Lee’s blog

"The phone companies are effectively saying: 'No, that's commercially sensitive and extraordinarily valuable data, and we're not giving it away on principle, so we'll just make up a justification.' What you got back was a pretty thin excuse, but given the history of these things, it doesn't surprise me."

"I've just been reading an advanced copy of the government's Byron Review on videogame ratings."

I saw No Country for Old Men last night. It's a good movie, certainly, but since it followed many of the rules of a typical genre action/chase/thriller. In that context, which you'll understand if you've seen it, it's ultimately unsatisfying.

One of the classic action genre moments is where character of Anton Chigurh performs self surgery using supplies he recently stole from a pharmacy. I love these scenes. I'm normally so squeamish about blood, all aspects of our organic machinery, but I'm fascinated watching someone who can suture their own wounds as if they were wiring a plug. Like the wetware equivalent of recompiling a kernel.

It's Hollywood shorthand for badass. Assassin, outlaw, good guy who for some reason is on the run from the authorities. It says "I don't need anyone's help". Full respect for the expression of self-sufficiency, yet uneasy distrust at someone who consciously prepares themselves to survive outside of society's protections.

It seems clichéd, yet when I check the imdb for movies with the keyword 'self-surgery' I only get five results, none of them the aforementioned. Fail. Come on internets, there has to be more than that. A Bourne at least?

It's a new year, I've got a new empty inbox, and I'm turning up the sensitivity dial on the spam filter.

Email, for me, falls into three broad categories - lists I've subscribed to, mail from people I know, mail from strangers.  

Lists can be identified by checking the "List-Id" header.  "People I know" is determined by checking the mail against the contents of my addressbook.  Whitelisting.  (Which is fine - until someone uses a new email address, then they drift back into the stranger category.)

"Strangers" consists of 99.5% spammers, and that's where the filtering effort is spent - extracting the 0.5% of wheat from the chaff.  Spam filters aren't perfect, but you either end up trusting your settings or commit yourself to visually scanning through low-scoring spam.  Not as bad as drinking from the full fire-hose, but still a stupid email admin task I end up putting off.  For days.  For weeks.  Sorry about the delay.

One solution to this is to implement challenge-response systems, or to require some sort of password be included in the mail.  Personally I never jump through the challenge-response hoops.  I've decided to implement something similar to the password.

If you want to bypass my spam filter, include a vCard attachment containing (at least) your first name, last name, and email address.

I've set up a filter that checks for mails containing MIME attachments of the type "text/directory" (or "text/x-vcard") and copies them into a directory where they can be easily checked and whitelisted with a single click.  Anyone I've mailed in the last couple of years is already in the whitelist.

Of course this only speeds up my reading of mail - speeding up my replies is a different problem...

Foutaises (1989)

On my way to work today I was thinking about "Foutaises", a seven minute Jean-Pierre Jeunet film which illustrates a character's various likes and dislikes.  Thoughts, experiences, a sort of observational nostalgia. Similar to the observations of the angels in "Wings of Desire" who, since they cannot experience them themselves, find insignificance and poetry in things that would go otherwise unkremarked.   If "Foutaises" seems familiar, it's probably because the same approach was used again a decade later for the character introductions in "Amélie".

I'm starting to think of my own whimsical list.  The first entry might be "I like inserting and removing Nintendo cartridges". U.S./Euro-size gamepaks on the N.E.S. to be specific.

Back in the early 80s the first "video games crash" had meant U.S. retailers were reticent towards stocking new video game consoles, so Nintendo redesigned their console to look like something different.  Grey, boxy, and a bit of a non-nonsense industrial feel.  At the time most homes didn't have computers in them, and (to 1985) this plausibly was what they'd be looking like.

Instead of the top loading approach of almost every cartridge console ever it had a unique front loading system.  You'd open the flap, slide the cartridge down a slightly angled tray into a metal cradle and then push down the cartridge down against a spring until it the cradle locked into place.  Press down on the cartridge for it to spring out of the lock, pull back to remove.

Outside of the intentionally entertaining, it was one of the most satisfying  physical interaction experiences I can remember (although it's a memory approaching two decades old now - I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy and am feeling a little nostalgic).  It wasn't perfect, the connections became more prone to mis-aligned pin connections and occasional complications from dust which also led to the kid-logic "remove the cartridge and blow on the pins" fix-all solution. But with time this is forgiven.

As Alan Partridge would put it, "Nice action".

I'm not sure what to think of Marvel's recent decision to begin to offer its back catalogue digitally. Inevitable, obviously, but still surprising.

I've been a buyer of 'singles' for many years.  A collector without the pretence of investment - a reluctant hoarder of paper.  For the last few years I've harbored fantasies of breaking free from my sentimentality for printed matter, recycling my collection and replacing them with illicitly scanned digital copies.

But for more than a decade American comics have been emphasising and fetishising the physical form.  The paper, the printing, special dies, metallic inks, embossed covers.  They've been pitching to a dwindling nostalgia crowd, while the next generation embraced manga.  Black and white, tersely illustrated, cheaply printed.  A form that emphasised the content over its physical form.  Bits versus atoms.

And while I don't doubt collectors exist, I'd imagine that hoarding manga's phone directories might seem unfeasible in the notoriously small apartments of Japanese cities.  To me, paper always seemed to just be its transitory form.

Franco-Belgian comics seem to be the antithesis of this.  The primary form for "les BD" is the album, a hardback of roughly magazine dimensions (similar to a UK comic annual) with a page count equivalent to two or three US singles.  Richly coloured, densely illustrated, expensively printed.  And while you often hear
about greater acceptance of the comics form in other countries, it's still surprising to someone from the Anglosphere to see new comic releases receiving the same level of promotion that a new CD or DVD might get.

I feel like a mutt of both cultures.  A bit like British stalwart 2000ad, I suppose.  Its black-and-white newsprint legacy sitting side-by-side with its euro aspirations (just compare the Sláine of the 80s with the 'Books of Invasions').

When stocking up on new comics I tend to favour Orbital on Charing Cross Road. Easily overlooked, its foreboding basement entrance seems to announce itself as the London headquarters for the Resistance Movement Against Mainstream Acceptance of Comics.  My girlfriend won't even go near it for fear of being
tainted.  It's like being in a religion without evangelists.  Our cultural curse.

But my Parisian doppelgänger is making his weekly comics-run on Rue Dante - an upmarket area dominated by comic book stores.  (Actually only a few different comic shops - the Haussmannian constructions of the 5th arrondissement are unsuited to modern retail and single stores get split up into multiple boutiques.)  And the comics he's buying are placed on a shelf, not secreted away in white cardboard filing cabinets.

But, like I said, physicality is sentimentally.  Data isn't a hassle when you're moving house.

"Actually, I think the Wii is quite effective in bridging the gap between hardcore and casual gamers.  Take 'Super Mario Galaxy' -  ostensibly a single-player game it incorporates tasks that can be performed by a second player.  A 'girlfriend assist' mode."

"They don't actually call it that, though?"

"No, that's what I'm calling it.  Basically the second player can use their wiimote to sweep up the 'star bits' on the screen."

"Tidying up!  You want your girlfriend to tidy up for you while you play."

"I wouldn't put it quite like that."