenced how we recorded a few songs in the studio: that ‘lo-fi pop songs, washed out’ approach.”

  Producer Wayne Connolly

  Mazlin: “He had great ideas from the very first email: he told [bassist] Ben Dalton, ‘you need a hollow-body bass and flatwound strings’. It sounded awesome!”

  No Comments / Music Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• March 8, 2013

  The Vine interview: Gareth Liddiard of The Drones, February 2013

  An interview for The Vine. Excerpt below.

  The Drones: “I’m not addicted to love”

  

  It’s a busy time for Melbourne rock band The Drones – or so I thought. When singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard (main photo, far left) calls in early February, their sixth studio album I See Seaweed is less than a month away from release, and the second All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) festival to take place in Australia – curated by Liddiard and his bandmates – is but a fortnight away. Yet the singer is lazily strolling around at his home in the Victorian bush, oil can in hand, searching for strong mobile phone reception. A picture of calm.

  I’m being slightly disingenuous in this depiction, of course. Late in our half-hour interview, it emerges that Liddiard’s had little time to himself lately. While their ATP curating duties have long since finished – judging by what I hear today, it seems there’s little more required of The Drones beyond showing up next weekend, shaking some hands, plugging in, and playing some songs – completing I See Seaweed has been a full-time concern of late.

  It shows in the songs. I’ve played the eight-track album perhaps 25 times by the time Liddiard and I speak, and I’m convinced it’s a contender for their best yet. Our conversation contains in-depth discussion around songs that, at the time of writing, you won’t have heard. Album spoilers aside, Liddiard offers a typically expansive conversation that touches on space-bound canines, alternative ideas to programming festivals, The Drones’ newly-confirmed fifth member, and experimenting with topless photography.

  –

  The lyrical themes of I See Seaweed are as varied as ever; it seems that nothing’s out of bounds for you. How do you decide what to write about?

  It’s more what not to write about. Some things are boring, and they’re done to death, so I steer clear of them, really.

  For example?

  Any sort of clichés. I don’t pick cotton; I’m not addicted to love. You know what I mean? Some things have been done before, so I try not to do that.

  I’m just trying to think whether I’ve ever heard a Drones love song before. I don’t think I have.

  There are love songs, but they’re not really obvious. It would be retarded if we did love songs, because I’d either get into trouble from the bass player [Fiona Kitschin, Liddiard’s partner] for being in love with someone who isn’t her, or if I wrote a love song about her, imagine me showing her the chords and telling her how to play it! That’s really wrong.

  Point taken. You mentioned avoiding clichés; has that always been something you’ve aimed to do? Has this changed since [2002 debut album] Here Come The Lies?

  I’ve always tried to avoid it, but I wasn’t always successful. I wasn’t always aware that some things were clichés. It’s self-awareness, that’s all. And being self-critical, I guess. Everyone has their blind spots, but you’ve got to work on those. Some people go, “check this out, man!” as if it’s some amazing thing, but they’ve just copied someone else. They have this enormous blind spot.

  I think the best example for all that is something like American Idol, or Australian Idol. There’s some severe fuckin’ blind spots going on there; people who aren’t self-critical at all. They think they’re good at what they do, but they’re not. If they just rationalised it – or if they used rational thought – they would see where they’re going wrong. But often that’s painful to do.

  I don’t find any clichés in your writing. Certainly not in the last few albums.

  Like anyone, I fuck up. I just try. I like it; it’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s like science. I’m sure a lot of scientists would be a wee bit striking [in their approach] when they initially put their hypothesis out there. People shoot ‘em down. But I’m sure there’s a large part of them that would be excited to see where they went wrong.

  It’s all about the truth; it’s getting close to the truth. They’re trying to find out what the hole is. I’m just trying to figure out what I’m capable of. I mean, I’ve got limits. I’m just using up everything within my limits to make music that’s interesting. Because I want to hear interesting music. That’s all that is.

  For the full interview, visit The Vine.

  No Comments / Music Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• December 12, 2012

  The Vine feature: ‘A Guide To Cannabis Law In Australia’, December 2012

  A feature for The Vine. Excerpt below.

  A Guide To Cannabis Law In Australia

  “Marijuana Use Most Rampant in Australia,” read a New York Times headline in January 2012. Cannabis – marijuana, weed, pot, hash; whichever other name you prefer – remains the most widely used illicit substance in Australia today by a big margin. Approximately 1.9 million Australians aged 14 years and over have used cannabis at least once during the past year; more than a quarter of a million smoke cannabis every day, according to data compiled by the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC). Keep in mind, too, that these figures were taken as part of the 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey; plenty more users were either unaccounted for, or chose to lie about their drug usage, so the true figures are probably even higher. This reality can be viewed one of two ways, depending on your personal politics.

  Either: it’s great that so many Australians enjoy the occasional puff, as its illegality is an arbitrary hangover from conservative generations past, and its negative effects are significantly less serious than those incurred by alcohol abuse or tobacco addiction.

  Or: it’s outrageous that so many Australians smoke up, as cannabis is a devil weed whose availability should be pushed further underground lest its psychological and subversive effects further corrupt otherwise sensible citizens.

  Illicit drug use is not a topic that attracts moderate views. Weaned on the powerful moralising of media sensationalism, political cowardice, and harsh words from the police force, many Australians are raised to believe that drugs are bad; the province of losers and law-breakers.

  Progressive views are slowly prevailing across the Western world, though, as many realise that the Nixon-led ‘war on drugs’ – which celebrated its 40^th anniversary in 2011 – did very little to break the cycle of power, violence and addiction that has forever plagued illicit drug culture. (For a succinct primer on the topic, my brother Stuart McMillen recently published a 40-page comic, ‘War On Drugs’, which outlines why drug prohibition hasn’t worked.)

  Immediately following the 2012 Presidential Election results in November, cannabis users worldwide rejoiced at the surprising news that two states in the war-on-drugs heartland, Colorado and Washington, had voted to legalise recreational use under state law. Colorado users will be able to grow up to six plants; in Washington, users will buy from state-licensed providers, and the sale of cannabis will be taxed and regulated, much the same as alcohol and tobacco already is. If you’re over 21, the drug will be legal to sell, smoke and carry – as long as you don’t drive while high.

  Australian pot smokers wondered whether they might see a similar decision – if not soon, then at least in their lifetimes. TheVine snooped around on your behalf, with a view to determine Australia’s current cannabis laws on a state-by-state basis and look to its future legal status.

  Dr Alex Wodak, president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, points out that Australian states don’t have ballot initiatives like the one that led to the recent weed votes; in fact, most US states don’t. “Australia will not see ballot initiatives on taxing and regulating cannabis like Colorado and Washington states,” Wodak tells TheVine. “Our cannabis reforms started in the 1980s in South Australia. We have had two decades of creeping liberalisation of our cannabis laws at the state/territory level. I think this process will accelerate now, but that it will still take a couple of decades before Australia taxes and regulates cannabis in all states and territories.”

  Legal weed in Australia? “It’s now inevitable,” continues Wodak. “There are so many contradictions and issues undermining cannabis prohibition. Sooner or later, the bosses of one or the other major [political] parties will realise that it is in their interest to get there first. But all social policy reform is slow.”

  To illustrate, Wodak points out that 2012 is the 40^th anniversary of South Australia becoming the first state to begin reducing the emphasis on the criminal law in relation to homosexuality. Jailing someone on the basis of the sexuality is a social policy that looks completely abhorrent and archaic nowadays. “I might be wrong,” he says, “but I think taxing and regulating cannabis will be slow to happen in Australia, and we will first go through many stages of watering down our criminal laws.”

  So what is the current state of Australia’s cannabis possession laws? The answers might surprise you. As The New York Times put it earlier in 2012: “The prevalence of marijuana use in Australia is widely accepted, if not openly condoned, and at least three states have moved to decriminalise the possession of small quantities for personal use.”

  For the full story, visit The Vine.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• December 12, 2012

  The Vine interview: Maynard James Keenan of Puscifer, December 2012

  An interview with Maynard James Keenan for The Vine. Excerpt below.

  Interview – Maynard James Keenan of Puscifer: “You can’t please everybody”

  Don’t ask about Tool. Don’t ask about A Perfect Circle. Definitely don’t ask when Tool’s next album – their first since 2006’s 10,000 Days – is due. These are the publicist-stated rules of engagement when interviewing Maynard James Keenan, frontman of those two bands and also Puscifer, a “multimedia project” that encompasses music, film, performance, wine and clothing, and has released two albums so far: 2007’s V Is For Vagina and 2011’s Conditions Of My Parole. Keenan is touring the Puscifer show outside of North America for the first time in February 2013, with three Australian theatre shows booked around his commitments with A Perfect Circle at Soundwave Festival.

  These interview restrictions open up lines of questioning largely outside of Keenan’s music, which has enthralled millions of hard rock fans since Tool’s first LP, Undertow, was released nearly 20 years ago. The singer owns and operates Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars in Arizona, where he’s lived for 17 years. Winemaking would be a gimmick – a distraction from his enormously popular musical outlets – if only Keenan wasn’t so damn serious about it. Multi-million dollar start-up costs aside, the business was built with a view to be sustainable, and Keenan says he has met this goal. A remarkable achievement, considering that Arizona had no wine reputation to speak of prior to Keenan’s involvement. Such is the pulling power of the man, perhaps, but it also helps that the wine is fantastic.

  –

  Hello Maynard. Where are you calling from?

  The bunker. [At the Caduceus winery]

  Australia was the first country to import your wine: I’ve met the two guys behind [Caduceus wine importers] Sip & Listen here in Brisbane. I’m guessing that exporting was always on your list of goals, but were you surprised the Australian opportunity came up as soon as it did?

  I guess so. We don’t really have a lot of volume, so that we had enough to actually export was a surprise. It was good timing; we had a little extra.

  Australians will also be the first outside of North America to see Puscifer tour. Why is that? 

  The opportunity came up. It’s a tough project to get out of the country because of all the extra stuff we put into the performance. It had to be the right scenario, the right situation for us to be able to afford to do it.

  You said in [2010 documentary] Blood Into Wine that touring becomes more gruelling on your body as you get older. How do you take care of yourself, and your voice, while on the road these days?

  Just like anybody else would: just pace yourself, get good sleep.

  Is that different to what you were doing when you were touring in your 20s and 30s?

  Well, you know, back then you have a little more resilience, and you can kinda push it a little harder, move a little faster. You don’t necessarily have to pay attention to maintenance much.

  I get the impression that all of your musical output these days – touring, releasing music – is done primarily to fund your wine business. Am I way off the mark?

  Hmm… no. I think the touring is just because we like to play music and we like to perform. The wine business – it takes care of itself. Of course, there’s a lot of initial investment, from prior touring. I used a lot of that money to get it going, but that was instead of buying a Ferrari.

  So after the initial start-up cost, the ongoing costs aren’t so great?

  Yeah, I mean, it’s barely paying for itself, but it is sustaining itself. The point of even doing it was to establish a sustainable endeavour.

  Do you feel that reorganising your life around the wine business has had a positive effect on your art so far? 

  I would think so, yeah. It’s in tune with where I am. So if your art is, in theory, you expressing your take on the world, or your place in it, or your interaction with it, then I guess, yeah, it’s more in tune.

  Do you find it freeing to create music around the wine season, or restrictive?

  I haven’t really found anything that was restrictive. I kinda schedule things as I schedule ‘em. There’s a timing involved with harvest, so a lot of stuff has to take a backseat during that period of time, but it’s not like I’m writing every day.

  Which is more satisfying: completing a recording session, or finishing a wine harvest?

  I think they both stroke you in a different spot.

  For the full interview, visit The Vine.

  Further reading: my first interview with Maynard, in late 2010 ahead of Tool headlining the 2011 Big Day Out.

  No Comments / Music Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• December 12, 2012

  Rolling Stone Q+A: Paul Kelly, December 2012

  A Q+A with Paul Kelly in the December 2012 issue of Rolling Stone. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

  Q&A – Paul Kelly

  The singer-songwriter on his new album, having his life documented, and nephew Dan’s cooking skills

  Few of us will ever know the feeling of watching a feature-length documentary about our own lives while sitting in a cinema filled with friends and family. Paul Kelly is one of the lucky few, though he probably wouldn’t use that adjective when describing the premiere of Stories Of Me at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August. Its limited release in October coincides with the release of the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s eighteenth album, Spring And Fall, which sees Kelly pare back rock-band tropes in favour of largely acoustic, softly-sung songs.

  Before we discuss that, though: what was it like to watch your life dissected on film? “It’s something I want to do only once in my life,” Kelly replies. “I had some of my brothers and sisters there. That was the best part of it for me; the celebration of my family. The rest of it was a pretty awkward thing to watch. But I got through it.”

  First the memoir two years ago, now this film. What in your life hasn’t been documented, Paul?

  I think too much has been documented, so it’s probably time to jump back into the shadows again for a little while! [laughs] I gave Shark Island [Productions] pretty good access, but from that point it was their film, not mine. It’s funny; I don’t feel connected to the doco like I would to my own work. I liked that they picked up a lot on my family; generations back, as well as my wider clan. That’s showing that people don’t work in isolation – they’re a product of a whole lot of things.

  Speaking of family, you and your nephew Dan have spent thousands of hours together, both onstage and off. Which trait sticks out more in your mind: the fact that he’s a great musician, or that he’s family?

  Family’s first, but he’s a joy to play with. He can be a bit of a worrier. He’s a great cook, so he’s great to travel with. He cooks like he plays [guitar]; never really follows a recipe, but he’s a great improviser. His playing has big, deep roots, because he listens widely to a lot of music. He’s got one of those ‘fermenting’ brains: there’s always a lot going on in Dan’s head, and it’s just a matter of catching it as it falls out.

  Spring And Fall is a love story – what can you tell us about the starring characters?

  It’s a love story from a couple of different points of view. Some of the songs are narrated, like ‘When A Woman Loves A Man’; ‘Time And Tide’ feels a bit more like a third-person story. Others are more directly speaking from the characters involved. But to me, the emotional arc of the record starts with love’s beginning – the ‘spring’ – and there’s a turning point in the middle around ‘Someone New’, followed by the aftermath.

  With your characters, do you go as far as envisaging their physical appearances and personality traits?

  Not on this record. I didn’t have it that defined; I don’t have names for them. But a bit of a model was a Willie Nelson album from 1974 called Phases and Stages. It’s the story of a divorce: side one is the man’s point of view, side two is the woman’s. I wasn’t getting quite as specific as Willie, but I kinda liked that idea.

  I’m not sure what you’ll make of this, but every time I listen to your song ‘When A Woman Loves A Man’, I think of how perfect it’d be as the soundtrack for a sex education video.

  Really? [laughs] Well, you know, if you know people in the know, then send it off!

  “Time and tide wait for no-one,” as you sing. You seem to have taken aging in your stride better than many musicians, perhaps even working harder as you grow older.

  Songwriting’s really a form of play. I still find it fascinating. It doesn’t feel like a grind. There are certain aspects of my job that’s grinding; sometimes the touring, and proofing, and approving YouTube videos. [laughs] If you want to be any good, you have to get involved with everything. There’s more work on the creative side now. And also, the record companies do less now than they used to: I do it, or me and the team do it. But the actual thing that starts it all is ‘play’: writing a song. Nothing would happen without playing in the sandpit. And that’s all it is.

  That’s a view that hasn’t changed over the years?

  Yeah. Songwriting’s not real work. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s a “craft”. It’s play.

  No Comments / Music Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• December 12, 2012

  The Vine live review: Harvest Festival Brisbane, November 2012

  A festival review for The Vine. Excerpt below.

  Harvest Festival
  Botanic Gardens, Brisbane
  Sunday 18 November 2012

  Arguably the hardest part of arranging a music festival is securing a headline act so superior that they simply can’t be followed. For the second year in a row, Harvest has achieved this. Sigur Rós are a delight: challenging, brave, and pure. Like Portishead last year, their main stage set is a sterling example of how to end a day filled with remarkable music. It’s a true spectacle, carefully structured to include peaks and troughs and the band work at eliciting a wide spectrum of emotions. There’s a real art to this, and it doesn’t go unnoticed by the thousands gathered before the Riverstage: a silent and attentive audience hangs on every note played.

  Before meeting the day’s peak, though, we find ten hours of solid entertainment bisected by a half-hour break in proceedings, owing to a storm cell menacing inner-city Brisbane. Organisers make the seemingly rash decision to evacuate the entire festival grounds – the first time I’ve heard of this happening in Brisbane – but in hindsight it’s a good call, at least from a public liability perspective. Hail and heavy rain lash the Botanic Gardens while thousands seek cover within the neighbouring university grounds, trading cigarettes and stories.

  During the storm I stand beneath a QUT building, adjacent to a construction site filled with plenty of objects which could easily become deadly in high winds. That doesn’t eventuate, though, and we’re all invited back inside at 6.30pm. A voice from the Windmill Stage coaxes us, urging us not to run, telling us that there’s room for everyone. Indeed. The situation is handled smoothly and professionally, all things considered.

  It rains intermittently throughout the day, starting one song into The War On Drugs’ set. This is not particularly interesting; most of the crowd came prepared with ponchos, given that the city was assaulted by severe storms the day before. (I won’t mention the weather again. Promise!) I love War on Drugs’ stage manner: the Philadelphia indie rock four-piece are calm, unpretentious and confident – it appears that nothing else concerns them right now. Their positive attitude is contagious. How much of the crowd is here because of their name alone? There seems to be few serious fans among the hundreds watching, yet they’re met with wide applause. They comply with a request for ‘Buying The Farm’from diehards down the front; in the closing moments, frontman Adam Granduciel removes and retunes a broken guitar string in 90 seconds flat. I’m impressed. It’s a strong start to the day.

  The Dandy Warhols are suited to the main stage when playing their singles, mostly taken from Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia; when indulging in slower, lesser-known material – including three plodders from 2012 release This Machine - they’re less appreciated. It’s a balance between crowd-pleasing and pleasing themselves, I guess. Their June 2011 show at The Tivoli was one of the best I saw last year. This feels a little flat in comparison. Silversun Pickups do too: the bass is nearly inaudible for the first few songs, Brian Aubert’s guitar parts are a little sloppy, yet his voice is spot-on. Drummer Chris Guanlao windmills his hair throughout the entire set, which draws material from their three albums. I’m a big fan of this band – Neck Of The Woods is one of my most-played albums of this year – but this performance feels far from their best. They namecheck Valley Fiesta, where Aubert tells us they played their first show outside of the US in 2007, and end strongly with ‘Lazy Eye’.

  Mike Patton is at home on the main stage, leading an orchestra through Italian pop songs. It’s a highlight because it’s so different from every other performance today. The Mondo Cane album is fantastic, and it’s a pleasure to see Patton working the songs in person, ever the genial frontman. The music is elegant, majestic, and all of those adjectives. It’s great that Harvest decided to book them: it wouldn’t have been cheap to hire, rehearse and tour that orchestra, nor is there a huge audience on the hill watching it take place. But damn, it’s fantastic. The Black Angels played a blinder headline set at The Hi-Fi last year, yet their performance on the smaller Big Red Tractor Stage is no knockout. While they play, I think about the quality of the Harvest 2012 line-up, and how there are few overlapping genres. This Austin-based psychedelic rock act play it cool, showing little emotion or enthusiasm before the hundreds-strong crowd. “You guys have been great,” singer Alex Maas says at the end of their set, and it’s hard to tell if he’s being serious.

  For the full review and photos, visit The Vine. Above photo credit: Justin Edwards.

  No Comments / Music Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet

• October 31, 2012

  Kotaku story: ‘What Went Wrong With Silicon Knights’ X-Men: Destiny?’, October 2012

  A 6,000 word feature story published on Kotaku in October; excerpt below. This is the result of 15 months’ investigative work.

  What Went Wrong With Silicon Knights’ X-Men: Destiny?
  by Andrew McMillen

  

  Bad video games are released all the time. A raft of factors conspire to influence the quality of the outcome. Maybe tight deadlines are to blame. Or maybe the problems include inexperienced developers, incompetent project management, impossible publisher requests, funding concerns. It’s a seemingly unavoidable fact that not every game can be great, or good, or even average.

  So how does a game, one made by a celebrated studio and backed by one of the richest game publishers in the world, turn out to be a bad video game? This is a story about exactly that. It’s about Silicon Knights the studio behind the great Eternal Darkness, the miserable X-Men: Destiny. It’s about a proud leader, frustrated ex-employees, many internal clashes and a secret sequel everyone hoped would be great.

  To an extent, it’s the role of the gaming media to warn potential buyers away from these inferior gaming experiences, and encourage them to spend time with well-designed games developed by skilled teams, led by sound project management, and unhurried by unrealistic demands. The conventional wisdom is that life’s too short to play every game — or read every book, or listen to every album, or see every film — and as a result, we tend to only want to invest our time and money into the very best.

  X-Men: Destiny — developed by Canadian studio Silicon Knights for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii — could have gone either way. Sure, previous X-Men titles didn’t exactly set the world on fire: 2006?s X-Men: The Official Game, averaged a score of 52 out of 100 on Metacritic across seven platforms, while 2009?s character-focused X-Men Origins: Wolverine averaged a 65 across six platforms.

  But X-Men: Destiny (XMD), released September 27, 2011, underperformed them both with a dramatically low Metacritic score of just 41 across four platforms. (The DS version, developed by Canadian studio Other Ocean Interactive, registered a 33 on the site, making it the single worst-reviewed X-Men title in Metacritic’s records.)

  There are plenty of possible explanations for the poor result. Maybe the game’s publisher, Activision, rushed the release in an attempt to hit a quarterly revenue goal. Maybe it was just dragged down by the weight of a crappy, overdone superhero licence, as so many games before it. Maybe the title just didn’t come together in the end, or simply failed to resonate with reviewers.

  These are all possible, but discussions with former employees of XMD developer Silicon Knights suggest that the game’s fate was sealed long before Activision gave the project a green light back in 2009. The following story excerpts extensive interviews with former Silicon Knights employees who describe their experiences at what they say was a disorganized, unfocused company that squandered ample time and resources before being forced to release a game it was far from proud of.

  Management at Silicon Knights refused to be interviewed on the record for this story, despite repeated requests over many months. A spokesperson for the game’s publisher, Activision, also declined requests for comment. Accordingly, keep in mind that what follows is but one side of a very complex story. When first confronted with wide-ranging allegations of XMD‘s tumultuous development in mid-January 2012, company president Denis Dyack gave the following statement:

  “Silicon Knights is obligated to its partners (in the case of X-Men: Destiny — Activision and Marvel) to not disclose the development process of any project they work on. These obligations also apply to all the people who worked on X-Men: Destiny. Silicon Knights appreciated the opportunity to work on the game and we hope to get an opportunity to work together with Activision and Marvel again.”

  This statement remains the only comment that Kotaku can attribute to the man behind the biggest failure in the studio’s 20-year history.

  Enter: “SK Whistleblower”

  It’s not as if Silicon Knights was some untested, fly-by-night developer brought on to quickly crank out just another licensed title. Founded in 1992 by current company president Denis Dyack, the St. Catharines, Ontario-based company is best known for their 2002 GameCube hit Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, which scored a “universal acclaim” score of 92 on Metacritic, based on 41 reviews. The company’s 2004 Metal Gear Solid remake, The Twin Snakes, scored 85 across 54 reviews. And while Silicon Knights’ 2008 Xbox 360 release Too Human averaged a sub-par score of 65, the company’s history still suggested it could produce good games.

  But X-Men: Destiny stands alone as the worst game that Silicon Knights has released since it was founded. How did a company that was once known for compelling, original, quality video games come to release a title best described as “mediocre,” “mindless,” “generic” and “an absolute mess”?

  (1UP gave the X360 version a D+, concluding that the game is “is an absolute mess that isn’t worth your time.” IGN gave the PS3 version 5.5 points out of 10 — “mediocre” — and remarked that “even for an action brawler, this one is as mindless as they come.”GameSpot reviewed the same version and awarded the game 4 out of 10, noting that XMD “does the incredible: it makes being a genetic marvel a generic bore.”)

  “I am writing to you in regards to Silicon Knights’ upcoming title X-Men: Destiny,” read the July 21, 2011 email from a mysterious, throwaway Hotmail account with the handle SK Whistleblower. “Silicon Knights’ executive team has just recently implemented a new policy to discredit all employees who have recently resigned. This includes employees who have worked on it for between six months and three years. Between 35 to 45 former employees will fail to have their credits appear in the game.”

  I knew firsthand how to deal with such serious allegations. At the time, IGN had recently published my 4,500 word feature story based on interviews with 11 anonymous former employees of the Australian studio Team Bondi, in which those developers detailed seven troubled years of work on L.A. Noire; years that culminated with many of those employees failing to receive the credit they believed they deserved for their work. Now, someone was suggesting that Silicon Knights was having similar problems with its latest title.

  “Much of what was written about Team Bondi’s situation can be said about Silicon Knights as well,” SK Whistleblower continued. “I am certain that if you contacted former and current Silicon Knights employees and offered them anonymity, you would receive evidence of an appalling antipathy from management towards the employees, publishers, and the quality of their games.”

  Anonymous allegations are easy to make; verifying them is much tougher. I spent the next couple of months reaching out to dozens of former Silicon Knights employees, including a list of 32 allegedly omitted names supplied by SK Whistleblower. Many of those who responded confirmed that they, too, had heard the rumours of their names being removed from the credits of XMD. Some refused to speculate (“I can’t confirm who made it into the credits or not until the game is released, so I’m unable to comment”); some expressed concern for their former colleagues (“I feel that any information I give you will only hurt the current employees at SK”); others feared the ramifications of their involvement in this investigation (“any other information possibly leaking would not look good towards my professionalism and possible future opportunities”).

  Ultimately, I secured interviews with eight former SK employees who worked on XMD, including the initial whistleblower. Between them, these former staffers represented over 45 years of service to the Canadian game development studio. All of them spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, for obvious reasons. Interviewees suggest that the company has been plagued by a complex set of internal problems for years. It soon became clear that this story was about much more than a minor grievance with SK’s crediting standards.

  To read the full story, visit Kotaku.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Tech Journalism / Andrew McMillen

  Like / Tweet